Awoke

I've been reading the replies to this tweet, which has received far more attention than I expected, and I think it highlights one of the biggest psychological problems people have when it comes to investing and trading. And I don't mean that from the perspective of people being upset about their investments or complaining about poor returns. I'm talking about the psychological dishonesty, or perhaps delusion, in the way people assess their own decisions. A lot of people seem to assume that if they hadn't bought and held XRP, for example, they would have automatically picked a better-performing asset and traded it more effectively. And I just don't think that's a realistic assumption. People say things like, "Well, if I'd bought XYZ ten years ago, I'd be up 10,000%." Well, yes. With hindsight. If we knew exactly which assets were going to perform the best over the next decade, we'd all buy them, sell at the perfect time and make extraordinary returns. But that's not how investing works. You have that exact same opportunity in front of you today. You could sell XRP right now and buy whatever asset is going to be the best-performing investment over the next ten years. But what is that asset? Nobody knows. It might be XRP. It might be something completely different. And the reality is that most people probably wouldn't identify it anyway. But here's where I think the real psychological mistake comes in. You're judging your historical investment decisions against a hypothetical version of yourself who somehow made all the correct decisions. You're assuming that not only would you have identified the better-performing asset, but that you would have bought it at the right price, held through the volatility and sold at the right time. And that's a pretty extraordinary assumption. Especially when you consider that, depending on your entry, XRP has actually delivered some pretty decent returns. If you bought at $0.30 or $0.50, for example, you could still be sitting on multiples of your initial investment. Of course, if you bought at $3.60, that's a completely different discussion. But that brings me to what I think is the most important point. If you're one of the people who bought XRP at $3, what on earth makes you think that, had you bought another asset instead, you would have somehow identified the best-performing investment, bought it at a better price and executed the trade perfectly? You bought near the top of this particular asset. Why are you assuming that your execution would have been dramatically better somewhere else? That's the part I find fascinating. People compare their actual investment performance against the absolute best possible outcome they could have achieved with perfect hindsight. Not against what they realistically would have done with the information, emotions and decision-making ability they had at the time. And I think this is one of the biggest psychological traps in investing. "If I hadn't bought that, I would have bought this, and I'd have made 1,000 times more money." No, you probably wouldn't have. Because if you were genuinely that good at identifying opportunities, timing entries and exits, and managing your emotions, you probably wouldn't have bought the asset you're now complaining about at its highs in the first place. I'm sorry if that upsets some people, but I think it's an important reality to confront. The lesson isn't necessarily that XRP was the right investment or that holding it forever is the correct decision. It's that you cannot judge your real-world decisions against an imaginary version of yourself who trades with perfect hindsight. That's not analysis. That's hindsight bias dressed up as trading ability.

Every time

Intelligent people have no friends. Or maybe just one or two. The thing is... they observe too much. They notice the little things most people miss. The change in your tone. The energy behind a compliment. The difference between what you say and what you "actually" do. The intentions behind carefully chosen words. They observe patterns. Read behaviours like a book. They can sense whether you're pretending, or being genuinely happy for them. They don't say it. But trust me, they know.