Tuga once had a mouse. Properly had it — caught, carried, deposited on the kitchen floor with enormous ceremony. Then she looked up for approximately one second, and the mouse was gone behind the washing machine and subsequently out of her life forever.

She sat in front of that washing machine for two days. Not hunting — waiting, with the air of someone who believes a mistake can be un-made by sufficient attention.

Everybody in this market has a washing machine. Mine is a conversation in a pub in 2013 that I did not follow up on. Yours might be the coins you sold at 10x, or the exchange account you opened and never funded, or the fact that you only started last year.

This article is about what to do with that, because it is costing people money right now, in the present, which is the only place money can actually be lost.

1. Hindsight Makes the Past Look Obvious

The central distortion: once you know how a story ended, you cannot un-know it, and the beginning reorganises itself into an inevitability.

So "I should have bought in 2013" feels like a judgement about your own foresight. It isn't. In 2013 the information available was: a strange internet currency, used mostly for things you'd rather not explain, that had already collapsed spectacularly more than once, run by nobody, with an exchange that would shortly lose everything on it. Buying meant wiring money to an entity in another country with no consumer protection whatsoever.

A sensible person who declined was not being stupid. They were making a defensible decision with the information of the time — which is the only kind of decision anyone ever makes.

The same applies to every other "obvious" entry point. They were all obvious afterwards and none of them were obvious at the time.

2. The Graveyard You Don't See

The deeper problem with the regret is that you're comparing yourself to one survivor.

Someone who was buying speculative internet assets in 2013 was also, statistically, buying several things that are now worth nothing at all. The same appetite that found bitcoin found dozens of projects that went to zero — and the people who had that appetite mostly do not have a clean story to tell, because their winner is tangled up with their losses.

When you imagine the version of yourself who bought early, you imagine someone who bought only the winner, held it through four crashes of 70%+, and never sold. That person is not your counterfactual. That person is a fantasy assembled from information you only have now.

3. You Would Have Sold

This is the part people resist hardest, and it's the most likely truth.

Almost everyone who bought early sold early. At 2x, because that's an unreasonable gain. At 10x, because that's life-changing on a small position. During the first 80% drawdown, because it was obviously over. The handful who held through everything are famous precisely because they are rare.

So the regret is usually about a position you would not have kept. Which makes it not a story about a missed fortune, but about a missed small gain and an enormous amount of stress — a far less painful thing to have missed.

If that feels like a cope, run the test honestly: look at how you behaved in the most recent drawdown you actually lived through. That's your evidence about the version of you who held through the earlier ones.

4. What Regret Is Actually Telling You

Here's the one useful thing in it.

Regret about a missed asset is almost never information about the past. It's information about your current horizon: you're carrying a belief that the opportunity has passed, while also behaving as though it hasn't, and the discomfort is the gap between the two.

Two honest resolutions, both fine:

• You think it's over. Then act like it — don't hold, don't buy, and stop reading about it. Carrying a position you believe is late is the worst of both.
• You think there's a decade left. Then today is early relative to the thing you believe, and the 2013 story is irrelevant. You cannot buy in 2013. You can buy on Friday.

What you cannot usefully do is hold the regret and the position and the belief that you're too late. That combination produces hesitation at every decision point and it is expensive every single time.

5. The Practical Version

• Never compare your entry to the best possible entry. Compare it to not having one. The second comparison is the real alternative; the first is fiction.
• Don't let a missed entry become a bigger position later. "I was too cautious last time" is the single most common reason people size recklessly this time — regret converted into leverage.
• Stop reading content built on it. "If you'd invested $100 in 2010" is engagement bait, manufactured specifically to produce this feeling in you. It has no informational content.
• Write down today's date and what you believe. In three years it'll be either the entry you were glad about or evidence that you should have acted on your own stated view. Both are more useful than a feeling.

The Point

The mouse was behind the washing machine for two days and then it wasn't anywhere. Tuga's vigil achieved nothing except two days of not hunting in a garden absolutely full of other mice.

That's the actual cost of regret. Not the thing you missed — the attention it takes from what's in front of you, while you sit in front of an appliance waiting for a result that was decided long ago.

You can't buy 2013. Decide what you believe about the next ten years, and act on that instead. 🐾⚡