My First Weekend Trading Cryptocurrency - BTC, ETH, XRP - Wild Swings!

Hello world...

I picked a heck of a weekend to drop a few grand into cryptocurrency, sign up for a few exchanges, get a Coinigy account and dive right into trading.

Last week I was like, "Derp, how does a wallet work?" Now I've made some good and some bad trades. But I'm a learn by doing sort of guy, so "practice trading" wasn't going to cut it. I lucked out to have such a volatile weekend to practice on!

Shout out to @quickfingersluc. I've now watched all his videos (some twice) and totally dig his take on support and resistance trading. I hope to develop the discipline and expertise to generate the kinds of returns he enjoys.

So let's dive into what I was up to. I kept all trades small, because I'm not a total moron. I risked more on ETH/BTC trades generally, which I have more faith in.

My main focus was playing the BTC/ETH pair. From what I've been able to work out, they tend to follow similar patterns and - me being a total noob - seem like the "main two" cryptos that don't run the risk of going to zero. I figure if most of my holdings are in one or the other, I'm as safe as it gets in this crazy world.

On Bittrex I got a little trigger happy and some of my trades are running longer than anticipated. My position opened at .0769 is still open. I clearly misjudged a turnaround in momentum and should have realized the past few supports were weak. I was also unaware of the news at this time. I nibbled on the way down then layered sells on the way up. There are two more open at .075 and a big one at .0799.

Once I got some perspective on the news I hung back and just watched ETH/BTC get hammered for no good reason. Support cracking on GDAX below .074 set off a nice panic and I waited to buy until I saw massive upward volume come in. Holding that position with an exit target of .07499. Price is trending towards it, so I'm hoping to close that one out today or tomorrow.

I wanted to snag some ripple in all of this chaos, so I bought this dip and sold half the position on the rebound.

Then I realized I only made about 4% on that trade, which didn't really justify selling half my position and intending to keep the other half long. May sell the rest if it spikes. But I think I got in at a good price regardless. I like the idea of moving BTC into other currencies to seed holdings there, then returning the "BTC-basis" with some of the alt left over. In the case of XRP, the only other two pairs I can use to try to trade back my "BTC-basis" are ETH and USDT, so I'll have to consider the approach. At least XRP/ETH shows super reliable swings, but it'd be a lot of small-position day trading. Probably a waste of time? Thinking out loud here.

Finally there's NEO, the bastard that started this whole crazy weekend. Before I saw the news, I got a "zelda secret" alert and then the all-hands-on-deck "airhorn" alert from Coinigy. I got all excited. This was it, my time for a first big move! So I proceeded to buy below two non-existent bases and then tried to catch the falling knife with the tether I'd converted over from Ether while awaiting an entry point for NEO.

By the time it was at 16.60, I was out of tether to keep nibbling.

Then I read the news about China "Banning ICOs." So I think, "ah crap, now the Chinese can't use NEO to launder their money as easily. That's going to take a speculative hit that could hurt the ability to reap short term gains."

So I set a "panic profit" sell order for NEO/ETH and NEO/BTC to get out of that mess and caught an upswing out.

As for the NEO I bought with Tether, I think I'm just going to HODL