Trading volume is the true heartbeat of the market; candlestick charts are just stories told after the fact.

I still remember the year I first entered the crypto world, carrying a dream with 50,000 yuan. Every day, my ears were bombarded with spells like "doubling in two or three days" and "hundredfold gains." And what happened in the end? I was lured into a long position and squeezed for half a year, buying the dip up the mountain, cutting my losses until my hands trembled, and my account once shrank by 97%. That feeling was suffocating.

Over these seven or eight years, I’ve slowly grown from 50,000 to 7 million. To be honest, it’s not luck that got me here, nor riding a certain trend, but every pit I stepped into deeply. Those pits I’ve dug could fill half a trading floor.

Today, I’ll share the 5 survival rules I’ve summarized from my struggles. Even mastering just one can help you lose tens of thousands less. If you manage to follow three of them properly, 90% of the trend-following retail traders will be left behind by you. After all, surviving in this market is more important than anything else.

**Gradual declines are for shaking out, sudden drops are signals to escape**

Newcomers see the price slowly sliding down and panic, quickly cutting losses and running. That’s purely feeding the whales. This slow decline isn’t a collapse; it’s essentially the whales clearing out the impatient. After shaking out the weak hands, the market is likely to go up again.

But if you encounter another situation—first a violent 40% surge, then a sharp halving within three hours—don’t overthink it. Your fingers must be faster than your brain; immediately close your positions.

I suffered a big loss from this early on. Watching SOL soar at that time, I couldn’t resist chasing, only to be crushed to the floor that same day. It took half a year to recover. Later, I realized that this pattern of rising then falling is a trap set by the whales for greedy people, specifically to slaughter those trying to make quick money.

The real danger isn’t in slow declines but in rapid crashes. During a slow decline, the whales are still in the game; a crash is a signal that they’ve already escaped.

**When the market is bad, "picking up bargains" is the easiest way to get killed**

Every time I see a big drop, there are always a bunch of people itching to buy the dip. But what happens? They often get hammered on the last leg. Picking bottoms during a crash is like trying to pick coins next to a bomb; the tiny profit you make can be blown away in a quick correction.

My painful lesson is: truly safe bottom-fishing opportunities only come when the entire market is afraid to buy, and even candlesticks are about to pierce the core of the earth. Beginners always rush in at the first or second sign of a slow decline, only to catch the longest knife at the end.

Market bottoms can’t be identified just by technical analysis. You have to wait until the crowd’s enthusiasm is completely dead, and no one dares to speak—that’s the real bottom.