How I lost $1362 in one week day trading cryptocurrency/altcoins

##Disclaimers

1. I have zero experience in day trading - whether it be forex, commodities or the new bitcoin/altcoin market
2. This is not meant to depress or dishearten you. I am sharing my experience.

The rush!

On October 11, 2017, it dawned upon me that perhaps I should try dipping my feet in the lucrative altcoin day trading in an attempt to multiply my cryptocurrency investments.

So then, I decided to do the following.

1. Keep 50% of my investment safe . Don't play with it! - i.e. 1 bitcoin. keep it in the locker.
2. Trade with the remaining 50% in alt coins.

Working capital on October 11, 2017 - 1 Bitcoin.

I have an account on Bittrex (one of the exchanges which lets you trade bitcoin with other coins).

What was the simplistic man's dream?

Umm... If I keep my bitcoin as is .. it almost would double in 8 months. Lets be a bit greedy and take the bitcoin and buy an altcoin which increases 10% to 30% in value over a week. If all goes well, considering a healthy average, I would double my bitcoin in approximately a month and half? Cool yeah? well it sounded so.

Now, which coin do we buy or sell?

Watched numerous youtube videos, blog articles and so forth. Some I understood, Some I did not.
The gist of all of it is as follows.

Technical Analysis

1. Have a really nice look at the Trading charts on tradingview.com or coinigy.com. look for the following
   a) Volume of trade . are there lot of buyers and sellers. low volume means nobody is interested in the coin. what is the ratio of buyers versus sellers. what prices are they buying and selling at ? Who pushes whom?
   

b) There are a ton of indicators that these guys use - like mean average (tracking 2 lines) which see whether the average buying in the last x points of time versus average selling in the last x points of time, giving you a trend whether things are going up or down and many many other things like RSI, and nice mathematical terms. I was just looking at their end predictions on the chart. I mean, all i wanted to know was , how high can it go, how low can it go, in approximately how much time.

Fundamentals

The fancy name "Fundamentals" means "Reading the news" and knowing about announcements. A few places you can get this is coindesk.com , google news and the twitter feeds of various exchanges like coinbase and poloniex.
Now, the news could work or not work.

For example, in the last week, IBM announcing a partnership with the cryptocurrency Stellar Lumen, made it pop and give the investors sweet sweet returns.. How does a +150% gain sound like?

However , this is not always the case. Almost the whole of cryptoworld was excited about the SWELL conference held by RIPPLE (a cryptocurrency thingy which was expected to connect all the banks and make inter-bank transfers happen in seconds instead of days it takes now, at a fraction of cost). Research on youtube, for videos posted during the first few weeks of october , you will see every crypto guru out there swear that RIPPLE would atleast double or increase by 30% after this conference (October 16 to 18).
What happened in reality? It tanked -30%! How did the whole world go wrong? Nobody knows.

Here is public apology video by one of the prominent investment gurus

So then based on numerous recommendations, here are the coins I tried to buy and sell

• XRP (Ripple) - the whole word was buying it last week :)
• MONA coin - the japanese crypto
• EMC2 - based on some tradingview.com chart - hey, here is some quick profit . lol
• NMR - numeraire - again some tradingview chart
• LTC - Litecoin - several sources predicting a modest 10% gain
• XLM - Stellar lumen -- well this one, i came to know about the news too late (about a few hours later)
• NEO - this is a mixed bag. I made some profit and made some loss today morning, because the world panicked at 4:30 and sold off a huge share.

The big question - Do people really make money day trading altcoins?

YES! They do!
perhaps, they have a lot more discipline in trading, experience and yes, some insider info.

What are some takeaways for newbies?

• If you are just beginning. do one trade at a time. I mean, yes, there is this classical advice of splitting your investment into 5 parts or 10 parts so that you minimize the risk. But I feel that we newbies have very poor attention span and get lost in the names of the coins and tabs open. So, its better to stick to one-trading pair at a time. Example - BTC-NEO or ETH-USD. we are simple one core processors .

• Aim for modest profits - 5% to 10% initially. consider the exchange fees while calculating. example: bittrex charges you 0.25% transaction fee per buy/sale.

• Set up an alert or trigger on tradingview.com free chart. lose some sleep over it , when your beloved coin goes up or down a threshold. get used to being woken up by alerts.

• read the news, follow youtube channels, or even opt for paid subscription - i don't know how much this is effective. I will try and update in a later post here.

So, have you decided to stop?

Nope! I intend to make back the $1362 i lost and yes, make some profit.

I witnessed a lot of things in the past week. Rumours, frantic panic selling, pumping up of a coin by whales and then dumping after poor people have bought. Random behavior. Dead behavior (Sideways movement of a coin, no up/no down)

and so, they say

albeit a costly experience indeed.

Please do hit the upvote button and follow me. Let me at least make $1 from steem for all the losses i made on crypto trading. I will post more of my experiences . Hopefully a positive one :)