Day trading

[Ac3Upz]

If you are "daytrading" I have some questions to ask. On average:
How often do you buy/sell?
Do you use one sized chunks (e.g. 100 BTC) or various sizes? How you decide on the amount?
For how long do you wait before admitting bad decision and buying/selling back with loss?
Are you using market orders? When?
Do you use API (bot/script) or web interface?
Do you use stop-loss orders?
What's your % gain since the 266 crash?

[1715615525]

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[notme]

If you are "daytrading" I have some questions to ask. On average:
How often do you buy/sell?
Do you use one sized chunks (e.g. 100 BTC) or various sizes? How you decide on the amount?
For how long do you wait before admitting bad decision and buying/selling back with loss?
Are you using market orders? When?
Do you use API (bot/script) or web interface?
Do you use stop-loss orders?
What's your % gain since the 266 crash?

Every 1.3%
Amount is halfway between constant $ amount and constant btc amount.  This gives me half my profits in each currency.
I start with btc I am willing to sell at current prices.  If the price shoots up too quickly I give it some time to retrace.  If it does not, I make a student loan payment.
Limit orders only
Bot
No stop loss
Depends if you count in $ terms or btc terms

[ironstove]

How often do you buy/sell? Depends on market volatility and indicators, but usually I remove/add orders at least once a day.
Do you use one sized chunks (e.g. 100 BTC) or various sizes? 10% sized chunks over large spreads, going from 5-20% gain to 40% with a 20% chunk sitting in a 'hail mary' (40%) territory incase the market rockets or crashes further than I expect, unless indicators are particularly strong that a certain price will be struck, then I do smaller spreads in larger portions.
For how long do you wait before admitting bad decision and buying/selling back with loss? This is a hard question and I don't have an answer to.
Are you using market orders? When? Never.
Do you use API (bot/script) or web interface? Manual through web interface.
Do you use stop-loss orders? No, can't find an exchange with high volume that implements this feature, hence I lose a lot of sleep. Still looking for a good program/bot to do this for me that I can trust.
What's your % gain since the 266 crash? I'm a bit above even ~110%, (versus 40% if I just held) of what I was at money-wise pre-crash, coin-wise, I'm up a lot (More than doubled). I never day-traded mainly due to the fact that the market was so bullish, but after the crash I started and I'm pleased with the results my strategy is just frequent small gains

It takes some knowledge and experience to know how to place your spreads, I think that's the success behind my strategy, if you don't know what you're doing and how to read the charts and know when to add or remove orders then you're going to calculate bad spreads and make very poorly placed orders which will more times than not backfire, result in buying right as a crash begins and selling right as a rally starts.

[ManBearPig]

How often do you buy/sell?

There is no regularity, the time has to be right AND I have the time or state of mind to fully commit until the round trip is done.

Do you use one sized chunks (e.g. 100 BTC) or various sizes? How you decide on the amount?

I generally go with as much as I have in my trading account.

For how long do you wait before admitting bad decision and buying/selling back with loss?

Only when the market is clearly heading in the opposite direction and I want to minimise that loss.

Are you using market orders?

No, never.

Do you use API (bot/script) or web interface?

No, never.

Do you use stop-loss orders?

No, never.

What's your % gain since the 266 crash?

That would be telling. I'm happy

[blackreplica]

If you are "daytrading" I have some questions to ask. On average:
How often do you buy/sell?
Just after the 266 crash, maybe once or twice a day. Now with the reduced volatility, maybe a trade once every couple of days

Do you use one sized chunks (e.g. 100 BTC) or various sizes? How you decide on the amount?
I have an standard order size. If I am not so sure about my chances of making a profit, i halve the order. If i am very sure if making a profit. I double or even triple my standard order size. I made the most money on my biggest bets. A standard order size is about 10% of my trading funds. I never deplete my fiat or btc holdings (always keep your gun loaded for a market move in any direction no matter how sure you are)

For how long do you wait before admitting bad decision and buying/selling back with loss?
Before i place a trade, i make a guess in which direction price will go and by how much. If the direction goes the wrong way by more than roughly 10% i take the loss and close my position. Out of a total of about 20 trades, ive made small losses on 3 of them following this rule and the biggest loss on the one time when i broke the rule - i eventually closed that position having lost 25% of the order amount. Thankfully, it was a small trade amount. I learned a very important lesson on that trade

Are you using market orders? When?
Never

Do you use API (bot/script) or web interface?
Web interface

Do you use stop-loss orders?
Wish i could. Gox doesnt support it via the web interface

What's your % gain since the 266 crash?
When the crash happened i wired in a sum of money to trade (i refuse to trade with my long term btc holdings bought last year). When the money hit the exchange the price was about 150. I am holding roughly 70% BTC and 30% fiat in my wallet at the moment but if i sold all my btc and cashed out now I'd have made a 72% profit on my initial trading amount

[Crypt_Current]

If you are "daytrading" I have some questions to ask. On average:
How often do you buy/sell?
Do you use one sized chunks (e.g. 100 BTC) or various sizes? How you decide on the amount?
For how long do you wait before admitting bad decision and buying/selling back with loss?
Are you using market orders? When?
Do you use API (bot/script) or web interface?
Do you use stop-loss orders?
What's your % gain since the 266 crash?

Depends on volatility.  Lots of volatility in shorter time periods = more trades.
I take a chunk of my total BTC, and use that as my total trading amount.  Of that trading amount, I only put a small percentage up for sale, and I use limit orders to stagger these sell orders.  I only ever buy if price drops considerably after I sold, because I also (mainly) mine crypto coins.
NEVER use market orders.  EVAR!
I play with bots, but none have been as good as me in person (even at 430 am local time with coffee brewing)
I don't have any loss to stop playing this way.
Not telling.

[Crypt_Current]

If the price shoots up too quickly I give it some time to retrace.  If it does not, I make a student loan payment.

+1 

[tuneman1980]

I'm new to the whole day trading thing, but I decided to use a rebalancing model.  I set my target percentages of each cryptocoin and then place trades daily to bring them back into balance.  This works to help me buy low and sell high unless one coin shoots for the moon and I keep selling it to invest in less profitable coins or if a coin is dying and the model wants me to keep buying into it to keep the percentages in check.  In either of these cases I have chosen to alter my target percentages for those coins.

I've only been doing this for a week and have yet to know how well its working for me.  I'm definitely eager to learn more and better strategies though.

[ironstove]

Market orders are terrible, they add on a heightened level of cost and risk for absolutely no reason other than to satisfy impatience and should only be used in extreme cases i.e. collapse or insane rally (And in the rally case, it's still extremely dangerous to do market orders). This doesn't seem bad when you're dealing with low volume and low amounts of money like I'm assuming you are since it's just a couple of bucks here and there, but when you start dealing in the tens of thousands of dollars in your trades, this could be a couple hundred dollars difference which adds up fast.

You should always place a limit order a .001 step above the highest bid at worst and it will be filled in 10-15 minutes, most times less.

Once you do a full circle trade, you could have easily made an extra 2-3%, but what's a couple extra bitcoins anyway eh?

[evolve]

How often do you buy/sell?

Depends on the market, sometimes I trade a couple times a day sometimes I am out of the market for weeks.

Do you use one sized chunks (e.g. 100 BTC) or various sizes? How you decide on the amount?

Various sizes.

For how long do you wait before admitting bad decision and buying/selling back with loss?

I know where I'll take profits and where I'll cut my losses before I set my order.

Are you using market orders? When?

I have before, but as a general rule, no.

Do you use API (bot/script) or web interface?

Not since about $12

Do you use stop-loss orders?

Not really.

What's your % gain since the 266 crash?

More than I expected.

[trogdorjw73]

I have a sure-fire way to make money day-trading. I go onto a public Internet forum and ask other people for their strategies, because if it works really well I'm sure they'll give the knowledge away for free! The other thing I like to do is when I'm about to put millions of dollars into a stock or Bitcoins, I tell everyone that in a few hours I'm going to spend millions of dollars to drive up stock XYZ (or BTC), and then I wait for everyone else to buy first so that I can buy at a higher price. Then, just before I sell, I do the same thing so that I can make sure to redistribute the wealth.

In other words, I'm pretty sure that 99% of the people on the speculation forum are like me: no clue whatsoever as to what we're doing. We guess, we lose money, sometimes we get lucky and make money and then pat ourselves on the back. And most of us are long Bitcoin, so the only time people are saying the price is going to crash is when they've sold (shorted) and want to buy in lower.

Welcome to the Internet! All the bad free advice you could want -- unless someone is making money off of advertising, in which case they have a reason to try to be useful. Or if they're egotistical and want to show others how smart they are. Good luck spotting the difference! 

[ManBearPig]

I have a sure-fire way to make money day-trading. I go onto a public Internet forum and ask other people for their strategies, because if it works really well I'm sure they'll give the knowledge away for free! The other thing I like to do is when I'm about to put millions of dollars into a stock or Bitcoins, I tell everyone that in a few hours I'm going to spend millions of dollars to drive up stock XYZ (or BTC), and then I wait for everyone else to buy first so that I can buy at a higher price. Then, just before I sell, I do the same thing so that I can make sure to redistribute the wealth.

In other words, I'm pretty sure that 99% of the people on the speculation forum are like me: no clue whatsoever as to what we're doing. We guess, we lose money, sometimes we get lucky and make money and then pat ourselves on the back. And most of us are long Bitcoin, so the only time people are saying the price is going to crash is when they've sold (shorted) and want to buy in lower.

Welcome to the Internet! All the bad free advice you could want -- unless someone is making money off of advertising, in which case they have a reason to try to be useful. Or if they're egotistical and want to show others how smart they are. Good luck spotting the difference! 

Have you read any Nicholas Nassim Taleb? If not, do so, seems like you'd enjoy it! And despite personal evidence to the contrary I agree with him quite a lot

But seriously, I gave up on luck a long time ago.

[fitty]

I have a sure-fire way to make money day-trading. I go onto a public Internet forum and ask other people for their strategies, because if it works really well I'm sure they'll give the knowledge away for free! The other thing I like to do is when I'm about to put millions of dollars into a stock or Bitcoins, I tell everyone that in a few hours I'm going to spend millions of dollars to drive up stock XYZ (or BTC), and then I wait for everyone else to buy first so that I can buy at a higher price. Then, just before I sell, I do the same thing so that I can make sure to redistribute the wealth.

In other words, I'm pretty sure that 99% of the people on the speculation forum are like me: no clue whatsoever as to what we're doing. We guess, we lose money, sometimes we get lucky and make money and then pat ourselves on the back. And most of us are long Bitcoin, so the only time people are saying the price is going to crash is when they've sold (shorted) and want to buy in lower.

Welcome to the Internet! All the bad free advice you could want -- unless someone is making money off of advertising, in which case they have a reason to try to be useful. Or if they're egotistical and want to show others how smart they are. Good luck spotting the difference! 

You really can't be this retarded. Are you new to the internet? The internet is giving away knowledge for free. Lots and lots of very smart, talented, successful people are part of online communities and part of what they do is giving advice. DIY forums are full of really good tradesmen (plumber, electrician, carpenter) who are constantly interacting with novices offering great advice. Coding forums have plenty of really really really talented coders who jump into all kinds of discussions. Years and years ago I was on a popular poker forum, discussing different strategies of a particular hand, and Daniel Negreanu joined in and gave his opinion on how he'd play it. Engineering/Robotics forums are some of the most helpful/amazing communities you'll find. And of course day trading/stocks there's a lot of great resources and helpful people out there.

Just because you have no idea what you are doing, doesn't mean there aren't a lot of bright people here. There's millions changing hands every hour on the exchanges, it's not all Bitcoin miners making it up as they go along. If you wanted to get into day trading BTC, you'd be an idiot not to come read this sub-forum. Doesn't mean it's all great information. Doesn't mean there isn't a lot of bullshit. But to completely write it all off, is moronic. People like to talk about their passion, and talk about things they are good at. People generally like helping others. There's been some decent advice in this thread, he's a little better off then he was before, which was probably his goal.

The fact the premise of his thread bothered you, is something I'd look into. There are some amazing self help forums on the internet. You can get help dealing with passive-aggressive behavior, anger management. delusional jealousy and autism. The first step is admitting you have a problem. Good luck!

[ironstove]

Since we're on the topic, what indicators or combination are some of your favorites? Do any day-traders trade based on the news and how well has that worked out for you?

I personally like to do a regressive graph of RSI to DCF and chart that vs CMF, of course I also pay attention to common stuff like EMAs, but can't find much of a relationship.

I'm in the works of trying to take one of the order call/asset distribution bots on the trading forums and changing to the code to have some back-end machine learning algo, however I'm relatively new to the subject and learning more as I trudge along so hopefully won't accidentally lose too much money in my attempt to make some lol!

[And1]

I have a sure-fire way to make money day-trading. I go onto a public Internet forum and ask other people for their strategies, because if it works really well I'm sure they'll give the knowledge away for free! The other thing I like to do is when I'm about to put millions of dollars into a stock or Bitcoins, I tell everyone that in a few hours I'm going to spend millions of dollars to drive up stock XYZ (or BTC), and then I wait for everyone else to buy first so that I can buy at a higher price. Then, just before I sell, I do the same thing so that I can make sure to redistribute the wealth.

In other words, I'm pretty sure that 99% of the people on the speculation forum are like me: no clue whatsoever as to what we're doing. We guess, we lose money, sometimes we get lucky and make money and then pat ourselves on the back. And most of us are long Bitcoin, so the only time people are saying the price is going to crash is when they've sold (shorted) and want to buy in lower.

Welcome to the Internet! All the bad free advice you could want -- unless someone is making money off of advertising, in which case they have a reason to try to be useful. Or if they're egotistical and want to show others how smart they are. Good luck spotting the difference! 

This forum is like BTCE Trollbox. Forum topics are chat messages, than you click them and see elaboration... it's actually worse than Trollbox, people here do more sophisticated stuff.

[pwi]

I use an algorithm. It's called G+U+T+S = (SU+CKER+S - MARKETVALUE) = (PRO-FIT - LONGSHARE)². My methods are both proven and repeatable across multiple markets.

[dexX7]

How often do you buy/sell?

Depends. Intraday - a few days. With the recent tiny volatility, more holding.

Do you use one sized chunks (e.g. 100 BTC) or various sizes? How you decide on the amount?

I try to chuck the amounts over the course. I.e. setting up bids on the way down. My BTC money is playmoney. I'm usually all in, if everything goes right.

For how long do you wait before admitting bad decision and buying/selling back with loss?

Tricky. It's hard to overcome the psychological barrier, but you have to reevaluate the position every time. It doens't matter if you are losing or winning. All that matters is the current price and the future.

Are you using market orders? When?

Almost never. But Bitstamp's trading engine matches your order to the best offer. I.e. you can bet +5 $ over the current price and still fill the cheapest bid/ask.

Do you use API (bot/script) or web interface?

Self coded.

Do you use stop-loss orders?

Not yet. The volatily may be to high, but I have to do some backtesting. Also this requires running the stop-service 24/7.

What's your % gain since the 266 crash?

~250 % since mid april.

[pwi]

How often do you buy/sell?

As infrequently as possible and as frequently as the market dictates

Do you use one sized chunks (e.g. 100 BTC) or various sizes? How you decide on the amount?

Various based on risk tolerance. Always leave set % in coin/fiat/orders. I treat each play as a multiple of a 'unit' in much the same way that a card counting blackjack player/poker player/sports bettor does.  This is done to both reduce risk of ruin and maximize likely positive outcome moves.   

For how long do you wait before admitting bad decision and buying/selling back with loss?

Good question. Time is irrelevant.  Sometimes I change my position in an instant.  Sometimes its hours or days. 

I never admit a bad decision, only bad or incomplete data that a decision was based upon.  Not every bad result is due to a bad decision.  Not every good outcome is the result of a good decision. 

Separating the signal from the noise is key.  Most of it is noise. 

I sell on the way down from 'bad' buys at predetermined levels and rebuy at a better position, providing a degree of correction of an otherwise less than optimal entry.

Are you using market orders? When?

Almost never. Someone will always pay more and sell for less.

Do you use API (bot/script) or web interface?

Web with assistance of data mining script that takes multiple market conditions into account along with variables (assumptions and confidence intervals) that can be manually modified.

Do you use stop-loss orders?

Kind of, but I do it manually.  See above.

What's your % gain since the 266 crash?

Sold all but 20% of coins in trade at an average of 187.33.  Re-entered at an average of 71.89 holding way more coin.  Not willing to be more specific.  Despite a few scares, a mis-click or two, and more than one bad play; I've done fairly well for having very little understanding of how things work.

I do not trade daily.  I do study daily. I do test new strategies regularly.  Following Bitcoin news, multiple markets, and global financial news is necessary.  Following smart money and extrapolating the maths have served me well.  I am not smart money.

My primary goal involves increasing Bitcoin holdings long term without excessive additional fiat injection.  I consider my activity a high risk hobby mitigated only by the tiny bit of common sense bestowed upon me.  I entered Bitcoin with $1000 pre '13 bubble.  It has served me well.