Note: This is my personal account and not financial advice. Do your own research.
First of all. Whether it is Crypto, Stocks or Commodities. Understand this. You are not a trader. You are the one being traded. Understand the difference between the user and the product. In this grand pyramid scheme. You are the product.
We’re Swimming with the Sharks
I don’t know if anyone can help right now. What I want and what the financial system delivers don’t line up: and fitting into their structure isn’t working. It’s frustrating and feels like being constantly outmanoeuvred. Trying to work as per their system structure is not working.
Gold is at an all-time high. Meanwhile we nibble at tiny gains, watch inflation nibble at our bank balances, and gold keeps climbing. The asymmetry is maddening.
I don’t think anyone can help at this point. We are almost basically doomed honestly.
At the time of writing (February 2, 2025, 05:07 PM BST), the New York market was about to open and lots of people were predicting volatility. Trump shook up a lot. There’s a lot of noise: tariffs, institutional flows, and an ever-present crypto narrative, and that amplifies swings. Trump launched his own memecoin. It went from USD 250 million to 24 billion. All this is in 9 hours, and then started dumping. Crypto influencers lost their marbles. And the whole meme community tracked it, for a brief moment it overtook $Dogecoin.
It is like the analysts on Reuters keep warning of volatility which has become systemic.
Then there are these institutional bodies, where a lot of money gets lost. Like Jane Street.
My Crypto Grind
I’ve been trading crypto the past few weeks and my strategy keeps evolving. At every step there are bigger players eating my small mistakes. I trade small chunks so losses aren’t catastrophic and I tweak strategy after each failure. It’s tiring work: experiment, tweak, repeat.
A few practical lessons from my recent failures:
- I was trading on BullX, which is. a trading bot. Bought Solanafrom Coinbase’s, which is a centralised exchange , all established cryptocurrencies live here. I learned I could train on Dexscreener too, it has the least fees (1% transaction fee + gas fee).
- Fees matter far more than I thought. I started trading 0.01 Solana (SOL) and quickly realised transaction fees made small trades pointless. I moved to 0.1 SOL and then 0.2 SOL, but even then you need a decent percentage move just to break even. Example: if you were buying 25.65. But you won’t actually make the $2.33 you think you’d make due to fees. So you really need to wait for the price to hit 16.46%.
- Small gains get eaten by fees. If your trade needs a 20–120% move to break even because of platform + gas fees, you’re not trading — you’re gambling.
- Scalping beats chasing 100x dreams. I moved away from hunting 100x pumps to scalping reasonable gains on less-obvious but not total-scam coins. Take profits, leave a tiny bag for potential upside.
- Psychology is huge. It’s addictive. One trade can feel like a rollercoaster. 20% up, one bad swing, 25% back down. And if you don’t get out when you have the chance, you are left holding a coin which is a long term shitcoin. That pattern destroys discipline. I am still trying to get a hold of the whole process. . There is a 50 percent potential chance of going higher or 99.99 percent chance of being dead.
It is frustrating, tiring and just time-consuming work and lot of experimenting, tweaking and re-doing it again and again and again. And always felt like 2 steps forward and 3 steps back so the confidence levels haven’t been that solid.
The Memecoin Circus (and AI Madness)
Memecoins are where the volume is. More people than ever are entering crypto. More liquidity for the institutional players. Great. Your mum will have heard of Bitcoin by year-end. That brings more noise, more pumps, more rugs, more thrill of risk. I’ve seen memecoins driven by pure hype: last week a silly token called dogwifhat, this week another. As of January 2025, the new meta was: degeneracy + memes + AI.
There are also wild integrations: AI agents buying/selling, agent-driven “hedge funds,” and memecoins tied to influencers. Example: Vader AI, an agent with wallet access and other agent assets is an eye-opener. This is novelty and risk at scale. This is on Virtuals protocol, which is on Base chain (Coinbase’s blockchain). The hype was real.
What Actually Matters
Stop waiting for “golden capital.” Capital helps, but discipline, strategy, and experience matter more. If you’ve never lost money before, you’ll make beginner errors. If you’re leaning on social chatter, or KOLs hype without understanding mechanics, you’ll get eaten.
If you want to start:
- Put a small, meaningful amount in (something you can stomach losing) and treat it like tuition.
- Learn fee structures and settlement mechanics for the chain you use.
- Build a simple playbook: entry rules, exit rules, position sizing, and a maximum loss per trade.
- Starting with a modest 100 month to month while you build rhythm. Think of scalping small wins, keep fees in mind, and try not to chase every new hype-coin.
- Or better yet, don’t trade memecoins at all. They are all pump and dumps.
Plan (My Next Steps)
With so much happening, can’t just sit and watch while the action goes down. But I’ll do exactly that, with rules, not FOMO.
Relying on capital without completely realising the commitment it takes. And investing with none to very less prior investing experience is ‘a false mirage’.
There is still a system to the madness that can be learned. But is it worth your soul. I never understood gambling before. Now I see why it’s so addictive.