@angrymime666 - I appreciate your honesty and insights into your psychology and fear. You're absolutely right that the markets--and indeed life!--are a tremendous mirror that reflects our boldness or timidity.
A few thoughts from someone in his fourth decade of playing with/against/for/despite Mr Market:
1. The nature of the investing game doesn't change. We do: with our experience, our (hopefully) improved decision-making over time, including our ability to forgive our mistakes and make even bigger and bolder bets despite how it turned out last time.
2. As your assets rise from four, to five, to six figures (the most important threshold IMO) your mentality MUST change.
The small-bet, risk averse approach that kept your assets trending top right needs to be replaced by bigger bets. Simply put, when you're young and your assets under management (AUM) are small the opportunity cost of bad decisions is the dominant factor in your thinking and decision-making.
However, as your AUM rises to six- and seven-figures and beyond (bless you!) the opportunity cost of missed decisions costs you more! E.g. when you're still trying to make that first 100K, slow-n-steady is king. But when you're in that 250K+ AUM range, and you didn't drop 10K on AAPL or NVDA way back when that really stings.
3. And finally, you absolutely must reconsider this thinking as your AUM blows up: "Dropping 50, 100k, 200k at once is unnerving." Spend some time reflecting on this bias. After all, consider this line of reasoning:
1. You're an equity investor and for simplicity, I'm assuming you're a long equity investor, so I'm excluding any short-term shorting or options activity you may dabble in during the choppy periods.
2. From (1) you're fundamental mental model is that over the long-term (5 years+), equities rise in value.
3. However, in your experience and study of (1) you also know that (i) drops and crashes occur, (ii) these are hard-to-predict (iii) virtually impossible to time or call the drops (and their resulting bottom) and so, you ascribe to the guidance to simply (iv) stay invested or even (v) invest more heavily when declines occur.
4. Given 1-3, shouldn't you delete this perception that "Dropping 50, 100k, 200k at once is unnerving."? From (1) alone, any quick chat with AI can demonstrate that even if you dropped big wads right the day before the worst crashes on record, as long as you stay invested, you'll eventually recover and continue the top-right trend?
Indeed, here's what my discussion with Gemini on this topic revealed:
View attachment 541034
View attachment 541036
View attachment 541038
View attachment 541039
Hopefully this helps. And please don't conclude that I'm telling you what you're doing now is wrong. Rather, I'm inviting you to explore your thinking. And your biases and blind spots. You may do that and decide to stay on your current course.
For myself, I've found it valuable to change my approach as my AUM climbs, convinced by thought exercises like the one above. Indeed, I would argue that a sign of our growth as investors is precisely when we change our minds. Indeed, I reflect on that exact question annually: "what did I change my mind about last year?".
Consider then, as I've concluded some time ago, our greatest barrier to wealth is not the worry over the wrong investment, or the Orange guy in the White House, it's
ourselves.
Wills.
PS. And just so you don't think this is some long-winded condescension by a guy who has "made it", I've invested in this lengthy reply because I am in your exact position myself. Just with different numbers. I'm on deck to put, leverage included, 750-900K into the market in the coming weeks. Good luck to all of us!
