Original Author:Pickle Cat, Live Trader

Original Translation: CryptoLeo (@LeoAndCrypto)

Live trader Pickle Cat published an article about the "high-frequency day trading scam," which gained attention and readership over a sluggish weekend in the market.

Pickle Cat is currently the top trader on the "Binance Contract Live Trading Rankings," with total profits and losses exceeding $45 million. His article details why retail investors should not engage in high-frequency day trading when speculating on cryptocurrencies, as retail day trading has too many flaws and shortcomings compared to institutional day trading. In reality, the trading strategies you believe in and execute may not lead to consistent profits and may not even be suitable for you. Many times, persisting in high-frequency day trading results in losing all your capital; this approach may not be better than seizing a market opportunity for a significant move. Odaily Planet Daily has compiled it as follows:

If you want to stop losing money in cryptocurrency, the first thing to do is stop day trading, because retail day trading is structurally a scam.

The article is a bit long, but if you are willing to spend 2 minutes reading it, I swear you will thank me years later.

I started trading in my teens; I once felt like "Batman" because of my trading profits, and I also collapsed due to failures, and I am still working to recover. I have tried every trading strategy available to retail investors. I even day traded for a year, thinking that day trading would ultimately save me, but I failed so miserably that just thinking about it now makes my heart ache. At that time, my win-loss ratio was terrible; how can I describe it? I set up automatic buys for BTC for my grandmother, and she made more money than I did.

Later, I became a low-frequency swing trader, rarely changing positions casually. After making a profit, I would completely exit and pause trading for a while. At that time, my life improved, and everything started to fall into place.

I am not a saint; I wrote this article to save that young, foolish, naive, impulsive version of myself.

First, as a retail trader engaging in high-frequency day trading, you have no real informational advantage (no real order flow, no real liquidity map, no market maker positions, no execution advantage, nothing at all). You can manage to do some day trading every quarter, but what about trading more than 10 times a week? Even if you have the world's strongest "discipline" and "risk management" skills, the math will still leave you broke.

Retail failures do not occur because they have never made a profit, but because we never stop trading, and the ultimate result of high-frequency trading is loss or even bankruptcy. This is precisely why I set up a penalty mechanism for myself to prevent me from exceeding the quarterly trading limit.

Every significant loss I experienced was due to continuing to trade after achieving high returns instead of cutting losses in time;

Every time I made a big profit (and actually retained the funds for a long time) was because I captured a major market move and responded calmly.

This pattern is obvious, winning does not mean you suddenly made a lot of money. It means preserving that money and not losing it again next year.

I see 14-year-olds on TikTok claiming to be day traders, drawing lines on TradingView, thinking that by buying a master’s course or joining Discord, they have obtained some executable trading system for every day. It disgusts me; I wish they knew this was gambling.

I don’t care; at least they realize the nature of the game, but the scale of day trading today is larger than the dropshipping wave of 2016 and 2017, and we all know the outcome after the madness.

Odaily Note: The dropshipping wave refers to the 2016-2017 trend of no-inventory e-commerce/dropshipping, which created the most insane and easiest two years to make money in e-commerce history, often referred to as the "era of making money while lying down," which ended in 2018.

People underestimate the difficulty of trading while greatly overestimating their abilities.

The problem is not just with the math. In fact, the more you trade, the fewer stop losses you implement, making it increasingly difficult to achieve sustained profits.

But the real problem is that young retail traders genuinely believe that as long as they practice "discipline" and "risk management," they are not entirely gambling. They think day trading is a "skill" that can be executed like daily life. This logic applies not only to cryptocurrency day trading but also to the U.S. stock market and basically all markets; high-frequency day trading is only effective within institutions. For example, in the U.S. stock market:

Do you know what institutional traders don’t even look at? Candlestick charts and TradingView; they have access to data on Bloomberg terminals that retail traders will never obtain.

Of course, you know this. But kids aged 14 to 18 do not; they think the indicators they use are the same as those used by all traders. That is the real danger.

If you know you are gambling, at least deep down, you will know when to walk away, but once you believe this is a "system," you will never stop. You keep trading until the market drains you dry.

It really is like a disguised casino. When you walk into Las Vegas or Macau, you clearly know what kind of place you are entering; you see the lights, the gambling tables, the dealers, and your brain knows this is gambling. But today’s high-frequency day trading is essentially a casino disguised as a coffee shop.

Novice traders walk in thinking they are there to "learn a skill," unaware that they are just sitting at a table specifically designed to slowly drain their funds. So they won’t stop.

That is the real tragedy. It’s not failure. It’s that they believe they are not gambling, and this mindset keeps them going until they lose everything.

And those retail traders you see who seem to be "making a lot of profits" (like me), to be honest, most of them just caught a big market move. They got lucky at the right time, and the lessons from their previous failures taught them to take profits. Even so, this small portion accounts for less than 1% of all retail traders.

Making money through trading is not difficult; preserving profits is incredibly challenging.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。