Take some profits when you hit life-changing goals. Save the game 🔰

For the last 3 months, after losing a big chunk of my portfolio, I've been reflecting on this a lot.

"Sell when your portfolio reaches your target, not when you think the market has topped".

I always thought that it was counterproductive to sell based on your own personal targets because your trading exposure and behavior should be dictated by the market. Attached, you can see a post by @DegenSpartan defending this point.

If I've achieved my goals with BTC at $50k, why would I sell if I think it's going over $100k? It never made any sense to me, in the same way that if your portfolio is $870k and you want to reach $1M, you don't force it to go there simply because your goal is $1M if the market is topping. You have to accept it, and let it go.

However, that mentality is quite idealistic, or realistic only for that 0.01%. Yes, it would be perfect but reality is that you are not going to nail it. How much money have you guys roundtripped? I bet a lot of people here achieved true freedom and amounts they could only wish for some years or even months ago, to later see it vanish in weeks. Illiquid shitcoins, revenge trading, leverage... some even rode 8 figs to 0.

You won't know if the market is topping because you don't have what it takes. The reason why you made a lot of money in the first place will be the same reason why you will lose it all—you are a perma-bull most of the time and your high risk tolerance gave you huge returns in the good times, but this same behavior and constant positive reinforcement due to consistent wins will blind you and get you rekt on the bad times. Not to mention timing: bottoms take months to form, and the top occurs in days especially after exponential runs.

Apart from the exceptional traders out there, you will likely be bullish again at the moment to sell because you've made it that way. And when wrong, like really wrong, some people cannot even handle it. If you've achieved your goals, why don't you just save the game and start again operating from a position of calmness, abundance, and objectivity? It's literally like a video game—you don't do it in one-go without shutting down the console.

There's something you realize when you lose a lot: you start valuing what you had much more and it somehow becomes more real than some numbers on the screen.

On the other side, I don't think you can ever make it if you're the one that thinks: “I'll get to that point and then I'll stop". That mentality will never get you even close to the target because you must love the game: learning > improving > winning. Money is just how to quantify your progress. But that doesn't mean you can't save levels as you reach your goals.

Sometimes the upside doesn't really change your life that much vs. the risk you are taking. You will always be lured to think it's the time to be max exposed, you'll ALWAYS have a reason to be bullish.

The vast majority of people trading these markets should simply have a methodological approach to take profits and risk management:

• Remove all-in behavior from your system. Accept you are not that elite trader. Maybe one day, not yet.

• Take money out progressively regardless of your views on the market as you win.

• Establish bigger clear goals with R:R on your own lifestyle: above a certain net worth you start taking less risks because the upside won't change your life, but the downside will certainly will (eg. $500k -> $900k doesn't change your life as much as $500k -> $100k even though the net difference of $400k is the same).
  
  

Take more money out and reduce risk at those levels you establish for yourself. Your goal is to operate from a position of abundance rather than from fear and scarcity. You'd be surprised how much objective you can become—suddenly, there's no emotions that control you anymore.

• Still manage your risk depending on the market. You can certainly be more risk-on after ETFs have been approved, when FED started to cut, Trump won, or the next time that Trump, Bessent, or Powell literally tell you to buy.

Your risk management and portfolio allocation should be a combination of (1) market-dependent and (2) personal life-dependent circumstances, not one or the other.

Most of the people only focus on (1) and inevitably never make it because it's not realistic for most.

→ Love the game, focus on progress, money comes after that. In order to make it, you can't ever stop. If you want to stop, you won't ever make it.

Link to the original tweet: https://x.com/resdegen/status/1899784773465186665