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As an institutional trader, I learned not to borrow too much in leverage from the exchange I was trading on, and to be right more often than I was wrong.

It’s rare that a person has an opportunity to experience the financial markets through the lens of both an institutional market maker taking down hundreds of millions of dollars on block trades.

However, I’ve been in the cryptocurrency trading space since 2017 when I was a freshman in college. I played through the ICO bubble, when I traded altcoins instead of studying for finals. I went through the summer of decentralized finance (DeFi) in 2020 during Covid-19, when I first started learning about liquidity pools. I experienced the exuberant bull run of 2021 while landing my first internship on the institutional side of trading, and I went through the crash of FTX.

I’ve learned several things from these few years, but here are a few of the key takeaways I’ve experienced after trading as both a retail and institutional trader.

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