$PEPE
" [TRADER'S NOTE #2] I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST VOLATILITY — BUT IT WASN'T "
Hi guys !!!
After that weird pattern kept showing up in my trades, I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
So I went back to the charts. One by one, I replayed every entry, every exit, even the “green” moments that somehow still ended up reducing my balance.
At first, I thought it was just volatility.
Maybe the market moved too fast.
Maybe it was slippage.
But no .... it wasn’t that.
I started noticing something else.
Every time I closed a position early, even when it showed 1–2% floating profit, the final result was almost always disappointing.
So I recalculated everything manually: entry, exit, expected profit in percentage. It should have been a win.
But when I checked the actual change in my balance… something was off.
And then it hit me.
Fees.
Funding rates.
Small charges that slowly chip away in the background.
The worst part?
You don’t really see them, not until you close the trade.
Suddenly, all those green trades made sense.
The platform shows your unrealized PnL,
but the final result includes the silent costs:
→ Maker or taker fees,
→ Funding rates if you hold too long,
→ Sometimes even slippage when exiting a position.
No wonder I kept thinking I won, but ended up with almost nothing.
It wasn’t volatility.
It was the structure.
That’s when I realized:
In crypto, “break-even” isn’t free.
It quietly costs you more than you think, especially if you’re scalping often.
But I didn’t stop there.
Because the deeper I looked, the more I realized something else:
Forex and crypto might look similar on the surface…
But underneath? The game is completely different.
I’ll get into that in the next note.
See you guys!!!