Vibrations on the phone in the early morning are usually not dreams of getting rich quickly, but alarms for liquidation.

The message at 2 o'clock came from a trader I consulted three months ago, and the words are full of panic: "Only 5,000 left in the account, this is the last money borrowed from a friend to turn things around..." Opening his trading record, the story is very familiar—three months ago, he started with a 50,000 principal, now it has shrunk to 5,000. He blindly followed online influencers and traders, chasing high during rises, and after being trapped, he self-hypnotized himself into believing a rebound was inevitable, dragging his account from full position to the brink of despair.

In these five years in the market, I’ve seen too many similar stories. Some have tasted the sweetness of luck and started treating trading as an ATM; others collapse in tears over liquidation screenshots in the early morning. Every time someone asks "how to quickly recover the principal," my first answer is always: the futures market is not about betting who can make money faster, but about betting who can survive longer.

Those who truly survive in volatile markets like SOL and Ethereum have mastered the same logic. I’ll share four hard rules that took me from 5,000 to 200,000, which might help you avoid most of the pitfalls others have fallen into.

**01 Position Management: This is your lifeline, not chips**

The most common death for beginners is going all-in or over-leveraging right from the start. I’ve seen the worst case: a buddy went all-in with 50,000 USD on a certain altcoin, smiling with squinted eyes when it rose 5%, trembling when it fell 5%, and half an hour later, he was liquidated—less than 1,000 USD left from the 50,000 USD.

My view on position sizing is very extreme: it’s not just a variable in trading strategy, but your first and foremost life. No matter how tempting the opportunity, never open a single position exceeding —