Welcome to another Nugget of Wisdom! A free weekly post I send out every Thursday. These are designed to be short and sweet, a quick read to (hopefully) impart some sort of wisdom, or at the very least to get you thinking about something interesting.
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Truth be told, I needed to see and hear this myself. I have been beating myself up a little lately for a few bad moves. I converted some ETH and HYPE into XPL and now the XPL is down 30-40% while the ETH and HYPE are up 10-20%. I saw PunkStrategy at a 10m mcap and despite being insanely bullish on punks, NFTs, and memetic tokens, completely slept on it and didn’t buy in. Many more stories like these.
I am coming up with all sorts of excuses for myself but none of them really matter. The past is the past, it can’t be changed, I shouldn’t get hung up on it, and neither should you.
Reflect on your process and then clear your mind is the important takeaway. Why did I make these poor decisions? Were they reasonable decisions (to buy and to not buy, respectively) that just turned out to be unlucky for me? Or were they objectively bad decisions because I didn’t do my research, because I was not in a good headspace, because I was trading out of emotion, etc?
Honestly, it’s definitely the latter for me. My head hasn’t been in the game for a while now. I’ve been traveling, my dad was ill, I had my honeymoon and wedding earlier in the year. I just haven’t had true focus since late 2024. So my strategy has been to sit on some longer term positions and run some lowish risk yield farming and airdrop farming strategies, and be happy with that.
And I have been very happy with that approach. But then I got hit with some FOMO and felt like I needed to be a part of more things, and so I started paying a bit more attention. Started to feel like I should do things. Danger, Will Robinson.
I started to do what I have previously written about as being the most dangerous thing a person can do when it comes to investing: I was spending a medium amount of time doing it.
If I was locked in and really focused, I would have bought XPL either on the pre-market before it launched, or shortly after, and would have had a much better entry price. I would have sold and taken profits on the clean 2x (maybe not my whole position, since I am still bullish, but I would have de-risked most likely). I would not have missed PunkStrategy or some of the other tokens that have run a lot lately.
I have a decision to make about whether to knuckle down and focus on finding more of these opportunities moving forward, or whether to sit back with my old strategy and be content missing a lot of these and having my portfolio approach continue to be hands off, letting the market do its thing, and being content with more modest returns.
I don’t know what I am going to do yet. But if you find yourself having similar thoughts, I strongly suggest you take some time to reflect as well, and come up with some sort of a game plan.
At the very least, stop beating yourself up about the infinite if only scenarios that might be running through your head.
They’re doing absolutely nothing for you.
Trust me, I have run through about a billion of them over the years, and not once has the if only line of thinking ever proven beneficial.
Thanks for reading! In case you missed it, check out Monday’s post below 👇
