Someone asked me, what kind of tricks can you really play with coins like RIVER? What about ZEC?

I initially wanted to give a nice answer. But then I thought, better to tell some real truths.

Looking at traders over the years, they can be roughly divided into three categories.

The first is those who truly make money—very few. These people have beautiful women, houses, free time, and have long since retired after achieving success. Trading no longer holds any meaning for them; they just glance at the market occasionally and move their fingers now and then.

The second category has made some achievements—their income is indeed better than a regular job, and they don’t need to look at their boss’s face, nor do they have to pretend in the office. But when you do the math carefully, their cycle returns are sometimes just so-so. At least, their lives are free from a lot of scheming and backstabbing.

The third and most heartbreaking category—accounts wiped out, even owing debts. Young and ambitious, full of dreams when trading, but ending up burdened with regret and unwillingness. I’ve seen too many stories like this.

Trading itself has no end point; it’s just an intersection in your life. How far you can go depends entirely on your understanding of the market, your discipline in execution, your accumulated skills, and the system you build during this period.

Most people exit because of human nature—arrogance, greed, fear, impatience—these things are full of pitfalls everywhere.

The most typical crash scene: a small position wins three or five times in a row, feeling great, then directly increasing the position. As a result, a big loss hits you, leaving you stunned, then you start to hold on stubbornly, doubling down to try to recover. And what happens in the end? The market wipes you out, and your account hits zero.

There’s also a slow death: first a few small losses, convincing yourself it’s no big deal, then gradually losing more and more. By the fifth or tenth time, you get anxious and go all-in, trying to turn things around in one shot. But still, you stubbornly hold on, and finally, you’re forced out.

This is what’s called a wind rising from the tip of a green duckweed. In trading, once human weaknesses are triggered, if you’re not careful, your principal can vanish in just a few days.

So what to do? Don’t try to completely eliminate human nature—that’s unrealistic. The most practical thing you can do is to put human nature in shackles.

How? By rules.

How do you divide your trading cycle? What are the conditions for judging the trend? When to enter, and how? Which signals will change your judgment? How large is each position? Where are your stop-loss and take-profit points? All of these are rules.

Traders who can survive in the market for over 10 years are earning money based on rules. They have fully understood: following the rules is the way to make money, breaking the rules will lead to losses. Many people make the fatal mistake—using rules to make money, but because of human fear and impatience, they lose money. This is called profit and loss coming from the same source; fundamentally, it’s a lack of rule enforcement.

Never take this dead end.