Topic: Avoiding The Post Hoc Fallacy When Trading (Read 169 times)

The tl;dr is for anyone who didn’t read the whole thing. I wrote the article, it’s just for those among us who might have skimmed.

In my opinion, you can not rely on historical data for cryptocurrencies. The market is strongly news-driven, positive news can cause massive leaps in the chart. The historical data can only be interpreted if one also takes into account the news situation in relation to the respective price fluctuations. This fits OPs "do your own research"

You did not read your own article? If you have copied it then add the proper references.

Anyways for making decision you not only need all the current data but historical data too. By checking what event caused what prive movement in history will give you some idea, how the market can behave in future if same events happens again.(though previous performance does not gurrantee the same future performance.)

These are all good points for any newcomers to consider, sometimes we get reactionary with the prices but if we did more in-depth research we would see the underlying causes of the rise/decline of Bitcoin prices.

Avoiding the Post Hoc Fallacy

When you first get into trading, many people try to make sense of market movements, but in doing so many also fall into a Post hoc ergo propter hoc mindset.

This is Latin for "after this, therefore because of this", and is an informal fallacy that essentially means "Since this second event followed this first event, the second must have been caused by the first event." Often people just shorten it to the Post hoc fallacy. This is a common problem for stock traders, and even worse at times in the crypto community.

Take for example the following scenario...


That is the basis of many people's trading strategy but unless you do a good deal of research it can cause you terrible losses. That scenario may be true, Aldi accepting Bitcoin may have caused a surge in market activity in the upwards direction, but if that was the extent of your research, what you may have missed was that on the same day, India legalized the use of Bitcoin for paying property taxes. If you didn't do thorough research, you could easily assume "if this, then therefore that" about the grocery store adoption and make a poor investment based on that fallacy.

This fallacy can also be a problem because these price movements aren't always in the same direction. Take for example the same scenario as above, but instead of legalizing cryptocurrency for paying property taxes, India took down the largest exchange somehow and the price of bitcoin fell rapidly. If you didn't research that and only saw the grocery store news and then saw the price drop, you might make the opposite conclusion, that somehow Aldi adopting Bitcoin pushed the price down. Large price movements can hide useful knowledge about other smaller price movements.

tl;dr
Do your research... thoroughly, especially when you want to start making assumptions about price movements using the news and current events.