크립토 투자자를 위한 리스크 관리법

Risk management involves setting clear objectives and risk tolerance before starting to trade or invest.
Common risks in the crypto market include market volatility, platform insolvency, user error, and smart contract exploits.
You must manage losses through position sizing, stop-losses and take-profits, and risk-reward ratio planning.
True diversification means holding assets with low correlation, such as stablecoins or fiat currencies, rather than holding multiple types of altcoins.

What is Risk Management?

We constantly manage risk in daily life, such as when driving, buying insurance, or preparing for medical expenses. Essentially, risk management is the process of assessing potential losses and preparing for them.

In economics, risk management refers to a framework defining how companies or investors handle financial risks. For traders and investors, this framework means managing exposure across various asset classes, including crypto, DeFi protocols, forex, commodities, stocks, indices, and real estate.

This document provides an overview of the risk management process and presents strategies to help traders and investors mitigate financial risks.

The Risk Management Process

Generally, the risk management process consists of five stages: goal setting, risk identification, risk assessment, response planning, and monitoring.

The first stage is defining primary objectives. This directly ties to risk tolerance. You must decide whether to pursue aggressive growth with high volatility or preserve assets with lower returns.
The second stage is identifying potential hazards. In the crypto market, you must consider factors beyond simple price movements. This includes exchange insolvency, smart contract bugs, and regulatory changes.
After identifying risks, the next stage is assessing their expected frequency and severity. For example, market downturns occur frequently with variable severity, whereas wallet hacks occur infrequently but can have catastrophic consequences.
The fourth stage is developing responses for each risk type. This may include setting stop-losses, using hardware wallets for asset custody, or rebalancing the portfolio.
The final stage is checking the strategy's efficiency. Since the crypto market operates 24/7, continuous monitoring and adjustments based on conditions are necessary. Strategies effective in a bull market may not work in a bear market.

Types of Financial Risks

There are many reasons why a strategy might fail. A trader can lose funds if the market moves against a futures position, or they may realize a loss by selling in a panic during a downturn. Below are key examples of financial risks and how to mitigate them.

Market Risk: The risk of asset value declining due to market dynamics. You can minimize this risk by setting a stop-loss order for every trade, ensuring the position closes automatically before larger losses accumulate.
Liquidity Risk: Relates to slippage when assets cannot be bought or sold quickly without significantly impacting the price. This can be mitigated by trading in markets with high volume. Be cautious with low-market-cap meme coins or new tokens that have low liquidity and are prone to slippage.
Credit and Counterparty Risk: Historically, this meant a borrower's default. In crypto, it includes platform risk where exchanges or lending platforms become insolvent. You can mitigate this risk by using exchanges that provide transparent Proof of Reserves (PoR) or by holding assets directly in a hardware wallet, removing the need to trust a third party.
Operational and Technical Risk: Encompasses both user error and technical failures, beyond simple corporate malfunctions. Investors can mitigate this by double-checking wallet addresses before sending funds, using Two-Factor Authentication (2FA), and clearly understanding that blockchain transactions are irreversible.
Smart Contract Risk: A risk unique to crypto, referring to the danger of hackers exploiting bugs or vulnerabilities in protocol code to steal funds. To mitigate this, you should only use DeFi protocols that have undergone rigorous third-party security audits.
Systemic Risk: The risk of the entire market collapsing together. Most assets in the crypto market are highly correlated with Bitcoin. For diversification against systemic risk, you must move capital beyond simply buying various types of altcoins. You should allocate to stablecoins like USDT or USDC, tokenized gold, or traditional fiat currencies.

Common Risk Management Strategies

There is no single perfect way to approach risk management. Investors often combine multiple tools to grow their portfolios safely.

1% Trading Rule: The 1% trading rule limits the maximum loss a trader accepts on a single trade to 1% of total account capital. It is important not to confuse position size with risk amount.
Position Size: The total amount allocated to a specific coin.
Risk Amount: The amount lost if a stop-loss is executed.

According to the 1% rule, if you have a $10,000 account, you must design your trades using position size and stop-loss so that you only lose$ 100 (1%) even if your prediction is wrong. This prevents the account from going bankrupt even if consecutive losses occur. The long-term goal is to ensure winning trades cover the losses, so keeping loss sizes small is key.

Stop-Loss and Take-Profit Orders: A stop-loss order limits losses when a trade goes wrong, while a take-profit order secures gains. You should plan these before entering a trade to remove emotion from the decision. In the volatile crypto market, trailing stop-losses are also popular. This method raises the stop-loss line as the price increases, locking in gains while protecting profits against sudden trend reversals.

Hedging: Hedging involves taking two positions that offset each other. For example, if you are holding Bitcoin in cold storage for the long term but are concerned about a short-term drop, you might consider opening a small short position on the Binance futures market. If the price falls, the short selling profit offsets the loss of the long-term held asset.

Diversification and Stablecoins: There is an old saying about not putting all your eggs in one basket. However, holding 10 risky altcoins that crash together when Bitcoin falls is not true diversification. True diversification involves including assets with low correlation, such as stablecoins, tokenized gold, or keeping a portion of the portfolio in cash. However, you must recognize the risk of stablecoins losing their peg, known as stablecoin risk. You can mitigate this specific risk by holding various types of stablecoins, such as USDC or USDT.

Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA): For investors who do not wish to monitor charts constantly or trade actively, DCA can be a powerful risk management tool. By investing a fixed amount at regular intervals regardless of price, you can smooth out the average purchase price over time. This helps reduce the risk of buying at the peak and prevents emotional decision-making.

Risk-Reward Ratio: The risk-reward ratio is a metric that calculates potential risk versus potential reward. A 1:2 or 1:3 ratio is commonly used as a standard. For instance, if you risk a $100 stop-loss to gain a$ 300 take-profit, the ratio is 1:3. This implies that you can ultimately be profitable even if half of your trades fail.

Conclusion

Before committing capital, traders and investors must establish a clear risk management strategy. Financial risks cannot be avoided entirely, but they can be sufficiently managed. Modern risk management is not limited to simple stop-losses. It is a comprehensive process involving strict asset custody security to protect private keys, understanding smart contract exposure, and utilizing strategies like dollar-cost averaging to navigate volatility.