Osiris · Blog
General trading concepts, techniques and market mechanics.
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.
You do not need to count five waves to read a market. Two words cover it: the impulse says who is in charge, the correction says where to join them. How to tell the waves apart at a glance, the one trade this vocabulary produces, and the alarm that fires when the two swap character.
Markets spend most of their time going nowhere, and that is where trend traders give their profits back. The two kinds of ranges, the two-touch rule before a flat deserves your money, how to trade the walls, and the two tells that say the break is coming.
A trendline is a level with a clock in it: the same crowd logic as horizontal support, tilted to track the trend's pace. The drawing rules that remove the subjectivity, what the angle tells you, and how to trade the third touch and the break without confusing either one with a reversal.
Every session starts with the same question: what kind of day is it? The Osiris Market page answers it from the live futures tape: breadth, volume, a Fear & Greed index computed from five real-time signals, funding extremes and the lists where moves show up early. How we read it before every session.
A pattern is not a shape, it is a map of who is stuck and where they are forced to exit. The five price-action setups behind the whole levels series, the crowd trapped inside each one, and the break of structure, the pattern that ends trends.
