IMO, if you're really going to be day trading, I would definitely get away from Coinbase Pro and use a platform like Binance or Kraken. CB Pro's charting tools and order types aren't very advanced and fees are high. For swing trading or even maybe a day trade every day or two you might be ok, but if you're really going to trade multiple times a day, you'll need something better than CB Pro for sure.   

I'm pretty new but I've been putting in hundreds of hours of work on trading and I'm convinced that success in this game really depends on experience more than anything else. One example of this that I never hear talked about is how you fundamentally look at charts when you're beginning vs. when you have some time under your belt. It's easy to look at a chart and spot entries and exits but it's a different story when you're looking at the patterns develop in real time. After a while, I started to look at charts from a perspective of: "ok, I'm on this bar and I'm seeing this, how could I have identified the right course of action without taking into account what comes after that bar (period)? It seems like common sense but i think it's easy to subconsciously miss this point when developing a system and later find yourself hesitant to take entries or taking the wrong entries.  

Another experience based thing is simply figuring out all the mechanics of trading and orders and becoming thoroughly familiar with the tools that your broker gives you. This doesn't happen overnight but I think it's really key to developing an effective strategy. It's like, somebody can tell you in mechanic school to that you need to tighten this bolt with a torque wrench, but if you don't have experience and confidence using the tools to complete the task, you're going to be slow and make mistakes with it. This is especially true with day trading because your mind will be working on a bunch of different factors to trade as it is and it's important to have your tools down as second nature so that you can focus on what you need to. With day trading, minutes if not seconds can really make a huge difference.

I've listened to many hours of interviews with successful traders of all kinds and it seems to me that the one thing they all agree on is that experience and time are things that you absolutely need to be successful and almost all of them experienced years of losing or not making much before things started to click for them. The more i trade, the more I understand why they all say this.  

I don't trade triangle breakouts but I do know that a lot of folks wait for a re-test on that upper line of the triangle after the first breakout before getting in. To me, triangles patterns are really vague. I look at these sometimes on a daily chart to give me a general idea of a range, but on intraday time frames for crypto, i don't even bother.

I think the huge S&P correction today and it's being overextended was a big part of recent downward moves in Bitcoin.. it's pretty well established that BTC has a connection with that index. I looked at the RSI for the S&P daily and just before today's dump it was at 80 and had been well over 70 for a while. Yikes... accident waiting to happen and doesn't take a genius to see that coming. I'm just glad the panic wasn't worse...so far anyway.

But yeah, I think bigger players were being cautious due to the S&P being way extended to the up lately.  Nothing nefarious going on that I can see. Plus, they say August/late summer is historically a shitty time for crypto markets.

 

This is helpful, thank you! I'm going to really try to get all of these order options straight in order to do what I want.

When I heard about this I really started to wonder if it's true how they say that anybody trading stocks with a bunch of money to throw around looks like an expert in a bull market. I have never traded stocks much but my experiences trading crypto has been really really difficult. That being said, I don't see how stocks would be much easier..

Thankfully, I did approach trading crypto with the mindset that this would be challenge of a lifetime and would require thousands of hours of work. I think that's probably the only way to look at it and get anywhere over the long haul. The fact that he has said that day trading is the easiest thing in the world makes me suspect that he's heading for some trouble somewhere down the line, big money or not. 

There's another simpler scenario where I may want to use an order like this. Lets say I have .5 Bitcoin I bought a long time ago and plan to be holding for a long while, but the price zipped up really fast and I sell some at 12,200 with the intention of buying back in when it pulls back. After I sell, I'm watching the price continue to bleed out slowly to the downside but I don't plan to be glued to my screen for the next 20 hours and I want to just let it run and kind of see how low I can get it back. So, I want to set a buy order a little higher than what the price is now (say, 11,800) in case it breaks the downtrend and starts to reverse with strength, but still allowing it to have a chance to continue lower. (I'd probably only be thinking about doing this if i'm seeing that it's pretty low volatility and steadily downtrending at the moment and so I'm not super worried about big price whips up and down that would make this order immediately pointless. Also bear in mind that this order would lock in that nice rebuy at 11,800, already a nice boost to my long term position.)

Basically, for this scenario, it's the same idea as setting a take profit order for a true margin short position. I'm just looking for the best way to do this with Kraken order types when you're not actually in a margin short trade but you're just trying to manage and optimize a strategy to re-buy lower when you sell at an overextended high and it's really going down steadily in a low volatility fashion.

The reason I put this forward is because I'd presumably be using the same kind of order for this situation as I would be for the first one I mentioned.

No..so I wouldn't buy everything at 3.05, I'm saying that I'm already in a long term long position in the asset and I want to take advantage of some short term downward movements. This is basically an order I'd put in at the start of a swing fade. So lets say I got in at 2.75 a couple months ago, it shot up to 3.05 and it's showing me signs of a low volatility downtrend that's going to go on for a while. Basically I want to take some profit at this point and re-buy when it retests at say 2.90 after a long grinding bleed out, but I don't want to babysit this thing while it makes slow, low volatility moves down after my sell point.

You mentioned selling and then setting limit buys at a lower price, I do this often for a similar kind of fade strategy and it works well, but only shorter term and w/ higher volatility conditions. I typically do this for little overextensions to the upside and I'm expecting to pick up a little bit and it's choppy or for consolidations in an uptrend. Also these are shorter term trades and I can reasonably watch it and make sure it doesn't go the other way on me.  BUT there are some circumstances where it's the start of a slow but persistent drift downward where I think it makes more strategic sense to basically but a stop loss style re-buy slightly higher than what I sold it for rather than put in a lower limit buy. Part of the reason for this is that I do have to sleep sometimes and I'd rather have a stop loss style order in to rebuy slightly higher rather than hope that it hits my buy orders overnight. (also, these low volatility conditions usually occur at the times that I'm sleeping and sometimes on weekends) But yeah, I have learned the hard way that just setting lower limit buys can miss or partial fill and pop back up and screw me while I'm sleeping or busy and can't do anything about it.

In a nutshell, these are circumstances where I'm taking the position that if there's any kind of upward trend reversal past my sell point then my theory is busted, this isn't the slow bleed I was looking for and I want back in. Again, this isn't something I would use in all circumstances but I often see really long slow fades in the assets that I trade and when these start, there's rarely much reversal to the upside past the strategic failed breakout sell points I would choose.

Hello, new here. I have a question regarding using limit orders, specifically with Kraken. What I want to do is sell an asset at a certain price, then set an order to buy it back at a higher price than I sold it, essentially like a stop loss for a short position but without actually entering a margin short.

I think I've been able to set stop loss orders for actual margin short positions by using just a Stop Loss Limit Buy order and it works, but it seems like I'm not doing it in a cost effective way even for that. I also wonder if this is the best way to go about this when I'm not in a margin position but simply want to buy back the asset with cash if it drifts up past a certain point.

Kraken offers regular limit buy and sell orders, Stop Loss and Take Profit orders, and Stop Loss (Stop) and Take Profit (Stop) both buy and sell orders.

To recap what I want to do here: Let's say I'm long a couple hundred XTZ and the price is at say 3.05. I think it's going to continue to drift downward short term so I sell half my holdings at 3.05 with hopes to buy it back later at a lower price. However, I don't want to risk missing out if there's an upward trend reversal. Therefore, I want to put in an order to buy back the XTZ I sold at say, 3.08 to 3.10. Would I use a Stop Loss (Stop) Limit order for this?

Note that I'm only going to do this when the market is exhibiting certain low volatility drift tendencies and with other technical signals. I do recognize that this isn't the best strategy to use in many situations. Also, I don't trade XTZ and the price targets are just for the sake of example.

I hope this makes sense and thanks for any advice in advance.. I don't know where else to turn for this question!