You Are Responsible For Your Trades
By: Crypto Otsukimi
Tags: Trading, Finance, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Responsibility

Throughout history and time, there’s always been the dilemma of responsibility and blame — issues of free will and predestination, issues regarding forceable labor and slavery, and issues of war. Personal choices are no different. Nearly everyone takes risks in their lives regarding major decisions like education choices to minor ones like flavors of ice cream.

Financial investments include this and particularly in this article — the issue of responsibility in making trades and investments with cryptocurrency. There seems to be a going trend and the misunderstanding of application in people providing content, educational tools, and even plausible opportunities in crypto space and placing blame on them when trades go bad. More recently, some on Crypto Twitter have been accused of getting some people “rekt” for following their trades. Many can understand the heartbreak of a bad trade, but the idea of this is both false and futile.

False, because it’s simply not true — the only one responsible for your trades is yourself. And futile — because if you always place blame for your trades on others, then you’ll never learn the blessing of personal responsibility and risk management.

This article will go over how you and you alone are responsible for your trades, no matter how much information you get from others. This will cover the reasons why this is the case along with my own personal story of placing blame that really held me back from successful trading.

My Story

When I first starting trading, I did an absolute no no — we were hurting financially and wanted to gain more money. We invested a small amount of money in Litecoin, which wasn’t necessarily bad in and of itself. What was bad about it was the source of where we received the funds. We used our emergency money to make the investment (don’t ever do this). By God’s grace in my stupidity, it worked out in our favor and removed our emergency funds from that kind of risk.

During Christmas, instead of giving gifts to myself and my wife, we gave ourselves small investments for crypto. I was silly and didn’t know much, and often listened to Crypto Rand and others for my own personal decisions. But I didn’t treat them that way. If I traded from someone’s information on Twitter and made a profit, I was happy. I did this quite often for a month and was decently successful in my stupidity. But one time I took a trade based on a very famous Crypto Twitter personally (which I will remain anonymous) and I held it for a long time. It retraced nearly 90% and lost basically all my investment. I dusted it since then out of angst and to get it out-of-sight, out-of-mind. But that was wrong of me and have since made ammends with it. For two months, I secretly despised the CT personality (even though I never had talked to them or knew I existed). But the kicker here is that the trade was my fault and my responsibility. I lost my money. It was me.

We Are Not Forced To Trade

From the beginning of our involvement in crypto, we are fully responsible for everything. Adding fiat from our pockets or sources of income and converting it to a wallet or exchange, we are not focused by someone else to do this. We are often deluded by the motivation for more money or greed, or more neutral and plausibility good motivations like opportunity. But we are not forced to feel that way and not coerced from other people to create an account and create buy/sell orders and look up Twitter charts. That situation alone creates a wealth of evidence that your solely responsible for yourself. Even the philosophy behind crypto is to “be your own bank” which comes with the character of responsibility and independence.

Influence Doesn’t Pardon Action

But what about influence? It’s so easy to say we’re not forced to trade, but in the moment it feels so different and difficult. You’re having a bad trading month or lacking time to study the charts and you notice everyone on CT talking about a bull run for alts and taking about the same three coins. The peer pressure is real, even your paid group is saying to buy something. So if you take a trade everyone else is, how can that be your fault? Well it is. And that very same thing happened in April when everyone including a few bigger names on CT were making calls and got a lot of stuff wrong. But being influenced by peer pressure of the news of profit opportunities are still your fault because your actions are still your own. Enough research could have prevented you from making the trade and the fact that many talk about the same coin or trade could be the indication to counter trade. That’s exactly how people get caught buying or hodling at the top — because they feel good about the opportunities without assessing the risks. And also note that trades are never 100% accurate, that’s why risk management has things like stop losses, becuase bad trades happen to everyone, even the best.

Everyone’s Situation Is Different

Other than not being forced and still taking actions under influence led by our desires, one thing thats fluid is our situation. Someone else may be working with hundreds of thousands of dollars with trading, with no concerns about where their meals will come from (please don’t buy into the ramen memes), while someone else probably has no business trading at all if they can’t live off their next paycheck. We all trade differently, have different strategies, buy and sell targets, methods of operation, life balances, moral implications, etc. These are all additional behind the scenes elements that help differentiate ourselves in setting buying and selling targets. Even the exchanges we use have arbitrage to where one price will differ from one exchange to another. Making investments is a huge implication that has real money at stake and each person has a unique situation in regards to that.

Responsibility For Trading is Good

I want to swing this article around for the good because although I want to hammer down the concept of personal responsibility in trading, I also want to drive home how this is a wonderful thing. You ARE responsible for your trades. You CAN make the important decisions of taking an investment opportunity. Dealing with money is a massive issue. Areas of institutional involment of money have largely made things for the worse for people as individuals — student loans, job placements, living expenses and housing, healthcare and taking care of the elderly. But the great thing about crypto is the opportunity to be independent from centralized corruption. But with the aspect of decentralization, at least for now, requires the personal responsibility of doing things with our own choices we make. This is a good thing.

Doing Your Own Research Is Important

Placing blame also doesn’t help us solve anything, it just creates a scapegoat from what we’ve done so that we never face our responsibilies. And then we never learn to grow as people and we certainly never learn to improve from what happened. Regarding myself in following the famous CT personality, I made amends with it and studied hard to be a better trader. I’ve learned to grow in trading (and in a bear market no less) and but some of my education in statistics to good use. Once you get to that point, you can do the best thing possibly for yourself in trading — you can teach yourself to do your own research. And that’s far more valuable than any tweet about any coin.

In the end, we still have an involvement in our trading and it’s not just from the profits.

Thank you.

Feel free to follow me or contact me on Twitter @hodltalk