Among the friends who come to consult, eight out of ten are stuck in a quagmire of losses. Some accounts only have a few hundred dollars in available funds, some have been liquidated multiple times, and they no longer have the motivation to even open market software. The most common thing they say is, "It's good enough to just preserve the principal."

I’ve never considered myself a market prediction expert; the crypto market itself doesn’t have an absolute correct direction judgment. But over the years of contact, I’ve indeed seen many accounts recover from near-collapse. The core logic is actually very simple: instead of wasting energy guessing ups and downs, it’s better to first learn how to survive.

Let me share two real cases—

A friend still has 1,000 dollars in available funds. He kept getting more and more addicted to losses, always wanting to go all-in to turn things around, but the deeper he sank. His mindset completely collapsed, and he was too discouraged to even respond to messages. My advice was straightforward: don’t rush to trade, just focus on two points—first, control the risk per trade, locking the maximum loss at within 100 dollars; second, use small positions to test the market rhythm.

Unexpectedly, after just three hours, he made a 200-dollar profit, which stabilized his entire mindset. Over the next two days, I helped him set up a few trend-following orders—no chasing highs, no greed for more, just steady execution. In the end, his account multiplied 12 times. He later said something that left a deep impression: "It turns out it’s not that the market has no opportunities, but that I was gambling with my life on the market before."

Another example is even more typical. After heavily risking and hitting a mine, his account was floating with nearly 100,000 dollars in losses. He had followed various community signals and made countless margin calls, finally realizing he needed to find me. I didn’t give him a direct trading plan; instead, the first step was to "stop and review"—look at each previous failure to see where the problem was: was it the opening logic, poor risk management, or incorrect stop-loss settings?

Through this process, he realized his real problem: he had no strict stop-loss awareness. Once his account was trapped, he would start adding positions to fight back, but in the end, he only got deeper in. We then developed a disciplined trading framework together—controlling risk per trade within 2% of the account, and strictly executing stop-losses without bargaining. After operating this way for a month, not only did his account stop declining, but it also showed slight growth.

These two cases illustrate one key point: whether your trading skills are strong or not doesn’t necessarily determine the fate of your account. Risk management and emotional discipline are the true dividing lines. Most accounts that end up closing are those that, at a critical moment, chose to abandon risk control and gamble.