At the beginning of last year, I dipped my toes in with 10,000 yuan of spare cash. By the end of the year, when I checked my account—it had jumped straight to 1.8 million.

Don’t rush to accuse me of making up stories; I look at these numbers every day, more closely than my credit card bill. What’s even crazier is that around April, my account shrank to just 40,000. At that point, I seriously considered selling everything and walking away. The comeback wasn’t luck—it was from relentlessly studying and truly understanding the market cycles. Honestly, this approach is way easier to grasp than those mystical indicators in the A-shares market.

A lot of people associate the crypto market with gambling, but with real money on the line, I’ve verified one thing: the people who really make money aren’t the so-called “hardworking players” glued to the screen 24/7, but the “hunters” who understand the cycles and have the patience to wait. Today, I’m sharing everything I learned climbing back from 40,000 to 1.8 million. Whether you’re a newbie just getting started or a veteran who’s been schooled by the market, after reading this you’ll at least avoid a few major pitfalls.

Let’s start with a harsh truth: the reason it’s so quick to make money in this market is because the rules are right there in the open.

Forget all those vague value investing theories. The underlying logic of the crypto market comes down to three words: cycle, allocation, and hot trends. The data doesn’t lie—

Over the past 20 years, A-shares have increased 78%; invest 100,000 yuan for 20 years and it becomes 178,000. Bitcoin from 2023 to 2024 alone surged over 220%; 100,000 turned into 320,000 in one year—one year equals twenty years of A-shares.

And the “set-and-forget” strategy is even crazier: in the past decade, if you bought Bitcoin every January and sold every December, even the worst year saw a 120% gain, and in 2020 it soared over 300%. Sounds amazing, right?

But my painful experience of dropping to 40,000 in April will tell you—