$PI You said it would break even in three days, but it ended up taking over three hundred days. I stayed up through the clock cycles on the chart, until the screen was foggy. — Thinking that a deep V pattern meant a reversal, only to find there was still a tipping Z behind it.

That deep night three hundred days ago, the moonlight was profound, and you all gathered in the square, scrolling the screen: “Almost there, almost there, if it drops again, it’s a golden pit.” I believed it. Only later did I realize that some pits aren’t golden; they’re just simple, bottomless holes.

Over this past year, I learned to brew the strongest coffee during late-night market watching, and I learned to translate “value investing” into a decent phrase: “playing dead and not moving.” I became half a trader, but I lost the bright-eyed self who once believed in “72 hours.”

The profit and loss in my account fluctuates wildly, like a silent play with no applause. Sometimes I’m ecstatic, sometimes despairing, sometimes like a stone statue. Until one day, I realized I no longer refreshed that page — not because I was free, but because my battery was drained.

Now, looking at that trend line again, it’s like the seventy-second chapter of Journey to the West — the Spider Web Cave. I’ve forgotten why I clicked that buy button in the first place. Maybe I’ve never been waiting for that number, but for an explanation: which of those “72 hours” I mortgaged, or the silent evaporation of “three hundred days,” truly reflects my life?

The candlestick at three a.m. can’t illuminate the darkness of the basement, but it stretches my shadow long and thin, nailed to the wall.
The monsters in the Spider Web Cave weave their webs to wait for Tang Sanzang. And I’ve woven my web for so long, only to be greeted by another dawn.