Quote from: JayJuanGee on June 10, 2019, 04:19:31 PM

Quote from: d_eddie on June 10, 2019, 03:52:49 PM

Disclosure: I have such a setup at the moment. The short position bought me some tasty bacon, but the long position is suffering. I'm going to be liquidated if the price falls below 3k. Yes. My liquidation is well below 3k. That's what I mean by "underleveraging".

I am supposing that you entered your long and your short at BTC prices that were decently higher than today, such as in the $8,200 or higher arenas?

That's right. My trades are multi-day affairs more often than not.

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But if you had entered both a long and a short, yesterday-ish, at the time that criptix was asserting his bearishness, in the $7,600 price arena, then the long would be doing much better than the short, currently... right?

Of course.

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So, it seems that your perspective on strategy is going to be influenced quite decently by when you entered the position, you are likely going to have to spend a decent amount of time watching the market and even trying to assign odds to various BTC price directions on an ongoing basis in order to figure out whether the odds would be in your favor to close a losing position early or to re-establish your bets to figure out if your trading stash is growing or shrinking.

Well there is a balance to be found between getting greedy and being too much of a pussy. That's one of those things you only learn by doing, by investing time - and money too (the only "trading lessons" that matter are those you pay for, IMO).

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I do appreciate your stated approach, d_eddie, in which you are setting aside some of your profits from time to time (taking them off the table), but still I would imagine that sometimes there is going to be shrinkage of the trading stash and even internal questioning about whether the size of the trading stash is enough (temptations to get greedy by redeploying profits into the trading stash that previously had been stashed away).

Since I started taking profits off the table at regular time intervals or regular profit amounts, I haven't seen my trading stash shrink yet. Of course, I can stay in the red for some time, but it ain't over until the fat lady sings - meaning, until ALL legs are closed. However, you rise a relevant point about lurking greed - the temptation to raise the stash does nag me from time to time. In my case, it happens more often when I feel like getting out of a tight corner by a bold move and some luck; less often when I feel I could enhance my profits. But I guess everyone is different. At any rate, I've learned my lesson, and I know that when someday I'm required to pull the plug on some losing trade, I will do it without risking more. In that case, I will probably replenish the trading stash to its standard initial state. I've made enough profits already that even getting liquidated a couple times over would leave me in the green.