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Crypto Just for Fun

Trades 6 and 7: Breaking Even and a Retrospective on the Week

I got busy and wasn’t able to write up the specifics of these trades. Suffice it to say I broke even over two days’ trading and decided not to stress for a few days.

Looking back at the week, I’m up in a big way. I mean, by percentages.

Whether it’s a dollar or a hundred, winning is winning and this week I won.

This is a snippet from the worksheet I developed to stay on top of trading goals. On the assumption that I started the week with $100 to trade, and making a 1% gain every day, you can see how the goals compound over time. Yes, it’s pennies, but on Monday I was going for a dollar, and by Saturday, my goal was 106% of that, $1.06. The columns on the right are especially important to me, as average trade value shows me how I’m doing trade by trade, and the net gain reflects the week’s work. Or “work,” I should say. I wouldn’t consider it work so much.

Anyway, I set out to make $7.21 out of thin air and I came up with $12.97. Even with the losses of the week, and even not having traded on several days, I made my goal. In the past I would kick myself for not having gone harder, or for missing opportunities that I convince myself I should have seen. This, I think, is the very essence of this exercise – maybe it’s because it’s small potatoes, but I have been successful at avoiding the FOMO and anxiety that got me stuck in crappy trades.

It’s later on Sunday evening and I had a very busy day. I may set up a trade, I may not. But in any case, I look forward to spending some time analyzing my options – when I have the time to give.

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Crypto Just for Fun

Trade 5: Short ETHUSD @ $250.41 (2/25/20)

Bam. Just sayin’.

After losing twice on Long orders, I saw the writing on the wall (more specifically, the high-timeframe wall) and flipped into a short. It worked out.

Entry. Short 1 ETH at $250.41 with 5x leverage (market sell).

Once the bull pennant that had been invalidated, I reasoned that there would be a gap that needed filling… down another Fib level. I rode this one down conservatively, ultimately pulling the pin at $237.05 for a profit of $11.47, or over 4%. This put me back in the green for the day’s trading. And it felt good, too.

Epilogue. The price continued to dump for a time, all the way down into the $215 range. Again, being ahead in profit for the week, I busied myself with other things. After all, it was big game hunting that got me in trouble last time.

More on that later though.

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Crypto Just for Fun

Trades 3 & 4: Long ETHUSD @ $255 (2/25/20)

This is why we Stop Losses.

Riding high on sequential wins, I continued to study ETHUSD and determined that there was probably one more action up before a big bear move. Ethereum has started forming a wedge on the daily and was at the bottom of a parallel channel on the hourly, so I figured I’d squeeze in one more 3-4% play before reassessing.

This did not go as planned. I set up a buy and $255 and a stop loss at $253 for the first buy. This morning, almost immediately after buying in, the candle wicked down and picked up my Stop Loss order.

But my analysis seemed to be holding, so I called that on overagressive SL order and bought back in again, this time at $252. It ended up that my trend lines were no longer valid and the price collapsed to $250 before I stop lossed out at $248. Oh well. All told I gave back a chunk of this week’s profits but still closed ahead.

Proof I Am Learning.

In the last major bull cycle, I allowed my ego to tell me the market was over by so many times that I ended up shorting early and losing huge amounts of profit. I remembered having read Mr. Anderson on Twitter having written that ego hero shorts the top instead of waiting for the market to showed it was time for a trend change. The Same is true when longing a clearly bearish moment. This time I shelved my ego, reread the charts and instead of sticking to objectively incorrect analyses and started looking for the next move.

That’s when I noticed that a major support had broken on ETHUSD, and that created a gap. Incidentially, the gap that opened up was around $230, which was also a Fibonacci level for the most recent bull move…

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Crypto Just for Fun

Trade 2: Short ETHUSD @ 265 (2/24/20)

Just a quick scalp.

Looking at a fresh analysis of ETHUSD, I decided to go back in for another short. Why didn’t I let it ride yesterday? Well, I took profit early and slept well. That’s why.

Setup. On higher timeframes, there still exists a gap between the mid $260s and around $227, which was the last pause in the last bullish run. I believe the markets are overdue for a pullback before a big move up, but am also fairly certain there is sentiment to see BTC over $10K, ETH closer to $300, etc. This will be a fast short with aggressive Stop Losses placed along the way. Not a terribly efficient setup, since there’s a lot more trade maintenance to do this way, but it’s good intraday trading practice. I’ll be looking around $260-262 for a quick scalp, but am ready to watch it drop lower.

Entry. Short 1 ETHUSD @ $265 with 5x Leverage; Stop Loss at $267, Take Profit at $262.

The market did climb after filling the order, but only to about $266, which is where my trendline predicted it would stop. From there, the price started breaking down, to a low of $262.25, as I monitored the position. I did some quick calculations, and practicing the metered approach I’m trying to take this go-round, determined that I could Stop Loss at $262.50 and have met my profit goals for the week.

Profit… in principle.

Exit. I was Stop Loss-ed out at $262.72, and the price continued to climb in the short term. By opening with a limit order, I saved on fees and netted a tiny profit of .51% ($1.35). However, doing so means that I met my weekly goal and can now be extremely conservative with the remaining time I have ahead and ONLY trade hot setups.

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Crypto Just for Fun

Trade 1: Short ETHUSD @ 274.61 (2/23/20)

Here’s one that went the right way – right away.

Opened a leveraged short position against ETH at $274.61. Less than an hour later, I’m looking at a 2% profit. I’ve moved by stop loss to 1.64% to make sure I cover trading fees.

Setup: A quick review of overall crypto markets (2/23/20, ~5pm PST) showed that BTCUSD was struggling against resistance at the all-important $10,000 mark. It is common knowledge that as BTC goes, so often does the market – at least for fiat pairs. I saw that ETHUSD, one of my all-time favorite pairs, was overbought on RSI and, even after a monumental injection of USD volume, the price had not climbed substantially. In fact, ADL showed that the volume was dropping, though the price stayed the same. Whelp, that’s short term bearish.

Entry: SHORT 1 ETH @ $274.61 with 5x leverage. Stop Loss set tight at $275.50. Take Profit at $265.00

The price collapses, dropping a wick all the way down to $266.00 before bouncing back around $270. A 5000 ETH sell wall goes up, so I move my Stop Loss to $270.25, confident that I have already secured my daily profit. I also move my Take Profit order to $266.10 just in case the price whips down again.

Nice. I’m already in the green. Love that.

Exit. Took profit at $267.41, netting a 2.2% gain (after fees) and a grand total of $6.04.

A Reflection.

$6.04 is small potatoes, to be sure, especially after having gained (or more often, lost) hundreds at a time recently. But a gain of 2.2% in just minutes of trading is something to be fired up about. It is rarely that simple, and almost never that fast, but a win is a win and it’s a good way to start this adventure off.

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Crypto Just for Fun

The Journey of 926 Trades

Audacious. Unrealistic. Naive. Mathematically sound.

I describe myself as a tech enthusiast. I like building and programming computers. I like fixing appliances. I like engineering sometimes complex solutions to otherwise simple problems. I love Frys, just about any hardware store, and Amazon. Heaven to me is a well-organized garage, rife with tools, and the time to use them.

As far back as five or six years ago, I had been dimly aware of Bitcoin, having seen it referenced in some article about a guy who created his own fake identity. He ended up sending hundreds of Bitcoin (then the equivalent of about $500) to a guy in San Francisco to get a REAL CALIFORNIA ID with a doctored picture and other fake documents. Anyway, at the time, I dismissed the whole cryptocurrency concept as a footnote in committing Internet fraud.

So imagine my reaction when I was introduced, early in 2018, to the world of cryptocurrency. At a backyard BBQ, a colleague of mine, respectable and intelligent, explained how he had just made a KILLING in Bitcoin trading. What’s more, he explained that there were dozens of other coins out there, and thousands of scammy copy-cat coins to boot.

And he said there was still money to make in cryptocurrency. So, that afternoon, with a fist full of twenties, I set up an exchange account and I bought my first crypto – Litecoin – at a friendly discount.

Then, like most, I lost a wad of real money in what was effectively Internet gambling. The market tanked in 2018, and, high on the “hopium” on Twitter and the dopamine doses I’d get with tiny gains here and there, I dove in and blew away real dollars and countless productive hours on trying to anticipate the market’s next big move.