Losing retail investors are trading, while profitable retail investors are resting.

Author: Pickle Cat

Compiled by: 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 later.

I’ve been trading since I was a teenager.

I’ve had victories that made me feel like “Batman,” and I’ve also suffered crushing defeats that I’m still recovering from.

I’ve tried every trading strategy that an average investor could 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 PNL was so bad that my grandma’s Bitcoin auto-buy plan made more money than I did.

Later, I transitioned to a low-frequency swing trader, barely adjusting my positions. After a profitable trade, I’d exit decisively and then pause trading for a while.

It was only then that my life started to improve and everything became clear.

I’m no saint. I’m writing this to save my younger, foolish, naïve, and impulsive self.

First, as an ordinary day trader, you’re trading at high frequency with zero informational edge (no real order flow, no clear liquidity map, no market maker position info, no execution advantage—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 best “discipline” and “risk management” in the world, math will eventually wipe you out.

The reason average investors fail isn’t that they’ve never won, it’s that they’ve never stopped. The only possible outcome of high-frequency trading is destruction.

That’s why I’ve set up a “punishment system” for myself: if I exceed my quarterly trading limit, I get penalized.

Every major loss I’ve experienced came from continuing to trade after a big win instead of stopping in time.

And every big win (the kind where I actually kept the money for a long time) was because I took a break and cooled down after catching a big move.

This pattern is so obvious, it hurts.

“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 some Discord group means they’ve got a 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 day trading craze now is even bigger than the “shopping agent” 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 frequently you trade and the less you stop, the harder it is to stay profitable.

The real issue is that young, regular traders truly believe that as long as they have “discipline” and “risk management,” they’re not gambling at all. They think day trading is a “skill” you can execute as a daily habit.

This applies not just to crypto day trading, but also to the US stock market and almost every other market.

High-frequency trading is only suitable for institutions.

Take the US stock market, for example.

Do you know what institutional traders never look at? Candlestick charts and TradingView.

They use Bloomberg terminals with data that retail investors will never see.

Of course, you might already know this. But 14- to 18-year-olds don’t. They think the indicators they’re using are what every trader uses.

That’s where the real danger lies.

If you know you’re gambling, at least part of you knows when to walk away.

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’s really just a disguised casino.

When you walk into Las Vegas or Macau, you know exactly where you are. You see the lights, the tables, the dealers, the noise. Your brain immediately knows: this is gambling.

But today’s day trading is like a casino disguised as a café.

New traders walk in thinking they’re “learning a skill,” not realizing they’re already sitting at a table designed to slowly drain them dry.

So they never stop.

That’s the real tragedy—not the losses themselves.

What’s truly sad is that they genuinely believe they’re not gambling, and it’s this belief that keeps them going until they’re wiped out.

As for those average traders who seem to be “making money” (like I once did)… honestly, most of them just caught a lucky wave.

They got lucky at the right time, and after being “taught a lesson” by previous losses, they finally learned to stop after a win.

Even so, such lucky ones make up less than one percent of all ordinary traders.

Making money in trading is actually not that hard; the real challenge is holding on to it.