It is 7:30am and I am sitting here watching the ticker for the cybercurrency, Ethereum, on one of my three monitors.  It used to be that I got up, meditated, had breakfast, and then moved outside for my morning practice of Chi Gung and Vajra Dance.

But, that all changed last week when I decided a week ago to become a day trader.  I still do my practice, but I intermingle my routine with monitoring the real-time sales and buys.

My success?  Well, for the week I am at a $1619 loss in terms of money.  However, I am intrigued by my emotional attachment to outcomes.  I think my gains in this area outweigh any possible monetary loss.

This all started mid May when I woke up one day and decided to check my bitcoin and ethereum values.  It been a couple of months since I’d last looked.  When I logged into my Coinbase Account, I could only just stare.

“So, this is what it feels like to become an instant millionaire,” I thought.  The small investment my partner and I had made the prior year had initially gone down and then just stayed flat.  Now the value was 10 times the purchase price.  Wow!

I wasn’t a millionaire, by far, but the change in value was so dramatic.  I could feel something shift inside me.  I had recently made investments in myself, and saw this as a direct payoff for the money I spent on a business coaching program.

I called my partner to the computer.  I said to him, “Should we sell?”  Ethereum was at $175 that day, but I could imagine it increasing like Bitcoin to over $2000 dollars.  I went to the sell page and sat their contemplating.  Then he bent over me and put the max we were allowed to sell in the cart and hit the sell button.  I gasped!  I turned to him in amazement and said, “You just pushed the button,” as if that was the easiest thing to do.  He seemed to do it without much deliberation.

His reply?

He simply said, “It is just numbers.”

I pondered the truth of it.  It was just numbers.  The source of my income is not Ethereum, or Bitcoin, or my work.  Still, I was attached to those numbers.

The next day the price had dropped $20 and I bought back what my partner had sold, making a modest sum of money.  This got me thinking about day trading, but it wasn’t till a month later that I tried…