Why Do My Stops Always Seem to Trigger Reversals?
I used to believe precision would protect me. I tracked every setup with obsessive care—entry triggers, stop placements, risk ratios. My system wasn’t guesswork; it was discipline. Yet trade after trade, I’d see the same pattern unfold: price would inch toward my stop like it was magnetized, tag it, then reverse hard—mocking me with each tick.
At first, I blamed timing. Then I blamed myself. But over time, the pattern became too sharp, too frequent to be random. It felt like someone was reading my screen, watching my trades unfold before I clicked confirm. And in a way, they were.
Crypto exchanges aren’t just venues—they’re vantage points. They see it all. Our stops, our liquidations, our hesitation. And their systems are designed to move liquidity—not just through the market, but through us. Internal algorithms identify clusters of retail behavior and squeeze them with surgical precision.
I wasn’t overleveraged. I wasn’t emotional. I was exposed to a game where transparency flows one way. The exchange doesn’t need to cheat—it just needs to see more than I do.