Don't leverage trade. Please.

So.. I'm a bit embarrased to write this, but if it prevents a single person from not losing money, it's worth it. Here goes.I'm a student who had a bit of spare money which just kept sitting and depreciating on my savings account. I don't really need that money and it isn't anything lifechanging (I couldn't even buy a car with it), so I decided to go all-in in crypto. I picked DOT for sensible risk-reward ratio. Things have been going great, when DOT peaked I doubled my money. I wanted to sell something to buy a new laptop at that point but my DOT was locked in staking and, more impornantly, I had a huge exam coming.When things were crashing for a few days I finally decided to unstake a third of my holdings - unstaking period on Binance is 2 days, my 60 DOTs arrived yesterday. After I passed (hooray!) the exam, I was really exctasic, and so was crypto, for that matter. I was convinced BTC was now safely above 50K USD. I hade prior experience with leverage trading, It always went like this: made money -> got greedy -> increased leverage -> lost everything. Total amount lost is like 150 USD - so nothing terrible - but my potential profits (if a pulled the trigger) were in 1-2K USD area. That sucked but at least it wasn't my money.I didn't really like the idea of selling my DOT as I truly believe in it's future - but i found something called futures. Didn't realy understand it but aparantelly there is also a possibility to leverage trade with your tokens (instead of USD) as collateral. That sounded great, were finally recovering from the crash to 45K USD, why not make a bit of extra money?I started with 3x leverage, nothing crazy and plenty of cushioning if shit hits the fan. In a few hours I made profit made a profit of 10 DOT or 340 USD - that's crazy, I'm from Europe and this is more than I made at my part time job for all of February! I was really pleased with myself, I passed the exam, my girlfriend came over and now this.This all happened after 4 sleepless nights, I was really nervous about that exam and couldn't sleep. Finally, I decided to go in bed - and my stupid ass opened another leveraged trade, after all, BTC was now stable, right? I woke up 9 hours later, BTC meanwhile dropped from 51 do 47K and my long trade lost value from 70 DOTs to 30. I could have swalloved it and cut my losses but I didn't, of course.In the next few hours I opened and closed many long/short trades with increesing leverage, just trying to save what lost. That didn't work. It never works - especially when greed and panic takes over. During the course of writing my post a lost last 12 DOT on overleveraged trade in the final attempt to break even. I didn't even care about it - despite 12 DOT being more than I make in a month.I'm feeling like shit right now, called my girlfriend who is really awesome and managed to improve my mood a bit. Also I still have 2/3 of my DOT holdings, I'm not in a loss - but my P/L is really close to 0 now. Decided to withdraw the rest from staking and will concider selling some of it if the market rises again. That said, I can't imagine how this possible feels when you loose your family savings or even take a loan to trade crypto.I guess the bottom line is this: Don't be greedy. It's not that hard to make more money out of it but you get in a never ending downvard spiral - always wanting more, more, more... Also, there are more important things in life than money - one of them is mental health. If you get severely depressed as a result of investing in crypto, it isn't worth it. I don't care what you say, it just isnt.I'm sorry for a chaotic post but I really wanted to get it out of my self. Leverage trading is shit. Market will recover, your losses won't. Please, spread the FUD about leverage trading, I'm going to go for a walk now. Also, I'm sure there are far worse stories than mine - I'd be happy to hear them if you got over it and want to further encourage people not to do this.Stay strong.

Submitted February 26, 2021 at 02:49PM

No comments:

Post a Comment