Post 4: The crash, Telegram, and Pre-pumping

Near January 4th, the cryptocurrency market crashed hard. I saw a portfolio near $1900 dollars in worth go down as low as $650 in a matter of 10 days. 34.6% drop! One of my biggest strategies going into this was to stay logical, so selling at a loss made no sense at all. So I held through until break even point, essentially where we are today (January 29th)

This was tough since part of the allure of cryptotrading was as a hobby. It had been a lot of fun to this point learning and ingesting information while feeling pressured to make the right moves at the right time. To occupy my time, I started diversifying my information sources. The first of these was to get into telegram (and apply to steemit).

Telegram introduced a new world to me. Pump and Dump

This concept makes a lot of sense. Group up, drive up the price, get out, screw the last guys. Naturally people are attracted to this as you can make big profits really quickly. Following two or three telegram groups that post once a day each has the ability to net you easily 80x returns in a single day in many cases. However, you won't actually be the first one in and best one on the way out.

Watching these groups drove me to a new idea. If one could identify what coin was going to get pumped prior to a group pumping it, they could buy in early and then set a sell order for 2x or 3x their buy in amount. This too seems idealistic because if it were that easy to buy into a coin before everyone else, you could just win every trade.

Thinking over this whole situation logically, I decided that the best way to accomplish this was to remove a bit of greed from the situation and make the minimum allowed investment into as many coins as I wanted. This flows back to the $12.50 coin idea, but instead is designed a bit differently. The goal here would be to find coins with high pump probabilities and invest across them. Setting maybe a 2.5x sell order over the buy, you can recoup your initial amount very quickly. Once noting that a coin was pumped, you could simply wait for it to recess to its original, and sometimes lower than original amount, and buy back in. Same as the $12.50 coin but with a faster turn if you catch a pumped coin.

To determine what coins may be pumped quite often, I started following telegram groups. It turns out this sketchy type of tactic happens on general sketchy exchanges. Crytpopia and coinexchange.io are very popular. When the rise was hitting big, and even during the first part of the crash, you could find 2 or 3 pumps every day happening on low volume coins on crytopia.

Unfortunately I haven't started to test out this strategy since my assets are tied up in the rest of the market. I still refuse to sell while down money, since everything seems like it will come back eventually.

Here's to hoping thats true.

Thanks folks!