Quote from: sgbett on December 09, 2013, 11:00:25 PM

Ugh, you are totally off topic with the trading fees argument. That has little to do with the point I'm making.

I'm going to draw a comparison here with the diet industry.

In the 1980's the USDA published guidelines about what comprises a healthy diet.

30 years later and in the face of overwhelming evidence against what they recommend at the time university educated nutritionists still recommend a 'balanced' diet based on those principals. Such that the foundation is bread and cereal.

Obesity, type II diabetes, metabolic syndrome are running rampant. The nutritionists have tried everything to justify why their food pyramid can't be wrong. They just can't see the glaring truth that people should eat plant matter first and foremost (vegetables). Everything else sparingly.

You remind me of those nutritionists, university educated, smart enough yes, but so sure of what you have been taught being 'true' that you refuse to think for yourself.

Time and time again in this thread people have spelled out the folly in trying to trade based on such naive heuristics as 'the china news was bad, so I would have sold'. I gave you an unlikely, but yet quite possible scenario in which you could lose badly and you ignore it. Instead telling me all about how you can find out the news before anyone else, know exactly how that news is going to affect the market, and then trade accordingly.

The news does not move markets, people move markets, and people are hard to predict. If people are hard to predict, then you are better off using something else. Even elliot waves is better than trying to trade the news!

I ask you this - how do you know the china news was bad, did you know that as soon as you read about it (because to me it looked good) or are you only able to tell us that after the fact because there was a sell off. Did you read about it before the market moved, or was the market already moving? If it was how far had it moved, do you still have time to make the trade, how did you know it wasn't going to reverse sharply?

Have you not noticed that every day the financial news is full of post-hoc rationalisation about why the market did this or that today. Its all written *after* stuff happened. At best you get semi-predictive news, written by somebody from an organisation that has a vested interest in trying to influence market sentiment one way or another. Much like you are doing now.

Was the silk road news bad, it certainly looked it, turns out the market rallied after that little bombshell. How is the fed taper going to affect the PM market? What's the news coming out of switzerland going to do to the price? Why are we already closing back in on $1000 is it a dead cat bounce or the next leg up? Was it the keiser report that explained the run up in LTC, or the interest in china, if it was china what caused them to pick it up? Do the chines watch the keiser report? how do you explain the subsequent NMC rise, a count that was so badly broken it looked to be going to zero.

Most of all I would like to know what on earth sparked the 2000% ANC rally on nov 22nd? I was just hours away from having some serious coin in that, bitcoin was flat, I put in a buy just under market price expecting it to fill, I came back the next day and 90% of my order hadn't filled (at least I got that tenth!), instead it had tripled overnight. What should I have done at that point? (I actually just bought what I could and had to be satisfied with the smaller position, because I believe ANC brings something new to the alt coin scene - here I go pumping it up eh!) Anyway god knows what triggered the rise - perhaps it was my buy order? Bitcoin was flat (for bitcoin) that day. Maybe a dog barked in Sweden?

Why the rise in FTC on the 30th, and why the subsequent retreat? Do you know? I don't but I was able to acquire more BTC through rebalancing and still retain a significant amount of FTC.

I watched all of these happening, I watch a lot of alt coins all the time, its starting to prove more profitable than my day job. I'm mostly in BTC but I also have a little bit of various other coin that I think might be contenders. I read the news and watch the charts but I don't pretend to believe that I have enough information to be able to 'trade' the way you describe it. I gently rebalance my portfolio, I look to mitigate risk, I massage the numbers to keep the ship on course. I do not chase the pennies. I let the coin do the work, and when it has appreciated according to the plan, I sample its fruit. I do *not* chop down the tree thinking a bigger one will grow!

This (to me) is reality, its about preservation of capital, acting rationally, keeping cool through the lunacy of the whole thing. I wasn't old enough to be part of the dot com boom and bust, but this is comparable, maybe even bigger.

I survived through the practical application of knowledge gained from being in various markets for some years. Equities, leverage trades, options. I had successes, which seemed to be perfectly understandable because the markets did exactly what they signs said they would do. I patted myself on the back. The losses, were excruciating, because the markets, they did exactly the opposite of what they said they were going to do - but only just enough to stop you out, before going on to do exactly what you "knew" they were going to do

I was convinced that TA worked... and it does, until it doesn't. It was round that time when I read talebs work. This is what changed my stance on TA. I can see how it works, and I can see that if you have enough resources and are quick enough you can gain an edge, but the stress and time for the gains (with limited capital, you can only make limited gains) it just doesn't add up. So I had to unlearn everything I knew. Now I am like those annoying ex smokers, that cough and splutter in public at the merest whiff of a cigarette. No really, I *am* one of those annoying ex-smokers Wink

Then, more specifically with BTC I learned through the stress of trying to work the $1-$32 bubble, and the anguish of what to do in the months that followed, how the charts didn't behave like they 'should' how nothing seemed to make sense.

This experience taught me so much about bitcoin, and more importantly about myself, what my greed and fear looked like, how they affected me. Why I did the things I did. Only then was I able to confidently instigate a plan, and to have the patience to execute it without fear that it is wrong. Everyone else in the world might think its wrong for them, but my plan is exactly right for me. This is when we come back to the notion that some random on the internet can come along and try and tell me "I should have done X": utter horse manure.

University teaches you a lot, I won't deny it but the most important thing is not to know stuff, but to know when you don't know stuff. I have to keep learning, I know I don't know shit about what is going on, and that is powerful, because that knowledge allows you to develop a plan that doesn't really on knowing what is essentially unknowable. So far, its all going swell, I am delighted to be me right now. Something I am not so sure I could have confidently said 5 years ago.

Seriously go ahead and try to trade! Or, save yourself some money by just posting what you *would* do if you had 100 BTC, as people in this thread have invited you to. See how it goes. I think sometimes the only way one really find out how hot the plate is, is by touching it yourself.

I'll start:

With my 100BTC my first move will be to move it all to an offline wallet, and wait.

IF anyone else wants to play along feel free

You just earned my respect (not that you need it but well...)

But it is an answer of this caliber that others have failed to say, and instead gave me all sort of nonsense.

I agree it might not be obvious at times how a stock will move following news. For me at least it was obvious the Chinese government's announcement would have a negative impact on Bitcoin, and this is usually true for all announcements based on facts and not just talk. Sure there might have been other "noise" going on in the market but noises usually cancel each other out. There's always the news that makes it to the headline (i.e. company missing estimates, or government banning something), that is more significant than the others, the one based on facts.

Reason why I don't own Bitcoins is because I don't have enough money to buy a quantity that makes me excited about this whole thing. Let alone not being able to buy because of the country I live in (few are the people who own Bitcoins here and its difficult to buy it from an online platform).