Bitcoin Forum

how to time the market?

As markets move through the stages of the price cycle, moving from downtrends into sideways accumulation, and from sideways accumulation into uptrends, eventually cycling into sideways distribution and finally new downtrend, there is always some genius who thinks that the bottom is in or the high has been made.

Occasionally they are right, but even then, they get out too early and rarely exploit the true potential of their position, typically exiting without any understanding of return on risk.

As Bitcoin continues its accent, the bullish articles continue unabated with one article (in a respected high circulation publication) claiming the cause of the rally was Bitcoin’s RSI, relative strength indicator, reading.

If some a trader really knows how to time the market properly,he will never share his knowledge for free.
Why creating competition,when he could get all the profits.

The weekly RSI definitely seems to be timed perfectly with the recent bull run, however, if you look at the weekly RSI during 2017, it was overextended for months up to 90 points several times and nothing happened. Bitcoin was able to climb from 800$ to 20000$ through a whole year with the RSI being overextended most of the time, the monthly RSI was through the roof at 97 points and nothing. While I agree that the RSI can be a good indicator, it is certainly not that important because it cannot take in count the buying or selling pressure accurately when FOMO or fear settles in.

there are no 'natural' trends.
there are no 'natural' market cycles

what occurs is some stupid trend anal guy see's 2013's rise.. sees late 2017 rise and shouts out "every 4 years theres a cycle"

what not been told is the 2013 rise was due to the invention of asics
what not been told is the 2017 rise was due to the invention of futures options

2 separate events, 2 events not tied to each other, 2 events that wont repeat
but now. because of trend anals. people start programming their bots that in 2021 expect another big event. (facepalm)

the foolish part is. then a group of bots plans to buy during 2017-2021 with the hope to exit at the preached facepalm date
theres also a group that think due to halvening of 2012 and 2016 they need to buy before 2020.

this causes bot programmers to set thousands of bots to buy early. to get best prices
thus causing rampant price rises.
not due to any actual natural proved trends. but simply reactions of hearing that someone preached something wil happen.

its like self fulfilling prophecy or better known as pump and dumps.
announce something will happen that wont happen if you kept mouth shut. but you cause it to happen just because you opened your mouth,

so here is a simple lesson.
if you think you can predict the future. thousands of others have thought the same thing and set their bots to do so. so by the time you want to act on your plan. others already have.. and you end up too late.

same goes for price dips
the 2014 dip and 2018 dip was not "trend" but was mtgox and a mix of futures sell off and next gen asic where old gen were sold off causing mining to get cheaper thus pools selling at less and still profiting.

this does not mean there is a natural "winter dip" as the events are unrelated and next winter wont occur again. but now bots have been programmed to foolishly think there would be a winter dip and so they will do things before winter,

so again if your planning on a winter dip. thousands already have and so they will react before winter to effectively maybe cause a autumn dip before the preached winter dip.

so here is a simple lesson.
if you think you can predict the future. thousands of others have thought the same thing and set their bots to do so. so by the time you want to act on your plan. others already have.. and you end up too late.

you CANNOT predict the future. because by the time you think you know. everyone knows and everyone has planned to act before it

trend anals are not predictors. they are pump and dump preachers. they say something will happen at Z so that people react and try to get in early at Y so that the preacher can get in at X and get out at Z. leaving anyone hoping to see Z as those left too late holding the bag

Really? Can real traders know the timing? If so, these people would make money all the time. Does anybody make money like that?

On a weekly timeframe, one of the things I can see to see the right timing market is an entry on a particular day. For me on Thursday-Saturday is the time to take entry and between Monday-Tuesday is the time to exit. Even though this cannot be generalized, you should try analysis and apply it first to some coins that you might like.

there is no timing strategy.
no one can predict a future movement of speculation. but they sure as hell can be a preacher and cause a pump and dump.
people say they have strategy groups people can join purely to get naive people in to invest when preached at.
what they dont realise is the preacher making the calls already bought in. and letting th naive investors DO the pumping. and while the preacher is shouting "look i told you it would go up" (but only due to his preach) the preacher is getting ready to exit.
leaving the naive investors stuck at the top while the preacher causes the dump

same goes for trend anals as explained in last post i wrote. they are not predictor guys, they are preachers hoping to get naive viewers to react to their preaches to actually cause the thing thats preached.

your are simplifying the market and over generalizing all the things you said. it is not that simple at all. bitcoin is rising not because of RSI or anything like that, it is rising because it is being adopted more and more. in simple terms more money is coming in every day! and supply is limited.

your initial statements are mostly true about altcoins. they get pumped and go high then they start dumping while people think it is the bottom but they get dumped more.

I became a trader for a long time and only recently have I experienced a considerable loss, with 1 late reason to sell. I don't understand for before if maybe there is a time to set the market, and far from my mind. Because I also often experience considerable profits in weekly trading. For now I don't want to comment too much, because I stopped trading for a while. While waiting for capital.

I had the same experience as well but instead of being late to sell I fell asleep I lost 300mbtc(the price of btc was 1.3k$ at the time)that day.
I was focusing on trading back then and have little to no sleep since I still have a day job. after losing 300 mbtc I stopped trading completelty
because I am too shocked about losing 300mbtc. I know 300mbtc may not be a lot back then but in my country that could provide me for months.

the trick for timing the market is always to figure out the market trend itself. and then as soon as you figure that out, you have to go with that trend instead of against it. for example in 2018 the dominating trend was downwards and going against it would have meant a lot of losses. and now in 2019 the dominating trend is upwards and going against that will similarly be devastating.
of course that is the big longer term trend not the short term fluctuations which have their own micro trends. but I focus on the bigger picture because it is easier to grasp.
doing some TA is always good but you should never rely on it because it is unreliable as it is and it gets less reliable when you enter a small market like bitcoin.

If only by chance alone

Unless you are an insider like a major exchange or a high-tier member of the SEC (or similar authority), your only chance to time the market is by luck alone. To most of us price action is just a random walk. Of course, you can build complex theories in hindsight but they will only be post hoc rationalizations of the unpredictability and randomness of the market at the most basic level (read, for the majority of ordinary traders). But that in itself doesn't mean the market is as unpredictable and random at higher levels of market participation (exchanges) or governance (authorities)

  Youve got a wise decision mate, because the current market has suffering volatilization and it is hard to determine on when does the stabilization will totally exceed. And I believe that trade is about our individual statistic to create liable outcome.

I agree with the follow the trend but its not that easy to see the trend, some of them could be manipulative and sometimes the trend can quickly shifting, I think TA itself will help a lot to give you good insight of the market trend, you need to combine few indicators and the news to get the timing

This is all in an unpredictable movement, You can not time the market movement with a long term analysis but you can always do a short term one and most traders are just using a short term one to make some earnings with it, But if you are talking about the trends and the bottom rally many speculators are looking back at the previous movement Bitcoin have, And that is how they can tell of how the market will move, But many are relying also on news because there is a chance that the movement will sure follow the news if it is a positive or a negative one.

The trend can indeed change quickly and surprise you when you're mainly working with very small time frames. If you however focus on the longer time frames, trends usually take a while to have a confirmed change.

There are people who consider the last few weeks to be very bearish, while if you look at the last 6 months, the trend is still very bullish. As long as the longer term trend is bullish there isn't anything to worry about.

At the end of the day, people who aren't trading regularly shouldn't pay attention to the short term fluctuations. If you're in for the long term and just sit on your coins, then why does it matter what the price today or tomorrow is?

The best tip is to do the exact opposite of what the traders are telling you to do. They are just in it to get their profits no matter what the cost is, you are either buying their dumps or selling them too cheap.

Your analysis sucks. Both 2013 and 2017 spikes were 100% due to halvings. Most coins for sale are newly mined, which is why halving this supply has such a dramatic impact. It doesn't go up smoothly because that's not how this market works - it way overshoots, overcorrect then settles back down to a price 10x+ what it was before the previous halving. Then the whole process repeats.
Everything you mention, asics, mt gox, futures, icos, is all just blah blah blah coincidental bullshit events people use to try to understand what is a naturally occuring event that was purposefully built into bitcoin. And it works, exactly as intended. The real reason people lose money is they don't want to use what they feel as "real" money to buy it and wait. They want to make free bitcoin doing short term trading, which is nothing more than gambling.
The song lyric "stealin' when I should have been buying" comes to mind.

I used to try to use TA with crypto but generally speaking it's mostly useless from what I've seen.  50% of the people that use it are right, 50% wrong (generally speaking).  Buy, hold, and enjoy life much better than trying to time markets.  If you lose out on 10-20% than so be it, you can lose a lot more by being wrong using TA.

But gaining bitcoin through trading seems like such a better option - until they realize that it's more likely they will lose it instead.
I get it, it's hard to throw money at a gamble - the trick is to stop looking at bitcoin as a gamble and look at it as a solid investment.

That's a rather bold statement

Especially the part about Mt Gox. It seems like it is you who needs a strong reality check here. Really, if the 2013 and 2017 surges were mostly due to halvings (as you claim), you will have a difficult question to answer, a difficult problem to solve. That is, if it really were thanks to halvings, how come that the price crashed 5 times in 2014 from the 2013 highs and over 6 times in 2018 after the 2017 peak? Did halvings get canceled or what?

in other words you are saying everything else was completely meaningless and noise. all the adoption, all the countries regulating  bitcoin with a friendly attitude, removing taxes on bitcoin payments and making them legal, media like for instance Goldman Sachs advertising bitcoin every week in 2017 and hundreds of others were nothing! price only went up because block reward halved. :D

by that logic any shitcoin out there should also go up to the same price levels as bitcoin since 90% of them are copies of bitcoin.

It's either meaningless noise, or it was timed to take advantage of the year following the halving like the icos, but yeah - the price would have done this with or without all of these events. That's what I'm saying.
And pretty much every significant coin also spiked during the last 2 halving spikes as well.

Trading is less risky than gambling and I think many people in this field of cryptocurrency will agree with me on this. Whoever said gambling is better should try and test the two as I have done and come out with the results. Developing your knowledge on how to trade professionally should be what we should expired for as a cryptocurrency enthusiast.

The trick is to not attempt to time the market.

When I consider the price to be low enough I start dollar cost averaging on the way down after every 10-20% decrease. If you keep buying you'll eventually buy the bottom or very close to it. My lowest entry point so far is $3300 which is pretty damn close to what right now looks like the bottom. If the price would have fallen below $3000 I would just continue buying, no difference there.

Last year I started a bit too early dollar cost averaging between $6000-$7000 but this year even these relatively higher entry points have turned into paper gains.

Short term trading isn't less or more risky than gambling, its the same thing.

Selection bias, anyone?

Or rather the Dunning–Kruger effect in action? If you can't earn money via short-term trading or just come to think that no one can (other than by pure luck as in gambling), that doesn't make the whole assertion necessarily true. Or is it more like "If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts"? Not that I particularly care, I'm more interested in finding out how far people are willing to go down the rabbit hole

Short term trading is gambling nothing more nothing less.  There isn't an argument that can be had to say short term trading isn't gambling.  Do people make money, yes.  Do people lose money, yes.  Just like at gambling.  The longer you gamble and short term trade the higher probability you will lose money.

Timing the market is very hard even if you use many indicators because its really unpredictable. Listening to the news can be more effective because in the past years bitcoin always move accordingly if there’s a negative or positive news. If you do make analysis, you will know when to enter but it doesn’t mean thay you enter at the right time there’s still a chance for a dump or pump so better to be contented of what you have already. 

As stated a lot of times and as the features itself explain everything that can't be predicted.
If that person knows what will happen next, will probably is the person who controlled the market. But we are a decentralize one and everything went in accordance to the market demand. All TA's seems not usable cause it is still in prediction and can't be near into actual event.

I wouldn't say that. The signal-to-noise ratio is worse at lower time frames but not impossible to overcome. I've successfully employed scalping strategies in the past but in general it's too involved and stressful, and my win rate is much worse than with swing trading. You really have to "grind it out" with day trading, putting in lots and lots of trades.

Bubbles are the time when leverage day trading BTC really pays off. Under those conditions you can just keep rebuying oversold conditions on the 1min-5min charts over and over all day. Every once in a while a flash crash will crush your position but overall longing BTC in 2017 was like taking candy from a baby.

I prefer the tried and true method of buying and holding, especially when prices are depressed. I think basic technical analysis indicators - such as support and resistance levels, moving averages, and chart patterns - provide short-term insights, but it's worth noting how wrong technical analysts have generally been about bitcoin. Technical analysis works with a healthy dose of acknowledgement about its limitations.

Yeah,  i can say that timing is the most important thing.
A trader and Bitcoin investor should know when to trade and what's the right time to do it.
I have seen many newbies, just wait when the price will fall down, so that they will buy the coin.
But according to me, they make the mistakes by doing it so.
We need be smart enough to know when to invest.
So better before investing in the coin, look at it's growth graph.
This will be the perfect timing.

And that's the whole problem

People think something is impossible because, well, they think it is impossible. But whether it is actually impossible still remains an open question. Technically, this logical fallacy is called a hasty generalization (or blanket statement). As an illustrative example, if I can't speak Swahili, does it mean that no one can? In this case, the falseness of possible generalization (that no one can speak Swahili because I can't) is pretty obvious but this variety of fallacy is more widespread than most people think and this is not a false generalization in itself

you have any data to back that up? especially since the OTC market is so opaque?

i'm sure the halvings have an effect in a general sense---they slow the inflation rate. but tying it price events by time? that's a long shot. we're better off just saying bitcoin is long term bullish, partly due to its supply dynamics. bitcoin's fundamentals have been drastically changing over its 10 years of existence---more is going on than inflation slowing. the bubbles are just as much about massive pent-up demand as they are about dwindling supply.

If we know how to time the market, we will make a big profit and will always make a profit. But unfortunately, we don't know how to do that, and we could only make a place an order base on our prediction and analysis. The only thing we can do is only prepare for what will happen in the next moment and for people who can have the right prediction, they will make a profit.

I doubt it would be that easy to time the market. Especially oif your are a trader. We all go with speculations and sometimes go blindly with our investments. For me what is best is to know what is a legit coin or not.

I get your point although your example doesn't fit.  Trading crypto is not a science, one can learn a language with enough practice and time.  With crypto there is NO way possible to know what other buyers and sellers will do in a given period, therefore it is by chance if you make or lose money, i.e. gambling.

That's why such an assumption (that no one can learn Swahili) is a logical fallacy (a premature or hasty generalization)


Then your entire idea simply doesn't make sense

As in this case all trading is essentially gambling. Anyway, to earn dough via trading, you don't have to know what other traders (buyers as well as sellers) are going to do. And then we are basically back to square one, i.e. you think that it is impossible to earn via short-term trading (other than by luck) because you don't see a way (or rather ways) of doing that for the reasons stated. But these reasons, your reasons, are not "all-inclusive", so speak. They would probably be if the markets were perfect (and instant across the board, just in case) but they are not, and far from that, so ways of consistently trading profitably with the short term in mind are definitely possible

Can you blame them?
Not all will try to Hodl for a long time.
Some needs profits in just a manner of time with a thought that it will be for their food the whole day and some for their bills.

I understand who does that for employment is getting difficult for a lot of countries.
Just maybe, this is like their daily routine although there will also be losses if done wrong.
Just like you said, the right timing is needed.

Traders fails because they focus on timing the market, they forget to set limit no matter what the situation. Yes, we make speculation but its not the perfect way to timing the market. Its hard, and too impossible to time the market perfectly. Everything can happen, traders or investors are on risk so we should learn to buy and sell on any level. This is the biggest challenge for all, to time the market without losing.

I never said you couldnt consistently make money trading but "timing the market" is the subject header.  So if you have all the current data that is available and it points to a buy, then China "bans crypto" comes out again in the headlines and markets dump, you "gambled" because there is no way to know what news or market effect will happen tomorrow effecting your current buy signal.  It's a gamble, possibly an educated gamble but a gamble no less.

Lol fine never mind.  Trading is a calculated effort in which you can make money consistently at by using information that is both known to exist and events yet to happen/occur.  You win, I'm not too into internet defending.   :D

You said that:


By any reasonable definition, it pretty much amounts to saying just that (as you can make money in gambling only by pure luck). You see, I don't actually care a lot whether you are right or wrong here, though in this specific case you make a common error called an overgeneralization (and a thousand of different names). But since you make it sound like a strong assertion ("nothing more nothing less"), that makes it interesting and even entertaining to a degree to see how far you are ready to go in defending your position


Okay then

One side note though, just because I said short term trading is gambling doesn't imply that I said you couldnt consistently make money trading(gambling) people do it at casinos all the time.  They gamble and some consistently make money from the casinos, doesn't mean they aren't gambling  ;)

I'm not sure why you decided to continue

As now you have two contradictory statements - one above and one below:


At first you said that you can't earn money via short-term trading if only by chance as it is a form of gambling. Now you are basically going back on your words and start to claim the exact opposite, namely, that you can consistently make money via trading or gambling, which is definitely not by chance. I think before deciding on continuing you should have first made up your mind on your real point of view

It seems you are about to get lost in conflicting ideas

"Some/few" can yes by chance consistently make money gambling.  I am just stating I never said anywhere that you cant make money trading, only that it is a gamble.

This is off topic now anyway, the OP asked how to time the market.  There is no correct way to time the market.  If there was everyone would know, that's why I said it was a gamble.  Many people tried to time the market and buy dec 2017 didnt work out well for them, many people tried to time the market and sell Jan 2019, didnt work out well for them either.  Markets fluctuate and different unknown, yet to exist factors come into play in the weeks/months/years ahead that make it a risk to try to time the market.  Most people that say they can are kidding themselves.  Especially with the low volume coins in which market makers greatly decide which way the coin goes....

So to recap I'm just saying that timing the market isn't an exact science and sometimes some would say it's a gamble. Okay

Even if we hypothetically assume that you can somehow earn by chance (read, through luck alone) consistently (which, technically speaking, defies either the idea of luck or the notion of consistency), you still have to backpedal your other post in this thread:


Sorry, but it doesn't look very consistent (pardon the pun) with your new idea of earning consistently by pure luck

You are still on this?  Ok so maybe 1 out of 1000 can earn consistently trading, more can do it by gambling in the short run but as time goes on the bell curve stands correct and there are few outliers.  That satisfies my comment ok.

Technically, it is you, not me. You already departed but then decided to make a comeback


I'm not talking about outliers here

And personally, I think the percentage of successful short-term traders able to earn consistently is a lot higher than among other types of traders. The reason for this conclusion is quite simple, though not quite intuitive. First, no one can't stand losses for too long (as the suffering ends along with your account balance), but with short-term trading the losses will necessarily be, well, short term by definition (until it is a gameover for you)

So it is kind of natural selection at work where short-term traders are selected to be successful if they are to remain short-term traders and it works fast. Further, the long-term traders have the option of turning into long-term holders and ultimately into bag holders, so it is also kind of natural selection too, though in this case in works in reverse, i.e. it is a negative selection which favors losers

The bottom line and the lesson to take home is that your assertion about short-term traders being gamblers doesn't stand to scrutiny and is in fact an example of drawing incorrect conclusions from false premises. In simple terms, short-term traders are not gamblers en masse. They know what they are doing

Since this is off topic we can agree to disagree, short term traders dont know what they are doing in masse

OP in short dont try to time the market you might get burned or miss out on an opportunity.  Put your money into an idea and hold it until either you need the money, dont like the idea anymore, or have a better use for that money.  Good luck, it IS needed

It is a gamble since you are speculating on the price in the further. The unknown factor are humans making decisions and therefor unforeseen events what makes the risk.

I dare both of you to continue here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5152956.msg51422203#msg51422203) (and everyone else interested in this matter)

As long as your exit or entry is part of your plan then I wouldn't call it a mistake on the trader's part. Even if they missed the "true potential" of their position I wouldn't call it a missed opportunity as I just followed my plan and their are no assurances if I waited for too long on what will happen with my position. It's just like a game of what ifs and the favor didn't go into your part but that is how the market goes you cannot really get what you want but as long as you are satisfied and followed your trade then I cannot really call it a bad move.

Will do

I think we are not capable of trading the market as traders or noobs or anyone really because of the unexpected movements of it not because we are bad at calculating it.

Think about it there are stocks all over the world that does exactly what people expect it to do, there are a ton of banking stocks that basically became so boring that they are going up 2 pace and going down one pace and basically do that until they do x3 or x4 then have big breakdown and then redo everything again, this has been going on for over 20+ years now.

Bitcoin is not like that one day we wake up and a bull bought 500 million dollars worth of bitcoin with tether, another day we wake up mtgox trustee sells 34k bitcoins, recently just couple days ago another 25k was sold. If these insanely unexpected sudden stuff didn't happen we would totally time it perfectly but we can't really know these unexpected stuff and when they will happen.

Proper timing is really necessary to succeed in your trading but you still need to equip yourself with enough trading skills even if you know how to timing the market. They said timing is one of the major factors that separates a good trade from a bad trade, it is also determine the profitability of your trade and you can be right and but still lose money if your timing is off. But good timing might not work with the whales because it is difficult to determine their next move.

It's really not. Timing is extremely difficult, much harder than identifying likely support/resistance and reversal zones. That's why traders need to be willing to get stopped out (sometimes more than once!) but still take the same trade setup when it presents itself again.

There's nothing more frustrating than getting stopped out, selling the bottom, and then watching the chart do exactly what you thought it was going to do. It's a very common thing though. Don't let stop runs kill your whale trades!

It is really not your fault, it really takes the courageous ones like you to trade in this type of volatile market, I lost interest in trading too because it seems to me that I predict the market better when I am not trading, but the moment I decide to trade, that is when the market will choose to go against me, and I really don’t know which law of nature is controlling that.

For this reason is why for now, I just prefer to hold my coins and juts keep waiting for it to increase or some of the altcoins gets pumped for me to be able to get some money out and look for other coins that would do the same to invest in.

Look you can't time the biggest moves, there are sometimes huge moves and those are always unforeseen and can't be calculated or timed perfectly. But, if you want to time the market on regular days there is only one thing you need to do. Check the resistance points and support points.

Support points are places where there are buy orders all collectively looking high and in order to break that and go even further down there needs to be a lot of sales, resistance is just the opposite there are people selling coins at some price and in order to go above that you need to buy more than they sell. If you learn where those levels are then you can follow that path and buy during support line and sell during resistance to make the most profits.

Timing the market perfectly has always been the dream of traders and investors and for obvious reasons it is impossible to do so, that has not stopped people from trying all kind of approaches to get to their goal and if anyone has ever reached that goal you can be sure they have kept that information a secret for everyone else, but the truth is you do not need to time the market perfectly to make profits in the market, as long as you have a strategy that can get you in a position early enough then you will get profits.