After selling, if the price keeps rising, does that prove you sold the wrong way?
Hypothetical scenario: You use 1,000 USDT to buy a coin at a fill price of 1.00 USDT. You заранее write a plan: “Sell everything when it reaches 1.20.” When the price hits 1.20, you sell according to plan and receive 1,200 USDT (ignoring fees). After that, it rises further to 1.40. This result only shows that after you sold, the price continued to go up—it cannot, by itself, prove that your decision at the time was wrong. If your goal was to lock in a planned 20% profit, then the sell action followed the original rule.
The wrong move is looking back at 1.40 and concluding you “sold too early,” then immediately using the 1,200 USDT to buy back at 1.40. Without counting fees, you can only buy about 857.142857 coins. If the price then falls back to 1.20, that position would be worth only about 1,028.57 USDT—about 171.43 USDT less than the original 1,200 USDT. You treated a post-event price as if it were a piece of new information that existed at the time.
What needs to change? Before placing the order, write the rationale for selling and the invalidation (exit) conditions clearly: do you exit when you reach the target price, or do you exit only when the trend is broken? After selling, if the price merely keeps rising, you should not trigger a buy-back. Only if the original plan required holding and you sold early without any new justification should the post-mortem support the judgment that you “sold incorrectly.” When reviewing, record separately the prices you could see at the time of selling, the rules, and the risk constraints—then compare them against later price action separately.
Hypothetical scenario: You use 1,000 USDT to buy a coin at a fill price of 1.00 USDT. You заранее write a plan: “Sell everything when it reaches 1.20.” When the price hits 1.20, you sell according to plan and receive 1,200 USDT (ignoring fees). After that, it rises further to 1.40. This result only shows that after you sold, the price continued to go up—it cannot, by itself, prove that your decision at the time was wrong. If your goal was to lock in a planned 20% profit, then the sell action followed the original rule.
The wrong move is looking back at 1.40 and concluding you “sold too early,” then immediately using the 1,200 USDT to buy back at 1.40. Without counting fees, you can only buy about 857.142857 coins. If the price then falls back to 1.20, that position would be worth only about 1,028.57 USDT—about 171.43 USDT less than the original 1,200 USDT. You treated a post-event price as if it were a piece of new information that existed at the time.
What needs to change? Before placing the order, write the rationale for selling and the invalidation (exit) conditions clearly: do you exit when you reach the target price, or do you exit only when the trend is broken? After selling, if the price merely keeps rising, you should not trigger a buy-back. Only if the original plan required holding and you sold early without any new justification should the post-mortem support the judgment that you “sold incorrectly.” When reviewing, record separately the prices you could see at the time of selling, the rules, and the risk constraints—then compare them against later price action separately.