Every time I finally manage to accumulate some profit, I end up endlessly testing trades, and the fees and slippage slowly eat away at my account. This time, I watched nearly half of my profit evaporate right before my eyes.

Looking back now, if I hadn’t stopped out at cost on that SOL move from 141-147, but had instead decisively closed at the top, my drawdown would have been cut by more than half. At least I didn’t mistake unrealized gains for real money back then, so my mentality was still okay.

The shrinkage of profits is secondary; what frustrates me the most is missing out on such a smooth downtrend. The trend was right there, but I was stuck fiddling with test trades—a classic case of making gains on paper without real profit. This kind of ineffective operation is honestly pretty embarrassing.