Many traders have experienced moments like these: staring at the market charts, unconsciously repeatedly clicking the open position button, knowing that frequent operations easily lead to losses but unable to control themselves.

The fundamental reason for this phenomenon is often not simply "trading addiction," but the limitation of capital size.

When the initial funds are limited, traders fall into a psychological dilemma—fearing to miss every market fluctuation. Finance emphasizes the time value of money, which is especially evident in the digital asset market. Today’s 100,000 yuan and the same amount five years later have completely different purchasing power and value. More importantly, exchange risks are unpredictable, and no one can guarantee the security of assets after several years.

Value investing advocates "holding high-quality projects to enjoy compound returns," but small retail investors simply cannot wait that long. Suppose the principal is only 30,000 to 50,000 yuan; even with an ideal annual return of 30%, doubling the capital takes three years. During this period, they might have already experienced two full bull and bear cycles, and unexpected life events could force them to use this money.

Coupled with the 24/7 volatility of the crypto market—leverage on contracts, sudden surges and crashes of new tokens—every day is filled with information bombardment like "missed opportunity means huge loss."

In such an environment, retail investors’ goal is not stable growth but quick turnaround. Insufficient capital makes it difficult to accumulate the chips needed for the next market cycle without taking risks.

This leads to a phenomenon: retail investors focus more on odds than on win rate. A contract trade that triples the return psychologically outweighs ten small, stable profits; catching a hundredfold token is equivalent to years of hard work. The problem is, high odds are inevitably accompanied by low win rates—100x leverage is a typical example, either instantly recouping losses or quickly liquidating.

With limited funds, traders cannot adopt the long-term, patient positioning that institutions do. They can only swing between two extremes: either being gradually eroded by fees and market volatility, or lowering the entry threshold by increasing trading frequency and relying on stop-loss and take-profit to compensate for the win rate deficiency.

Frequent trading itself is not inherently problematic, but the issue lies in the lack of a systematic approach—opening positions based on intuition, blaming "market makers" after a liquidation. This reflects a lack of a truly effective trading system. Mastering a set of proven trading strategies is far more important for small-capital traders than relying on luck.