You may stick to that definition of course but I find it rather restrictive, especially the part about entering and exiting a position within the same day. From my perspective, this is an unwarranted and unjustified requirement from purely technical point of view. If you see that the price rises, why would you want to exit a profitable position? Just to make sure it fits some clumsy definition? You may make a dozen trades one day and no trades the next day because you are just waiting for the right time to hit. Does it mean that it is not day trading? Or one day it is day trading, while the other not? Anyway, if you don't like me or anyone else, for that matter, using the term day trading, replace it with active trading in your mind. Basically, you are being overly pesky about insignificant details which are debatable even on their own. I don't think quarreling over definitions adds anything of substance to the discussion. Most of us understand what day trading essentially means.

Myself, I belong to the same flock. I never understood that idea about waiting a few years until price rises high enough. Okay, you set your target price to some value but what if price stops just short of it? You will hate yourself till the end of your days for not selling right then. I understand when people want big profits, I want big profits too, and big profits come with big price changes. I'm okay with that. What I'm not okay with is the idea of stubborn waiting and blindly hoping for the best. And here comes day trading, or active trading if someone is not happy with my understanding of it, and riding the wave whenever there is an opportunity.

I don't see how it can be otherwise. As I have already said in OP, a sideways market and speculative one at that like Bitcoin's, is a sort of controlled "lab" environment where things can't be different. Well, I have heard that point of most traders losing in the long run mentioned multiple times here and there but since I didn't have any source I just looked for it myself. Here are the hard numbers. I think you can find plenty of other sources to that tune. Other than that, I don't say that all trading is gambling. It is gambling for most traders, which I also mentioned in OP.


Well, this is the point I'm trying to make here. No matter how sophisticated your theories are it still comes down to chances.


I refer to house edge here as something which you can't beat, neither in gambling nor in trading. You can think of trading against a lot of other traders like yourself as a manifestation of what loosely matches luck in gambling. So you either win or lose and it is a game of chances minus the house edge.

This is a good observation and I was thinking about something to that tune myself, more specifically how well it fits into the scheme presented in this topic or how well such actions can be explained in the scope of the idea I am taking about here. It could be said that when people jump into the market without any clue about what they are doing, they are basically in the same position when they find themselves confused and helpless due to a sudden unexpected price change, just blindly hoping for the better. Though in the former case, they themselves are the cause of this situation, not market forces are involved as in the latter case. In other words, if you don't know where to go, no wind will be favorable.

I think stop-loss in gambling is when you stop gambling. Really, as the term itself suggests, stop-loss is used to prevent additional losses by closing your position when the price goes against you. But the loss already suffered by that time can be considered as a losing bet made in gambling. In this sense, at least metaphorically, we can say that gambling has stop-losses kind of built in. Otherwise, I agree that panic sellers are mostly gamblers because when they open a position they are just hoping for the best, which is not very far from what we see in gambling.

I don't see what the first method has to do with delays. There are no intentionally added delays when an exchange takes liquidity from the orderbooks. In fact, it is in exchange's best interest to pull off the job as fast as possible. I'm curious where you got this idea from. Care to explain?


Neither I understand what you mean here by "making the spread", but front running is definitely not an allowed practice on regulated exchanges up to a point of causing serious penalties. And there are good reasons for that like providing level playing ground for all market participants.

I don't really understand what you are trying to prove here. If you don't like my approach to day trading, I'm not forcing you to post in this thread. Also, you don't seem to be reading what I write either. Here we are talking about day trading not being gambling. In gambling, you are not supposed to earn other than by luck alone and over longer terms the impact of luck is entirely cleared away. That means losing whatever language you speak. So it is a pretty simple choice. If you earn over longer time spans, it is not gambling. Whether it is day trading or otherwise is irrelevant. I don't really know what else can be added to this, though I don't mind if you disagree or anything.

This is definitely not about fees, which you implicitly accept when you start using an exchange. You know human greed knows no limits, so you wouldn't really expect exchanges to lose 100% bullet-proof opportunities of making money off their clients, even if such practices are universally frowned upon, would you? And still more so if they can walk away completely unscathed, and there is no single entity to unleash justice on the wicked.

It may not look like a big deal until you send a really big order and then things get real nasty. And they get even nastier when you send a market order which means that you give the exchange a full leeway to do whatever they want with the price and go at the double where their greed leads them. In short, it is not as innocent as it seems to you. The point is if you are a person with deep pockets, you should be aware and beware of how exchanges want to make money off you in a way that you don't even suspect. Will you be happy to find out that someone is making money at your expense? I don't think you would.

No, I don't mean that. Out of order execution is out of limits even for crypto exchanges, though where it happens, and it does happen here and there, it may in fact be due to bugs in a trading engine rather than malicious intent. I know that at Bter, a Chinese exchange that was active a couple or so years ago, you could fool their trading engine and get your orders executed before anyone else's in the same queue. Obviously, this is an unfair advantage. But there is nothing fair in what I speak about in OP either. Honestly, I don't understand why some people here consider this or similar practices kind of normal. Regular exchanges get severely punished if they get caught doing such things.

No, it is not just about listing the orders. 2 second delay at WEX is the clock tick at which data is refreshed. It means that if you are using their API to access trading data, you will be querying cashed data. Obviously, it is claimed that the purpose is to lower load on exchange servers but as a side effect, you don't know what's actually going on at the exchange for the next 2 seconds after you receive refreshed information. But 2 seconds is a huge amount of time within which a lot of things can happen.

Obviously, you can find many differences between trading and gambling. In the end, it all depends upon what you are looking for and into. But here, I'm looking into the most important thing that all traders are striving for. This is profit or lack thereof. And as far as profits are concerned (lack of profits), trading and gambling are quite similar. And it is not only about some outward similarities and likeness in this regard, it is more about mechanics which explains why people are set to lose both in trading and gambling, what makes most traders lose in the long run.

I beats me why some people still believe that gambling can be more "promising". In trading you can at least hope to evaluate fundamentals and expect the prices to rise or fall in the near future unless these fundamentals have already been priced in. But in casino gambling, such as dice, your only chance at winning is pure luck, except when you can change the odds in your favor somehow. The longer you play the less importance and effect luck will have because it will be largely overridden by house edge. It is not particularly different in trading either, given that the market has its own "house edge" over a typical trader, but at least milking the market as via arbitrage is not considered illegal here.

I'm not very fond of TA, which is what we see here. My understanding of the current market is that many people had bought at 12k when the price first crashed in January, thinking it was a good buy. Now many of them are desperately trying to close their positions and call it a day for good. Since 12k has become kind of new high, we could expect the price to continue going down along the same pattern that we saw in late December and early January. If the price goes below 6k, which we shouldn't completely rule out, the pattern will have established itself. The point being don't buy into this rally, it is likely a bull trap.


People are trying to get away cheap.

Personally, I'm not a strong believer in TA myself unless we speak about pretty simple things like seeing the trend, which don't require convoluted math. That said, it is not just about sideways markets alone. It is even harder to make money on a falling market, and let's not forget that Bitcoin had been falling for almost two years before, and now we may well be at the verge of our road down. Indeed, you can try shorting but we all know how often it ends in a complete disaster with deposits blown away in a glimpse. In a sense, such markets are the worst nightmare for the total majority of traders if they come to stay.

Maybe, because front running, which the tricks mentioned here fall under, is considered unethical practice in any trading environment? Obviously, it gives an undeserved advantage to some market players, in this case to exchanges, but in trading such advantage always means money, money lost and earned, if it can called that. Which, if you ask me, is not very far from stealing. Anyway, front running is officially prohibited on any major regulated exchange, and the exchanges that get caught suffer severe penalties. Not that it prevents them from further attempts at secretly deceiving their clients whenever possible but still.

If we presume that the absolute majority of traders are losing in the long run, then, to me, this pretty much counts as gambling. I agree that traders do think they can expect certain scenarios to come about more often than others but if they invariably lose in the end, what does it change? When you flip a coin and you don't know anything about your chances, you can also build sophisticated theories why, for example, you should get heads more often than tails. But it doesn't matter, does it? Given that there is a sort of house edge in trading too, we should unmistakably come to the conclusion outlined in OP.

In my opinion there is no common denominator apart from what I'm discussing here. In other words, it doesn't matter whether you are an experienced trader or beginner, you should at least get worried if the market falls suddenly and entirely unexpected for you. It may or may not be an opportunity but rationalizing it in the way you suggest doesn't look very appealing to me. It can bring you peace of mind, of course, but I don't think this is what most traders are looking for. They are looking for profits, not a feeling of being safe or protected.

It has worked for you only because the market had been rising for well over two years, starting in September, 2015. If it starts trading sideways as many established markets do most of the time in some narrow or not so narrow range, you will see that this strategy is not as good as it seems to be. Further on, you don't know in advance whether it is an ATH or price is going to rise higher. But booking profits now and then is not what HODL means. Actually, it is half-way to day trading. The same applies to buying at dips. In short, a long-lasting sideways market will kill HODL.

Many people have reported that they noticed a lot of shady behavior on the part of exchanges, and here I want to discuss specific methods which many, if not all, exchanges employ to steal our money. I know of at least 2 risk-free methods which are in the store ready to be used on trading folk:

1. Exchange sees a big sell or buy order entering the system which would fill a lot of orders in the orderbook at prices higher or below the price set by the trader. In this case, exchange can itself sell or buy all these orders first and then fill the entering order at its specific price. The effect is that the exchange earns profit while the trader gets his order filled at maximum or minimum possible price. This method works exceptionally well with market orders filled at the current market price. Guess what price it will be.

2. Exchange can set arbitrary delays while adding new orders. For example, WEX (former Btc-e) officially sets a 2 second delay within which a trader doesn't know what's going on at the exchange. In this case, if exchange sees a big order, it can delay adding it waiting for another big order to arrive. If these orders are offsetting each other, exchange can then fill them itself and put the spread in the pocket. This approach works particularly well with exchanges that have lots of liquidity.

If you know of other dirty tricks that exchanges use, share them here.