It’s been a shaky few days in the crypto market. I noticed last week there was a lot of hubris going around, but the technical charts didn’t show any good opportunities for trading for me. My strategy is conservative. I prefer to get in and out of a trade in less than a day and scrape the excess into a high-interest account. Just before the selloff last week when most of the top currencies lost between 5 and 13% in value, I decided to lock in about 60% of my portfolio as stablecoins. Compared to the market, my portfolio lost only 2% of its value.
I figured as the market recovered, I could easily make that value back with a few small volume trades. But the trades haven’t yet presented themselves. I made 3 trades on Friday (see below). Litecoin (LTC) was the only currency that had a recognizable buy setup pattern – so I took it. The thing about the crypto markets is that most assets reinforce each other’s behavior. If ETH starts to have a good day, you’ll soon see LTC or BTC’s technicals start to take on the same pattern. So even though it wasn’t very wise, I ran the same trades with BTC and ETH despite how weak the signals were. I swung $100 at each trade.
It took 36 hours for my trades to follow through (longer than I like). I usually like my risk-to-reward ratio to be 1:2 or 1:3, meaning that if I swing a $100 bat at a trade and aim to make 3 to 6 bucks on that trade, but it drops below $98, then I’m out of the trade and move on. If this happens, I take the loss and move on. I have no interest in being a long-term investor so I’m not going to risk a significant loss and be forced to stay in a trade for weeks, or even months, in hopes of making my money back.
Luckily for me, my trades were all positive, however weak (see below).
And here’s my chart with my total profits on the trades. I made my money back and decided to hold on to the excess to put into my BlockFi account where I gain interest on my coins.
Litecoin was the only one to reach its target, but ETH and BTC were still in the positive at the time so I pulled out of those trades at the same time. Overall, I netted some pocket change. It’s easy to see how in hindsight I could have swung bigger bats for more profit, but the signals at the time were not clear enough. As the market corrects itself, I ought to be able to start hitting home runs once or twice a week again.