Osiris · Blog
General trading concepts, techniques and market mechanics.
We build tools for fast traders, and honesty requires this post anyway: for most people, the daily chart is the better business. One honest candle a day, fees that stop eating the edge, a life outside the screen, and the reasons even scalpers answer to the daily close.
He turned a $5,000 client account into $15 million, compounding around 60% a year, while checking the market for minutes a day. But the most valuable thing Ed Seykota ever produced is one sentence about why losers lose, and it is the darkest, most useful idea in trading literature.
Myths survive in trading because they either sell something or soothe someone. Hard work guarantees nothing, entries are the least important thing everyone teaches, the exchange is not hunting you personally, and turning $1,000 into $100,000 has a timeline nobody posts. The full list, with the math.
Risk management runs the trade. Money management runs everything around it: how much money enters the account, how size steps as equity moves, when profits leave, and why topping up after losses is martingale at account scale. The layer the industry wrote a pamphlet about.
Everyone draws 3R rectangles on their charts. The account statement tells a different story, because the planned ratio and the realized ratio are different numbers, and only one of them pays. The expected value formula, the three ways your real ratio quietly shrinks, and the audit that exposes yours in five minutes.
A study tracked 19,646 new day traders. Of those who persisted for 300 days, 97% lost money, and persistence made the outcomes worse. The statistics the trading industry never leads with: the academic record, who actually gets paid, how survivorship bias hides the bodies, and why a trading platform is telling you this.
Smart people trade for years without becoming profitable, and it is rarely the analysis that fails them. The path has a shape: one strategy survived through its bad cycle, fewer and better trades, a process you can repeat on red weeks, and the breakeven phase nobody celebrates. A map of the road, including the boring parts.
Sooner or later every trader discovers the Kelly criterion and concludes math endorses risking 15% per trade. Kelly assumes you know your edge precisely (you don't) and tolerates 50% drawdowns (you won't). What Kelly is actually for.
Price going against you is only one of the ways to lose money in crypto, and rarely the fastest. The full map of trading risks: leverage, thin books, exchanges holding your coins, depegs, outages, fraud and yourself, with what actually mitigates each one in 2026.
Every emotional failure in trading, revenge trades, panic exits, stop-widening, has one cause: the position is too big. At the right size a losing trade is boring, and boring traders execute. Size for indifference. The complete guide.
You can be right about the chart and still lose to the day. Most coins move with the market, not on their own. The five instruments of market context, and the rule that saves accounts: the regime picks the playbook, the chart picks the trade.
Perpetual futures routinely trade several times spot volume, and that is where crypto price discovery actually happens: leverage, funding, liquidation cascades. What the futures tape tells you that spot never will, and how a plain holder can use it to decide what to buy and when.
