the bear bites
The bear market didn’t break my portfolio. It broke something else.
I kept most of my money in stablecoins for most of the cycle. Not because I was particularly smart, but because I didn’t want to get caught holding bags when everything started dying. On paper, I was fine. But the longer the bear dragged on, the more I started feeling this quiet tension inside me. I was scared of not risking enough.
There were times when I felt something was off, but I still wanted to trade. The feeling was there. The itch was real. Yet I kept holding back. Sometimes that saved me. A lot, actually. But there were also moments where I fumbled. I watched things run without me. Roundtripped opportunities that could have changed the size of my stack. It happened more than once. And every time it did, I wondered if I was becoming too defensive for my own good.
the more I reached, the deeper I sank
At the same time, I knew what happened when I let emotion take over. I tried revenge trading once. Tried to force my portfolio back to where it was before. It was disgusting. The more I tried to chase the old number, the more I realized how stupid that was. I remembered something GCR said once about not looking at your all-time high. Focus on what you’re actually doing now. That advice sat with me for a long time after I made that mistake.
The truth is, there’s no clean rule for when to risk more and when to stay small. It’s all messy. You see anomalies everywhere. Sometimes the best-looking setups fail, and the random ones print. Trial and error helps, but it also costs. And the older I get, the less I want to pay that cost. There’s this quiet fear that if I risk too much now and lose it, I won’t have the same energy to build it back again. If I could time travel, I would go back three or four years and tell myself to risk more. Back then I still had that kind of stupid courage. Now I think too much.
one by one, the wave took them
I watched people around me get washed.
Some of them were actually good. They helped me when I was still figuring things out. They weren’t idiots. They understood narratives, liquidity, timing. But one by one, they got pulled deeper into the game and couldn’t get out. Maybe they got too comfortable with the aggression that worked in the bull market. Maybe they couldn’t accept that the game had changed. I still don’t fully understand it. I’ve seen people hit six figures, lose it, hit it again, lose it again, and still keep showing up. Their ability to survive that cycle multiple times feels almost inhuman to me.
It made me wonder how much of this game is actually about edge, and how much is just about not breaking. My own edge, if I can even call it that, is that I tend to feel when the fuel in an ecosystem is running out. I don’t always catch the top, but I usually know when to stop participating. That habit saved me more times than I can count. But it also made me feel like an outsider sometimes. While others were still pushing, I was already pulling back. It felt lonely, but it felt necessary.
There were moments where I felt relieved that I didn’t follow them. And then I felt guilty for feeling relieved. The market doesn’t care if you’re good or bad, kind or selfish. It just runs. Watching people you respect slowly disappear from the space does something to you. It makes you more careful, but it also makes you colder.
My own behavior changed without me realizing it at first.
I used to lock in for entire days. Charts open, Telegram groups active, constantly hunting. Now I spend most of my time working with AI tools, learning how to build things, and occasionally flipping small positions in NFTs or coins. The shift wasn’t dramatic. It happened slowly. One day I just realized I wasn’t refreshing Dexscreener every thirty minutes anymore. I was reading documentation instead.
Sometimes I still feel the old urge. I see something that looks like alpha and I hesitate. Not because I don’t believe in it, but because I’m no longer deep enough in the game to have the same conviction I used to have. That’s the trade-off, I think. The more you step back to protect yourself, the harder it becomes to recognize the real opportunities when they appear. And the more you stay inside the game, the higher the chance you get zeroed.
In a bear market, winning for me became very simple. It meant accumulating as much USD as I could. Not because I wanted to stay in stablecoins forever, but because I wanted real size for the next time the market becomes easy again. I didn’t want to enter the next cycle with the same stack I had before. I wanted to be bigger. Not because I needed to prove anything, but because I wanted more room to make mistakes and still survive.
The bear market didn’t take my money. It took my old way of thinking. And it’s still taking things from me, slowly. The aggression. The willingness to risk everything on a feeling. The comfort of being fully inside the game.
still walking, still figuring it out
I’m not sure if that’s a loss or a necessary adjustment. I’m still figuring that out.