Always, but especially after early 2020 these markets have become a shameless capital-draining machine. Some put it as "crime season"

You can still play the game, you can still win, but understand the board you are sitting at. Your toughest opponents are not random retail traders with indicators and YT thumbnails. Your real opponents are whales with 99 out of 100 cheat codes: information, liquidity, influence, market access, political protection, media reach, private deal flow, and the ability to move narratives before you even know they exist.
When you truly learn to read markets, you stop seeing candles as random movement. You start seeing extraction. You start seeing who is being trapped, who is being fed hope, who is being used as liquidity, and who is quietly walking away richer while selling the public words like:
Progress,
Innovation,
Freedom, and...
saving humanity.
Give the wrong people enough capital, enough influence, and enough distance from consequences, and they stop seeing society as people. They start seeing it as fuel.
Fuel for their status, for their empires, for their vision. Fuel for whatever private longevity project they convinced themselves justifies the damage. They do not care who gets destroyed, as long as it is not themselves. They do not care who is here in 200 years, unless they believe they can still be here in 200 years. So they drain the present while pretending to build the future.