20$ Challenge! Week 0 - Introduction.
So I finally decided that I need to start setting myself some goals to see how well I can actually do by trading cryptocurrencies. Although I mentioned in my previous posts that my preferred way (as well as more natural for my personality) of building my portfolio is long term investing, I really want to test a couple of strategies and see if I can increase my initial trading pot over a longer term. Now, just to be clear, I do not live in a fantasy world and I do not expect to become a millionaire overnight and also I know that it is going to take time and patience to make it work.
Cryptocurrency market has proven to be extremely volatile so to start with I decided to set aside a small proportion of my portfolio (somewhere around $500) and, by only trading what I think is within my comfort zone, see if I can do $20 of profit every week.
Now, another reason why I am doing this with 500$ only is to hopefully demonstrate that even with a small sum of money trading profitably (without using leverage) is possible. I have seen so many traders uploading videos and posts about their trades and how they make several thousand dollars every time but that just does not hit home. It just does not resonate with me and unless you hold hundreds of thousands of dollars/euros/pounds in your portfolio it probably won't with you too... The most inspiring blogs and videos that I have seen is where people start taking small baby steps and demonstrate persistence to work hard in order to reach their goal. I remember watching a video of this guy who was so happy about increasing his follower number from 16 to 25 in one week that he made a video to just thank them all.
I've digressed - back to the challenge!
In theory, as long as risk/reward ratio of the trades that I choose is >1 and more than 50% of my trades are profitable, I should make money. Now, nobody knows what is going to happen - I might beat the target easily as 20$ is just 4% profit of the initial sum of money every week (one profitable trade a week). I have never traded consistently and have never really counted my profits or losses from active trading so I don't know!
I suppose before you start laughing at my $20 target I should mention that I work full time and have other real life commitments so I will only be able to allocate a limited amount of time every day. It takes time to find good setups and I won't trade just because I "have" to. Because I don't.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that I am a little bit behind with the intro. I have already closed 3 trades this week and 2 of those I've covered already in my previous posts.
Here: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@andrius1/live-trading-2-xlm-elastic-band-effect
And here: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@andrius1/live-trading-3-steem-elastic-band
I will write about the third one shortly. Please don't judge me if I do not talk about them in a perfect chronological order - sometimes thoughts flow easier about one than the other. Trust me, I will cover them all eventually.
Thanks for reading, and I will speak to you soon!
Follow me @andrius1 for updates on the 20$ challenge, feel free to re-steem and upvote!
really bitcoin will kill dollar and the crypto will kill the banks
@andrius1 - time is the most valuable thing that we all have. Your target of making $20 / week with $500 is not really worth the time that you will have to spend to do so unless you are trading selectively - selectively with your time to trade.
But, all the best!
As for me, I believe the power of compounding and HODL-ing does that.
freedomshift, thanks for your comment. The real purpose, I suppose is not to make $20/week, it is to test a couple of strategies that I have in mind and hopefully reach a point where I have enough confidence to scale the position sizes up. 20$ is just a simple benchmark number for me to start with. It is probably worth another post but my partner and I have decided to do a bit of travelling in the next year so I want to be confident that trading could become an additional source of income when I leave my full-time job. When it comes to HODL-ing, most of my cryptocurrencies, stocks and other assets are long term investments so I am totally with you on that.
@andrius1 - I know exactly what you are doing or intend to do - because that was also exactly what I wanted to do.
I did that a few times, months at each time, while I was working and found that it will not work. I would place a trade and waited and waited and it finally did when I was either travelling, on vavcation, or in a meeting and when I became free, it was all over and sometimes, even worse, it reversed and turned a big win into a loss.
I also ventured into trading options and the time aspect was even more compressed! It is for full time trading only.
Trading virtual assets(VA) AKA crypto-currencies (CC) is 24 / 7 and watch out for exchnges going down when trading is hot - Binance went down for hours once when I wanted to transfer and trade and I totally missed out ...
If you want to trade for a living or just for extra income, I would do options trading and /or ForEx as they are more reliable and less subject to manipulation.
I have good experience with trading SPY (ETF for S&P) due to the liquidity and low spread trading.
VA / CC have very thin trading volumes especially the alt-coins and thus, the spread can be large. Also, there might be issues of time delays in moving / transferring.
All the best!
@Originalworks