20 , been doing intraday trading for a few months now. Something I’ve noticed about myself — when I take a loss, I skip meals, stop talking to people, basically shut down for the rest of the day. Tried a few things to snap out of it but nothing sticks long term.
Sometimes I think I should just enjoy life more, but honestly I don’t even know what that looks like for me anymore. Also catch myself comparing my progress to others way too much, which doesn’t help.
I’m 20, trying to build something real and make good money, but I don’t want to burn out or lose myself in the process. For those of you who’ve been trading (or just grinding at something) for longer — how do you separate your mood from your results? What actually worked for you?
Would genuinely appreciate any advice.
Haven’t day traded but I have speed ran games, you get a similar awesome feeling when you’ve accomplished the goal, and similar feelings when your runs that day are just worse than yesterdays.
You can’t separate your mood and results. At least I couldn’t. Most days this was fine, I could focus on “I got this trick down, just need to integrate it into the run better” or “wow, that was a perfect 2 minutes” (of an hour-long run). The days where there wasn’t a silver lining, those days were a mess. Spend hours, all fucking day, accomplishing nothing? Killed me. I stopped speedrunning. Mostly stopped gaming, but I still like doing factory games or doing things like making a living dex in Pokémon, and still play games with others.
If you’re shutting down on those bad days, you have it worse than me, which makes sense, since you’re spending money to do this. My advice is to look at what money you’ve actually made. Is it more than what a normal job would make for the time you’ve put in? If not, then stop doing it, its not profitable. If it IS making you more money, then you need to put a value on your happiness, since its costing you that. Spoiler, most people want money to live well and get happiness. Even if you’re making more, think of it like “was the extra hundred I made worth the crashes I’ve been having?”.
Gambling isn’t sustainable, anyway. Day trading is a short term thing, at best, and it sounds like you’ve tapped that out, at least as far as you can without sacrificing your health.