Do you even trade bro?
In this day and age trading has become a big buzzword, some might have been familiar with it if they were interested in stocks or other commodities while some were forced to do it to be able to trade their fiat into cryptos and vice versa.
First off, as an introduction and back story to my trading history, I am not that active myself at trading currently. I used to sport it for some time a few years ago but it really required you to focus on it at all times if you wanted to be successful at it. It didn't only require you to follow charts, but also rumors, news, developments and anything really that could have an effect on prices short-term. It was a deep rabbit hole of finding out which sources were some of the first ones that gave out information early on potential groundbreaking news that would effect the markets combined with following other traders that had a successful history.
There are a lot of different aspects involved in it, small traders, big traders, manipulators, bots and everything in between. Needless to say if you were in it you had a hard time not being emotional about some trades, even knowing that in the long-term it would only go up and that you might have started out with a small amount it didn't change the "then and there". It took a big strain on your sleep, your patience and some times you even needed a reality check now and then.
I was never involved in bot trading, I either didn't want to trust them with my coins or found the sites and users that sold these to be shady and untrustworthy. Why do they have to sell bots that are successful at trading if they can themselves use them to make endless profits? Although I doubt there are many out there that use these "automatic" bot trading programs I am sure there are some that set up their own with different rules and requirements to take in profits with this volatility and with the price only going up in the long term in mind.
The reason I quit trading is that it wasn't worth it for me, the little gain over the big strain it had on your mentality did not seem like a good trade. I also started looking back more and more and found out that many times if not most of the time I ended up with not that much more profit than if I had just held my coins secure offline from the beginning instead. This is why I started thinking for the long run and was glad I stumbled upon Steem which at the time had a 2 year power down period and it encouraged me to do the same with other currencies that were starting out and seemed like they had the potential to become as big as the mother of all coins: Bitcoin.
Now before I go on to the part about how to pretend you are good at trading I feel like I need to say a few words about Trading Analysis in cryptocurrencies. In my opinion TA's are not completely useless, I have no clue about them in usual stock trading or other commodities, but in a young market such as cryptos and with its volatility day-traders do have a bigger impact on them than anywhere else. The low cost of trades do make it possible to profit from actively trading but there is always going to happen something that no one can predict at some point in time, wheather it being exchanges going down and taking your coins or flash crashes triggering your stop-losses and other fun stuff like that.
Most of my friends look at the volatility and ask me "why do you not trade back and forth on them constantly?". Many seem to fail to understand that for you to profit off of the swings there has to be someone else that has to lose that same amount. In the end its a lot more closer to gambling than anything else and even with the "house edge" advantage being on your side since you know that sooner or later there is no where but up for the currencies you trade with I've come to terms that the safest method to make profit is to do re-search on projects, invest early and keep your coins locked in cold storage (offline). If you don't hold the keys and control of your coins then they are never fully safe, in my opinion. Many seem to forget what happened to Mt. Gox and it is probably only a matter of time until the same thing happens to others, which one it will be and when I cannot say.
I'd rather risk losing my private keys somehow than having someone else lose them for me.
Prediction Markets of trading
With the Steem platform and the blockchain paving the way for transparency I've been hoping to see a lot more prediction markets or posts about future trading here. Its kind of disappointing that there is not much of that going around yet, considering how we can actually vote with stake of our own on market movements and everything will be saved on the blockchain to keep tab on which predictions have been better than others and which traders have shown to successfully predict them.
I think many might be careful with that since they sense that an account having many followers might be trying to "pump and dump" on their readers short-term, but there are ways to secure that from happening as well, especially for long-term trades and investments. Since blockchain addresses are public there is nothing stopping these authors from announcing the wallet addresses they will be holding the currencies they support so the readers can be assured the initial author calling out the buy-in won't use them for his own gain.
Instead we see many traders who say they trade and tell you what you should be buying and selling, yet either most of the time don't provide any proof to back up their predictions or a history of being successful at it themselves in the past. Most of the times the TA's they bring forward are either quite obvious of what has happened and what might happen but predicting short-term movements seems to always be a guess as much as anyone else.
I'm hoping that with the increase in adoption and more and more "professional" traders joining as of late it will raise the activity of these prediction markets and posts on the platform.
This post became a lot longer than I initially expected, apologize to the readers for that.
How to pretend you are good at trading!
- Create a bunch of accounts on exchanges
- Send a small amount of Bitcoin to all of these
- Start trading back and forth on all of them at different times with the same currency you want to brag you are good at trading
- When the time comes, you pick the account with the best trade history
- You make sure to only include the date & time, the buy/sell and price of the currency only it is important not to give away the amount you trade with else step #1 & 2 become obsolete
- You only post about your successful trades, don't worry about the losses, the post rewards about the successful will get them back to you and this is why you only trade with dust amounts
- If someone were to ask how you do it, tell them you you've seen a lot of charts in your time and provide them TA's with what has happened before and make sure to place circles on where you traded on that successful account
- If someone asks if you ever fail at trading or have lost anything doing it you tell them: "absolutely not"
- If they ask for more proof of how much you've profited from your trades and how much weight your TA's really hold, you start arguments and flame those users until they've forgotten how they even got to that point
- As a trader and technical analysis expert you have to make sure you are never wrong, during off days and big downtrends you stop trading and focus 100% on pointing fingers and blaming people that should work harder so your currency you trade with doesn't have to suffer, regardless if all crypto markets are in decline
I hope the readers realize the last part is a bit of a joke.
I do believe trading can be quite successful but bear in mind to never start out with more than you can afford to lose and only look at it as "play money" the same way how cryptos are still viewed in most countries to this day. This helps to not get too emotional about your trades and keep a cool head during the tough times. :)
Images from Pixabay.com