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.
The advice to 'donate appreciated assets to charity' flips completely once a position is underwater. Donate a losing stock or coin directly and you forfeit the capital loss for good. Sell first, then donate the cash, and you keep both. The full comparison, a worked example, and the crypto-specific appraisal rule most people miss.
Losses inside a 401(k), traditional IRA, or Roth IRA generally can't be deducted on your tax return — and a 2025 law permanently closed the one narrow exception that used to exist. Here's how retirement-account losses actually work, compared to a taxable brokerage account.
The Senate's cloture vote on the CLARITY Act failed 49-50 on September 15, 2026, and crypto sold off as prediction markets that had priced 2026 passage at 82% in February collapsed to single digits. The mechanical lesson: a procedural vote isn't a law, and positioning around 'this bill will pass' is a bet on politics, not a fundamental.
The disposition effect is the well-documented tendency to sell profitable positions too early and hold losing ones too long — the opposite of what's optimal for returns or taxes. What the research actually found, why it happens, and how to catch it in your own portfolio.
When a margin or futures position gets force-closed, the IRS still treats it as a sale — you owe tax or claim a loss based on the liquidation price, not what you meant to exit at. How the gain or loss is actually calculated, and why the type of contract you were trading changes the tax rate.
Your purchase price, an asset's all-time high, and round numbers all act as psychological anchors that distort what a fair price actually looks like. What anchoring bias is, the research behind it, and how to actually price an asset without one.