Hello fellow Steemians and Cryptomanaics!
This will be a weekly series tracking my ups and downs (hopefully mostly ups) day trading cryptocurrencies on Binance. I hope you enjoy following me on this journey. I know there are a lot of challenges in day trading and a lot of people advise against it in favor of holding, but I like to make life difficult for myself and enjoy a good challenge, so here we are!
I have been day trading for a couple of months now, but it was only last week where I started officially tracking my progress in a spreadsheet. While I know the value of taking profits, right now I am solely focused on maximizing my BTC and ETH holdings, so I'm not withdrawing any funds and always reinvesting my gains. That will definitely change if I hit certain milestones, but for now it's all in!
DISCLAIMER: This is not financial advice, and I am not a professional trader. I am learning along the way and am sharing my experience for those of you who are interested and/or curious. I don't recommend anyone try this just because I'm doing it. I do it so you don't have to. Having said that, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask and I will try my best to answer!
Here are the guidelines of how I trade:
- My tracked trades are ETH pairs. I do have a separate BTC balance that I sometimes day trade with, but I don't track each trade. I do include my gains and losses for BTC in my progress, but I track my ETH trading balance separately so I can see how my ETH balance grows each week.
- I try to stick to 1% - 5% gains. If I get more, great, but I will most often sell in this range and rebuy when the price drops. This way I keep my win percentage high and can accumulate more profits rather than waiting for a larger gain and risk having the price drop dramatically on me.
- I mostly play channels, which means coins that have decent volume and are bouncing between two values over and over again. So I'll buy at the bottom of the channel and sell at the top of the channel.
- I use a few basic technical analysis indicators. I'm still learning, but there are a few indicators I have learned to use such as Bollinger Bands, MACD, RSI, and StochRSI. I don't chart but I do follow charters on Twitter.
- I day trade while working my day job as a freelance web and game developer. I usually am listening to 80s and 90s music while trading. :-)
Now that that's out of the way, let's get started!
WEEK 1
My first week was pretty successful. Overall it was a very bearish week with bitcoin dropping as low as $6,000 and bouncing back as high as $9,000. That's the thing I like about day trading over holding - you can still make a profit even in a bearish market if you play your cards right, of course.
Here's a link to my spreadsheet below:
The spreadsheet has three tabs, one for overall daily tracking, one for the current week, and another for a weekly summary. In my weekly sheet I set goals for myself. My first week's goal was 25%. I will keep it at 25% for the second week as well and depending on how I do, I may increase it in coming weeks.
February 5th was my first day of tracking, so I was a little gung-ho about getting trades in. Fortunately, I was still able to turn a profit of 13.12% that day, which I attribute partly to trading LTC, which was in a predictable channel all week long. I got lucky with MTL, jumping on during a high volume period and was able to flip a couple of trades there too.
Another notable day was February 9th, which saw ENG having a breakout. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to catch it at the bottom but managed to get in for over 10% gain.
On top of the ETH pairing trades, I managed to scoop up just under 17% in gains on BTC. As I mentioned, I don't track the BTC trades, but it was mostly on POE, ICX, and USDT.
I had a couple of trades that resulted in small losses where I jumped out before things took a nosedive. Good decisions on both instances, fortunately.
A quick note about USDT (Tether). I generally try to stay away from trading USDT because of the controversy surrounding it, but I sometimes jump in and out for very short term trades if I see an opportunity to increase my ETH or USDT.
All in all, a good week! Here's a summary:
Starting ETH Value: 0.2996
Current ETH Value: 0.4015
ETH Return %: 34.01%
Starting BTC Value: 0.03224
Current BTC Value: 0.0377
BTC Return %: 16.84%
BTC + ETH Return %: 50.85%
Feel free to follow me to track my progress! I'll be updating at the beginning of every week.
Thanks for reading!