When My Profits Stopped Feeling Like Enough

I’ve had a little time on my hands lately. With the meme-coin market running hot again, I’ve been going on-chain each day with a small amount of money to hunt for promising tokens.

The first few days went smoothly. I was using the approach that suits me best: buy only at low market caps, take my initial capital out when a position doubles, and decide what to do with the rest as the trade develops. All I wanted was to build profits gradually with an approach I believed had a positive expected return. With a little luck, I might occasionally find a narrative I understood well enough to hold for longer, and catch a much bigger multiple along the way.

I hadn’t caught a spectacular 100x winner lately, but I was making a little money every day. By the standards I had started with, that was already very good. The capital was modest, the rhythm was familiar, and I was still leaving myself a chance of finding something exceptional.

But the hotter the market gets, the easier it is to feel you aren’t making enough.

I would see one huge winner after another, then look at my own returns, and slowly begin to feel dissatisfied. How could the market be this good without one of those trades coming my way? My account was still making money, yet I already felt as though I was falling behind. The small profits I had been happy with began to seem barely worth mentioning.

That feeling became even stronger with Brew. I had already caught a severalfold gain, but now my position felt too small: with its market cap this high, how could I have bought so little at the start? Then I saw that someone had recently made a few million on a single coin, and became even more convinced that I couldn’t keep playing on such a small scale.

So I began adding to positions on the back of unrealized gains.

Looking back, those additions had already taken me outside my original trading plan. What drove them was the feeling that I hadn’t made enough, the sight of other people making more, and the urge to make up quickly for returns I had missed. I was using gains that had already happened to blame the version of myself who had been facing uncertainty: why hadn’t I put on a bigger position then?

The result was that I gave back every bit of the profit I had built up, little by little, over those few days.

Then came a familiar cycle. Giving back profits made me more anxious. The more anxious I became, the faster I wanted to earn them back. And the faster I wanted to earn them back, the harder it became to follow my own approach patiently. What had begun as putting a little money into the market gradually became something that left me restless, tense, and determined to prove a point.

One thing this experience brought home to me is that your mindset can go wrong while you are making money, too. The moment I began measuring myself by how much other people had made, my own trading rhythm was already starting to falter. The profits in my account were still growing, but my demands on the outcome were growing faster.

Whatever you trade, there is no getting around discipline. A trade making money does not prove it was a good decision. Trades that stray from the plan can be profitable too, and sometimes those profits make it even harder to stop: once crossing a boundary has been rewarded, it becomes easier to believe the next trade deserves an exception as well. Do that often enough, and the profits you have accumulated may disappear in a single lapse of control.

Of course I know all this. But there is a real distance between knowing and doing.

Keeping a steady mindset is hard in itself. When prices rise, your position feels too small. When they fall, you want to wait a little longer. After missing a move, you want to catch up quickly. After a drawdown, you want to get back to even as soon as possible. Many rules demand that we go against our instincts precisely when it feels most uncomfortable. Even a trader like Jesse Livermore could not always maintain his discipline. I have even less reason to believe that a few reminders to myself will keep me rational all the time.

That is why I want software to help me stick to these rules.

In secondary markets, I have already turned some of my trading rules into constraints enforced by Trading Note, the system I built for myself. I set the rules while I’m calm, then let the system help me hold to them when I’m actually trading. At the very least, this leaves less room for changing my mind in the moment or finding a reason to make an exception.

This on-chain experience has also made me think that perhaps my next step should be to build an on-chain trading system of my own. The conditions for adding, the maximum position size, when to take out my initial capital or exit, and when to step away for a while can all be defined in advance. The rules I know I should follow, but am most likely to overturn when I get carried away, are exactly the ones that should become constraints the system actually enforces.

Whenever I think about this, I feel grateful to be living in the age of AI.

In the past, even if you knew exactly what kind of tool you needed, you usually had to choose the closest fit from the software already available. It was hard to find someone who would build for all those small, specific needs that mattered only to you. Now, knowing how to work with AI gives you a chance to turn those ideas into a program, piece by piece, then keep refining it around your habits until the tool fits the way you trade more closely.

That ability means a great deal to me. I can gradually write the pitfalls I’ve encountered, the mistakes I’ve made repeatedly, and the rules I believe in when I’m thinking clearly into a system I use every day. Each review of my trading then gives me another way to put a lesson into practice.

The profits from these past few days are gone; I can’t change that. But at least I can see more clearly where I began to lose my rhythm. The next time I catch myself thinking, “Everyone else has made so much—why have I made so little?”, I hope I recognize it sooner. And I hope that, by then, my system will be able to stop me from making a few of the trades I made this time.