After spending a long time in the crypto world, you’ve definitely heard statements like: "An analyst predicts the bull market is coming" or "A trading expert has already gone all in." These sound like voices from market participants, but if you confuse them, it can be disastrous—you might go all in based on an analysis report and end up losing everything.

**What is a trader?** Simply put, they are the ones who directly engage with the market. They only look at one indicator—the growth of their account balance. Profitability is their only goal; everything else is secondary. A mature trader’s mind is filled with risk management: where to set stop-losses, take-profit points, how much a single trade can lose or earn. They are more aware than anyone that even if they see the right direction, poor execution can still wipe them out.

What are the core skills of a trader? Market intuition, execution ability, and psychological resilience. They can sniff out opportunities from real-time information like price movements, trading volume, and order flow. Today they go long, tomorrow they switch to short—so long as they can profit from short-term fluctuations. They live in the moment, with every trade’s account drawdown and return rate calculated precisely.

**And what about analysts?** Their work is completely different. They don’t gamble with real money; their task is to provide perspectives, predict directions, and explain phenomena. Their value comes from the depth of information and logic.

Analysts focus on the big picture: fundamentals, on-chain data, policy trends, project progress, technological evolution… these are medium- to long-term factors. They might spend a week drawing complex charts and writing thousands of words in research reports. Their main skills are data interpretation, model building, and report generation.

**The key difference:** Traders are action-oriented, living every minute in the market, responsible for their gains and losses. Analysts are thinkers, mainly providing frameworks and logical support. So don’t be misled—analysis reports can serve as references, but they should never be taken as trading instructions.