Today I had AI go through every single trade in a few of my wallets. It said I’m the kind of person who cuts profits short and lets losses run!

This whole year, I feel like I’ve been standing still. My wallet balance has gone up and down, from 3k U to tens of thousands. Whenever the market turns, my true colors always show…

In January, during the AI rally on the Base chain, I wasn’t early to discover anything, from Lobster to Moltbook. But I got in at a $10m market cap and still made more than 10x, which helped me recover some losses and left me with $20k.

After that, things just kept getting quieter and quieter. I had no idea what to trade, so I tried futures. The altcoin rally in April was really good for futures—I made money. Binance Life went all the way from a $40m market cap to $900m. I remember writing a long post on Binance Square saying that Binance Life would be the first meme coin this year to break $1b and become a universe-level phenomenon. In the end, it stalled at $900m, which was a bit of a shame.

I went all in with 10x leverage, and I caught the moves on Beat, Lab, Ordi, and Rave. I felt like a futures-trading genius and just couldn't stop. The easiest thing with futures is getting carried away—it's really that kind of “YOLO, if I die, I die” mindset...

Later, a new project called Space Dog came out. I was really bullish on it at the time. I said in my group that Musk would definitely reply to the little girl's letter and would surely be willing to make it his mascot. I put $10K into Space Dog on Solana and bought a few hundred dollars' worth on the ETH mainnet. In the end, the ETH one went up more than 10x, while the Solana one nearly went to zero...

I was close to losing it. Honestly, I was just lazy too. I had a two-day window back then, and when I saw ETH's OG, I should have looked into it more. ETH's picks were clearly performing much better than SOL's on the last day, but I just didn't see it...

After going round in circles, July came around. Since I felt like there wasn't much happening in June, I agreed to help a classmate run a training center for high school students over the break. There were too many students and it was incredibly busy: 10 to 12 hours of intensive teaching a day. We charged each student over 300 for an hour, so the money was good, but I completely missed Robin's early run-up.

I'm not someone with high energy. After working a full 10 hours and getting home at 9 p.m., all I want to do is lie down. I have absolutely no desire to look at the market or think. I really envy big names like Sun, Yi Jie, and CZ, with their seemingly endless energy and vitality.

I also missed Bull and Mars. In mid-August, after wrapping up the institutional work, I switched over to on-chain and started researching with Uncle (a big shot in the group). I went heavily into Pons around 200M. People were saying it would be the next Pump, and it eventually reached 980M (including the burned tokens). I bought Stonk around 100M. And Tape Out on BSC, an on-chain digital-circuit mining project, was a real eye-opener.

The biggest earners were those two platform tokens and BEM. I made some money on other Robin memes, Fugui, and CatGPT too, but I basically YOLOed all my meme gains into Jacob. At the time, a post worrying that AI would destroy humanity was going viral. The author had just quit a big tech company, and I thought Musk would surely reply. I kept adding to my position at 3M. In the end, all the things I expected came true—the post got over 100 million views—but the token never took off...

Then came the big ZC drawdown in October. Lately, there's been a second leg, but it's really hard to build a large position on a second leg, especially with liquidity like this. Everyone's only putting in a few hundred dollars at a time...

After all that, the money in my wallet is back to where it was in January. Sigh. We always say to let profits run, but a lot of the time we can't hold on as soon as something goes up, cutting our gains short; when we're down, we don't want to admit we're wrong, and we let our losses run!

There are two months left in the year, and a year and a half left of university for me. If I can't find my own alpha in these two years, maybe I'll have to get a job first, build up some cash flow, and wait for opportunities to come along...

I don't deny crypto, and I'm grateful to it for letting me get through university without having to ask my family for money and for helping me support myself. I still think this is a place where ordinary people can turn their lives around. Here, no one cares about your background or education—what matters is whether you can make money.