This is the module that decides whether you're still here in three months.
Everything else in this playbook is about picking better trades. This one is about surviving the ones you pick badly — and there will be plenty.
Risk 10–20% of your wallet on a trade. No more.
If you're holding 1 SOL, that's 0.1 to 0.2 SOL per position. The amount picker on the coin page shows you the percentage as you choose, so you never have to work it out.
That's not caution for its own sake. It's arithmetic, and the arithmetic is unforgiving.
Here is the thing almost nobody internalises until it has cost them: a strategy that wins on average can still take your account to zero if you size it wrong.
Run the numbers on a set of real trades — a 63% win rate, a positive average return — and simulate a run of them at different sizes:
| Stake per trade | Reached the target | Went broke |
|---|---|---|
| 100% of balance | 14% | 86% |
| 50% | 72% | 21% |
| 25% | 81% | 0.5% |
| 10% | slow, but almost never broke | 0% |
Same trades. Same edge. The only variable is size, and it's the difference between compounding and craters.
The reason is that losses compound against you harder than gains compound for you. Lose 50% and you need +100% just to get back to level. Two of those in a row on full size and the edge you were counting on can't dig you out.
The edge is real. Sizing is what turns it into a result or a hole.
This is not gambling, and it should not feel like gambling.
Gambling is one big position because you're sure, no plan for being wrong, and doubling down after a loss to get it back. Every one of those is a decision made by how you feel at the time.
What this is instead: