Quote from: SeaofBTC on September 20, 2014, 01:52:50 PM

Most technical analysis is completely worthless. The stuff you will find with a quick Google search will lose you money. People say it is different with BTC, but it is not.

If you really want to be profitable, learn to program, and learn to back test your strategies to find out how they would have performed in the past. All of the basic TA stuff I've backtested, with horrendous returns.

Back testing is not a sure-fire thing either. Once you get good enough at programming, you will learn to data-snoop and void your back-tests and maybe convince yourself that you did good. Look at cryptotrader.org. Tons of strategies have great back-tests but do not perform in the forward. It's probably because people are datasnooping for the "Best" strategy given the historical data and finding it. It's easy with computers, and it's a costly mistake.

People who do not understand datasnooping or how easily computers can help us do it, look at things like epic back tests and think something amazing has been found.

At the end of the day, day trading will almost *always* lose you money. Do not look at it as "profitable." Look at it as a hobby only.

Here's my longest running account with no funding changes from December 2013 to today: http://seaofbtc.com/harrisonkinsley/honeybadger/client/1

It will take a while to load. That's done by automated day trading, and it's done using a mindless grid-strategy that anyone could do by hand, it's not high frequency. I just choose to automate it so I don't have to sit there all day and don't miss any trades. Bitcoin is volatile, so it works, and I've significantly beat the market, but there are plenty of totally possible events that could leave me far behind market performance never to recover again.

The truly safest strategy is hold, in cold storage. Trading on exchanges brings in a lot of risk. Not just price anymore, nope, we have to worry about actual exchanges just plain disappearing.

Not bad, especially for a fully automated system. If I read that right your account is up ~40% in BTC terms since Jan 1st (from 52 to 72). USD account value is down, but obviously less severe than the comparison buy & hold.

I don't know what to make of your blanket statement "most technical analysis is completely worthless". If you mean the random, sloppy TA article published in a crypto blog, trying to predict the price for next month based on a trendline drawn from 2011 to today, I agree.

If, however, you dismiss more or less all discretionary trading, and the TA around it as useless, then you're most likely wrong. Say, TA as presented in this book, described and defined with a minimum amount of rigor and seriousness.

Personally, with a discretionary, and for the most part, non-backtestable combination strategy of mean reversion, momentum following, and a dash of predictive analysis (volume analysis, fib, and a bit of Elliot Wave - though I'm not particularly good at the last one), my account is up in BTC terms since Jan 1 by about a factor of 3.5. And as I've seen evidence for more than once: I'm not even really particularly good at it - I know several traders outperforming me by a large margin.

The real keyword here is: risk control. Without it, you're just a gambler.