To be honest, who hasn’t done something foolish like “dreaming of financial freedom with just a few thousand bucks” when they were young?

Five years ago, I rushed into this market with 2,000 yuan in my pocket. Back then, I had only one thought in my mind—if others can double their money, why can’t I? Looking back now, I was basically jumping into a pit with my wallet in hand.

Risk management? Didn’t exist. Going all-in was the norm, and if I lost, I just held on, never setting a stop-loss. When my account dropped from 2,000 down to a few hundred, I kept telling myself, “I’ll definitely make it back next time.” You can guess the result—after a series of liquidations, my account hit zero. That’s when I finally woke up: this wasn’t about luck at all, the whole approach was wrong. Not losing all my savings was already half a miracle.

What really brought me back to life wasn’t luck, nor some secret strategy, but just two words—**reviewing trades**.

This is the first lesson I want to share: If you don’t have the habit of reviewing your trades, you have no business talking about trading. I pulled up all my historical orders and dissected each one. That’s when I realized every liquidation followed a pattern: either I opened positions based on gut feeling, doubled down after small wins, or ignored stop-losses out of wishful thinking. After that, I set some rules for myself: every trade must answer three questions—what signal triggered my entry? What percentage of my capital am I using? Where’s my stop-loss set? If I couldn’t answer these clearly, I’d skip the trade.

Second lesson: Don’t chase too many indicators—master a few. I tried all sorts of fancy tools, but eventually focused on Bollinger Bands. The key isn’t memorizing parameters—most people stare at the upper and lower bands, blindly guessing direction, and miss the core logic: a tightening band means the market’s winding up for a big move, an expanding band signals a trend is starting, and whether a breakout is real or fake depends on whether it can retest and hold. For example...

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