If you want to stop losing money in the cryptocurrency space, the first thing you should do is stop day trading; it's a scam!
The article is long, but if you read it, I promise you will thank me in a few years.
I've been trading since I was a teenager.
I once made a lot of money and felt like Batman; I also experienced a real heartbreak that still makes me struggle to regain myself.
I tried every strategy that retail investors could think of.
I even engaged in day trading for an entire year, thinking that would ultimately save me, but I ended up failing miserably, and every time I think back on it, it pierces my heart.
My profit and loss record is so terrible that my grandmother (whom I helped set up Bitcoin automatic purchases) made more money than I did.
Then I became a low-frequency swing trader, hardly touching positions, taking profits immediately, and stopping trading for a while.
Only then did my life start to improve, and everything finally began to fall into place.
I'm not a saint. I write this article to save that young, foolish, naive, painfully impulsive version of myself.
First of all, as a retail day trader, you are engaging in high-frequency trading, but without any real information advantage (not knowing real liquidity, order thinness, not being a market maker, having no execution advantage, nothing at all).
But doing it a few times each quarter, you can get through it. Doing it more than 10 times a week?
Even if you possess the world's strongest 'self-discipline' and 'risk management' abilities, mathematics will still leave you helpless.
Retail investors fail not because they (we) never win. We fail because we never stop, and high-frequency behavior has only one final outcome: destruction.
> This is why if I exceed my quarterly trading limit, I set up a punishment mechanism for myself.
Every major failure I've encountered happened after a significant victory because I didn't stop there, but kept pushing forward.
> Every major victory I achieved (and actually kept the money for a long time) was because I seized the market's big trend and then calmed down.
This pattern is too obvious; it's almost unbearable.
Winning doesn't mean you suddenly made a lot of money.
Winning means keeping that money, not losing it next year.
> I saw some 14-year-old kids on TikTok calling themselves day traders, drawing lines on TradingView, thinking that after buying a course or Discord account from some guru, they unlocked some executable daily trading system.
It disgusts me because if they knew this was gambling, I wouldn't care. At least they would understand the rules of the game.
But today's wave of day trading is larger than the wave of delivery in 2016 and 2017. And we all know how that wave ended.
People underestimate the difficulty of trading while greatly overestimating their own abilities.
The problem is not just mathematics.
That's right, the more trades you make, the fewer times you stop trading, and the harder it becomes to sustain profits.
The real issue is that young retail traders genuinely believe that as long as they have 'self-discipline' and 'risk management', it doesn't count as gambling. They think day trading is a 'skill' that can be executed like a daily routine.
This is not just day trading in cryptocurrency. The same logic applies to US stocks and almost all markets.
High-frequency trading only works internally within institutions.
Take US stocks as an example. Do you know what institutional traders don't look at? Candlestick charts and TradingView. They use Bloomberg terminals to access data that retail can never see.
Of course, you definitely know this. But teenagers aged 14 to 18 do not. They think the indicators they use are the same ones all traders are using.
This is the real danger. If you know you're gambling, at least deep down you will know when to cut your losses.
But once you believe this is a 'system', you will never stop.
You keep clicking until the market completely empties you.
It's just like a disguised casino.
When you walk into Las Vegas or Macau, you are very clear about what you are facing. You see the lights, the tables, the dealers, and the noise. Your brain knows this is gambling.
But today's day trading is like a casino disguised as a coffee shop.
New traders think they are here to 'learn skills', but they don't realize they are just sitting at a table designed to slowly drain their energy.
So they won't stop.
This is the whole tragedy.
It's not about winning or losing.
They genuinely believe they are not gambling, which is why they keep betting until they are completely broke.
And those retail investors like me, you see them looking like they 'made money'... to be honest, most of them just caught a big trend.
They got lucky, caught a good opportunity, and their previous failures gave them enough self-discipline to learn to stop after a victory.
Even so, this small group represents less than one percent of total retail.
Making money in trading isn't hard.
It really is too hard to maintain.
