Bitcoin Forum

Hello, I've been in bitcoin trading since august, and I must say, I'm not very good at trading... I sort of had like 5btc, and now I'm down to 3. That's Ok, shit happens.
I guess I've been bear-trapped like 99% of times.

Only today I've managed to understand what is a buy/sell wall, and I'm quite aware about the manipulation involved.

So- Could anybody please explain to me what is a bear trap.
I mean, it's going up and down, at a certain point it goes up like 30$, and then down.
How (can) do you recognize a bear trap from a ascending stabilization?

Note that I'm not asking something impossible, like a 100% correct prevision, or where and how should I invest, nobody can do that, not even btc-e trollbox.

Pro Tip : Buy & Hold.

+1

Day-trading is a newbie mistake.

Buy and hold Btc, right? not dollars (which I'm currently stuck with)

Yeah, don't get lured in to doubling your holdings or increasing them via day trading. Decide how much you think Bitcoin is going to be worth..and how much you want to have when its worth that amount.
Now are you there.. if you're not then its time to buy and hold. And by time I mean buy in the dips of the trends not saying crashes or corrections but for example yesterday you would've got coins at 750-770 while the price remained near 800 for the majority of the day.

If you're able to acquire more than you want to hold in the future you can then try to start selling a percentage of the btc you don't want to have when it goes to the moon, at certain intervals...the price doubling would be good, the sell intervals would be devised on how much fiat you'd like to have returned(profit) vs ending bitcoin holding position over a period of time.

Hold whatever you believe in.

Don't trade.  If you absolutely must trade, use your BTC for margin trading and only go long, and only with low leverage.  Selling in this market is best left to profit takers.

Only when we're dropping REALLY fast does it make sense to sell and only when you're not "late to the game". Sell only into a crash growing in speed, if its slowing down, you're probably too late. For example if you had sold into that time we went from like $900 to <$600 in 10 minutes, even if you had caught it at the end and bought on the way back up, you'd still have earned Bitcoins. But it only worked because we were crashing so fast, which erroded confidence and allowed the bears to overshoot. If the drop isn't fast enough to cause people to lose confidence in your opinion, don't sell, because otherwise you're acting irrationally while the market is acting rationally setting you up for failiure

if you aren't good at trading, don't trade!
Or at least infrequently trade, it's more relaxing when you don't have to check the price 100 times an hour too!

Buy and Hold and Sell and Buy and Hold and Sell and Buy and Hold and Sell.

Make it profitable with trading.  ::)

if you are not good at something, try to improve.. and after an honest effort, you should just take your losses. the OP is trying to learn more about investing affter all.

Investing is something completely different from speculating. Trading is usually speculation.

Like everyone else says: Buy and hold. I cannot help you with the timing but either just buy right now or dollar cost average over the course of 1 or 2 months (with only ~$2400).

Then, just don't sell. Appearently that's harder than it sounds for a lot of people ;)

The track record of those who buy and hold bitcoins is invincible.

nice advices, thanks

stop trying to trade it. If I were only working with 3k I would roll about half into a cheaper coin (once), and then leave it all alone for a few months at least.

Daytrading is the hardest thing in the world, I have been trading for near 20 years and I would not dream of short term trading this kind of market. Lambs-----silenced.

Good luck.

So far.

I agree that the only good market move I have ever made is to buy and hold. Everything else is just random at worse. Granted, real time information is much better these days and markets are much more distributed.  It used to be a nightmare when everyone was just on Gox, which would freeze up due to overuse or DDOS and by the time you could log in the price had fallen 50%.

That said, if you are particularly bad at trading that is a talent as well - just pull a George Costanza and do the exact opposite of what you originally were going to do. If you're really getting bear trapped 99% of the time, you can turn that around to 1%.

TRADE!
But trade with part of your money.
The beauty of BTC is that it is diversable to 8 places.
So:
- put 99% into cold storage
- learn to trade with 1%

Good luck!

Read this article:

http://garyscommonsense.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/strong-hand-weak-hand.html

Buy and hold, practice trading with a small amount, by the time you are confident with your trading you will hopefully have matured to 'strong hand' status.

1) Never goto sleep or turn your back on an open trade, always close out what you want to be holding, personally I hold btc.
2) Set a mental stop loss and never violate it. If the price goes above or below your stop loss, you were wrong, put your pride aside and close your trade for a small loss rather than a massive loss.
3) Don't get greedy, if you start to become shocked at how much profit you've made from a trade, it's time to close that trade. If you're feeling it, others already are and they're ready to buy back in which will wipe out all of your profits far more quickly than they took to accumulate.
4) Where possible use limit orders because they maximize your profits and provide you a bigger safety buffer if you're wrong.
5) Study study study. Learn how to analyze charts, volume, orderbooks, ema's, stochastics, macd, etc.
6) Risk / Reward. How much do you stand to lose on a trade vs how much you stand to gain. Only go in on trades that you deem an acceptable risk. 1:1 is not good enough as it's no better than flipping a coin.
7) Study up, if you only just learned what a wall is then you have a long way to go. Plenty of awesome guides on youtube and a lot of good books to read on the subject.

Your account is to small to be trading in the time frame you are using (day trading more or less). With what you have, buy and hold may be a better stratadgy, especially taking into consideration the currect ecomomic situation of the btc; for instance,  the fact that only 1% of the population has been exposed to it yet .