Bitcoin Forum

I'm not looking to become a day trader or anything like that. I just want to find the best way to capitalize on spots if I time it right.
I'm anticipating some run-ups and I'd like to be able to take profits without placing them in added volatility. Now I haven't paid much attention to stablecoins in the past but it makes sense to use them in this way.

I'm keeping a portion of my coins on Binance... I know the risks but these are funds I want to trade with. If I feel either of these coins enjoys a run-up that looks like it will retrace I want to sell off and convert to USDT, hold that until I see it retrace, or convert to more BTC.

I'm not interested in setting up a bot or getting into margin trading or really anything else more involved than what I describe above. Any tips or advice on a better way is welcome.

The way I understand it what you're asking for is an interconversion strategy between the stable coin USDT and BTC, in which case other than looking at the candles and seeing how the bullish run progresses there's isn't much to say.

Stop-loss is important but give yourself a reasonable window on either up/down trend end. I'd say this though, things are looking greenish and if anything I'd buy BTC now and when the volatility increases convert it back to USDT - an idea  ;D

Since I'm not a real trader, I don't have any pearls of wisdom to give you--but if you're looking for stability in between altcoin trades, going the stablecoin route is probably going to be your safest bet.  If the coins you're trading are correlated in any way with bitcoin, that might be problematic if you hold bitcoin while waiting for your next trading opportunity.  I've never owned stablecoins, but I know they're made for situations exactly like this.

Right, and that's exactly what you'd be doing by holding bitcoin instead of a stablecoin.

There are some easy profits that you can achieve quickly, for example, there is a section in binance that tracks the movements of whales, a huge purchase of shitcoins can be esaily effected with next hour, you can take advantage of this feature and try to achieve 3-5% of the gains in less than an hour.
Some currencies have a good future like ADA, steller, so you can bet on the long term and buy more.
BTC/USDT is also a good way when you use it with the support levels.

I plan on making any trades manually and at spot essentially. I'm only looking to capitalize on spikes in price, and then jump back in somewhere if the price pulls back. Yes I'm anticipating upward trends for a lot of the market, so that's why I'm getting things in place at this moment.

Most of the coins aren't directly correlated, some are small projects that look to be gaining momentum. BTC is also one that I have a portion on the exchange that I'm planning to do this with as well.
Right, but I'm being greedy  :P . I'm just looking to hit those moments when we see a 3K price run-up over the course of a day or 2, which seems to be followed by a correction somewhere in the middle. Not definitely going to hit it perfect that's why it's only going to be a portion. The altcoins I will sell for BTC, but again if the price appears likely to drop off I'm probably going to use a stablecoin until I see which way it goes.

I just got to thinking that despite it being a few years now, I'm still missing out on some opportunities.

Thanks for the tip. I might check it out from time to time and see if I can pick up on the patterns. Not something I'd have a lot of time to watch. ADA is something that caught my eye last year. Someone gave a presentation about it at the meetups I was going to. Hoping to see big things in the coming years... really sick of updating the wallet though takes me forever.

I am agreed with hugeblack. I will suggest you move only to earn a little quick profits of about 3-5%. In this case, the feature of Binance that hugeblack mentioned can help you much. Also, take care of your own decisions. Only when you feel comfortable doing these things, then do it. Otherwise keep hold your capital in BTC. or withdraw it from exchange to personal wallet.

Using the huge purchase shitcoin tracking is an excellent idea. I just open an account on Binance where can i find the features you just said.

You should have said you want to Hodl and just buy and hold your coins. From the explanation you have made here it’s clear that you want to Hodl, and you can do that. You have to find good cryptocurrencies that you believe are going to be increasing in price soon, then you can buy them and hold until their price increases.

I have a friend who prefers to Hodl Bitcoin, he never bothers himself about the other cryptocurrencies, just buys Bitcoin and keeps holding the coin until the price goes up. There is the possibility of Bitcoin going up in future, though I don’t know how long you want to be holding the coins , but if you have plans to be holding for a long time, then I like to suggest you not to worry about taking out profits.

I'm still stuck at this point. You must think twice before taking this risk. Every major exchange has worst history of getting looted by hackers. I mean yeah I get it you might be needing it for quick trade whenever there is surge in the prices for that particular coin to holding. However, no coin will go up and come down in like blink of an eye.

You still get plenty of time to transfer and trade the coins.

Even stop loss is so risky since we put up big amount of money for trade. Just a thought, I am no enthusiastic trader but sure the logic shall be followed.

Then you misunderstand my intentions here. I have held my coins, and still hold the majority in personal wallets. That being said I am still looking to use a portion of that to attempt to increase my holdings. The second part of what you said is exactly what I'm doing. I'm taking stabs at projects I think have a decent future. Given that the markets are always moving I want to play with using stablecoins, as a means of maximizing my profits by trying to avoid dips.

It won't be perfect, and could lose. I'm just not interested in doing nothing when I see a decent chance to improve my portfolio.

New to crypto?? I haven't been around that long but I've seen enough 20% swings happen overnight, to know things can change very quickly. Most of the time I was no where near my wallets to do anything about it. So I am fine with the risk I am taking to trade on Binance, while it would suck I am using an amount I can lose and not be to pissy about.

I also said I have no interest in trying to play with stop/losses this is going to be me manually deciding when to trade.

No interest in holding stable coins just a tool to try and capitalize on big run-ups.

This ADA is a nightmare for me. I heard good thing about them and long ago I bought some large amount wishing them will give me good profit. My buying price was 0.00004500 BTC. Have a look on the current price now :-P

@Steamtyme, whatever you do buddy, always use Stop-loss. Don't let the greed to lose your coins like I did.

If nothing else, always keep high asks on the book where you want to exit. Spikes in altcoins (and sometimes even BTC) are often momentary, and if your orders aren't on the book, you'll miss out. That's the primary advantage of keeping coins on the exchange.


What is your primary objective, gaining BTC (stacking sats) or preserving USD? Trying to do both all the time is a good way to make terrible trading decisions.

If you've got no exit strategy, this is a good rule of thumb for trading altcoins during a BTC bull market: take 50% profit on a double (that's your principal investment). Let the rest ride.

This reminds me the time when pump and dumps on small coins was famous and I took advantage of them. There were a lot of groups that did pump and dump and in order to be more fair it gave some options (so the coins were known beforehand, changed daily which one was picked) and depending on some block mined at certain hour people bought and sold all at the same time.

In any case I just figured I could put buy orders on my bot, and tell it to buy if the price goes 10% higher and sell when it reached 50% and that is how I made my first capital in crypto world, thanks to that place I was capable of constantly being in profit, because as soon as it stopped I sold as well it didn't need to reach 50% neither. You can do the same, have a bot and put a buy order at a number it increases and put a sell order even higher.

Ah shitty I'm guessing you bought it on it's decent from ATH. I'm definitely lucky with my ADA, and am in a good position there. Though it's not going to be a quick buck but am looking forward to seeing what it does in the next year or so.

I might consider putting in a stop-loss on a few coins that either don't take off or are middling btween me pulling out my initial investment and breaking even. It's not like I'm married to any of these projects. Some I think have a bright future but others are more of an opportunity.

That's interesting to think of. Pretty sure I can come up with some reasonable and profitable spots to set a sell at for a portion of each of the coins. thanks I hadn't really considered doing this.

The primary objective is to stack sats. Ideally this will be done through my altcoin trades given ideal conditions. Apart from that I would also be looking to try and make an opportunity of a BTC price increase that happen rather fast and dramatically, this is when I would be looking to use a stablecoin to wait for a good re-entry.

I like the idea of taking my initial investment out after a 100% increase and letting the rest ride. Some of these coin that I got into after their initial run-ups this is definitely something I will implement, there are others where I'm in somewhat early and will likely wait until I see something larger. These i would like to capitalize on my risk a bit more and might wait for a 3 or 4X before pulling out my initial investment.


Solid info/advice here thanks.

It was early 2018, sometimes between January to February if I am not wrong. At that time almost all the coins were performing well, and I was hearing a lot about ADA and some other coins for long term investment. At some point I got convinced, and we all know what happened once BTC started to bottoming.

All ALT started falling too and their rate was exponential. My biggest mistake was that I did not have stop-loss. In the last few years I learnt to control my emotion, still not perfected it but it's better than ever. I am married to BTC though :-P

Edit
A lesson I want to share which is why I am editing this post - when BTC is in it's ATH, there are no long term investment with any other ALT. Always change your Stop-Loss if your ALTs are in the exchange, if they are in your own wallet then just convert them into BTC if you are married to BTC or Cash out.

It can be extremely profitable. There is a tendency for people to wait out of greed and see how high a pump goes, but in my experience that usually doesn't end well.

Lack of order book depth usually cuts both ways. Consider doing this on both sides of the book. On the buy side, we call them "stink bids." :D


If your main objective is gaining BTC (not preserving USD) then you might avoid trading against fiat at all. In a BTC bull market, there will surely be badly timed sells where you can't get back on the train. It's easy to think "it has to correct" and then it just goes exponentially higher. This is fine if your only concern is not losing USD, but if you don't want to lose coins, then you should probably be holding your value in BTC.

Think about the 2017 bull market. It was when the Winklevoss ETF was rejected and BTC corrected down hard that the altcoin bubble erupted. The ideal is to ride the money flowing back and forth between altcoins and BTC. You don't want to be stuck holding fiat during a bubble!

You can literally do what you are talking about, what other help do you need? Binance has stablecoin itself as well, I think it was USDB or something or BUSD or something and with that you could simply just trade any coin you want whenever you want and if you do not want to trade and get out, do not have to do it with fiat, just focus that on with the stablecoin and keep it at there, whenever you feel like you are ready to get back in you can get back in there.

It is a simple method yet so elegant and a lot of people do it, stay at stablecoin as long as you want to and trade whenever you want to and get back on stablecoin when you are done, thousands upon thousands of people are doing it. There is no secret or a tip that could help you any further than what you already know.

My point is that trading BTC against fiat or stablecoins is essentially the same thing.

If your portfolio is pegged to fiat value, you're probably going to be able to afford less and less BTC as the bull market continues. You'll be gaining and preserving USD value while losing BTC.

I think a better way to trade BTCUSD during active bull markets is to hold BTC (no fiat or stablecoins) and then use leverage to give yourself extra exposure to BTC. No need to go nuts with gambling; 2-3x is plenty for even experienced traders. I prefer this because it allows you to prudently take profit off your leveraged position without taking the risk of missing upside on your base BTC position. In a bull market like 2016-2017 (and that is where I think we are in the market cycle) it's just so easy to get left behind. The shakeouts happen extremely quickly, and the tendency when you're holding fiat is to wait and watch in fear instead of buying the dip.

That isn't to say go all in on BTC, or go long, at this moment. The weekly and monthly charts are showing lots of indecision. I could easily see a brutal shakeout to $10K or lower coming soon. That would be a good "buy the dip" moment if you're still holding fiat or stablecoins.

OP, you can try indexing with this index builder, https://pandaanalytics.com/index

It can help you allocate how much of each cryptocurrency to own in your portfolio, and can guide you to resize each allocation based on profitability and volatility.

Doing this manually is hard to be honest. You should use some bots like 3comma in order to automate your spot traders, else you are following some good signal providers with middle to long term signals. But for scalping , I would advice you to use  automatic trading bots since they are fast to execute your orders.

The market is really crazy and the way price manipulation going on is really bad impact on crypto market. The way shit coin pump is crazy.. Like yfi... In this market only and only big capital holder take profit because they manipulate price up and down. Leverage trading makes more risk for traders and exchanges don't think about it. Even in last dump binance not working and many people got liquidation. This should be stop

OP can develop his own bots to track markets. It is not that tough and AFAIK, he has knowledge on coding.

He already said in the OP that he does not want to use them. ::)

Aha, thats the reason why many forum users have changed focus to trading. Unlike me who has been doing it since a long time. Me just watching the waves on my older shitcoins now and selling them. ;D

Like if you bought them at this price it would be a mistake. Prices have risen and thus it is the time to dump them. Starting trading now is an incorrect one but not a bad one. 

Leverage and Spot are two different ballgames. If OP is new to trading I would suggest them Spot obviously and to stick to Spot later on because I feel it is the more safer of the two. Leverage and Margin just adds in more mental stress, which is important to minimize if you want to start healthy in this game.

Stick to bitcoins would be my advice. Time and again we have seen it prove it resilience in the same and if bought at good lows it can give good returns.

I don't believe that OP is looking for bots instead of his own. He actually wanted to trade manually and I know he has the capability to work on it or even near to perfections. Trading could only be hard if you are not comfortable with it and not your passion. No, nothing will it results good if we are not in our comfort zone.

Signals? Following those things is enough for you to drag in hell. Signals are not a thing that it helps to have better results in trading, instead of having those, we better make our own and we are also learning.

This is exactly what is getting me discourage from trading more often but I can't help it since holding bitcoin sometime becomes a little bit boring. It takes some experience for you realized that it's better holding your bitcoin instead of doing any of the suggested alternative mentioned above, whether it's trading stablecoin or trading altcoin. Many individuals don't pay attention to their sat value since they're lost in wanting to profit in USD (which they do) but loss when the sat value held is compared to their previous holding.

I understand want you intend doing OP but you just have to be conscious, I'll still vote for the holding of your sats instead of trading them for stablecoin. The rate at which bitcoin rises something's so quick that it can make you fomo into buying that'll end you having less bitcoin.

If the market situation is very bad then there will be a lot of risk in stacking if we analyze the market well and follow the trading strategies then the problem is easy to solve. But in order to make a profit you have to invest in good currency and keep it in stock. Even if the market is affected badly the difference in the price of the currency will happen but it will rise again but be careful about exchange sites.

it's gonna be a boring experience to stack sats nowadays only from spot trading since it takes time and can only benefited from price going up.
margin/futures trading is a hype lately in cryptocurrency and many traders prefer it to spot trading.
at first i avoid it as well, but now i dwell into it since i could get profit, and loss, from both up and down movement.

but if you still don't want to margin/futures trade, the best way to stack sats of course to stick with bitcoin and scan for new projects with good prospect for short term, like defi craze that we've seen lately (sell and forget, then put your profit into bitcoin).

I also prefer manual trading than using bots or margin trading. But manual trading should always monitor the market,
and you must use the stop-loss feature in case the market suddenly drops. What you did was right by saving some
coins on Binance, because we need funds to trade on Binance. It is risky, but we must be brave enough to face these
risks. The role of stablecoins like USDT is very important in trading, because I also chose USDT to secure the profit
I made. And I'll convert my USDT to Bitcoin or altcoins if the price is low enough to buy.

YFI is indeed very risky. Going up and down by hundreds of percent, that's pretty crazy these days.

The bad impact on the crypto market will indeed be felt when YFI is present. Many DEFI projects similar to the Y family have sprung up, many are even scams. Defi has a very high risk compared to ordinary crypto in general.

Many people are subject to liquidation, it is very painful when we are affected too.

Every circumstance have it own benefit but I don't think this year market will be that big as you said because the world economy and the damage causes by the pandemic will still impact the market.

Well this past week, if I had something set up I likely would have made at least one buy. I did however get something done manually before everything tanked off for a bit there. My first buy was at 3X so I took out my investment, and on the drop used that to DCA a different coin, almost caught it's low.

Apart from that I'm going to be funneling some FIAT in for more BTC, and play it by ear for the next month or so.

Hmm looks neat. I might check it out if I keep up with trading into the future. Most of my coins are of the potential "bag holder" variety. I'll either win or lose but they may become something that builds up more of a trading market in the future.
Nope. Tried to learn coding in my spare time but couldn't find a resource that I was a good fit for me. Still interests me and might be something I dabble with again in the future.
I did look into the leverage and margin side of things and decided it just wasn't for me. This is going to be a rather passive and lazy adventure for me. There are certainly markets out there I could have given it a go in, but I'm not looking to examine charts daily or hourly. Just a guy looking to grab bags and attempt to make profits

Had a good laugh this past week. I do generally tell people if I'm buying something wait a few days it will get cheaper. Most are on the mend, and are back to nearly my entry point.  ;) I'm also definitely not getting out of BTC, just expanding my portfolio a bit.

Sorry for the late reply, so I assume you would be trying to get into a long term hodl if observing charts for hours is not your thing.

There are two ways you could approach this:

1. Check the charts once to decide your buying points, make a spreadsheet to mark those. Then it is all a game of patience, buy it at the right price. I cant stress this enough, buying at the wrong point because you are becoming impatient is the bad mistake. You would have to regret it during your hodl period. If prices keep dropping, buy more at lower prices with increasing difference in price. 10kUSD+ is not a proper range to buy anything if you ask me.

So better to wait till it drops to 9k or better even lower. This would need some judgement from your part.

2. I see I was wrong about your coding skills, never mind, I know you are into mining so I have assumed that. Anyway you can take part in day trading as well if you get bots to monitor the charts. I think you might be knowing of the Gunbot developed by our very own Gunthar? Search for it if you havent already. But yes this is day trading on spot so more losing of sleep if you know what I mean. ;D

Trading BTC and ETH will be the right choice for long-term trading. Yes, in recent months, you could make a big profit on altcoins. But this is only if you sold them on time and now keep your balance in stablecoins. I am sure that many people still hold altcoins and they may lose their balance, as it was in 2017, when altcoins lost up to 90% of their value.

Bitcoin, Ethereum and using USDT to trade them would be basically ideal in any type of situation. I personally do not like USDT and would use any other if I can but the places I use usually has them. Go to binance they have their own and that is trustworthy as well, binance is huge and I do not think they will let any of that go to waste over few million stable coin neither.

So, if you move money around in those three ones, you are going to end up with a lot of profit, do not get hyped and make too quick moves and lose, make calculated moves so that you know where you are getting in and where you are getting out. In a yearly move bitcoin gives possibility as much as 10x if you buy at the right bottom and sell at the right top but it is a big challenge.

Well, the problem is with timing it right, you can’t really time it right unless you will have to depend on certain events that takes place for your timing it properly. But sometimes these events might be ones that won’t even have any effect, that’s another problem. Events you can use as example, like the Halving and pandemic, these two things affected the price, especially the pandemic.

The pandemic was a big opportunity to buy Bitcoin , but so many people didn’t realize that, instead of investing their money they were busy asking some dumb questions like whether Bitcoin will ever recover from the low price and whether it’s dead.