Long weekend update: altcoin trading

Hello again Steemitians!

Over the easter weekend I had some free time so I decided to hop on Bittrex and Poloniex to try my hand at altcoin trading. I was inspired by @quickfingersluc and reading about how he turned $300 into $50,000 in one year. I have been buying and holding Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, and NEM for a while and although I have been happy with my returns it seemed unlikely I was going to get close to $50,000 in profit by the end of the year so I decided to try my hand at altcoin day trading to see if I could increase my profits while my main investments were in a fairly stable period.

I started Thursday night by signing up for accounts on both Poloniex and Bittrex and transferring a small amount of bitcoin to each. I picked these two platforms because they seemed popular relatively respected and offered a number of altcoins to choose from along with high trading volume. To be honest the number of coins to pick from is overwhelming. I had previously stuck to investing in top ten by market cap, although I have stayed away from Litecoin, Ripple and Dash for various reasons even though they have all seen a recent surge that I have missed out on. I started by picking one coin from each platform to invest in. I choose Stratis for Poloniex and Ark on Bittrex since they both seemed to have good fundamentals and both had been in upward swings. I first bought Stratis on Poloniex. My first impressions are that I like the Poloniex trading interface and graphs much better than Bittrex which is why I started with Stratis since Ark is was not listed on Poloniex.

I started off confidently, buying Stratis on a pretty big uptick (see the green arrow on the picture below). The price continued to rise and I felt pretty good about my initial investment. After a few hours I checked back and saw that the price had gone back down and I was hovering at break even range. I started to get a little nervous. What if I had just bought in at the top of a pump and dump? I decided to give it a few more hours to see if it would go up. When I checked back in before I was going to bed my heart sunk because the price was down and I was starting my day trading journey in the red. I was thinking how am I supposed to make it to $50k starting at a loss? I decided to sell (red arrow) and went to bed.

Although I slept better not potentially losing money I woke up the next morning only to see Stratis immediately rebounded and went on to have solid gains throughout the next day. At this point my confidence was just about in the gutter. With my spirits down I decided to make a hearty breakfast before making any new trades so I cooked some bacon and eggs for breakfast. As I mentioned in my previous post I am on a low carb high fat or ketogenic diet and this is the ideal breakfast for such a diet even though the conventional wisdom would say otherwise. But I am a cryptocurrency enthusiast and always looking to challenge conventional wisdom.

After a satisfying breakfast I decided I was feeling energized and ready to get back at it. Even though I lost on the previous day of trading I was feeling better that Stratis did go on to gain and that I just needed a little more patients to see the profits. With my new found optimism and full belly I decided to log in to Bittrex and buy Ark. This was my first successfull day trade. actually I ended up holding on to it for a few days because it kept going up and up.

I bought in at 0.000085 and sold at 0.00028 once it looked like it was starting to take a dip. It did go back up but nevertheless I was more than happy with this trade and the 3.3x return on my investment. This more than made up for my loss on the previous day. Although I did make out pretty well over the weekend I was questioning my ability to handle day trading. The ups and downs and uncertainty where hard to take and I was only investing very small amounts of money. It is strange that I have no problem spending $100 but I become extremely nervous when putting that amount into a trade.

My final thoughts on Bittrex vs Poloniex are that I like Bittrex due to its selection of coins and although the interface seems a bit slower and the volume is lower it feels less like you are in a casino. With all the flashing price changes and huge gains listed on the side while you are trading makes it distracting and makes you feel like your trade could be next to hit the jack pot. I'm sure that design is not on accident. I think for my medium to long term trades I will sticking with Bittrex unless I find a problem with it down the road.

After some contemplation I think I will stick with medium to long term trades but continue to venture out into the alt-coin space and build a kind of index fund into project I believe find interesting and worthwhile. What are your most successful trading strategies? How do you pick which coins to invest in? Is it on trends or do you see it as investing into the project?