The Hardest Trade Is No Trade: Simon Mach on The Dad Ledger Podcast

What does Simon Mach mean by “no trade is the hardest position”?

No trade is the hardest position because doing nothing takes more discipline than acting. Simon says a trader has three positions: buy (go long, betting on a rise), sell (go short, betting on a fall), or stay out. Staying out needs patience and a system that shows when there is no edge, meaning no real advantage in the odds.

“No trade is the hardest position to take.”

Ryan knew the feeling. He started buying crypto in the spring of 2025 and watched his Ethereum and XRP positions fall well below where they had been. Then came the itch to do something, to make a trade.

Simon’s answer was that waiting is a skill. In his words, it requires discipline and it requires patience as well. It also needs a trading system: rules, set before the trade, that decide when you act and when you wait. Our article on why waiting is a position turns that idea into a routine.

“If you don’t focus on the risk first, then you are in this kind of emotional roller coaster.”

On that roller coaster, he warned, a bad trade becomes very easy to make.

Why does Simon Mach put risk first and the trade second?

Simon puts risk first so a loss never surprises him. His firm sums it up in four words: risk first, trade second. He links it to the reward prediction error, the jolt the brain feels when a result beats or misses what it expected. An unexpected loss pushes dopamine, a brain chemical tied to wanting, below its normal level.

The brain then wants to climb back to that baseline. Without the trader noticing, it pushes the trader toward a trade they should not take, just to feel better. Simon’s fix is to expect the loss before entering. Then, if we actually lose the dopamine levels are at baseline, and there is no hole to climb out of.

“So thanks to focusing on risk first we are not in a state of uncertainty.”

When a trade fails, the team already knows what it cost. The next trade comes from the system, not from emotion. As Simon put it, a trader who focuses only on the upside gets punished by the market sooner or later.

Why is crypto trading harder now than in 2017 and 2021?

Crypto trading is harder now because the players changed. In 2017 and 2021, Simon said, the market was mostly driven by retail buyers. Spot Bitcoin ETFs, exchange traded funds that let stock market investors hold Bitcoin, brought in institutions. Professional traders also arrived from forex, the currency market, drawn by crypto’s volatility, its big and fast price swings.

He explained it with a poker game. In the past, you might sit down with two professional players and five tourists who had already had a lot of drinks. The tourists had no strategy and were there for fun, so their chips were easy to take. That table, in Simon’s view, has changed.

“There are five other professional poker players and only one tourist.”

At that table, he said, you have to be very strict about when to be aggressive and expose your chips.

“So you need to be much more focused on the risk management, much more focused on protecting your chips.”

Ryan, a retail investor himself, admitted the problem. The players across the table have more knowledge, more experience, better tools and more speed.

How should the market cycle decide your trading tactic?

The market cycle should decide your trading tactic, because no tactic works in every phase. Simon sees a large crypto cycle of roughly three to four years, with smaller cycles inside it. He has watched reckless traders beat careful ones during some cycles.

The lesson comes later. In his words, it is important to watch them when the next phase of the market cycle hits and they lose everything.

“You can have a strategy that works in some cycle and then a new cycle hits and the strategy lost its edge.”

So the team keeps watching the market and adjusts. Sometimes the market is more volatile. Sometimes there is hardly any volume, meaning few coins change hands.

Scalp, swing or position trade: what is the difference?

Simon admits the terms are subjective. He defines them by how long a trade usually runs. The clock stops when the trade hits its stop loss, the exit that caps the loss, or its first profit target:

• Scalp: within a few hours.
• Short-term swing: within a few days.
• Longer swing: within a few weeks.
• Position trade: a few months, built around accumulation and distribution.

Accumulation and distribution are the phases when large buyers quietly build a position and later sell it. Our guide to the four phases of the market cycle explains both. MyCryptoParadise has several traders, so it can run all four tactics at once. A solo trader has to choose, and Simon’s first step is to understand where you are, where is the volatility.

When volatility is very high, he does not scalp, because a tight stop loss gets hit too easily. When the market is illiquid, with few buyers and sellers, a quick spike in price called a wick can knock a stop out. Our free crypto insights tools track that kind of market condition. Sometimes the better move is to slow down and switch to longer swings.

How does Simon Mach think about leverage?

Simon treats leverage as a dial for risk, not a way to chase bigger wins. Leverage means trading with borrowed money, so a small price move makes a larger gain or a larger loss. He compares it to blackjack and poker, where a skilled player knows whether the odds favor them, and still loses hands.

His rule: I would think about leverage the way that you think about your risk.

“You understand not only when you have edge on your side but also if the edge is big or small.”

In poker terms, a skilled player bets less when the edge is small and sits the hand out when the odds are against them. The lesson for a beginner is the order: decide the risk on a trade first, and only then whether leverage belongs in it at all.

Leverage cuts both ways. It magnifies losses as fast as gains, and a probability is only an estimate. A leveraged position can also be liquidated, meaning the exchange closes it when the price moves too far against you. Our guide to position sizing under volatility shows how to size risk before leverage enters the picture.

Why should a good trading system feel boring?

A good trading system should feel boring because its results do not surprise you. Before Simon opens a position, he knows what he loses if he is wrong and what the target pays if he is right. That removes the uncertainty that hooks gamblers. As he admits, it is pretty boring.

“If I lose on this position I will lose this amount of money. If I win I win this amount of money, the uncertainty disappears.”

He contrasted it with a slot machine. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and not knowing what comes next is exactly what keeps you pulling.

Then he described an experiment with rats. Each rat had a lever that sometimes delivered juice. When the juice came every time, the rat drank enough, got bored and went to sleep. When the reward was unpredictable, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, sometimes nothing, the rat kept smashing the lever.

The brain keeps trying to predict a reward it cannot predict. And dopamine is not a pleasure chemical. It’s actually wanting chemical. He went deeper on that wanting in his What The Heck, Fintech interview. In trading, the cure is to take the surprise out, then follow the system over and over again.

What was Simon Mach’s biggest trading mistake?

Simon’s biggest mistake was believing he could make money in the markets without a strategy. When he started trading, he made a lot of money in his first months and took it as skill. He thought he had an inner sense of what would happen next. Then he lost everything.

“I was lucky in the beginning. I didn’t know I was lucky.”

He compared it to flipping a coin. Flip a fair coin long enough and you will see eight tails in a row, sometimes 20. That does not make betting on tails a strategy, because every flip is still 50/50. But in short run, this kind of luck can play big role.

“So the biggest mistake was that I thought that I can make money in the markets without having any strategy.”

Why early wins push traders to bet bigger

Ryan said that is how the casino gets you: you start winning and you are hooked. Simon took it further. A gambler’s first $200 win feels amazing. By the fifth time, the same win no longer feels special, so the gambler bets $1,000 to feel the same rush. Traders fall into the same escalation, he said, and many get into serious trouble that way.

What should you do when your crypto portfolio is red?

When your crypto portfolio is red, Simon’s first advice is not to act on impulse. Ryan asked what a dad should do when he opens his trading app and the account is down 20 or 30%. Simon pointed to who gains when you react: many exchanges charge a fee on every trade.

In his view, that is why apps push alerts that Bitcoin is pumping or Bitcoin is dumping. In his words, they actually want you to act.

“You either buy or sell, they get a fee.”

“If you are seeing red numbers on your account, I would not touch it.”

That holds, he added, only if you know why you bought those coins. With a large loss in coins he understands, he said he would hold and treat them as a long-term position. The aim is to exit at break even, the price paid, while building a strategy. With a small loss, he would cut it and focus on a system with an edge.

That is his general view, not advice on your own holdings. The point underneath is the same as the rest of the episode: decide from a plan, not from a notification.

How should a beginner start trading crypto?

A beginner should start by reading and then by understanding themselves, Simon said. His first pick is the Market Wizards series by Jack Schwager, interviews with top traders about how they think. Next, understand your own personality. Only then build a system and learn technical analysis, the study of price charts.

“You need to develop such a system that is comfortable to your personality.”

A system that fits you is one you can follow in the good times and in the bad. As Simon’s team puts it, the system is a marriage, and every position is a one-night stand. You commit to the system for the long term. A single position is just a way in and a way out, so his advice for each trade is short.

“Don’t be emotionally attached to it.”

The goal, he said, is to train our mind in probabilistic thinking. Every trade is taken with an edge, and the exit is known in advance, both for being wrong and for being right. Our guide to Bitcoin trading strategies for beginners is a practical place to start.

Should you marry a single coin?

The same rule covers coins. Ryan asked which coins could do well over the next 6 to 12 months, and Simon declined to pick one. He has feelings about some coins, but he treats each as a one-night stand: it can cheat on me. I can cheat on it.

Instead, the team studies the market for patterns, then enters the coins that fit its system. He said that betting on one coin to be the next big thing is a gamble. That is his view, not a recommendation to buy any coin, Bitcoin included.

Where does Simon Mach put his stop loss?

For stops, Simon likes Fibonacci retracement levels, ratios drawn across a price move that traders watch as likely turning points. On a long trade, he places the stop below the 0.618 level of the move. On a short, he places it above that level. Underneath, the principle is support and resistance, price zones where buying or selling has stopped a move before.

In his words, I’m placing my stop losses below some supports when I am in a long position, and above resistance when he is short. Our guide on why your stop loss keeps getting hit covers the mistakes around stop placement.

Asked for a final word, Simon came back to where he started.

“Focusing on risk first when trading is really important.”

He hopes the advice can save a lot of people some money.

Watch the full episode with Ryan Fields-Spack

Chapters in the video description let you jump to any of Ryan’s questions.

About Simon Mach

Simon Mach started MyCryptoParadise in 2016 as a Telegram group where he and a few friends shared signals among themselves. Then people joined. The group was free and public, and it grew by word of mouth. Today it is a crypto signals and market analysis firm that still puts risk first. MyCryptoParadise has operated since 2016 and was incorporated as MyCryptoParadise s.r.o. in Prague in 2025.

He is based in Prague and traded stocks and forex before he moved into crypto in 2016. He records Bitcoin analysis three times a week on the MyCryptoParadise YouTube channel.

Risk, psychology and discipline come up in most of his interviews. He explained risk first, trade second to a fintech audience on What The Heck, Fintech. The Risk Management Show heard why he judges a trade by its process rather than its result. With the Crypto and Coffee podcast, he compared a professional trader to the owner of a casino.

On The Gambling Files, he showed what separates a real signal from a tip. 21st Century Entrepreneurship asked him how a crypto firm survives one market cycle after another. He talked trading psychology on Market Mamas and filtering signal from noise on the Crypto Hipster podcast.

Crypto trading involves substantial risk and is not suitable for everyone. Leverage can multiply losses as fast as gains. Nothing here is financial advice; it is education only. Never risk more than you can afford to lose.