How to deal with greed, FOMO and ego when trading and investing in cryptocurrencies?

It isn't always easy to make good rational decisions when investing, especially not in the crypto world! You are constantly overwhelmed with all these exciting investment opportunities which all turn out to be super profitable as soon as you decided not to invest in them. This leaves you with a constant sensation of fear of missing out. Some people around you constantly seem to be making more money than you, which hurts your ego. Also, as cryptocurrencies are so volatile, your portfolio is constantly moving up and down. Recently you made some good profits and now they're decreasing, which definitely makes you yearn for more. Meanwhile you remain emotionally attached to your decisions, this time you have to be right, you will proof it to them, just wait and see.

The problem with FOMO, fear, greed and your whole ego in general, is that they often makes you prawn to making stupid decisions. Your ego and greediness want that profit so bad that it takes over the ship (your brain) and starts making decisions for you you normally wouldn't make. It isn't always easy to know which feelings you should listen to and which not. Some would argue that you should never listen to your feelings and some will say the opposite ("just listen to your gut feeling bro!"). In the case of investing, I would personally argue that the best way to go is to become aware of your feelings and where they come from and then make a rational well argued decision of whether you should make an investment or not.

That sounds very obvious and easy, however I can assure you that it isn't. Even though I am trying this already for quite some time, I still catch myself making emotional hasty decisions on a regular basis. In order to control my greedy monkey (reptile) brain, I decided to write down some questions which I to ask myself every time before I make a big trade or investment. As the whole point of these questions are to become aware, it is important that you don't rush through the questions answering them quickly and proceed with your investment. The idea is that you first sit in a quiet place, breathe and then consciously ask yourself the following questions:

• Are you feeling rushed? Stressed? FOMO? Fear? If so, why?
• Are these feelings affecting your decisions? Is so, how?
• Are you being emotionally attached to your speculation?
• Would you buy the good at the price you are selling it for (or vise versa)?
• Is now really the right moment to invest? Are you being hasty?
• Did you do proper technical and fundamental analyse of your investment?
• Are you leading a trend or following one?
• Did you diversify and spread your risk?
• Did you put a limit and/or a stop loss? why (not)?

Most of you will already be familiar with most of the questions/points I put there. After a while you will go through these questions automatically without taking a specific time for it. However, as most of us are still beginning investors and traders, it can really help you to go through them consciously so you don't forget about any of them. Going through the questions forces you to really think about your decision from every angle before blindly taking it.

When you are in an excited or scared mood, it is often better to wait a couple of hours before making a decision. This is then really difficult because you are super excited and want to do it right away "before it is too late". However when you force yourself to wait a bit, you will find that you often make better decisions and that you are definitely not too late yet. Think about the last time you panic sold or bought because you saw a drop or spike in the market, was that a good decision? For me personally all those decisions have been bad decisions looking back at it. This is because in these moments, my emotions took over and made me forget or neglect doing proper technical analyse, I just went for it because I wanted it. Just going for things because you want them in the moment usually work very well for me, except in trading and investing.

The same counts for investing in online investment options like cloud-mining or lending platforms. Although there are some legit options out there, unfortunately most of them turn out to be a scam. People invest in these scams even when they already heard many times before about all the scams that are out there and know from within that when offers seem too good to be true, they usually are. People invest in them because of the same reasons people make stupid trading decisions; greed and fear. There are a lot of profitable options out there, you can find the most profitable cloud mining companies in this sheet, where I try them all myself and compare them. You do however want to make sure you invest in a real legit company that isn't going to screw you and walk away with your money.

In order to assess online investment opportunities on their legitimacy and trustfulness, I created this sheet. Now before opening it, go to www.sun-mining.com and see for yourself what your first impression is of the website, legit or no? For me it looked decently legit on the first look, good design, good story, good pricing but not TOO profitable (on the first view). It was exactly what I was looking for, a green cloud mining company with solar panels, offering 3 year contracts for a good price! Yeah! Mhh, when you buy their biggest package, one TH is only 90 USD!

Luckily I first did a full research into the company. During my research I was so hyped about the company that I started catching myself trying to mask their lack of trustworthiness in my mind. I started making up excuses of why it could be true they couldn't tell their location and didn't have any pictures of their equipment, "apparently they can't show their identity too much due to safety reasons". Even though I have experience with these kinds of practices and have been in the crypto space for over a year now, I still almost fell for it. For this reason I decided to write down all the points to look out for when considering making investments like these, so you guys don't have to make the same mistake as I nearly did! Check it out!

If you have any additional questions to ask yourself before making a trade, or any additional points to look out for before investing in lending platforms and cloud mining companies, please let me know in the comments so we can all learn from each other! Please like, share subscribe so more people can be aware. If you have any suggestions, contributions or questions about my sheet, please feel free to contact me about it! I am even willing to try out certain cloud mining companies and compare them, so you can always make sure you make the best investments!