Hope vs ego, adjustments vs closing the spread

A cautionary tale for those that don't stick to your rules…I sold a SPY call credit spread back in Apr. The market went against me but I stuck to my conviction and rolled out. Rolled out a few times (one to avoid getting called on my deep ITM short call due to dividend payout) to wait for an opportunity to break even. Kept putting more money in for the rolls but I was confident in my chart pattern analysis in late July to keep pushing it. The market finally took a dive and the chart pattern came to fruition. Made an adjustment to turn into a butterfly to push out the break even points. Now I was safe, and my large loss position broke even/a little positive. Did I close it out after working this for 4 months? Nope…my ego came into play and I thought the market would continue down, and not do a V bounce. I was wrong…lost it all.

At that point I also had no realistic adjustments to make (that I could think of) as the debit would have increased past my max investment mental threshold. Never had a trade get this big and lose it, but here we are. Lesson learned: if you had a losing trade that you worked to break even, and that was the point, don't change the strategy again.