Back in March 2025, I still had close to 1.2 billion VND in my account (saved up from the 2021 bull run plus some year-end bonuses). I was super confident because throughout 2023–2024 I kept making 3–5x on small-cap altcoins; basically every trade I touched turned to gold. Then SOL broke its old all-time high and I was 100% convinced the new cycle had officially started. So I went all-in with 80% of my capital into the “new hot Solana meta” coins: $WIF (everyone was shilling it like crazy as “the PEPE of Solana”) $BONK (FOMO-chased it near ATH because I was scared of missing out) A bunch of presales and fair-launches on and Moonshot; I was throwing $2–3k into each one thinking “easy 10x”. April–May 2025, the market pumped one more leg up and my portfolio hit almost 2.1 billion VND. I was bragging everywhere, bought a brand-new SH scooter, put a bigger down payment on an apartment. Felt literally invincible. Then June started feeling weird. BTC dropped from 108k to 92k in just one week. I told myself “it’s just a retest, buying the dip is free money”. So I loaded up even more on $POPCAT, $MOTHER, $GIGA at 70–80% off their ATHs because “the community is still strong and KOLs are still holding”. August came: Fed didn’t cut rates as aggressively as everyone hoped, plus Trump won the election but went radio silent on crypto for the first two months of his term → the entire market got dumped on. SOL crashed from $220 to $108 in just three weeks. I kept holding, telling myself “in 2021 I held SOL from $260 down to $16 and still came out way up”. By October 2025, reality hit me: almost all the meme coins I was bag-holding went basically to zero: $WIF from $4.8 → $0.28 $BONK from $0.000045 → $0.0000078 $POPCAT from $1.8 → $0.09 Out of more than ten launchpad/presale coins I aped into, 8 out of 10 either rugged or the devs ghosted the Telegram group. I started cutting losses in waves, but the more I sold, the worse it got. From 2.1 billion at the end of May → only 420 million left by early November. Lost 80% in just 5–6 months. Right now my account is sitting at exactly 380 million VND, all in BTC and ETH for the long term. I can’t even look at meme coins anymore. The brand-new SH hasn’t even hit 3,000 km and I already had to put it up for sale to pay back margin loans and bank debt (yeah, at one point I borrowed an extra 500 million VND to keep trading). Every time I open Twitter and see the same kids who were begging for referral links last year now flexing new houses and cars, I just turn off my phone and lie face-down on the floor. Lessons learned? Absolutely. 1. Meme coins should only ever be 5–10% of your portfolio; the rest is for actually living your life. 2. Never, ever borrow money or sell assets to trade. 3. When the whole world is in full FOMO mode, that’s the exact moment you should be terrified; not the moment to go all-in. I’m still going to work every day, still earning 45 million VND a month, but every single price alert still makes my heart race. Probably gonna take me a few years before I ever swing hard again.