Bitcoin Forum

He all,

I am quite new to the whole crypto scene and I am curious what kind of strategies you use for trading alt coins and how much profit (or loss) you had so far. I have been terrible (75% loss, bought Megacoin and Quark at their peak) and I am looking for some tips.

-which indicators do you use to decide to buy or hold?
-are you in long term or short term?
-do you go for the latest coins or the more established ones?
-any other strategies (arbitrage pump and dump)?

Reveal your trading secrets!

Well i'm checking to forum alot and get alot of giveaways.
Also when a coin is just released i start mining it, altho i have 20kh/s, in the beginning i can get some coins.
So i stock up on multiple coins in hope they will be something later, and do some research wich coins have good devs and idea's


I also bought coins at high price before drop so i lost some money there, you learn from it. Buy low, its an art.
Also in my experience (not alot) when coins are rising very quickly (read too quickly) i assume they are going to crash and i don't buy, rather sell at high point.

Anyone any comments on what im doing?

On Bitcoin I do short term, I use indicators such as StochRSI and MACD and I rarely fail.

For Altcoins I do Long term, beacuse there is not a webpage where I can use StochRsi or MACD, so I feel like I was blind for the short term. I do my reaseach on every coin before investing. I do not invest in pre-mined coins, infinite coins (like devcoin), coins with bad reputation (like Quark), and I try to invest in coins that are worth less than .0001BTC because I've seen that's the average price for many altcoins, so I invest hoping to cash out at that price.

I'm also a miner and my strategy is to mine the coins that have less than a week of life and then sell them 6 months later but if I see the coin has potential or a huge community I also buy and trade for the short term. For example, I bought 2 million Dogecoins when they were worth 10 Satoshis and sold them when they were worth 200 satoshis. That's something like 2000% return.

Furthermore, I do some "arbitrage" when I'm bored. xD

I noticed that many coins with a low market cap (junkcoin, sexcoin, BBQ, enz) occasionally undergo pump and dumps. I am now buying these coins right after a pump and dump when the price is low and immediately put a sell order at 30% higher of what I bought them for in the hope there will be another pump and dump and my order gets full filed

Not sure if this strategy works though.

Yeah, don't buy coins that have grown very quickly in the last days, it is much likely that you are already late when you hear about that. Don't buy when they are losing momentum.

Do you look at hourly, daily or weekly indicators for you bitcoin trading?

I helped develop DeVCoin and am a "tenured developer" and a Devtome author so even if I did not hold any Devcoins I would have a vested interest in its exchange rate as it is one of my employers so to speak. It is also a merged mined coin so I also have a small income of them from mining too.

Thus I have watched its exchange rate long term and noticed it has gone down to somewhere around 30 satoshis and up over 300. This last peak though my sell offers only got bought up up through 193.

So on the bottom end I try to keep it from hitting zero and on the sell side I place sell offers all the way from 350 satoshis on down, an offer at every possible price. I only saw it go over 300 once, but boy was that a good day, I sold 100 million on the way up and bought them back again on the way down (way down, cannot recall exactly but probably in the neighborhood of 30), so at the end of the day I still had my hundred million plus a hundred bitcoins for my trouble and still had bitcoins left to again put offers at every possible satoshi of price all the way up the buy side and offers at every satoshi of price all the way down from 350 to make sure if it tried for the moon again I'd be waiting for it with offers some distance up past where I'd seen it go in the past.

As I said, that paid off just recently as that recent spike ate my sell offers all the way up through 193.

Which meant this time I was able to place my buy offers at a larger scale. So I placed offers to buy ten million divided by the number of satoshis of price all the way up to 50 satoshis or 60 maybe or whatever, noticed I had lots of bitcoin left so did the same again. Hopefully eventually there will be buy orders sitting way down at the bottom of the buy side sufficient to eat the entire 200 million coins per month that get minted, and eventually enough to buy every devcoin that has ever been minted.

At that point the top of that pile of buy offers will be a pretty secure floor on the price, since it would take every devcoin ever minted to knock it down to zero and as soon as any nibbles are taken out of the top of it I can put them back up at 350 satoshis and downward from there.

Then as more sell offers get taken I will be able to gradually increase the height of the buyside total-consumption-of-all-devcoins pile, gradually forcing the price floor upward.

Obviously this is not the strategy of a slash-and-burn farmer but rather it aims at sustainable cryptoculture.

Once DeVCoin has a solid floor, I will focus more on the next merged mined coin, and the next, and the next, and the next, until all seven child-chains of the merged mined family of coins have price-floors, all of which I will keep trying to increase in height aka price.

I do this on Vircurex of course, originally because no other altcoin exchange seemed responsible about what coins to list, and now also because those bitcoins sitting there in lowball buy-offers earn "interest" from Vircurex's fees so even if no one ever sells into those offers they are earning anyway, which is super-nice and yet another reason to pick Vircurex as my exchange-of-choice.

By the way you can get a discount on trading fees at Vircurex by signing up using a refferal URL, so here is a referral URL (mine) you can use if you wish:

https://vircurex.com/welcome/index?referral_id=597-1636

-MarkM-

If you want "safe" middle term trades use MA (moving average) Indicator with 6h or 12h time interval: whenever the blue line goes above red line that's a BUY signal; when red goes above blue that's a SELL signal. For example, I'm buying Bitcoin right now because finally the blue line went above red after all the china bad news, that indicator is saying that the down trend is almost over. You can check by yourself on http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/bitstamp/btcusd

If you want short term trades MA is too slow, so you need StockRSI or MACD with 4h or 2h time interval. I do not recommed it for "trending" markets, only for "trading" market (if you don't know the difference you can read it here: http://www.ino.com/blog/2010/05/trending-and-trading-markets-%E2%80%93-finding-the-best-indicators-for-each/)

Good trading! ;)

Thanks a lot! Hopefully I become a better trader  ;D

Do you know if there is some program or automated trading that warns you when lines cross? Is it worth it to do short term trading since the trading fees for bitcoin are quite high.

Yes, but since vircurex started listing Quarkcoin and Dogecoin I start to doubt their responsibility a little bit. I Hope this will not become a trend.

Still my favourite exchange too by far.

Well I do like to put offers at every satoshi of price so DOGE looks convenient for that if nothing else.

Until they add an option to go like "spread this many coins across this price through this price on each satoshi for me okay thanks that is cool".

(It takes many many 16+ hour days of just sitting there typing to do it manually, even if skipping by 1000 satoshis at a time then going back in filling in the 500's then going back in and filling in the 250's etc etc etc and after many days I am still skipping by 5's on some coins.)

-MarkM-

I think you could use their trade API with cronjobs on your server to do exactly that.

I just started trading recently and I've learned the biggest obstacle to overcome is patience.

20-50% daily fluctuations on the altcoins are very common.  When you see a coin's rate go up by 20% over a few hours it's easy to think "Holy crap this is it!  It's going through the roof!  Buy all I can!"  The reality is, that's just a normal day.

Turning a 500% or 1,000% profit on a coin is purely luck.  It happens, yes - but there are so many coins out there, it's tough to keep an eye on them all, including constantly lurking on forums for news/developments that might cause a coin's value to skyrocket.

I think alot of people who lose in the market are thinking (hoping) they can make big money in a few hours time rather than days or weeks time.  They see a coin up by 150% on CoinMarketCap.com and think "Man - if I had invested $500 this morning, I would have made $1,000 already!"  So, they look for a coin that is up by 20%, buy it, and hope it goes up by another 30-100%.  This is a great way to lose $$.

85% of the time, every big rally of 20-50% is followed by a decline of close to the same amount a day or two later.  Look at the 24h and 1-week lows, buy somewhere near these lows, hold for a few days, and sell at 30-50% profit.  Yes, we would all love to see our investment triple or quadruple (or more) over a day or two's time.  Yes, sometimes you will regret selling at 50% profit when you check the chart a day later and realize you could have made 80% or 100%. 

For me, I'm perfectly content with turning 2.0 BTC into 2.5-3.0 BTC over a 24-hour period.  Doesn't sound like much but it compounds very quickly. 

Assuming 30% profit on every investment:
Turn 2.0 BTC into 2.6 BTC on day 2 of trading
Turn 2.6 BTC into 3.38 BTC on day 4
Turn 3.38 BTC into 4.3 BTC on day 6
Turn 4.3 BTC into 5.7 BTC on day 8
Turn 5.7 BTC into 7.4 BTC on day 10

In a week and a half, you earned 5.4 BTC (roughly $4,000)

I agree that patience is one of the biggest problems.

Also the desire to trade at all times.

Suppose you just won 100% profit. You should then not think that you have to reinvest all this money in a new gamble immediately.

That's how you'll lose everything in the end.

You have "to sit on your hands" most of the time, as they say.

Wait for the really exceptional trade opportunities that appear from time to time, those trades that make sense and you really believe in.
(like a solid coin with long established history and good community, that has an extremelly low price for some reason)

Don't look for good trades all the time, because most of the times good trades are not available.
And then your brain plays a trick on you and imagines the lesser of all bad trades to be a good trade... that's when you will lose.

Trading is tricky. You must synch with the momentum of each coin you trade.
Watch it for a week, or more, then trade it.

i think you are from financial trading to crypto trading
technical trading is hard bcoz we don't have indicators and candle charts for all crypto currencies

so batter you trade fundamental
use good money management for safety of invested fund

There are Indicators and technical graphs for Bitcoin, Litecoin, PPCoin, and Namecoin, but yeah I don't campare classic tradig with crypto. In classic trading if you get 100% return in less than 6 months you're a genius, but in Crypto I can get 100%return in less than a week.

www.bitcoinwisdom.com
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv

My trading trick # 1:

Buy WorldCoin and do not sell.
If you trade it, you will win in terms of dollars but probably loose in terms of WDCs. You know, it is impossible to loose dollars with WDC - if you loose dollars, it means you are a horrible trader.
Now it is quite cheap so it is excellent time to hoard.

there are indicators and charts for only few crypto coin not all
also crypto coins can't be traded technical analysis i think

From time to time I see large pumps that lead to a sudden 300% value increase. How are people initiating such a pump able to profit from it since many times the prices plumits right after.

300% of what? How many bitcoins did it cost them to eat that far into the sell side of the order-book?

Might it merely be people who decided what to buy and simply bought it?

For example right now you can buy DeVCoin for less than 100 satoshis a coin. If someone decided they wanted to buy a few hundred million to put away for a few years or for their expected child's college fund or whatever, they would drive the price up almost a satoshi per half-million coins.

They might figure so what, the average price they'd get them for would still be less than 350 satoshis per coin even if they bought pretty much the entire sell-side of the order-book, and be happy with that figuring by the time their descendants dig out the pieces of the cold-wallet and put them together to get at the coins they will be worth thousands of satoshis per coin or more...

Or look at I0Coin or IXCoin, many times all you can see on the sell-side is my offers to sell 10 of them, and not even ten at each satoshi of price, heck sometimes many of the offers are 25 satoshis apart as I first put offers at each thousand then at each 500 then at each 250 and so on, when you see an offer every five it means I have that part of the price range getting close to being fully populated - but only with initial sketch offers of 10 coins. Someone who decides they want a few thousand clears a huge swathe of such offers. Same applies on the buy side, I can try to pile up little offers all the way up to try to get the buy side up close to the sell side after someone did a buy that cleared a huge swathe of the sell side, but someone dumping a few thousand blows them all away in one buy too.

It is going to take time to build up large enough offers, densely enough packed, on both sides of all the order-books even on an exchange like Vircurex that doesn't spam the user with billions of worthless coins making the job of filling the order-books ever harder.

Hopefully VIrcurex will add an option soon to let you tell it to fill all prices between a start price and an end price with offers using X number of whatevers, then people will be able to re-fill such gaps in the order-books a lot easier. But as far as I know Vircurex is the only exchange that is even considering making such an option available so expect massive gaps on other exchanges even after Vircurex has that tool in place.

-MarkM-

Cool. So this explains why you sometimes see this complete straight lines in the graphs going up or down. Because  all these linear spaced buy or sell offers get fulfilled.

On btc-e you can download MT4 and use it interface, signals, rules and other trading instruments.

Who wouldn't be content with turning 2 BTC into 2.5-3 BTC in 24 hours?  It's a bit silly to think that you or anyone could sustain that kind of return day after day.  Apart from the fact that you won't always enter a winning trade, the market liquidity is not there to sustain that kind of growth.  The 24 hour trade volume on many coins isn't even a few Bitcoin, so trading any significant volume will move the markets far too much.

In saying that, if I could even guarantee a 1% return per day while compounding my gains, I could turn $1,000 into $37,783.43 in one year.  I'd be extremely happy (and rich) if that was not just being delusional.

By the way, $1,000 at 30% per day compounded daily over the course of one year would net you $388,439,683,864,471,242,462,639,369,352,853,954,800,648,192.00

If you have amazon prime you can borrow this in the kindle library for free

http://amzn.com/B0091XN1KS

Not altcoin specific but what every trader must know to survive long run. (Disclaimer, I might have penned it, but it's true all the same. Good luck...)