Sometimes it takes a painful lesson to find out who you really are.

A little about me:
I'm broke, enough said.

On a more serious note. Here's my situation for context.
- Male, 38 years old
- Husband, 14 years
- Father, 16 years
- Children, 6
- Home, mortgage
- Car, financed
- Bills, outrageous
- Education, college (mistake)
- Income, underpaid
- Status, overworked

I'm employed full time (45 hrs/wk average)
My wife does not work. We're a single income household
I manage a relatively successful retail store.
We have everything we need and most of what we want but I'd be lying if I said things weren't tight.
We're up against insurmountable debt that weighs us down like sandbags in the bed of a 96' Ranger. yeehaw!

I spent well over a year siphoning off a few dollars here and there when I could spare it using Coinbase and Robinhood primarily to purchase small amounts of crypto at a time. I even took spare change to a local coinstar machine and turned that into bitcoin too.

Long story short I spent all that time learning as much as I could. Wallets, layer 2, nfts, staking, exchanges, you name it I tried it just to learn the ropes. I had a few failed transactions due to copy paste errors. Lesson learned. A few transaction fee mistakes where a swap or bridge ended up costing me more than the transaction was worth. Lesson learned. Funds stuck in wallets because there wasn't enough ETH to pay the gas fee to send the erc-20 to where I needed it. Lesson learned.

Then the biggest lesson came. Experimenting with trading... and later, what led to my demise, derivatives.
Boy oh boy do these things sound amazing. A way to use leverage and magnify your profits but also convexly magnify your losses.

I spent some time, learned as much as I could about it and placed a few trades. The first several took a while to mature but eventually went in my favor landing me pretty sweet gains on not a lot of initial capital. I was hooked. I did more research. Placed more trades. Made more gains. It was magical.

I started looking into decentralized exchanges because the primary exchange I used changed their regulations and blocked derivatives to US customers. By now I was fully invested in this, every dime I had put in was now on this decentralized derivatives exchange. Big mistake on my part.

I did the research for my trade. Took time to calculate the risk and entered the position with about 25% of my total capital. I placed a take profit and went to bed. Got up the next morning to check the trade to see the market tanked and I was down. Significantly. Based on the charts It seemed the worst was done. So I did the unthinkable. I cost averaged down on a margined trade. I put another 25% in. I'm now 50% invested in this trade and still down close to 20% *after* the second buy. This pattern continued until I was 100% on this trade and mere pips away from liquidation. Missing fingernails, cursing like a sailor and scaring people around me.

I stopped watching it. I accepted defeat. About 3 minutes later I got the email. "Your position has been liquidated". Gone everything I worked so hard to save up gone in less than 24 hours, and I could NOT be any happier.

*I learned something about myself*.
No matter how hard I try I simply don't have the time to educate myself enough, I don't have the discipline to manage my emotions, or pay close enough attention to the markets to be a trader.

I love the idea of it, it's exciting and new and delivers a rush and when a trade goes good it's euphoric but when it goes wrong it's devastating. At least to me. I don't poses the mindset of a trader and for that reason I'll always be a *hodler* and that's ok!!!

Back to square one but with a new strategy. STACK AND HOLD BABY... NEXT STOP MOON!!!!