Risk First, Trade Second: Simon Mach on the What The Heck, Fintech Podcast

What does Simon Mach mean by risk first, trade second?

Risk first, trade second means judging every trade by what it can lose before what it might win. Simon used those exact words for the philosophy of MyCryptoParadise when Rob asked him to introduce himself. The reasoning is survival: a trader who protects capital can stay in the game through the losing streaks every system has.

“The simplest way to describe our philosophy is risk first, trade second.”

Rob, who calls himself a finance guy, asked how to evaluate crypto and manage its risk without a balance sheet or an income statement. Simon said the team starts with the downside, not the upside. Because when you first take a look at the risk, then you have higher probability of survival, and that’s the whole game, right?

Survival matters because even a good system loses for a while. Simon wants two things from a system. The first is more winning trades than losing ones. The second is a good risk to reward, meaning a winning trade earns more than a losing trade costs. Then he reached for a coin to show why neither one prevents a bad run.

Every flip, he said, is a 50/50 chance if the heads or tails comes in. Flip it often enough and the coin can land on heads eight times, even 20 times, in a row. A trading system with good odds goes through the same kind of losing streak. On its own, a losing streak can be probability, not proof that the system broke. Our article on risk management for losing streaks shows how to budget for one.

“So we need to protect our capital because we understand we can get unlucky, right?”

Without that protection, he warned, the losing streak arrives sooner or later and the account goes bust.

Why does Simon Mach call a mistake a gift?

Simon calls a mistake a gift because it shows where an assumption was wrong. He told Rob that school gave him a bad view of mistakes: At school, when we make a mistake, it’s always bad, right? Trading and business taught him the opposite. Without mistakes, you keep building on assumptions that do not work.

“I’m always happy when a mistake happens because it’s like a gift.”

Rob agreed. He recalled the mantra he knew from Fidelity: scan, try, scale. He tells his own students something similar: you learn to duck by bumping your head. A lesson from a failure, he said, stays with you far longer than one from a success.

Is spreading money across altcoins real diversification?

Spreading money across altcoins, the coins other than Bitcoin, is not real diversification in Simon’s view. Crypto coins tend to fall together. Holding some XRP, some Litecoin and even some Bitcoin feels diversified. But when the crypto market falls hard, all of them drop at once. So the ParadiseTeam spreads its risk across trading tactics instead of across coins.

As Simon put it, when something goes down, everything goes down. Trading tactics are different. Each one tends to do better in a certain market phase, such as a rising, falling or sideways market. Combining them is what Simon counts as real diversification, though in a sharp crash even different tactics can lose at the same time.

“So not between coins, but between strategies and trading tactics.”

Why is there no indicator that works every time?

No indicator works every time because the market deals in probabilities, not certainties. Many traders still hunt for a magic one that tells them when to buy and when to sell. They hope for a 100% success rate. Simon was blunt: nothing like this exists.

Rob asked what the team does that others do not. Simon said it is a lot about psychology, because the indicators and strategies are public. Anyone can follow them.

“But what not everyone can do is follow the strategy with discipline during the good times and during the bad times as well.”

Discipline means running a sound tactic over and over, the way a casino owner runs the house. The owner designs the game so the odds sit on the house’s side, then lets the gamblers play. Sometimes a gambler gets lucky. The owner is there for the long term and keeps the rules the same. The comparison has a limit: a casino knows its odds exactly, while a trader can only estimate them.

Why do gamblers keep playing after a loss?

Gamblers keep playing after a loss because of dopamine, a brain chemical tied to reward. Simon pointed to the reward prediction error, the brain’s response when a result is better or worse than expected. A win sends dopamine up and a loss sends it down. That swing, he said, is what keeps the gambler pressing the button again.

“Dopamine is not this pleasure chemical, it’s actually wanting chemical.”

So a losing gambler plays on to chase the next dopamine rush, not because the odds improved. The gambler tells himself, Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. The uncertainty itself is the hook. Simon went deeper on dopamine on the Market Mamas podcast.

Rob asked whether crypto trading overlaps with gambling. Simon said absolutely, because crypto gives you what you want out of it.

“So if you treat crypto trading like a gambler, it will give you gambling results.”

Treat it like a business and the focus moves from the next bet to the long term. That was Simon’s intention from the start. He is honest about the cost: it’s going to be boring.

Why should every trader keep a trading journal?

A trading journal turns every trade into data a trader can learn from. Rob asked whether the team keeps statistics, the way a roulette table shows which numbers came up. Simon said every trader should keep one, recording why he entered each trade and what happened after it, losing trades included.

The team learns from the losing trades and gathers data from the winners too. Simon applies the same idea to the firm’s own record.

“We believe it’s very important to be transparent and honest about our profitability and how much we lose versus how much we win.”

That is why the yearly result sheets are public, with the losses next to the wins. We have tracked our results since 2018, and they are independently reviewed and verified by a third party. CryptoSignalsReview checked all 3,450 signals from 2018 to 2025 against the original posts, trade by trade. Past results never guarantee future ones.

How does Simon Mach’s team use stablecoins?

Simon Mach’s team uses stablecoins as the sidelines. A stablecoin is a crypto token built to hold a steady value, usually one US dollar. When the team wants to step away from risk, it moves into USDT, the Tether stablecoin. When it sees a high probability setup again, it moves back into volatile coins.

Simon summed up the team’s rule: we treat it like a fiat, meaning ordinary government money. He called stablecoins a kind of safe haven in crypto trading, while admitting they are not a true one. His choice rests on trust. USDT has been in crypto since the early days, and he believes the more people trust a stablecoin, the steadier it tends to be. That is the team’s own practice, not a recommendation. A stablecoin can fall below its target value, so none is risk free.

Rob compared it to parking money in bonds and asked whether the team ever steps outside crypto. Simon answered with pizza. If you want great pizza, you skip the restaurant that also serves French food.

“You go to restaurants that only focuses on pizza.”

Focus, he argued, builds intuition. If he spread his attention across other markets, he would lose the feel he has built for crypto, so the team stays in crypto only. Our focus market method applies the same idea to trading pairs, the markets a trader watches, such as Bitcoin against USDT.

Should crypto traders follow the news or the charts?

Simon Mach’s team follows both, for different jobs. It reads the charts and on-chain data, drawn from the public record of every blockchain transaction. It watches the news too, but mainly as a warning that sharp price swings are coming, not as a forecast of what comes next.

So we might, for example, close before some news event is going to happen, he said. The positions at risk are aggressive ones with a tight stop loss, an automatic exit placed close to the entry price. A short spike in price, called a wick, can hit that stop. So the team may close them and reopen them after that news event, basically after the dust settles.

The news also says something when the market refuses to react. Support is a price zone where buyers have stopped falls before. Bearish news, the kind that points to lower prices, should push the price through it. When it does not, Simon suspects that there is somebody absorbing the selling pressure.

“When bearish news starts being pushed at some important support, we can usually assume that it’s a bullish signal.”

The reverse also holds. Good news that fails to lift the price at resistance, a zone where sellers have capped rises before, can warn of a top. Simon called it another indicator: a reading to check against the rest of the data. It is never a certainty or a reason to trade on its own. Our guide to reading market news shows how to use headlines without getting played.

What does crypto still need to fix?

Crypto still needs safe access and recovery, and more trust, in Simon Mach’s view. It has improved since its wild west years from 2016 to around 2020, when there was little regulation or infrastructure. Builders arrived, faster blockchains appeared, and buying Bitcoin now takes minutes in a phone app. Regulation, he argued, should build that trust without adding friction.

The next fix: safe access and recovery

People should know exactly what they are agreeing to before they send crypto, Simon said. They also need protection against simple mistakes and a recovery process they understand in advance.

“If losing access can become a permanent financial loss, that’s a major barrier for ordinary users.”

The hard part, he added, is building recovery without creating an easy route for someone else to take over the account.

The fake Exodus ad that emptied Simon’s wallet

Simon learned this the hard way. When he was new to crypto, he set up his first software wallet, an app on his phone that came with a 12-word seed phrase. That phrase is the master key: Whatever holds those keys has access to that account.

He searched Google for his wallet, Exodus, and clicked the top result. It was a paid ad that led to a fake copy of the site. The page asked for his seed phrase to continue. He typed in all 12 words, and five minutes later the money was gone.

He still sees the same trick on Crypto Twitter, so he repeats the lesson whenever he can.

“Do not share your seed phrase with anyone.”

You need it only to restore your wallet if you lose the device that holds it. That might be your phone or a hardware wallet, a small device built to store keys offline.

Fewer people believe the quick-money stories

The culture has changed too. Simon calls psychology the main obstacle for traders, because almost everyone wants fast money. For years, many buyers chased tips that a meme coin, a token built around an internet joke, was about to soar. Then they learned it was a pump and dump: a price pushed up so early holders can sell to latecomers. They were left holding coins nobody wanted.

Today he sees fewer of those schemes at their old scale, and more people who already know how the story ends. As he put it, a lot of people are getting smarter, thankfully. More of them now approach trading like professionals.

“The important stuff is not the outcome, but it’s how you get to that outcome.”

Regulation that builds trust without friction

In Simon’s view, regulation should be there to put the trust in the industry, which has a reputation for scams. He does not want so much that buying crypto becomes hard, because mass adoption needs easy access. Rob, speaking for himself, wants a little more rule-making than today, without going overboard.

What did Simon Mach answer in the lightning round?

In the lightning round, Simon picked Bitcoin over gold and called fear a useful check on the downside. Rob fired the questions fast, and Simon answered each one in a sentence or two. His answers echo the rest of the conversation: no tool deserves blind faith, and a profitable stretch proves little.

• Bitcoin or gold: Bitcoin, because it’s closer to my work and interest. That doesn’t make it the right choice for everyone.
• Bull market or bear market: Whichever gives me conditions I understand.
• Fear or greed: Fear can remind you to examine the downside as long as it doesn’t make every decision for you.
• Most overrated trading indicator: Any indicator someone treats as a guarantee.
• Bitcoin in three words: Scarce, global, volatile.

On charts or fundamentals, meaning the project behind a coin, he chose both, depending on the decision.

“I don’t want to turn a useful tool into a belief system, for sure.”

Rob then asked for the biggest crypto myth.

“That making money proves you know what you are doing.”

A bad decision can still produce a win, and Simon knows it firsthand. Asked what he wishes he had known at 20, he went back to his first months of trading. He was profitable for a few months, which he called bad fortune, and he thought he knew what he was doing. In his words, I didn’t have any strategy, any trading tactic behind it. He wishes someone had told him back then that he was simply lucky.

Asked to describe himself in three words, he chose curious, disciplined, learning.

Watch the full episode with Rob Sarnie

The full episode runs about 47 minutes, with Rob’s questions and the whole lightning round.

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 grew up in Prague and studied at a business university there. His father runs his own business, which is where Simon’s interest in building a company with longevity began. He traded stocks and forex, the currency market, before he moved into crypto.

Simon speaks regularly about risk, psychology and discipline. On the Risk Management Show, he explained why the process matters more than the outcome. He likened professional traders to casino owners on the Crypto and Coffee podcast.

On The Gambling Files, he took apart what goes into a real signal. For 21st Century Entrepreneurship, he explained how to build a firm that lasts through every market cycle. And on the Crypto Hipster podcast, he talked about separating signal from noise.

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