Kindly share your experience?
What I get from reading your post is that your friend might be doing margin trading or something like Binary Option, which is more riskier than your usual buy low sell high trading. I don't think that's a good 'trading' activity for newbies tbh. And btw both of your way is 'correct', making profits from crypto trading sometimes can give you insane results (looks at BTT, LTO, etc where they can give you more than x5 return in weeks).
I've stopped doing trading and right now focused on long-term investment, that's better for me because I don't have the time to go to the market and pick coins and follow news 24/7. As for you, it's better to keep making profits even though it's small, don't envy your friend especially if he has more capital than you.