Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

I read several times (on altcoin boards) someone mentionning his/her experience on Forex. My question is: why are you on cryptos?
- mere curiosity (the person I read seemed to be heavily on cryptos, though)
- still on forex, just diversifying
- forex is too hard
- forex is too simple (!)
- forex requires much larger amounts of money
- ...

So you tell me. I instinctively think that forex is better than major crypto (LTC, BTC) itself better than minor crypto (cryptsy and mintpal) themselves better than the LTC market (or, god forbids, the DOGE market). But I might be wrong.

Care to enlighten me?

Thank you

you can't trade both directions on cryptsy like you can on forex. 
altcoins have greater spreads, more pump and dump action
vs reliable price action.

but easiest money appears to be just buy and hold bitcoin.

Or invest in just-dice (investing, not gambling) :)
If I understand correctly, altcoins is more risky than forex?

for me it was

fee's
lack of community
the whole bank transfer polava
lack of volitility meaning only small profits, but requiring large sums just to get to see small profits
the fact that you are miliseconds-minutes behind the market makers, meaning your not abl to trade the changes the milisecond they happen.

yet with bitcoin. its easy, cheaper and faster to play the spread. using smaller lump sums to gain profits allows for use of many lumps to take advantage of other movements you could have missed with the first lump sum.

id never go back to forex, thats for sure.

I think so.  Look at all the altcoin charts.  With the exception of a few (litecoin), its all pump and dump.
Unless you can short altcoins, you'd be trying to trade countertrend.

Thanks. Yeah, feeling lonely behind my screen is not something I enjoy. Plus the need to spen a lot of money (I don't have more than some hundreds of euros). Please define "polava".

I am planning to trade on kraken, for the simple reason kraken has trailing stop, which no other exchange has. I don't know wich pair I will trade, though. Is XBT/EUR more dangerous than they, FLT/BTC on altcoins?

Is "shorting" the same as "whales manipulating the market" (altcoin parlance)?

Cryptos are 10 times easier to manipulate from their piss poor liquidity. Forex is dominated by large hedge funds, central banks etc. Crypto traders tend to be novice basement dwellers who panic at the first sight of any whale.

True :)

i'm not familiar with all the places you can trade pairs like forex.  i just know on cryptsy, you can't sell hobonickles or barbacue coins unless you buy some first.  If you could trade BBQ/BTC as a "pair" like in forex, you could "short" (sell) bbq coins without buying any.

Check kraken.com (major cryptos) and swaphole.com (minor cryptos).

If you can, then just short all the shitcoins.  sounds like easy money.

What do you mean by 'better'?

They are not so different I wouldn't think, price goes up or down,  except with BTC  there is only supposed to be a one way major trend created by exponential take up. It should behave more like a small cap  rather than a currency.  Forex pa is cyclical. Forex pa is also more predictable due to the study of historical charts being available and also everyone agrees on what news should move a pair. 
Allegedly 95% of retail forex traders wipe out their account and if most BTC holders hold, the success rate will be much higher. 

Lol trading coins when you dont know whales moves is kinda crazy :)

That's why I am more and more considering this:
- Get closure for my lost money (Mt.Gox plus altcoin trading)
- Convert a monthly fixed part of my paycheck in BTC (as long as the BTC is undervalued (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=322058.msg6015891#msg6015891))
- Invest said BTC into just-dice.com
- Convert back 10% of my remaining amount of BTC everytime it doubles (10/200 rule (http://david.latapie.name/blog/investment-strategy-10-200-and-trailing-stop/))

What does shorting means?

it means speculating that will they decrease in value.

So you wait for a crypto to lose value, you massively buy them all because you have a lot of money, this increases the price and then you you sell all of them massively, is that it?

No, you SELL them without owning them  (if any exchange allows that.)  You can do this in forex.

So basically what you mean by that, is you sell them at a set price of say $0.10 hoping that you can buy them before a preset time at $0.07 ? Is this what shorting is?

No that sounds like more of what's called an "option" when you're talking about preset times.

On the stock market , shorting a stock means you are betting the stock will fall in price.  It's not really that important to understand the inner workings of it, but basically you are borrowing the stock from the broker  with the money you put up as collateral, selling it, waiting for the price to fall, and then closing the trade as you buy it back from the market.  You pocket the difference (or eat the loss if the stock rose).

In the forex world, currencies are traded in pairs like EUR/USD and you can "bet" in either direction.  Going up is known as a long trade and going down is called going short.

For me it's the privacy and being in control of my own wallet instead of relying on a bank or some crappy third party processor like Skrill.

Interesting thing, I did not think about it.

Shorting is selling something that you don't own.  For example when BTC was $1200.  You borrow 1BTC from a HODLer and you sell it for $1200.  When the price drops to $500 you buy back 1BTC from the open market for $500 and return to the person you borrowed + premium.  You just pocketed $700 minus the cost to borrow

I'm not a forex trader—although I have traded forex markets and I follow them closely—, but I do manage investments professionally for qualified investors.

Why cryptos?

I truly love investing and finance, and cryptos are a technically and psychologically fascinating part of that world, albeit in a very fledgling way.

Cryptos are very fun.

Cryptos are a game-changer.