It started out as a really slow day. I couldn't find anything interesting to trade. I tried getting into NEO, but wussed out after a few hours and got out at +1%. Of course, an hour later, it finally went up to where I wanted to sell. I'm too skittish! I know the market doesn't care about me personally, but it really feels like it's mocking me most of the time. Patterns cease to exist at the moment I enter. I can wait for hours for a pattern to continue and then finally exit (out of fear or frustration), trying to minimize my loses, only to see exactly the trend I was predicting to happen within the next 15 minutes or hour (most of the time even exceeding my expectations). Is this a common experience amongst traders?
I kept thinking I could get in one the low swings of ETH and make little off the steady upswings to $1000+, but I keep missing the buy-in.
My biggest confusion/obstacle at this point is how to get in and out of the market effectively. There are only a few currencies that trade against USDT on Binance, so if I don't see a really great opportunity in one of the Alt coins, I won't buy into ETH. I suppose there is probably some strategy to looking at how the different Alt/ETH, alt/BTC play against each other, but currently I just default to entering through ETH.
The issue arises when I see an altcoin opportunity and I'm 100% out of the market. I have to buy ETH wherever it is (usually it is at a high point) and then hope I make some gains and get my money back out of the market through ETH while it is at least at the breakeven point. So far, timing has been on my side and I have made a small profit on my ETH in addition to my alt coin gains, but this really stresses me out as it seems the two markets move opposite each other. When buying opportunities present themselves in the alts, ETH is at a point that I do not want to buy and once I exit the alt trades, ETH is nowhere near where I want to sell back.
I'm thinking this is not a coincidence and ETH spikes as people do the same as me and move their money into ETH to make entries in the various coins at opportune times. I have noticed that when all my alerts start going off at once, ETH seems to take off. I'm wondering if I can use this as an indicator of when to jump onto an ETH spike?
I had a dream last night that TRX spiked 8000% in 5 minutes! It was too hard for the charts to process and they all started running backward! I was trying to tell my dad about how much money I would have made if I hadn't pull my original investment out, but all he wanted to talk about was hot air balloons. Couple that with this anti-TRX opED and I'm wondering about my instincts. If I get out what's stuck in there now, I only lose $500. It is getting away from me fast.
While considering this conundrum, I am looking for something to trade. I keep coming back to a brand new addition to Binance, APPC. I saw it right as it launched yesterday and I tried to snipe a flash crash that never happened after the first one. I should have thrown something in to hold because it ended up jumping 100% today. I missed that, but I decided to play it on 1 minute candles and had a really good time! So far APPC is really volatile with 5%, 10% and even 20% up and downs and it is really respectful of it’s bases (annoyingly so). There is also a lot of volume going through right now.
This was my first time trying to trade on 1 minute candles, but there wasn’t enough information to make historical analysis at this point. I will be back to this one. I missed some of the bigger bumps, but overall I made ~ $400 today messing around with it!
After some soul searching, I decided to exit TRX completely while ETH was riding high. I took ~$400 loss. Even so, I’m clocking out 19% up today! And I managed to plug up my hemorrhaging TRX deficit and I’m up ~11% for the week.
Daily rate is sitting at 1.47%.
Arrows are approximate since coinigy doesn’t trade with the binance API, I hand placed them around where I entered/exit.
Who is going to be the first to yell at me for trading 1-minute candles?
See you next time, and remember, don’t trade like an idiot!
