Can you make more money as a bear than being a bull in this market?

[Tim Johnson]

?

[adamstgBit]

lol! yes

no

Maybe!

watch out when a new bitcoinia comes along

[SkRRJyTC]

I think Thursday, but if not, definitely Toyota.

+1

[Dargo]

The market is currently in an uptrend, meaning that it has been more profitable to be a bull than a bear. Best strategy going forward is to trade with the trend - i.e. be a bull - until the trend breaks. How do you know when the trend breaks? You have to learn technical analysis. 

[ArticMine]

I see the risk of being a bear with Bitcoin in this market as massive. It is not just about loosing it all. It is about how deep in the hole one can go by shorting Bitcoin.

[Vandroiy]

Feels like it's most profitable to be more bearish than the usual forum user, but not so bearish that you forget Bitcoins are worth something.

BTW, I disagree with Dargo. Trends and chart analysis become decreasingly useful the healthier a market becomes. Excessive following of trends is the main reason average humans trade worse than random. Personally, I see trends as no more than the skew of the probability distribution for future price, and thus use them only to determine the size of moves, not their direction.

Admittedly, there have been users who showed that trends on BTCUSD has been strong enough to be exploited, see Goomboo's Journal for an example. But such methods not only require good back-testing, but also a model of when they stop being profitable, and how much you lose before you notice it stopped working.

[smoothie]

The market is currently in an uptrend, meaning that it has been more profitable to be a bull than a bear. Best strategy going forward is to trade with the trend - i.e. be a bull - until the trend breaks. How do you know when the trend breaks? You have to learn technical analysis. 

I.e. Learning how to draw lines.

TA isn't difficult. Just lines.

[Qoheleth]

In this market, I think you can make more unrealized gains by being a bull.

But to make more money, you have to become a bear before the wind changes.

[Qoheleth]

BTW, I disagree with Dargo. Trends and chart analysis become decreasingly useful the healthier a market becomes. Excessive following of trends is the main reason average humans trade worse than random.

There's a difference between "following trends" out of human nature/crowd logic, and "using trends as input into a well-defined strategy and following the output of the strategy". The former is a losing strategy in the long run, but the latter is the basis of many successful asset trading methodologies (the Turtle system, for one example).

[Dargo]

BTW, I disagree with Dargo. Trends and chart analysis become decreasingly useful the healthier a market becomes. Excessive following of trends is the main reason average humans trade worse than random.

There's a difference between "following trends" out of human nature/crowd logic, and "using trends as input into a well-defined strategy and following the output of the strategy". The former is a losing strategy in the long run, but the latter is the basis of many successful asset trading methodologies (the Turtle system, for one example).

+1 Successful technical traders don't simply "follow trends." But they generally do trade with the trend in the sense that they will trade more long set-ups than short set-ups in a market that is in an uptrend (and vice-versa in a downtrend).