In December 2018, I had put around twenty thousand euros into crypto.
The portfolio was worth less than five thousand.
I looked at the number and did something that felt completely reasonable at the time.
I bought more.
That sentence still bothers me.
Not because I lost money. I have made peace with that. What bothers me is that I was using the size of my loss as the reason to risk even more.
The more I had lost, the harder it became to stop.
When the past starts making today's decision
There is a simple question I wish I had asked myself then.
If I had none of this today, and I had the cash in my hand instead, would I buy it now?
That question removes the history.
It removes the price I paid. The time I spent watching it. The conviction I once had. The story I had already told myself about what this investment was going to become.
What remains is the decision in front of you.
That is what I failed to do.
I was no longer deciding whether the investment was good. I was deciding whether I could accept being wrong.
The expensive part of being wrong
The sunk cost fallacy is usually described as a mistake in logic: money already spent cannot be recovered, so it should not determine what you do next.
That sounds obvious when you read it.
It is much less obvious when the money is yours.
Because selling means admitting that the story you believed was wrong. Holding gives you another day in which the story might still become true.
That is why some losses become strangely difficult to leave behind.
You are no longer protecting the investment. You are protecting the version of yourself who made it.
I have seen the same pattern outside investing. A job that no longer makes sense because you have already spent ten years building the career. A project that should have been stopped because too much work has already gone into it. A purchase you keep because admitting you never needed it feels worse than letting it sit in the cupboard.
The past starts charging rent.
You are allowed to have been wrong
Eventually I sold the dead coins.
Then I made another mistake. I took some of the remaining money and moved it into other falling coins.
The lesson had not really reached me yet.
That is what makes these biases dangerous. Knowing the name does not automatically make you immune to the behaviour.
You have to notice the moment when the past starts making the decision for you.
When you hear yourself thinking, “I've come too far to stop now,” that may not be commitment.
It may be the loyalty tax.
You are allowed to have been wrong.
What you cannot afford is to keep paying for it.
From the story to your own portfolio
I explore the practical side of this mistake on NobodyToldMike.com, including the investing decisions behind this story.
The NobodyToldMike YouTube channel is where I break down the psychology of sunk costs and the question that can help you separate today's decision from yesterday's mistake.
If you want to step back and look at your own investments rather than one individual position, the NobodyToldMike.com Portfolio Tracker is a practical place to see what you own and whether each position still has a reason for being there.
The Journal is where I think about why we behave this way. NobodyToldMike is where I turn the lesson into something you can use.
The question is always today
The money you lost yesterday is not available to you today.
The decision is.
That is the part I wish I had understood in 2018.