Our approaches are a bit different from one another.
I don't attempt to predict short term price movements in either direction,but I assume in the long run BTC prices are going up... so accumulating is going to pay off.
Therefore, I only sell within profits.. so for example if I hold 100btc, then I can only sell up to $1,000 for every $10 the price goes up, and so I continue to stagger on the way up and on the way down and the price intervals vary... but continue... I am somewhat agnostic regarding whether prices go up or down, but of course, since I have been accumulating BTC, I prefer that the prices go up.
So, it sounds like you may invest about 1/5 of your holdings every $10 the price goes up. It also sounds like you do this over a relatively long period of time. You keep up with the amount of BTC purchased and at what price. Which means you have pre-determined an exit for each fifth of your holdings ($1,000) you have invested as the price heads upward. This would mean most of the time you are not in a position to have invest all $5K or 5 fifths for example because the price may not have gone up $50 or $60 over the period you are trading before it goes down again. At least that is what has been the case lately. It has stayed pretty much between $435 and $465 for quite a while now.
I was a bit distracted since the BTC/USD market has been very happening in the past several hours….. so for posterity sake, as I type, BTC prices are currently floating between $472 and $478 (after having had risen about 5% from about $453).
Anyhow, let me attempt to clarify because possibly, I did not describe very well in my earlier summary regarding my current approach to BTC trading.
Even though I call what I do BTC trading, maybe what I do does not really fit any exact typical pattern of trading because I definitely tailored it to myself?
I know technically I am BTC trading, but also what I am doing is engaging in a kind of ongoing small level tweaks of my BTC holdings in order to hedge some of the downward volatility with underlying assumptions that in the long term BTC prices are going upwards.
I am also engaging in a certain level of BTC price prediction attempts (with some margin of error), so for example my view of recent BTC history is something like this:
In August 2015 BTC trade volume began to pick up after the downward testing of $200 and the bounce back thereafter, and through October November BTC prices shot up to $502, but the BTC price battle remained for at least a couple more months through December 2015, and the bears were largely unsuccessful to get BTC prices to return below $350, even though there were some temporary successful short periods of such pushes below $350. So after getting through those more than 4 months of relatively high volume BTC price battles, BTC prices have been trickling back up up and becoming more and more difficult to drive down absent some major spreading of FUCD or finding of some actual technical flaw or real news item.
So anyhow with my description of recent BTC price history, I have certain assumptions that since about August 2015 we have been in an upward bound bull market, and probably we did not really realize for sure until about December 2015 that the BTC market had truly shifted from its nearly 2 year long bear market into a bull market (yeah some people recognized such sooner rather than later and surely others did not recognize such transformation until much later, and a few are still denying – but not too many), and yeah there have been some fairly significant attempts at keeping BTC prices down with blocksize limit debate etc, and maybe even attempts to revert to the bear market but the upwards BTC price trajectory seems a decent medium term assumption, that has kind of become more solidly reaffirmed in the past 12 hours.
Let me show how my projected BTC buys and sells are currently stacked, and then I will attempt to explain further about those projections.
In the past couple of years, I discontinued disclosing my actual number of BTC, but the below rendition assumes that I have 100 BTC (about 96% in BTC) (and about 4% in fiat, which is about $2,120 ), and even though these are hypothetical numbers, the actual ratios of all of that is proportional to my actual current BTC portfolio and stacking of projections.
I attempt to always have enough cash on hand and to stagger to buy at least a 15% correction, and if there is a 10% correction, I have to rejigger everything in order to be able to continue to buy if there is another 15% correction from there (which would end up being 25% correction total.. etc etc etc.. I mean I never want to run out of either fiat or BTC to be able to keep trading with the funds in my BTC portfolio no matter which direction the price goes and for how long.
My current BTC buy staggerings are proportionally as follows (read this one from the bottom up):
BuyPrice BTC_tobuy $Amt_ToBuy
$437.00 0.19614253 $85.71
$443.00 0.22573363 $100.00
$447.00 0.22371365 $100.00
$450.00 0.22222222 $100.00
$453.00 0.25228635 $114.29
$456.00 0.25062657 $114.29
$459.00 0.24898848 $114.29
$462.00 0.24737168 $114.29
$465.00 0.24577573 $114.29
$467.00 0.24472316 $114.29
$468.50 0.24393962 $114.29
$470.00 0.24316109 $114.29
$471.50 0.24238752 $114.29
$473.00 0.24161885 $114.29
My current BTC sell staggerings are proportionally as follows.
SellPrice BTC_toSell $amt_toSell
$480.00 0.17857143 $85.71
$482.00 0.17783047 $85.71
$484.00 0.17709563 $85.71
$486.00 0.20576132 $100.00
$489.00 0.20449898 $100.00
$491.50 0.23252434 $114.29
$494.00 0.23134760 $114.29
$496.50 0.25895555 $128.57
$499.00 0.25765817 $128.57
$501.50 0.28485971 $142.86
$504.00 0.28344671 $142.86
$506.50 0.36666197 $185.71
$511.00 0.44730221 $228.57
$521.00 0.43871675 $228.57
$531.00 0.43045467 $228.57
Each time I buy or sell I readjust the parameters and project ahead, and if the price shoots passed some buy or sell points, I combine them, and profit more from allowing it to shoot, if I have an inclination that the price is not going to reverse directions.
Currently, I am only authorizing myself to trade up to about 50% of my profits.. so like I said if BTC prices go up $10, with 100 BTCs, I can trade up to $1,000, but in actual practice, currently, I am only authorizing myself to trade about $500 – 50% because I am bullish and because I would rather not sell too many BTCs
So my total fiat holdings are currently only about 4%, and that is not bad – given that as I type, BTC prices seems to be heading upwards. Just a day ago, I was at only about 2.2% fiat, and the last time we were at $470 (about 2 months ago), my fiat amount had migrated up to 8% of my BTC portfolio (and I felt too much in fiat), and thereafter with like three major corrections back to the $430s, I had gotten my fiat down to 2% which was feeling a bit risky… Maybe ideally if BTC prices surge a bit, then I am going to be able to float between 10% to 20% fiat, yet I think part of the reason that my fiat levels are currently so low is that I remain quite bullish about BTC’s short term price direction, and the three recent price corrections to $430 were quite a bit more than I had anticipated and caused me to stock up a bit much on BTC – and now I am a little more relieved after our 5% upwards correction today.
Under my current practice, even if there is a BTC price upsurge to $5k, I will likely still hold over 50% of my BTC; however, I may decide to make some kind of special exception selling if I really believe that we are strongly in a BTC price bubble and I am fairly confident that there is going to be at least a 10% downward price correction.
I hope that this helps to clarify a little bit regarding what kinds of proportions of my BTC holdings I am trading and kind of how it may play out with larger kinds of price movements.
