Reflecting on the year, what's your biggest trading blunder?

I've been trading for two years now and managed to make a decent amount of cash. But guess what? I lost it all again. My biggest takeaway? Not locking in profits. Another regret of mine was spending my leftover USDT on some terrible altcoins that tanked by 90%. That's my reality check. What about you? Have you made any choices that helped you out or totally wrecked you?

Trading is not good at all, you will think you are good and winning but at last you will lose. The best is to be holding bitcoin and stop holding shit coins.

I went through something similar with USDT .I also had a small amount and spread it across some altcoins that are now worth less than a cent. I felt this drop too and literally lost almost 95%. Maybe the only good thing is that I withdrew my money just in time, and after this sudden crash, I bought BTC, so it’s not all that bad.

Trading is not easy and not for the weak ones. Don’t waste your time trying to trade if you’ve not made up your mind to be a trader. Making up your mind to find a way to adapt to the condition of the trading market in all situations and coming out a better trader should be your watch goals. Trading is not bad but it’s hard to manage and pass through the stages to reach the stage of a profitable trader. Bitcoin should be giving more priority when investing in any cryptocurrency. Just because the price of bitcoin has risen doesn’t mean you can’t buy a little quantity of it and nurture it to grow. Going for altcoins because of their low price will put you in a higher risk. Stick to what is definite and has a high probability of yielding good returns.

From then until now, I still keep making the same mistake like instead of saving my earnings here on bitcointalk from signature campaigns and contest prizes, I end up gambling them away always.. If I hadn’t used my BTC earnings for gambling, I might have been able to retire by now. Well, that’s life regret always comes in the end. It’s really hard to avoid gambling for me since almost every day we see gambling signature ads here on the forum.

The biggest problem with the 'traders' is, they all think they are going to be millionaires at the end of the month.  They think the money just rolls in day and night.  They get a few successful swaps, now all the sudden are the wolf of wall street. Nothing wrong with alts but don't be the fool who jumps on every new clown coin that pops up, because it's got some stupid meme on it, thinking  to the moon !!!  That money has already been made... by the person who put the coin out!   Be smart about your investments. The biggest mistake i see time and time again, is people do not have the discipline to cut a loss, and will ride it all the way down the toilet every time. oh shit im down 20 percent.... oh god no.. its 40 percent.... oh lord help me  it's 70 percent,  someone help me!!   oh got i lost 90 percent!!! waaaahhhh!!!!  and will sit there a year or more, pretending there is going to be some miracle spike to get them their money back.  They do not have the discipline to admit, oof, i made a mistake on that one, i better get out while i still can... and will ride it to its death. sometimes you have to cut your loss.  take the hit, re establish your new brackets and work them to get your coin back.  money that is sitting doing nothing is also not earning.  have to keep it moving.  take the loss, learn from your mistake and nibble it back. aaron

The topic you created is only compatible with the trading discussion board, because if you had created the topic here, it would have been standard. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=8.0 You could not profit from trading because you had too many people inside you and you were not trading in a reliable coin. If you had held Bitcoin instead of trading altcoins, your money would still be in your wallet. But you have faced losses in trading because of excessive greed and coins that are about to be destroyed from the market, so you have to trade or hold reliable coins.

but there are alt coins that are reliable. doge been around forever and is not going anywhere.   ltc is another staple coin. doge is low enough value that even novice's can get in on it and make some money playing the wiggles on it without having to put the house up for sale.  i've made many thousands of dollars off doge over the years. aaron

Maybe there was something wrong with your learning or you were too greedy. I don't know which coins you bought, maybe you were trading with Shitcoins and Memecoins. It was wrong not to take profit, if you tried to take profit at the right time, then you would not have faced so much loss. However, I suffered huge losses by buying meme coins a long time ago, so I stay away from them. But if I do trading, then trading with the top currencies in the market, like, BNB, SOL etc. So my advice, if you still want to trade then trade with the top currency in the market, and best of all is to invest in Bitcoin longer term than trading.

Yeah, same here, buying altcoins that I thought will repeat itself in 2021 because in that version of the bull run, many top altcoins have made significant gains. But not this time, those expected to make a good gain was just so-so, while those you didn't expect make all time high like Bitcoin very early. Although I have sold all my altcoins already because I know that that altcoin season is bleak and move everything to Bitcoin. So I don't regret it, perhaps I should have been very careful on investing on altcoins that early.

I don’t think their is any altcoin that is reliable. Also if you are suppose to mention a altcoin which you think is reliable, then it’s not even suppose to be doge coin. Just because doge coin is currently in the market, that doesn’t mean it’s not going to end up disappointing people later in the future. I don’t know why you think doge coin will never disappoint people, because right from the beginning I never trusted the coin. Is there any coin which you will need to put your house on sell before you will be able to buy? Or are you referring to bitcoin? If you are referring to bitcoin, then you should know that even with little amount of money, you will be able to accumulate bitcoin. You don’t have to buy one bitcoin which we are  going to say it’s already expensive, with even $10 you will be able to buy bitcoin, so how is that difficult to buy?

I don't blame you I blame the market, Trump is the one that got us here, in 2021 we have thousands of new coins and tokens and in 2025 we have millions, the existence of pump.fun and others make the whole market a shit space, Trump made all this happen because he failed to strictly regulate the crypto market, it is now that I am starting to regret that he won the election. Trading is the biggest trap of all, one year you are victorious and the next you go back to the trenches, this is why I only do spot trading, and so far I don't have a regret thats worth writing about, I've always been cautious about hacks and malwares, but I won the race because I got a hardware wallet. Everyone has their lessons to learn from and those who failed to learn will repeat the same maybe in a year or two, I should have invested everything I had on Bitcoin only, splitting my bag does me no justice either but half bread is better than none.

Doge is still far away from getting to all time high. We do not know what will happen after dip, maybe it will become shit coin or its price will also later increase. Also litecoin is still far away from all time high that it achieved in 2021. They are both good coins that are disappointing people. Until they get to all time high that people should post good about them, but they are far behind.

Seems youve seen the potential of the altcoins and make manage to hit another investment and this recent down fall of the market makes your asset goes down the value, well its partly normal because there are a lot of people did the same way even me base on my first hand experience so when it comes we have stable coins which we have planned to use and its ended up lossing because we are getting tired, impatient to the things we are doing which is waiting for the market dump to happen. Now its up to you if you will cut those losses or wait for the another signal because seems the bitcoin are into the head and shoulders pattern which im afraid to see another downward of the market.

So in your eyes, any coin that is not to the moon is disappointing?  i put my money in it and im not a millionaire after a week, that coin sucks!!! The only thing disappointing is your trading strategy. Stop lurking praying for a moon shot, learn how to work the market on smaller market moves, don't be greedy / lazy. maybe someone is playing shorts, in that case, the coin is doing well. good coin / bad coin, is all in the eye of the beholder. whats a good coin?  imo one that has been around a decade and has not done a rug pull and still trades often. For those questioning bitcoin as a tool to 'get rich quick' well yes, go ahead and play with bitcoin on a small budget, with its 50 cent and dollar per transaction fee hoping a major move does not happen and those fees go up to 5 and 10 dollar, which has happened in the past.  If you are starting out small, that can eat into ones profits fast, whereas a coin like doge, or ltc, trades fairly well, and has what, a penny fee or so?  much more affordable for the 'have nots' when it comes to flipping coins back and forth.  Also  bit coin has to move a few thousand dollars for you to cover trade spread, alt coins, a few pennies, so the chance of 'profitable movement' is higher with those alts. what is your game plan, how do you intend to make your money?  do you want to just sit back and think it's going to pour into your wallet?  then buy bitcoin sit back a year, then see what happens?  if you want the money a bit faster and not afraid to actually do a little work for it, then play the alt coins.... playing can be time consuming though.  if you work a 8 hour day / a 12 hour shift, you may not have time to day trade so that method does not work well for you. one has to see what they are willing to do, and what they are able to do, to decide which coin and method works best for them. Aaron

I also have almost the same experience as you regarding trading, even though I have studied various methods, almost all of them have failed. And from there I learned that trading is not a style or skill that I want to learn in the long run, it is losses that make me stressed and frustrated. I think with your 2 years of experience in trading, you should already know the ins and outs of the various types of altcoins. If I see you speculating that you want to get big profits by investing in memecoin,  Supposedly, you don't need to repeat the second mistake, such as buying coins that don't have good fundamentals.

From your story, it seems like you're putting your ego first when you're winning, when you're already making a profit. That's when you should exit the trade and secure your winnings so you can enjoy the things you've always wanted. Because if you know that trading won't always be profitable in any coin, you'll naturally value those profits as little as possible. I've never been too brutal in trading, but I've only taken advantage of a few good moments to trade just before the market crashes. So, I don't have any sad stories to tell, because when the market crashes, I prioritize buying at the bottom to accumulate and increase the number of coins I like.

Having some shit coins in your wallet and seeing them crashing to the extent of being delisted from an exchange isn't something new because I have experienced that a long time ago. But this time I'm wiser not to invest in anything I see called crypto. So instead of a negative story, mine isn't that way because I have come to understand that crypto investment is what you have to be careful about and that the best to invest in is bitcoin. Again, I avoid messing up with my transfer and wallet passphrase because in the past I think that might have happened few times maybe I don't remember if it did but I know newbies made such mistakes but I didn't have to make such mistake. Avoid being scammed online, it is the most painful aspect of online investment.

We all live that, everyone learned the hard way. Thankfully I have not lost that much in these, I lost maybe 100 bucks total, nothing big, because I know they are shitcoins and that is why I avoid them. However, it's quite obvious that we are going to end up with a lot of losses if we are not careful. So focus on making as much money as possible, while without worrying about the mistakes, because what is done is done, learn from them and move on. That is just the way it is and we can't move away from it, we have to accept it. As long as we can accept it, there won't be any issues. This isn't something major, we can definitely make it work, as long as we hold, all these mistakes will be small stuff in the future.

At some point every trader has made this mistake, take it as part of the learning process. When you start making profit as an intermediate trader there's this confidence you have that makes you feel like you can always make profit because you have mastered everything about the market but that is a deceiving thought, you must learn to avoid being greedy and take your profits made from each trade. Like I said, it's a lesson