Many people enter the market with the same dream – to buy assets that can significantly outperform the market, to see a rise immediately after purchase, and to have a profit model that can be replicated long-term. It sounds beautiful, but reality is often cruel. Behind this lies the "Unholy Trinity" of the trading world: high win rate, high odds, and replicability; you can only have at most two at the same time.

This concept originates from economics and refers to the fact that when faced with multiple choices, it is almost impossible to achieve three goals simultaneously. Trading is exactly caught in such a dilemma. Let's break it down one by one.

**What are the three core indicators in trading?**

A high win rate is easy to understand—if you make ten trades and profit on seven, the win rate is 70%. However, to improve the win rate, you need to avoid market noise, place orders only when you are confident, tolerate fluctuations to a reasonable extent, and make judgments based on market consensus and the larger environment. Essentially, the pursuit of a win rate is about "stability," prioritizing the safety of the principal.

High odds refer to the profit-loss ratio, where the money earned in one instance is significantly higher than the money lost in another. For example, if you earn an average of 30% and lose 10%, the profit-loss ratio is 3 times. This concept may seem enticing, but it corresponds to a higher risk—high risk, high reward is an immutable law.

What about reproducibility? It means that your trading system can be used repeatedly over a long period, not relying on a single stroke of luck. A truly effective strategy must be able to be validated repeatedly across different cycles and different cryptocurrencies, rather than being a flash in the pan.

**Why can't win rate and odds be balanced?**

Want to increase your win rate? Then you have to sacrifice the odds. The most straightforward method is to "loosen the stop loss and take profits in time"—holding on during losses and waiting for a rebound, and when you make a profit, you run away quickly. This can indeed raise the win rate to over 80%, but you only make 5% each time, and once you incur a loss, it's a big hole of 30%. In the end, even if you win more often, you still end up with nothing. This kind of win rate is meaningless.

Conversely? High odds are bound to be accompanied by low winning rates. Just look at football betting to understand—betting on strong teams to win (most people favor it), has a high winning rate but pitifully low odds; betting on weak teams for an upset has a low winning rate, but if it hits, the rewards are substantial. The logic behind this is: the stronger the market consensus and the higher the "certainty" of an opportunity, the narrower the profit margin; opportunities that are less favored by others actually have a larger profit margin. By the time the whole world sees it clearly, the winning rate may be high, but the odds are long gone, and it could even lead to significant losses.

**Why does replicability reject extremes?**

Sustained excessive profits (both high win rates and high odds) are nearly impossible to replicate. A high win rate requires a perfect combination of timing, location, and human factors, while high odds heavily rely on luck. To have a long-term stable trading system, one must abandon extreme pursuits—find a reasonable win rate foundation, match it with appropriate odds, and accumulate slowly through long-term compounding, rather than hoping for overnight wealth.

**How do the three mutually restrict each other?**

The time cost has further exacerbated this dilemma.

If you prioritize improving your win rate, the most direct method is to "take profits immediately and hold losses" or simply maintain a long-term short position and wait. What are the results? The former has an extremely high risk, and the returns are suppressed; the latter has skyrocketing time costs, making it impossible to replicate.

If you want to shorten the holding period (the idea of day trading), due to limited time and high market noise, you simply cannot "cut losses and let profits run"; the risk-reward ratio is severely constrained, and maintaining a high win rate in high-frequency trading is also very difficult.

If you want to raise the risk-reward ratio, you have to "cut losses immediately and let profits run," but this directly lowers the win rate—at a low win rate, you need to frequently experiment and make mistakes, which inevitably increases the time cost, and the three cannot be balanced at the same time.

**The conclusion is heartbreaking - it is almost impossible to achieve all three.**

You can only optimize two at the same time, while the third can only cooperate passively. The real core of trading is to find the balance among the three under the premise of "positive expected value"—it must satisfy the substitutive relationship while also aligning with your own personality and risk tolerance in order to truly implement it.

**Is there a way to break the deadlock?**

There are indeed two special cases that can temporarily break through this deadlock, but the conditions are extremely harsh.

First, there is the advantage of capital and influence. Large amounts of capital or influential institutions can temporarily influence market trends through their own power, accelerating trend formation while improving win rates, without affecting the risk-reward ratio. However, the problem is that the competition among large funds is intense, and having too much capital makes it difficult to withdraw quickly; in extreme situations, the costs can be extremely high. Moreover, this high win rate can only be maintained in the short term, and there are regulatory risks.

Second, there are black swan events. Sudden events pose risks for the majority but present significant opportunities for a few (like the negative oil prices of that year). Such events can give rise to extreme market conditions characterized by a single direction, small pullbacks, large amplitudes, and short durations, fulfilling the criteria of high win rates, high odds, and replicability (similar events can apply the same strategies).

**Why are so many traders unable to make money?**

The root of the issue lies here - they want to simultaneously have a high win rate, high odds, and replicability. However, the risk-reward ratio in the market is relatively fixed, and opportunities for low risk and high reward are extremely rare. The essence of trading is to make trade-offs in the "Unholy Trinity", finding a balance that matches one's own personality and risk tolerance, and accumulating long-term gains through stable and replicable strategies.

Many people fail to make money simply because they want all three conditions. Wanting both often becomes the grave for traders.