6 must read tips for trading Bitcoin and Altcoins

You can be a trader or a holder. Trading is very stressful. When the price is going up you don’t want to sell because you’re sure this is “the big one.” When the price is going down you don’t want to buy because you’re sure it’s going to go even lower. You miss the top point. You miss the bottom point. You feel like you’re wrong about everything. You can make money on it (and we hope you do!), but it’s pretty damn stressful.

Want less stress and less risk? Commit to medium- to long-term holding — you’re probably going to do well and won’t need to be worried when the price jumps like crazy like it has been.

Here’s my advice for my fellow holders:

1. Pick the price you want to cash out at and decide on a reasonable and slightly pessimistic time frame that you think it will take to happen. Maybe $1000/eth is your goal and you figure it will happen at the end of 2018. Great! Whatever happens between now and doesn’t really matter.

2. Don't feel like you've "lost money" every time the price drops. It’s a powerful psychological effect you need to be aware of and fight against. You don’t lose money unless you cash out at less than you bought for. If you bought for 100 and later watch it drop from 400 to 200, you have haven’t lost 200/eth, you’re 100/eth ahead. Yeah, you could have sold at the top, but you didn’t. That’s ok, stop kicking yourself. Just wait. And if eth is worth less now than when you bought it, realize that the quick buck you hoped you would make will just take a little longer. Eventually you will see rewards on your investment, and the rewards will almost certainly be at much higher percentages than you find elsewhere.

3. Ether will surprise you, good and bad, but it’s still on track. When ether jumped from 10 to 50 earlier this year suddenly it was “game on” and there was a lot of talk that it would go to $550 by the end of the year. That seems very reasonable, still. And we can expect to be surprised again and again.

4. There’s lots of talk about ICOs cashing out, draining the buyers and sending the price down. That may be, but then that means that there’s a lot of talent that are now very motivated to go out and make many many fine products that will use ethereum. Within a year we’ll be seeing user-friendly ether browsers and dapps with exciting functionality, all of them running on ethereum and using ether. When that happens, your ether is going to be worth a whole lot. Think of the price drops now as paying in advance for to be able to realize the ethereum dream. And then not only will you reap the financial rewards, but the world will have some great tools.

5. Obsessed with the ups and downs and wishing you were taking advantage of them? Try a little day trading with a small percentage of your ether. If you play around with 2% and lose a quarter of that in bad trades you’ve only lost 1/2%. And if you guess right it’s fun to earn a free dinner or a free vacation (depending on how many ether you’ve got). But keep a chunk of ether reserved for your target price and don’t touch it.

6. Enjoy the ride! As a holder you can laugh when you the price drops and you say “I just lost $X today!” You can also laugh when your friends say “The price is all the way up to $Y, why aren’t you selling?” Nope. Let it ride, relax, and enjoy being part of this experience.