Topic: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion - page 22699. (Read 26710071 times)

Short term trading in bitcoin is otherwise known as gambling.

some will says that you gamble.

i going to have to get some more new coins to trade with... only place i can trade is btc-e right now .........if u call what i do trading .

Coin
Explanation

See my post above.  There may be "super-traders" that successfully play such complicated short-term trading strategies, and they may take money from less sophisticated traders; but, averaged over all traders, short-term trading will always be a losing game.

>Do you consider everyone else here on BCT other then[sic] yourself mentally feeble?
No.  Only those who listened to Reptilia.  And not even every one of them those, either.

>And it turns out that HODLING at 700 was sound advice because it went up to almost 1200.
Not for those who continued hodling because Reptilia forgot to tell them to dupm even as he himself was sodling.
While [accidently] telling them to hodl

Turned out pretty shitty for those mental giants, actually.

He is basically right this time. Since bitcoins are neither produced not destroyed (by consumption), the only basis for demand is people who think it is worth more, and the only source of supply is people who think it is worth less. Historic value could for some be of importance, but should not, again since they are not consumable there is no reference. Only expected future value should matter. Just like cold and heat, where cold is just absence of heat, and darkness and light, where darkness is just absense of light, bitcoin supply is the same as absence of demand. So in case of bitcoin (and other pure money types), there is really only one parameter: The demand.

The speculation is about projecting the demand for bitcoins in the future. Those never exposed to the idea are one source of future demand.

Agree 100% about trying to trade, this has been my experience.

You are looking to gain more by short-term trading, profiting from short-term variations of the price.  That is not a rational strategy, since the expected gain of that activity is slightly negative.  Some traders may make a profit, but some will lose money, and the average gain of all traders (compared to the long-term expected gain) will be negative.

If your expectation of the price increase over the next few years is more than the expected increase in value of other possible investments, then the best strategy is basically invest all your disposable money as soon as you can, and hold until you want to spend your profit.

Otherwise, the best strategy is not to invest at all.

Short-term speculation makes sense only if you believe that there is some key attribute -- knowledge, skill, luck, courage, determination, intelligence, reaction speed -- that increases one's expected profit at day trading, and that you have more of that thing than the average speculative trader out there.

Indeed, it seems that the only reason why day-trading exists is that most people think that they are better than average in that regard.  Which is not likely, since the traders that are dumber than you will go broke and drop out before you do, while the super-traders with robots and privileged information, who are surely better at the game than you, will hang around to the end and will probably take your money before you can take theirs. (You may have noticed the absence lately of several posters who apparently enjoyed eating dog food in order to pay for Risto's cigars and for KnC's global warming plants.)

If you accept that you are no better that the average day-trader, and you have a positive expectation for the price in the long run, short-term trading will give less expected profit than just buy and hold -- because you will not profit from the end-to-end trend during those times when you are holding dollars. For example, if you expect a 20% valuation over 3 years, but you keep 50% dollars and 50% BTC, on the average, over that time frame, then your expected profit will be only 10%. 

A similar conclusion holds if you have a negative expectation for the price in the long term: day-trading is a bad idea, because  you are expected to lose money while you are holding BTC.  If you expect the price to drop 20% over the next 3 years, then, by day-trading with a 50% BTC average position, you will have a 10% expected loss.  Whereas, if you don't invest at all, your loss will be 0%.

Do you consider everyone else here on BCT other then yourself mentally feeble?  Everyone has own brain to decide what to do.  And it turns out that HODLING at 700 was sound advice because it went up to almost 1200.

I didn't con the mentally feeble into stocking up on this wholesome goodness even as I was dumping it right into their buys.
There's a slight difference

Ha ha good one.

By my reckoning he sold pretty much where you did nlc.

You felt the need to troll bitcointalk for 6000 posts afterwards though sadly.

Don't feed lambchump

You asked for an example of dishonesty.  I gave you one.  You countered with "well, he didn't profit that much."
My point is simple:  He is not merely insane (as in involuntary institutionalization insane, classified in DSM-5 as "Batshit Crazy"), but a sleazy lying piece of shit.
You don't tell people to hodl while sodling hand-over-fist yourself.

Now, at the risk of being too optimistic:

I just can't see situations like these as coincidences, especially when that person has a reputation in Finland for being a shady businessman at best.
I'm a simple guy, and if something looks like sh*t and smells like sh*t, then I'll simply conclude that it must be sh*t. Rpietila carries himself like a sterotypical con-man with all his uncontrollable vanity and "trailer trash rich" mentality, and things around him tend to get screwed up. So my conclusion is simply to stay away from things that he is strongly involved in.

As far as I remember he said he sold at 700 so no where near the top.  Ok, I do see your point but in reality he was not such a large holder of BTC that he needed to Shill the market in order to unload whatever portion he did.  What he sold represented a very tiny fraction of the BTCs being bought and sold during that time.

Anyway, lets go back to trollinig BTC.