Bitcoin Forum

Define "Trader" for me, Please.
I am a newbie and have bought stocks for over 50 years.  I am excited to buy my first bitcoin, but the old school concept of buy and hold kicks in so where does the "Trade" part kick in?  Can you give me a step by step, "A day in the life of a Bitcoin Trader". ie - I set up an account with the Coinbase Exchange and then to stay in sync, I registered for a Coinbase wallet and then bought a Ledger Nano S for security and only then tentitively bought $50 worth of Bitcoin from a Bitcoin ATM machine at the Exxon Gas Station at the corner of Alpha and Beta in downtown Chicago.  I held up my iphone to the QR code on the screen and my Bitcoin software grabbed the encryption code ....  well you get the idea.  I need a step by step primer as to what the "Trader" does to Trade.  Thanks for reading. 

I posted this on another subject, so please excuse me if it is cross-posted.  D

What exactly do you mean?

Cryptotrading is like any other stock, but much more volatile.

You are already speculating on bitcoin, but to start trading you will need to move your BTC to an exchange such as bittrex.com , and then buy into another altcoin of which you think will be worth more.

I still think buy and hold is the best option, even in crypto, but because it is much more volatile, people start to daytrade eg, rapidly selling coins. I guess that is what you mean by "trading" / trader. I personally think it is pretty much a meme. You need to know what you're doing otherwise you're going to fail miserably at it.

Check out this post.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2221007.msg22416951#msg22416951

I'm sure it can be very stressful to become a bitcoin trader, especially with the huge fluctuation in price.

Yeah.. your framing of this issue is quite broad and vague...   There are a lot of ways that bitcoin holders trade, yet some holders are reluctant to sell any of their bitcoin so they just buy and accumulate and buy on dips and replace any that they sell.

So you could establish any systematic way of doing a kind of trading, and it does not need to be daily - for example, in my recent formulation, I am selling about 1.6% of my bitcoins for every 10% that BTC prices go up and I am doing it in $100 increments and buying back with a similar formula...   Such formula can be tweaked in terms of percentages and also in terms of increments.. also it can be tweaked if you are more inclined towards accumulating more bitcoin or selling more bitcoin to accumulate cash.

When I started, my amounts were smaller and also my increments were smaller because I was trying to practice a lot; however, with the passage of time, I have increased my increments .. my percentages have remained somewhat similar except sometimes I might make some extra play and then have to attempt to reallocate over time to get back in balance...   

So you can make it as you will. 

To me it seems that most folks trade in a such a way that is gambling too large amounts to bet in one direction or another, and I tend to advocate against those kinds of approaches .. and assertions that you are going to outsmart the market...

One of the biggest certainties about bitcoin is its volatility, and for that reason, you can build in a kind of trading that allows you to profit from such volatility, continue to accumulate with perhaps dollar cost averaging investing and without getting greedy.

Do you know, that "the old school way of buy and hold" is the way that fills the accounts of people with a lot of profit that people like me and you cannot think of because our budget is not enough to buy bitcoins that can generate good profit for us. People buy bitcoins, and hold them for a while, and when the price is up, they sell them, and all they get from this is pure profit and that is exactly how Bitcoin Trading works. You buy, then hold, and then sell, that's all.

Your description of trading differs from mine in that you use the charts to time the market - and I engage in automatic trades as the price goes up, I sell and as the price goes down I buy.  It appears that your system could make me more money (perhaps?), but for some reason, I cannot bring myself to increase or decrease my BTC trading amounts or my trade/price increments based on those kinds of chart indicators...   Sure, it could be my familiarity and comfort, and yeah your description of the RSI seems pretty decently indicative of changes in likelihoods.

I give myself a sample. it really gets very tiring. Particularly short-term trade leads me to make a lot of effort, and I made too many mistakes, so I could not think well. I put a limit of 6 hours a day.

For being a trader is like an escrow man or a third party. You acquire goods to someone at low price and sell it to someone at higher price. Except there are no someone and it is just the price that is being manipulated and i waiting for the right time to sell the coin i have bought for a fair price.

I would phrase it a little bit differently because you are kind of suggesting that you have some kind of insight about fair price before fair price rises, yet I don't think about it that way because in time 1, bitcoin fair price might be x and at that price you buy some bitcoin; however, in time 2 bitcoin's price is x + $100, and you sell the bitcoin that you bought with profits.  You might attempt creating your orders in such a way that you do not care if the price goes up or the price goes down.  If the price goes to x - $100 then you buy some more BTC.  You let the price come to you and you don't get excited about whichever direction that it goes because your orders just execute one direction or another and you tweak your plan from time to time if your goals change a little bit or if you have some changes in your sentiment.. but that change is not 100% it is just making incremental changes, like changing your increments to $150 (or $200)  (when you are learning you might have your increments a little closer together just to practice but you gotta have it enough to cover the trading fees, too) or changing your quantities and hopefully stacking your orders in such a way that you are able to automatically buy even if the price drops 50% or automatically sell even if the price goes up 50%.

Do traders predict and bet what they think of how prices go or are unaffected/non-personal opinion based decisions?

Think of Bitcoin as essentially a VERY volatile stock and you will will understand what it means to be in this space. Yet, BTC is SOOOO much more.

Though trading bitcoin is not much different from the conventional stock trading but if you what to day trading then you have to learn how it works from cryptocoin trading platforms like bittrex and novaexchange. I will advise you to study careful what people are saying at the toll box as most of the new and trending information are discuss there. Then from there you can transfer some of you bitcoin to exchangers platforms and start trading.

There may be some need to emphasize the "SOOOO much more" part of your statement - so yeah, agree that extremely volatile; however, we cannot really consider bitcoin as exactly any other asset class (except perhaps closer analogies to some of the other cryptos), but part of my point is that bitcoin is not very likely to be mature in its own right.. so we have to consider s-curve adoption, exponential growth, metcalfe networking principles, etc. 

So, even if we are not exactly locked in to any kind of exact model, we can see developments in the space that show that adoption and development is likely increasing and likely to reinforce theory that s-curve will play out...

On the other side, we have various anti-bitcoin battles both from without and appearing to be from within, which cause price manipulation dynamics.. and even sabotage attacks, threats and various unprecedented attempts at attack mechanisms (for example, multiple hardforks, attempts to divert and manipulate mining and spreading of FUD). 

So in the end, the most likely thing that you do happen to have is ongoing volatility rather than predictability - especially shorter term... so we may continue to have inklings that bitcoin will be continuing up, continuing up, continuing up.. however, it is also possible that such confidence can be widdled away or even shattered by another 3 years of bear market (maybe maybe not) and even skittishness that is caused by BIG money with seemingly endless abilities to short and to dump upon bitcoin.  Might work, but might not.   ;)  So we can still profit and trade, and protect our investment through trading by taking advantage of one of the most likely known factors in bitcoin - ongoing volatility.

Man, you must be old! ha ha ha! Anyway, the major difference between cryptocurrency and stock market is the government. Everything else is the same. Think about it this way - Ethereum is "McDonalds", Litecoin is "Apple Inc", Ripple is "IBM", and Bitcoin is "US Dollars" - and then Poloniex is "Nasdaq". So just like the good old days, you would pick a stock of your choice and then keep it on your portfolio, wait for the price to climb up, and then sell... and then wait for the price to pull down a little bit and then buy back. You see it is not very much different from the stock market, is it? - Though stocks and exchanges are regulated by the SEC; cryptocurrency on the other hand, is a punk - nobody regulates it. Verily, the only risk for you grandpa, is once those exchanges decide to go out of business, your coins go out of business too.

Try to answer it by yourself along the way and see how it goes? :)

Transfer your bitcoin to the real trading platform where you can see the real actions. If you trade on Coinbase, you are trading against their wallet and not on a trader itself. Build experience and set your goals. While progressing, soon your questions, not just your concern today, will have clearer answer because of your experiences.

Just like what the trade means, a trader buy and sells a certain something to gain profit. in my case i am a cryptocoins trader. if you're trading stocks then it'll be much more easier to understand as they are really a like, its just that cryptocurrencies particularly altcoins are much volatile to compared to them. there are much more detailed articles all over the net which you can just search but i'll give you an overview of things.

1. you have to create a exchange account, my recommended site is bittrex
2. you have to transfer your bitcoins to your wallet on bittrex
3. plan out everything e.g. which coin to get, trading strategies etc.
4. start trading e.g. pick a coin, create a buy order

The fact is that before making orders, you need to learn you can learn information about the most popular coins and about their price courses for a long time. so you can calculate that moment and study the process itself. When you can make money on the difference in the price of these coins.

A typical day for me if I am trading starts with checking the markets that I'm following closely, then seeing if there is anything I would like to buy or sell at that time. I then follow the markets throughout the day whilst trying to get up to date on any news.

Trader is a person who buy and sell goods, stock or even currencies. And by the way you are doing i think it's more like a hoarder than a trader. But you're still a trader though because you buy bitcoin and wait for it to accumulate much value than the value when you buy it. But other traders not just relying on bitcoin. They buy other altcoins to maximize their income in a fast way. Coinbase is a good one. But you need a little more exploration. Coinbase doesn't list all good coins in the market. You have to find them at other market or exchange to buy and sell them at higher price and able to get some profits.

A trader is confident and ready to take risk and know what to do when loosing money, because without this traits a trader will be very unbalance and scared to trade again.

Just love it.
I could gain lots now.

It is just fun.
I am having a fun day as trader now.

Every day of a trader is the most important day from the last day because while in trading the major element is the price of goods which are used for trading so if a trader miss any of the day in the routing which is the routing of trading then he may be miss a great opportunity of getting a pretty big profit from their trade because prices of most goods are change in the market day by day.

A bitcoins traders life is similar to an FX traders life.. stressful. Honestly unless you have what it takes, I'd recommend not to get involved in too much trading. You can have sleepless nights and anxiety attacks if your living depends on this, which not everyone can take. The good things about BTC traders in contrast to FX traders, is that BTC is trading 24/7, so hooray! You can stress yourselves 24/7 instead of 24/5 (FX market is open from Monday to Friday)

A person who considers himself as a trader knows how big the risk is when it comes to trading. Other people thinks that, we, traders are only doing exchanges. They don't see that before the profit is gained, a trader goes to bed without the assurance that their money will be processed over the night and will gain the target profit. I have been trading since I first got my money from the first altcoin campaign I have joined and I assure that as someone who does trading, there is no guarantee when it comes here. You will put your money at risk hoping that  a profit will be gained, monitoring the price is also stressful because of the volatility, a sudden change in the equivalent prices means so much and if you have made a wrong move I am sure that you will be restless because of thinking about the profit.

Yes the prices are changes everyday because the demand is always there in the market and it can give a good​ profit to the​ day trader. Trading bitcoin is also a risk but more profitable if you know all the methods in trading and make your own strategies to overcome every problems in trading. Experiencing mistakes in trading is just a part of a big opportunity because it helps you to make a better strategies and also earn a good profit.

Well, since I am still new to trading. Traded for about a year now I first lost some btc but after that I made a good bit. I am definitely ready for the next bull run since I learned so much. I'd say don't wait and really start trading it to learn and you will get better at it.

Loss and win is a part of game and trading is nothing but it’s a game and a person who wants to be a good trader he must have ability to control their itself in both condition weather he has a loss or profit. So every moment is different for trader from the previous moment because of changing price in the market due to which every moment is stressful from the previous moment.

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To become a real trader, you need a lot of time to understand the market psychology because every transaction you have to consider carefully because just a little mistake. Your property can be reduced by 20% immediately ;D

That is  bullshit.

Surely you can trade in the way that you describe; however, on the other hand, you can create a system and follow the system and tweak the system to ensure that it is profitable.

One of the best systems is to buy as the price goes down and to sell as the price goes up.  The trick is to figure out your increments in order to be profitable and not to gamble with your strategy and if you do gamble to only use a small amount of your total proceeds for gambling plays.


Edit: My criticism of your post relates to your seeming suggestion that there is a kind of "real trader," and implications that trading strategies are limited. 

On the other hand, I do agree with any point that you make that if you don't know what you are doing, and if you get too greedy, gamble too much or bet in only one direction, then you can lose a lot of your stash in a short period of time, especially if you engage in leverage trading (aka margin trading).

Further, like pearlmen says above, a decent strategy for anyone who does not know is to practice and to learn with relatively small amounts of money.  Of course the more bullish you are about bitcoin, then the more you will engage in a BTC accumulation strategy, and the less bullish you are about it, then you will try to use it to accumulate more cash - and either strategy can work - and so sometimes going through the trading process will cause you to tweak a bit here or there because your bearish/bullish sentiments change with the passage of time, market momentum and events (news). 

Finally, a point that I am attempting to make, here, is that if you set up your strategy to extract value in either price  direction, then you don't even have to be correct about predicting the market or even attempt to engage in any kind of meaningful prediction of the BTC price direction - even though you might set your trading strategy up in such a way that you are more profitable from one BTC price direction (the one you are predicting) as compared with the opposite BTC price direction (the direction that you are predicting not to happen).
 

You probably know the right information steps to go about trading but one key thing is that, you don't just jump into it without understanding what  its about because a lot of times when people jump into trading, they ended up making money for the experts in the field. What I would suggest is to take the next few weeks in studying the market, understand the trend then try starting out small before going fully into bitcoin. There is no doubt it might be discouraging but don't give up is what matter.

Sadly, I lost possible 50% once after panicking when the bitcoin's price dumps. I thought that bitcoin will not rise again that easy so I decided to sell some of my coins. The worst is that I also loss half of possible profit when I was trading my coins into bitcoin. The life of a trader is not easy, many people would think that a trader is rich, just waits and he has no problem in money. A trader sleeps thinking about his trades and wakes up thinking about it again, sometimes would not sleep good due to thinking of his money that is at processed.