First of all welcome to trading.. this is easily one of the most fun and profitable things you can do if you spend the time and discipline to learn (and failures, you will sometimes lose money and your ego will be bruised, sorry!)
This question has a lot of different angles so everything I say won't be relevant right away, but can be referenced later as your experience grows.
To me the most important thing about trading is you can't be emotional.. you will make mistakes.. you can't let your ego get in the way. The more painful a trade is the more you will learn from it.. its better to lose 1000 dollars at the beginning over making 5000 the wrong way gambling and lose 100,000 later. Success in this game a few times in a bull market will not work forever.. and nor does doing the right thing always pay off.. but the point is over time the odds swing into your favor and you have to have confidence in your ability.. and humbleness to step away when you make mistakes.
The second most important thing in trading is your entry point is more important than your exit.. People concentrate way too much on their exit point and write entry points off as irrelevant since it "will go up anyways". Treat your entry point as the most important thing you do... you can't ever control your exit point if things go south but you can always control your entry.. Make sure sure sure you are not fomoing here and wait for trades to come to you.. if unsure look up a couple of videos on moving averages and look for coins to pull back to a reasonable 50/100 day MA as atleast a starting point for an entry.
Stack size.. the smaller your initial investment the more it will work against you... I've seen it time and time and time again that people who start with a couple of hundred dollars will feel the pressure of min/maxing large moves and will get rekt. Having small stacks will lead to you also changing positions too often and over trading.. so just do paper trading of 5000 dollars until you're ready to invest 5000.. to remove the pressure of having to execute dynamite trades daily to get anywhere.
Any trade you make bitcoin is a great trade... don't get caught up in making 50-100% every go round or wishing welling exit points that are just speculative guesses because this is emotional trading and makes you question selling when you should exit immediately when markets are tipping over.
Dont trade vs USD ($) unless you are entering the market in USD and leaving daily or weekly in USD.. USD comparitive values will make you lose sight on beating the gains of just hodling bitcoin and gaining USD value but losing in BTC value overtime is a bad trade. If this doens't make sense look at Ripple and NEO's history in coinmarketcap.. check out how high these coins were in BTC value in Juine of last year compared to December.. and how hodling or focusing on just USD value would have made you miss out on A LOT.
Hodling is a whale's mantra to noobs. Whales or people who tell you to hodl are either dumping on you or bought in at ICO price and are already up 10-100X.. mindlessly hodling forever is poor decision making.. not making money in this market and not participating is the same as losing money.
Have a long term strategy. Let it be clear and precise when you are closing positions and take profits (including out of alt coins to bitcoin as well as when to draw profits to banking account). Having strategies in place will allow you to not be emotional.
The rest of my advice is more for when you start using technical analysis and whether its useful or not. This is an article I wrote on another thread about the usefulness of TA (from my opionion) (This is for min maxing results, over 75% of the result will come from the things listed above)
TL:DR Yes and No.. it depends on the coin..and even if it helps.. common sense and avoiding emotional trading like fomo/fud/greed will take you alot further, especially as a noobie.
I do believe fundamental technical analysis works but only when other traders use it as a basis too... I think BTC/USD for example has high enough volume and enough millionaires/professionals where'd they'd all basically see the same indicators and tools giving them buy and sell signals so it becomes sort of a self fulfilling prophecy.. If you day trade BTC or ETH/USD, fibonacci levels or "just under" seem to play out very well with entry and exit points.. larger broader trades using moving averages and ichi cloud seem to follow stock indicators atleast in a general sense.
The problem with alt coins and btc/eth pairs is when you use technical analysis with these. there tends to be an extra moving part.. because the volatility of the alt coin also primarily goes up and down vs the price of the coin you're purchasing with.. which is often not found in traditional technical analysis since the price of traditional currency is way less volatile. Any TA can fall apart in seconds if BTC is bull running or dropping.. so the only real way to really use TA in these types of markets is to use it to judge what BTC/USD is going to do, and use that as the primary buy and sell indicator of your favorite alt coins. You can have a lot of success in alt coins I feel if you can move to BTC fast enough based off of things you see through technical analysis on the BTC chart, because you're moving one step ahead of the best revolving position...Think BTC won't break 9200 USD and we'lll spiral down to 6000 USD again or lower? You could move to USDT to buy BTC at that price again and alts will be waiting for you 50% off.. so the risk you take could net you 50%+ gains just reaching the correction price.. which is the safest of all sell zones to reach again (any price thats happened in the past will be exponentially more likely to be reached again over speculative all time highs).
Anyways.. as far as BTC TA (or even alt coins TA, but ALWAYS have BTC/USD Bitfinex on tradingview open while trading alts at all times so youre monitoring what the king is doing to help/hurt your trade's cause).. I try not to overcomplicate my predictions.. (breaking supports for profit - See Quickfingers Luc youtube videos this guy explains safe buying zones using nothing but resistance support for basic day trading, really good)
Ones I find useful
Moving Averages on the Day Chart (50/100/200 Day) - I value this one the highest.. its simple, and allows at a glance of scanning coins what has pulled back enough from runups that may be worth looking at if other indicators seem positive
Fibonacci retracements for buy and sell zones (just ideas on where to look for resistance levels to take profit, always leave the areas a bit lower, since everyone uses these to sell as zones, hence the more who use TA, the more of a self fulfilling propechy it becomes.
Bollinger Bands (sometimes I use these just to see how tightly wound things are getting when trying to break out from descending wedges/bull flags/etc.
MACD and RSI (just a quick indicator to pair with others to confirm the information the other indicators are showing me)
Ichimoku Cloud - Love seeing the overhead resistances and when on bull runs if its starting to fall flat.. this indicator isn't good on its own but like using with others.
Things I don't find useful:
Elliot Wave Theory - I can certainly appreciate the concept and I think overall the general concept of any 1-5 wave will lead to an ABC correction in a general sense is good, but as a predictive price to buy or sell at, it seems way too optomistic 99 times out of 100 to me. When chasing coins on a pullback however I do wait for the confirmed C pattern to form.. the problem is large runups can lead to a very long C extension (especially when paired to BTC acting up) so its just best to wait for confirmed reversal pattern over trying to buy based off of the measurement of C.
RSI alone - alot of people use RSI alone for whatever reason which I don't feel is a good idea.. it can in a general sense show if something is overbought or oversold, but something can rally oversold for days or weeks..btc in 2017 is a good example... if you sell when something is overbought or buy when its oversold, youre gonna miss alot of the tops of runups and get cut by the falling knife as it just becomes even more oversolid.. wait for other indicators to confirm what the RSI is telling you.
Anyways I do find some of the tools useful, but like all things nothing is always a perfect science. Even if you think TA is complete garbage.. use common sense when trading.. do not buy things in parabolic runups and dont buy coins all at once price (make sure to ladder into positions so you cost average.. and YES sometimes that means you will miss some of the bottom). At the end of the day I think TA can help you min/max your results with some practice.. but most of the gains comes from using common sense... buy low sell high and not fomoing or getting too greedy or panicking. If you are a new person work on managing your emotions and common sense first then work on perfecting your TA later.
Last thing is just a couple of resources I find useful.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvQ12D5GqyW1qtM0a3Qpwcw/playlists (Tips to setting up tradingview charts the correct way including basic tools such as candles, fibonaccis, trendlines, etc.)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbcxHiowf0TSNKn3xVpGTiQ/videos Quickfingers Luc videos.. this guy has some really useful basic explanations of safer trading options from analyzing basic support breaks (bases) that in general can give noobs a basic understanding of how important entry points are.
Good luck and I hope you get out what you're looking for.
