18 years old, you just started college, and you heard that trading cryptocurrencies can make money.
You opened an account, took your parents' living expenses, bought a meme coin, and three days later, it doubled.

You think of yourself as a genius.

At 20, you are in your sophomore year, and your account has doubled. You start skipping classes, staring at candlestick charts all day, fantasizing about becoming the next Buffett. Until one day, the market suddenly crashes, and you've lost all your profits and even your principal.

You curse: "Damn it!" and then uninstall the software.

At 22, you graduated and got a regular job.
The salary isn’t high, but it’s enough to live on. One day, a colleague is talking about stocks, and you feel tempted, so you download the trading software again.
This time you learned your lesson, only buying Bitcoin for 'value investing'. As a result, Bitcoin stagnated for a year, and you couldn't hold on, so you sold.

The next day, it started to soar.

At 25, you switched jobs to a financial company, your salary increased, and your confidence came back.
You started researching technical analysis, drawing trend lines, watching MACD, and confidently saying: this time is different.
As a result, a prolonged bear market arrived, and your account was halved again.

You comfort yourself: it's just bad luck.

At 28, you met a girl through a blind date.
She asked you what your hobbies are, and you said: "Researching investments." She smiled and said: "That's great, I’ll leave the family finances to you in the future." You felt a tightness in your chest because you knew your account was still in the red.

At 30, you got married.
At the wedding, a friend asked you: "How's the stock market lately?" You chuckled awkwardly: "It's okay, long-term investment." In fact, your account had already lost 40%, but you didn't dare to say it.

At 32, your child was born.
You started to feel anxious: formula, diapers, kindergarten; everything costs money. You told yourself: "I must make it back!"
So, you leveraged and went all-in on an 'insider tip'. The next day, news broke that the exchange would delist the coin, and the coin you held started to drop by 30% every day.

You sat in your car, smoking, looking at the numbers in your account, feeling despair for the first time.

At 35, you finally faced reality and started dollar-cost averaging Bitcoin.

The market slowly warmed up, and your account finally broke even.
But you realized that you no longer cheered for soaring prices or got angry at drops like you used to when you were younger.

You just calmly watched the candlestick charts, like watching a movie whose ending you already know.

At 40, your child started school, and expenses for tutoring and extracurricular activities kept rising.

You occasionally bought some meme coins, but no longer fantasized about getting rich.

One day, your child asked you: "Dad, what is the crypto world?"
You thought for a moment and said: "It's a group of people using money to buy hope, but most of the time, what they buy are just lessons."

At 50, your child entered college, and the tuition fees were very high. You looked at your account, and the money you saved over the years was just enough.

You suddenly remembered the dream you had when you were young—"financial freedom". Now you understand, freedom isn't about the numbers in your account, but no longer being enslaved by desires.

It turns out that life is like candlestick charts, with ups and downs, but in the end, it all returns to calm.

In the last second, you heard the bell of the exchange.

On the screen, that meme coin you bought when you were young was still trading.

But your account had long been cleared.

What I want to say is that lowering your stakes is the beginning of success.

#币安Alpha上新 $ETH