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Stop Losing Money in Crypto: Why Day Trading is a Structural "Scam" for Retail Investors

The author, drawing from personal trading experience since adolescence, argues that day trading is fundamentally rigged against ordinary investors. Retail traders lack critical advantages like real order flow data, liquidity maps, or execution speed. While infrequent trading might be survivable, high-frequency trading almost guarantees eventual ruin due to mathematical inevitability, even with strong discipline and risk management.

The key insight isn't about winning—it's about keeping the money. Major losses often follow big wins when traders don't step back. The author transformed his results by becoming a low-frequency swing trader who pauses after profitable trades.

The piece warns that the current social media-driven day trading culture misleads young people (e.g., on TikTok or Discord) into believing it's a learnable skill, not gambling. This false sense of control is dangerous—it prevents them from quitting. Unlike a casino, which is openly a gamble, day trading is disguised as a legitimate "system," making it harder to recognize the risk.

In reality, most profitable retail traders are simply lucky, catching a trend and having enough discipline to stop temporarily. True success lies not in making money, but in preserving it.

<html><head></head><body>Author:Pickle Cat
Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow
Want to stop losing money in the cryptocurrency market? First, stop your day trading!
Because for the average investor, day trading is structurally a "scam."
This article is long, but if you're willing to spend 120 seconds reading it, I guarantee you'll thank yourself years from now.
I started trading when I was a teenager.
I've had wins that made me feel like "Batman," and I've had painful failures that shattered me inside—wounds I'm still healing from today.
I've tried every trading strategy an average 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 look back.
My profit and loss (PNL) was so bad that my grandma's automated Bitcoin buying plan 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 began to make sense.
I'm no saint. I'm writing this to save my younger, foolish, naive, and impulsive self.
First, as an average day trader, you're engaging in high-frequency trading with no informational edge (no order flow data, no clear liquidity maps, no market maker position insights, no execution advantages, nothing).
If you only trade a few times per quarter, you might 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 average investors fail isn't that they never win; it's that they never stop. The only outcome of high-frequency trading is one: ruin.
That's why I set up a "penalty system" for myself—if I exceed my quarterly trading limit, I face consequences.
Every major loss I've experienced came after a big win, when I kept trading instead of stepping away.
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.
The pattern is so obvious it hurts.
"Winning" isn't just about making a lot of money suddenly; 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're playing a game.
But the current day trading craze is even bigger than the "drop-shipping hype" 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 issue is that young retail traders genuinely believe that with "discipline" and "risk management," they're 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 retail investors will never see.
Sure, you might already know this. But 14- to 18-year-olds don't. They think their indicators are the tools everyone uses.
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 quit.
You'll keep clicking until the market empties you out.
<h2>Day Trading: A Casino Disguised as a Café</h2>
It really is like a casino in plain sight.
When you walk into Las Vegas or Macau, you know what kind of place you're entering. You see the lights, the tables, the dealers, the noise. Your brain immediately recognizes: this is gambling.
But day trading today is like a casino disguised as a coffee shop.
New traders walk in thinking they're there to "learn a skill," unaware that they've already sat down at a table designed to slowly drain them.
So they don't stop.
That's the essence of the tragedy, not the losses themselves.
The truly sad part is that they truly believe they're not gambling, and it's that belief that keeps them going until they lose everything.
As for those retail 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 ones make up less than one percent of all retail traders.
Making money in trading isn't actually that hard; what's truly difficult is keeping it.
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