120 Seconds to Change Your Trading Perception: Why Is Day Trading for Retail Investors Just Gambling?

Author: Pickle Cat

Compiled by: Tim, PANews

If you don’t want to keep losing money in the crypto market, the first thing you need to do is stop day trading.

Because retail day trading is essentially a scam.

This is a long article, but if you give me 120 seconds, I promise you’ll thank me years from now.

I’ve been involved in trading since I was a teenager.

I’ve had moments when I thought I was a genius, and I’ve also experienced the painful lesson of losing everything and slowly recovering.

I’ve tried every trading strategy a retail investor can find.

This kind of searing pain is often the scar that finally wakes us up.

My trading returns were pitiful—my grandmother, whom I helped set up automatic Bitcoin investments, made far more money than I did.

Later, I became a low-frequency swing trader, barely touching my positions. Once I took profits, I’d immediately exit and stop trading for a while.

It was only after that that my life gradually improved, and everything got back on track.

I’m not a saint—I’m writing this to save my younger, stupider, more naive, and painfully impulsive self.

First of all, as a day trader, you’re trading at high frequency without any informational advantage (no real order flow info, no complete liquidity map, no idea about market maker positions, and no operational edge—you have nothing).

If you trade a few times per quarter, you can survive. But what if you trade ten times a week? Even if you have the world’s best “discipline” and “risk management” skills, the math will still bury you.

Retail investors don’t fail because they’ve never made money, but because they simply can’t stop, and high-frequency trading only ends one way: zero.

This is exactly why I set up a punishment mechanism—if I exceed my quarterly trading limit, I must enforce it.

Every major loss I’ve experienced happened right after a big win, because I didn’t stop and just kept going.

And every time I truly made big money (and kept the profits for the long term), it was because I caught a trend and then calmly stopped.

The pattern is so obvious, it’s painfully clear.

Winning isn’t about making a quick fortune.

Winning means being able to hold onto your profits, not losing them all back the next year.

I’ve seen 14-year-olds on TikTok calling themselves day traders, drawing lines on TradingView, thinking that by buying a masterclass or joining a Discord group, they’ve mastered some kind of daily executable trading system.

This behavior is disgusting, because if they knew they were gambling, I wouldn’t be so annoyed. At least they’d be aware of the game they’re playing.

This current day trading craze is even bigger than the ICO boom of 2016 and 2017, and we all know how that ended.

People underestimate how hard trading is, and grossly overestimate their own abilities.

The problem isn’t just about the numbers. It’s true: the more frequently you trade, the less strictly you cut losses, the harder it is to make stable profits.

But the reality is, young retail traders genuinely believe that as long as they follow “discipline” and “risk management,” they’re not gambling at all. They think day trading is a “skill” that can be executed just like any daily task.

This isn’t limited to crypto day trading. The same logic applies to the US stock market and every other market too.

High-frequency trading is only for institutions. You know what institutional traders don’t look at? Candlestick charts and TradingView.

They use Bloomberg terminals, accessing data retail investors can never get.

You probably know this. But 14 to 18-year-olds don’t—they think the indicators they’re using are what all traders use.

And that’s the real danger.

When you realize you’re gambling, at least part of you knows when to walk away.

But once you believe it’s a “system,” you never stop.

You keep trading until the market cleans you out.

It’s really just a disguised casino.

When you step into Las Vegas or Macau, you know exactly what you’re facing.

You see the lights, the tables, the dealers, hear the noise. Your brain knows—this is gambling.

But today’s day trading is just a casino disguised as a coffee shop.

New traders walk in thinking they’re here to “learn a skill,” without realizing they’ve already sat down at a table designed to slowly drain them dry.

That’s why they never leave—and that’s the real tragedy, not the money lost.

The real problem is deep down, they don’t believe they’re gambling. That’s what keeps them at the table until they’re out of chips.

And those “winning” retail traders you see (like me), most of them just happened to catch a bull run.

They got lucky at just the right moment, and after being hardened by past failures, finally learned to walk away when ahead.

Even so, this small group is less than 1% of all retail traders.

Making money in trading isn’t as hard as people think; what’s really hard is keeping the money you make.

PANews has interviewed the author. Interested readers can listen to the Xiaoyuzhou podcast: “Post-00s in Crypto and Their Friends” NO.3—Female Degen, Trader, Rebel