If you want to stop losing in the cryptocurrency field, 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 years later.
I started trading when I was a teenager.
I once made a lot of money and felt like Batman; I also experienced a true heartbreak that still makes me struggle to regain myself.
I have tried all the strategies that retail investors can think of.
I even did day trading for a whole year, thinking that it would ultimately save me, but I ended up failing miserably; every time I think back on it, it breaks my heart.
My profit and loss record is so bad that even the money my grandma (whom I helped set up Bitcoin auto purchases) made is more than mine.
Then I became a low-frequency swing trader, rarely touching positions, taking profits and immediately leaving the market, stopping trading for a while.
Only then did my life start to improve, and everything finally started to fall into place.
I am not a saint. I write this article to save that young, foolish, naive, impulsive self that is painfully familiar.
First of all, as a retail day trader, you are engaging in high-frequency trading without any real informational advantage (not knowing the real liquidity, order thinness, not being a market maker, having no execution advantage, nothing at all).
But if you do it a few times each quarter, you can get through. More than 10 times a week?
Even if you have the world's strongest 'self-discipline' and 'risk management' skills, mathematics will still leave you helpless.
Retail failures are not because they (we) have never won. We fail because we never stop, and high-frequency behavior has only one final outcome: destruction.
> This is why I set up a punishment mechanism for myself if I exceed the quarterly trading limit.
Every major failure I've encountered happened after achieving significant victories because I didn't stop there but kept moving forward.
> Every significant victory I've achieved (and actually kept the money for a long time) was because I caught a major market trend and then calmed down.
This pattern is too obvious; it's almost unacceptable.
Victory does not mean you suddenly made a lot of money.
Victory is about keeping that money, not losing it next year.
> I saw some 14-year-olds on TikTok calling themselves day traders, drawing lines on TradingView, thinking that by buying some master's course or Discord account, they had unlocked some kind of daily executable trading system.
It makes me sick 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 speculative trading in 2016 and 2017. And we all know how that wave ended.
People underestimate the difficulty of trading but greatly overestimate their own abilities.
The problem is not just mathematical.
That's right, the more you trade, the fewer times you stop trading, and the harder it becomes to keep making a profit.
The real problem is that young retail traders sincerely believe that as long as there is 'self-discipline' and 'risk management', it is not gambling at all. They think day trading is a 'skill' that can be executed as part of their daily routine.
It's not just cryptocurrency day trading. The same logic applies to US stocks and almost all markets.
High-frequency trading only works 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 know. They think the indicators they use are the same as those used by all traders.
This is the real danger. If you know you are gambling, at least deep down you will know when to cut losses.
But once you think 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 going to face. 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 do not 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 sincerely believe they are not gambling, which is why they keep betting until they lose everything.
And those retail investors like me, you see them looking like they 'made money'... to be honest, most of them just caught one big trend.
They got lucky, caught a good opportunity, and the previous failures gave them enough discipline to finally learn to stop after winning.
Even so, this small group accounts for less than one percent of retail total.
Making money in trading is not difficult.
It's really hard to maintain.
This article is sourced from @OxPickleCati
