I used to run a building materials business. At its busiest, I had more than a dozen people working for me, and the monthly turnover looked impressive. I always thought I was pretty good at making money. Later, an old customer introduced me to cryptocurrency. At first, I only bought spot, picking up a few major coins. I was happy when prices rose, and when they fell, I told myself to hold for the long term. Then I realized you could trade futures in both directions, so I started looking into leverage. I figured that after so many years in business, judging the market couldn’t be that hard. But reality was far harsher than the business world. If you made a mistake in business, you could still clear out your inventory. In futures trading, one sharp price move could wipe out your position.

Once, I thought the market was about to rebound, so I kept adding to my long position. At first, I really did make a few thousand U, and I even counted that money as part of next month’s operating funds. But then the market suddenly weakened and prices kept falling. I didn’t stop out in time; instead, I kept adding to my position, thinking that after such a big drop, a rebound had to be coming. In the end, I lost nearly twenty thousand dollars from my account. During that time, the warehouse was piled high with goods, my employees were waiting to be paid, and I was sitting in front of my computer, thinking about how to make back my losses. Looking back, it all seems absurd. In real life, I knew better than anyone how important cash flow was, yet in the trading market, I completely forgot the most basic principles.

When I started trading again, the first thing I did wasn’t study indicators—it was to completely separate my living expenses from my trading funds. I wouldn’t touch the money for my business or my family’s emergency fund. I would trade only with spare money that I could afford to lose without affecting my day-to-day life. As for my approach, I stopped trying to guess the bottom. Instead, I first looked at the direction of the longer-term trend, then used shorter time frames to find entry points. For example, if the broader trend was clearly weak, I wouldn’t rush to buy the dip just because prices had fallen a lot. And if the market had no clear direction, I’d rather make fewer trades. Before each trade, I set a stop-loss level, then adjusted my position size based on the distance to the stop-loss—instead of opening a large position first and figuring out what to do afterward. These days, I trade much less often than I used to, and I no longer compare my returns with other people’s. Running a business taught me that profit isn’t the number shown in your account. What’s truly yours is what you’ve actually secured and have left after accounting for the risks. The same goes for crypto: don’t mistake unrealized gains for your net worth, and don’t mistake luck for skill. It takes reaching a certain age to understand that living a steady, peaceful life matters far more than proving how good you are at trading.$AGT $TIA $SIREN