I have lost over five hundred thousand American dollars in the stock market.
I want you to sit with that number. Let it wash over you. Let it enter your body. That's a house. That's several houses in Ohio. I have donated multiple homes to the market makers. They have not sent a thank you card. This is fine.
I was losing money during the easiest bull run in human history. You people were buying stocks based on emoji sentiment and becoming wealthy. I was studying charts. I was doing "research." I was "being smart about it."
Some of you have witnessed my posts over the years. A beautiful public decomposition. Each update a little more desperate. A little more creative with the cope. You watched a man slowly enter the wood chipper feet-first and narrate the experience. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your awards. They meant nothing but I did notice them.
Here is something I learned about myself: when I lose money, I do not stop. I do not "cut my losses." I look at the loss and I think "what if I made this worse." And then I DO. Exposed to flame, I do not recoil. I lean in. I say "more please." I say "I can take it." I could not take it. The more I lost, the more deranged the plays became. This is what scientists call "chasing." I was chasing. I was chasing so hard I lapped myself. I was running in circles in a burning building looking for the exit and the exit was just more fire and I said "this is fine, fire is just fast air."
I am 38 years old. I have spent a DECADE of my life watching lines go directions I did not want them to go. Ten years. Three thousand six hundred days of looking at a screen and seeing my net worth do a little dance and then die. I have aged like a president. I have the internal organs of a much older man.
Last year, I reached what the philosophers call "the bottom."
I was suicidal. This is not a joke part. I was genuinely going to leave. I had made peace with it. The market had taken everything and I was going to let it have the rest.
I started having panic attacks. Do you know what a panic attack is? It's when your body decides to simulate death for practice. Very helpful. Great feature.
I could not sleep. I would lie in bed and my brain would calculate. Automatically. Without my permission. "If you had sold there. If you had bought here. If you had simply done nothing. If you had simply been born a different person with different impulses. If you had simply not been you."
The losses compounded in my skull. They grew. They multiplied. They became a whole civilization in there. A society of regret. Little regret people building little regret buildings. Infrastructure. Economy. The losses became MORE organized than I was.
The truth is embarrassing so I'll tell it. I was googling ways to kill myself. Specifics. And the algorithm, in its infinite wisdom, decided to serve me an article about old folk tales where people who die by their own hand become trapped as spirits in the place they died. Forever. Exposed to the elements. Unable to leave.
And my first thought was: "that would be annoying." And my second thought was: "what else did medieval peasants actually believe."
Six hours later I had written eleven pages about bells and runners and men who chased sounds they couldn't name and I had not thought about my portfolio once. My brain found a loophole. The loophole was folklore.
I am not okay but I am BETTER. I am standing. I am vertical. The market tried to put me in the ground and I said "not today, I have to finish writing about the town that destroyed itself chasing a bell that meant nothing."
So here is my gift to you, degenerate gamblers.
My daily "stock tips."
They are folklore now. Warnings from the old world. Written by a man the market already killed. I am writing to you from the afterlife. It's quiet here. No charts. No tickers. Just me and the bell and the runners and the ones who learned to stay still.
Read them. Heed them. Or don't. I am no longer in the business of telling people what to do with money. I am in the business of warning you about what happens when you chase every sound.
Sometimes they are the same thing.
In closing, I made a website. I'm not going to say what it is because this isn't an ad. It's just a place where a broken man posts folklore about financial ruin. If you google "unhinged stock market folklore written by someone who should be institutionalized" you'll probably find it. Or just go to capitalaxioms.com. This is not financial advice. This is not even website advice.