This is going to be a rant. If you don't like rants, flee now. Also, I am sure it's TLDR Its been a recurrent theme on this forum lately. Arguments go in circles and eventually devolve into a few boys trading insults. Nobody cares about the truth, it's about being right. For fuck sake, this is not a political debate.We should only care about making money. That is what differentiates a trader from the sales people, trading advice sellers, consultants, talking heads and so on. The buck stops with us. A few interesting examples to discuss are right below. Part 1. "You are all idiots" Trading is a business of making mistakes and learning from these mistakes. Accept what just happened ("oops, that was expensive"), draw the right conclusions and move one. If you have missed the bitcoin rally, don't go around trying to explain to other how they are wrong and will be losing all of it shortly. Bitcoin rally is the reality, there is little you can do about it (well, maybe you can find Satoshi Nakamoto, stick a soldering iron up his arse and force him to dump his million coins to cause a massive down spiral in price). If you still have a strong bearish view and have the appropriate risk tolerance, figure out a way to short it. If you have changed your mind, buy it. There is huge value in figuring out why your view was, apparently, wrong at least up to this point. Ideally, that's what this forum is all about - yes, let's discuss this. But there is no value in going around insulting others just to make yourself feel better about your mistake. Case in point is yours truly. Last December I made a decision to sell about half of my personal equity holdings because I was expecting a selloff. Wanted to have my power dry, Trump looked scary etc. Well, I was wrong. Can the market sell-off 60% from these levels? Yes, probably. Does it change the fact that I was wrong about this rally? Nope, not at all. It's a fact. I did some post-mortem on my thought process and hopefully will avoid making the same error again. I certainly do not go around insulting people that have been long over this year and you don't see me making a prophecy for annihilation of the equity market come tomorrow. Part 2. "I know better" Trading is also a business where being wrong for free is a wonderful thing. If you make a statement or express an idea and someone shoots it down, it's worth listening no matter how it makes you feel. Ego sinks hedge funds and blows up portfolios. I will repeat it again, it's better to be wrong and rich (it appears that Bill Ackman thinks otherwise, sadly). There are people here who know a lot about specific subjects. It's worth listening to them, the world of finance is vast and nobody knows everything. Shit, I've been in the business professionally for 20 years, worked in a few top institutions and yet I find blind spots in my knowledge set all the time. PS. I was not sure if this belongs in Trading, Forum or Psychology, but I think the problem is general enough to talk about it here
Hear, hear. The bolded rings a bell. I offloaded all my tech on the trump win only to reverse my decision 48 hrs later. A stupid mistake, but I learned my lesson. I still don't get why people aren't doing the crypto thing....seems like traders would be all over it. Easy to enter/exit, and the exchanges offer good enough tools....only concern being liquidity on a massive sell off. But if you're elite enough, let the bag holders worry about that.
Trading is like politics and sports discussions/debates...alot of blowhards who think they are right and are the stuff -- but if we had a gun to our heads to show our cards on the table...99.7% of the players would turn red. Kind of like an old fashioned Western Duel...99% of the prospective players couldn't even get their shaky hand on the holster, let alone aim for the killshot when it matters. 1999, excellent year...many elite traders existed here.
Nah, short rant. Read on guys ! As of the bitcoin rally, yeah, sticking 3-5% there a couple of years back would have felt great right now, congrats to those who have been holding bitcoin.
You really have to differentiate here (Let's discuss ) Thing is, a LOT of people missed the Krypto hype or sold a couple of hundred BTC too early. This means FOMO is all over the place now. Everywhere. Heck, there is even a guy on reddit whose brother killed himself, cause he sold 200 BTC in 2014 and could not stand it anymore. Second, there are a lot of new faces coming to ET and to the market in general....FINALLY. The big money has always been made in crashes or when Joe Public decided to gamble his life savings away. DotCom, gold rally above 1k, Marihuana Bubble, Ebola Stocks and so on. TL;DR: GOD BLESS, we old farts are getting action again. The fact that a lot of new wanna be traders are screaming and shouting at lazy bastards who missed out here on ET means only one thing: Free money, ready to get picked up....one trade at a time
This thread has little to do with the state of the markets and it definitely has nothing to do with the bitcoin. I am just trying trying to get my head around what seems to be the key behavior bias here - stubborn desire to be right at all costs. Personally, I would love to be proven wrong and called an idiot every day if it would increase my revenue.
I doubt that is really true (despite the fact that my best years were the most volatile ones) for various reasons, but that’s really besides the point here. Ok, so everyone is bearish, fine. So why aren’t majority of threads in crypto go like “I am bearish on crypto because of X, Y and Z - what’s the most intelligent way to go short”. Instead, we have people arguing how crypto is or is not not Windows 98.