Don't predict the market — "to make money, you don't need to know what happens next"

Core idea

A trader's goal is PROFIT, not FORECASTING. Profit comes from consistency, capital management, tactics, mindset, and knowledge — forecasting contributes only a very small part. Your job is to blend into the market's flow, read what it's showing right now, and only look from here to the nearest target zone — once you get there, read it again.

Details

1. Why forecasting is impossible

You can never be 100% certain about any signal, simply because there are variables that sit outside the chart: today the US president gets on stage and trashes crypto, tomorrow the Fed hikes rates by 0.75%. A counter-argument the teacher often uses: if there were ever a case that was 100% certain to win, you'd only need to all-in with 100x leverage once and retire — in reality nobody can do that, so this profession is not built on forecasting.

What is certain is: whether it's a small fish, a big fish, or a whale, every action leaves footprints on the chart. Your job is to read the footprints, not guess the intent.

2. You're allowed to build a scenario, NOT allowed to impose one

The boundary is very thin, and the teacher stresses it hard:

• Building a scenario = writing down "if A then I do X, if B then I do Y." This must be done (see Building a wave scenario).
• Imposing a scenario = pushing that scenario into your subconscious and clinging to it. At that point the scenario itself becomes your own limitation.

The right state when entering a trade: no expectation, no craving — not hoping this trade must profit, and not fearing this trade must hit the stop-loss.

3. A deliberately short field of view

The teacher's closing line at the end of one session:

"At this point I don't know whether it will go up or down. I only know that from here, I can see up to here. From here to here, I profit; when I get here, if it keeps going up I profit, if it goes down I also profit — so whichever way it goes I make money, and yet I don't know anything about the market at all."

This is the entire philosophy of The step-by-step market analysis process packed into one line: analysis stops at the nearest feasible target zone, and only there do you make the next decision. There isn't a single forecast anywhere in the whole chain — and yet there's still profit.

The mountain-pass driving metaphor. Trading is like driving at night on a mountain pass: your headlights only light up 600 meters ahead, while the next 1 kilometer is invisible. You only make decisions for the stretch you can see clearly: the current signal shows the correction wave will come down to the nearest support zone → you handle things up to there. Whether it bounces off support or breaks through further is "the next 1 kilometer" — no need to know now, read it again once you get there. That's why you have to cut the wave into segments and go segment by segment, "as far as it's lit, that's as far as you go," never straining your eyes to guess the whole stretch of road. Alongside this is the reset-the-sell-amount technique: in a downward wave, sell at the higher zone then buy back at a lower support zone → you profit on price, accumulate more coins, and stay safer — instead of "clinging stubbornly" to one direction and letting your ego refuse to admit you were wrong.

4. Standing aside is also a way of handling it

• When the timeframes are chaotically out of phase with each other, nobody has grounds to lean toward either side → don't judge, don't favor either side; whichever one actually happens, focus on that one. This exact mindset is what helps you avoid "needless" stop-losses.
• When important news drops (Fed, macro data): the price whips up and down violently. Anyone who hasn't yet mastered the small timeframe should stand outside the market — the teacher advises this directly, and does not recommend trading through it.
• When the market genuinely has no force (RSI sits at 40–60 on most timeframes): sit still.

5. Going along with the market is never too late

A common objection: waiting for a clear signal means entering too late. The teacher pushes back: review past waves, and the moment the timeframes pull apart and give a consensus signal is exactly "the right time." Entering at that moment gives you higher confidence and lower risk — that's what has value, not shaving off a few dozen points by entering early.

The system is "the secretary" — and it has THREE states

No system / indicator / school is better than another, because all of them are built on the same thing: the price chart = the balance of buying power / selling power. The only difference is how deep the user digs.

Think of the system as a secretary who goes out to survey the field then reports back. It only has three lines it can say:

1. Buyers outnumber sellers.
2. Sellers outnumber buyers.
3. The two sides are even.

Death lies in line number 3. People call it "noise," call it "the system is broken," then go looking for another system — while the secretary is reporting very accurately a real state: force is balanced (or 60 people are sitting it out, 20 buy 20 sell = an extremely weak market). When you hear that, the answer is "okay, so sit still," not forcing it to make up a direction.

The classic vicious cycle: in a trend, people praise the system as godlike → in a range, they curse it as broken → they switch systems right when the market turns back into a trend → and praise the new one. Once you understand the underlying nature of it, a range is something that has to happen; the old system still works fine.

The system's job is to read the balance of force, not to fire off side signals. "Cross up, buy; cross down, sell" is a death sentence.

If it's falling, it's FALLING

Watching a 2D/3D chart fall and reasoning "it probably wants to curl back up so it's more likely to rise than fall" — that's forecasting, even though it sounds reasonable. If it's falling, it's falling. Setting your mindset that way makes you trade far more effectively.

Same logic: you cannot overlay one year onto another. 2017 and 2021 were both "sharks pushing it," but the scenarios were completely different — 2017 pulled straight up in one stretch without giving back any momentum, 2021 made a top before giving anything back. Anyone who overlaid the 2017 pattern onto 2021 lost money. Each period requires picking up the logic and the pieces of that period itself before you can work out the scenario.

The reassuring part: no matter how the sharks orchestrate it, they still leave footprints on the chart in the form of buying/selling power. In 2017, on the monthly timeframe, RSI expanded downward + the fast MA crossed below the slow MA = a genuine out-of-phase state, hard to pull back up; elsewhere, with the fast MA still sitting far above the slow MA, being pulled up further was still normal. Your job is to read the footprints, not guess the intent.

Trust no one — not even on-chain data and "the fund is buying"

The only trust you're allowed to have is: your own analysis + your own strategy + your own risk management. Don't trust experts, business leaders, magazines, governments, or KOLs.

Two real cases the teacher cites at the opening session:

• Tesla / a top business leader (2021): the company allowed payment in Bitcoin, and the whole market took it as an endorsement — then that same company sold about $37–38 million worth of Bitcoin around the $30,000 price zone. Anyone who pinned their expectations on that symbol paid the price.
• On-chain data saying "a fund is buying $4 billion of BTC": that number tells you nothing if you don't know what percentage of their portfolio it is and their time target. A $100 billion portfolio, just bought $4 billion, a 10–15-year target with a price target far off → the more the price drops, the happier they are, because they get to buy more cheaply. If you see "$4 billion" and go all-in, you're dead.

Macro news / interest-rate news works the same way: the chart usually already had the signal beforehand. Watching the news mostly makes you more confused than it helps you decide.

Putting it into practice

1. Every time you analyze, your conclusion must take the form: "Right now the ___ timeframe has a ___ pattern. The nearest feasible target is ___. Once there, if ___ then hold, if ___ then reverse." — If your conclusion takes the form "I think tomorrow the price will come back to ___," that's a forecast — delete it and rewrite.
2. Ban the words "about to rise / about to fall" from your notes — only describe what the market IS right now.
3. When someone asks "where's the market going tomorrow?", the right answer is I don't know — and there's no need to know.
4. After every wave, check back: did I profit by reading the evidence, or by guessing right? If it was by guessing right, that's a dangerous trade, even if it was profitable.

What the teacher stresses / common traps

• A root misconception the teacher himself once had: "to trade you have to know in advance where the price is going in order to make money." Completely wrong — no forecasting, no expectation, and profit still comes.
• The pressure to forecast is exactly the source of psychological pressure. Once you drop the need to "guess correctly," analysis becomes light, with no more feeling that you're forced to go long or forced to go short.
• The trap of letting someone else steer your beliefs: hearing one comment, seeing one other person's trade in the group chat, is enough to pull you toward a direction without you even realizing it. See The step-by-step market analysis process.
• "No technique beats technique": the less clear the market is, the less you should force yourself to guess ahead of time.
• The reverse trap: not forecasting ≠ not preparing. You still have to write out every scenario and the conditions for switching between them, or you'll be caught flat-footed once the wave moves.

Related lessons

• Getting Comfortable with Uncertainty — why a perfect signal doesn't exist; zones with no evidence
• News & the market (narrative, good/bad news, capital flow) — don't forecast using news; place news within the wave's position
• The step-by-step market analysis process — the concrete process behind this philosophy, stopping at the nearest target
• Building a wave scenario — building a scenario: allowed; imposing a scenario: not allowed
• Two neighboring timeframes both have a pattern but they conflict — which one do you follow? — "I don't yet know which one decides" is a valid answer
• Risk wave vs profit wave (the 80/20 rule) — filtering waves instead of guessing direction
• Multi-timeframe (multi-timeframe logic) — language discipline: only say what the market IS right now