If you want to stop losing money in the cryptocurrency space, the first thing you should do is stop day trading. Because retail day trading is essentially a scam. This article is long, but if you're willing to spend 120 seconds, I guarantee you'll thank me years from now. I've been trading since I was a teenager. I've had victories that made me feel like Batman, and I've had devastating failures that still break my heart and that I'm still trying to recover from. I've tried every trading strategy available to retail investors. I even did day trading for a year, thinking it would finally save me, but it was a complete disaster, and the memory still pains me. > How bad was my performance? I set up an automatic Bitcoin buy for my grandmother, and she made more money than I did. > Then I became a low-frequency swing trader, barely touching any positions, exiting immediately after making a profit and taking a break. > Only then did my life start to improve, and everything finally got back on track. I'm not a saint. I'm writing this to save my younger, foolish, naive, and impulsive self. First, as a retail day trader, you're engaging in high-frequency trading without any real informational advantage (no real order flow, no real liquidity map, no market maker positions, no execution advantage, nothing). > Trading a few times a quarter might be manageable. > Trading ten times a week? > Even with the world's strongest "discipline" and "risk management" skills, the mathematical calculations will still cost you dearly. Retail traders don't fail because they (we) never profit. We fail because we never stop. High-frequency trading has only one end result: Bankruptcy. > That's why I set up a penalty mechanism for myself; I'm punished if I exceed my quarterly trading limit. > All the major losses I've experienced have occurred after a big win because I didn't cut my losses in time and continued trading. > All the big wins I've experienced (and truly held long-term) were because I caught a major market move and then calmed down. This pattern is so blatant it's almost unacceptable. Winning money doesn't mean suddenly making a fortune. Winning money means preserving that money, not losing it all next year. I see 14-year-olds on TikTok claiming to be day traders, drawing lines on TradingView, thinking they've unlocked some daily executable trading system by buying a master's course or a Discord account. This disgusts me because if they knew it was gambling, I wouldn't care. At least they understand it's a game. But today's day trading craze is bigger than the dropshipping craze of 2016 and 2017. We all know how the dropshipping craze ended. People underestimate the difficulty of trading while greatly overestimating their abilities. The problem isn't just math. Yes, the more you trade, the fewer times you stop trading, the harder it is to consistently profit. The real problem is that young retail traders genuinely believe that as long as they are "disciplined" and "risk-managed," they are not gambling at all. They see day trading as a "skill" that can be performed like a daily routine. This isn't just limited to cryptocurrency day trading. The same logic applies to US stocks, and virtually all markets. High-frequency trading is only suitable for institutional investors. Take US stocks as an example. Do you know what institutional traders don't look at? Candlestick charts and TradingView. They use Bloomberg terminals, possessing data that retail investors can never see. Of course, you know this. But teenagers aged 14 to 18 don't. They believe the indicators they use are what all traders use. And that's where the real danger lies. If you know you're gambling, at least deep down you know when to stop. But once you believe it's a "system," you never stop. You'll keep clicking until the market drains you dry. It really is like a disguised casino. When you walk into Las Vegas or Macau, you know exactly what you're entering. You see the lights, the tables, the dealers, the noise. Your brain knows it's gambling. But today's day trading is like a casino disguised as a café. New traders walk in, thinking they're there to "learn skills," unaware that they're just sitting at a table designed to slowly drain their money. So they keep trading. That's the tragedy. It's not the loss itself. It's that they genuinely believe they're not gambling, which keeps them going until they're broke. And those retail traders like me, those traders you see who seem to be "profitable"... frankly, most of them just caught one big move. They were lucky, they caught the right opportunity, and the discipline from previous losses taught them to cut their losses promptly. Even so...