Ive been lurking off and on on this thread since i bought alot of shares of return over the past few months and more since more shares were created. I was wondering how do you guys plan on trading with alt coins do your tradebots work with them or are there specific ones you planned on getting or what? i'm inclined to vote yes on the active poll but i know i've lost money over the years trying to trade on alts and most just lose value over time and the market is very volatile. I mean if you lose 10% of the portfolio--say 10 btc gets turned into 2 then you do it again and have 9 turn into 3 thats a very big loss, what will happen to dividends, will you just have no dividends until the -15 btc is caught up?
We've done some tinkering on the alt-exchanges that do have an API (cryptsy primarily so far) and for these kind of trades we primarily do things pretty simple, we look out for a coin that's got a steady rise, like darkcoin for a few weeks until recently or hobonickle for several months (flat now, could go either way) and buy in manually, often in a few stages so were not loaded with one coin. Then we query the API at regular intervals to look for changes and if it goes beyond a certain threshold drop we sell---though this part is still kind of beta as we work out the coding. As it rises we seal in the earnings, also in stages typically and if we earn a 100% of the funds back only then do we ever "let it ride"; for instance: let's say we buy 100 darkcoin at .003 for .30btc total, we sell some along the way of the rise and then say as the price hits .006 we have earned .30 btc back and have 35 darkcoin leftover, well then be a little more risky with these funds and try to get a nice return since none of the principle is at risk.
Generally speaking we try to avoid jumping in a trend too late or too early, too late meaning the rate of growth has slowed for a few days and you can see the leveling coming, too early being a sudden jump up that is only over the course of a day or two. We can't imagine losing a whole lot like that unless something goes really wrong (block forked or something) but that is a good question, we would have to cover the losses from profits elsewhere unless shareholders want a vote on this to say we cover them over a period or cover 90%. If this were to happen and we lost enough to kill a day's dividend then we think it'd be best to reduce our balance of alts immediately as to reduce further risk. However, with buying in at stages, taking profits when possible, having fail-safes with our trading platform, and avoiding being too eager (along with avoiding extremely low-volume alts) the risk of this should be very small.
Sorry for the long answer but we think being specific here is better than not.
-Tom and Jeff