A blogger who reported a $45 million profit on Binance's live trading platform commented: "Inexperienced traders, stop day trading now!"

Original author: Pickle Cat , live trader

Original translation by CryptoLeo ( @LeoAndCrypto )

Live trader Pickle Cat published an article about "high-frequency day trading scams," which garnered attention and readership over a sluggish weekend.

Pickle Cat is currently the top-performing trader on Binance's live futures trading leaderboard, with total profits and losses exceeding $45 million. His article details why retail investors should not engage in high-frequency day trading when trading cryptocurrency, arguing that retail day trading has too many flaws and shortcomings compared to institutional day trading. In reality, the trading strategies you believe in and execute may not guarantee consistent profits, nor may they be suitable for you. Often, persisting with high-frequency day trading results in losing all your capital; this approach may not be as effective as seizing a large market move. Odaily Planet Daily has translated his analysis as follows:

If you want to stop losing money on cryptocurrencies, the first thing to do is stop day trading, because retail day trading is a scam by its very nature.

The article is a bit long, but if you're willing to spend two minutes reading it, I swear you'll thank me in a few years.

I've been trading since my teens. I've felt like "Batman" when I was profitable, and I've also been devastated by failures, and I'm still struggling to recover. I've tried every trading strategy available to retail investors. I even did day trading for a year, thinking it would finally save me, but it failed, and the memory still haunts me. My risk-reward ratio was terrible. To put it another way, I set up auto-buy on Bitcoin for my grandmother, and she made more money than I did .

Later, I became a low-frequency swing trader, rarely changing my positions. After making a profit, I would completely withdraw from trading and pause for a period of time. Only then did my life start to improve, and everything began to get back on track.

I am not a saint; I am writing this article to save my younger, foolish, naive, and impulsive self.

First, as a retail intraday high-frequency trader, you have no real information advantage in high-frequency trading (no real order flow, no real liquidity graph, no market maker positions, no execution advantage, nothing). You can manage to do some intraday trading every quarter. But what about trading more than 10 times a week? Even if you have the world's strongest "self-discipline" and "risk management" abilities, mathematical calculations will still leave you penniless.

Retail investors fail not because they've never profited, but because they never stop trading, and the ultimate result of high-frequency trading is loss or even bankruptcy. This is why I set up a penalty mechanism for myself to prevent me from exceeding my quarterly trading limit.

Every major loss I've experienced has been caused by continuing to trade after achieving high profits instead of cutting losses in time.

Every time I make a big profit (and actually hold onto the capital for a long time), it's because I catch a big market trend and then calmly respond to it.

The underlying principle is clear: winning doesn't mean suddenly making a fortune. It means preserving that money and preventing it from being lost again next year.

I see 14-year-olds on TikTok claiming to be day traders, drawing lines on TradingView, thinking they've acquired daily trading systems after buying courses from masters or joining Discord. It disgusts me; I wish they knew it was gambling.

I don't care, at least they realized the nature of the game, but the scale of this intraday trading is even larger than the dropshipping wave of 2016 and 2017, and we all know what happens after the frenzy.

Odaily Note: The dropshipping wave refers to the dropshipping e-commerce boom of 2016-2017, which created the two most crazy and lucrative years in e-commerce history, and was called "the era of making money while lying down" by countless people. It then came to an end in 2018.

People underestimate the difficulty of transactions but greatly overestimate their own abilities.

The problem isn't just about math. In reality, the more you trade and the fewer stop-loss orders you use, the harder it is to achieve consistent profitability.

The real problem is that young retail investors genuinely believe that as long as they practice "self-discipline" and "risk management," they're not entirely gambling. They see day trading as a "skill" that can be performed like everyday life. This isn't just about cryptocurrency day trading; the same logic applies to the US stock market, and essentially all markets. High-frequency day trading is only effective within institutions. Take the US stock market as an example:

Do you know what institutional traders never look at? That's candlestick charts and TradingView; they have data on the Bloomberg terminal that retail investors can never access.

Of course, you know that. But kids aged 14 to 18 don't know that; they think the indicators they use are the ones all traders use. That's the real danger.

If you know you're gambling, at least deep down you'll know when to quit, but once you believe it's a "system," you'll never stop. You keep trading until the market drains you dry.

It really is like a casino in disguise. When you walk into Las Vegas or Macau, you know exactly where you're going; you see the lights, the tables, the dealers, and your brain knows it's gambling. But today's intraday high-frequency trading is essentially a casino disguised as a coffee shop.

Novice traders walk in thinking they're there to "learn a skill," unaware that they're simply sitting at a gambling table designed to slowly drain their funds. So they won't stop.

That's the real tragedy. It's not the failure itself, but the belief that they weren't gambling, a belief that kept them going until they lost everything.

Those retail traders you see who seem to be "profiting a lot" (like myself), frankly, most of them just caught one big market move. They got lucky at the right time, and their previous failures taught them enough to know when to take profits. Even so, this small group makes up less than 1% of all retail traders.

Making money through trading is not difficult, but preserving profits is incredibly difficult.