I bought BTC and ETH very early. Then I discovered leverage and gave it all back.

This is probably the most painful financial lesson I've learned.

I bought BTC and ETH very early.

Much earlier than I would have expected in hindsight.

I held through enormous volatility.

Eventually, I sold my BTC around $65,000 and my ETH around $4,000.

At the time, those numbers felt incredible.

I had made substantial gains.

Then I discovered leveraged trading through social media. And that's where everything changed.

I started using leverage. And eventually I lost essentially everything I had made in crypto ; and my original capital as well.

Years of patiently accumulating and holding were undone by a much shorter period of leveraged trading.

The frustrating part is that I didn't need leverage.

I had already done the part that required patience.

I had bought early. I had held through volatility. I had realized substantial gains.

And then I convinced myself that I could make even more by trading with leverage.

I couldn't.

I gave it all back.

Looking back, the lesson seems embarrassingly simple:

Don't turn an investment into a casino just because you've made money on it.

Making a large return doesn't mean you suddenly have an edge at short-term trading.

And leverage doesn't make you a better investor.

It simply makes your mistakes happen faster and with larger consequences.

My stock investing history has a similar pattern.

I repeatedly sold winners after relatively modest gains and DCA'd into losers.

With crypto, I did almost the opposite: I built a successful long-term position and then destroyed the result by introducing leverage.

So I've ended up learning the same lesson from two completely different directions:

I kept trying to do something instead of simply letting a good investment compound.

My current philosophy is therefore much simpler:

Diversify.

Keep costs low.

Avoid leverage.

Don't confuse a falling price with a bargain.

Don't confuse a rising price with a reason to sell.

And if I can't explain exactly why I'm making a trade, I probably shouldn't be making it.

My boring conclusion after all of this?

DCA into a diversified global ETF or or a basket of mixed cryptocurrencies (from the top 10), keep a sensible allocation, and leave it alone.

You probably won't become rich overnight.

But you also remove a huge number of opportunities to sabotage yourself.

I hope someone reading this who is currently discovering leverage through social media learns this lesson without having to pay for it the way I did.