I sold Bitcoin at six thousand dollars.
I had bought around three thousand.
I told myself I was being sensible. I had doubled my money. It was time to take the profit.
Two years later, Bitcoin reached sixty-nine thousand.
The uncomfortable part was not missing the upside.
It was realizing that my decision had not really been about the numbers.
I was afraid.
Fear had made the decision. Logic arrived afterwards and wrote the explanation.
The same thing happened three times
The Bitcoin sale was only one example.
In 2020, I made an offer on a five-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-euro apartment without properly calculating whether I could afford it. The number felt normal because it was the number I had been hearing around me for years.
Then there was a job offer. A recruiter promised me a fast-track career path. I accepted without negotiating the salary. I told myself the opportunity mattered more than the starting number.
Three years later, the fast track never came. I left.
Three situations. Three different explanations.
The pattern underneath them was the same.
The story comes after the feeling
Daniel Kahneman's work helped me understand why this felt so convincing.
We have fast, automatic reactions and slower, more deliberate reasoning. The fast reaction can arrive before we are even aware that a decision has started.
That doesn't mean every emotional decision is wrong. Emotion is part of good decision-making too.
The problem is believing that the logical story we tell ourselves proves that emotion played no role.
Sometimes the logic is not the decision.
It is the press release.
What I look for now
I pay attention to the feeling that arrives immediately before certainty.
Am I genuinely confident?
Or do I feel relieved?
Am I excited about the opportunity?
Or am I afraid of missing it?
Am I selling because the investment thesis changed?
Or because I want the discomfort to stop?
Those questions don't remove emotion. They make it visible.
Make the decision before you need it
The most useful thing I learned from these experiences is that I don't want to rely on discipline in the middle of an emotional moment.
I want rules that were created when I was calm.
A contribution that happens automatically.
A portfolio allocation I have already decided on.
A pause before a major purchase.
A requirement to write down why I am selling before I press the button.
The point is not to eliminate emotion.
It is to stop emotion from having the entire meeting by itself.
Take it from the idea to the system
I explore the psychology behind these decisions here, but the practical side lives on NobodyToldMike.com.
The NobodyToldMike YouTube channel goes through the three decisions in detail and the behavioral pattern connecting them.
If you want to make your investing less dependent on how you feel on a particular day, the NobodyToldMike.com Portfolio Tracker can give you a clear view of the system you are actually running.
The Journal is where I ask why the emotion wins.
NobodyToldMike.com is where I try to build a system that gives it less room to decide.