The day I lost 30%
A name that was climbing nicely cratered. Here's what I learned.
That day I had lunch as usual, sat down, and opened my quotes app. The screen was all red minus signs. −28%. At first I thought I'd misread the number. The next day it slid to −32%.
At first I was in denial
"It's just a temporary wobble." "It'll recover tomorrow." I repeated these to myself for days. I checked the chart dozens of times a day, but truly I just stared, unable to do anything.
The hardest part wasn't the loss itself — it was that I couldn't even explain to myself why I'd bought this company. I'd only followed along because someone said it was good, because everyone was buying.
What did I get wrong?
Looking back, the mistakes were clear. First, I put nearly my entire savings into one stock, so I had no room to hold on when it fell. Second, I bought on borrowed conviction — leaning on someone else's certainty, not my own, so I had no anchor when it shook.
Third, I had no plan for after it dropped. I only imagined it rising; I'd never once thought about what to do if it fell. So when it did, I froze and did nothing.
So what changed?
After that, I built the habit of writing down, in one sentence, why I'm buying a company before I buy. If I can't write that sentence, I don't buy. And I only put in as much as I can lose without my daily life shaking.
That −30% genuinely hurt. But thanks to it, I learned 'how not to collapse when I lose' before 'how to make money.' In hindsight, learning it early with a small amount was a blessing.