The biggest rival is hidden in the mirror

When it comes to investing, on the surface it may seem like you’re dealing with market trends and numbers, but in the end, it’s a battle between yourself and your own inner mind. This is something that’s naturally at odds with certain instincts in our bodies.

People naturally like the feeling of having everything under control. They want things to have a clear, definite answer. They hate losing money and fear that kind of suspended state where the future is unclear and you can’t see what’s coming. But the market is always full of variables—no one can know what will happen in the next second. In this contradiction, we’re especially prone to having two emotions hijack us: one is greed, and the other is fear. When the market rises, greed comes rushing in, afraid of missing out, eager to jump in; when the market falls, fear takes the upper hand. Either you panic and cut positions quickly, or you clench tightly and refuse to let go, forcing yourself to hold on to the end. These reactions are actually quite primitive, like how our ancestors would chase prey fiercely when they encountered it, and flee when they encountered danger. But when these instincts are applied to investing, they often make people do the most irrational things at the critical moment.

Many people’s losses aren’t because they can’t understand the direction, but because they’re too obsessed with that “perfect moment” to buy at the lowest and sell at the highest. They always want to catch the most precise price, and they repeatedly agonize over the tiny differences—down to a few cents. In reality, there is no absolute perfect price in the market. That’s only a fixation in your own mind. The more you can’t let go of this idea, the easier it is to miss an entire run of opportunities waiting for a “better position,” or to get dragged down deep just because you’re stubbornly unwilling to admit you were wrong.

To jump out of this vicious cycle, you have to learn to restrain yourself first. Start by letting go of the obsession with perfection, and accept the wisdom of “good enough”—getting it roughly right is enough; no one can take all the profits. The more critical step is to have the courage to admit when you got it wrong. The moment you discover that the actual situation is different from what you expected, don’t cling to wishful thinking. Don’t tell yourself, “Just wait a bit longer and it’ll come back.” Exit decisively, preserve the remaining capital. This is what people commonly call cutting losses in time. If you stubbornly hold on, not only will it be hard to get back to even—you’ll also completely wreck your mindset. At the same time, you also need plenty of patience. Like a cheetah waiting for prey, most of the time you just quietly watch; when there isn’t an opportunity that meets your standards, then you do nothing. Don’t trade just for the sake of trading.

Doing all of this is indeed very hard, because it requires fighting against our most primitive instincts. But precisely because it’s like that, the road to investing feels more like a journey of cultivating the mind. When you’re no longer being swung back and forth by greed and fear, when you no longer obsess over buy and sell prices that are dialed in to extremes, and when you learn to admit losses and exit, and learn to feel at ease staying in cash and waiting, you gradually step out of that human trap that makes people lose money again and again. In the end, if you want to live long and live well in this market, the prerequisite isn’t to master the market—it’s to master yourself first.

$BTC $GT $ETH