Topic: Is day trading on Coinbase profitable? - page 3. (Read 8212 times)

Yep.  Every nickel, every tick matters.

Fees add up fast, as does everything else.   When doing a cost analysis it is important to factor these things in. 

I've traded the commodities markets and lost money because the fees ate the profit on the position.  I'm sure others have as well.  Look at all the numbers involved before doing anything.

Learn how to trade, how to read charts, etc.  That's boring stuff but will save tons of money in the long haul.  If people do not, they are at a relative disadvantage and will eventually be eaten the vast majority of the time.

So leverage basically makes your profit and loss increase faster than it would without leverage?

Sure, how profitable are you?

If you really want to get profit from trading you need to use leverage on a liquid exchange.  Smaller spreads and lower fees help.

I use it all the time.

Spread on coinbase is too large to be a viable trading platform.

If the price goes too high you'll get margin called.

And with okcoin futures contracts expire.  You might have a weekly, biweekly  or quarterly contract.

When the contract expires it'll get settled against the index.

If the settlement price is lower than your entry price you make Bitcoins, if its higher then your entry price you lose Bitcoins.  If you get margin called you lose all your Bitcoins you used for the contract.

What are you left with if you open a short position and you never close it?

with this low volatility you need leverage more then ever, to raise you profit with lower risk, i would agree to no use it if the swings were higher

Day trading on Coinbase cant be easy in this low volatility.  I don't bother trading BTC/USD without leverage.

If you're interested in an exchange you should consider one where a lot of trading volume is being done.  For margin trading okcoin.cn and bitfinex.com are good.  Okcoin.com is still developing.  What's good about these sites is that you can implement 3x leverage.  Leverage is a useful tool for augmenting your trading balance.

And then there are the okcoin.com futures that lets you use up to 20x leverage.  It's slightly different from margin trading so it takes a bit to learn but futures are also another good tool for trading.

Profitability is slightly dependant on skill.  Everyone might have a slight edge in different areas, or you can just suck at trading.  Trading takes experience and screen time.  Don't think of it as easy money.

One of the main goals of trading is to not lose your money.  If you don't lose all your money you'll be able to come back to trade another day.

Another key to trading is patience.  You need to wait for good trade setups.  If you overtrade then that can lead to disaster.  You do not always need to be in a position.  Wait for high probability trade setups.

I trade purely on okcoin.com but another site might be better in your situation.  Okcoin futures offer up to 20x leverage and offers 0.03% trading fees.

https://www.okcoin.com/?invid=2033157

Also note that you can both long and short which means you can profit off of any direction.  If you're new wait for good entry points for longer term trades.  Other people are better at scalping which is short term trades for smaller spreads.

And I think the other thing about the bots is a bit ridiculous.  Bots can help add liquidity to the market.  They also just implement strategies, and those strategies can be wrong. 

No and I pointed that out a few posts back:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11330647

But that wouldn't be day trading anymore, now would it?

Not that there's anything wrong with the good old buy/hold strategy, it's actually a lot better than trying to time the market, which, at the end of the day, is all day trading is, really.

You just have to accept it's a gamble.

It could be different in my case because I wouldn't mind holding more BTC long-term.  Assuming the price of BTC is going up long-term (which is a belief of mine), how could I lose?

The fees are exactly that high for a reason. There goes the gains.

If you have the fund to protect yourself against losses, yeah why not. It's a matter of how much you can make and whether you are willing to let the fund sitting idle in your account and wait until the price is right before selling. If you aim big margin trading is the way to go.

No, it's not profitable. Better invest your hard-earned money on something fun like hookers or cocaine. Same ROI.

You can only make money trading if a) you're gambling with other people's money or b) you have access to priviledged information (this is called inside trading and is highly illegal) and/or can exploit order flow (a practice called "front running", which, like insider trading, is also in violation of every securities law on the planet).

I guess there's also option c), which is the investment equivalent to Russian roulette. Imagine 10,000 monkeys throwing darts at a candlestick chart; with enough market participants, a random simian millionaire is bound to emerge from this twisted economic experiment.

I'm coming from the other direction.  I know the altcoin market well but lately I've been wondering if I'm neglecting BTC.

Were you trying to make multiple trades per day?  I'm thinking more like swing trading (although I said day trading before).

this is what i was thinking before i started trading. i though it is easy an i simply buy low and sell higher (with considering fees) and i will profit. but in action it is much harder than that, specially in a long run.

anyway i figured out that bitcoin market is not meant for me so i went to altcoin market and it was good for me so far. but i still have much to learn.

Sure I'm serious.

Wait, so u re not joking, u re serious about this plan?