Fellow US traders -

Binance restricting American users to a separate exchange is a pain in the ass, and while I’m not surprised I am a bit peeved.

Honestly as a day trader most of my stack is in BTC so I didn’t really get caught by the alts dumping, but my precious BNB took a big hit…

What’s going on in the background that made Binance do that?😱

The US government “alphabet soup” agencies (SEC, FSB, etc) have drawn a line in the sand and told crypto exchanges that their American customers had better comply with American laws. 👮‍♂️

This is causing Binance to split into an American exchange and an “Everywhere else” exchange, Bittrex to restrict access to some coins for Americans, Polinex to delist some alts, and so on.

For American traders, what does this mean?

Unfortunately we’re going to have a different set of rules, and it’s going to have a big impact on crypto.

Expect to have to provide more identification, especially for withdraws.📋

The SEC won’t let Americans freely trade any coins that it thinks are securities.

A lot of alt coins will take a beating during this time, but that’s actually the good news! 🔨

See, all through the bear market of 2018 very few bad projects actually ran out of money and shut down or gave up. That’s the point of bear markets, to shake out the crap. 🐻

I’m not happy that the SEC is deciding which coins get beat down and which don’t, but at least some of the worst projects will finally die.

It means that we’ll finally get rid of a bunch of shitcoins and even outright scamcoins! 👌

In the short term it might cause pain, but in the end this is good for crypto.

Cull the herd. 🐮

Let the strongest survive! 🏆

I hate mosquitoes. They eat me alive.

I suspect that my blood tastes delicious... but I swear they fly miles just to find me and irritate me.

In trading, bad habits are like little mosquitoes.

Flying around biting you and bleeding your stack little by little... 💉

Neither of those little blood sucking bastards would be missed if they went the way of the dodo 🦖🎇

Maybe you have a habit of letting your stop loss slide a little wider, or maybe you have the habit of selling too soon - screwing with your risk to reward ratio 🎯

I have a bad habit of wanting to jump into a trade as soon as I start my session, instead of waiting for the best trade to take. 🕗

These stack bleeding little bad habits need to be exterminated!

The most effective bug repellent for bad trading habits is keeping a journal. 📓

Review your trades to uncover bad habits and squash them! 🦠

If you'd like help with your trading, check out Voodoo Crypto.

Feedback is a gift. 🎁

Sometimes that feedback is asked for, and sometimes it’s unsolicited, but all of it is valuable even if you don’t agree with it. 🤷‍♂️

Anybody who cares enough to spend time providing valuable, honest feedback is doing so to help you. 🤝

Occasionally you can find some hidden 💎 that will help you see some blind spots.

In trading, those blind spots could be costing you money with losses or the opportunity cost of not taking the best positions.

If you’ve never put your trades together and looked at your performance, this is a good opportunity to do so. Journaling is super important but not the subject of this thread. 📓

HERE’S MY CHALLENGE TO YOU TRADERS OUT THERE -
Format your trades so they’re easy to read, and ask three people you trust to review them and critique them. 🔥

I love the mental image of my monitors covered in sticky notes, trying to see the screen behind it.

Neat idea! Definitely helps reinforce your rules.

I'm part of a group of crypto traders who specialize in day trading alts. We're called Voodoo Crypto and offer guided training help traders improve their skills.

www.voodoocrypto.com

When 💩 hits the fan...

I woke up this morning to find the ceiling in my bathroom raining. Happy Monday, world. 💦

It turns out that when property management installed new toilets 🚽 in all the apartments this weekend, they screwed up installing one in the apartment above mine. Hence the water coming out of the ceiling and the vents.

While I waited for the plumber to come repair 🔧 things, I made a couple trades and it had me thinking about what a trader needs to do when shit hits the fan.

Not every trade goes the way you expect it to, and sometimes it goes sour in a spectacular way. 🎇

When stop losses get blown and people are market selling left and right, what do you do?

Don't panic! ‼️

Panicking leads to poor decisions based on emotion, not on logic. 🤖

Instead, take a breath and evaluate the situation. The goal is to get out of the position as quickly as possible, with as little slippage as possible, while minimizing any further risk.

Depending on your strategy and the trade, sometimes the best decision is to simply market sell and get out ASAP, while sometimes you can get away with sneaking out slowly.

Whether in trading or in plumbing, when shit hits the fan it does no good to panic. Deal with the situation quickly and efficiently, even though it stinks. 💩

Keeping a journal is critical for new and experienced traders to maximize their profitability. 3 reasons why you should use a journal if you don’t already ➕ what to include in your journal. 📓

1. Discipline
The self discipline needed to maintain a trading journal helps fortify a trader’s discipline in sticking to their trading plan. This is a valuable skill to build, and can only be built through doing. 🛠

2. Accountability
Recording your trades holds you accountable for your performance. Did you have a plan before opening the trade? Did you stick to that plan? 🎯

3. Analysis
Once trades are consistently being recorded, you can analyze those trades to improve your strategy. 📈 Example analysis of one’s trade journal might reveal that stop losses are getting triggered more than they should be. With that information, you might conclude that you are either buying too high or that your stops are too tight. A solution could be to focus on getting better entries, even though you might miss some opportunities by not buying sooner.

When looking for a journal or template, consider journaling both each individual trade as well as each trading session. Break down the profit/loss details for every trade, and reflect on your performance and emotions for each session.

❓For those already using journals - what have you learned about your trading since you've started journaling?

I remember when I hit my first stop loss.

It took a lot of pain to convince me that I needed to use stop losses. It's a good thing at that time I was playing with money I could afford to lose, because I would throw a little bit of BTC at different projects and watch in agony as the coins bled away into obscurity. 💉

Still though, my portfolio bleeding away from a little bit of play money to almost no money was nothing compared to the feeling of getting stopped out and price rocketing straight to the moon a few seconds later. 🚀🌖

That's the part nobody warns you about.

You find yourself in the awkward position where you were right - price was about to go up!

But you got shook out before it did and took a loss.📉

There's a million possible reasons why that happened. As you improve your skills as a trader, you'll begin to identify those situations and avoid them, but you'll never get rid of the chance completely. 📖

It took a long time for me to accept that while sometimes sticking to a stop loss hurts, the majority of the time it will save you from even greater pain. 🤕

When things go wrong in manufacturing, this phrase is often thrown around: "Your first loss is your best loss." It refers to tossing the problem product in the trash right away, instead of spending a bunch of money trying to fix it. 🗑️

Trading isn't so different. If the trade isn't going the way you thought it would, throw that trade in the trash and move on to another.

There's so many opportunities for profit in this market, seize them!

I can absolutely relate to this, and I'll explain why.

I heard about crypto a long time ago, but didn't get genuinely interested until early 2017. Since then I've been learning as much as I possibly can about crypto, but I still had my day job.

I ended up finding a group called Voodoo Crypto who taught me pretty much everything I know about trading. Since finding that group and investing in my education, I've been day trading regularly.

I made the decision to go all in on crypto a few months ago, and I don't just mean with my money but with my time, energy, and passion. It's the best decision I've ever made, but it caused great tension with my day job.

I've since established a plan to build my stack to a point where I can day trade for a living and dedicate my time to sharing everything I've learned about crypto. Only a few more weeks and my financial independence will be completely secured!!

Best tip I've got?

Don't click strange links in crypto.

Second best tip?

A strange link in crypto: www.voodoocrypto.com

(Voodoo Crypto is where I learned how to trade, which has been one of the best decisions of my lifetime)

There are tons of similarities between the crypto and stock markets, but they behave very very differently.

My personal preference is crypto, but if I see a stock trade that I'd be stupid not to take, I'll jump in no problem.

Yea, you're right that you have to time the market to get in and out in some way, but the purpose of the post is to describe a strategy that encourages reasonable profit defense without having to worry so much about making the best timed trades. With a deep understanding of how markets work, it is possible to get better at that on your own. However, that's going to be an uphill battle against all the misinformation out there.

I choose to accelerate my path by learning with Voodoo Crypto. They taught me more as a trader than I could ever hope to share, but I'm doing my best to do just that.



edit: broke the quote, fixed now

The drop down on Bitmex was pretty wicked, whole place locked up for liquidation after liquidation.

I happened to be in a short down from 7800, I expected a drop but that was something else.

Love the volatility!

Personally I never stopped trading through the bear market. I see BTC as the global reserve currency and therefore trade to increase my BTC stack. Still, even through BTC dropping 70+% in value, my USD value has gone up tremendously.

Professional traders practice their craft in (almost) all types of markets.

I definitely agree that learning about different strategies can often be useful. Learning how to evaluate different strategies is a useful trick, too.


It's true that profits don't come easy at the start. In fact, it's never "easy" but with education and training it's definitely possible to be good at it. Ask a welder if they think welding is easy. They'll tell you that they just make it look easy!


Good luck starting your journaling journey! If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out.


You're right that different traders have different strategies, even though they all look at the same markets. That said, some things like one's mindset and discipline make a big difference, regardless of what strategy they are applied to. Personal experience is a great teacher, but sometimes learning from other people's experiences can work too. This is really important in trading when mistakes can cost you real money.

Hopefully people can learn from his stupidity and seek out education and training before trading recklessly.


The market that he tried to buy on was very illiquid, meaning that there were very few orders on the book to buy. You're right that buying a lot of an illiquid coin takes a long time, and this person's impatience ended up costing them a lot of money.


I don't know that he has much left to trade with...

But really, DYOR is no joke. That applies to both the coins you invest in and the way you go about investing in them. Education is critical.


Amen to that, don't get too greedy. A little bit of greed is a good motivator, though... 

I learned how to trade crypto from www.VoodooCrypto.com

They offer guided education and training to teach you the skills you need as a trader.

I realized after trying to learn on my own that a ton of info out there is either inaccurate, not detailed enough, or downright misleading. I made the decision to invest in my education, and it was the best decision I've ever made.

Congratulations all around for weeks of gains and a couple days with some really exciting price action! For anyone who bought sub 6k, that’s some nice return on investment. With those kinds of numbers, it’s natural for you to want to take some profit.

If you’re someone who will actually hodl through the next six bull/bear cycles, I commend you. If you’re a mere mortal like the rest of us, having a plan for how you take profits is the first step towards building a secure future for your family.

My personal strategy is to bank 30% of the profits from each trade into cold storage BTC, locked away for decades to come. When it comes to USD/BTC movements, I prefer to margin trade to accumulate BTC rather than cash out for dollars.

Some people may prefer to take profits in USD or other currencies. If that’s your end goal, that works too. The strategy can be personalized to your needs, but the key concept is that a self tax on trading income is a solid way to defend your profits.

One strategy that often floats around is the idea that at some (generally poorly defined) point you should cash out and attempt to rebuy at some (equally poorly defined) point lower. As tempting as this may be, trying to time the long term market with sufficient accuracy is like throwing a dart at a moving dartboard in the dark. Strong technical analysis might turn on the light, but ultimately even just hitting the board isn’t a given.

If you want to learn more about trading strategies, check out Voodoo Crypto.

There have been a few theories about why this particular situation happened, including whether it was related to the Binance hack. Ultimately it was a great excuse to talk about an underrated yet important topic.

Not understanding the concept of slippage cost this guy $400,000. That’s a really expensive way to learn that lesson, so I’m offering up a different way.

In order to understand slippage, you need to understand the difference between limit and market orders as a foundation. A “limit” or “maker” order is essentially advertising that a trader is willing to transact at that price, and is waiting for a “taker” or ”market” order to take them up on it. A market order will fill immediately at the best available price.

The way a market order executes the “best available price” is what creates slippage. If there aren’t enough limit orders advertising that they’re willing to transact at the best possible price, a market order will then automatically fill as much as possible at the best price, and then continue filling the second best price, the third, and so on. I’m a numbers guy so I’ll provide an example of how that works.

Imagine that Coin A is currently trading at 100 satoshis. You have 1,000,000 coins, worth 1 BTC. There are limit buy orders for 250,000 coins at each 100 sats, 99 sats, 98 sats, and 97 sats. If you market sell your 1,000,00 coins, your order will fill each of those four limit orders for a total of 0.985. The average sell price for those coins is 1.5% lower than the highest original limit buy order at 100 sats. It can be said then that your slippage was 1.5%.

If in that same scenario you decide to place a limit sell at 100 sats, your sell order would immediately fill the 250,000 coin limit buy order at 100 sats. The remaining 750,000 coins would be listed as for sale at that price, waiting for another trader to take you up on that offer and buy your coins.

Relying on another trader to fill your order is a risk and may take some time, which is why some traders prefer to absorb the cost of slippage instead. This is especially true in highly volatile markets where price can turn on a dime.

In the case of the guy who lost $400,000 to slippage, he got a taste of what can happen at the extremes. In this case, he made such a large market buy that the only sell orders to take were at absurd and unrealistic prices. It's unfortunate that they made such a costly mistake, but hopefully other traders can learn from his poor example.

If learning how to trade is something that interests you, check out Voodoo Crypto.