are you saying you never hold overnight?
Here is what it means to trade the 10/21 crossover:
- When the 10 period moving average is above the 21 period moving average, hold BTC
- When the 10 period moving average is below the 21 period moving average, hold cash
So this means that I will be holding for days, weeks, or even months at a time. The longer I hold and don't have to trade, the better for me! I prefer to buy and hold through a massive trend rather than paying commissions, crossing the spread, and churning my account through trading.
Here's a chart to show what I mean. The red circle shows where I would sell my BTC and the green circle shows where I would buy back. This means that for this month and a half, I should have held cash and not BTC.
So to directly answer your question: I hold overnight...I hold for as long as the trend remains.
I've been following EMA / MACD on 10-day timeframe as well as 2-month an am sometimes surprised by a 10-point overnight drop where I miss an exit... I'd think the ability to generate real time alerts would be key to trade these kind of signals given that the market is often active 'after hours' as Japan awakes, etc...
I think we're talking about two different things. When I say the "daily timeframe", I mean that each bar on the chart I examine is comprised of one day of trading data. How much data is actually shown on the chart is irrelevant for this exercise.
When I read your post, the "10-day timeframe" sounds like you have 10-days of information on the chart. What matters is the what one bar on the chart represents, not how much data is on the chart. Notice how in my chart above, at the very top it says "1 day bars" - that means that each candle represents the open, low, high, and close for an entire trading day. This is what I mean by the daily timeframe.
sorry if I sound negative, but when looking at the past months of trading, I do not think that the 10/21 moving average is a good trading indicator. most of the time it gave false signals or it too late to generate outstanding profits. have you backtested it seriously over the past 6, 12, 18 months?