Getting hesitant when taking profits and feeling fearless when facing losses—this is the most common deadly weakness among crypto traders.

Watching a 10% unrealized gain makes you uneasy, fearing the profits will fly away, so you hurriedly lock in the gains. But once you see a 30% unrealized loss, you become calm and composed, closing the trading software and muttering, "As long as I don't sell, it's not a loss."

Does this sound like mental discipline? Wrong. This is actually your brain playing tricks.

Nobel laureate in Economics Daniel Kahneman explained in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" that your brain creates a "mental account" to maintain psychological balance, systematically deceiving itself.

**Why is stop-loss so difficult?**

Because you live in an illusion woven by your brain. Deep in your subconscious, two sets of books are running: one is your real financial account, and the other is your emotional account on a psychological level. When these two accounts start to conflict, the psychological account often wins.

When in profit, you see it as "money already earned"—this triggers loss aversion, fearing to lose it. When in a floating loss, you define it as "paper loss"—automatically downgrading the risk level and numbing yourself to continue holding.

Result? Those who think they see through the market are always the ones being harvested—"liquidity." True rational trading begins with recognizing the tricks of your own brain.