When Bears Attack!

Apparently, after my epic battle against myself last night, I forgot to log out of coinigy. So, this morning while I was having my first coffee, eating breakfast and talking with my wife, I kept hearing alerts go off in my office. I didn’t think too much of it, thinking it was some old alerts from the previous evening on some alt coins that would have new patterns today anyway.

I casually finished my breakfast and then decided to go see what all the dinging was about. I walked in the END OF THE WORLD! ETH and BTC were both tanking! ETH was down $100. I quickly got logged into binance and bought a small piece right where it was. I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew it was something silly and would soon correct itself. But A), I wasn’t sure how far it would fall and B) I actually wanted to know what was happening.

It had been in free fall for about 30-45 minutes and I bought in at $930. I set some stops up at $900, $850 and $700 (because you never know!). And then started trying to figure out what was going on. After about 10 minutes of searching I finally found this, which explained that coinbase had decided to remove some south Korean prices from their average without telling anyone! Oops! (or maybe not oops.. *thinking face).

Once I saw this, I realized that the price wouldn’t drop much farther and in fact it had already started climbing again. By the time I checked back in it was back up to $1,080. So I put everything I had into it figuring once people caught up with the news, the price would correct back to where it was hanging out just before the big panic. That was my first bear sighting of the day. The second was much more terrifying!

So after setting up my alerts for the day I head over to my new favorite play ground, APPC.

I got off to a rough start. I am feeling pretty confident with profiting off of down-ward trending markets as they crack their bases. But I am now thinking of how to profit from upward trending markets. I don’t want to get sucked into buying into a spike just because everyone else is doing it, but there has to be a way, right.

I thought I would try a few things out today and APPC provided a good place to try. I have already mentioned that this coin is downright religious with it’s support and resistance levels. I noticed that it was crawling up and I had a hunch that if it broke through a particular tough resistance level, that it would keep climbing. So I set up a stop and when it went off I decided to wait and see if it took off. It didn’t. It dropped! I missed a shot to get out with a small profit because I really thought it would take off again. I should have exited as soon as it didn’t meet my expectations. I am slowly learning this lesson.

I bought in again little lower expecting a rebound. Didn’t get it. Managed to get a successful trade at the bottom and then settled in. I have started keeping an eye on the ETH price during times like this because I’ve realized that if I recalculate my exit based on the current ETH price, then sometimes I can mitigate my loss or even make money by selling for lower than I bought because ETH has risen higher than it was when I bought into the market in the first place. So I found a nice spot where I didn’t lose that much on my first buy and actually still made a little profit from the second and waited for the market to come back to me. I missed the first sell by a smidge, readjusted and then got a small partial fill on the 2nd bump (the half-filled star).

Then, you see that Sell arrow all the way on the right. Suddenly, out of nowhere comes this huge freaking bear, throwing up 166k (415 ETH/400,000USD) wall right in front of where I needed to be. This is the biggest order I have seen on any exchange in any context. I had no idea what to do. No volume I had seen so far suggested that this market could eat that wall, so what to do?

Clearly, anyone with half a million dollars to throw around in AAPC knows what they are doing, they were trying to do something specific. It seemed to me they wanted to push the price down by making everyone move their orders below the wall. I noticed a lot of people doing this. I was sure it was scare tactics, but I just don’t have the experience to know how this might play out. I didn’t want to lose more than I already had, so I sold out at that last arrow. Whatever, I made a killing on my ETH grab this morning, so I would still come out pretty good today.

I set some reasonable sell orders up to cash my ETH out and went to take a shower and make a pizza. Would you effing believe what I saw when I checked back in??

ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? Not only did they break the wall (or maybe the guy just pulled his order), but the thing sky rocketed and was still burning fuel as I watched. WHAT?? Can someone explain to me what just happened? I know this has to be some sort of textbook market manipulation. Should I have seen this coming and held on?

I have heard that Warren Buffet once said that they market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient. Today I was very impatient. I need to work on that. I keep losing great trades because of it.

So, I attempted to get in on this new trajectory. I only barely missed the first pull-back at A. I feel like I’m getting pretty good at predicting these tops and bottoms, I just need to tighten up my stops and quit trying to catch the very peak. I have missed a lot of them by thousandths of a coin.

So, I did manage to get back in on the next pull back, but , of course, it was over. I waited for a bit to see if it would rally, but the reds started pouring out like blood. Something in my brain was screaming “SET UP!”. Is this a pump and dump? Is it normal for a giant half-million dollar bear to stomp the market down just before it happens? Again, I missed a chance to get out with a small profit, because I felt like it would catch another rally. I should have jumped out as soon as the pattern I was expecting didn’t emerge. Once I realized it wasn’t going to happen, I managed to get out even, but only barely. If I would have waited for one more minute I had another chance to profit, but that might have never happened and then it tanked. So, I feel good about my decision.

I am expecting some interesting market behavior for a few weeks as Binance has decided to let in some new users after having a hiatus for a minute. They will not be announcing when these daily limited registrations are going to be, so there will be an daily influx of new users, excited to have their account and eager to get into the game. I’m not sure that I’m saavy enough to know how to take advantage of this, but I know it will happen.

And interesting finish to the day. I cashed out most of my ETH well above where I bought it in the morning. I opted to cash out 50% at the average market high for the day and keep the other 50% at a slightly higher sell.

While I was writing this article, I noticed that after I sold my ETH, the market was slowly correcting back down towards $1000 as expected, but there was one short spike producing a long wick back to the support. I threw out a line at $1110 just in case and sure enough I got a ding! I quickly flipped it for market and was surprised to see $150 appear out of thin air in seconds. Almost too easy, right! (Yellow Smiley face on the graph).

Overall, a pretty good day! The two bad days I've had have been really bad, but even so I feel like I'm off to a good start. up 20% overall on the first week!

Until next time!

..and don't trade like an idiot!