Perhaps what you need to give up is not contracts, but the gambling addiction.
Let me express a bit of my thoughts again. Contracts are just tools; you can use them to gamble, going all in each time at 125X, betting that your luck might be good this time, turning a bicycle into a motorcycle, then a motorcycle into a Lambo, and then back to a bicycle; or you can take the time to learn how to trade, how to manage risk, for example, by using 5% or 2% of your account for each trade, performing at least 100 trades in backtesting over a minimum span of six months on TradingView, to verify whether your strategy is profitable. Otherwise, money earned through gambling will likely be returned to the market in due time.
I previously worked in cross-border e-commerce, did Facebook ads, Google ads, and affiliate marketing. It wasn't until I encountered trading that I realized how great a skill trading is and how it can be a profitable business model that you can do solo. Unlike some money-making models, where the cost of trial and error is high and the replicability of profits depends entirely on fate and platform policies. Learning to trade can completely transition from backtesting to forward testing, then to real-time trading with a small account, and finally to managing a large account in real-time.
I know a group of foreign traders, some of whom are still in high school, yet they are already very skilled traders. It will be a natural progression for them to become full-time traders in the future. Of course, most people in the group trade forex, while I mainly trade cryptocurrency. The strategies are similar, and some strategies are applicable across different fields, regardless of whether you trade stocks, futures, forex, or cryptocurrency.
As I mentioned before, if you treat trading as a skill to be learned, it may open up a new door. Whether trading cryptocurrency contracts or forex futures, to become a trader who can achieve stable profits, you should focus on doing the following three things.
1. Start by mastering one strategy. The premise is to first choose a field, such as only doing contract trading in cryptocurrency. You can completely try different strategies while you start learning and find one that suits you. For example, some people can only spend one or two hours a day watching the market, so strategies requiring long periods of observation may not be suitable for them; compared to day traders, they may need a swing trader strategy.
Assuming you have spent some time learning (there are countless free resources on YouTube) and found a strategy you like or that suits you, you want to backtest this strategy for at least 100 trades. I suggest using data spanning over a year with more than 200 trades. If you are profitable, then consider validating your strategy in the market, rather than going all in when you know nothing (the newer the trader, the bolder they tend to be, often going all in). If it’s a swing trade strategy, such as looking at the 4-hour chart, you may not need to test as many trades to obtain relatively reliable backtesting data.
2. Risk Management. This is completely essential. I don't know if some people understand risk management when they trade with 125x leverage on their entire account. No trader can achieve a 100% win rate; what we need to do is earn more than we lose over a month or a year, and then you are profitable.
Note that I am talking about making more money, not winning more. With some high RR (risk-reward ratio) strategies, you don't even need to win more than you lose to make steady profits. For example, with a 1:3 RR strategy, achieving a 33% win rate actually means you’re making a profit, losing two trades while winning one, but the win is three times your risk. Therefore, discussing win rates without considering RR is misleading. When I first started trading, I encountered strategies that could easily achieve over 90% win rates, but every time I lost, I would lose 15% of my account, and I had to achieve over 95% to make that strategy consistently profitable.
Also, for those who do not set stop-losses, be careful not to fall into the trap of small wins and large losses. Unless your test data can support not setting a stop-loss, everyone I know sets a stop-loss for each trade, which means you clearly know how much you will lose if that trade fails. Know your win rate, understand the average RR of your winning trades, know how many trading opportunities you can have each week or month in the market, and then set a risk percentage of your total account for each trade (which can be determined based on your win rate, say a conservative 2%, or a bit more aggressive at 5%). Furthermore, to avoid revenge trading and prevent getting carried away, you should establish some trading rules for yourself, such as stopping trading for the day after two consecutive losses, or stopping after losing 10% in a day, etc. These are all part of risk management.
3. Mindset. You can only talk about mindset after you’ve done the above. If you don’t have a backtested trading strategy that can yield stable profits and do not manage risk, discussing mindset is meaningless. Only after you have done the first two well can trading mindset come into play, which is also of utmost importance. Some people perform excellently during backtesting, but once they start trading live, they fail. This is probably due to mindset issues, such as constantly breaking your own rules or being too afraid of losing profits and closing trades prematurely, which may cause your winning trades to not achieve the same high RR as during backtesting, effectively ruining your own rules.
Moreover, some people always want to achieve success overnight. It’s normal to not find a job after four years of college, so how can one expect to learn a skill that can provide a livelihood, or even financial freedom, in just one or two months? That’s unreasonable, right? Therefore, working part-time while trading is fine until you can trade full-time; your data will eventually tell you.
In fact, skills can often be learned quickly, but mindset requires a longer period of refinement, especially for those who do not initially have a good mindset. Trading is a form of practice, akin to life itself. Don’t focus on how much others have earned today, or how someone has doubled their account; your only opponent is yourself. I am also learning on this trading journey and hope everyone can achieve their goals.
Writing is not easy; even if I can help just one person, that’s enough. Whether new or experienced, investors in the crypto space gain not only financial returns from me but also growth in investment knowledge and experience.