#Gate事件合约积分榜

Gate Event Contracts Beginner’s Guide: 90% Lose Money by Making These 5 Basic Mistakes

Gate’s event contracts, with their low-barrier format featuring “short cycles, clear outcomes, and automatic settlement at expiration,” have become many crypto beginners’ first step into contract trading. When they first try them, many find the rules simple and the outcomes clear, making them much easier to use than traditional contracts. But once they start trading, they often find that after a dozen or more consecutive trades, their account balance is shrinking instead of growing. In fact, most beginners lose money on event contracts not because they are bad at judging market movements, but because they make several typical mistakes that could easily have been avoided from the start. These pitfalls have nothing to do with your ability to predict price trends, yet they directly determine whether you can survive the beginner phase.

The most common mistake is treating event contracts as “purely guessing higher or lower” and completely abandoning fundamental and technical analysis. Many beginners think event contracts are simply about betting on whether BTC’s price will rise or fall 5 minutes later, so they place orders based entirely on “feelings”: after winning one trade, they follow a direction based on intuition; after losing one, they randomly take the opposite side, without even checking BTC’s current support and resistance levels. I once saw an extreme example: a beginner placed 20 one-minute event contract trades in a single night without looking at the chart at all. Their win rate ended up below 40%, and after fees, they lost 70% of their account’s principal. Event contracts are still trading products based on real market conditions, not pure-probability coin tosses. A strategy based entirely on luck will inevitably deplete your principal over time through fees and low-probability extreme market moves.

The second major pitfall is falling into the gambler’s fallacy of “doubling down after a loss.” After losing one event contract, many people instinctively double their position on the next trade, thinking one win will recover all their previous losses. Some even put all their remaining principal into one final bet after losing two or three trades in a row. But short-term crypto market movements are not evenly distributed by probability, and extreme consecutive one-way trends occur frequently. For example, if BTC produces five consecutive large bullish candles in the same direction within 30 minutes, and you keep doubling down in the opposite direction five times, even if your initial position uses only 5% of your principal, your total investment on the fifth trade will account for 80% of your principal. One more mistake would send you straight into liquidation. This flawed position-increasing strategy is the core reason 90% of beginners quickly lose all their principal in event contracts.

The third, more subtle mistake is choosing the wrong event contract duration and forcing trades in a low-volatility market. Many beginners focus on one-minute and five-minute ultra-short-duration contracts as soon as they start, placing orders continuously without checking current market volatility. When BTC’s hourly volatility is below 0.1% and the chart is moving completely sideways, short-term prices essentially wander randomly within a range of a few dozen points. In these conditions, short-term rises and falls have no discernible pattern. No matter how you analyze them, your win rate can only stay around 50%; after exchange fees, sustained trading will inevitably result in steady losses. Many beginners repeatedly trade in this kind of sideways market and unknowingly turn all their principal into fees paid to the platform. Only afterward do they realize they had barely encountered any conditions with a high probability of success.

The fourth pitfall beginners easily overlook is ignoring the detailed rules of event contracts, only to discover at settlement that they misunderstood the conditions. For example, some of Gate’s event contracts are settled according to the “mark price” rather than the exchange’s real-time transaction price. Many beginners see the market price reach the level they predicted, yet their trade is ultimately settled as a loss because they failed to notice that the mark price is calculated using a weighted average of prices from multiple leading exchanges. A price spike on Gate’s local market chart does not affect the final settlement result. Many others fail to check the contract’s expiration time. They may have predicted the trend 30 minutes later but mistakenly selected a contract expiring in 5 minutes. As a result, the trade settles at a loss before the market reaches their expected level, wasting a correct prediction.

The final mistake, and the one with the greatest impact on long-term returns, is failing to set clear stop-loss and take-profit levels and instead closing positions arbitrarily under the influence of emotions. Many beginners panic and close a profitable event contract early after earning a small amount, fearing that their profits will disappear. As a result, even when their directional prediction is completely correct, they end up with only a meager return. Conversely, after a trade starts losing money, they stubbornly refuse to accept the result and may even continue adding to the position to average down before the event contract expires. At settlement, they suffer the full loss. Over time, this creates a vicious cycle of “small wins and large losses”: even if they win 6 out of 10 trades, their overall account can still remain in the red.