Exit Strategy
I want to tell you about the worst financial mistake I ever made. Not because it was complicated — it wasn't. It was embarrassingly simple. I had a position in a mid-cap coin. I was up 900%. And I didn't sell. I watched it go back down to 40% and convinced myself every single week that it was about to go back up.
It never did. Not to those levels anyway.
And the wildest part? I knew it was happening. I watched the number fall. I had the app open. I just couldn't hit sell.
I've talked to a lot of people in crypto since then. Traders, long-term holders, people who do this for a living, people who just put money in during the last bull run. And basically everyone has a version of this same story. The number goes up, way up, and then they hold through it coming back down. Over and over.
This is not a timing problem. This is not a skill problem. Here's what's actually going on.
When a coin is going up, your brain does something annoying. Every time you think about selling, it immediately asks: "But what if it goes higher?" And you can never rule that out. Nobody can. So you wait. And while you wait, the number keeps going up. Which feels like proof that waiting was the right call. So you wait more.
Then it peaks and starts coming down. Now your brain switches to: "It'll come back. I've seen it come back before. Just hold." And sometimes it does come back — which reinforces the behavior again. Until one day it doesn't.
This loop is not a character flaw. It's just how human brains handle uncertainty combined with money. We're genuinely terrible at this kind of decision in real time, when emotions are running high and the stakes feel huge.
You're not bad at selling. You're just making sell decisions at the worst possible time — when the market is moving and your emotions are fully online. Nobody does well in those conditions.
The fix I found — and I've tried a bunch of approaches — is simple in theory: you make your sell decision before you buy the coin. Not during the run. Not at the top. Before you ever put money in.
You ask yourself: "Why am I buying this? What would need to happen for this trade to be a success?" And you write down the answer as actual targets. "I want to sell 25% at $1.00, another 25% at $2.50, and the last 50% at $5.00." Or maybe you're thinking in market cap terms: "I'll start selling when this project hits a $50B market cap."
These numbers come from a version of you that's calm, not greedy, and not watching a flashing green number. They come from your actual research and your actual goals. They're much more reliable than anything you'll decide in the moment.
Here's the problem with just writing targets in a notes app or a spreadsheet. When the coin hits that number, you still have to remember to check, notice that it happened, and force yourself to act. That's still asking you to make a real-time decision under pressure.
I had targets in a Google Sheet for two cycles. I missed four of them because I was traveling, I was asleep, or I just didn't check that day. One of them I saw the alert, looked at the chart, convinced myself it would go higher, and overrode my own plan.
That's the thing about plans you keep in your head or in a doc somewhere. They're easy to ignore when the moment comes. You need something that creates friction in the other direction — something that makes it harder to deviate from the plan than to follow it.
The way I set this up now: before I buy anything, I add it to ExitLedger and set my targets right then. I type in the quantity I'm buying, my average cost, and my planned exit points with the quantities for each one. The system monitors the price around the clock. When a target hits, I get an email. The email tells me exactly which target fired and what the projected proceeds are. I click to acknowledge it, log the actual sale, and the system updates my remaining position automatically.
What this does psychologically is enormous. I'm not deciding in real time anymore. I'm just confirming something I already decided. The pressure is almost totally gone. It feels like executing a plan, not making a bet.
The other thing that's helped me is splitting targets into tranches. I used to think about selling as binary — sell it all or sell nothing. But that's a false choice. Selling 20% at each of five levels means you never fully miss a run, and you also never fully ride it back to zero. It takes the all-or-nothing pressure off the table completely.
It sounds obvious. But I honestly didn't think this way until I had a tool that made it easy to model out different tranche scenarios. When you can see on a screen: "If I sell 25% at $1.00, 25% at $2.00, and 50% at $4.00, here's my total projected exit value" — you start to see that partial exits are almost always smarter than waiting for the perfect top.
Nobody catches the top. That's not the goal. The goal is to take enough off the table, consistently, that the math works in your favor over time. A system is the only way I've found to actually do that.
Add your assets, set your targets, and let ExitLedger handle the watching. Free forever.
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