The Elder’s scolding echoed in my ears.
“You lack focus. You are too careless.”
Those words hurt me, but they also became a driving force. At the end of Chapter (9), I had lost money because I did not fully understand candlestick patterns. This time, I decided not to make that same mistake again.
For the first two months, I sacrificed sleep to study. I woke up early in the morning and opened TradingView charts. I marked key areas with lines. In the afternoon, I watched YouTube videos again to check if I really understood. In the evening, I practiced with Bar Replay on old market data. I placed about 30 fake orders to test my system. At first, I was not good at it. I placed stop losses in the wrong places and miscalculated risk-reward. But by practicing every day, I slowly improved. Later, I started to take care of my health again. I fixed my sleep and meal times, and began doing light exercise.
During this time, my writing career also slowly became successful. Over five years, the articles and short stories I wrote started to gain a name among readers. One day, a book publisher contacted me. They said, “We have liked your articles for a long time,” and offered me regular writing work. So I began to earn enough for living expenses. I no longer had to depend completely on the Elder’s investment.
I realized I needed to make my study more systematic. So I tried using AI help again, like before. I took phone screenshots and asked AI to calculate profit and loss. I thought AI would calculate each trade for me. But AI advised me, “Just showing screenshots is not enough to calculate exact profit and loss. You should export your trading records to an Excel file and calculate in detail.” So I had to find my own way.
Because I am old‑fashioned, I felt more satisfied writing things down by hand. In a notebook, I recorded the date of each trade, the token type, selling price, buying price, loss or profit amount, where I set TP/SL, and what lesson I learned from that trade. While writing, I could clearly see each trade’s loss and profit. Finally, with AI’s help, I created an Excel file for my own performance record. Now I could see my strengths and weaknesses more clearly.
Looking back at these records, I understood that I needed better risk management rules. I decided never to risk more than 1% of my total account balance per trade. For example, if my account had 1,000 dollars, the maximum risk per trade would be 10 dollars. Also, I decided only to trade when the risk-reward ratio was at least 1:2. I placed stop losses only at support or resistance levels. When the stop loss was hit, I closed the trade immediately. I no longer held positions with the hope that “the price will come back up.”
In the first two months of the six‑month period, I studied hard without enough sleep. In the second two months, I started caring for my health again and traded regularly. In the third two months, small profits began to appear. So when six months passed, I calculated everything. I not only recovered the losses from the Elder’s initial investment, but I also made an extra amount equal to half the price of a new laptop. That laptop cost 2,000,000 kyats, so I had recovered 1,000,000 kyats (about 330 dollars) in profit. But let me be clear – this profit came from sleepless effort. I had cut back on entertainment a lot. I met my friends much less often. This is not a fancy success story. It is the fruit of sacrifice and hard work.
What I learned from crypto is that there is no shortcut to success. This was the reward of small risks, consistent processes, and patience. The strategies I learned and the lessons from my mistakes allowed me to stand where I am now.
In the next chapter (11), I will continue to share how I built my own trading strategy and how I kept trying with that strategy. I don’t even know where this journey will end. But I have already decided to keep walking.
Jack
#TurningPoint
#HardWorkPaysOff #RiskManagement
#TradingDiscipline #BinanceSquare