Why do you feel the urge to trade more frequently when the market is doing poorly? This is the deadliest psychological trap for retail investors. In a bull market, even if you pick the wrong asset, the overflow of liquidity in the market can still forcefully lift you back up. But in a low-volume, blood-draining, stockpile game, the harder you try to hustle, the faster your principal gets wiped out. Every time your account balance shrinks, it magnifies your unwillingness to accept losses. Many people refuse to stay on the sidelines after a drop; instead, they obsessively track more indicators, frantically hunt for low-market-cap altcoins, and fantasize about catching one big green candle to recover everything in one go. But instead of catching that green candle, they end up paying exorbitant fees from frequent trades, turning temporary paper losses into permanent real losses. This isn’t diligence—it’s the gambler’s mindset, perfectly exploited by the market makers. The most insidious wash-trading logic in a trash market isn’t a one-sided crash; it’s the market makers using the remaining liquidity to create fake localized hotspots. Today it’s AI pumping, tomorrow it’s Meme coins mooning, the day after it’s hyping up a new blockchain. Every sudden move looks like the next big breakout opportunity, but as soon as you can’t resist jumping in, you realize the market makers just switched narratives to trap you into buying at the top. True sidelining isn’t because you don’t understand the market—it’s because you’ve seen through the current risk-reward ratio and know it’s not worth betting on. The hardest threshold for traders to cross has never been learning how to buy, but learning how to control their impulses and allow themselves to do nothing. The market doesn’t care about your tears, and it certainly won’t give you a chance to recover just because you’ve lost money.