At the end of 2022, Bitcoin was trading around $15,000. I wanted to buy. I didn't.
ETH was sitting around $1,000. Solana was around $8. Looking back, those prices turned out to be excellent buying opportunities. But at the time, all I could see was everything that had already gone wrong.
I remember opening the chart almost every day. Every time I was about to buy, I told myself — just wait a little longer.
Then the rumour arrived.
Me and my friend heard that the biggest crypto whales had placed their buying limits around $8,000. It was not just random social media noise. After Terra-LUNA and the collapse of FTX — I have not written about that one yet, let's keep it for another day — another huge drop did not seem impossible. The rumour fit perfectly with what I already feared. That is exactly why I believed it.
By the time BTC was near $15,000, I had already lived through two major crashes. Coins dropping like they were in freefall. Watching portfolios go from something to almost nothing. With all of that behind me, hearing that smart money was waiting at $8,000 was exactly what my fear wanted to hear. It gave me a reason not to act.
So me and my friend waited.
The price never even touched $14,000.
It turned around and started climbing. And as it climbed, we did not buy — we actually placed short trades, still believing the rumour, still waiting for the drop that never came. Slowly, steadily, a real opportunity slipped through our hands.
From that day on I stopped using social media as a reason to enter or avoid a trade. If an idea cannot survive my own analysis, it does not deserve my money. That is not me dismissing social media entirely — many traders use it well, and plenty make money trading the news. My experience with it has simply never been good.
That experience is also one of the reasons I now wait for market confirmation instead of opinions. Charts cannot predict the future, but they can tell me what price is actually doing. A rumour cannot.
The rumour did something else too — it made me feel less guilty about missing the opportunity. If I had not heard it, would I have bought those coins? Honestly, I do not know. The fear from the previous crashes was already there. Maybe the rumour was just a convenient excuse for what fear had already decided.
Trading mistakes become expensive only if we refuse to learn from them.
If you have ever missed an opportunity because of a rumour or someone else's opinion, I would genuinely like to hear your story.
Bye for now, take care.
0 Comments