In the shadow of the “bot blowup,” I find myself having to check my Dalio bot frequently. When The Fed went bad, it went bad very quickly. With Dalio it is not supposed to have the crazy tendencies that The Fed did, but if I am not looking frequently, how can I know for sure?

While bots are not exactly like walking into a casino, they are not a guaranteed return. Gambling earnings and forex earnings are both speculative. Thankfully, my wife and my speculative investments are a single digit percentage of our overall portfolio. I don’t care what percentage of your portfolio it is, a loss hurts. My hyper-vigilance has not become unhealthy yet. (In my mind, it is simply cautious. Others will call it what they will.) For 6 months, The Fed ran fine…until it didn’t.

With the loss weighing on me, I am trying to figure out what “safer” investments I can pursue between now and the end of the year. Investment losses are not fully deductible on your taxes, so I either hide under a rock or try and continue to trust the bots and similar products. I am working to pick up the pieces of my bot farm and break even by the end of the year. My goal has to be to still make a profit, but I will settle for being closer to even than I am now. If I stumble across a solution, I will report in.