The trading is just relentless!

I've gone long again. Holding 19 BTC @ $4.8753

Maybe this is a bottom after all? I've liquidated my short but now hold no position. Lost $3.19    or 3.306%

Anticipating more drops to come, I've gone short 20.5 BTC @ $4.7114

More action.

Liquidated my short position and am on the sidelines again.

Lost    $3.19 or 3.120%    on the liquidation. I now have 99.93 USD in my account. Less than I started with!

And a quick 180 here. Liquidated my short for a loss of 1.04 USD, or 1.017 %. My balance stands at $103.16374, and I've gone long again,
19 BTC @ $5.374

Well, that was a longer time on the sidelines than usual! Now I'm back in again:
Short 19.2 BTC @ 5.3116   

I liquidated my position, taking a loss of 1.12 USD. Now it's the waiting game again, with no position.

I've gone long again, 20BTC @ $4.8983   

Thanks for the link, stochastic, I'll have a look when I have time. One reason I'm not interested in any more involved trading than this is I have little enough free time as it is...

Liquidated my long position when the profit was showing $3.72 or 3.760% with a swap of -$0.13.

I'm now holding no position with 105.20559 USD in my account.


Stochastic: sorry I didn't get around to replying earlier.

As you point out, no system will turn a losing strategy into a winning one. This is a losing strategy. That's kind of the point, actually. I'm a complete moron when it comes to trading, but you don't have to take my word for it - the strategy I'm applying is also completely moronic. It's a monkey's trading strategy.

The speculation forum is full of, well, wild speculation and curious methodology. I'm providing a base to compare against, a guaranteed bad strategy. If you can't beat me, you should get out of the game.

Stochastic, thanks for your input. I'll formulate a reply tomorrow, too tired now.

Just updating since I forgot to earlier:

I'm long again, 21 BTC@4.7145

Coin taints would kill mixer services, I think. It takes time to notice a theft. In most cases, a thief will be able to pass stolen coins along before anyone notices, and the taint would actually just punish anyone unlucky enough to receive them before the theft is noticed.

Not to mention it gives the supposed victim a lot of power. Bitcoin transactions are supposed to be irreversible, this has been a big deal for many merchants, not to be at the mercy of their customers. Taints shift the balance of power towards the buyer. How do you prove a theft occurred in the first place? Would these taints also be used for claims of fraud?

I can see the need for protection measures. These need to be separate from the base system itself. Paypal - as much as it's a bad word here -  provides buyers security they wouldn't have with cash transactions. (not to mention convenience, but that's not as applicable here.)
The rest of the payment system provides security for the merchants too - payment processors handle the risks of theft, at a cost of course.Similar services can be provided for Bitcoins, and merchants can accept straight payments or payments through a processor of some sort, according to their own best judgement, pricing the costs into their fees or not.

Well... not trading at all is a strategy too, if you look at it that way. I expect I won't be able to outperform that one in the long term.

I've divined from my readings of random.org that the exchange rate will go  up, down or sideways. In the face of uncertainty, I've
liquidated my short position at a loss of ~2.37% and now hold no position. We'll wait and see!

my balance: "$101.52193"

Banks and the CC companies do a lot of things, but let's talk about lending.

People want loans. They want them so much, they're willing to pay for the money they get, in the form of interest. This is true now, it's likely to be true in the future. Bitcoin won't change that.

Personally I'm skeptical very many will want to handle their own security vis-a-vis wallets, but even if I turn out to be wrong, all a bank needs to do to draw deposits is to offer sufficient interest on them. Even in the worst case (for the bank), they'd just need to offer higher interest on deposits than banks currently do, and correspondingly charge higher interests on loans, but that's not going to stop lending. As long as the returns on loans given out are greater than the costs of operating, lending is profitable.

If, in this scenario. the long-term situation remains such that interest rates stay high, the banks may have an incentive to hold significant reserves of their own money for lending  purposes, as this reduces the need for expensive (for the bank) deposits to finance lending. So, even if Bitcoin banking starts off small, and no established, large institutions enter the market, any long-term players in the lending business are likely to take as much of their profits as they can and hold it for lending to get a competitive edge in the form of the ability to lend at lower rates.

This is all pretty premature IMO. Bitcoin lending may spring up in a bigger way soon enough. Probably it's going to get quite ugly. There will be fractional reserve banking, but at first anyway, it's going to be wild west - style, with little to no assurance on the level of reserves actually held by lenders.

I've liquidated my long position , at a P/L of  -$1.11, or -1.066% and swap of -$0.09

This leaves me with $103.81294 in my account.

The flips seem to be pretty action-oriented lately, and the same trend continues. I went short 20.5 BTC @ $4.8934

So how long until Bitcoin is popular enough that this kind of scam starts to make the rounds on Facebook etc?

I could have sworn I posted here but apparently I forgot to click "post".

on the 24th I liquidated my long position at a profit of around 13% IIRC and went short, liqudating that position yesterday (didn't have time to come write here as I was on the move) at a profit of around 0.4% and went 21 BTC long @ 4.9461. Currently I have $104.98754.

For posterity - the current graph predicts a big rally up starting three days from now (feb. 26.), with prices hitting 5.5-ish around feb. 28.

Don't count your hens until they've hatched... I don't know when I'll be liquidating again.

I wonder how many people actively trading here have done better than I have with this method, and how many have done worse.

10 BTC sent your way.

No rewards, thanks. I'd rather see all of it go to the actual goal.