Quitting after 4 years of trading - my stats

Overall stats:

5 exchanges | 48 cryptocurrencies | ~250 transactions | -$92,000 CAD

History:

I got into crypto right before the pumpiest days in 2021 and therefore was hooked on the quick profits I was able to quickly make. Got so excited that I even took some money out of the credit line to invest into crypto. Wasn't fine paying it all back while watching everything crash for a whole year in 2022.

Got more cautious and tried to time things, experimented with position sizes, types of crypto, different signals, etc. Nothing worked for consistent results. I thought I had figured something out when I made ~$27,000 profit in 2024 but when I saw that most of the altcoins I held kept going down in 2025 I realized I have no idea what I'm doing. Decided to sell most bags and when I saw that the resulting net was -108k CAD, I realized how much of a dumbass I have been. Nothing I've thought of or devised worked, I just lost a shit ton of my money and time.

The whole thing seems like a scam to me. The sheer amount of information, types of currencies, types of "rewards", number of exchanges, and just factors to consider is designed to confuse and distract. You lose track of what's what. Even with manually trying to track what is going where in spreadsheets, plotting and recording trades in Tradingview, using budgeting software to track which funds go into which account... none of that helped in the end.

Looking back, the conclusion is that I should have only been buying BTC and ETH. Everything else went through unpredictable rollercoasters or crashed to the bottoms of hell. So at this point I am out I don't trust myself to make any decisions about individual investments anymore. Will just put any savings into index funds and forget about looking at charts until retirement.