Do not waste every loss, the "Sisyphus Revelation" of the crypto market.

Author: thiccy

Compiled by: Tim, PANews

In 2025, the crypto market presented an astonishing volatility script again, yet many suffered heavy losses in trading.

This article is not written for those traders who are continuously losing money, but for those who are highly profitable yet have experienced a significant decline in profits this quarter.

One of the greatest pains in life is witnessing months or even years of effort go to waste in a single night.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is condemned to endlessly push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down each time he reaches the top. The cruelty of this punishment lies in its precise hit on the core of human existence, that absurdity of futility and repetition. However, Camus saw another possibility in Sisyphus: when he acknowledges the absurd and no longer hopes for ultimate redemption, but instead fully commits to the act of pushing the stone up the hill itself, he changes his fate in the process. True victory may not be in the stone resting at the top of the hill, but in that moment of conscious awareness and unwavering calm every time he bends down to push the stone.

Cryptocurrency trading also requires this trait. Unlike most professions, there is no so-called “progress bar” in this field. A single wrong decision is enough to completely ruin an entire career, which has led many people to a dead end.

When the giant rock really rolls down, people will respond in two ways.

Some people increase their bets in an attempt to recover losses. They adopt a more aggressive trading style, essentially trying to recoup their losses using the Martingale strategy (a method of doubling the bet when losing). If they can quickly earn back their funds, they can avoid facing the emotional reality of their losses. This approach is often effective in the short term, but it is an extremely dangerous strategy, as it reinforces a trading habit that will inevitably lead to losing all your capital mathematically.

Some other people, exhausted, choose to completely withdraw from the market. They usually have enough funds to live comfortably and believe that the risks and rewards of the market are no longer aligned. They comfort themselves by telling themselves that there are no longer any advantages in the market, or that these advantages are about to disappear. Their choice to exit is essentially a “death sentence” for the market, never to return.

Both of these reactions are understandable, but they are merely temporary fixes that do not address the root of the problem. The real issue lies in the vulnerabilities of your risk management system. Most people tend to overestimate their actual level of risk management.

Risk management is not an insurmountable problem in itself; the relevant mathematical principles have long been well established. The real challenge lies not in not knowing what to do, but in being able to persist in executing the established strategy when faced with emotions, self, pressure, and fatigue. Keeping actions aligned with cognition is one of the hardest practices for humans, and the market will always mercilessly expose the flaws of this cognitive bias and disconnection from reality.

How to get out after a loss?

First, you must accept one thing: you are not unlucky, nor are you suffering from injustice. This loss is an inevitable result of your human weaknesses. If you do not identify and address this issue, losses will occur again.

Secondly, you need to fully accept your current net worth; you cannot always anchor yourself to past historical highs. “Earning it back” is one of the most dangerous impulses in the market. Step away from the screen for a while and be thankful for what you have already achieved. You are still alive, you are still in the game, and you are no longer trying to recover losses, but simply focusing on achieving new profits.

View this loss as the tuition you pay for your own shortcomings; this lesson is one you will learn sooner or later. The fortunate thing is that you are paying for it now rather than at a higher cost in the future. If you can respond correctly, you will look back on this moment with gratitude. Character is often forged in times of adversity.

To accurately identify the reasons for failure. For most people, the problem usually arises from a combination of the following situations: over-positioning, not setting a predetermined stop-loss point when entering the market, or failing to strictly execute when the stop-loss point is reached. Establishing iron rules regarding risk control and stop-loss can help avoid most disastrous losses.

Remind yourself that the only way to prevent the boulder from rolling all the way down again is to strictly adhere to those rules. They are your only guarantee against the torment you are experiencing in the present. Without rules, you are nothing.

Let yourself vent for the losses; you can scream or smash things. Release your emotions instead of keeping them bottled up inside.

The most important thing is that you must turn pain into lessons. Otherwise, it will surely repeat itself.

This insight on coping with pain applies not only to trading losses but also broadly to life. The common coping mechanisms mentioned earlier seem blunt in their driving force because they often introduce just as many new problems while solving existing ones. If you cannot recover from losses in a refined and precise manner, you will ultimately oscillate repeatedly around the optimal solution, overshooting continuously like a gradient descent algorithm with too large of a step size, never converging to the correct position.

When Napoleon lost a battle, he would immediately start rebuilding his army and preparing for the next move. A failure is not fatal unless you lose the ability to continue fighting because of it. The primary task after experiencing a setback is to ensure that this weakness will not be exploited again and to restore your best competitive state as quickly as possible.

You should not seek redemption, nor should you seek revenge. You should not react passively, nor should you harbor anger. You must become a cold machine. You must self-repair and then rebuild the system to ensure the same mistakes are never repeated. Every failure you endure will become a moat in your system, and this moat is something that everyone else must personally pay the price to learn.

Such losses can shape a person, so be grateful for them; their appearance is meant to give you insights. This loss did not happen for no reason. Allow yourself to feel the pain, but turn that pain into motivation, and ensure that you never make the same mistake again.

The reason these matters are difficult is that once you find the right direction, the continuous growth of wealth becomes a natural consequence.

Good luck.