The more frequently you trade, the less you stop, making it harder to continue profiting. Want to stop losing money in the cryptocurrency market? First, stop your day trading!
Because for ordinary investors, day trading is structurally a 'scam'.
This article is long, but if you are willing to spend 120 seconds reading it, I guarantee that you will thank yourself years later.
I started trading in my teenage years.
I have had victories that made me feel like 'Batman', as well as painful failures that have shattered me and I am still in the process of healing.
I have tried every trading strategy that an ordinary investor can find.
There was even a whole year when I was obsessed with day trading, thinking it would allow me to turn things around, but I failed so miserably that every time I think back, it stings.
My P&L is so bad that the Bitcoin automatic purchase plan I set up for my grandma earns more money than I do.
Later, I transformed into a low-frequency swing trader, hardly adjusting positions easily. After a profitable trade, I decisively exit and then pause trading for a while.
It was only then that my life started to improve, and everything began to become clear.
I am not a saint. I write this to save that young, foolish, naive, and impulsive version of myself.
First of all, as an ordinary day trader, you are engaging in high-frequency trading without any information advantage (no real order flow, no clear liquidity map, no market maker position information, no execution advantage, nothing).
If you only trade a few times each quarter, you might still survive.
But what if you trade more than 10 times a week?
Even if you possess the world's strongest 'discipline' and 'risk management' skills, math will ultimately lead you to a total loss.
The reason ordinary investors fail is not that they have never won, but that they have never stopped. The only end to high-frequency trading is destruction.
This is also why I set up a 'punishment system' for myself, where I will be penalized if I exceed the quarterly trading limit.
Every significant loss I experienced was due to continuing to trade after a big win instead of stopping in time.
All my big wins (and the victories that truly allowed me to keep my money for a long time) came from seizing a major market opportunity and then choosing to take a break and stay calm.
This trick is too obvious, so obvious that it hurts.
'Winning' is not about suddenly making a lot of money; true 'winning' is being able to keep that money rather than losing it all the next year.
Now I see 14-year-olds on TikTok calling themselves day traders, drawing a few lines on TradingView, and believing that by buying some 'master's' course or joining a Discord group, they have mastered some executable trading system.
This makes me feel sick. If they knew they were gambling, I wouldn't mind; at least they would understand they were playing a game.
But the current trend of day trading is even bigger than the 'proxy purchasing craze' of 2016 and 2017. And we all know the eventual outcome of that trend.
People underestimate the difficulty of trading but seriously overestimate their own abilities.
The problem is not just mathematical. Yes, the more frequent the trading and the less you stop, the harder it is to continue making profits.
The real issue is that young ordinary traders genuinely believe that as long as they have 'discipline' and 'risk management,' they are not gambling at all. They think day trading is a 'skill' that can be executed like a daily habit.
This applies not only to cryptocurrency day trading but also to the U.S. stock market and almost all other markets.
High-frequency trading is only suitable for institutions.
Take the U.S. stock market as an example.
Do you know what institutional traders don't even look at? Candlestick charts and TradingView.
They are using Bloomberg terminals, which contain data that ordinary investors will never see.
Of course, you may already know this. But 14 to 18-year-olds do not. They think their indicators are the tools that all traders use.
This is the real danger.
If you know you're gambling, at least a part of you will know when to stop.
But once you believe this is a 'system,' you can never stop.
You will keep clicking until the market drains you.
Day trading: a casino disguised as a café.
This really is like a disguised casino.
When you walk into Las Vegas or Macau, you know exactly what kind of place you are entering. You see the lights, the gambling tables, the dealers, and the noisy sounds. Your brain immediately realizes: this is gambling.
But today's day trading is like a casino disguised as a café.
Newbie traders walk in thinking they are here to 'learn a skill,' unaware that they are sitting at a table specifically designed to slowly drain them.
So they won't stop.
This is the essence of the entire tragedy, rather than the losses themselves.
The truly sad thing is that they genuinely believe they are not gambling, and it is this belief that keeps them going until they lose everything.
As for those ordinary traders who appear to be 'making money' (like I once did)... honestly, most of them just caught a wave.
They got lucky at the right time, combined with a little discipline learned from prior losses, and finally learned to stop after winning.
Even so, such lucky individuals are less than one percent among all ordinary traders.
Making money in trading isn't actually difficult; the real challenge is how to keep that money.
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