Because retail investors are essentially a structural scam.

This article is a bit long, but if you are willing to give me 120 seconds, I guarantee you will thank me in a few years.

I started trading when I was a teenager. I made a lot of money, thinking I was Batman. I also lost even more money, which hurt a lot, and even now I am still fixing the cracks from back then.

I've tried all the strategies that retail investors can access.

I even seriously day traded for a year, thinking I could finally turn things around, but the result was so miserable that just thinking about it still hurts.

How bad was my PNL at that time? Even my grandmother made more money than I did! And she just followed the method I taught her to automatically invest in Bitcoin.

Later I became the kind of ultra-low-frequency swing trader who avoids trading unless necessary, making a large profit and then immediately exiting the market to live my life.

Since then, my life really started to turn around, and I began to understand what the market was really playing at.

I'm not a saint. I write this to save the foolish and impulsive version of myself from back then.

The reality is:

As a retail trader day trading, you are trading at high frequency but you have no informational advantage, no real order flow, no liquidity perspective, and you don't know where market makers are placing their orders; execution is so weak that to put it bluntly, you are just running naked.

A few trades in a season is fine, but more than ten times a week?

Even if you are disciplined like a monk and risk control is done to the extreme.

Mathematics can slowly bury you.

Retail investors don't fail because they've never won; they fail because we can't stop. Once the frequency increases, there's only one result...

Back to zero.

> I even set a punishment mechanism for myself: if I exceed the number of trades in a season, I will punish myself.

> All my major losses happened after a big win when I didn't stop.

> All my real big wins and the money I kept long-term.

> It's all because they caught a good trend once and then immediately stopped to live their lives.

> This pattern is so obvious it makes people heartbroken.

> Winning is not that you suddenly made a profit.

> Winning is about holding onto that amount, not losing it back next year.

Now I see a bunch of 14-year-olds on TikTok calling themselves day traders.

Drawing lines on TradingView, thinking that buying a course from a teacher has unlocked some executable system.

I really feel uncomfortable watching because if they knew they were gambling, I wouldn't care, but they don't know; they think this is a 'skill,' which is really dangerous.

This wave of day trading hype is reminiscent of the 2016 and 2017 e-commerce boom... we both know how that ended.

People always underestimate the difficulty of trading while vastly overestimating their abilities.

The problem is not just mathematics: the higher the frequency, the harder it is to maintain stable profits...

The real poison is: young retail investors really believe that they are not gambling as long as they rely on discipline and risk control. They think day trading is a 'skill' that can be executed daily.

This is not just crypto; the same goes for US stocks, all markets are the same.

High frequency only works in institutions.

Do you know what American institutional traders do not use?

K-line charts and TradingView. They don’t even look at K-lines!

They use data that retail investors can never see.

But you certainly understand, whereas 14 to 18-year-olds don't know.

They really think their indicators are what all traders around the world are looking at.

The risk lies here: if you know you are gambling, at least you have a voice in your head saying 'it's time to go,' but if you think you are 'executing a system,' you will never stop.

You will keep clicking and clicking! Until the market has drained you.

This is the casino trick; the only difference is that casinos at least let you see the lights and the dealers, you know you're gambling!

But day trading is just a casino dressed in a coffee shop's coat.

Beginners come in thinking they are here to 'learn skills,' but they don't realize that the position they just sat down at is specially designed to slowly squeeze you dry.

So they keep going, the tragedy is not losing money, the tragedy is that they truly believe they are not gambling, so they never stop until there's nothing left to lose.

Those retail investors you see who 'made a lot' mostly just happened to catch a good market trend, plus they were previously knocked down and learned to take profits.

And this type of person is less than one percent of retail investors.

Earning money in trading is not difficult, what's difficult is keeping the money.