Most new traders don't blow up because they picked a bad trade. They blow up because they sized it wrong.

Here's the math nobody explains early on: if you risk 2% of your account per trade, you can lose 10 trades in a row and still have ~82% of your capital left. Risk 20% per trade, and 5 losses in a row wipes out 67% of your account — even though your win rate might be identical.

A simple framework I use with beginner accounts ($500-$5k range):

1. Never risk more than 1-2% of total capital on a single trade. That means your position size is a function of your stop-loss distance, not your gut feeling.

2. Set the stop before you enter, not after. If you don't know where you're wrong, you don't have a real position size — you have a guess.

3. Correlated positions count as one trade. Long BTC and long ETH at the same time? That's one leveraged bet on crypto risk-on sentiment, not two independent trades.

4. Journal every entry with your reasoning. Not just win/loss — write down why you took it. Patterns in your own mistakes show up fast.

This is the boring stuff nobody wants to hear when they're chasing 10x gains, but it's the actual difference between traders who are still around in a year and traders who aren't.

Been building this out with a small group over at Northstar Signals — daily crypto/stock calls with the sizing and reasoning attached, not just tickers. Happy to answer questions on risk management here regardless of whether you join.