Author: Pickle Cat

Compiled by: Tim, PANews

If you don't want to keep losing money in the crypto market, the first thing you need to do is stop day trading.

Because retail day trading is essentially a scam.

This is a long article, but if you give me 120 seconds, I promise you will thank me years from now.

I started trading in my teenage years.

I had moments where I thought I was a genius, and I also experienced the painful lesson of truly going to zero and slowly recovering.

I tried every trading strategy that retail traders could find.

The memory of that painful experience is often the scar that wakes us up completely.

My trading returns were pitiful; even my grandmother, whom I helped set up a Bitcoin automatic investment plan, made far more money than I did.

Later, I became a low-frequency swing trader, rarely taking positions, exiting immediately once I made a profit, and then stopping trading for a while.

It was only after that that my life gradually improved, and everything returned to normal.

I am not a saint; I write this to save that younger, foolish, naive, and painfully impulsive version of myself.

First, as a day trader, you engage in high-frequency trading without any informational advantage (no real order flow information, no complete liquidity distribution map, no understanding of market maker position layouts, and no operational advantages—nothing at all).

If you trade a few times a quarter, you might survive. But what if you trade more than ten times a week? Even if you have the world's strongest "discipline" and "risk management" skills, mathematical laws will still bury you completely.

The failure of retail traders is not because they haven't made money, but because they simply cannot stop, and high-frequency trading has only one end: going to zero.

This is indeed the reason I established a penalty mechanism; once you exceed the quarterly trading limit, it must be enforced.

Every significant loss I experienced was after a big win because I didn't choose to stop but continued to trade.

All the times I truly made big money (and managed to hold onto profits long-term) were because I caught a wave of market movement and calmly exited.

The pattern is so obvious, painfully straightforward.

Profit is not a fleeting windfall.

Winning means being able to hold onto profits, not losing them back the following year.

I see 14-year-olds on TikTok claiming to be day traders, drawing lines on TradingView, thinking that by buying a masterclass or joining a Discord group, they have mastered some executable daily trading system.

This behavior is nauseating because if they knew they were gambling, I wouldn't be so disgusted. At least then they would be aware of the game they are playing.

The current craze for day trading is even greater than the ICO boom of 2016 and 2017, and we all know how that ended.

People underestimate the difficulty of trading while greatly overestimating their own abilities.

The problem is not just in numerical calculations. Indeed, the more frequently you trade, the less strictly you execute stop-losses, making it increasingly difficult to achieve stable profits.

But the reality is that young retail traders genuinely believe that as long as they follow "discipline" and "risk management," they are not gambling at all. They think day trading is a "skill" that can be executed like a daily task.

This is not limited to day trading in the crypto market. The same logic applies completely to the U.S. stock market and all markets.

High-frequency trading is only suitable for institutions. Do you know what institutional traders don’t look at? Candlestick charts and TradingView.

They use Bloomberg terminals, accessing data that retail traders can never obtain.

You surely know this. But 14 to 18-year-olds do not; they think the indicators they use are the same ones all traders are using.

And this is precisely the real danger.

When you realize you are gambling, at least a part of you knows when to stop.

But once you believe it is a "system," you will never stop.

You keep trading until the market completely drains you.

It really is like a disguised casino.

When you step into Las Vegas or Macau, you clearly know what you are facing.

You see the lights, the tables, the dealers, and hear the noise. Your brain knows this is gambling.

But today's day trading is just a casino disguised as a café.

New traders walk in thinking they are there to "learn a skill," unaware that they have already sat down at a table designed to slowly drain them.

So they never leave; that is the real tragedy, not losing money.

The real problem is that they genuinely feel they are not gambling. This will keep them at the table until they exhaust all their chips.

And those seemingly "victorious" retail traders you see (like me) are mostly just lucky to catch a big rise.

They were fortunate enough to have good timing, combined with enough discipline honed from previous failures, finally learning to take profits.

Even so, this small group still accounts for less than one percent of all retail traders.

Many people think making money in trading isn't that hard; the real difficulty lies in how to hold onto the money made.

PANews once interviewed the author; interested readers can listen to the Xiaoyuzhou podcast: “Post-00s in the Crypto Circle and Their Friends” NO.3—Female Degen, Trader, Rebel

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