Practical playbooks, tax help, and straight talk for anyone who's down on a crypto or stock trade and needs a plan back to green.
Step-by-step playbooks for what to do after a loss.
Market moves that matter, explained through a recovery lens.
The behavioral side of losing money — and how to think straight again.
Tax-loss harvesting and capital-loss guides for crypto and stocks.
Airdropped crypto is taxed as ordinary income the moment you can control it, based on what it's worth that day — not what it's worth when you eventually sell. If the token later craters, the loss you get back is capped at $3,000 a year. How the rule actually works, with a worked example.
The IRS's own Office of Chief Counsel ruled in 2025 that pig-butchering crypto scam losses can qualify as a deductible theft loss under Section 165(c)(2) — but only if you can show profit motive, and a nearly identical romance-scam loss can be fully disallowed. Here's the actual test, the forms, and the math.
Overconfidence bias is the tendency to overestimate your own skill at picking winners and timing markets — and the largest study ever done on it found the most confident, most active traders earned the worst returns. What the research found, why crypto makes it worse, and how to check your own numbers.
On September 17, 2026, the SEC issued a five-year conditional exemption letting permissioned venues trade tokenized U.S. stocks on-chain. Here's what the Innovation Exemption actually allows, what protections don't automatically carry over, and a checklist before you touch it.
Trader tax status and the Section 475(f) mark-to-market election can remove the $3,000 annual capital loss cap entirely — but qualifying is a facts-and-circumstances test, the trade-off is steep, and whether it even applies to crypto is genuinely unsettled.
NFT losses follow the same capital-loss rules as crypto or stock — sell or dispose of it to realize the loss, no deduction just for a floor price dropping. But two under-covered wrinkles change the math: the IRS's move to tax some NFT gains as collectibles, and the personal-use trap that can void the deduction entirely.