Confessions of a day trader is an interesting term, I first discovered about a year ago - a guy from Norway, living in Riga, contacted me about some issues with doing business in Georgia. That guy turned out to be a day trader, writing a popular blog on day-trading. Here is the blog: Quantified Strategies
I thought - hmm, that's cool - Confessions of a day trader, sounds really cool. But that's all I stopped there. The thing is, I don't feel like a day trader and in fact, I'm not (at least in classic understanding of this term). Despite I've been involved heavily in such volatile markets as crypto investments, I rarely trade. I've tried. I have made some success, but that hasn't been interesting to me. So I keep denying and I'm proudly saying I'm not a day trader.
For me day-trading sounds like a rats race, trying to predict the market, trying to predict the right timing, scalping every trade and so on. Technical analysis? Sure, that's the thing I like about investing. RSI indexes, moving averages and so on. I'm not familiar with all those terms yet (well, because I'm not a day trader), but I admit I use them more often than I would love to think. These charts help. It's fun fact, but I started to master those charts by buying cryptocurrencies (strong buy&hold here). I can even read Fibonacci Retracements.
Technical chart reading and understanding is a must have. Hell, I even have built some popular Google Spreadsheet for tracking both stock and crypto movements.
- Simple Google Spreadsheet to Track Stock Portfolio Changes Using GOOGLEFINANCE
- How To Track Your CryptoCurrencies Portfolio Automatically Using Google Spreadsheets
Trading is fun, trading involves many skills. Trading develops skills.
I'm a long-term investor, investing in peer to peer lending, stocks and crypto market. Peer to Peer lending doesn't ask charts technical analysis, as I'm investing with a buyback guarantee for defaulted loans, and giving a nice 12% yearly - the only concern I have - will the platform will keep afloat and not run away with my money. Trust.
Stocks - this is the most concerning part of my not a day-trader philosophy - I keep buying Baltic Stocks for a long-term dividend income. There are several stocks yielding 10% and more per annum. Unfortunately, the Baltic stock market is not very liquid, and the culture here is pretty low. I wanted to keep building a small passive income from Baltic Dividend stock by just buying and forgetting about purchases I've made. That's not the case with the Baltic equity market. I would even say the volatility of individual stocks here is larger than in crypto space. For the past 2 months, I've been closely monitoring and performing a few trades, liquidating positions with dividend cuts to 0, just to learn in the next morning that there will be an increased dividend. Then buy back the stock. The Wild Wild West.
Crypto investments - hell, that's probably the best place to excel as a day trader (except Forex) - but from my short crypto investor experience I've learned it's better being a swing trader (buying the dips)