Transcription
Over the past 10 years, I've lived through bull runs, brutal crashes, scams, rugs, and basically everything in between. I've lost millions of dollars, and still managed to make it all back. And in this video, I'm sharing the raw reality of crypto after a full decade in the game, along with some advice that I wish someone gave me when I first started. Because the truth is, crypto is not a get-rich-quick scheme. But if you take these lessons seriously, you can skip years of mistakes and possibly save yourself from some very expensive lessons. Let's dig into it.
First up, we're going to talk about market cycles. Most new traders actually join crypto in a bull run. They see their friends talking about it. It's on the news. It's going up every day. So, they join and they only know how to long. They see green candles. They buy. That's their entire strategy, or lack of one. Then they wonder why they're holding altcoin bags for multiple years, hoping and praying that it comes back to their entry.
Here's the thing. Every single market has a bull cycle and a bear cycle. Bitcoin's market cycles often last 4 years and they're pretty predictable. So, if you learn simple things like basic structure, higher highs and higher lows mean we're in an uptrend. Lower highs and lower lows mean we're in a downtrend. Or use simple tools like the 50-week moving average. When we're trading above it, it means we're bullish. We're probably in a bull market. We're trading below it, it means we're bearish. We're probably in a bear market. This is going to help you survive and not end up holding the bag. And please, for the love of God, don't marry any narratives. We're going to talk about that a little bit more later, but you should respect structure over speculation.
Next up, I want to talk about emotions. This is where most people blow up. Social media is constant noise. You're always going to feel the pressure to act. You see someone posting big trading profits. Suddenly, you need to be in a trade. That's how you become exit liquidity. The FOMO, fear of missing out, is very real and it will destroy you. Then there's things like tilt, revenge trading. You're down. You feel like you need to make it back, so you take a shitty trade and you make it worse. How do you combat this? Use a journal. I know it sounds lame, but track your emotional triggers. Know when you're feeling FOMO, when you're feeling tilted, fear, or greed. If you track it, you can learn to manage it. Know your entry and exit and your invalidation before you even consider clicking a button. If you don't have a setup, you don't have a trade. It's as simple as that.
Don't fall in love with coins. This one's huge. I know you think you're a community member. You're in the Discord. You've got the profile picture. You've got the hashtags of the coin in your bio. You're defending the project on Twitter more than the founder is, but you're not a community member. You're in a mental asylum. You're actually exit liquidity for the people who got in earlier and actually know how to take profits. Look at some of the top-performing coins from last cycle. Cardano, Link. They've bled against Bitcoin for years where people who are still holding are coping and seething online. You need to compare your coins to Bitcoin, not just USD. Not making higher highs anymore? That trend is over. It's time to get out. Remember, we want to be capital allocators, not cult members. Bag collectors, not bag holders.
The power of risk management. One of the best ways to make it in crypto is simply to survive over a long enough time frame. Bitcoin is the best performing asset over the last decade. So, if you just held Bitcoin, you outperformed almost everything. You want to know a great way to survive? Understand risk management. Unfortunately, most traders have no idea what risk management even is, and they end up blowing their accounts, getting liquidated because they oversize, and they don't use stops. They let a few bad trades nuke months, even years of progress. I know it's not sexy, but risk management is imperative to survival in crypto long-term.
Here are some tips that you can use for leverage trading, trading spot, even trading meme coins. I know it doesn't sound fun, but risk 1 to 2% of your trading account on any given trade. You don't need to go all-in, no matter what people online tell you. Learn to set your stop-losses before entering. That means you know how much you stand to lose if you're wrong. Remember the section about managing our emotions? Well, if you know the worst-case scenario before you even enter the trade, it allows you to remain objective. Calculate your risk-to-reward. And if it's at least not one to two, you should probably skip that trade. Why do I use 1:2? Well, simply, you're not going to be right all the time. I know people on YouTube and Twitter like to talk about having a 100% win rate. They never lose a trade. The reality is you're not as good as you think you are, and neither are they. With a 1:2 risk-to-reward ratio, you only need to be right 33% of the time to break even. I like those odds. Remember, if we can learn to accept our losses before entering the trade, not after, and mitigate them to not blow up our accounts from a few bad decisions, our likelihood of survival is that much greater.
Patience. More patience means more profits. If you're impatient, you're going to overtrade. Overtrading generally leads to bleeding out slowly while thinking you're being productive. Your goal should be to only take A+ setups. And if those setups aren't there, you need to have the discipline to walk away. Here's what I do to help. I break my portfolio into four separate buckets. I have my long-term spot. This is what I'm using to capture high time frame trends, monthly and weekly. I have my short-term spot. This is to be in and out of maybe multi-week, multi-day trends. I have my leverage trading portfolio to trade pairs. And last but not least, I have my high-risk portfolio, meme coins, altcoins, etc. Each one of these has its own rules. Combine that with risk management, like we discussed before, all of a sudden you no longer have a single point of failure. This keeps me from doing something stupid with money that's supposed to sit still and allows me to take more aggressive risk with money I've allocated to do so.
You need to learn to filter out the noise on social media to avoid getting scammed. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, it's full of influencers who are actually broke behind the screen and have no trading ability at all. There's paid promos, fake win streaks, and a new meta-coin every single week. Don't trust. Verify. This is crypto, after all. We want to look for transparency, not for hype. So, what are the red flags of some of these influencers? They're never wrong. They never show drawdown. They buy every dip. They sell every top. They're always bullish. They're constantly shilling you a new coin. And then when it goes down, they stop talking about it. That is not a trader. That's a marketing account. You need to be able to spot the difference.
Nobody goes broke taking profits. You know who said that? Bernard Baruch, one of the greatest investors of the early 1900s. And he's right. Unrealized profits aren't real. They're numbers on a screen until you convert them to something that can't rug, like fiat or BTC. You actually want to use strength to exit, not weakness. The time to sell is when everything feels easy, when your portfolio is green and you're tempted to hold for more, not when you're panicking and the bid has vanished. Remember, you don't have to sell the top. Nobody does it consistently. You just have to sell somewhere at some point before things that always happen happen again. You don't want the ticket to the roundtrip express. The goal isn't to maximize every single trade. It's to extract enough that the wins compound into something real over time. Something that you can use, invest, or hold in an asset that won't go to zero because the founder decided to rug and move to Dubai. Profit taking isn't weak. It's the whole [ __ ] point.
All roads lead to Bitcoin maximalism. I'm going to go a little hard on this one because I think it's super important. Most altcoins bleed against Bitcoin over time. Look at any altcoin chart denominated in Bitcoin, not USD. The story is almost always the same. There's a few pumps, maybe a small window during the cycle where it outperforms, then a slow grinding decline backwards of relevance. The exceptions, of course, exist, but exceptions don't make the rules. The base case for most of these coins is death. BTC is the anchor of the market. Everything trades relative to it. When Bitcoin bleeds, alts often bleed harder. When Bitcoin rips, some alts, they might outperform briefly, but that's often just the window, not the norm. Understanding this hierarchy is foundational. Bitcoin isn't just another coin in your portfolio. It's the benchmark. It is the base case.
Use alts as a vehicle to stack more Bitcoin. This completely reframes the game. You're not trying to find the next Ethereum or the next Solana and hold it forever. You're trying to catch an asymmetric move in altcoins and then rotate that profit back into the hardest asset in the space. Alts are tools. Bitcoin is the treasury. Measure success in BTC, not USD. This mindset shift is going to separate the tourist from the people who actually make it in crypto. If your portfolio went up 50% in USD, cool. Did it outperform Bitcoin? If not, you took more risk for less reward. You would have been better off sitting in Bitcoin or touching grass. If you're underperforming Bitcoin, you need to rethink your strategy. This is honest self-assessment that most people completely avoid. All that research, all that planning, all that time in the trenches and stress, and you're still behind the guy who bought Bitcoin and did nothing. That's not a failure. It's simply data. Either get better, get more selective, or accept that Bitcoin is your strategy and stop overcomplicating it.
All right, guys. Now you've got 10 years of crypto trading knowledge condensed into one video so you can move forward with more confidence in the market. As always, if you want more from Maine, you know what to do. Click the link to my website below. If you want to learn from some other high-level traders like me, join the Haven. There's six of us sharing our trades, our strategies entirely in Discord. All that info can be found below. If you want to try some of these strategies out without your money, use Breakout. You can trade up to $200,000 of Funny Capital. If you use code Maine, M A Y N E, that will give you a sweet little discount. And of course, my free Discord, my free Telegram, all that other fun stuff can be found on my website. If you like this video and you want to see more like it, let me know in the comments. I'll talk to you guys in the next.