$139
October 10th, 2025
Picture yourself…
$209. That was the entry. You remember it clearly, the way you remember every trade that goes wrong. The market was flying. Solana was flying. ETFs were pumping billions into crypto, institutions were buying, every metric screaming up. The macro was perfect. Rate cuts on the horizon, inflation cooling, risk-on sentiment everywhere. Solana specifically, unstoppable, the king of the cycle. You'd watched it climb for weeks, and then, finally, a dip. From $245 down to $209. A healthy pullback. A gift. This was your chance. Buy the dip. The perfect entry. Easy money. The charts confirmed it. Clean support level, volume coming in, all indicators showing oversold. Twitter confirmed it. Everyone buying, calling it free money, posting rocket emojis. The macro confirmed it. The news confirmed it. Your gut confirmed it. You went 3x long on the dip, a calculated risk, conservative even. So safe, in fact, that you went a little larger than usual. After all, there's no chance you get liquidated, right? Your liquidation sat at $139, absurdly far away, a number so distant it felt theoretical. There was no scenario, no world, no timeline where SOL dropped 33% from here in a market this hot. And it was going to be quick. A quick play. In and out. Catch the bounce back to $230, maybe $240, close it within a few hours. Clean. Efficient. Disciplined. Easy. That's what you told yourself. That's what you always tell yourself.
And now, twelve hours later, you're watching it fall. It started with a notification. Trump tweeted. 100% tariffs on China. Your stomach dropped before the price did. You stared at the screen, watching the first red candle form. $205. Okay. Not great, but manageable. Should you close? You hover over the button. No. It's bad news, sure, but it won't drop that much. $170 at worst. Maybe $165 if people really panic. Your liquidation is at $139. That's miles away. You're fine. You hold. The next candle closes. $198. Then $192. Your chest tightens. Your throat dries. The selling isn't stopping. It's accelerating. All your technical analysis, the clean breakout, the volume, the indicators, none of it matters now. When Trump tweets, TA becomes irrelevant. Support levels don't exist. Resistance means nothing. No chart pattern can save you from macro shocks. Panic sets in. Fear spreads like contagion. People aren't looking at charts anymore, they're protecting their assets, selling before it gets worse. But it won't go that low, right? It can't drop 33%. Not in a bull market. Wrong. Liquidation cascades. The leveraged longs getting flushed out, triggering more liquidations, which trigger more selling, a feedback loop of destruction. You refresh the page compulsively, as if the act of reloading will somehow change the trajectory, as if the universe will notice your panic and intervene. It doesn't. The price keeps moving. $187. $181. $176. Each tick a small death. You thought $170 was the floor. You were wrong. The market doesn't have floors when liquidations cascade. It has trapdoors.
You do the maths obsessively, a ritual that doesn't help but you can't stop. Liquidation at $139. Current price: $174. That's $35 of cushion. That's 20%. That's still safe. That's... getting closer. Your stomach twists. You switch tabs. Twitter is chaos. Some people are celebrating shorts. Others are buying the dip, posting rocket emojis, proclaiming this the opportunity of the year. You want to believe them. You need to believe them. But the chart doesn't care about belief. It ticks lower. $171. $168. $165. The number next to "Unrealised PnL" is a wound that won't stop bleeding. Negative and growing. You think about your entry, about how confident you were, about the certainty that feels, now, like delusion. You weren't wrong to enter. The market was perfect. SOL was perfect. The timing was perfect. And yet, here you are, watching perfection unravel in real time.
You hover over the "Close Position" button. Your finger trembles. You could end this. Take the loss. Walk away. Preserve what's left. But closing means admitting you were wrong. It means locking in the pain, making it real, permanent, irreversible. This was supposed to be quick. In and out. A few hours at most. And now you're twelve hours deep, trapped, watching your capital evaporate, unable to pull the trigger because closing feels like surrender. As long as the position is open, there's hope. As long as the candle hasn't closed, it could reverse. It could bounce. It has to bounce. You've seen this before. The market loves to wick low, shake out the weak hands, then rip back up. Maybe this is that. Maybe you're being tested. Maybe the bottom is in, right now, this exact moment, and if you just hold for five more minutes, you'll see green again. Five minutes. You can do five minutes. The price ticks to $162. Then $159. Then $156. Your heart pounds so hard you can feel it in your throat. Liquidation at $139. That's $17 away. That's 10%. That's nothing. That's a wick. You've seen SOL wick 15% in seconds during high volatility. One sudden move and you're gone. Liquidated. Rekt. A statistic. Another fool who thought 3x was safe.
Your hands shake. You're not breathing properly. Short, shallow breaths. Your eyes burn from staring at the screen. It's 4 a.m. You should be sleeping. You tried to sleep. You lay in bed for an hour, eyes closed, but all you could see was the chart. Red candles burning into your retina. The liquidation price, $139, flashing behind your eyelids. Every time you started to drift off, your brain jolted you awake with a thought: what if it's dropping right now? What if you're getting liquidated while you're lying here? So you got up. Opened the laptop. And now you're watching. You want to look away but you can't. If you look away, you'll miss the bounce. If you look away, the price will hit your liquidation and you won't even see it coming. So you watch. You watch the candles form and close, red after red after red. You watch the volume bars spike and fade. You watch the orderbook, a cascade of sell orders pouring in, drowning the bids. You watch the number that represents your position, your capital, your conviction, shrink. $154. $151. $148. You're praying to God now. Please. Please make it stop. Please let it bounce. Just one green candle. Just one moment of mercy. You'll close it. You swear you'll close it. You'll never do this again. Just let the bleeding stop.
It doesn't stop. $145. $143. $141. Liquidation at $139. You're two dollars away from total annihilation. Two dollars between you and zero. Your entire position, everything you put in, about to vanish because the market decided, for no reason you can articulate, to fall. Not because you were stupid. Not because you didn't research. Not because you over-leveraged. You did everything right. And it doesn't matter. The market doesn't care. The candles don't care. The liquidation engine doesn't care. It's coming for you, patient and inevitable, a guillotine in slow motion. And then, somehow, mercifully, impossibly, the candle closes at $140.32. One dollar. One single dollar between you and liquidation.
The next candle forms green. A tiny, fragile green. The price climbs. $141. $143. $146. You exhale, a breath you didn't know you were holding. It's not over. You're still deep underwater, still bleeding, still broken. But you're not liquidated. Not yet. The descent has paused. And then it keeps climbing. Slowly. Painfully slowly. $149. $152. $156. Each tick up a small mercy. Your heart is still pounding, but the terror is loosening its grip. $161. $165. $170. You're no longer thinking about liquidation. You're thinking about escape. $174. $178. $183. The number next to "Unrealised PnL" is still red, still negative, but shrinking. The wound is closing. $187. $192. $197. You watch the candles, green after green after green, the same way you watched them fall. Each one pulling you further from the abyss. $201. $204. $207. And then, finally, mercifully, $209. Your entry. Breakeven. The position flashes neutral. Zero profit. Zero loss. You survived.
You close the position. Immediately. No hesitation. No greed. No "maybe it'll go higher." You click the button and the position disappears. Breakeven. A sigh of relief so deep it feels like your soul is unclenching. You close the laptop and sit in the darkness of your room, heart still pounding, hands still trembling. You didn't lose. But you didn't win either. And in that moment, exhausted, wrung out, you make a promise to yourself. Never again. No more leverage. You survived the worst liquidation event in crypto history, one dollar away from total annihilation, and escaped with nothing but the clothes on your back and the capital you started with. Every trader goes through this. The allure of easy money, the perfect setup, the quick scalp that turns into a nightmare. Every trader learns this lesson eventually. Some learn it with a small loss. Some learn it with everything. You learnt it with terror and sleeplessness and twelve hours of watching a number tick towards zero. And now you know. The stress isn't worth it. The sleepless nights at 4 a.m., eyes burning, watching candles tick towards liquidation. The physical anxiety, the chest tightness, the shallow breathing. The way it consumes you, hijacks your thoughts, follows you everywhere. For what? A chance at quick profits that evaporate the moment the market turns? No. You're done. Spot only from now on. Buy and hold. Let the market do what it does. You'll still lose sometimes, still make mistakes, but at least you'll sleep. At least you won't spend another night watching a number tick towards zero, praying to God for mercy from a system that has none. Never again. And now, sitting in the darkness, heart still racing from what you just survived, you finally understand why it's haram.