Interested in Capital.com?Community Rating →Go to Site →65% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider.
OP
The worst thing that can happen to any trader is having early success, because it makes you think you are smart instead of lucky.
This is so painful to read
@annonymous_guard It’s only painful when actual numbers are in the text. This is not the case, OP maybe just lose 5K on a 200$ investment. Lol just saying
@kingpin_479 That is exactly what happened after the Covid crash and what is happening right now as well. Everyone’s euphoric, everyone thinks they’re geniuses… they’ve made +400 per cent on MRNA, +250 per cent on AMD, +400 per cent on INTC… and I’m not even talking about SPCX, ARM, PLTR, which have gone up ten or fifteen times over, and so on.
For the moment, I’m sitting patiently on the sidelines with plenty of cash, ready to buy back into the indices when they fall by around -15 per cent… it’s only a matter of time… maybe in 12 months, maybe in 5 years… that’s fine, I’ve got time now…
@veteran I’ve lost the equivalent of half a lifetime’s earnings! Can you imagine everything you could earn and accumulate over half a career of hard work? Well, that’s exactly what I’ve lost on the financial markets.
I also neglected my friends, my social circle… I drifted apart from some of my family because of the stress caused by my financial positions… I wouldn’t sleep for four or five days on end… I was losing my mind…
My family have finally ‘forgiven’ me and I’m slowly rebuilding my life.
@Shake_SeeSaw Yes, I can imagine, because I bought BTC and ETH in March 2016. I am still holding, leverage will never get me.
Log in or create an account to reply.
This is probably the most painful financial lesson I’ve learned. I bought BTC and ETH very early, much earlier than I would have expected in hindsight, and held through enormous volatility. Eventually I sold my BTC around $65,000 and my ETH around $4,000, and at the time those numbers felt incredible: I had made substantial gains.
Then I discovered leveraged trading through social media, and that’s where everything changed. I started using leverage, and eventually lost essentially everything I had made in crypto, plus my original capital. Years of patiently accumulating and holding were undone by a much shorter period of leveraged trading. The frustrating part is that I didn’t need leverage: I had already done the part that required patience. I’d bought early, held through volatility, realized substantial gains, and then convinced myself I could make even more by trading with leverage. I couldn’t. I gave it all back.
Looking back, the lesson seems embarrassingly simple: don’t turn an investment into a casino just because you’ve made money on it. Making a large return doesn’t mean you suddenly have an edge at short term trading, and leverage doesn’t make you a better investor. It simply makes your mistakes happen faster and with larger consequences.
My stock investing history has a similar pattern. I repeatedly sold winners after relatively modest gains and DCA’d into losers. With crypto, I did almost the opposite: I built a successful long-term position and then destroyed the result by introducing leverage. So I’ve ended up learning the same lesson from two completely different directions: I kept trying to do something instead of simply letting a good investment compound.
My current philosophy is therefore much simpler: diversify, keep costs low, avoid leverage. Don’t confuse a falling price with a bargain, or a rising price with a reason to sell. And if I can’t explain exactly why I’m making a trade, I probably shouldn’t be making it.
My boring conclusion after all of this? DCA into a diversified global ETF or a basket of mixed cryptocurrencies (from the top 10), keep a sensible allocation, and leave it alone. You probably won’t become rich overnight, but you also remove a huge number of opportunities to sabotage yourself.
I hope someone reading this who is currently discovering leverage through social media learns this lesson without having to pay for it the way I did.
NB. Edit. I hope the text is easier to read now. Sorry about the mess earlier.