Watching the numbers move on my phone until 4 AM

Getting addicted to the late-night ticker

There was a period last year where I just couldn’t put the phone down. I was obsessed with checking the US stock market in real-time, even though I was living in Seoul and the hours were completely backwards. My screen time went up by three hours a day, mostly just watching the QLD price crawl up and down. I started with a few thousand dollars, thinking it would be a passive thing, but then I found myself waking up at 3:30 AM to see if the Nasdaq was going to dump. It’s strange how a sequence of numbers on a screen makes you feel like you’re actually part of a big, important movement, even when you’re just sitting in your pajamas in the dark.

The QLD trap and why I stayed

I remember reading those forums where people talked about mixing SCHD with QLD. It sounded smart at the time. I put about 20% into QLD because I wanted that leverage kick. The problem was, whenever it dropped, I felt a weird urge to double down rather than pull back. I wasn’t doing it for the dividends or a long-term retirement plan anymore; I was just chasing the volatility. It cost me a decent chunk of sleep and probably my sanity for a few months. Some days it went up 5% and I felt like a genius, and the next day it would slide back down and I’d be staring at the ceiling wondering why I didn’t just put the money in a parking-type ETF and call it a day.

Realizing I know nothing about space or AI

Around the time I was obsessing over these tech ETFs, everyone started talking about SpaceX and those weird 2x leverage funds. I kept seeing headlines about people dumping millions into these niche products. I looked at the charts for these space-related ETFs, and honestly, they just looked like jagged lines to me. I don’t actually know how rocket technology translates to stock value in the short term, but I almost bought in just because the volume looked high. It felt like I was standing in a casino watching everyone else bet on red, and for a second, I thought I could see a pattern. Thank goodness I didn’t, but that impulse to chase what ‘everyone else’ is buying is hard to shake when your account balance is fluctuating by hundreds of dollars while you’re trying to have breakfast.

The coffee and the cost of waiting

I think back to when I bought my first few shares of Starbucks and Coca-Cola. It felt boring compared to the volatility of something like QLD or the newer MSTY options I kept seeing pop up in my feed. Those steady, boring stocks don’t give you that dopamine hit, but they also don’t make you want to check your app every time you get a notification. I ended up selling most of my volatile positions during a particularly stressful Tuesday morning when I had an important meeting and kept getting distracted by the red arrows. Maybe that was for the best. I still check the market, but the urge to ‘beat’ the system feels a lot less urgent now than it did when I was convinced I was going to be the guy who retired on leverage gains before thirty.

Still left with questions

I look at the QLD chart sometimes and wonder if I should have just held it and ignored the noise. People always talk about these 5-year or 10-year success stories where they put in a small amount and it turns into a house deposit, but they never talk about the days where they lost 8% in a single session. I suppose the ‘hold forever’ strategy works if you’re made of stone. I’m definitely not. There’s this lingering feeling that I missed out on a trend, but also a sense of relief that I’m not waking up at 4 AM to check if a specific company’s bond issuance is going to ruin my week. I’m still not sure what I’ll do next month, but for now, the app stays closed until the sun is actually up.