Bitcoin Forum

I have woken up to some surprises some good some bad. If you are day trading and not planning on going long but are actively trading daily, before you go to bed each night should you put some stop limit sell orders in just incase it crashes over night especially when we have seen the price double this month, meaning it could go back down to 15k btc quite quickly, is it just common sense to set orders for your worst case scenario before you go to bed or plan on not being able to trade for twelve hours or so? I really worked hard to trade my small amount of money up to what it is now. I would hate to see all that work gone one morning because the market does something crazy like it always does. What do you guys do? When it goes below 30k$USD I plan on selling off most of my coins that way I have locked in my profits keeping only a small amount to play around with. My successes so far has been a bit of education combined with a bull market so when I do something stupid I can just wait and renter the market. 

This just happened to me so I would say you should really set your stop-loss before you sleep. I have an open position of this particular crypto and I'm confident that I won't get liquidated so I didn't set my stop-loss. I check it every time I get to wake up in the middle of the night and it's still fine but when I wake up in the morning I have no open order anymore meaning I got liquidated. What's funny is after it hit my liquidation price it started dumping hard.

It makes a lot of sense to use stop losses in a day trading perspective and I personally don't even know a single active trader that doesn't use it. The question is really not if you should use stop loss orders or not, but at what price should you set them? That's where it gets quite subjective; and you'd need to figure that part out yourself depending on what you're trading.

Shower thought. Can anyone, that’s not the exchange itself, see all the automatic stop-limit sell orders placed by other traders? The market makers of the exchange perhaps? If yes, then I believe that it would definitely NOT be wise.

It all depends on your trading goals. I used to use overnight stop-limits, but after few pleasant and not so pleasant surprises, I start to cancel all orders before going to bed.

Now I keep running just a few slow bots for specific markets and nothing mad-moving like BTC/USD. This improved my sleep quickly as before that I had the bad habit of checking my orders mid-night.

I think daytrading should be about trying to guess the local highs and lows, so you should be closing all your positions when you aren't ready to trade. With how volatile crypto is, it's very likely that your stop-loss orders will be filled, so you would still be losing money. If you were trading like normal, you could have noticed an unfavorable pattern and closed your positions way earlier than a stop loss would occur. The only way to keep daytrading while away is with bot, but you need to really know what you are doing.

This is odd, if you are a day trader then for the most part you should never have any position open and you should instead  close them down as soon as you decide to call it quits for the day, after all that is what it means to be a day trader, you only make trades that last a few hours at best.

However if you are going to keep some trades open during the time you are sleeping then you are more of a swing trader and without a doubt you should set a stop loss just in case the price crashes while you are sleeping, it could be convenient to also set up an alarm system that sends you a notification when a stop loss is reached, this is going to be bothersome but it is a life saver when the market is moving incredibly fast as that is when you do not want to miss a single minute of the markets due to the high volatility and the potential profits they can give to you.

You can even put stop loss when you are going out and may gone in front of PC for a day  so why not when you are sleeping ?
Stop/loss is created for this occasion when we are AFK so i don't know why ask this here .
Unless you are a 24/7 trader that really don't want in bed  ;D :D
as Long as you put your target buy/sell orders then best to put this before sleeping .If you are not in a Hurry to profit(or lose of course) then cancelling is one best way but for OP? since this is His concern then for sure he wanted to continue the goal even when he is in Bed.

Stop limit orders aren't any different from anything else you would do as a "trader" and whether or not using them is wise depends on your own speculation about the market again as a "trader". You have to speculate whether price is going to fall or rise during the time you are away and whether it will remain at the final price or will it be "fall and rise" or "rise and fall" (aka normal fluctuations) during that time.
For example you could place a sell order at $35k and price touches $35k and bounces back to $38k and you come back to see your account no longer has bitcoin balance but a fiat balance and you've lost a lot of money.

It is wise, but it is not right because it is better to close your trade without having a plan to buy or sell when you want to sleep. The market will not always move to the price you want, and sometimes it could go down or up. So if you think you want to sleep or doing something which is not related to trade, you better don't do anything because you will not know what will happen to the market.

That is what I did so far because I don't want to see when I woke up, I buy or sell automatically without analysing what happened to the market.

Stop limit is a great tool if you know how to use it. Depending on your risk level and strategy you can adjust the stop limit. But, generally, I would suggest you to don't go to bed without of stop limit. Because, anything can be happen in the market specially when you are talking about crypto market. You will need to also read some books and watch some videos about risk management to make sure how to adjust your stop limits and targets. However, some people use stairs strategy when they place stop limits. So, they will minimize the money they lose.

Some traders, especially crypto Twitter traders. Sometimes I can see they are tweeting about, they are closing their trade position before going to sleep, or no open position while they are sleeping, I believe they are using futures trading and probably a high position size or leverage.

For the OP, putting a stop loss is a must for every trade, why even if you don't go to bed, you are not putting stop loss on your trade? Market crash or huge pump can happen anytime, that's why stop-loss is very important.

This should be next to common sense IMO, given that bitcoin or crypto in general is a highly volatile market that gets from the extreme highs to the extreme lows in a matter of hours, at times. Or, you could just close your position and start your day with some fresh trades on the next morning. Either of the two works, though of course IMO the latter is the safest considering that it doesn't allow your money to be placed in the open chaos of the market while you are sleeping.

With total respect to you, you were just lucky. Day-trading is not for everyone and if you are asking about stop-loss, it means you don't day trade for long enough. Education and bull market means nothing. As you said everything can get red very easily, and too many replies I've read above means absolutely nothing and coming from people that probably never day-traded otherwise they would have had the experience of having your stop-loss not filled and getting liquidated. You aren't safe with a stop-loss, especially during high volatility, however you should set it correctly and at levels according to your trades. There are traders that don't use stop-loss at all for this reason, and use higher leverage, with smaller trades.

My friend stop limits are always wise in trading. Stop loss and Take Profit. It doesn't matter if you're offline or not, you shouldn't be having open ended orders. Always have a target for entry, and for exit. In fact, even if you're online you shouldn't be sitting and watching charts and waiting to pull the trigger manually!

I do agree with this strategy since this has happened to me countless times and have learned from them. which is why I have applied this strategy long ago. which is why I get to sleep better at nigjt compared to when I still didn't use such strategy. I remember having the need to check my phone or laptop every time I wake up in the wee hours to pee. I really recommend this strategy to everyone.

Stop limit is very important when you are in trading especially when you are not a full-time trader.

You are buying at $5 before you sleep or going to the office and when you get back it only traded at $1. Not sure it was surprising but this really meant so hard to think why I'd never do the stop-limit strategy.

Anyway, it is just a sort of learning experience. We can never be good at trading if we never have these failures and success.

Anyone who does something stupid will face problems. Be vigilant. Do what you feel.

I think it makes sense to cancel any of your orders for the night because in case something happens, you won't be able to react in time. Then again, if you're putting the price at which you're definitely willing to sell (or to buy), then it doesn't matter if the order gets filled at night or not. I'd prefer to be at least hypothetically in control and thus wouldn't allow any trading actions with my money while I'm sleeping, but then again, when I tried trading back in 2017, I can't say that I was successful.

How do you get these bots? I have all kinds of good ideas that I can only implement by constantly watching and putting in market/sell  orders if I could automate this it would be a huge money maker. Kind of like hyper trading where I make a few dollars every few minutes and when the market dips the "program" just pauses at the  last buy order until I do a manual sell or take a small hit then I could reset the bot. Basically it would sell everytime it goes up 5$ buy everytime it goes down$5. Or make it a % where it would sell more/less based on % change.

Im going to start setting stop limits before bed at my break even price which at this point is way lower then market.

You sound like you know what you are talking about. Care to elaborate? Criticism is good as long as its constructive.

Well, stop-loss feature is certainly good for minimizing the loss and/or ensuring the profit but it has a bad side as well. Imagine your stop-loss order has been executed and right after that, there was an uptrend. You will miss the potential gain too and thus losing your BTC in case you plan to buy back which you will as you are a day trader.

Just set out things that you do look that would really be useful for you.In my case im not really making out any orders when i do tend to sleep because this would really be just
adding up my stress which would result for me on having a hard time to sleep just because my mind is telling me that i have some open position that is really playing out.
Im not really that too confident when im away from my pc and not able to look at on the prices but i do love the idea on setting out neither Stop loss or Take profit tools
These are very helpful things but be sure that you do set it out according to your own personal realistic goals and this isnt something that all people could do.

yes I think this is quite wise, so far I often do stop loss while going to sleep, this for me personally avoids excessive dumping, namely the risk of liquidation. this applies to tokens and altcoins. while for bitcoin I don't do it.

If you're shorting Bitcoin you are going to keep waking up to some surprises over the next few months ;)

I'm not joking. You are shorting an asset in a bull market, going against the trend. Good luck to you, you're gonna need it.


At this point thinking about BTC at 15 thousand is more or less like when those shorters in 2020 at 5000 were hoping it would crash to 1000.

You're lacking fundamental knowledge. For us to go to 15 we would first need to go through a trend reversal. If you're watching the market every day you're going to see it happening. It's not going to go from 30000 to 15000 in 1 night.

Yes it is proven and tested, in order for you not to lose too much when a big changes in the market happens while you take rest you should put stop loss and don't make some tp if you want, but as long as I am sleeping I put both TP and SL for me to sleep comfortably without hesitations and regrets and so far this week my sl is not yet touched and my money is still okay and having a gain.

You were lucky that the price got liquidated and the price started dumping hard, what would you do if the market reversed after your coins got liquidated, you just watch the market rallying without doing anything. I will not test my luck by setting a stop limit sell order when i go to sleep as the market always have the tendency to have a minor correction and then bounce back pretty fast in the current scenario.

You are right and it is somewhat considered for him to be lucky because he did really make a right call on setting out some limit which it did really pays off well since the market
had really moved on what he had expected but same as you said about mirror conditions which would really be leaving you in regrets when you do miss out that rally.
One of the things i do hate when i do active trade is that you would really be needing to have some ample time to check out from time to time.Proper sleep had been compromised
and which one of the things are cons when you do actively trade. If you arent that confident then its better not to trade at all when you are sleeping.

i have heard this question also from my friends about setting stop loss before going to bed incase of any unforseen dump or flash dumps which may occur at night. its a good idea to save capital and also secure some profits.

Each and everyone into trading could've used is atleast once. During the night time we don't know how the market is varying, a preset price will make the execution at the right point avoiding the loss. One of my friend was into trading. He used to set stop loss order during night times. The shares(GameSpot)got sold at the right point, and if he's kept it idle the next day there is a big drop in the market that has grown high and dropped within few days time.

for me small trader i always use stop limit to my futures account since you know "liquidation is monster" not before trading but before i start trading and when i gained profit i change my stop limit but with different setting (so not minus but plus for stop limit)

There are many popular and open-source crypto bots:

https://awesomeopensource.com/projects/trading-bot

https://3commas.io/blog/best-crypto-trading-bot

If these bots don't fit your needs, you could code your own in Python/JS using CCXT or the native exchanges' APIs.

https://github.com/ccxt/ccxt

I'm using Gekko and my coded bots.

Close your position at the end of the day / don't open position if it's already late. It's better to close and start again tomorrow, that way you don't have to set stop loss and you can actually sleep peacefully. If the price moves up / down when you are asleep then just consider yourself lucky / unlucky. But at the end of the day it's your strategy, if you are more comfortable to set stop limit (anything can happen when you are asleep) then you can do it, but personally i will close my position and just sleep.

So I'm setting stop limits at night on my alts at the price I bought them for. With alts I buy 1-4 coins ususally $1000-3000USD My goal with alts is to not get greedy but sell them within 48 hours, I look for coins that are volatile but trending up over the 30 day chart. My price goal is only to make 50-100$ although I made $450 of MKR when I got lucky and it hit an ATH as I bought in a few days before. This way I dont lose money but if there is a big bounce I might lose out, but I am not a gambler, I have been to the casino once made 500$ on black jack just going off the probability of the cards. I wanted to bet more but left as I wasnt there to gamble. Gambling is not exciting to me its stressful and the house always wins. So I think of coins as investing based off charts. I wish I knew more to take more of the gambling side out and rely more on math/patterns. Most of what I learned was by doing, placing small 100$ trades and seeing what worked and what didnt. Then as my confidence grew and the gambling went down I upped my trades to 1000$ . I have up to 10k to trade that I made over the last few months but only trade 10-20% of  that with most of my portfolio in BTC going long, although I do take some profits out of the BTC every now and then and put 1000 back in when its really low. I treat this as my job since I cant do a legit w2 job due to disabilities. Thanks for all the good advice and for those of you who say dont do this while you sleep/ take time off from trading, I ask why?

I think that's very important as a day trader you should always set stop lose at night before you sleep to avoid losing your money when you wake up. I always make sure I set stop lose before I sleep because sometimes bitcoin always dump at night to avoid waking up and realizing your funds are gone or you are at lost. Before I sleep I always make sure I set my stop lose and a profit zone, so even when the coin dumps I will make sure am in profit. It happens to me so many times when I will make up and see the coin I bought have been dumped and my stop lose have been triggered but my capital is still safe and I can still buy back when the price is low and I will still set stop lose for that too.
I don't think you should only set your stop lose at night I believe you should always set your stop lose in all your trade because is better to lose 5-10% of your funds than to lose 50-70% of your funds. Somepeople think using stop lose is not important or is just total waste of time but me I will personally advise everyone to always use stop lose.

Actually it depends because sometimes that will work and sometimes it will not but that kind of strategy not setting your stop loss limit before going to bed will be kinda risky as well for you have no idea while you were sleeping what can most likely to happen into your tradings. Better set stop loss limit before going to bed because there must be certain limitations on where to stop and go and not just to continuously keep it running unknowingly you are not aware of what's happening while you sleep. There are cases that opportunities came while you were sleeping making you to think not setting limitations but that is not always how the market works for it is unpredictable and tricky so better save yourself setting stop loss limitations before getting into bed.

I had to take three days off where I didnt look at bitcoin open apps on my phone or read forums. I was staying up all night making trades then every time I woke I would pull up my phone. The stress got to me. I went from paying change for something on thanks giving to having just under 12k in three months. Most of it luck, like finding my trezor, getting the password to localbitcoins I lost my 2FA then my account email in 2017 when I paid 1000$USD in 2016? for a bit coin and still had a fraction of one left. That took probably 10 hours of trying passwords and combinations of gmail and wouldnt have been possible if they didnt have such great cust service. Then I had to wait two weeks to get the 2FA removed. I have a binance account in the same shape that I'm trying to reopen but their cust service is so slow been waiting over a week for a response. I was so worried about hackers that I ended up locking myself out. No one cares about my little accounts, but at the time I was paranoid. My vacation just costs me some potential profits had I been active these last three day but I learned be patient dont get greedy. Im still waiting for coinbase to find some lost bitcoins that were sent in dec, went through the block chain got 3 conf. but never showed up in my account. With all the money CB makes they need to step up their cust serv game, and even get a functional 1800 number, BTC is real now not just some fringe internet thing. Thanks to BTC I now have a part time trading job, my back rent (Still havent paid yet, rather invest it until I HAVE to pay it) and some savings. Being disabled getting a job during the virus has been impossible going on a year now.

This is one of the few instances in which I think trading bots will be useful, a human cannot monitor the market every single day, we are human so we have other needs, we have to sleep, eat and do some other stuff so it is impossible to watch the market all the time, but if you are able to create a piece of software that is able to trade exactly in the way you can do it then you can keep that bot running while you're sleeping and you are not going to miss any of the action.

Obviously this has some risks, you are giving a piece of code complete control over financial decisions that will affect your entire life and if you made a single mistake the bot could not perform as you expected and lose money that you did not expected to lose.

I think in trading you don't need to catch every moment but the best ones. Try and experiment yourself, set stop-loss limit on the coins that you trade, do the same for two weeks and then check if the risk of using stop-loss limit outweighs the cons of just selling all of your coins before sleep and storing them as USD or stablecoins.

Personally, I prefer to catch only good moments, so, there are times when I leave my money in coins and set stop-loss limit or I just store them in USDT and wait for the next day to trade or even skip that day if I am not mentally ready for everything related to trading.

No doubt using a stop loss in a trade is really important, this is one of the mistakes I made back then when I started trading, I usually take on trades without using stop loss, and just as you said it I woke up to a liquidation alert on my phone, so every trader needs to make use of this tool while trading to avoid 100% loss.
I think it's wise to always use a stop loss when your about to go to bed and you still an open position, cuz due to how volatile the crypto market is anything can happen at any time,maybe during a flash crash using a stop loss will be really helpful.