Humble Author’s Note: This is how ya boy fooo fooo conceives of some concepts surrounding the Fear emotion and its management in crypto trading. fooo isn’t turbo wealthy, at least not yet, but humble fooo is chugging along on that path from humble origins. The concepts in this article constitute fooo’s set of principles for comprehending risk comprehension itself. This is fooo riffing on a topic that fooo deeply enjoys and finds fascinating. None of it is financial advice.
Let us begin:
What is Felt-risk?
Fud is the feeling that what you bought sucks and will go zero
Fomo is the feeling that what you haven’t bought is going 100x tomorrow so you better hurry
All of these are fears. It’s fear, uncertainty and doubt. Or it’s fear of missing out.
Do only the bravest of us survive the crypto market?
Nah rily. It’s more about how strongly you are able to not give a fuck.
Two Types of Peeps
Type 1: If you are good at not giving a fuck about others’ opinions, you will be able to withstand the fears of the volatile crypto market much better and probably have a chance at trading crypto effectively rather than just passively investing
Type 2: If you are the kind of person that cares from an emotionally-felt sense what others think (sometimes caring what others think can be practically necessary, but that’s not what we’re talking about here). Probably best to just buy some crypto as a part of a well-balanced portfolio and hodl for a 10 or 20 year time horizon.
How do you know if you’re type 1 or type 2. Are you a part of a paid group? Do you blindly follow others’ calls on twitter or discord? do you show off material possessions a lot? You’re type 2. If you’re a toxic maxi of any stripe? Type 2 herd animal. If you have to ask if you’re type 2, you’re probably a type 2.
If you’re a type 2 can you change into a type 1? Sure, with enough consistently-applied effort. People can change personality traits about themselves, big and small, that’s a neuro-psychological fact. But it’s also hard to change, and generally requires an immense catalyst in a person’s life. Certainly not worth gambling on someone changing about most things most of the time.
So
Wat mean.
Think of fear in terms of the lizard brane’s attempt to accurately assess financial risk.
If you aren’t deployed? When numba has gone up lots, you’ll feel fomo for NOT being invested.
When numba gone down a lot you’ll feel fear for having STAYED invested.
There is always a felt-risk on each side of a bet in investing.
The risk of buying against the risk of not buying
The risk of selling against the risk of not selling
If you are risk averse naturally, your brane will cook up some simple maths
Either: Me not deployed + Numba going up = Reeeee I have to buy
Me deployed + Numba going up = I’m a genius, never selling
Me not deployed + Number going down = I’m a genius, waiting another 70% or never touching
Me deployed + Number going down = Reeeee I have to sell right now
You know how everyone always thinks they’re the logical one and people who disagree with them are illogical? Often most people are capable of basic logic and it’s more a question of premises being at odds. Often emotionally-driven premises.
That’s to say that while all of these calculations may SEEM logical or rational, they are built on lizard brane premises.
to trade effectively, one needs to shed this mirage of logical deductions, and disregard fear-based logical calculations in favor of assessing, instead, the premise at their heart, which is unrelated to the current status of their stack.
This market, like this world, doesn’t revolve around you or fooo. It is indifferent to us. It does what it does as a sum of its causes and effects. How you feel about this market is irrelevant to the truth of the market itself, in relation to which you and fooo are insignificant.
There is a truth that exists outside of you or fooo. To see and project the truth of the market relative to where one is, irrespective of one’s recent PNL or financial situation, and to have the self-direction not to ape this way and that and make only measured moves are, in fooo’s opinion, the two most important skills of an effective crypto trader.
Narratives, big players’ opinions, disliking the guy that just bought or sold, high IQs threads, tribes of maxis… it’s all just noise. It’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter to what the truth of the market is at a given time. At best it may provide a small hint, but that hint is often not straightforward. All that matters is the physics of a market.
If fooo ever starts a team someday. fooo will not be hiring mathematicians or statisticians or economists or finance majors. fooo will hire someone with a unique combination of interests in, say, physics, history and the human animal.
fooo has a high appetite for calculated risk, and is comfortable being surrounded by those who disagree. fooo also prioritizes wisdom over intelligence and plays defensively. No leverage. Only the easiest trades. Only the highest time frames. One can make immense returns without leverage over time. Often those that defend leverage just stand to gain more by their ref links if you use it, or they defend it just because they did it and want to push back to make it look like a “debate”, even if they know it fucks normal people most of the time. How many 1000 times has fooo seen someone get blown out by leverage when they were rich already, or would have made it spot trading or even hodling…
fooo likes to say leverage magnifies your loses (as well as gains).
It also magnifies the felt-risk emotion around your trade. It’s like turning the sound up on the thing that makes trading difficult. You’re making it harder to scythe through the conclusions to properly assess the premises.
There are actually alfalfa males like Rookie that used leverage to good effect from what fooo hears, but statistically-speaking, you aren’t that 1 in 100,000,000, anon. So, in fooo’s opinion, best to avoid leverage, and just accept that the road to making it is going to take longer. Better RR that way.
Felt risk stems from a natural and organic, evolved process whereby people, who like to feel safu, would generally opt into herd-thinking, consciously or subconsciously. It’s the deepest part of our evolution to seek a tribe to belong to for mutual protection and defense.
In crypto, it’s also why most people are wrong publicly most of the time — on some level they succumbed to groupthink. It’s neither good nor bad, it just is. Humanity is that way for a reason. Imagine a world where we didn’t have this instinct. How would any hierarchy be effective? How would any organized labor projects ever get completed. We need groupthink as a species. Not good for trading though, since trading is a war game where it’s you vs your counterparty.
All of this being said, there is a difference between being able to analyze what seems fundamentally important in trading, and actually being able to execute it. fooo has built good trust with foooself over time to adhere to fooo’s principles, but you never know. Maybe someday in a moment of weakness, fooo will break one of fooo’s own trading rules, disregard the knowlege fooo has spelled out here, and lose fooo’s hard-earned muns lol. fooo isn’t pontificating in these articles as fooo recognizes keenly fooo’s own fallibility in executing on these ideas just like anyone else. but fooo thinks the ideas themselves seem good tho. if u know what fooo sayin
So if you’re reading this, and you’re finally realizing you’re a type 2. Maybe you decide to stop trying to make it all back on 100x leverage. maybe you just DCA in a portion of your paycheck each month for a few years. maybe you make it that way?
Or maybe you’re a type 1 and this article has refined your perception of fear as a hidden, felt-risk premise, at the heart of wrong conclusions. the veil you have to comprehend in order to pierce, and once pierced, disregard.
Or maybe the whole cryptocurrency space collapses now that everyone seems complacent that it’s impossible to collapse because it’s too big.
Just like in that R.E.M. song “It’s the end of the world as we know it”
One thing is for sure.
This is the most absurd financial space in human history.
fooo likes dat.
