Currently, I am using around $250 increments and my spreads are around $900...
I have gone back and forth with jbreher on this topic of increments, and he seems to have way the fuck smaller increments than me, and he claims to be making a killing whether the BTC price is going down or it is going up, he is saying that he is making a killing..
Jeebus - my eyes glazed over again - I almost fell asleep before I saw my name.
Yeah.. maybe I should have highlighted or some way of making it easier for you to see.
No, I don't claim to be making a killing - just harvesting a consistently nice bit of the volatility.
You are correct, "killing" might be a wee bit too strong... .
Firstly, my current increments are exactly what you claim to be employing. But I think I see the issue that keeps you thinking all the time, instead of just rote executing. What is this $900 spread of which you speak?
For example, currently, my next buy order is at $6,300-ish and my next sell order is at $7,450 - ish
So maybe the spread is $1,150; however, my last sell was at $7,200-ish, so I am thinking that the buy back for the sale is $900 cheaper than the price that I sold... even though really the spread between my next action of some sort of buy and sell might be considered higher than $900.
so yeah, by increments I mean that every additional $250 down, I buy some more.. . and every additional $250 up I sell some more.
I did think that you used to have much smaller increments and even a smaller spread, too.
Nay, if my increment is $250, my spread is $500. So any order gets entered exactly as the order two before it (think about it).*
I used to do something closer to that, but I did not like it and I think that part of the reason was that I thought that I was spinning my wheels too much in terms of ratio of profits to fees, and also maybe I felt that such a small spread just caused my orders to trigger way too often. I prefer what I am doing now largely for those two reasons.
By the way, we have been in these prices for so long that my order locations are largely in my head, too... so I don't really have too much time with that, except maybe sometimes orders might not get hit for a week or more.. sometimes only a few orders hit in a month's time.. but surely in recent times they have been getting hit quite a bit.
* spread has to be 2X increment. If a buy, fill the middle with a sell. If a sell, fill the middle with a buy. duh.
Well, it is a strategy.
Sure.. there is not ONLY one way to structure the buy and sell orders and the tweaking from time to time and the thought process around resetting matter, but surely it takes me more than 12 seconds on average per buy/sell order to reset such buy or sell orders after they have been filled, and maybe I fart around in other ways, too that cause me to believe that sometimes when a bunch of orders execute, then I sometimes will feel that i am spending a decent amount of time on considering some matters (or gloating perhaps), but some of that might be other aspects that i want to monitor whether deemed as trade secrets or not.. or personal analyzing details that I just do not feel willing to share.
Sometimes I might feel like a bot when going through some of the mechanics of setting orders and keeping track and tweaking, even though I am not a bot.. and sometimes I am not sure how well what I do could be replaced by a bot, even though there are ways to set up what I do like a bot would do and also to carry out the functions like a bot, and maybe if orders are filling quickly and repetitively, then maybe some of my actions do become more robotic during those kinds of times, so there is that aspect, too... but still no where close to 12 seconds per order reset.. nothing close to that...
Oh, I just thought of another tweaking thingie-ma-jiggie that I have been doing in the past couple of weeks whenever sell orders fill, which I have been tweaking my buy orders all the way down to $3k... For sure, I do not want to have those buy orders executed.. but that has been taking a bit more work to use some of the proceeds of recent sell orders to cover higher amounts at lower prices and lesser amounts at higher prices (a kind of ongoing redistribution of buy orders to make me feel much MOAR better, even though I hope that those buy orders between $3k and $5k never, ever, ever fill).
Hey jbreher:
I have been pondering this BTC order increments and spread idea for the past couple of days, and I thought that maybe there is a way that I could attempt to further clarify points of my above post, and maybe my clarification could help to quantify part of the utility that I consider for myself in maintaining a larger spread that goes beyond my merely wanting to become a larger and larger swing trader, so my trades do not trigger as frequently.
Something like this.
So hypothetically, if you have a spread of $1,000, and you are trading .1BTC on each sell order, then if your last sale was at $7,200, you would have generated $720 worth of cash minus the fee. So if the fee on each end is .5%, then your $720 sale is going to have a $7.20 fee for both sides of the trade, to sell the .1BTC and then to buy back the dollar value that had been generated.
So if your spread is $1,000, then you have to go to buy back at $6,200, you only have $712.80 to buy back, once you subtract the fee. That would buy you .11496774 BTC at that price, which would be .01496774BTC or the dollar equivalent of ($92.80 at $6,200) or ($107.77 at $7,200)... so yeah, are you counting your profits in BTC or dollars or some combination of the two... you can divide your profits how ever you like.
Now, if you instead decide to have a spread that is only $500 rather than $1,000, you will still be more than sufficiently profitable with fees that are .5% on each end, but it will be less than half because of the fees, and you are going to stay a lot more busy with your orders, which is likely o.k. with someone who is learning, practicing and someone who is wanting to stack more sats for free.
So, the sale at $7,200 would still generate $720, and it would still be $712.80 once the 5% fee is subtracted out on both sides.
So therefore when you go to buy your BTC back at $6,700 rather than $6,200 you are only going to be able to buy .10638806BTC, which is surely less profits therein. You make only .00638806BTC ($42.80 at $6,700) or ($46 at $7,200) per trade rather than .01496774BTC, which is a .00857968 BTC difference ($61.77 at $7,200), and probably you need to have nearly three back and forth trades with those kinds of smaller spreads in order to accomplish the same profits with larger spreads (with a quite a bit more accounting and more time consuming, but to each his own).
Frequently, what happens, for me, is that I find that once the BTC price starts going in one direction, it will go for quite a ways, too, so frequently you are not going to get a lot of back and forths, anyhow, so sometimes it is better that each of the BTC buys are generating a higher profit and not having to play around so much or think about whether trades are executing or not so much, but again to each his own in terms of how much time that he wants to spend thinking about this and if he feels that he needs to generate more sats.
Furthermore, since we are using .1BTC as a sell amount, a lot of guys should be dealing with smaller amounts than that because the size of their holdings would not justify larger trades, but of course, if you have a larger holdings then you might be dealing with 1BTC on each order or some other amount that will, of course, generate more profits due to size, even while any of us who engages in this practice and who is longer-term bullish needs to be keeping in mind the size of our total BTC stash that should cause each of us to be careful NOT to be selling too much BTC because our supply of BTC will really diminish if the BTC price goes shooting straight up to $100k and then we do not have any BTC left to sell, but the price keeps going up.. and various other scenarios of selling too much and missing out on the likely upwards BTC profits by holding too much fiat rather than BTC.
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