The pressures of trying to trade on a buckling exchange!

This morning, I decided to have a little bit of a fettle, or more of a play. Nothing major, $1000. Having been watching the markets recently and the spike in BCH over night, I felt that the indicators were it was going to raise more today. Was going to see if I could catch a rise and drop on a fall.

I sold 25LTC, bought 1.5 BCH. Then went about my day. Even this morning however, Kraken was really slow and did get frequent drop outs and the CloudFare error screens with the Gateway Timeout message.

3 hours later, I came back in from being out and about, and BCH was now trading at around the $940 mark. It was bouncing around with $50-100 dollar swings. It took a large drop ~$840 and appeared to hover around this price for a short spell, so I felt enough was enough and sold the 1.5 BCH again. This was a nightmare though, Kraken was persistently hanging up, un-responsive, timing out etc. Very frustrating. I just had visions of the price tanking and by the time I got the sell order in, would end up at a loss.

Anyway, eventually got the order in and it executed within a few seconds. I had got them sold for $820. With all fees etc. return was around 10%, nothing greedy or record breaking, but a gain is a gain. And more than if the money had been sat in a bank this morning! Bought back my 25LTC plus an additional 2LTC.

Had the exchange been more responsive, I was ready to sell at the 950. Yes, I could have placed limits etc. but was want to watch what was moving, and size of the swings, volumes....

Don't think I could do that all the time unless the exchange was operating perfectly. Even simply moving from page to page on the site is still a nightmare. I would hate to be doing any large volume trading in that situation, as you could potentially be losing thousands if you can't get an order placed at the right time.

I did check Kraken's Twitter account, but there was no mention of any issues or delay's and I did tweet them with a pivute of the gateway timeout message, but didn't receive any response.

Not to worry, achieved what I wanted to try, and made a little to boot. But......could do with less of the hassle next time!

The price is on the way back up again, but that's just the way it goes....it could have easily just kept going down. It was more off a play than attempt to make money. I still have my BTH that I acquired at the fork, so I'll just hold for the time being.