Yeah, I think that’s the right mindset to treat it. If it didn’t mean I’m losing money it would be hilarious how bad I sometimes am at this game. I’m currently not owning any coins anymore and I’m down 5% compared to my initial investment because I didn’t see the latest uptrend coming and sold all because I got scared of taking part in another “crash”.
Now I’m waiting for the next “crash”, though that’ll probably take till after the next fork which I didn’t take into account.
Did you end up buying some? I don’t think it can reach 15k this year anymore.
Well, consider yourself lucky. I think I burned more than 5% when I tried day trading, but in all honest, the sum was insignificant to begin with.
Normally, there’s an additional instrument for situation where market is going down - it is shorting. Meaning you first sell (getting negative number of stocks), and when the price gets lower, you buy the stocks back, getting profit. In practice, however, it means that you’ll have twice the opportunities to burn your money by incorrectly predicting trend direction. Not sure if this is available on cryptocurrency exchanges.
I’ll consider myself lucky if I ever make it to a significant plus . I think I made more good than bad trades, just the bad ones were… worse.
I’ve heard of it, but the exchange I’m using doesn’t even have stop-loss or take-profit orders at the moment, so I wouldn’t be surprise if there’s no way to short either. It’s something I don’t wanna touch anyway, same as margin trading.
Anyone still playing? While I’m waiting for BTC to crash again I’ve traded a bit on ETH and made a few bucks. Not quite out of the red yet, but getting closer. I moved from -5% to about -2.5% compared to my starting sum. Still nowhere close to what I make with regular freelance work.
But that’s not why I’m posting. I’ve seen a fulltime trader say something along the lines of “it’s better to lose money doing the wrong thing, than win money doing the wrong thing, because the lessons you learn from those trades can prevent or cause much greater losses in the future”. He was referring to people buying BTC now while it’s very high - if they make profits from that, they learn the wrong lesson, because right now isn’t the right time to buy, the next crash is. I found that really interesting because it’s applicable to many other business related things. You might get lucky once with one kind of game, but betting the farm on the next project of the same kind might be a desaster.
I’m reminded of Tacoma and Gone Home. Gone Home was a lucky break in many ways that pushed the team who made it into the spotlight and had great success. Tacoma in comparison was not very successful, because it didn’t come in at that perfect time.
I don’t know anything about bitcoin trading but i did a good amount of work with markets.
The lessons I learned about traders (and I worked very closely with many very successful ones) is that they’re all full of shit.
Basically, modern trading in ever rising markets is akin to tossing dice with dice loaded slightly in your favor. You win more than 50% of your tosses. After tossing the dice (win or lose) people then rationalize the results (usually favoring/protecting their own ego). The bigger the win or loss, the more important that rationalization becomes.
With so little oversight on those markets, the only people I would trust on the subject are people operating the exchanges or people with close contact to them. There is so much opportunity for massive amounts of market manipulation.
When I looked into it, I was disappointed to find out that Bitcoin has fairly high transaction fees, which makes it useless for daily operation. The other fun thing is that a lot of the currencies forgot about security part, and for example, somebody can look up how much money you have by simply knowing your wallet address. At least in some of the currencies.
Nice example! The 10k units sold for Tacoma doesn’t seem bad at all on its own, it’s just the context of the success that Gone Home had, that makes it look like a failure. I don’t like the walking sim genre very much, but I got Gone Home through a bundle and finished it. I actually liked it, though I wouldn’t go out of my way to buy games in that genre. Tacoma somehow made it onto my steam wishlist, which for me is like bookmarking a game, but I can’t quite remember why I put it there.
I certainly can see where you’re coming from. Though there’s one fulltime trader guy on youtube who I like. He once made a video about why he doesn’t do the classic technical analysis stuff like Fibonacci retracements. He used the bitcoin charts, put on the Fib overlay and pointed out places where it worked out and where it only “sort of” worked out. Then he did the same thing again, but this time he drew in completely random lines… and then scrolling down the history of the graph those actually would have been better predictors of price changes. So yeah…
His actual method is identifying the last historic price level that gave a major bounce after a drop, and then waiting for the price to go even lower than that, so that people panic. Then he keeps buying as long as it goes down, with increasing volume per trade, and when it’s going up again, he starts selling with the goal to get a reasonable profit and keep some part of the profit in that crypto currency. Those are what he calls “free coins”. If the price keeps going up, he participates in that with the “free coins”, if it goes back down again “who cares, still made a profit”. He talks like someone who knows his stuff and is risk-averse. Says it’s still like gambling, but with the odds skewed heavily in his favor.
He even made a video about a case where his strategy didn’t work out on a trade in the stock market, trading penny stocks (also he clearly advised everyone who isn’t already a trading pro to stay away from trading stocks). He made a bit of a loss there, and without his experience he’d have made a big loss. I also never saw him advertising anything, he has no products that he’s selling. I always question why people do what they do. In his case I think what he’s getting out of it is, that the kind of community that he creates around his channel, makes useful stuff for him. Like one guy has made a market scanner that automatically scans for sudden pricedrops on exchanges and gives him an alert to check it out himself, and then decide whether or not to buy. He doesn’t want to use bots. To be honest he seems like someone who just enjoys trading like others enjoy video games. I can understand that. I wouldn’t wanna play a shooter with an aimbot either.
But yeah, I’ve seen far more dudes with fancy hipster offices or pretentious vlog-like videos made in their car that talk about opportunities, and being excited, and how crypto is gonna change the world etc. etc…
Iirc the fees I’m paying per trade are somewhere below 0.25%. I don’t care about the details of actually using crypto to pay for things. I’m just in it for the speculation game and the related learning experience. It has been very educational so far. Also I know I’m neglecting the security side because I’ve heard a million times you shouldn’t leave your money on exchanges. But with how long transactions can take and how much of a pain it is to deal with this stuff and how much you can fuck up along the way… I feel like just leaving it on the exchange is the lesser of all evils. I mean the most popular method seems to be to put it onto an electronic device that can break or get lost, and I don’t have the faintest clue how it even works. That’s more red flags for me than the potential of the exchange shutting down or my account getting hacked.
I did get an interesting phishing mail 2 days ago. It was of above average quality and tried to blackmail the recipients into transfering 300USD worth of bitcoin onto a wallet address. I thought it would be funny looking that address up to see how many fall for it, but of course we can’t know how many other wallets have been created to customize those phishing mails. Afaik making wallets is free, so they could have made one per mail theoretically. It went to my address compromised in the Unity forum hack by the way. Normally I get more spam on my other addresses because I use this one so rarely.
Did anyone else from here happen to get a phishing mail that claims to have recorded webcam and screenrecording footage of them from their last pornsite visit, and threatening to send it to all their mail contacts if they don’t pay up?
I did a lot of work with so called “statistical arbitrage” which I would put more weight into than any kind of charting. Although that technique is more difficult with this type of security. Even more quantitative methods can have problems though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_arbitrage
From casual reading (a few articles, I’m not very familiar with bitcoin or bitcoin markets) it sounds like they have real problems from exchange to exchange, with price level differences that are sometimes massive. I’m not sure how this could be possible without traditional arbitrage producing price equality. So I may not really understand how these work.
If you want to learn about this stuff - I would probably look into ForEX trading in general if bitcoin is actually a becoming a more mature currency (I don’t know if this is the case or not).
Finally, it’s also worth noting that his system as you described is essentially a “Martingale” betting strategy.
It would essentially have the same characteristics as the martingale if leveraged consistently.
The martingale works better in markets than it does in casinos since the chance of hitting a long losing streak is often lower (markets have a long term up trend). But it’s basically the same system
I’m not super convinced that is fully applicable because neither can a stock or coin go down forever, nor is it 100% guarantueed to ever go up again. It’s likely to follow a certain pattern within specific situations, but that’s about it. It’s more like doing a thing over and over again, that statistically has worked out for you e.g. 90+% of times, because if it works you earn enough to make up for your fuckups.
The investing more and more as price goes lower is more a way to lower the average buy-in cost for as long as the price drops. And selling in increments is a way to try to maximize the profit without waiting too long and risking to miss the top. The dude in the videos always says “anywhere with a profit is good, I’m usually one of the first ones out again”.
I think it just takes too long to make your money go the roundtrip of bank → exchange → buy crypto → transfer to other exchange → sell crypto → withdraw fiat to bank and repeat. One round of that can take days. Crypto being so volatile most traders probably can just make more money if they keep it in one exchange and trade. Hell, during uptrends just holding BTC should have bigger payoff than that arbitrage thing between different exchanges. It’s just that the risk profile is different (though I couldn’t tell which is riskier). Verification on kraken was such a pain, otherwise I would have tried to arbitrage between kraken and another exchange, just to see how well it works in practice.
The fees are much higher. I think that youtuber I was talking about mentioned paying 5-figures per year in fees for his stock trades. And Iirc all brokers I checked in the past had minimum fees that aren’t just a percentage, so it only makes sense if you do big trades, which I don’t want to risk.
Honestly, this is the martingale system. Just think about the eventual outcomes, the performance characteristics are exactly the same. If you do a search for “martingale investing” it will also talk about ‘dollar cost averaging’ and other stuff like that.
I’m not saying that it can’t work, but this is essentially an 18th century betting system and comes with the same fundamental problems regardless of how you dress up the language or justify it.
The anti-martingale can also work, I would argue that it probably works better for swingy markets since a lot of the fallacies actually exist in markets more so than other areas (hot hands fallacy, etc).
btw - I’m not trying to discourage you or disparage your youtuber. But I would always advise caution to anyone involving themselves in retail speculation. As a small scale actor, you are always the ‘dumb money’ - inside actors are always in the advantage. Also, in terms of what algorithmic trading is capable of and the lack of oversight, I would imagine these markets are probably being immensely warped.
Some ideas for how these markets could be very easily manipulated would include:
Selling execution priority (this almost certainly happens)
Selling data feed on market depth
To give you some idea - here is a description of the different execution feeds you can get access to in regulated markets:
With less regulation you can also do more and more work with execution prioritization and stuff like that. I imagine that in an entirely unregulated environment you could give a well funded actor a view of all executions before those executions take place and priority. Allowing them to intercept nearly any execution.
Order cancellation can also be used (and is also used in better regulated markets) to create illusionary pricing. In other words, they can enter orders which sit on the books and are reported to datafeeds then cancelled before execution.
These kinds of things are being done on major stock exchanges with regulatory oversight, the kind of stuff that you could sell in an unregulated environment is … just crazy.
Yeah, I agree, this is martingale. THis stuff is occasionally used by people trying to sell somebody an “amazing never previously heard of way to win in casino”. In Roulette, it goes like this : Say, you bet on black. If you get black, next time you bet on red. However, if you get red, you place double amount on black. The idea is that the same color cannot keep coming up forever, and eventually luck will turn in your favor, meaning you’ll get everything you bet back. In practice… red/black probability is not 50%, there are zeroes on the wheel, the record same color streak was 37 consequentive numbers of the same color, and casinos have minimum/maximum bet to prevent this system from being used.
That’s not to say that these kinds of systems can’t work, they can. But you need to understand the behaviour.
Martingale style trading is basically trading higher short term win rate in exchange for a higher risk of ruin long term.
You can win with any system you want (you can bet according to the phase of the moon, because of how it affects the psychology of traders), but it doesn’t make the system actually work.
*I didn’t build a mining rig, just used what I had ( 2 x GTX 1080)
*run it when I’m not using the system
Mining
I’ve tried alot of different ones, but decided to stick to NiceHash for now.
You could make more mining specific coins, but NiceHash will mine whatever is most profitable and then just put bitcoin into your wallet.
*back in July it made about double the current amount.
Here are some current stats:
Final verdict (~ 3 months):
I made about $500 - $600 (keep in mind I “cashed out” when bitcoin was at different values)
Not bad, it has paid for 1 of my Graphics cards!
Trading
I really think this is where the money can be made or LOST!
I traded for 1 month with $50 for fun…(I believe 90% of people lose money trading from my research)
Learned alot on my “bad trades”, but overall i’m Plus
$50 to $68.30
People need to understand that cryptocurrency is the biggest con. It used to be lucrative. It used to be you could make a profit. Nowadays it’s practically gambling, and every new ICO, every new currency, is explicitly designed to fill the pockets of whoever is offering it.
Why else do they do it? for your benefit? for charity? hell no. Wake up, guys… the ship has sailed and you’re all just behaving with the exact same excuses and mannerisms that gamblers do.
It’s probably fine to use bitcoin as a donation spot or to pay for things but doing it for business is laughable. It’s entirely unregulated nonsense. At some point it will (and this is not debatable) be regulated by governments. Japan is doing it. China is acting on it. America is too slow as usual and England is as always, clenching it’s arse like Theresa May after a hard night of trying to digest the internet.
Edit: Russia has just begun regulation as well, probably others too. I would predict most of the world will be regulating cryptocurrencies in some form or other by Q4 2018.
What I am saying is that it will always be gambling with this amount of volatility. You are gamblers. That is not business.
Again, cryptocurrencies will generally benefit the currency provider, not the small fry that use it. I have yet to see a consistent benefit for the users. It is usually always going to be a company that will benefit from this. Unity, Otoy, anyone else - it benefits them much more than it does you. It’s the classic gold rush fever with no shortage of people selling you maps, snake oil and shovels.
I don’t see that a classical exchange where both parties benefit equally, at all. I know there is a lot of potential benefit but it will be for the few, not the many it promises.
Do you mean per month while mining or do you pay a fixed price no matter how much you use? For me even without mining I already pay about double that for electricity. If you have a flat rate for electricity or it is vastly cheaper than here, that could easily explain the difference in profitability. Either way, I’m glad it worked out for you. Congratulations on being in the plus with trades too.
As always, your bluntness is greatly appreciated!
I’m trying to remember what kind of statements I’ve heard on that topic but I think all bigger traders pretty much said things along the lines of “this is a market, it shifts money from the hands of the many into the hands of a few, like any other market does”.
I’m only interested because of the gambling, so I didn’t hear much from the ideological bitcoin believers that would buy bitcoin, even if they were sure to lose money on it.
. I think I made more good than bad trades, just the bad ones were… worse.
