How profitable is BTC daytrading?

[Datcracktho]

It simply isn't. Too many variables too much luck. Just not gonna happen. I would stick with legit long term investments. You need to come up with something more tangible. Even a job in McDonalds is more efficient IMO..

[zymafluo]

Maybe I was lucky but I had some successful daytrading from April to September, I was playing with dust btw.

[InwardContour]

Some time ago I have seen a thread about holding vs daytrade and the first method was really hard to beat and of course easier than the second.

[bassclef]

You need the right kind of personality to daytrade.

Are you patient?
Are you obsessive?
Do you recognize patterns easily?
Can you suppress your emotions?
Are you willing to put in the time?

If you are not ALL of these things, you won't make a good daytrader. If you are, start studying the charts for 6 months while you trade with .05btc. Then reevaluate.

[oda.krell]

You need the right kind of personality to daytrade.

Are you patient?
Are you obsessive?
Do you recognize patterns easily?
Are you able to analyze your own emotions and those of others, and, if necessary can you suppress your emotions?
Are you willing to put in the time?

If you are not ALL of these things, you won't make a good daytrader. If you are, start studying the charts for 6 months while you trade with .05btc. Then reevaluate.

With one minor addition (underlined), I believe this is an excellent summary.

Plus, risk control. A trader without at least some basic understanding of risk control is just a gambler.

[Eastwind]

Maybe I was lucky but I had some successful daytrading from April to September, I was playing with dust btw.

Is that swing trade?

[BitcoinAddicts]

Most people that daytrading lose to commission charged from exchange... So just keep and do nothing with your BTC is the best..

[SeaofBTC]

Most technical analysis is completely worthless. The stuff you will find with a quick Google search will lose you money. People say it is different with BTC, but it is not.

If you really want to be profitable, learn to program, and learn to back test your strategies to find out how they would have performed in the past. All of the basic TA stuff I've backtested, with horrendous returns.

Back testing is not a sure-fire thing either. Once you get good enough at programming, you will learn to data-snoop and void your back-tests and maybe convince yourself that you did good. Look at cryptotrader.org. Tons of strategies have great back-tests but do not perform in the forward. It's probably because people are datasnooping for the "Best" strategy given the historical data and finding it. It's easy with computers, and it's a costly mistake.

People who do not understand datasnooping or how easily computers can help us do it, look at things like epic back tests and think something amazing has been found.

At the end of the day, day trading will almost *always* lose you money. Do not look at it as "profitable." Look at it as a hobby only.

Here's my longest running account with no funding changes from December 2013 to today: http://seaofbtc.com/harrisonkinsley/honeybadger/client/1

It will take a while to load. That's done by automated day trading, and it's done using a mindless grid-strategy that anyone could do by hand, it's not high frequency. I just choose to automate it so I don't have to sit there all day and don't miss any trades. Bitcoin is volatile, so it works, and I've significantly beat the market, but there are plenty of totally possible events that could leave me far behind market performance never to recover again.

The truly safest strategy is hold, in cold storage. Trading on exchanges brings in a lot of risk. Not just price anymore, nope, we have to worry about actual exchanges just plain disappearing.

[BeeTeeSea]

Not much in my experience, i lost coins.

[oda.krell]

Most technical analysis is completely worthless. The stuff you will find with a quick Google search will lose you money. People say it is different with BTC, but it is not.

If you really want to be profitable, learn to program, and learn to back test your strategies to find out how they would have performed in the past. All of the basic TA stuff I've backtested, with horrendous returns.

Back testing is not a sure-fire thing either. Once you get good enough at programming, you will learn to data-snoop and void your back-tests and maybe convince yourself that you did good. Look at cryptotrader.org. Tons of strategies have great back-tests but do not perform in the forward. It's probably because people are datasnooping for the "Best" strategy given the historical data and finding it. It's easy with computers, and it's a costly mistake.

People who do not understand datasnooping or how easily computers can help us do it, look at things like epic back tests and think something amazing has been found.

At the end of the day, day trading will almost *always* lose you money. Do not look at it as "profitable." Look at it as a hobby only.

Here's my longest running account with no funding changes from December 2013 to today: http://seaofbtc.com/harrisonkinsley/honeybadger/client/1

It will take a while to load. That's done by automated day trading, and it's done using a mindless grid-strategy that anyone could do by hand, it's not high frequency. I just choose to automate it so I don't have to sit there all day and don't miss any trades. Bitcoin is volatile, so it works, and I've significantly beat the market, but there are plenty of totally possible events that could leave me far behind market performance never to recover again.

The truly safest strategy is hold, in cold storage. Trading on exchanges brings in a lot of risk. Not just price anymore, nope, we have to worry about actual exchanges just plain disappearing.

Not bad, especially for a fully automated system. If I read that right your account is up ~40% in BTC terms since Jan 1st (from 52 to 72). USD account value is down, but obviously less severe than the comparison buy & hold.

I don't know what to make of your blanket statement "most technical analysis is completely worthless". If you mean the random, sloppy TA article published in a crypto blog, trying to predict the price for next month based on a trendline drawn from 2011 to today, I agree.

If, however, you dismiss more or less all discretionary trading, and the TA around it as useless, then you're most likely wrong. Say, TA as presented in this book, described and defined with a minimum amount of rigor and seriousness.

Personally, with a discretionary, and for the most part, non-backtestable combination strategy of mean reversion, momentum following, and a dash of predictive analysis (volume analysis, fib, and a bit of Elliot Wave - though I'm not particularly good at the last one), my account is up in BTC terms since Jan 1 by about a factor of 3.5. And as I've seen evidence for more than once: I'm not even really particularly good at it - I know several traders outperforming me by a large margin.

The real keyword here is: risk control. Without it, you're just a gambler.

[James1970]

if you are good you can earn 10%-20%, if you are not good or wanna learn, better don't do it with real money...
long term is the only way for secure investment with very good profit vs banks, gold etc

[Argwai96]

Most technical analysis is completely worthless. The stuff you will find with a quick Google search will lose you money. People say it is different with BTC, but it is not.

If you really want to be profitable, learn to program, and learn to back test your strategies to find out how they would have performed in the past. All of the basic TA stuff I've backtested, with horrendous returns.

Back testing is not a sure-fire thing either. Once you get good enough at programming, you will learn to data-snoop and void your back-tests and maybe convince yourself that you did good. Look at cryptotrader.org. Tons of strategies have great back-tests but do not perform in the forward. It's probably because people are datasnooping for the "Best" strategy given the historical data and finding it. It's easy with computers, and it's a costly mistake.

People who do not understand datasnooping or how easily computers can help us do it, look at things like epic back tests and think something amazing has been found.

At the end of the day, day trading will almost *always* lose you money. Do not look at it as "profitable." Look at it as a hobby only.

Here's my longest running account with no funding changes from December 2013 to today: http://seaofbtc.com/harrisonkinsley/honeybadger/client/1

It will take a while to load. That's done by automated day trading, and it's done using a mindless grid-strategy that anyone could do by hand, it's not high frequency. I just choose to automate it so I don't have to sit there all day and don't miss any trades. Bitcoin is volatile, so it works, and I've significantly beat the market, but there are plenty of totally possible events that could leave me far behind market performance never to recover again.

The truly safest strategy is hold, in cold storage. Trading on exchanges brings in a lot of risk. Not just price anymore, nope, we have to worry about actual exchanges just plain disappearing.

I think you've missed the point about TA. To use TA is to employ back tested trading methods (based on trends, divergences, etc). To say your system is "back tested" and therefore superior just means you are employing a different method of TA.

[realdope]

I come from a TA background and I have no idea about how to go about predicting BTC. We are talking never seen before, unparalleled technology here... hardly any precedents to work with.

[SeaofBTC]

I think you've missed the point about TA. To use TA is to employ back tested trading methods (based on trends, divergences, etc). To say your system is "back tested" and therefore superior just means you are employing a different method of TA.

Nope, I've got it. I didn't say anything about my strategy being back tested. My strategy has been forward tested, and the results are posted. That events into a historical graph, but that's not a back test. Those are real results.

Back-testing using TA comes with serious data-snooping flaws.

I am fully aware that there are people who believe whole-heartedly in TA.

I prefer the true forward test of time. We can reference bitcoin, but we can also reference history in the stock market. TA, by far, consists mostly of pure losers. It's not an opinion.

It is simply fact. There are a handful of TA people who have shown long track records of success. A true statistician can inform you that this is also with statistical certainty to occur for some.

Maybe, just maybe, this 5-10% of successful TA people are really just plain good at what they do. Still, chances are, by far, it's not you. I know people take great offense to that, but it's just plain fact.

Even me and my "successful" strategy, in the grand scheme of things can be utter crap. Most likely it is. Again, just a fact.

[sandykho47]

Just use bot for trading with arbitrage
You can make the bot / buy the bot

But, you need a lot of money / bitcoin to start
Because, if too small. You don't get profit because your PC power & internet connection

[dothebeats]

It is very profitable if you have the $$ and the inside information about what coins would make it big. Also, you need a deep understanding of the charts, graphs, and some symbols presented to you before you jump in this business. You will also need a lot of time to do the day trading effectively, because the cryptotrading world is a fast-paced environment: you may lose an opportunity within a blink of an eye.

[Grinder]

Here's my longest running account with no funding changes from December 2013 to today: http://seaofbtc.com/harrisonkinsley/honeybadger/client/1

It will take a while to load. That's done by automated day trading, and it's done using a mindless grid-strategy that anyone could do by hand, it's not high frequency. I just choose to automate it so I don't have to sit there all day and don't miss any trades. Bitcoin is volatile, so it works, and I've significantly beat the market, but there are plenty of totally possible events that could leave me far behind market performance never to recover again.

It's hard to know if your profits are a result of alpha or beta. Measured in BTC you are clearly ahead, but then you've probably been at least partly in USD a lot of the time. The market has been in a more or less continuous decline, so you would have archived about the same result by just staying 50/50 in BTC/USD. Unless the bitcoin price goes back up and you're still ahead you can't really know if your model beats the market in general or just the current market conditions.

[SeaofBTC]

Here's my longest running account with no funding changes from December 2013 to today: http://seaofbtc.com/harrisonkinsley/honeybadger/client/1

It will take a while to load. That's done by automated day trading, and it's done using a mindless grid-strategy that anyone could do by hand, it's not high frequency. I just choose to automate it so I don't have to sit there all day and don't miss any trades. Bitcoin is volatile, so it works, and I've significantly beat the market, but there are plenty of totally possible events that could leave me far behind market performance never to recover again.

It's hard to know if your profits are a result of alpha or beta. Measured in BTC you are clearly ahead, but then you've probably been at least partly in USD a lot of the time. The market has been in a more or less continuous decline, so you would have archived about the same result by just staying 50/50 in BTC/USD. Unless the bitcoin price goes back up and you're still ahead you can't really know if your model beats the market in general or just the current market conditions.

No doubt the decline has helped us to beat the market since we're not fully invested, but there have been multiple occasions when price has been in the positive gain, or the fund is at +20% while market is still in the negatives. The main account started while price was $700 per, and breaks even right now at $500 per BTC, while market is still - 27%.

So sure, the decline has helped us beat the market, but the actual profit is gained from volatility, and we'd be beating the market with this much volatility in either direction.

[BigOrangeBee]

You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away and know when to run 

[malykii]

I have lost coins on knee jerk reactions (pump and dumps), but have made a decent profit by just setting my buys and sells, and then waiting for them to happen.  The alt coins definitely have a pattern of going up and down, but the range usually varies day to day. 

I aim for at least 1 profit gain every 3 days with the set and wait method.  Sometimes it only happens once a week though, but I rarely lose coin with this approach.