nini

I didn’t enter the market in 2020 because I was smart. I entered because everything was going up and staying out felt stupid. That’s an important detail, because most of what happened later can be traced back to that mindset.
When the first real drawdowns came, I learned quickly that holding losses feels very different from imagining them. I bought Bitcoin around 58,000. At the time, it didn’t feel late. Funds were buying, narratives were clean, and every pullback before that had been bought aggressively. When BTC slipped into the low 40s, I called it noise. When it lost 30,000, I stopped looking at the chart altogether. I told myself I was “long-term,” but what I really did was outsource decision-making to time.
#Ethereum was worse, because I thought I understood it. I bought ETH near 3,800, confident that fundamentals would eventually override price. When it dropped below 2,000, I didn’t reassess the thesis. I reframed the pain. I convinced myself patience was a strategy. It wasn’t. It was a way to avoid admitting that I had no exit plan once momentum broke.
$BNB was the position that exposed my arrogance. I bought it between 500 and 550 because I believed exchange tokens were different. Cash flow, dominance, brand — all the words that make you feel protected. When it fell under 300, I didn’t panic sell. I also didn’t cut. I did something worse: I stopped questioning it. I decided that being wrong was impossible as long as I didn’t act. That mindset locked the loss in place far more effectively than any stop-loss ever could.
The problem wasn’t volatility. The problem was that I had no framework for a market that goes nowhere or down for a long time. I was trained by a bull market to believe that time fixes bad entries. Downtrends taught me that time only fixes them if your thesis survives price, sentiment, and silence. Most don’t.
By 2022, some positions were down 60–70%. I didn’t cut them because selling felt like crystallizing failure. Every small bounce felt like forgiveness. Every breakdown felt unfair. I kept asking where the bottom was, instead of asking whether I deserved to still be in those trades. Hope became my largest position, and it paid nothing.
The shift came when I stopped asking when the market would recover and started asking what if it doesn’t care about my timeline. That question forces discipline. I looked at my portfolio and asked simple, uncomfortable things: would I buy this again today, at this price, with fresh capital? Is this a conviction, or just sunk cost wearing better clothes? In several cases, I sold at a loss that felt humiliating. Months later, it felt obvious.
Downtrends don’t reward intelligence. They punish fragility. I now hold more cash than I’m comfortable with, and I’m comfortable being uncomfortable. Doing nothing is a position, and often a superior one. I stopped using leverage in bad conditions, not because leverage is evil, but because I finally understood that survival matters more than precision. Being right once doesn’t matter if you’re forced out before the cycle turns.
I trade less and write more. Not content — records. Why I entered. Why I hesitated to exit. What emotion I tried to disguise as logic. Charts don’t show that. Writing does. Over time, the pattern became clear: the market wasn’t hunting my positions. It was exposing my behavior.
Downtrends do offer opportunities, but they’re not the ones people advertise. They offer clarity. In bull markets, everything looks like a good idea. In downtrends, most teams disappear, most narratives collapse, and most “convictions” reveal themselves as borrowed confidence. I watch who keeps building without attention, who keeps shipping without price, and which products retain users without incentives. This isn’t exciting work. It’s slow and quiet. That’s the point.
I don’t try to catch bottoms anymore. Downtrends give something more valuable than a perfect entry: time. When price compresses and sentiment stays negative, I rebuild exposure slowly. I accept bad timing. I focus on durability instead of optimization. Bull markets don’t allow that. Downtrends do.
The real edge built here has nothing to do with charts. It’s patience during boredom, discipline when nothing is happening, and the ability to stay intellectually engaged while being financially conservative. Downtrends thin the field. Not because people become less capable, but because many lose interest, confidence, or capital.
The market will recover. It always does. But it won’t remember who suffered the most. It only rewards those who didn’t remove themselves from the game. Downtrends are not where you prove you’re smart. They exist to see whether you can stop lying to yourself long enough to survive. If I’m still here, still thinking clearly, and still willing to cut my own bullshit, I haven’t won — but I’ve earned the right to keep playing. And in this business, that’s already more than most.
What about you — what have you been through in the market?
#BTC #nini