It's very easy in the crypto world to look at the massive gains attainable from some of the high fluctuating charts, and to get roped into the belief that within a short period of time, you can become rich and live a completely different life.
I too have fallen into this trap, and coming from forex, have had a bit of a culture shock where I found the things that I had dialled in becoming loose and affecting my mentality.
For example, I was happy to wait 3 years or so trading forex with a defined method before I even thought about riches. Within 3 weeks of crypto, I was up tens of thousands of pounds, and got carried away with where I could be in just a few months of that period.
One of my rules was to never trade news announcements on forex because you almost always get REKT, but in this unknown world to me I started trading news announcements in crypto. My account suffered as a result.
This affected my mentality massively, and my patience for anything wore thin. I was irritable, impatient, in a bad mood all the time, and worst of all, highly emotional.
The cool, calm and collected person that I'd always been in trading was someone I could no longer identify with.
The issue here is that crypto is like a fast forward button compared to the other financial markets. Small starting valuations turn into big gains in a tiny space of time, and it's very easy to get carried away.
Something that has always stuck with me, except in this bad period I had for a good 6 weeks or so, was that "professional traders look to get rich over the long term and succeed; greedy traders look to get rich in the short term and fail".
I was looking at my performances in trading with 10% modest daily compounds and projecting that I could turn a small account (£1000) into over a million in just 2 months. Whilst that was actually very possible, and in the good times I was riding a wave of positivity as I was getting nearer to that target, the market crashed. I lost some money through emotional trading and through a feeling of "needing" to trade every day. My overall mood was very low, and everything suffered as a result.
Thankfully I was able to step back for a period of time and re-evaluate everything that I was doing. I've since been able to put myself back onto a straighter path again.
I feel that these sorts of losses are needed. It's like 2 steps forward and 1 step back, and will serve you better in the long run. I now know how to behave going forward, and how to dial in my expectations and ambitions.
It is far better to take everything as it comes to you with no emotion, rather than emotionally investing in a target and working towards it. Emotions and trading do not combine well together, and on some level, creating a target for yourself such as I did where I wanted to make x amount of money in 1 month, and then another x amount in 2 months - this will hinder you.
It is better to take the opportunities as they come, rather than mentally and emotionally aiming for something because that will cause you to irrationally search for things that aren't there.
You must respect the markets. They don't care about you and your targets. Therefore, you must trade on a day to day basis with what is on offer. What will happen, will happen.
