The emperor in the rear is as steady as a rock, but the soldiers on the front lines are fighting fiercely. I have seen too many people fail in this game.

Do you remember the madness at the beginning of October? Bitcoin surged to a historic high of $126,300, and the entire market was in cheers. However, in less than two months, the price plummeted by 31%, leading to over 190,000 people globally being liquidated at once. Looking back at the calendar, October 11th was even more extreme—1.66 million investors were completely washed out in 24 hours due to a wave of forced liquidations.

Behind these cold numbers, there are actually different versions of the same story: seeing the right direction but missing the reversal, seizing the opportunity but collapsing entirely due to poor position management.

**Leverage is like a knife; you never know which cut will hurt you.**

Leveraged trading in the crypto world is truly a double-edged sword. A 10x leverage sounds reasonable, but as long as the price moves against you by 10%, your margin will vanish into thin air. Some exchanges are even harsher, offering options of up to 125x leverage — this means that if the price moves just 1%, your account will either double or be wiped out.

The most terrifying thing is that once the market starts to convulse, the entire ecosystem falls into a "pinning—liquidation—sell-off—further liquidation" death loop. Prices suddenly crash through the liquidation line, and investors are out before they can react. The plunge of a single cryptocurrency triggers a wave of concentrated liquidations, which further drives down prices and triggers more contracts to be forcibly liquidated. The whole process is like a domino effect; one falling means total disaster.

I have observed the patterns of losers: they open positions with full force, and when they are in profit, they leverage up as if seeking revenge, while when they are in loss, they add to their positions as if writing a tragic novel. They are not losing to the market, but to their own greed and ignorance of position management.

**Change the mindset: The principal is the emperor, and the profit is just the soldier**

My trading logic is completely opposite to that of most people. Protecting the principal is not about being conservative; it is the first rule of survival—without capital, there is no chance to turn things around. This is why I never let the loss from a single trade exceed a certain percentage of the total account balance, no matter how tempting the opportunity may seem, the position size must comply with risk principles. Profits can accumulate slowly, but once the principal is lost, it takes much more effort to rise again. In this game, the one who survives the longest is the ultimate winner.