Day Trading: A hard pill to swallow

Much like the rest of the world, when BTC hit around $10k I decided to finally get myself in the door. Unfortunately, buying BTC takes a few days of getting some papers verified, and by the time I could buy any, BTC hit $13k.

Many years ago, I visited a family friend and he was day trading on Forex. I only saw his computer screen very briefly, but was immediately attracted to it. I didn't ask anything about it, but it lingered in the back of my mind.
Around four years ago, I wanted to give it a go, and started investigating how to get into it. Forex trading requires an enormous sum of money to make any profits, as you're trading on tiny margins. Your gains are tiny percentages, and there are flat transaction fees. I quickly put it out of my mind.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. I bring up putting some money long term into BTC, and my nesting partner† is on board. I start the work on figuring out what to do and how, and I find two websites that will allow me to buy BTC with local currency, they both require proof of residence, so I hand it to them. A long weekend of waiting as I see BTC soar, and leaving me in the dust. I finally get verified, and buy some BTC on a market not dissimilar to bittrex, just local, with a small sum of about $280.

I see the charts, and I'm immediately brought back to that brief moment of seeing the family friend's computer screen all those years back. The intrigue. I do a couple of trades "to test the waters and learn". Transaction fees are really high at 0.05%, but I still manage a bit of profit. I do some research, and read some articles. One of them says "If you don't like looking at charts all day, this isn't for you". Boy do I like looking at charts! I find bittrex is my best option, as coinbase doesn't allow people outside of the US to trade.

I tell my nesting partner about it, and she pretty much rolls her eyes at me, but she doesn't mind as it's still a small sum of money and I can play around with it if I like. We're fairly well off these days. I start buying and selling. I make a few good trades, and one very bad one as I misread the charts. I start to record my progress, and think that if I do good over time, I could convince my SO (and myself) to put more money in. I initially thought of trading against BTC, and measuring my success against how much BTC I own, but eventually decided USD is where it's at, as I want to be able to show concrete progress. One night it hit me, compound interest is amazing. If I make just 1% a day, I can make %43 in a month, 106% in two. I set out to do some trading with the mindset of small gains, not sitting on the coins for days. If I can do this for 30 days, I can do it forever, right?

I make up a nice spreadsheet to record my progress. I have percentage gain on the far left, which is my daily gain. I have my compounded gain, which is gain from where I started recording. And then I have a handy little chart on the right, which allows me to put in my buy price, and show me the sell prices and the corresponding percentage of profit. This doesn't include transaction fees, but transaction fees are about 0.25%, or 0.5% on a buy and a sell, so I need the topmost profit to cover the transaction fee. I also set up a way for me to quickly get a loss stop price and a loss stop condition.

December 13th, things are looking good, right? I start feeling a little cocky. This is pretty easy so far. I make a purchase late in the afternoon for litecoin, and it drops. I see it getting near my loss stop, and I remove it. It's going back up in a minute, just like it did so many times before, right? Well, no, no it didn't. My losses grow slowly, and I'm left with either starting over, or waiting for it to go back up. Stress is quite high this afternoon, as I worry litecoin will keep dropping, and I'll have to slowly gain everything back over several days. Also, this isn't a good show and doesn't bestow confidence not by my SO, and not in myself.

Thankfully, the market is with me, and the coin eventually goes back up far enough for me to make a nice profit. I sell, and get out.

The the following day I do the same mistake again! Losing 2% is such a hard pill to swallow, but I need to get used to it. Take the 2% loss, and go make it up somewhere else.

Don't remove the loss stop. DON'T. REMOVE. THE. LOSS. STOP.

† Nesting partner is a term from polyamory. Since I have more than one partner, I differentiate my nesting partner, with whom I share a household, finances, etc.