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Most retail traders lose money. Not because they're unintelligent, but because crypto markets are irrational, manipulated, and emotionally punishing. This page covers how to think about trading if you choose to do it, and why most people shouldn't.
Investing is buying assets you believe will be worth more in the future and holding them. Trading is trying to profit from short-term price movements. They require entirely different mindsets, skill sets, and risk management approaches.
If you're new to crypto, you should be investing, not trading. Buy Bitcoin on a schedule. Hold it. Check the price once a month, not once an hour. The people who make real money in crypto are usually the ones who forgot they owned it.
Charts show price over time. The two most common types are line charts (closing price only) and candlestick charts (open, high, low, close for each period). Here's what actually matters:
Everything else in technical analysis is built on these four concepts. Indicators like RSI, MACD, and moving averages are derivatives of price and volume. They can be useful but they are not magic. They lag. They conflict. They work until they don't.
Crypto moves in cycles driven largely by Bitcoin's halving, which occurs roughly every four years and cuts the rate of new Bitcoin creation in half. Historically, this has led to bull markets 6-12 months after each halving, followed by bear markets that wipe out 70-90% of the gains.
The cycle tends to go: accumulation (smart money buys quietly), markup (price rises, retail notices), distribution (smart money sells to excited retail), decline (price crashes, retail capitulates). Then it repeats.
You don't need to time the cycle perfectly. You need to avoid buying the top and selling the bottom. Dollar-cost averaging does this automatically.
Crypto is designed to break you emotionally. When the price is rising, you feel like a genius and want to buy more. When it's crashing, you feel like a fool and want to sell. Both feelings are wrong. Both feelings will cost you money.
The best traders have a plan before they enter a position: where they'll take profits, where they'll cut losses, and how much they're willing to risk. They execute the plan regardless of how they feel. Most people can't do this. That's why most people shouldn't trade.
Beyond price charts, you can look at blockchain data itself. How many coins are being moved to exchanges (potential selling). How many long-term holders are accumulating or distributing. Network activity, active addresses, transaction fees. Tools like Glassnode and CryptoQuant provide this data for free or cheap.
On-chain analysis is more fundamental than technical analysis because it measures what people are actually doing with their crypto, not just what the price is doing. It's slower and less precise but harder to fake.
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