Whenever the day arrives that I’m swimming in cash and showing receipts to reveal the possibilities of the stock market, remember this column.
It’s all the proof I can provide that I’ve done my time and paid my dues.
Because I’m getting absolutely cooked.
Q3 made one thing pretty clear: not all of my losses were the cost of investing. Some of them were the result of me making bad decisions.
At various points, I felt like a horrible investor and an even worse trader. Frustration turned into confusion, and confusion eventually forced me to ask a more useful question — What am I doing wrong?
The answer is becoming clearer.
The more I traded, the more I wanted to trade. The snowball became an avalanche.
And that’s when I realized I have a problem.
Not with investing. With me.
And the part that bothers me most isn’t just the money I lost. It’s the compounding I lost with it.
Every dollar I lose is a dollar that can’t compound for me anymore. It’s one less dollar working next year, and the year after that, and 10 or 20 years from now.
I’ve spent nearly four years trying to build a portfolio that gives compounding time to do its thing. Then I spent a quarter working against that.
That’s a tough thing to admit.
Because I’m starting to realize I don’t need to find more ways to make money.
I need to stop finding ways to lose it.