Bitcoin Forum

I wanted to ask any professional traders or people with more experience what they do when markets stop moving and there isn't much activity going on. I realise this is a pretty noobish question but I'm teaching myself how to buy in a disciplined way because I've found I always keep making life harder for myself by panic buying into an altcoin. Do you think it's a good idea to just hang back and observe the prices rather than just rush in and wait for a sensible low price to pop up or is it sometimes worth the risk if you think there's going to be a surge of buyers coming in?

For me I've found that a price rise never usually happen fast and when I buy in at what I think is a new low it always drops further meaning I have to wait longer in order to make any money but I don't like the idea of a price spike suddenly happening and me not being there for the profit taking. :(

You hodl.

I'm not a pro trader by any means... but one choice is just to hodl if you're feeling nervous, and might not be a bad idea. But another method would be to set entry/exit points and stick with them. It's going to be unprofitable for awhile but should make up for itself hopefully once a new trend sets in, which is rarely long in the world of bitcoin. Things do seem to be slowing down though, all this sideways/oscillating movement for the past week has kind of sucked.

GO DACNING!  :D

Maturbate - If the price don't move at least you will.

look at the logarithmic chart for the past couple of years at http://bitcoincharts.com/

Try drawing a straight line somewhere "fair" between the highs and the lows. Choose a few points on this line from the time when you will have your money ready. Check the corresponding prices.

Depending on how long you will stay in for and also the market conditions at the time you might decide to give yourself some leeway with the actual price you will pay: a lot of positive news coverage / near-future events for example might make you may decide to buy in a little higher than the line.

In my humble opinion this method will work for most people looking at investing for 6 months to several years from now. Some might disagree with me, saying that a few months is too short-term, but given the current situation if you buy in between the extremes at some point now I think you will soon be sitting pretty.

Sell all your coins on an exchange then use the resulting money to leverage short on Bitfinex as much as possible. After that borrow as much money as possible and use that to get even more margin for your short and max it out.

Only this way you can get a feeling how the dumber half of this forum feels right now. They're just leverage long... :P

Seeing the effects of hacks, hype, news, etc. on prices throughout this year it is safer to look at the "long" term. Leveraging your bets on something that swings so much on news and whale trading is playing Russian roulette.

Just wait till the holidays are over. I would think most people are looking for tax deductions right now.

Meaning?

Set up a buy order for a coin you want at a LOT lower price than you think is reasonable and then chill. Either it'll hit or it won't. Give it a few days. You'll be surprised how low markets can go!

Be prepared to move your orders - my lowest orders never get filled !  :D

I'm no expert but have read quite some on trading.

Traders hate markets that go sideways. Markets must go up or down so you can go long or short.
A diehard trader will pull out his money and invest it in another market that does go up or down. Why wait (hodl) if you can hop on a train that is going somewhere.

Bitcoin is another game alltogether. If it moves it goes so fast that you better hodl until it goes to da moon or you will miss a lot of money.
No other investment can go up 10-100% in a matter of hours and has a long-term uptrend since it was invented. With normal stocks you hope to make 10% in a year.

If there's a period of relative stability (and that's a big if right now) it's time to look into the alt markets.

There's not much stability in BTC but when it does happen I've noticed a marked increase in the trading of alts resulting in some very large price movements.

Stare at charts all day piecing together useless TA and tinfoil hat conspiracy theories while accomplishing absolutely nothing.

Work hard at a job and invest when it crashes. Has worked for me for 2 years.

I do absolutely nothing when a market stagnates.  Overtrading can be your worst enemy (well, one of your worst enemies - there are plenty of them when trading).  In fact, tradeable opportunities are few and far between.  In the past year, there have only really been 4 tradeable opportunities on a daily chart and these are still very difficult to spot in real time.  I try to take only the most obvious of obvious trades and I am often wrong.

2013 has been very generous to the bulls, including me.  I don't know what 2014 has in store, but good luck.

I'm with Ben.
What ever your position is right now, hold it and sit on your hands. Set a stop sell (if long) or a stop buy (if short) and wait. It'll break this consolidation soon enough.

Its good to hear an honest post amongst all the bs and hubris. There's a degree of luck in trading that people often overlook.

Its 80% predicting human behavior.

In all honesty, the best thing to do is buy.

Stability fuels the rocket.

Thanks for all the posts guys that was really helpful, looks like I should work on my manga and jewellery some more ;P I don't have enough Bitcoin that I can make people think twice about selling or buying so it's better for me to just wait until I break even and get the hell out.

I guess you could call this hodl-ing.

Teen: You guys holding?

Jay: Shit, everything but coke, heroin and your cock.

You can trade the small movements with an automated bot, which is impossible to do by hand. Or you can sit back, relax, and buy any dips. You also can use bitcoin for buying goods since the price is stable. What you definitely should not do - is stare too much at the charts because then you would be impulse-trading tiny movements, which are, all of the time, just meaningless noise. Set buy orders 10%, 20%, 30% below current price and you don't have to even look at the price for days.

Woot more advice :P Yeah, I've gone ahead and just sold to get out, I only was on a very minor loss so I'm okay with that and I didn't want to have to worry about the price dropping more, time to exercise some buying patience now I've learned how to hold so I can get the best deal.

I wish games like X Rebirth were working properly because then I'd just go and play that instead :(

My condolences. Selling bitcoin with small profit is pretty silly, selling bitcoin at a loss, didn't think it is possible. Well, everyone must make mistakes I guess.

Not the right time to sell at a loss... sorry!

EDIT: Not that it is ever really the right time to sell at a loss (presuming no medical emergencies etc)  :)

lol! Well it was only something like 0.009 so I'm okay with that, I'm trading altcoins because I want more Bitcoins and don't care for paper money, plus it will help me pay for stuff, I haven't done too badly for myself really considering I only started out with £8 worth that I mined. I currently have around £80 in profit so in the end if it goes disastrously wrong I'll have only lost £8 but I don't want to do that because I've got plans.

It is really difficult to make sure you don't impulse buy for sure but if I've taught myself to hold I can teach myself to buy in a disciplined way as well.

Well then you are safe with your rather large profit margin! Still not the time to sell though, he he  :D

Yeah, just need patience and other things to occupy myself with while the cryptocurrencies do their thing >_< what I find baffling is I've actually seen Dogecoin and PPCoin have a crazy spike in activity but I'm not falling for it! No! :P

Perhaps I need to get more motivated and follow some of the pump and dumps, but I just can't get enthusiastic about them!  :D

I stay away from those pump and dumps like the plague myself especially if the coin doesn't have anything behind it.

I usually use this period to buy into large dips

Take no notice of this chump Lethn.

He tried to laugh me out the place when I announced that I was selling $1100 coins for $1000, and buying back in between $600 - $700.

He said to me that I would be, "crying when I was buying back in at $1300"

(I was laughing when I plunged back in at an average of $640 and then sold at average of $880).

But you trade on Bitstamp don't you? How did you sell at $880? It hasn't got near that price (not even on Gox) since the time you must have "plunged back in" (I've been aware of your strongly bearish sentiments up until recently so this trade must have been over the last few days). Do you have another outlet?

I did well on Dec 2013 crash Mk I. I bought in at average price of $640 and sold on average at $880.

Dec 2013 crash Mk II I did not so good on. I had my original buy-ins at $400 - $500, but had spent too much time on forums like this listening to all dearanged idiots with their '2 da moon' and 'hodl' nonsense. Although I make a show of shooting these muppets down and I do like to remind Paramida as much as possible about his general wrongness on Bitcoin since Dec 2013, I  do actually think it was a post that he made stating:

"Lol, Sooooo many people have their buy-ins at $500 - $600, that it just isn't going to happen"

That somehow managed to fk with my own prognosis on Bitcoin.

With allowing my mind to be too exposed to all this sort of talk I decided that I had better raise by buy-in tranches to be sure I don't miss out. So I did. I raised em up $100 to $500 - $600. Of course, it hit as low as $380. The news was horrific at the time and the chart consisted of waterfall after waterfall, therefore I started 'babysitting' my investment and lost my nerve after a bounce back to $550 subsided to sub $500 and started to form a 'bearish' pennant on the 5 min chart. I therefore took the decision to 'cut my losses' and sold everything at $490. Two hours later it was away up at $600. Now we are in low $700 range. So my weak nerves turned what could have been a 2000 GBP profit into a 900 GBP loss.

Although I done badly here, I did at least place my bets and my predictions in the right direction, in stark contrast to the bulk of the 'advice' administered on Bitcoin nutter forums such as this one.

I don't give a fk about being a 'bear' or a 'bull', I am only interested in winning, but especially interested in not losing. I bought some coin at $720 the other day, just as soon as slight bullish trend had confirmed. BTC got as high as $765 and I ended up selling at $750. Since then, slight bearish trend has reconfirmed. With that in mind, Bitcoin right now is not a buy for me at these prices. For me to buy a $700 Bitcoin, the market will have to be pointing blatantly upwards or it would have had to have trended in this range for a good few weeks, if not months. Otherwise I have my buy-ins set for $100 - $250, but will keep my eyes on market for opportunities.

I respect everyone's own decision to make their strategies, plans for their Bitcoin and crypto investment portfolios. Everyone's entitled to their own opinions, however i know you've been around since March around the same time i joined in, so you bought in some stash at significantly lower prices, when you bought it again in December you say purchased at the $400-$500 range, an excellent large-dip entry actually (from $1250 ath).

Still your cost average should be fairly low even with those prices, why didn't you just hold on to your cost averaged-coins? It may have been a better strategy than chasing the prices.

Bitcoin breaking April's $250 ATH is very unlikely imo, we will need some major negative news (like an american ban, which seems more and more unlikely with latest developments)

Just my 2 satoshis

$250 is not going to happen. $450 is right on when looking at the past.

American ban is not going to happen. Quite the opposite is happening and there is absolutely no reason why it will stop.

I never invested in Bitcoin in earnest until late November. Before then, Bitcoins bought and spend in their hundreds on Silk Road.

Of course, back in 2012 and  even 2011 I had always talked a lot about investing 1000 GBP into Bitcoin (that would have netted me 100K) but never did, and after the April 2013 crash, I predicted a life cycle of repeating bubbles and bursts for Bitcoin until one day, the whole thing became completely untenable and was replaced by some establishment alternative. With that said, you would have thought that I would have made an investment.....but.......

Am I annoyed with myself that I haven't been involved in the investment opportunity of a lifetime until it was (possibly) too late?

Oh yes!


Like almost everyone else on here, you are simply talking your book.

With Bitcoin, everything is possible. This has been proven on upside and downside many times already. U think that the only extremes to come are upside extremes? If I had your confidence, I would be going all in....but I don't. So I won't.

It's NOT too late. The fundamentals are simple. Supply is fixed (capped, to be precise) and the demand keeps growing. Buy and wait for a year. Even just a small amount, trade with the rest or whatever you want. You'll see.

I prefer to call it putting my money where my mouth is  ;D 

If I thought the 3rd leg down was still going to happen I would be waiting still. I am invested now because I believe it is the right moment to be so. Time will tell whether I am right or wrong.

Actually so far not everything is possible with Bitcoin, including the important point that after a bubble the price is left very significantly higher than it was in the run up, the lowest drop after the pop doesn't touch the run up price either, etc.

Of course I am basing my predictions on past performance - it is an important indicator and you have to start somewhere when trying to work out what is possible and what is not. I also try to take into account what's going on practically speaking such as adoption, government responses, etc. When I say that there is no reason for the positive momentum with the government in America to stop it's because I can't see one. Perhaps you could give me a good reason why you think America will ban Bitcoin? I haven't discovered one anywhere.

Can I ask in relation to looking at the historical charts, can't you see that $450 as a low is at least a reasonable proposition this time? Yes there will be swings up and down but can't you see that $750 is also a reasonable price at the moment? I'm talking about trying to read the mid to long term market of a couple of months to a couple of years, not trying to day trade a crash based on chance news.

If I may say I think you might be having a problem understanding Bitcoin's growth rate. I know the prices are jumping like mad but one of the earlier bubbles was far more extreme (it was just in dollars not 100s of dollars). My advice - and of course you are completely free to ignore it if you wish - is not to base your assessment on the linear price but to look at the logarithmic charts, to do some research about how many people may start using Bitcoin in some way or another next year, and to make a plan from now until the end of 2014 that involves one simple purchase and no day trading. You will have a good chance of success.  :)

this has worked wonders for a gr8 many bitcoiners

Living the DREAM BABY! Living the dream!

http://www.overflow.biz/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/25419991.jpg

LMAO!

You hodl.

I am so grateful that adblock takes away images as well lol :P Yey! The markets are coming back to life now! Should be interesting when next year gets back to normal and January starts properly.

I have increased my holdings 40% since the beginning of December buying between $400-600. Been doing lots of buying low selling high.

Now that market has stabilized recently I have reverted to my buy and hold strategy, last buy orders went around $640.

I believe in Bitcoin long term so I'm staying in as much as possible.

I wait for a big crash like this.