Topic: timing the market (Read 628 times)

Timing the market perfectly has always been the dream of traders and investors and for obvious reasons it is impossible to do so, that has not stopped people from trying all kind of approaches to get to their goal and if anyone has ever reached that goal you can be sure they have kept that information a secret for everyone else, but the truth is you do not need to time the market perfectly to make profits in the market, as long as you have a strategy that can get you in a position early enough then you will get profits.

Look you can't time the biggest moves, there are sometimes huge moves and those are always unforeseen and can't be calculated or timed perfectly. But, if you want to time the market on regular days there is only one thing you need to do. Check the resistance points and support points.

Support points are places where there are buy orders all collectively looking high and in order to break that and go even further down there needs to be a lot of sales, resistance is just the opposite there are people selling coins at some price and in order to go above that you need to buy more than they sell. If you learn where those levels are then you can follow that path and buy during support line and sell during resistance to make the most profits.

It is really not your fault, it really takes the courageous ones like you to trade in this type of volatile market, I lost interest in trading too because it seems to me that I predict the market better when I am not trading, but the moment I decide to trade, that is when the market will choose to go against me, and I really don’t know which law of nature is controlling that.

For this reason is why for now, I just prefer to hold my coins and juts keep waiting for it to increase or some of the altcoins gets pumped for me to be able to get some money out and look for other coins that would do the same to invest in.

It's really not. Timing is extremely difficult, much harder than identifying likely support/resistance and reversal zones. That's why traders need to be willing to get stopped out (sometimes more than once!) but still take the same trade setup when it presents itself again.

There's nothing more frustrating than getting stopped out, selling the bottom, and then watching the chart do exactly what you thought it was going to do. It's a very common thing though. Don't let stop runs kill your whale trades!

Proper timing is really necessary to succeed in your trading but you still need to equip yourself with enough trading skills even if you know how to timing the market. They said timing is one of the major factors that separates a good trade from a bad trade, it is also determine the profitability of your trade and you can be right and but still lose money if your timing is off. But good timing might not work with the whales because it is difficult to determine their next move.

I think we are not capable of trading the market as traders or noobs or anyone really because of the unexpected movements of it not because we are bad at calculating it.

Think about it there are stocks all over the world that does exactly what people expect it to do, there are a ton of banking stocks that basically became so boring that they are going up 2 pace and going down one pace and basically do that until they do x3 or x4 then have big breakdown and then redo everything again, this has been going on for over 20+ years now.

Bitcoin is not like that one day we wake up and a bull bought 500 million dollars worth of bitcoin with tether, another day we wake up mtgox trustee sells 34k bitcoins, recently just couple days ago another 25k was sold. If these insanely unexpected sudden stuff didn't happen we would totally time it perfectly but we can't really know these unexpected stuff and when they will happen.

Will do

As long as your exit or entry is part of your plan then I wouldn't call it a mistake on the trader's part. Even if they missed the "true potential" of their position I wouldn't call it a missed opportunity as I just followed my plan and their are no assurances if I waited for too long on what will happen with my position. It's just like a game of what ifs and the favor didn't go into your part but that is how the market goes you cannot really get what you want but as long as you are satisfied and followed your trade then I cannot really call it a bad move.

I dare both of you to continue here (and everyone else interested in this matter)

It is a gamble since you are speculating on the price in the further. The unknown factor are humans making decisions and therefor unforeseen events what makes the risk.

Since this is off topic we can agree to disagree, short term traders dont know what they are doing in masse

OP in short dont try to time the market you might get burned or miss out on an opportunity.  Put your money into an idea and hold it until either you need the money, dont like the idea anymore, or have a better use for that money.  Good luck, it IS needed

Technically, it is you, not me. You already departed but then decided to make a comeback


I'm not talking about outliers here

And personally, I think the percentage of successful short-term traders able to earn consistently is a lot higher than among other types of traders. The reason for this conclusion is quite simple, though not quite intuitive. First, no one can't stand losses for too long (as the suffering ends along with your account balance), but with short-term trading the losses will necessarily be, well, short term by definition (until it is a gameover for you)

So it is kind of natural selection at work where short-term traders are selected to be successful if they are to remain short-term traders and it works fast. Further, the long-term traders have the option of turning into long-term holders and ultimately into bag holders, so it is also kind of natural selection too, though in this case in works in reverse, i.e. it is a negative selection which favors losers

The bottom line and the lesson to take home is that your assertion about short-term traders being gamblers doesn't stand to scrutiny and is in fact an example of drawing incorrect conclusions from false premises. In simple terms, short-term traders are not gamblers en masse. They know what they are doing

You are still on this?  Ok so maybe 1 out of 1000 can earn consistently trading, more can do it by gambling in the short run but as time goes on the bell curve stands correct and there are few outliers.  That satisfies my comment ok.

Even if we hypothetically assume that you can somehow earn by chance (read, through luck alone) consistently (which, technically speaking, defies either the idea of luck or the notion of consistency), you still have to backpedal your other post in this thread:


Sorry, but it doesn't look very consistent (pardon the pun) with your new idea of earning consistently by pure luck

"Some/few" can yes by chance consistently make money gambling.  I am just stating I never said anywhere that you cant make money trading, only that it is a gamble.

This is off topic now anyway, the OP asked how to time the market.  There is no correct way to time the market.  If there was everyone would know, that's why I said it was a gamble.  Many people tried to time the market and buy dec 2017 didnt work out well for them, many people tried to time the market and sell Jan 2019, didnt work out well for them either.  Markets fluctuate and different unknown, yet to exist factors come into play in the weeks/months/years ahead that make it a risk to try to time the market.  Most people that say they can are kidding themselves.  Especially with the low volume coins in which market makers greatly decide which way the coin goes....

So to recap I'm just saying that timing the market isn't an exact science and sometimes some would say it's a gamble. Okay

I'm not sure why you decided to continue

As now you have two contradictory statements - one above and one below:


At first you said that you can't earn money via short-term trading if only by chance as it is a form of gambling. Now you are basically going back on your words and start to claim the exact opposite, namely, that you can consistently make money via trading or gambling, which is definitely not by chance. I think before deciding on continuing you should have first made up your mind on your real point of view

It seems you are about to get lost in conflicting ideas

One side note though, just because I said short term trading is gambling doesn't imply that I said you couldnt consistently make money trading(gambling) people do it at casinos all the time.  They gamble and some consistently make money from the casinos, doesn't mean they aren't gambling 

You said that:


By any reasonable definition, it pretty much amounts to saying just that (as you can make money in gambling only by pure luck). You see, I don't actually care a lot whether you are right or wrong here, though in this specific case you make a common error called an overgeneralization (and a thousand of different names). But since you make it sound like a strong assertion ("nothing more nothing less"), that makes it interesting and even entertaining to a degree to see how far you are ready to go in defending your position


Okay then

Lol fine never mind.  Trading is a calculated effort in which you can make money consistently at by using information that is both known to exist and events yet to happen/occur.  You win, I'm not too into internet defending.  

I never said you couldnt consistently make money trading but "timing the market" is the subject header.  So if you have all the current data that is available and it points to a buy, then China "bans crypto" comes out again in the headlines and markets dump, you "gambled" because there is no way to know what news or market effect will happen tomorrow effecting your current buy signal.  It's a gamble, possibly an educated gamble but a gamble no less.