Author: Pickle Cat
Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow
Original Title: Losing Retail Investors Keep Trading, Winning Retail Investors Take Breaks
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 you will thank yourself years later.
I started trading when I was a teenager.
I’ve had victories that made me feel like "Batman," and I’ve also suffered devastating losses that shattered me and still haunt me to this day.
I’ve tried every trading strategy an ordinary investor can find.
There was even a whole year when I was obsessed with day trading, thinking it would finally turn things around for me, but I failed so miserably that it still stings every time I think about it.
My profit and loss (PNL) was so bad that the automatic Bitcoin purchase plan I set up for my grandma made more money than I did.
Later, I transformed into a low-frequency swing trader, rarely adjusting my positions. After making a profit, I would decisively exit and then take a break from trading for a while.
It was only then that my life started to improve, and everything became clear.
I’m not a saint. I’m writing this to save my younger, foolish, naive, and impulsive self.
First, as an ordinary day trader, you are engaging in high-frequency trading without any informational 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 a quarter, you might still survive.
But what if you trade more than 10 times a week?
Even if you have the strongest "discipline" and "risk management" skills in the world, the math will eventually make you lose everything.
The reason ordinary investors fail is not that they never win, but that they never stop. The only outcome of high-frequency trading is one: destruction.
This is also why I set up a "penalty system" for myself—if I exceed the quarterly trading limit, I face consequences.
Every major loss I’ve experienced happened because I continued trading after a big win instead of stopping in time.
And all my big wins (the ones where I actually held onto the money for a long time) happened because I caught a major trend and then chose to rest and cool off.
This pattern is so obvious it’s painful.
"Winning" isn’t about suddenly making a lot of money; real "winning" is being able to keep that money instead of losing it all the next year.
Now I see 14-year-olds on TikTok calling themselves day traders, drawing a few lines on TradingView, thinking that buying some "guru’s" course or joining a Discord group means they’ve mastered some daily executable trading system.
It makes me sick. If they knew they were gambling, I wouldn’t mind—at least they’d know they were playing a game.
But the current day trading trend is even bigger than the "proxy buying craze" of 2016 and 2017. And we all know how that ended.
People underestimate the difficulty of trading and severely overestimate their own abilities.
The problem isn’t just mathematical. Yes, the more you trade and the less you stop, the harder it is to sustain profits.
The real problem is that young, ordinary traders genuinely believe that with "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 doesn’t just apply to cryptocurrency day trading; it’s the same for the U.S. stock market and almost every other market.
High-frequency trading is only for institutions.
Take the U.S. stock market, for example.
Do you know what institutional traders don’t even look at? Candlestick charts and TradingView.
They use Bloomberg terminals, which contain data ordinary investors will never see.
Of course, you might already know this. But 14- to 18-year-olds don’t. They think their indicators are the tools all traders use.
That’s the real danger.
If you know you’re gambling, at least part of you will know when to stop.
But once you believe it’s a "system," you’ll never stop.
You’ll keep clicking until the market empties you out.
Day Trading: A Casino Disguised as a Café
It really is like a casino in disguise.
When you walk into Las Vegas or Macau, you know exactly what kind of place you’re entering. You see the lights, the tables, the dealers, the noise. Your brain immediately realizes: this is gambling.
But today’s day trading is like a casino disguised as a café.
New traders walk in, thinking they’re there to "learn a skill," unaware that they’re already sitting at a table designed to slowly drain them dry.
So they don’t stop.
That’s the essence of the tragedy, not the losses themselves.
The real tragedy is that they genuinely believe they’re not gambling, and it’s this belief that keeps them going until they lose everything.
As for those ordinary traders who seem to be "making money" (like I once was)... honestly, most of them just caught a wave.
They had good luck at the right time, combined with a little discipline learned from previous losses, and finally learned to stop after winning.
Even so, such lucky individuals make up less than one percent of all ordinary traders.
Making money in trading isn’t actually that hard; what’s truly difficult is keeping it.
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