Recently, I experienced several losses while trading, and only after reviewing did I understand the underlying logic.

Take MET as an example: entering with 3x full leverage, a 5% drop in Bitcoin results in a 10% drop, leading to a loss of over 300U at one point. The next day, it rebounded to a 50U profit, but I panicked and cut my position, fearing a deep loss that would lock me in at 160U. As a result, the subsequent daily chart showed a continuous 20%+ rise, and I missed out entirely. The same trap happened with MON—3x full leverage, setting stops too tight, triggered at 150U, then the coin price started rising steadily, also over 20%.

XPL hit even harder. Entered with 3x, quickly made 90U profit, but when Bitcoin rose 1%, it pulled back, and I hurried to close the position. Later, I found the pullback didn’t even reach the stop-loss level, and it kept rising for several days, with gains exceeding 50%. The most painful lesson was with FOLKS—nearly 10,000U full position at 3x leverage, a 5-point fluctuation triggered a 430U loss. Doing the math, if I had used 1x leverage with a 3-point stop-loss, I could have profited from the same market movement in the opposite direction.

These cases reveal a problem: high leverage makes your mindset prone to collapse—either cutting losses at the bottom or missing out on big moves. Many people think the charm of futures trading lies in leverage, and that’s true, but there’s no need to go all-in with full leverage on a single position. A more stable approach is to use 1x leverage with incremental position increases. For example, when holding Asset A, if it rises 10%, set a breakeven stop-loss, then add position in Asset B, and if it rises another 10%, set a stop-loss again. Repeat until you have 5 positions, with a total leverage of about 5x, but the risk remains at the level of 1x leverage—much safer than full 5x leverage on a single position.

I only trade with real funds. To avoid pitfalls and achieve stable profits, you need to find the right strategy.