Dear friends, today I want to honestly share some cold facts about contract trading. Have you ever encountered this heartbreaking situation: just after opening a position, the price immediately reverses, and you grit your teeth to close the position, only to see it shoot toward your target—clearly predicting the right direction, but ending up losing everything in the end.

I paid nearly a million in tuition fees for this lesson before truly understanding the logic behind it. Today, I will break down the behind-the-scenes truths of trading platforms and reveal those secret tricks designed to exploit retail traders.

**1. What is the true nature of contract trading?**

Many people see contracts as simply buying long or short, but in reality, it’s a game of betting against each other. You need to understand a harsh reality: every penny of profit in your account is the blood and sweat of someone else’s liquidation loss. And the trading platform? It sets the rules and acts as the "hidden bookmaker," steadily making money from fees and mechanism design.

In other words, when you go long, someone else is shorting. But the platform always remains unbeatable—regardless of how the price moves, its profit comes from transaction fees and rule differences. So instead of obsessing over candlestick charts, it’s more important to understand the game rules thoroughly—this is the real skill to survive.

**2. Three most tricky hidden traps**

**1. The truth about funding rates**

On the surface, when the funding rate is positive, longs pay shorts; when negative, shorts pay longs, settled every 8 hours. It sounds like a normal cost.

But here’s the secret: once the rate exceeds 0.12% continuously, it becomes a signal for the big players to harvest. A high funding rate indicates a severe imbalance between longs and shorts. At this point, the big players often reverse their positions to forcibly liquidate the side with the high rate.

I’ve personally been burned by this—once holding a long position for 4 days, and then…