“The market is the best teacher —
and the tuition is pain.”
The weekend glow of confidence still lingers.
Valentine wakes early, makes coffee, and checks his portfolio.
The numbers look steady — green, quiet, reassuring.
But as the hours pass, the chart begins to shift.
Green turns gray. Gray turns red.
His small gain fades, then flips negative.
The curve sinks lower, pixel by pixel, as if mocking him.
“It’ll bounce back,” he tells himself.
“It has to.”
He watches, breath shallow, as a candle dips below his stop-loss line.
And still, he waits.
He doesn’t close the position — pride holds his finger still.
“Illustrations created with AI. Story written and produced for Steemit Originals.”
A notification blinks: –12%.
His stomach tightens.
The chart looks the same as the stories he used to study —
except this time, he’s inside it.
He clicks Sell.
The position closes with a quiet beep.
Silence.
Only the hum of his laptop fan remains.
He leans back, staring at the ceiling.
No anger. Just a deep, strange calm.
“That’s the price of learning,” he whispers.
“And I just paid it.”
Valentine opens his notebook.
The page below Trade #1 waits, blank.
He writes slowly:
“Trade #2 — Loss. Lesson: respect the plan, not the emotion.”
Then he adds one more line:
“Failure is information.”
He closes the book and exhales.
“Maybe loss isn’t the end — maybe it’s the teacher.”
The loss hurts — but it feels clean, honest.
For the first time, he understands why traders talk about discipline like it’s faith.