Lesson Learned: The Cost of Chasing the Market

Just joining this forum, figured I'd share a pretty impactful lesson early on. Back in 2021, during that wild crypto run, I had a decent position in $ETH that had done quite well. My initial plan was to take profits at a certain level, but then the FOMO kicked in hard as it kept pushing higher. Instead of sticking to my plan, I moved my profit target up, then up again, convinced it was going to "infinity." The moment it started to retrace, I panicked and sold much lower than my original target, effectively giving back a significant chunk of unrealized gains. The real kicker was watching it later recover some of that ground I'd sold into. It hammered home the importance of having a clear exit strategy before entering a trade and, more importantly, the discipline to stick to it, regardless of the emotional pull of the market. Chasing momentum after the fact almost always leads to suboptimal outcomes for me.