Spent the last few years trading altcoins and watching other people trade them, and the pattern is always the same: it's rarely the entry that kills people. It's what happens after.

Three things I see constantly:

1. No predefined exit. People buy a coin because someone said it's pumping, then have no plan for where they're taking profit or cutting losses. By the time they decide, the move's already reversed.

2. Position sizing by emotion, not risk. Sizing up on the "sure thing" and sizing down on the trade they actually did the homework on. Backwards, every time.

3. Chasing the coin that already moved. The 40% pump on your timeline already happened. Chasing it is buying someone else's exit liquidity.

What actually works: define entry, target, and stop before you're in the trade, size based on where your stop is (not vibes), and only take setups where the risk/reward is worth it before you know the outcome.

Building a small crypto signals community around exactly this — structured entries/exits with defined risk on every call, no "trust me bro" picks. If that's useful to you, it's called Signal Desk — link in my profile.