I’ve only been here for more than a month, I honestly don’t remember exactly what the date was because it was such an impulsive decision, so bear with me.
It might say in my profile that I’ve been here for almost 10 months now, but that was when I joined before but didn’t really appreciate writing as much. I don’t really want to force myself to write something that doesn’t inspire me, so I stopped and just recently found my way back again.
I’ve been earning some BCH here in read.cash and in noise.cash too. I am also slowly testing the waters in trading. I’ve been scalping and trying to sell high, buy low to increase my BCH, hoping to get 1 BCH soon!
For many attempts, I wish I could be like everyone else and say it was a success and I made some profit but let’s be real here. Whenever I sell high, it goes higher and I can’t buy it back!!! Help me, I'm stuck! Though, don’t call me stupid, I’m literally laughing at myself right now, remembering the dumb things I did and I honestly don’t know what will happen in the next few months or even the next few trades.
But I’m here to share you the dumb things I did so you can learn from it when you start your trading journey too!
Obviously, I’m not an expert, if I was I wouldn’t be stuck in this position right now but I keep track of my trades and I try to analyze where I went wrong, where I should improve and many other things.
These are literally lessons I learned the hard way and I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more to come.
Know your risk appetite.
To just sum it up, there are 3 major types of investor: conservative, moderate and aggressive. Your classification is based on how much risk you are willing to take and of course your profit or rewards will vary depending on the risk you will take.
As they all say, the higher the risk, the higher the reward and vice versa. The more risk you are willing to take, the more that there is a possibility of huge earnings and as well as, huge losses.
Before trading it’s best to know your risk appetite, because for me I’m a conservative to moderate investor, I usually freak out when my investments plummet down. Knowing this, I won’t take as much risk in my investments, hence I should not expect major returns. Because honestly most of us would have a conservative profile but expect huge returns, it doesn’t work that way, the risk you are willing to take is the return you will get. Knowing this will also stop me from being greedy with my trades.
Now, I’m not saying be an aggressive investor, but I think it’s important to know this for you to adjust your strategy and don’t get FOMO with other traders.
Track your trades
As you all know, I'm an auditor and an accountant too, so SPREADSHEET IS LIFE! I track all of my income, expenses and investment even before I started doing crypto. So tracking my crypto trades and earnings is not really new to me.
For me, I have a google spreadsheet of what I earn in noise.cash and read.cash. I’m still on my way in making a strategy in my trades and I’m really stumbling because I really can’t handle much exposure in my portfolio. That’s why I always track my trades and learn from them, whether they're a gain or a loss, just record them. Later on, you can use it to reflect on your trades!
Don’t let emotions affect your trades.
This is one of those “easier said than done” quotes. I told myself this a thousand times already but it’s a hard thing to learn. When trading, I like myself to really be logical and just trust my technical analysis but sometimes I get so nervous and I rattle down and that causes me to make more mistakes. I’m really, really learning to do this but I think for me not to let emotions affect my trade, I should really put an effort in learning more about charting and the psychological aspect of investing. After all, trading is a lifelong learning as it evolves day by day.
It’s also a must to be objective and don’t get too greedy with your trades. We all should set reasonable expectations and don’t expect $10 to turn into $1,000 in just one trade, it’s nearly impossible.
While being greedy is a thing, another one is we should learn to acknowledge when we make mistakes and divert our plan as needed. When you know you made a bad trade don’t just pray and wait for something to happen, act and mitigate losses. This is why the stop loss was invented, sometimes we need to assess objectively if a trade is really worth fighting for.
Just like recently, I bought a bunch of SHIB because I was FOMO-ed. I literally bought it out of emotions without putting research into it and when I did my research I realized how much of s***coin it is. I immediately sold it even though I am at a loss and I thank myself for it because it’s recently plummeting down.
Maybe I wrote this as a reflection paper to just really absorb what dumb things I did recently and hopefully I learned a thing or two from it. I know I’ll still make mistakes but the only thing that surpasses them is just to learn from them.
I wrote this when all of my trades failed, hehe. Hopefully, next time, I’ll write all about how my strategy worked and how much I learned from it.
I hope you got something from this!
See you around!
Lead image: Photo by Jason Briscoe on Unsplash
