My Personal Experience in a Stock Market Crash｜A Scary Loss That Taught Me a Lifelong Investment Lesson

Back then—arrogant, fully invested, with zero defense.
I had been in the market for a few years then, short-term trading went pretty smoothly, small positions kept accumulating profits, and I started to feel like “I’ve got the market figured out.”
My mindset slowly became arrogant; I felt I didn’t need to follow rules, didn’t need to keep cash on hand, and certainly didn’t need to fear a big drop.
When the pandemic news first broke, the market was actually already showing warning signs—the index was soft every day, individual stocks started to skidded.
But I completely ignored it back then, still thinking it was a “short-term correction, a golden bottom-fishing opportunity.”
I made a decision that still terrifies me to think about now:
The broader market wasn’t stable, the slow decline hadn’t stopped, yet I went all in on heavily weighted growth stocks.
I didn’t leave a single cent of cash in the account, put everything in, single-mindedly waiting for a big rebound to make a huge profit.
Real hell—days of endless, relentless decline, couldn’t even get out if I wanted to.
The days that followed were filled with a fear I’d never experienced.
The market wasn’t just crashing for a day; it was falling every day, plunging every day, with no rebound, no escape.
Open low immediately in the morning, steadily decline all day, close at a new low, repeat the next day.
My heavily weighted stocks went from “lightly trapped” to deeply trapped, heavily trapped, hopelessly trapped within just a few days.
The hardest part was the mindset:
At first, thinking “it’s fine, it’ll bounce back.”
After a few more days of falling, it became “hold on stubbornly, don’t want to stop loss, unwilling to admit defeat.”
Finally turning into “fear, panic, not knowing how much more it’ll fall tomorrow.”
Every day I opened my phone, I didn’t dare look at the account. Watching the book value evaporate constantly, my mood was completely shackled by the market.
Couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep well, the whole person weighed down by losses.
The most painful blow—forced liquidation at the lows, losing until I learned fear.
By the later stages of the decline, the market had completely weakened, market sentiment had collapsed, all sectors falling together.
I finally sobered up:
This wasn’t a correction; it was a market crash.
But because I was fully invested from the start, with zero cash, no position diversification, no stop loss, I was left with no choice, completely passive.
Finally, at the absolute lowest point, in extreme panic, at the worst possible moment, I was forced to painfully liquidate.
Wiped out in one go the profits I had accumulated over a long time, and even lost a big chunk on top of that.
It was only at that moment I truly understood:
The stock market never cares about how excellent you are; it only cares about how cautious you are.$Hang Seng Index(00HSI.HK) $MINIMAX-W(00100.HK) $BABA-W(09988.HK) $TENCENT(00700.HK)