Amazing, thanks for the link, will check that out!

I have to admit I have no idea about technical analysis right now so I might not be able to contribute on trading ideas right now, but definitely up for learning, so will get on that.

Haha, know what you mean about the blog going all cryptos… it’s all I’ve wanted to write about for the last few months but have held back as feel it’s not really that interesting for the wider audience just yet.

Anyway, as I say I’ll have a play with that tool and drop you a line if/when I get anything concrete that looks like it might be a good idea. Cheers again!

Hey TFS, the trading bot is backtested using a tool called Gekko. You can add different strategies and play around. Fairly easy to use just run it locally with Node, fetch some historical data and backtest! But I want to do it properly with my own stack (Java, own storage) and custom code for more flexibility. Sure, we can collaborate.

I only recently started learning about technical analysis and indicators. The most important ones I found are EMA, MACD, RSI, StochRSI. The idea is to find certain thresholds that an indicator or a combination of those will make profit. Then run it live! Maybe I should write a post on that, I just don’t want the blog to go all-in cryptos lately.

I also think cryptos can have a negative correlation with the stock market. It feels they’re in their own world. We’ll have to wait and see!

Hah, that’s a good analogy with the falling knives.

Trading bot sounds awesome!
Would love to see a post on the basics of that, or if you’d rather chat privately ping me an email. I’m a dev as well so I might be able help out, would a collaborative bot be something you are interested in? We could pool trading ideas as well.
How have you paper tested it? Are there any online resources that can do this automatically? I would imagine literally doing this on paper would take forever to test.

” I found that helps you also to get to know myself better as I have not experienced such rapid falls in stocks yet.” – Honestly that is one of the reasons why I thought it would be good to get into Cryptos. I started investing around 2013 so the stock market has pretty much just gone up since then, so I wanted to see how strong my hand was when faced with a big red number next to some of my investments. So far I would say I’ve handled it pretty well, but it’s been great training for the next stocks crash that is for certain.

One random thought I had recently, a big stocks crash could end up being really good for Cryptos as people sell out of the market, money might flow into Cryptos instead. Obviously the opposite could happen as well, I guess panic in the markets could cause panic in Cryptos as well, but personally I don’t really see how the two are in any way correlated so they could actually be a really good hedge against a market crash. Will be interesting to find out whether my hunch is true when it happens! :)

I know what you’re saying, Andy. I tried to catch some falling knives and still waiting for those funds to reach their previous levels!

Overall, I’m up 20% but that can definitely change within a day :)

However, I’ve started looking into building a trading bot. It makes profit on paper, so now I’ll have to see how to build the execution part.

I’ll do a crypto update again in the near future. Perhaps on what I’m holding and why, and my experience these few months from a behavioural point of view. I found that helps you also to get to know myself better as I have not experienced such rapid falls in stocks yet. Looking forward to reading your crypto update!

It’s tough because you can never know when the bottom is going to happen… I’ll leave it at that!!! :)

I think I’m about even, maybe lost a bit due to getting involved and over excited a bit too early and with some altcoins I had no idea about. But now I’m pretty happy with the holdings I’ve got for the long term so won’t be doing any more fiddling for a while (Hopefully!). So I guess we’ll see where we are in 6 months time (sounds stupid but that is a long time in Cryptos isn’t it!)

I’ll probably do a post soon updating on what I did, all the crazy moves that have happened already, and all the mistakes I made along the way. Hopefully others can avoid them!

How are you getting on so far? Are you going to do a post on what you are holding?

With regards to your guide and my cryptos toolkit… yes I definitely will add your link to that page! Cheers!

I agree! I think in the long term cryptos will reward people involved in 2017-2018.

But who am I to say? Maybe the whole thing will be
cracked down by regulation and the Amazons of the world will issue their own not-so-decentralized coins to benefit from the blockchain :)

Your strategy of just buying the dips is promising, Andy… How are you getting on?!

I agree that, especially in retrospect, Bitcoin (and the rest of the cryptoverse as you note, the prices are very much correlated!) in late 2017 was indeed in a bubble. But only a mini one. Looks like we’ve had the crash (wish I’d bought more in that, but ) and prices are now stabilising again. I agree that there was a bit of a mania, people waded in knowing nothing about it (including my good self) and then probably sold out panicking when it started to crash and lost money. Or maybe they’re Hodlin’ and waiting it out till it goes past it’s previous peak to sell out.

Anyway, I’m glad I started to get involved as having some skin in the game forced me to actually learn about the tech and research many other coins, and I’m finding it all really interesting, so if I lost a bit of money in the short term, I think getting involved long term is going to pay dividends!

Also, I wish I’d read your article on buying bitcoin with no fees before I started getting involved with Coinbase, that would have saved me about £100 at least!!! I found the thread on Reddit that described the technique but again it was a little too late to avoid a lot of the fees I’d already paid.

D’oh! We live and learn :)

Hopefully when all my coins are worth 1000% in a years time I’ll forget about the odd £10 here and there :D

Hey Alchemist and thanks for your comment! What I’m trying to say here is that the same mania, euphoria, fear of missing out and crowd awareness that happened in Tulipmania in 1630 is happening again in 2017 (not before) with cryptocurrencies. Obviously, blockchain has a much higher underlying value than a flower and they’re not the same.

The characteristics, however, of how people react to a rising price of something are exactly the same. Just look at another conversation I had yesterday with a friend:

– “Michael, I want to buy some bitcoins, how can I do it?”
– “Do you know what it is?”.
– “No, but the price is going up, everyone is making money.”

This is real. We are a long way from having a stable Bitcoin price but I believe we will see it becoming more mainstream and I hope for more use cases too! Even when the price is $5,000 or $50,000.
What is your opinion on other coins? Bitcoin Cash?

This thing just needs to survive to be at least better version of gold. Just survive. And I am talking only about replacing gold.
We are still very far from point where it makes sense to sell bitcoins to real estate or whatever. Everybody talks about cryptos but most people hold nothing or close to it.
And only thing which can bring this thing down is if underlying principles and technology will be compromised or if goverments will take it down.
But risk/reward ratio is very good. I would still advise to allocate at least 5% of net worth to it or amount you can comfortably survive losing.

Hi Issa, thank you for reading the article and for your comment!

To me it looks quite hard to predict bitcoin prices, especially 3 months in advance given its very high volatility. I just read Steam’s announcement that they actually stopped accepting bitcoins as a payment mechanism particularly due to the high transaction fees and the volatile price between rejections – http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1464096684955433613.

Although long term view, I see cryptocurrency as a more established way to pay everything. Not sure if it’s going to be bitcoin, let alone trying to do technical analysis on its short term price! Hopefully bigger market cap will solve volatility. 2018 will be an interesting one ;)