Topic: Mentor Wanted (Read 2632 times)

posting so i can refer to this thread later. thanks everybody!

Daytrading takes discipline. I followed the bitcoin exchange rate sporadically for 2.5 years before selling any. Selling a bitcoin is tough speculation, there are very few people in this world who have made money selling bitcoins. Most money is made by buying them.

I agree with some posters above, there are great opportunities for daytrading/swing trading constantly present. But skill is required. Today we watched the rally with my broker, and I had instructed him to sell BTC1,000 aggressively to the thinning volume followed by the turn in Bid/Ask ratio, before the price turns down, or immediately after it does. Then buy back at 61% fibonacci retracement with a limit order.

Although we were spot on (61% fibonacci from 13643-9500 is $111.16, which would have enabled us to buy back the position in 60-90 minutes after the sale at anything between 10-20% profit), the trade never materialized.

- My broker had been away for 15 minutes, just when it was starting to turn. If you work 40 hours per week, you miss 76% of the positions.
- The sell signal was not clear enough in the beginning.
- The volume was not there after it was clear enough.
- I called my broker when the fall was intensifying, distracting him
- I canceled the plan when we had already hit $124ish, because I deemed a 10% profit potential too small. From the hindsight, I made a mistake. Should have sold anyway.

So we made exactly BTC0 today. I forbad any additional trading, because when excited, you make mistakes. And excited we were after busting this one 

Actually this feels more like the golden age of daytrading, only with oddly high per-trade fees and access to the order books and half-decent charting tools, and without the big money manipulator interests (although you can almost feel their hot breath on your neck). I give it a thumbs up, if you know what your doing you can really make out here. I'd like to see trading fees move to maker-taker which is more sensible than charging both sides, mtgox makes far too much for doing far too little. That's pretty much my only complaint.

I shot you a message a few days back. If you're unfamiliar with the feature, it is available on the main tab, third from the right.

Here is my advise:
Keep an eye on the issues with BlockChain bloat/ 1mb limits and how it is/is not fixed.
Also keep an eye on how often clients are updated and how blindly people install the new updates.

You see lasting trouble there getting out of BTC may be a really good idea. Otherwise hold "forever".

As for day trading:
I'm not doing it, but it seems the best indicator is the press, how much, how positive etc.. Sell when its high, buy when its low.

I find clarkmoody to give you a better idea of the current price/trades etc, as it seems to update more frequently - about as Live as I have seen it tbh, providing that there is no lag of course.

http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/

I would like to use this thread to ask a question.
In bitcoinity, what doesn't the price in big numbers match the price of the last trade (ie: the first trade in the column underneath). ? According to the field descriptions, they both should have the same value as they both are the prices of the last trade.

This is good advice. First, most day traders (and most traders for that matter) lose, and lose a lot. Including those who have studying for years. If you really want to learn it, bitcoin is not the market to start with. The exchanges are a joke right now and do not have the tools or liquidity you will need. You can learn trading, but it must be thought of as professional training that likely takes years to get consistently profitable. And you will pay in lots of ways for that education. I speak from experience.

If you want to play the long game because you see bitcoin as viable "venture capital (high-risk) investment" then probably the best path is dollar-cost averaging to get in, or just throw it in as someone else suggested. Then strap in and hold on tight. There are other ways to play the long game in a multi-year bull market that can potentially reduce your risk, but it is certainly not day trading.

Best of luck.

This is why some of our eyes are burning like the seventh layer of hell right now.
But we're still reading!

This is true but everyone has to deal with that. If you navigate those waters better than others, there is money to be made. There are distortions in the short-term price movement that don't occur in any other market and it's specifically due to these crappy exchanges handling all the orders.

Day trading BTC is retarded because the exchanges are all incredibly basic and the information and tools slow, lagged and generally terrible. So it's mostly blind luck . That being said I have made back alot of coin the last few days, but i've also lost lots of coin day trading.

As it was mentioned few posts back - day trading doesn't differ much from gambling. The market is very unpredictable... but its inefficiencies can offer some guidance and hints on how the price may change.

Yeah. You're probably not a candidate for the job :p

OP: this sounds flippant but the best way to learn is to do and lose money.

Nothing stays crystal clear in your memory like the pain of losing LARGE sums of money.

To be fair, to tempt someone who really can teach you a lot in a short time, you'd need to offer a large bounty.

The good traders could make more by trading instead of teaching otherwise

You are putting the cart before the horse if you want to day trade so you study the market.  Instead study the market and if you find an edge it can define your trade.  The duration and timing of that trade is defined by your edge not by your desire.  Always ask yourself what additional risks you are exposing your trading assets to and your exposure should be primarily aligned with what you see as the long term trend (are you holding USD and trading into BTC, or are you holding BTC and trading into USD?).

To find an edge, look for where information leaks out of the system.

Can you probe the system to elicit information?  Here's an example: how long does it take to move your $ to Gox through dwolla?  Gox kept limited funds in their dwolla account, so if your transfer OUT completed quickly it meant that lots of other people had just transferred IN, if your transfer OUT took out forever, the money flow was heading OUT (and vice versa).

And you know, after all that effort you'll likely find that if you just spent all that time doing real paying work (whatever you are good at) and plowing those proceeds into BTC long term you would have been better off.  

Day trading is a zero sum game.  Value is not created, it is taken from other traders.  Study TA not because it works, but because if your competition thinks it works they will be predictable. 

If you are unwilling to do this vast amount of work, and do not find an edge, recognize that your day trading is simply gambling with a lower house edge then a formal gambling site offers.  So have fun with it but do it as you would do gambling -- very carefully.

That's it.  Your mentoring is done.  1CKeoT8vBDQDEpMHz5VAswV39pZJ2GTGYd

Thank you so much.  I love this forum. 

Seriously, I recommend smoothie.

Don't daytrade. You will lose money. Either you believe in BTC long term or you don't.
lucif has some very good advice on that side (I mean what he says about emotions, not his TA).

The most important advice you'll get in this topic:

1) 80-90% of all day traders lose money. It's a well-known figure amongst stock traders. I highly recommend against it. And btw, I say that and I love day trading more than anything. But it's not for everyone and it takes a long time to master.

2) Discipline/patience/risk management is more important than anything, no matter what your method is.

3) Execution will be a huge edge in this market because of how illiquid the market is, the risk of the primary exchange shutting down, the risk of lagging data feeds (from which your trading signals will come from, assuming you trade based on prices), and the lack of direct access trading. How do you handle all these risks? Nobody is going to teach you that, you have to learn that on your own when you're in the driver's seat. One second too late on a breakout and you might be paying up 2-4 points higher and that's huge since it could be 5% of the trade. If your plan is to buy when it gets above 65, and the offer jumps to 69 in 2 minutes, do you send a market order? Do you bid 66-67? Do you pass on the trade? Day trading is higher frequency trading and the more trades you make, the more it matters to save every $1 per coin.

4) Although I do trade based on price action/charts, most technical analysis out there is just junk. Be careful what you learn because it will take even more time to unlearn it. If you want to learn charts, I'd recommend these 3 guys:
http://www.alphatrends.net/    
http://adamhgrimes.com/blog/
http://thepatternsite.com/

I don't recommend "just watching" the prices right off the bat to learn. I think you need to learn some kind of theory about how markets work and how other participants think, otherwise you won't be able to form any noteworthy observations, you'll just be stargazing.

some excellent tips here Seleme.

I am happy to sit and watch markets for as long as it takes - except I have no clue what I am looking for  

Yes, I like the thought of small earnings over several trades. It's the better way to learn and build confidence and as you have said, it wouldn't be demoralizing.

Thank you for these - plenty to learn