You may stick to that definition of course but I find it rather restrictive, especially the part about entering and exiting a position within the same day. From my perspective, this is an unwarranted and unjustified requirement from purely technical point of view. If you see that the price rises, why would you want to exit a profitable position? Just to make sure it fits some clumsy definition? You may make a dozen trades one day and no trades the next day because you are just waiting for the right time to hit. Does it mean that it is not day trading? Or one day it is day trading, while the other not? Anyway, if you don't like me or anyone else, for that matter, using the term day trading, replace it with active trading in your mind. Basically, you are being overly pesky about insignificant details which are debatable even on their own. I don't think quarreling over definitions adds anything of substance to the discussion. Most of us understand what day trading essentially means.
Topic: Common misconceptions about day trading - page 2. (Read 539 times)
You may stick to that definition of course but I find it rather restrictive, especially the part about entering and exiting a position within the same day. From my perspective, this is an unwarranted and unjustified requirement from purely technical point of view. If you see that the price rises, why would you want to exit a profitable position? Just to make sure it fits some clumsy definition? You may make a dozen trades one day and no trades the next day because you are just waiting for the right time to hit. Does it mean that it is not day trading? Or one day it is day trading, while the other not? Anyway, if you don't like me or anyone else, for that matter, using the term day trading, replace it with active trading in your mind. Basically, you are being overly pesky about insignificant details which are debatable even on their own. I don't think quarreling over definitions adds anything of substance to the discussion. Most of us understand what day trading essentially means.
I assume everyone saying Bitcoin daytrading is profitable means in comparison to just "hodling" or, as you say, beating the market. Why are you assuming that's not what they mean?
I disagree with you here, I do not think that is what they mean. That is not what the word "profitable" means. I don't know why you think they do mean that.
Daytrading doesn't really mean doing trades each and every day, unless you are arbitring or scalping (which can also be more profitable in comparison to market). It means watching the market all day long and taking advantage of any clear signals you might see (and maybe doing some routine "scalping" to profit on the volatility in the meantime).
No, this is demonstrably false. Look at the link I sent. Day trading has a definition, and it requires making two trades within one day. Day trading means entering and exiting a position within one day. If you are not doing this, you are not day trading. It's simple.
You may stick to that definition of course but I find it rather restrictive, especially the part about entering and exiting a position within the same day. From my perspective, this is an unwarranted and unjustified requirement from purely technical point of view. If you see that the price rises, why would you want to exit a profitable position? Just to make sure it fits some clumsy definition? You may make a dozen trades one day and no trades the next day because you are just waiting for the right time to hit. Does it mean that it is not day trading? Or one day it is day trading, while the other not? Anyway, if you don't like me or anyone else, for that matter, using the term day trading, replace it with active trading in your mind. Basically, you are being overly pesky about insignificant details which are debatable even on their own. I don't think quarreling over definitions adds anything of substance to the discussion. Most of us understand what day trading essentially means.
I dont see how daytrading is gambling if I've identified a bitcoin chart pattern that is going to yield me a 30% profit 95% of time and yield me a 2% loss the other 5% of the time. It's more like picking bills off of a free money tree.
Any income generation is associated with excitement. I disagree that trading on the stock exchange is like gambling. When you play casino you depend on luck 100%. When you trade on the stock exchange depends on luck by only 50%. The remaining 50% is your knowledge and ability to analyze the situation.
Profit earned is all that counts in the end. Note that I'm not saying that day trading is profitable for everyone or it is a losing game for every trader out there. But it simply can't be gambling if you accept that trading as such is not gambling. There is no other choice because all price growth starts small, even profits from long-term investment are made of small price moves. Capitalizing on the volatility which results from these small moves allows you to earn higher profits because there is no growth without corrections, however small those can be. Add to this that you can't always be right in your assessment of the future growth and even more so in respect to the extent of it.
First of all you talk about capitalizing on short term volatility like it is easy to do, and like people are capable of doing it consistently. When you buy an asset with the intent of trading it intra-day, how do you know it is going to go up and not down? You can lose money as easily as you gain it. There is no way to accurately predict price movements on this small of a scale CONSISTENTLY. Day traders will lose just as often as they win over a long enough period of time, and because of fees, this will end up putting them on the losing side overall.
Also, profit earned is NOT all that counts. If I am day trading in the stock market and earning 8% ROI in a year, but the S&P500 returns 12%, all of my work figuring out what to sell and buy and when, was just a waste because I could make more profit by just holding an index fund. Same with bitcoin - if you day traded bitcoin in 2017 and made a 200% return, you have failed because you would have made more money by just holding bitcoin. All of that day trading not only failed to help you make money, but it resulted in a massive amount of wasted time and wasted potential profit.
As I have written in OP, there is a lot of confusion about day trading. Day trading doesn't necessarily mean that you buy and sell all you have within just one day. Day trading refers to your trading activity, how many trades you make daily. In this way, there is no precise definition of it. It is a loosely defined concept where many different trading strategies fit. You determine the trend in the same way as you do for long-term holding, and then you capitalize on short-term volatility. As long as you can make profits consistently as in arbitrage, which is also day trading, it is not gambling. This is the difference I want to point out.
I never said, or implied, that day trading meant buying and selling all you have. However, it DOES involve buying and selling within one day, BY DEFINITION. That is what day trading is. Intra-day trading to take advantage of fluctuations in price within one day. This is not a misconception or anything, this is literally the dictionary definition of day trading: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/day%20trader
You are not reading what I wrote. It does not matter if you profit, that is meaningless. The only thing that matters is how you perform compared to the market. If you profit but you underperform the market as a whole, your strategy is failing.
Day traders do not determine trends the same way as long term investors. Long term investors look at fundamentals and day traders do not because fundamentals do not affect intra-day price movements.
Day trading is gambling, period. It is 100% luck based. Anything that is luck based is gambling. Long term investing is NOT luck based, and therefore is not gambling. It's that simple.
I don't really understand what you are trying to prove here. If you don't like my approach to day trading, I'm not forcing you to post in this thread. Also, you don't seem to be reading what I write either. Here we are talking about day trading not being gambling. In gambling, you are not supposed to earn other than by luck alone and over longer terms the impact of luck is entirely cleared away. That means losing whatever language you speak. So it is a pretty simple choice. If you earn over longer time spans, it is not gambling. Whether it is day trading or otherwise is irrelevant. I don't really know what else can be added to this, though I don't mind if you disagree or anything.
No actually I clearly did read what you wrote. You continued to claim that the term "day trading" meant something that it does not mean, despite the fact that I had already mentioned the dictionary definition which contrasts with your inaccurate definition.
Day trading IS 100% luck based. Just because you profit over the long term does not mean that you are not gambling. As mentioned before, which you still seem to be having trouble grasping, it is about your performance compared to the market. Anybody could have chosen literally random points to buy and sell bitcoin over the course of 2017 and they almost certainly would have made a profit, but they also would have almost certainly underperformed the buy/hodl strategy.
I find it interesting that you claim you "really don't understand what I am trying to prove here" when I have made it extremely objectively clear. I'm trying to make people aware that day trading is gambling, which is an indisputable fact. You can continue spending hours and hours learning and researching bogus day trading strategies and underperforming whatever market you are trading in, or you can buy and hold, make way more money, and use that time to do something that is not useless.
Further, there is a question of limited profitability. This question has some substance but it seems that people who raise it don't fully understand what day trading comes down to. Many erroneously think that it is mostly about missing good profit opportunities. In fact, nothing can be farther from truth than that. Day trading if done right is actually about maximizing your profits, not losing them.
Others would say that if I just hold my coin then I would not miss good profit opportunities by selling earlier but I am just maximizing my profit by riding the waves. I am swing trading and taking small profits everyday because that's the way I like it. I am not the kind of person who would wait for the time when the coin would be hype because I just want to learn trading and besides that, I will learn more about it when I trade continuously and watching the charts more often than just waiting for the day when the coin is hype. Well, we have different strategy and I like day trading more.
Myself, I belong to the same flock. I never understood that idea about waiting a few years until price rises high enough. Okay, you set your target price to some value but what if price stops just short of it? You will hate yourself till the end of your days for not selling right then. I understand when people want big profits, I want big profits too, and big profits come with big price changes. I'm okay with that. What I'm not okay with is the idea of stubborn waiting and blindly hoping for the best. And here comes day trading, or active trading if someone is not happy with my understanding of it, and riding the wave whenever there is an opportunity.
There seems to be a lot of confusion, misconception and misunderstanding about day trading and its advantages as well as disadvantages. Some people even say that it is a form of gambling. In this topic I want to explain why it is not and also address the most common issues which day traders encounter and how they handle them. Thank you for your attention.
First of all, day trading is no more gambling than any other trading. If the price rises you ride the wave, if it doesn't you wait until it does. That's pretty much all. In this sense, if day trading is gambling, then all trading is essentially gambling. Besides, arbitrage is also day trading which involves quite a few trades (actually, twice as many) albeit it is anything but gambling.
Further, there is a question of limited profitability. This question has some substance but it seems that people who raise it don't fully understand what day trading comes down to. Many erroneously think that it is mostly about missing good profit opportunities. In fact, nothing can be farther from truth than that. Day trading if done right is actually about maximizing your profits, not losing them.
Statistically, your best trading strategy would be capitalizing on both short-term volatility and long-term growth. Since most price moves happen in a rather narrow range followed by relatively rare but big price changes, an optimal strategy would be dividing your trading capital into parts, smaller parts for catching short-term volatility, while bigger parts for capitalizing on longer-term growth.
You are correct in what you write, but the reasons those misconceptions exist at all has to do with the irresponsibility of many of those that day trade, day trading can be extremely profitable but there are those that engage in the activity despite their limited knowledge and as you may expect their results are very poor this leads them to conclude that day trading is like gambling even if that is not the case. First of all, day trading is no more gambling than any other trading. If the price rises you ride the wave, if it doesn't you wait until it does. That's pretty much all. In this sense, if day trading is gambling, then all trading is essentially gambling. Besides, arbitrage is also day trading which involves quite a few trades (actually, twice as many) albeit it is anything but gambling.
Further, there is a question of limited profitability. This question has some substance but it seems that people who raise it don't fully understand what day trading comes down to. Many erroneously think that it is mostly about missing good profit opportunities. In fact, nothing can be farther from truth than that. Day trading if done right is actually about maximizing your profits, not losing them.
Statistically, your best trading strategy would be capitalizing on both short-term volatility and long-term growth. Since most price moves happen in a rather narrow range followed by relatively rare but big price changes, an optimal strategy would be dividing your trading capital into parts, smaller parts for catching short-term volatility, while bigger parts for capitalizing on longer-term growth.
Profit earned is all that counts in the end. Note that I'm not saying that day trading is profitable for everyone or it is a losing game for every trader out there. But it simply can't be gambling if you accept that trading as such is not gambling. There is no other choice because all price growth starts small, even profits from long-term investment are made of small price moves. Capitalizing on the volatility which results from these small moves allows you to earn higher profits because there is no growth without corrections, however small those can be. Add to this that you can't always be right in your assessment of the future growth and even more so in respect to the extent of it.
First of all you talk about capitalizing on short term volatility like it is easy to do, and like people are capable of doing it consistently. When you buy an asset with the intent of trading it intra-day, how do you know it is going to go up and not down? You can lose money as easily as you gain it. There is no way to accurately predict price movements on this small of a scale CONSISTENTLY. Day traders will lose just as often as they win over a long enough period of time, and because of fees, this will end up putting them on the losing side overall.
Also, profit earned is NOT all that counts. If I am day trading in the stock market and earning 8% ROI in a year, but the S&P500 returns 12%, all of my work figuring out what to sell and buy and when, was just a waste because I could make more profit by just holding an index fund. Same with bitcoin - if you day traded bitcoin in 2017 and made a 200% return, you have failed because you would have made more money by just holding bitcoin. All of that day trading not only failed to help you make money, but it resulted in a massive amount of wasted time and wasted potential profit.
As I have written in OP, there is a lot of confusion about day trading. Day trading doesn't necessarily mean that you buy and sell all you have within just one day. Day trading refers to your trading activity, how many trades you make daily. In this way, there is no precise definition of it. It is a loosely defined concept where many different trading strategies fit. You determine the trend in the same way as you do for long-term holding, and then you capitalize on short-term volatility. As long as you can make profits consistently as in arbitrage, which is also day trading, it is not gambling. This is the difference I want to point out.
I never said, or implied, that day trading meant buying and selling all you have. However, it DOES involve buying and selling within one day, BY DEFINITION. That is what day trading is. Intra-day trading to take advantage of fluctuations in price within one day. This is not a misconception or anything, this is literally the dictionary definition of day trading: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/day%20trader
You are not reading what I wrote. It does not matter if you profit, that is meaningless. The only thing that matters is how you perform compared to the market. If you profit but you underperform the market as a whole, your strategy is failing.
Day traders do not determine trends the same way as long term investors. Long term investors look at fundamentals and day traders do not because fundamentals do not affect intra-day price movements.
Day trading is gambling, period. It is 100% luck based. Anything that is luck based is gambling. Long term investing is NOT luck based, and therefore is not gambling. It's that simple.
I don't really understand what you are trying to prove here. If you don't like my approach to day trading, I'm not forcing you to post in this thread. Also, you don't seem to be reading what I write either. Here we are talking about day trading not being gambling. In gambling, you are not supposed to earn other than by luck alone and over longer terms the impact of luck is entirely cleared away. That means losing whatever language you speak. So it is a pretty simple choice. If you earn over longer time spans, it is not gambling. Whether it is day trading or otherwise is irrelevant. I don't really know what else can be added to this, though I don't mind if you disagree or anything.
No More Bitco Wallets
From the devices that beginners rely on in continuing Bitcoin, creating a backup wallet is the most important thing. Users control their own Bitcoin, need proper anticipation to ensure Bitcoin can be accessed anytime. The wallet feature features a wallet feature. Absolute backup wallet in Bitcoin world. There's no reason not to make one.
From the devices that beginners rely on in continuing Bitcoin, creating a backup wallet is the most important thing. Users control their own Bitcoin, need proper anticipation to ensure Bitcoin can be accessed anytime. The wallet feature features a wallet feature. Absolute backup wallet in Bitcoin world. There's no reason not to make one.
I assume everyone saying Bitcoin daytrading is profitable means in comparison to just "hodling" or, as you say, beating the market. Why are you assuming that's not what they mean?
I disagree with you here, I do not think that is what they mean. That is not what the word "profitable" means. I don't know why you think they do mean that.
Daytrading doesn't really mean doing trades each and every day, unless you are arbitring or scalping (which can also be more profitable in comparison to market). It means watching the market all day long and taking advantage of any clear signals you might see (and maybe doing some routine "scalping" to profit on the volatility in the meantime).
No, this is demonstrably false. Look at the link I sent. Day trading has a definition, and it requires making two trades within one day. Day trading means entering and exiting a position within one day. If you are not doing this, you are not day trading. It's simple.
Further, there is a question of limited profitability. This question has some substance but it seems that people who raise it don't fully understand what day trading comes down to. Many erroneously think that it is mostly about missing good profit opportunities. In fact, nothing can be farther from truth than that. Day trading if done right is actually about maximizing your profits, not losing them.
Others would say that if I just hold my coin then I would not miss good profit opportunities by selling earlier but I am just maximizing my profit by riding the waves. I am swing trading and taking small profits everyday because that's the way I like it. I am not the kind of person who would wait for the time when the coin would be hype because I just want to learn trading and besides that, I will learn more about it when I trade continuously and watching the charts more often than just waiting for the day when the coin is hype. Well, we have different strategy and I like day trading more.
Profit earned is all that counts in the end. Note that I'm not saying that day trading is profitable for everyone or it is a losing game for every trader out there. But it simply can't be gambling if you accept that trading as such is not gambling. There is no other choice because all price growth starts small, even profits from long-term investment are made of small price moves. Capitalizing on the volatility which results from these small moves allows you to earn higher profits because there is no growth without corrections, however small those can be. Add to this that you can't always be right in your assessment of the future growth and even more so in respect to the extent of it.
First of all you talk about capitalizing on short term volatility like it is easy to do, and like people are capable of doing it consistently. When you buy an asset with the intent of trading it intra-day, how do you know it is going to go up and not down? You can lose money as easily as you gain it. There is no way to accurately predict price movements on this small of a scale CONSISTENTLY. Day traders will lose just as often as they win over a long enough period of time, and because of fees, this will end up putting them on the losing side overall.
Also, profit earned is NOT all that counts. If I am day trading in the stock market and earning 8% ROI in a year, but the S&P500 returns 12%, all of my work figuring out what to sell and buy and when, was just a waste because I could make more profit by just holding an index fund. Same with bitcoin - if you day traded bitcoin in 2017 and made a 200% return, you have failed because you would have made more money by just holding bitcoin. All of that day trading not only failed to help you make money, but it resulted in a massive amount of wasted time and wasted potential profit.
As I have written in OP, there is a lot of confusion about day trading. Day trading doesn't necessarily mean that you buy and sell all you have within just one day. Day trading refers to your trading activity, how many trades you make daily. In this way, there is no precise definition of it. It is a loosely defined concept where many different trading strategies fit. You determine the trend in the same way as you do for long-term holding, and then you capitalize on short-term volatility. As long as you can make profits consistently as in arbitrage, which is also day trading, it is not gambling. This is the difference I want to point out.
I never said, or implied, that day trading meant buying and selling all you have. However, it DOES involve buying and selling within one day, BY DEFINITION. That is what day trading is. Intra-day trading to take advantage of fluctuations in price within one day. This is not a misconception or anything, this is literally the dictionary definition of day trading: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/day%20trader
You are not reading what I wrote. It does not matter if you profit, that is meaningless. The only thing that matters is how you perform compared to the market. If you profit but you underperform the market as a whole, your strategy is failing.
Day traders do not determine trends the same way as long term investors. Long term investors look at fundamentals and day traders do not because fundamentals do not affect intra-day price movements.
Day trading is gambling, period. It is 100% luck based. Anything that is luck based is gambling. Long term investing is NOT luck based, and therefore is not gambling. It's that simple.
I assume everyone saying Bitcoin daytrading is profitable means in comparison to just "hodling" or, as you say, beating the market. Why are you assuming that's not what they mean?
Daytrading doesn't really mean doing trades each and every day, unless you are arbitring or scalping (which can also be more profitable in comparison to market). It means watching the market all day long and taking advantage of any clear signals you might see (and maybe doing some routine "scalping" to profit on the volatility in the meantime).
Profit earned is all that counts in the end. Note that I'm not saying that day trading is profitable for everyone or it is a losing game for every trader out there. But it simply can't be gambling if you accept that trading as such is not gambling. There is no other choice because all price growth starts small, even profits from long-term investment are made of small price moves. Capitalizing on the volatility which results from these small moves allows you to earn higher profits because there is no growth without corrections, however small those can be. Add to this that you can't always be right in your assessment of the future growth and even more so in respect to the extent of it.
First of all you talk about capitalizing on short term volatility like it is easy to do, and like people are capable of doing it consistently. When you buy an asset with the intent of trading it intra-day, how do you know it is going to go up and not down? You can lose money as easily as you gain it. There is no way to accurately predict price movements on this small of a scale CONSISTENTLY. Day traders will lose just as often as they win over a long enough period of time, and because of fees, this will end up putting them on the losing side overall.
Also, profit earned is NOT all that counts. If I am day trading in the stock market and earning 8% ROI in a year, but the S&P500 returns 12%, all of my work figuring out what to sell and buy and when, was just a waste because I could make more profit by just holding an index fund. Same with bitcoin - if you day traded bitcoin in 2017 and made a 200% return, you have failed because you would have made more money by just holding bitcoin. All of that day trading not only failed to help you make money, but it resulted in a massive amount of wasted time and wasted potential profit.
As I have written in OP, there is a lot of confusion about day trading. Day trading doesn't necessarily mean that you buy and sell all you have within just one day. Day trading refers to your trading activity, how many trades you make daily. In this way, there is no precise definition of it. It is a loosely defined concept where many different trading strategies fit. You determine the trend in the same way as you do for long-term holding, and then you capitalize on short-term volatility. As long as you can make profits consistently as in arbitrage, which is also day trading, it is not gambling. This is the difference I want to point out.
I never said, or implied, that day trading meant buying and selling all you have. However, it DOES involve buying and selling within one day, BY DEFINITION. That is what day trading is. Intra-day trading to take advantage of fluctuations in price within one day. This is not a misconception or anything, this is literally the dictionary definition of day trading: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/day%20trader
You are not reading what I wrote. It does not matter if you profit, that is meaningless. The only thing that matters is how you perform compared to the market. If you profit but you underperform the market as a whole, your strategy is failing.
Day traders do not determine trends the same way as long term investors. Long term investors look at fundamentals and day traders do not because fundamentals do not affect intra-day price movements.
Day trading is gambling, period. It is 100% luck based. Anything that is luck based is gambling. Long term investing is NOT luck based, and therefore is not gambling. It's that simple.
ITs not gambling. Buying a 50-70% crash with a volume candle that eclipses everything else on the chart is a 95% win. The other 5% is the exchange youre trading on getting hacked. If you think it's gambling it's because you're new to bitcoin and not familiar with how bouncy and resilient it is.
TERA, I know your track record, and I agree that spotting buying opportunity in bitcoin is not that difficult. What I struggle is to identify when to sell - I guess I got hodler mentality now, plus for tax reasons selling can be risky - I mean, it does not make sense to loose long-term capital gains to rebuy 10% cheaper. Do you mind sharing your criteria for selling?
The strategy that short-term trading should account for only a (relatively) small portion of your portfolio seems to be good one to me, and it is something which I have followed too. If you truly believe in Bitcoin, then the long-term coins that you hold will give you the returns. The smaller portion, which you use for day trading, can provide a further boost to your portfolio value.
I hope many novice traders will look into this approach without having superstitious fear about day trading. As long as you manage to keep things under control (not overdoing it), it is quite doable as well as financially rewarding and emotionally fulfilling. By employing the tactic described here, you are making stats work for you. No one knows how the price will behave even in the near future but we can be dead certain that volatility, and short-term volatility specifically, is not going anywhere, so why not take advantage of it?
As I have written in OP, there is a lot of confusion about day trading. Day trading doesn't necessarily mean that you buy and sell all you have within just one day. Day trading refers to your trading activity, how many trades you make daily. In this way, there is no precise definition of it. It is a loosely defined concept where many different trading strategies fit. You determine the trend in the same way as you do for long-term holding, and then you capitalize on short-term volatility. As long as you can make profits consistently as in arbitrage, which is also day trading, it is not gambling. This is the difference I want to point out.
Believe me, most of us get it. But not everyone has what it takes to be a day trader. I tried it when I first started trading Bitcoin. Of course, I lost some money. Hahaha.
So I changed my strategy to "buying the dips", and everything has been ok for me ever since.
I feel your sentiments brother because day trading isn't like you're buying and wait it all day to pump because we might tend to miss the pump to sell and we're just like staring at the blank space and repeat it the other day. So better buy when everyone is shaking and sell when everyone is greedy.
As I have written in OP, there is a lot of confusion about day trading. Day trading doesn't necessarily mean that you buy and sell all you have within just one day. Day trading refers to your trading activity, how many trades you make daily. In this way, there is no precise definition of it. It is a loosely defined concept where many different trading strategies fit. You determine the trend in the same way as you do for long-term holding, and then you capitalize on short-term volatility. As long as you can make profits consistently as in arbitrage, which is also day trading, it is not gambling. This is the difference I want to point out.
Believe me, most of us get it. But not everyone has what it takes to be a day trader. I tried it when I first started trading Bitcoin. Of course, I lost some money. Hahaha.
So I changed my strategy to "buying the dips", and everything has been ok for me ever since.
There seems to be a lot of confusion, misconception and misunderstanding about day trading and its advantages as well as disadvantages. Some people even say that it is a form of gambling. In this topic I want to explain why it is not and also address the most common issues which day traders encounter and how they handle them. Thank you for your attention.
First of all, day trading is no more gambling than any other trading. If the price rises you ride the wave, if it doesn't you wait until it does. That's pretty much all. In this sense, if day trading is gambling, then all trading is essentially gambling. Besides, arbitrage is also day trading which involves quite a few trades (actually, twice as many) albeit it is anything but gambling.
Further, there is a question of limited profitability. This question has some substance but it seems that people who raise it don't fully understand what day trading comes down to. Many erroneously think that it is mostly about missing good profit opportunities. In fact, nothing can be farther from truth than that. Day trading if done right is actually about maximizing your profits, not losing them.
Statistically, your best trading strategy would be capitalizing on both short-term volatility and long-term growth. Since most price moves happen in a rather narrow range followed by relatively rare but big price changes, an optimal strategy would be dividing your trading capital into parts, smaller parts for catching short-term volatility, while bigger parts for capitalizing on longer-term growth.
First of all, day trading is no more gambling than any other trading. If the price rises you ride the wave, if it doesn't you wait until it does. That's pretty much all. In this sense, if day trading is gambling, then all trading is essentially gambling. Besides, arbitrage is also day trading which involves quite a few trades (actually, twice as many) albeit it is anything but gambling.
Further, there is a question of limited profitability. This question has some substance but it seems that people who raise it don't fully understand what day trading comes down to. Many erroneously think that it is mostly about missing good profit opportunities. In fact, nothing can be farther from truth than that. Day trading if done right is actually about maximizing your profits, not losing them.
Statistically, your best trading strategy would be capitalizing on both short-term volatility and long-term growth. Since most price moves happen in a rather narrow range followed by relatively rare but big price changes, an optimal strategy would be dividing your trading capital into parts, smaller parts for catching short-term volatility, while bigger parts for capitalizing on longer-term growth.
The strategy that short-term trading should account for only a (relatively) small portion of your portfolio seems to be good one to me, and it is something which I have followed too. If you truly believe in Bitcoin, then the long-term coins that you hold will give you the returns. The smaller portion, which you use for day trading, can provide a further boost to your portfolio value.
Profit earned is all that counts in the end. Note that I'm not saying that day trading is profitable for everyone or it is a losing game for every trader out there. But it simply can't be gambling if you accept that trading as such is not gambling. There is no other choice because all price growth starts small, even profits from long-term investment are made of small price moves. Capitalizing on the volatility which results from these small moves allows you to earn higher profits because there is no growth without corrections, however small those can be. Add to this that you can't always be right in your assessment of the future growth and even more so in respect to the extent of it.
First of all you talk about capitalizing on short term volatility like it is easy to do, and like people are capable of doing it consistently. When you buy an asset with the intent of trading it intra-day, how do you know it is going to go up and not down? You can lose money as easily as you gain it. There is no way to accurately predict price movements on this small of a scale CONSISTENTLY. Day traders will lose just as often as they win over a long enough period of time, and because of fees, this will end up putting them on the losing side overall.
Also, profit earned is NOT all that counts. If I am day trading in the stock market and earning 8% ROI in a year, but the S&P500 returns 12%, all of my work figuring out what to sell and buy and when, was just a waste because I could make more profit by just holding an index fund. Same with bitcoin - if you day traded bitcoin in 2017 and made a 200% return, you have failed because you would have made more money by just holding bitcoin. All of that day trading not only failed to help you make money, but it resulted in a massive amount of wasted time and wasted potential profit.
As I have written in OP, there is a lot of confusion about day trading. Day trading doesn't necessarily mean that you buy and sell all you have within just one day. Day trading refers to your trading activity, how many trades you make daily. In this way, there is no precise definition of it. It is a loosely defined concept where many different trading strategies fit. You determine the trend in the same way as you do for long-term holding, and then you capitalize on short-term volatility. As long as you can make profits consistently as in arbitrage, which is also day trading, it is not gambling. This is the difference I want to point out.
It's really depends what you base your decisions on,because if you base your decisions only analyzing the graph, then you will probably lose at day trading because there are always bots who can do it better, so at the long run it will be hard to make a profit.
But bots can't trade based on news and predictions, so if you can predict a product to be successful or you know that an agreement is going to be signed between a cryptocurrency and a big company, then you can buy a coin for the long run, and the bots won't have an advantage over you.
I believe that earning in day trading if you trade by hands is harder then buying coins for the long run.
But bots can't trade based on news and predictions, so if you can predict a product to be successful or you know that an agreement is going to be signed between a cryptocurrency and a big company, then you can buy a coin for the long run, and the bots won't have an advantage over you.
I believe that earning in day trading if you trade by hands is harder then buying coins for the long run.
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