Trading Psychology
By Carlitos
By Friday the 11th, my meme coin portfolio reached an all time high of $151,000. I had a strong gut feeling a correction was due, too many people had made too much money far too quickly. I recorded a video and posted my warnings publicly.
I took profits across most of my positions. So far, clean execution.
Then fatigue got the better of me. Instead of stepping away, closing the screens, and resting, I got drawn into a falling token. I kept averaging down into a dropping market, buying the dip until the dip kept dipping, ultimately taking a painful -$28,000 loss. My worst trade in a very long time.
To make matters worse, I cycled that frustration back into buying my favorite tokens at higher prices. Over the next four days, my portfolio halved to $73,000. I completely ignored my own rules. I stopped going outside, skipped sport, slept poorly, and ended up mentally drained. Even though I started the whole stack with $25,000 and remained up significantly in absolute terms, psychologically it felt like a heavy loss.
I realized I had gotten emotionally attached to a paper balance. My mind was playing games with me. Over the week, I forced myself to reset, disconnect, and make peace with losing 50% of peak paper meme wealth. It’s all fugazi anyways.
At the end of the day, these are just numbers on a screen moving up and down. How you feel day to day should have zero correlation to the performance of your magic internet money. If market fluctuations cause you to lose sleep, skip meals, or abandon your daily routines, you are overinvested, plain and simple. Either trim your sizing or run through the internal monologue until you can accept total downside risk dispassionately (Mind games breakdown).
Fast forward to Wednesday the 17th: the Clarity Act got voted down, driving a minor market pull back. Shortly after, the SEC’s tokenized stock news dropped, driving a recovery. As I type this, the portfolio has bounced back to ~$105,000.
My worst trade was executed under mental exhaustion, and I own that mistake fully. My best trade was simply staying exposed to structural market tailwinds when panic sellers got caught off guard.
