What follows isn’t advice you’ll find in most trading courses. It’s the stuff that becomes obvious only after you’ve blown an account, revenge traded into oblivion, or sat frozen while a position bled out. Some of these principles sound simple. They are. Executing them when it matters is a different story.
Losing Shouldn’t Kill Your Ability to Take Risks
Here’s something you won’t hear from most of Crypto Twitter: the best move for 95% of traders in choppy markets is simply trading smaller.
Not sitting out entirely. Not forcing trades because “you have to stay active.” Just sizing down until the picture clears up. This can be 11 out of 12 months in a year.
Position sizing isn’t just risk management math. It’s a strategic decision that determines whether you’ll still be able to play when the real opportunity shows up.
Trade too big in low-conviction environments and you’re not just risking capital – you’re risking your ability to take risks later. A 30% drawdown doesn’t just hurt your account. It hurts your psychology. It makes the next entry harder. It turns a temporary rough patch into a hole you spend months climbing out of.
The goal isn’t to avoid losses. Losses happen. That’s the game. The goal is making sure that losing doesn’t remove your capacity to act when clarity returns.
Think about it: the traders who crush it after a major market event aren’t the ones who were “all in” during the chaos. They’re the ones who preserved enough capital and mental bandwidth to size up when the setup was obvious.
Smaller size in uncertain times isn’t weakness. It’s also a trade.
Stop Blaming the Market
You’ve seen the tweets. “This market is impossible.” “Nothing makes sense right now.” “Just waiting for better conditions.”
Fuck that thinking.
The market doesn’t owe you clean setups. It doesn’t care about your preferred trading style. And the moment you label a market “untradable,” you’ve already lost – not to the market, but to your own narrative.
The choice was always yours
Here’s the thing nobody wants to admit: you always had the option to not trade. Every single day. Nobody forced you to open that position. Nobody made you chase that pump.
Blaming market conditions is just outsourcing responsibility. The market did what markets do – moved in ways that were inconvenient for your thesis. That’s not the market being untradable. That’s you being unprepared for what the market actually is.
There’s a difference between “this market is untradable” and “I don’t have an edge in this environment.” The first is a complaint. The second is self-awareness.
Some of the best traders made their year in the exact conditions you called impossible. Not because they’re geniuses – because they adapted. Different sizing, different timeframes, different instruments. Or they simply sat out without pretending the market was broken.
The market is never untradable. Sometimes you just don’t have a read or price action is not matching your style. Appreciate that.
Stop Being One-Sided on Everything
Most unexperienced traders are binary. Bullish or bearish. Long or flat. Risk-on or risk-off. But markets aren’t binary. At any given moment, something is outperforming something else. ETH bleeding against BTC doesn’t mean there’s no trade – it means the trade is relative, not absolute.
Long leg, short leg
Start thinking in pairs. A long leg and a short leg. You’re not betting that crypto goes up – you’re betting that one asset outperforms another.
The beauty: you can be wrong about market direction and still make money. You can be right about the relationship even when you’re wrong about the level.
“There’s always a bull market somewhere” isn’t just a saying. It’s a framework. When BTC is grinding and alts are dying, the bull market is in BTC dominance. When a narrative is rotating out, the bull market is in the new narrative – and the bear market is in the old one.
No need to call the top or bottom
Directional trading forces you to time the market. Relative trading lets you profit from the spread. One requires prediction. The other requires observation.
You don’t need to know where ETH (or any imaginary shitcoin) is going. You need to know whether it’s going there faster or slower than the thing you’re pairing it against.
Treat It Like a Sport
You wouldn’t expect to run a marathon after two weeks of training. You wouldn’t step into a boxing ring after watching a few YouTube tutorials. But somehow, traders expect to be profitable within months of starting.
Trading is a sport. It requires training, recovery, discipline, and – most importantly – longevity.
Look at any professional athlete’s career. The ones who make it aren’t always the most talented. They’re the ones who avoided catastrophic injuries, managed their energy, and showed up consistently over years.
Trading works the same way. The goal isn’t to have the best month. It’s to still be in the game five years from now. Ten years from now. Every blown account, every tilt-fueled revenge trade, every overleveraged “conviction play” is an injury that sets you back.
Athletes have seasons. Periods of intense performance, followed by rest and review. They don’t go 100% every single day – that’s how you burn out or break something.
Your trading year has seasons too. High-opportunity environments where you push. Low-visibility periods where you pull back and recover. Trying to perform at peak intensity in every market condition isn’t discipline. It’s a fast track to exhaustion.
Nobody cares about that one 500% trade if you gave it all back three months later. The flex isn’t a single win – it’s sustained performance over time.
Think in quarters/years, not weeks. The PNL curve follows.
Lower Your Ego
Here’s a truth that should be liberating: nobody expects you to predict the future. Not the market. Not other traders. Only you expect that from yourself.
Ego turns trading into a game of being right. Every position becomes a statement. Every loss becomes personal. You hold losers too long because closing means admitting you were wrong. You skip obvious exits because taking profit feels like doubting your own thesis.
This is how ego quietly bleeds accounts. Not through one big mistake – through a thousand small ones rooted in the need to be correct.
Your job as a trader isn’t to predict. It’s to react. To identify setups, manage risk, and execute. That’s it. The market gives you information constantly – but ego makes you deaf to it because the new information conflicts with what you already said publicly, or believed privately.
Being wrong isn’t failure. Staying wrong is.
Strong opinions, loosely held
The best traders have a view and are ready to abandon it the moment the evidence shifts. They’re not flip-flopping – they’re updating. There’s no glory in being stubborn. The market doesn’t reward conviction. It rewards adaptation.
You’re not a prophet. You’re a risk manager with a thesis. Act like it.
Appreciate the Counter-Party
Every time you buy, someone sells. Every time you short, someone goes long. That’s not a bug – it’s the entire point.
Without someone taking the other side, there’s no trade. No liquidity. No market. The person you think is an idiot for selling right here? They’re the reason you could buy.
And here’s the uncomfortable part: sometimes they’re right and you’re wrong. Often enough that you should stop wasting energy trying to convince them.
Twitter threads arguing why someone else’s trade is stupid. Quote tweets dunking on opposing views. Hours spent defending your position to strangers who don’t care.
For what? Every minute spent forcing your narrative on someone else is a minute not spent on your own process. You’re not getting paid to win arguments. You’re getting paid to manage risk.
Let people be wrong. Let people be right. It’s not your problem.
Learn from both sides
The counter-party isn’t your enemy – they’re free information. When smart money is taking the other side of your trade, that’s worth understanding. When someone you respect has the opposite view, that’s an opportunity to stress-test your own thesis.
You don’t have to agree. You don’t have to engage. But you should be grateful they exist.
Without them, you’d have no one to trade against.
Take Profit
Two words. Somehow the hardest thing in trading.
You know the feeling. Position is up 80%, you’re waiting for 100%. It pulls back to 50%, now you’re waiting to get back to 80%. It retraces to entry, you’re holding for breakeven. It goes negative, you’re bagholding what was once a winner.
Unrealized gains are not gains
That PnL number is a suggestion until you close the trade. The market gave you money and you said “no thanks, I’ll wait.” Sometimes that works. Often it doesn’t.
Ask yourself: if I had no position right now, would I enter here at this size? If the answer is no, you probably got your answer already.
Nobody ever went broke taking profit. Plenty went broke waiting for more.
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