At 3:17 AM, my phone on the bedside table vibrated wildly. The screen was blindingly bright, and notifications flooded in like a tide — "Bitcoin shorts plunged 12%, falling below $42,000."

I touched my phone and opened the crypto group. Messages flooded in with 99+ notifications; some sent crying emojis, some shouted "buy the dip or cut losses," and others cursed "the manipulative market makers." As my fingertips skimmed through these anxious words, I calmly pressed the lock screen, got up, and walked to the living room to pour myself a cup of warm water.

These hands were not like this ten years ago.

On that deep night in 2013, my fingers trembled on the keyboard like chaff.

When I first entered the market, I was always awakened by the candlestick chart in the early morning. I remember my first experience of Bitcoin plummeting by 20%; I stared at the constantly jumping green numbers on the screen, my fingers trembled so much I couldn't even press the close button correctly. That morning, I squatted on the rooftop for two hours, cigarette butts piled up like a small mountain, with only one thought in my mind: "It's all over now."

On the wall of my study hang two yellowed papers, which I deliberately kept as my "shame pillar":

On December 17, 2017, Bitcoin surged to $19,870. I stared at the screen calculating "how many houses I could buy," reluctant to close my position. As a result, three days later it dropped to $12,000, with a single-day loss of 47%, and my account balance was cleaner than my face.

On May 19, 2021, the whole network plummeted. Because I had set a 5% stop loss the night before, although it hurt to close out, I preserved 83% of my principal — this was the first time I survived by "discipline."

Over the past ten years, I have foolishly bumped into walls in the market. From a youth pursuing a "90% win rate," I became a "craftsman" satisfied with a "51% win rate" — only later did I understand that trading is not about who is more accurate, but about who can last longer.

That rainy night, the 11th liquidation made me see the cruelest scam in the crypto world.

Three years ago, on a rainy night, my account faced liquidation for the 11th time. I locked myself in the study, pulled out ten years of trading records, and laid them out on the floor. The rain pounded on the window, and I suddenly discovered a neglected truth:

The average holding time for profitable trades is 17 times that of losing trades. But 80% of my profitable trades are hurriedly closed after making 3%, while I can stubbornly hold onto losing trades even when they drop by 20%.

"Holding onto profits and cutting losses," these four words I have read for ten years, but only that day did I truly understand. It is not a skill, but a struggle with human nature — greed always makes you "wait a bit longer" when in profit, while fear makes you "hold on a bit longer" when in loss, resulting in a perpetual cycle of "making small money, losing big money."

Old Zhang and I entered the market in the same year. In 2020, we both heavily invested in UNI. When it rose by 80%, he called me, his voice trembling: "Should we run? I'm afraid it will drop back." I said: "According to the strategy, hold on until the take-profit point is reached."

Later, he closed his position at 1.8 times profit, while I followed the preset rule of "take profit when it falls below the 20-day line" and achieved 17 times. It wasn’t that I was more insightful than him; it was because when he was anxious and couldn’t sleep at night, I was calmly watching my position according to plan, too lazy to even check the candlestick chart.

Now my trading system is so simple it makes beginners laugh.

After 3,284 days and nights of honing, my trading rules have been simplified to three:

Single trade stop loss does not exceed 2% of the principal.

It's like installing a fuse on the account; even if the direction is wrong, at most, you lose 2% of your funds, always having the opportunity to rise again. Last year, there was one time when I misjudged the direction of ETH, losing 1.8% on the stop loss, but a week later I seized the opportunity with BTC, not only making back what I lost but earning an additional 5%.

Never average down on losing trades.

This is the most counterintuitive one. Losing trades are like wounds; averaging down is like pouring salt on them. I have seen too many people buy a coin at $1,000, average down at $800, average down again at $600, and finally get trapped at $300 — averaging down is not increasing your position, it is pushing yourself to the brink.

No more than 3 trades per month.

Frequent trading is the grave of retail investors. I have done statistics, and when I trade more than 5 times a month, my win rate drops from 51% to 38%. Now at the beginning of each month, I list 3 opportunities; if there are none, I stay in cash, even if the market is lively, I resist — staying in cash is not missing opportunities, it's waiting for the real opportunities.

These three rules can be understood by even the newest entrants to the market. But it took me ten years to truly engrave these three sentences into my bones.

Only later did I realize that all experts are practicing the same thing.

In the past six months, while helping institutions manage funds, I suddenly laughed when flipping through their trading manuals — those hundreds of pages of risk management rules surprisingly aligned perfectly with the three rules I summarized from ten years of blood and tears.

The real secret to making money has never been in the yin-yang lines of the candlestick chart, nor in the golden cross and death cross of MACD, but in every deep night when the market plunges by 12%, whether you cut your position in panic or calmly refill your cup with warm water.

The most ruthless harvesting in the crypto world has never been the market makers' sickle, but your own uncontrollable greed, restless hands, and impatient heart.

Ten years ago, I was stumbling in the dark, bleeding from my head; now, I have a lamp in my hand, the wick is discipline, and the oil is patience.

I will keep this lamp lit.

Do you want to follow me and walk out of this darkness together?