Hello steemit, I am going to share my story of trading-turned-gambling, in the hopes of warning new crypto holders to be conservative in their holding/trading strategy, and to keep check of their emotions when making decisions. Emotional, greedy trading ruined me.
I first bought bitcoin in 2013. I had about 15 of them on a certain website that went down, and I will never recover those coins. That one hurt alot, but I knew it was still early days. I also had a real life business go bankrupt around this time, it was hell really. But eventually I got myself a job, started saving, and in 2015 got myself 13 bitcoins. Delighted with myself, I held on tight.
This time last year, I had been researching trading TA, because I just had a feeling a big move was coming. I was right, and a few days before Xmas I got lucky on a large margin trade, as the price broke $850. Over the two weeks following that, I grew up to 45 coins. But in retrospect, this was beginners luck. I soon lost 15 of them, and took a break.
But my stack continued to shrink, despite my confidence from that first good run of trades...before the ETF decision of March, I made a few coins, but when the actual decision came out, I became an insane gambling lunatic, trying to chase the volatility, I made terrible decisions and ended up with just 10 coins left. Ugh. So I sold and ragequit, and let my $10k sit on an exchange while I tried to figure out what to do...but the price was slowly rising...
And so at the end of April I dived back in, got leveraged up, and by the end of May was sitting on 27 coins again. What a fucking rollercoaster. Then we hit $2700 and pulled back to $1850. And during that volatility, and the volatility following that drop, I became a full on degenerate gambling lunatic and shrank my stack to a whopping zero. Blinded by large losses on bad trades, I chased my losses, did the 'revenge trades' everyone warns about, and cried my way down to zero. And realized this was the behaviour of an actual gambler.
Now as I watched the price skyrocket over the last few months, while I look for a job, I've been dying inside a little everyday, wishing I never crossed the line from holder to trader, as if I had never started messing with my coins in the first place, I could have a 6 figure net worth today instead of zero and struggling.
Don't be me. Invest responsibly. Avoid using leverage. Play the long game. Large fast wins will blind you, it's better to let your wealth grow slowly.