Hi Everyone,
My name is Austin Angler, and here is my story on how a typically good stock trader can loose money being emotional in the market of Cryptocurrencies.
First lets start off by saying I didnt start out losing money! I actually started out by making quite a bit of money actually. From the begining I started to watch ethereum when I saw bitcoin had a pullback from $1200 to $900, and it caught my eye. At this time Ethereum was actually only at $17 per token/coin and then I watched it go to about $20 right after it had been added to the coinbase exchange. I thought I should probably get in it now!!
well at that time I took a small $200 and I put it into etherium! That was a good trade, and a great idea at the time it had went up to $40 right away, making my value $400! I thought, wow, that was too easy and good. So I pulled my money out and then I actually started gambling it on March Madness Basketball that was a bad idea, but that wasn't the only bad idea that I had though.
It does get better before it gets worse. Since I actually didn't lose any money gambling on March Madness, but I didn't make any money, I took that $400 and added another $2000 and ended up watching etherium go up to $212! Now at this time I didn't actually buy Ethereum. I waited until it went down to about $160 and decided to pull the trigger this was a good trade idea! one of my best! That bought me somewhere around 15 coins at the time and I ended up taking those 15 coins and as it continued to rise, I found out that gdax.com coinbase is exchange allowed margin! So I signed up for margin to leverage my 15 coins, THis was another good idea! so I took the task on of adding margin to get my token balance to double up to about 30 coins I use that 30 coins then to ride the price of Ethereum all the way up to $413!! What a trade I was thinking! on top of the world which was great I had then turn 2000 into about $10,000 if i would have paid off my margin.
That's when things went wrong and I should have sold. My emotions got the best of me at that time and I thought that I was a genius Trader in this cryptocurrency world! Well, I was exactly wrong and the market showed me that. When I sold it at 413 I did watch it pull back to 370 and I bought in on full margin 50ish coins. well then we had a very large down day where the market of etherium went all the way down to the 330 level I ended up selling at about $340 just to watch it go all the way back up to 370. I was very upset at myself at that time. I was down about $5,000 because of what the margin had made me lose so I was only up about $5,000 from that point and I owned it at 370 now.
The next day I watched it then go down the next day to 270ish, But before it went down, I got scared and sold it at 315 not wanting to lose another $5,000. well at that point and went down and then it went all the way back up. At this point I bought back in at 350. I was only up $2,000 at that point well today we had another scareful drop where I sold my etherium at 330, when I saw it continue to pull back to 325 i thought it would go back to 270 at least so I shorted it and then rebound all the way back up to 350 I was fully in margin so that erased all of my gains that I had had from the previous week! My 10k+ went all the way down now I only have 500. I am typically a good Trader in stocks, I have a degree in finance but my emotions got the best of me in this situation crypto currencies Kicked My A$$. They are definitely volatile and I should have known that I was trading based on pure emotions and I probably should not have played with the margin, even though it made me a lot in the beginning I should have called it quits Being up so much. 10k+ could have bought my girlfriend a new car, we could have taken a vacation or I could have bought my self a Fishing boat. All those things are now Impossible because of the whipsaw action of emotional trading. THank you all for listening and reading. I'm going back to being an analyst, not a trader.
Austin