Quote from: SwayStar123 on Today at 03:53:33 AM

Quote from: nullius on Today at 03:46:10 AM

It seems that I must have made a mistake here

Thats no mistake, but trading isnt just that simple, theres alot of nuance to it, especially market manipulation which will rekt you if your not careful

Surely, I don't play around with margin, but I still kind of have some ideas about what experienced traders are attempting to accomplish in terms of attempting to assign probabilities to a certain amount of BTC price movement in a certain amount of time.

If the trader realistically assess the odds of a price move - yeah, sure a BIG "if" because frequently the assignment of odds is not very accurate, then such trader can play both sides of the anticipated BTC price direction.

So, for example, if the payoff for betting correctly is 5%, but the loss of betting incorrectly is 1%, but the odds of getting the 5% is 2/5 because the trader has good predictive skills and is able to hit with that level of precision, then surely if the trader has assessed the odds correctly, then largely in the long term for every 5 times that the trader plays those odds, s/he will get 5% twice, and s/he will lose 1% three times, which seems to be decent profits of somewhere in the ballpark of 7% from those 5 trades.

Yeah, I understand that the odds are never going to be that clear to assess, so in that regard, the devil is in the details, because usually the odds are not going to be so easy to figure out. Accordingly, the more success that a trader has in being able to establish the price direction with confidence, then the more that s/he can reach goals of getting the payouts that offset the losses.. we can tweak the numbers around of the hypothetical, but getting the profits to outweigh the losses seems to be the general idea, and of course, if there are are also some possibilities that from time to time the BTC price will run way greater than the 5% payout, causing the trader to get even greater payouts than 5% from time to time, but the same is true in the opposite direction of incurring more losses than expected, but the hypothetical is attempting to even out those scenarios in a kind of average expected payout that would be profitable in the long run so long as the profits are exceeding the losses.

Also, some traders roll their profits into their trading stash, and other traders will take some profits off the table on a regular basis in order to use for living expenses or just to stack away some of their profits.