In this video, The Art of Crypto recounts how he made his first million by trading simple price patterns—breakouts, retests, wedges, and triangles—during the 2021 crypto bull market. He explains that while such pattern‑based trading can appear highly profitable in a hype‑driven up‑trend, it is fundamentally flawed because it often leads to fakeouts and positions entered at relatively equal highs or lows, causing premature stops. Recognizing these shortcomings, he describes his transition to a Smart Money Concepts (SMC) approach that seeks to follow the actual flow of market participants rather than relying on static chart patterns. The narrative contrasts the allure of easy pattern trading with the more nuanced, market‑structure‑aligned SMC methodology.
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It doesn't take a genius to make money in a bull market if you are a retail trader or if you are someone that trades with patterns. Like, for example, I used to trade patterns all the time, especially back in the 2021 bull run. Like, that's how I made my first million. It's just trading patterns and buying breakouts and retests and stuff like that. Very simple. But that kind of strategy works amazingly well in a bull market where there's so much, you know, kind of hype and mania all around that people just don't really care what they're throwing their money into and everything's kind of going up. And if anything, even an idiot like myself look like a genius in a bull market. Back then, this was what I was using, but there is a reason why I have eventually come to the realization that this strategy is probably not the best bet. But there is also a reason I would say that in the last couple of years or so, I have completely switched my strategy to one that revolves around Smart Money Concepts. It's because I realized this strategy over here is fundamentally flawed in the sense where it doesn't trade in line with how markets actually move. This Kind of comes from the assumption that okay, just because it's a pattern and somebody on YouTube said that a pattern works, we're going to trust you know whatever that YouTuber is saying and we can trade it and we can trust our money with it. But the reality is, if you have seen this before, where on a you know wedge pattern or like a triangle pattern, you'll notice even if you enter, you end up getting into a lot of fakeouts. You're either going to be doing two things, right? One is you're going to be trading into relatively highs or lows. Like I want you to imagine here, right? If you end up going short, guess what? You have relatively equal highs, right? Big pull. That could just get stopped out before price dumps. Or B, if you end up going long, same thing here, you have relatively equal lows. So that's the first one. You're always going to be trading into relatively equal levels.
