Making money in trading is not hard; what's really hard is sustaining it.

We are all ordinary traders. I am writing this article to save that young, foolish, naive, and painfully impulsive person. As an intraday trader, you are engaging in high-frequency trading, but you have no real information advantage (you don’t know the real liquidity, the order book, you’re not a market maker, you have no execution edge—nothing).

How many times do you trade a day, and how long can you keep it up? How many times a week? How many times a month? Can you guarantee your win rate, and how much do you wear down?

Even if you have the world’s strongest “discipline” and “risk management” skills, the odds of winning or losing will leave you helpless.

Retail traders don’t fail because they (we) never win. We fail because we never stop, and high-frequency behavior has only one ultimate outcome: destruction.

People underestimate how hard trading is, but greatly overestimate their own abilities. The problem is not just about probability theory.

The more you trade, the less you stop, and the harder it is to make consistent profits. The real problem is that many retail traders truly believe that with “discipline” and “risk management,” it’s not gambling at all. They think day trading is a “skill” that can be executed like any daily routine. This logic also applies to stocks and almost all markets.

The real danger is cognition, subconscious awareness. If you know you’re gambling, at least deep down you’ll know when to cut your losses.

But once you think you’re doing the “right thing,” you’ll never stop. You keep clicking until the market completely wipes you out.

Many newcomers enter thinking they’re here to “learn a skill,” but don’t realize they’re just sitting at a gambling table designed to slowly drain their energy. The dopamine rush keeps them from ever stopping; even when they do stop, their mind is still thinking about it, and their heart still struggles with it.

And those retail investors like me who seem to have “made money”… To be honest, most of them just caught a big trend.

They got lucky, caught the right timing, and their previous failures taught them enough discipline to finally learn to stop after winning.

Even so, this small group makes up less than one percent of total retail traders.