Of course, it is very tempting to want to engage in trading, and personally, I do not consider it to be a good idea to sell bitcoin with the thought of buying back lower, even though sometimes you can sell a little bit on the way up, especially if the BTC price is seeming to go up outrageously a lot and then just hold that money on the side in case the BTC price goes back down..
Yes, it seems too risky, selling bitcoins for speculative purposes is perhaps too big a risk. I am now thinking about how good an idea it is to try trading with the set aside money, or rather, some part of it, insignificant compared to the total amount. I dont know yet, just thoughts, I talked with many people and most of them say that long-term investing always brings better results than trading, so maybe I should just listen to experienced people and just buy bitcoin for long-term investments, as I already do quite a long time.
Of course, this is a bit of a dilemma that a lot of bitcoin HODLers have, and I really cannot blame anyone to want to learn about the matter - however, sometimes you might be telling yourself that you want to learn, but your real goal is that you are wanting to make more money.. and sure there is nothing wrong with wanting to make more money, but part of the problem with when you fuck around with bitcoin, is that you may well start to fail/refuse to recognize the bullish case for bitcoin, which largely should inform you that the best bet is on UP.. even if we may well experience extended periods of downward correction.
If you really have discipline, then you should be able to control yourself and limit your trading (learning) budget to maybe 5% or less of your whole BTC holdings. So if you were to have $10k of value in your BTC investment portfolio, then you would be limited to a $500 total trading/learning budget... and there is not a whole hell of a lot that you can do with that amount of value.. but you still can attempt to learn with it..
By the way, I do recommend using small amounts of value to learn rather than fucking around with those learning platforms in which there is no value, and you are just using play money.. fuck that nonsense.. From my point of view it is better to use actual value.. but just use really small amounts.
I have told this story before, but let me just reiterate it.. For my first 18 months in bitcoin, I did not sell any bitcoin, and if I did give some away or use some bitcoin to buy something, then I would replace anything that I sold (and almost always more than I sold) within a few days of the sale/gift.
So by the time that mid-to-late 2015 came, I established a system in which I authorized myself to sell small portions of BTC on the way up, and so I developed a formula.. and when I first started to practice with my formula, the BTC prices were around $250.. and so the BTC price had to move $5 or more, and maybe I would sell a few dollars and then back and forth I would look and see that after fees I would make $0.25 or some small amount, so over time, you can imagine that my sales were way more than my buys because the BTC price went up from $250-ish in 2015 to mostly over $1k in early 2017.. and so I did not care whether I sold more BTC on the way up than I bought, because my formula already accounted for how much that I authorized myself to sell on the way up, and I continued to have to move the max of the formula up and up and up, and I believe that by the time the BTC price got to nearly $20k in late 2017, I had sold around 10% of my BTC holdings.. and maybe even a bit more than that.. but it was already calculated, and still part of my point in regards to why I even mention this is because in the earliest days, the amounts that I was selling and buying back were so small that I was getting laughed at because I was "not making very much money," and I did not care. .. because the earliest days was just to practice and to get used to how much I authorized myself to sell and if the BTC price were to go shooting up, my formulas (and systems) already showed me that I had placed limits on the maximum amounts that I was authorizing myself to sell.. so there was no real downfall to the system.. and largely the ONLY downfall was if the BTC price went down and went to zero then I would continue to buy BTC even though it would continue to go to zero, so my formula already calculated for UP.. and had a built in assumption that the odds for BTC to go down was not good and at some point if the BTC price continued to go down, I would have to stop buying at a certain point so that I still would have money, even if BTC price were to go to zero...
So.. part of the point, is that some places allow you to trade as low as $5 per trade, and if you calculate fees, you can make your spreads in ways in which you are just practicing with very small amounts, and by the way, I never used leverage and I never wanted to learn how to use leverage because on a personal basis I did not want to go there... because I did not consider leverage to be necessary, especially on bitcoin when my bet is mostly that bitcoin will go up and go up forever, so there is no need for leverage if BTC does end up going up, then it does not take a lot of value in order to potentially profit stupendously so long as you are mostly stacking your value in order that you are prepared for UP by not selling too much on the way up but mostly accumulating BTC on dips and holding.. and selling only small amounts (if any?) on the way up.. that's my overall framework that has been quite successful, so far.