As I mentioned right back at the start, I suck at trading. I have an incredible talent for selling just before a big pump, buying just before a dip, holding the wrong coins while selling the good ones… every possible way to mess it up. So when I saw someone on BlueSky doing 1% trades back in April, I followed.
The idea was to stop trying to guess when BTC is going to pump or dip, but instead take 1% profit on regular trades. It worked really well – they were about 20% up, I think, and I was in profit as well – until they disappeared suddenly. I tried to continue for a while after, but my guesses sucked as usual and I made some losses (thankfully small).
So I split the investment into three unequal parts:
- Trading
- Copy Trading
- Banked
For this week’s info post, I’m looking at trading, and the things I’ve learned over the last 6 months or so.
Bitcoin Sucks
The main thing I’ve learned in the last half a year is that BTC sucks for trading. I’m talking about swing (or day) trading, not margin/futures. I don’t understand how that stuff works and the potential losses scare the willies out of me, so I stick to spot trades.
BTC sucks because you need the price to go up by over $1,000 to gain 1% profit. That’s a HUGE amount, even for something with such a high price, and it doesn’t happen quickly. Worse, places like Kraken will suck 0.25% (maker) or 0.4% (taker) fees out of your profit – both buying and selling – meaning you need the BTC price to move by over $1,500 (or almost $2,000 taker) to get that tiny 1% gain. Put that together with my stunning incompetence at trading and you can see the problem.
On the up-side, BTC is great in the long term. “Bitcoin’s price always goes up,” that 1% trader said, and they’re right. It does always go up… you might just have to wait months for it to go back up to where you bought it.
Unexpected Copy Trading Benefit
I’m not going to talk about the nightmare that is copy trading here – I’ll get to that in a later post.
What I will mention is the unexpected side benefit I noticed while suffering through my learning experience in copy trading: coin choices.
Most exchanges have hundreds (if not thousands) of coins and tokens listed for trading, so finding “good” ones is incredibly difficult as soon as you step outside the major players (BTC, ETH, DOGE, SOL, and so on).
What do I mean by “good” options? You ideally want coins (or tokens – I’ll just call them both coins for simplicity) with a lower price than BTC – something where 1% is a much smaller, easier fluctuation – and a relatively stable price range, but which move regularly up and down within that range. Something you can predict with reasonable precision outside of the big market shifts.
So you’re avoiding the high-value players, the meme coins and the ones that slowly deteriorate because they have stupidly high staking and masternode rewards. You want coins with solid backing, a reason for existing, enough volume to trade the amounts you’re buying/selling (which may be tiny or huge, depending on your seed investment), and the all-important regular/gentle price fluctuation.
You can find these yourself by going through each coin’s trading page in turn, switching to 4h or 1d view on the chart and looking for stability, fluctuations, etc.
You can do that, yes.
But the traders you can copy have often found the good ones for you.
And on MEXC, you can see their trades and history before you copy.
So you can see what coins they trade regularly and you can see that info for all the top traders.
Bingo!
There’s no guarantees, of course, but I’ve found some sweet tradeable coins using this method.
By now, you’re probably screaming “WHICH ONES?” at the screen, so I won’t keep you waiting. I’ll just take a second to tell you that this is not advice (of any kind), you’re responsible for your own trading, all the usual disclaimers in case you lose money acting on an incompetent’s information!
So far, I’ve done bearably well with SUI, got away with a bit of gain on PUMP (moves more, scares me), and profited nicely on ENA (prone to sudden larger movements in my experience).
I’ve also made a bit on AVAX, XRP and DOGE, though they move less. I’ve avoided SOL (price is quite high), though it’s another very popular choice.
The best one so far is GRT. Stable, regular, nice price, all the things I like.
Those are all coins on MEXC, where the fees are 0% (maker) and 0.1% (taker), so it’s even easier to hit the 1% per trade or more. I’ve had several 3% to 5% trades in the last 3-4 weeks, though the current dip’s left me hanging until it recovers a bit.
Here’s the ref link for joining MEXC again, in case you need it: promote.mexc.com/r/lDmaLBdp
I’ll keep looking for good trading options and will post any I find, along with my thoughts on them (same as here).
How about you? Any good coins you’re trading?
Watch out for this weekend’s earnings update!
