Don't waste a single loss: the Sisyphus lesson of the crypto market.

Author: thiccy

Compiled by: Tim, PANews

The crypto market experienced another dramatic volatility in 2025, resulting in significant losses for many traders.

This article is not written for traders who consistently lose money, but for those with strong profitability who have experienced a significant profit drawdown this quarter.

One of the greatest pains in life is witnessing months or even years of hard work go down the drain overnight.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was punished by being forced to endlessly push a boulder up a mountain, only to watch it roll back down each time he reached the summit. The cruelty of this punishment lies in its precise targeting of the core of the human experience of existence: the absurdity of futility and repetitive repetition. However, Camus saw another possibility in Sisyphus: when he acknowledged the absurdity, abandoned hope for ultimate salvation, and instead devoted himself entirely to the act of pushing the boulder uphill, he changed his own destiny in the process. True victory may not lie in the boulder remaining at the top, but in the conscious awareness and unyielding tranquility with each downward push.

Crypto trading requires the same qualities. Unlike most professions, there is no "progress bar" in this field. A single wrong decision can completely destroy an entire career, leading many to their tragic ends.

When the boulder actually rolls down, people will react in two ways.

Some people increase their bets in an attempt to recoup losses. They adopt a more aggressive trading style, essentially using the Martingale strategy (a method of doubling down when losing) to try and recover their losses. If they can quickly recoup their capital, they can avoid emotionally confronting the reality of the loss. This approach is often effective in the short term, but it is an extremely dangerous strategy because it reinforces a trading habit that mathematically will inevitably lead to total ruin.

Others, exhausted and disillusioned, choose to leave the market altogether. They typically have enough money to live comfortably and believe the market's risks and rewards are no longer commensurate. They console themselves by telling themselves they no longer have any advantage in the market, or that these advantages are about to disappear. Their exit is essentially a death sentence to the market, a permanent farewell.

While both of these reactions are understandable, they are merely stopgap measures and fail to address the root cause of the problem. The real issue lies in the flaws in your risk management system. Most people tend to overestimate their actual risk management capabilities.

Risk management itself is not an unsolvable problem; the relevant mathematical principles have long been well-proven. The real challenge lies not in not knowing what to do, but in consistently executing predetermined strategies despite emotions, ego, stress, and fatigue. Maintaining consistency between action and cognition is one of the most difficult human endeavors, and the market will relentlessly expose this cognitive bias and disconnect from reality.

How do you recover from losses?

First, you must accept this: you are not unlucky, nor have you been wronged. This loss is the inevitable result of your human weaknesses. If you don't find and address this problem, the loss will happen again.

Secondly, you need to fully accept your current net worth; you can't always anchor yourself to past all-time highs. "Make it back" is one of the most dangerous impulses in the market. Take a break from the screen and be grateful for what you've already achieved. You're still alive, you're still in the game, and you're no longer trying to recover losses, but simply focusing on achieving new profits.

View this loss as tuition you're paying for your own shortcomings—a lesson you'd have to learn sooner or later. Thankfully, you're paying it now, not when the cost will be higher in the future. If you handle it well, you'll look back with gratitude. Character is often forged in adversity.

To pinpoint the exact cause of failure, for most people, the problem usually stems from a combination of factors: over-leveraging, failing to set a stop-loss order upon entry, or failing to strictly adhere to the stop-loss order when it is triggered. Establishing ironclad rules regarding risk control and stop-loss can prevent most catastrophic losses.

Remind yourself that the only way to prevent the boulder from rolling back down to the bottom is to strictly adhere to the rules. They are your only safeguard against the torment you are currently experiencing. Without rules, you are nothing.

Let yourself vent about the loss; scream, smash things. Release your emotions instead of bottling them up.

Most importantly, you must turn pain into a lesson. Otherwise, it will inevitably repeat itself.

This insight into coping with pain applies not only to trading losses but also broadly to life. The common coping mechanisms mentioned earlier seem crude because they often introduce just as many new problems as they solve the initial one. If you cannot recover from losses in a refined and precise way, you will ultimately resemble a gradient descent algorithm with an oversized step size, oscillating around the optimal solution and constantly overshooting, never converging to the correct position.

When Napoleon lost a battle, he would immediately begin rebuilding his army and preparing for the next move. A single defeat is not fatal unless it renders you incapable of fighting. The primary task after a setback is to ensure that this weakness is not exploited again and to recover to your peak competitive form as quickly as possible.

You should not seek redemption, nor revenge. You should not react passively, nor harbor anger. You must become a cold-blooded machine. You must heal yourself, then rebuild the system to ensure the same mistakes are never repeated. Every failure you overcome becomes a moat in your system, a moat that everyone else must learn by paying the price.

Such losses are what forge a person; be grateful for them, for they exist to teach you lessons. This loss did not happen without reason. Allow yourself to feel the pain, but transform that pain into motivation, ensuring you never repeat the same mistake.

These things are difficult because once you find the right direction, the continued growth of wealth becomes a natural consequence.

Good luck.