Thoughts on trading analysis and signals

Hey everyone!

Without getting much into who and where, I just wanted to lay out some of my own thoughts on these kind of activities on the platform and my doubts about them.

I am not new to trading. I've never traded stocks or invested in them, I mainly started trading when I was introduced to cryotocurrencies. There were a few years where I traded some coins back and forth with the goal of increasing the amount I have, it felt like I had an edge over the market cause I was always trading knowing these coins would in the end go nowhere but up. At least as an altcoin enthusiast I felt like I had an edge over the market because my thought process was to always buy more on the dips and sell less on the highs.

There are things though that a human trader can not predict or execute properly in time. It's no surprise that exchanges and their API's are filled with trading bots, they are after all taking over wallstreet and other markets as well. Even though the crypto markets are a lot more volatile and crazy, bots will outdo human activity 99 times out of 100. If you believe you can do better you'll be as disappointed as World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov who lost his first ever match versus a computer in 1997.

After coming to the realization that I often ended up with either the same amount of coins or less than I had started with, even worse - less than if I had just mined them on my 2 GPU's at the time instead of spending many sleepless and stressful months trading. I decided to go for the long-term approach in trading and investing and it has by far been the best decision I ever did, both for my health, sleep and for my crypto holdings. I am not saying it is impossible, but I found that the more often you trade the bigger the odds are of you losing, especially on exchanges that take a hefty trading fee per executed trade (Bittrex and Poloniex usually take 0.2%-0.25% per trade).

Shameless self-promotion to use Binance instead which has a lower trading fee (0.05%). The link has my referral which I would appreciate if you used.

Now comes my thoughts on having a Steemit account where you announce currencies you believe will shoot up combined with having a huge following both on Steemit and on other social media platforms.

If some of you have been here longer, you might remember my attempt at this on my account @cryptochannel which is now discontinued. I want to also provide some details on my decision to discontinue that activity because it is related to my issues with this.

There is a lot of room for abuse with this activity. There's been a lot of discussion about technical analysis, elliot waves, etc, etc. But as a matter of fact we all realize that this technology and way of trading is something we may have never seen before. It's nothing compared to stock markets where most exchanges will only let you trade at certain hours of the day, or where most users are verified and only certain parts in the world are active trading, etc. Cryptocurrencies are worldwide. It is impossible to predict who is acting on what and when as there are so many different aspects in it. Big hands coming into a market, big hands leaving, big hands manipulating the price, bigger hands destroying the manipulation. Digital thefts being dumped on markets, unstable exchanges causing flash crashes or whales manipulating margin traders liquidation. There are so many possibilities and reasons to markets moving and from so many different people and regions, not to mention news and other events. There are too many to count, but when we are in a bull market and new investors coming in who don't even take the time to look into what they are buying it becomes a lot more of a gamble - the prime example being what some investors out there are currently doing with Steem back Dollars which are supposed to be pegged at a dollar each.

I realized quick on my cryptochannel account that if I continue to grow and build a following, especially when the time came that we would hit the next bull market, one that happened in early 2017 and the other recently, I would not only be able to predict a lot of currencies correctly and make it seem like I am good at what I do, but with the right amount of followers and people blindly following my trades I would also be a reason to the movements. It's not rocket science that if you are receiving 2-4k views per article signaling this and that coin is going to go up short-term next, that a lot of traders will follow suite cause they believe you have been correct about many other coins in the past. They may not even realize that 80% of the other unmentioned coins have done the same thing due to the bull market and new investors just throwing money at anything that's been around for longer than a few months and has a working blockchain.

I want to mention that my posts offered content about the coins, not just a graph that said it has done this and that and now I believe it will do this and that. Even if that might have been a bit overrewarded, it wasn't just short posts.

Now imagine yourself in my shoes if that account had received a lot of followers or if I were to resteem it on my account. Knowing that my next "prediction" might cause the price to jump up 5%-100%, would you resist on buying that coin for yourself prior to announcing it? Knowing that no one will be able to know if you've done it or not due to the anonymity of exchanges, would you be able to resist accumulate a random coin that hasn't moved for a long time and then feed it to your fanbase?

I am not saying that anyone actively does it, but considering human nature it wouldn't surprise me if some of that is involved. The trading fees are often so low as well that some big traders could be accumulating first, waiting for a "signal" and then buying up the start of it by a lot leading to the rest of the fanbase only purchasing what the initial buyers are now selling at a premium and profit.

As I was realizing that problem, I came up with a sort of "proof of holding" on that account where each time I wrote about a new currency I believed had potential in the future to gain value, I would at the same time add a screenshot or video recording of the exchange and showing my trade order history that I haven't dumped the currencies on my followers. This of course is also not a fail safe way cause I could've just created another account where I did much bigger trades with the coins instead and had the other one as a placeholder. I couldn't come up with a good solution on how to make it impossible to game my own followers, so I quit.

Even if you are amazing at predicting and wanting to share it with many people, there's no safety that you aren't getting a much better deal off of users in private and the people you say you are helping make a big profit in reality are the ones causing the upswings combined with the rest of traders jumping on top of rising coins and often ending with less than they had in the beginning. Since this all comes down to a gamble in the end if you are looking for quick profits, remember that many gamblers often forget about losses and only remember the winnings.

Be careful out there Steemians, slow and steady wins the race.

Images from pixabay