Nine rules from a working trader, tested on years of live deposits. The first one is the most important and the most ignored: how you split your money between spot, stablecoins and futures decides whether you survive the first bad month. Move the sliders below to see what each split looks like.
The single decision that decides whether you survive a bad month: where your money sits. Most beginners load everything into one bucket - either spot or futures - and the first big drawdown wipes the position with nothing left to deploy. The split that survives most market conditions:
60% spot for long-term holds in BTC, ETH and a small set of established alts. 30% stablecoins as buffer - this is what you spend when the market crashes 40% and everyone else is paralyzed. 10% futures for high-risk leveraged trading. The 10% can go to zero and the rest of your portfolio still works. Move the sliders in the hero above to feel how the numbers shift.
The stablecoin bucket is what most beginners get wrong. Without dry powder you cannot buy the dips that make the cycle profitable. With everything deployed at the top, every drop is pain instead of opportunity.
No exchange is too big to fail. Mt. Gox in 2014 took 850,000 BTC. FTX in 2022 took 8 billion USD. Both looked safe the day before they were not. Register on at least 3 to 5 exchanges and split your trading capital between them. Add at least one self-custody wallet to the mix - hot wallet for small amounts, hardware wallet for serious holdings.
Pick exchanges with strong reserves and multi-year track records: comparison of major exchanges covers the trade-offs in detail. For storage that is independent of any exchange, the guide on how to store crypto safely walks through hardware wallet setup.
Same principle on the asset side: do not hold one type of coin only. Mix categories - large caps (BTC, ETH), exchange tokens, layer-2 chains, real-world utility tokens. Correlated holdings move together. A "diversified" bag of 12 small altcoins is one bet, not twelve.
Print this section, pin it next to your trading screen. Every rule has prevented a specific loss. Every loss happened because someone ignored a specific rule.
Rule 7 is the one beginners hear most often and follow least. The reason is emotional: setting a stop is admitting the trade can be wrong. Most beginners would rather watch the loss grow and tell themselves it will come back. It usually does not.
The math is simple. With a stop at -3%, you can be wrong on 30 trades in a row and still have 41% of your account left to keep trading. Without a stop, one bad trade in 30 takes the whole thing. Stop-loss is not a tool for limiting losses on bad trades. It is a tool for staying in the game long enough that good trades have time to play out.
Practical setup: SL distance should be wide enough to survive normal noise (typically 1.5 to 3 times the average minute-candle range) but tight enough that liquidation never fires before SL does. Take-profit at minimum 2x the SL distance. Both orders set before clicking open. Tick reduce-only on both. Detailed mechanics in the crypto futures guide.
Rule 9 is hardest because it goes against every instinct. When the market is dumping and your friends are selling, the rational move is to buy. When the market is pumping and your social feed is full of green, the rational move is to take profit.
The signals on /live exist to give you a real picture of what the market is doing - whale flows, liquidation cascades, pump alerts - independent of social-media noise. The reason most retail loses money is not lack of information. It is acting on emotion in the moment when the data says the opposite.
Mechanical defense: set the buy and sell levels in advance, when you are not in the trade. Then when emotions hit, you are following a plan made by your calmer self. The plan does not need to be perfect. It needs to exist.
Everything above is a set of rules used by working traders to manage risk. It is not a recommendation to trade any specific asset, use any specific strategy, or invest any specific amount.