As I learned the hard way with Ethereum (bought at $87, sold at $83) and Gamestop (bought at $60 and $200, sold at $50), panicking is the easiest way to lose your money when investing. Thankfully it wasn't too expensive of a lesson, but I'm now done gambling and stick with buying ETFs that track the stock market.
There's no difference between investing and trading for the average retail stock market dabbler. Anytime you trade money for a stock, you are speculating that the asset will go in the direction you want, mostly up. If someone is looking through financial statements and has intimate knowledge of the industry, more power to you since you are more likely to be the classical definition of an investor.
I can give you loads and loads of examples where you could have held and suffered much greater losses over time. Last year I "invested" in $FSLY. Look at the stock performance. It would need to go up 900% to get back to its 2021 peak. Can it happen? Sure. Would you buy the stock thinking it could do a 900%?
Ethereum is now at $1,328, 15x what I paid for it four years ago. $GME went back up after I sold. Neither purchase would have been a loss if I had held through paper losses.
Yep, I feel lucky I experimented with bitcoin around 5-10 years ago. Its cycles are short so I got a much more intuitive understanding of timing vs buy-and-hold and how to avoid panicking, which has helped a lot now.
