By skyforbes 
You can probably guess the moment I finally opened up to futures. I saw gold going up month after month, and figured it'd probably be a safe bet to just keep some futures sitting there longer term, so I sold all my crypto for gold futures on Coinbase the literal day before crypto crashed, bought the highest amount of gold and silver long contracts coinbase would let me, and got extremely lucky. So, I figured I'd use the excess money to go even higher risk for funsies and figured I'd try to ride crypto's rebound back up, and I figured I could just sell back out if it went back down to where I started.
As it turns out, I do not know much about how stock prices work, so when crypto kept sliding instead of just steadily rebounding, I panicked, and kept flipping trying to day trade the money back, banking on the idea that gold would keep going up and pad my losses, and that I could just back out of crypto futures if I dropped back down to where I started, which I did, and it felt like a safe idea.
Until it didn't. I straight up wasn't even looking at gold's charts and didn't see the double peak forming, and I didn't even set a stop loss (People kept hitting my crypto stop losses with some random wick 20% below the actual candle right before it shot up so I figured I'd just watch it all manually), so I rode it the whole way down on 80 contracts.
At this point, I'm just stepping away from trading for a while to actually learn it properly and sticking to smaller moves when I get back in, but I'm still hoping to re-enter gold after the correction is decisively finished if I can and just swing trade some longs again and keep rolling them longer term with a rising stop loss this time since the long term outlook still seems pretty overwhelmingly positive, but I have no idea if that'll work out.
Definitely going to be playing it a lot safer until I'm a little more consistent, and ease into larger positions from now on, but I am left still pretty genuinely interested in the whole world of investing; I'd really like to actually understand it better, and I do find it pretty fun to root on price movements with others live in some streams. So, I'm not out yet, but this really does hit hard.
Lesson of the day: Do NOT ever touch leverage until you know how to properly stop loss. No matter how lucky some people get, absolutely no opportunity is ever safe.