Retail investors in the cryptocurrency market frequently open positions not purely out of greed, but out of the helplessness of having too little capital.
No one wants to endure K-line charts, with sore eyes, but with only thirty or fifty thousand in capital, they truly cannot afford to miss any seemingly profitable fluctuations.
This is not a "trading addiction," but an inevitable choice without sufficient capital to support it.
The time value of money in finance and the marginal utility in economics are particularly evident in the cryptocurrency market. The current 100,000 and 100,000 five years later are simply not the same thing — no one can predict whether the coins in hand will still exist in five years or whether the exchange will run away.
Value investing says "hold quality coins for compound interest," but retail investors cannot wait. Even if they can achieve an annualized return of 30%, it takes three years for the capital to double, during which time they might miss the bull market, or even face urgent needs in life before they can wait for a doubling moment, resulting in funds being used to address immediate issues first.
The 24-hour volatility in the cryptocurrency market is relentless, with contract leverage and meme coins skyrocketing and crashing, presenting the temptation of "missing out means losing" every day.
What retail investors want is never "stable profits," but rather "quick turnarounds" — with little capital, if they don't take a gamble, how can they accumulate chips for the next bull market?
Therefore, retail investors can hardly talk about win rates; they can only focus on the odds: a threefold return on a contract is worth ten small profits; catching a hundredfold meme coin might save them from suffering for five years. But high odds are always accompanied by low win rates, just like using 100 times leverage, either recovering the capital in one go or instant liquidation.
It's like a cryptocurrency version of Texas Hold'em; the little margin they have cannot be diversified and wait for trends like institutions do.
They either watch their capital slowly deplete due to fees and slippage, or loosen their opening conditions, gamble a few more times, and rely on stop-loss and take-profit techniques to compensate for the losses caused by low win rates.
In fact, frequent trading is not shameful; what’s shameful is having gambled ten times without seizing an opportunity, making trades based on feelings, and then blaming "the big players targeting them" after getting liquidated — this is not a problem of frequent trading, but a lack of ability.
If you often find yourself torn between "wanting to gamble but fearing to be wrong," it might be better to focus on practical trading skills, concentrate on stop-loss and take-profit strategies, and turn "relying on luck" into "relying on skill."
