Funny, but your numbers check out if we use rounding up to the nearest 1e-8 unit separately for the fee, contrary to my previous post for the OP's numbers... Your numbers are copy/paste so let me trust them more.

Anyway, your fees were 13.15148308 / (1 - 0.0025) - 13.15148308 = 0.03296111047619, rounded up to 8 digits: 0.03296112.

13.15148308 * 0.00132104 = 0.017373635208, rounded up: 0.01737364 (this is how much you paid for the amount you actually received)
0.03296112 * 0.00132104 = 0.00004354295796, rounded up: 0.00004355 (this is how much you paid for the fees)
0.01737364 + 0.00004355 = 0.01741719, which checks out.

If we add up the amount and the fee first:
(13.15148308 + 0.03296112) * 0.00132104 = 0.017417178165, rounded up: 0.01741718, which does not check out.

I suspect you posted the order at 0.00009494 but it got filled at a (better) 0.00009495 price because there was a bid for that price on the order book (somebody was willing to buy your coins for more than what you asked for).

The commission is always deducted from the currency you acquire: 7.61314167 * 0.00009495 * (1 - 0.0025) = 0.00072106063, which is exactly 0.00072106 when truncated to 8 decimals (which it seems is how they get rid of the extra decimals).

Reference: https://support.bittrex.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000199651


If you received 7.61314167 BAT after the fees paid, you must've received 7.61314167 / (1 - 0.0025) = 7.632222226 before fees, and 7.63222222 * 0.00009000 = 0.0006868999998, which checks out.

Would I be Bittrex, I always rounded fees up to the nearest satoshi (or its altcoin equivalent), but it seems they figured let's just truncate the numbers.

believe it or not, nobody f*cking knows 

Can I direct you to https://www.streber.st/? It's a website by a guy who arranges and manages exactly these kind of things for his customers. There are heaps of information on it, I've read through much of it, and I have the impression the guy really seems to know his thing (I base it mostly on his responses to comments and on articles when he touches on things that I personally know about, such as managing data security and privacy).

The catch is that he's doing it anonymously, "just for fun", and so you won't be able to hire him or ask for a solution for your specific needs (he's only taking on clients through trusted intermediaries). At the same time, this is exactly why the info you'll find there is so much more reliable than all of those other "I'll tell you wise thingz, now here's my price" sites. While you won't find the exact solution, you'll learn enough to steer clear from the fakes. There's also a (not too busy, but neither dead) forum on his site, where you may post this same question.

You may find this useful for getting prepared for the bullshit you'll hear: The Real Deal about Nominees - https://www.streber.st/2014/05/offshore-incorporation-nominees/

Opening a shell company is super easy, by the way; you can do it on the web or on the phone in an hour, and you'll have a company in a day. It's not even expensive, e.g. Nevis LLCs go under $1,500.

Here are some articles about the actually hard part, banking:

“Zero Tax Anonymous Bearer-Shares Offshore Company with Secret Bank Account” - https://www.streber.st/2014/04/zero-tax-anonymous-bearer-shares-offshore-company-with-secret-bank-account/

Banking Secrecy - https://www.streber.st/2014/04/offshore-banking-secrecy/

Why Banks Say No to You But Yes to Me - https://www.streber.st/2014/04/why-banks-say-no-to-you-but-yes-to-me/

How to Maintain a Transit Account - https://www.streber.st/2014/04/offshore-transit-bank-account/

I come here whenever I feel like I'm in need of a good laugh...

Run from this forum. Let's face reality: crypto trading is not so profitable (for a small minority, that is) because of some special quality of cryptocurrencies. It's profitable because most of the players trade on the level of the people on this forum. It's almost unfair to play against people who understand so little about even the basics of trading. Why would you want to know the exact ways they suck? Please, don't. Just run.

Please, share with me your millions 

Well, you misunderstood the first, and it's likely you don't understand the second as much as you think.

BTC is volatile, but so is everything else that is worth trading: it's true that you can't lose without volatility, but you couldn't win, either. Trading isn't about avoiding volatility, it's about how to capture the upside of it.

About the second point, you do capture two important ideas:

  1) position sizing: don't risk more than what you're willing to lose
  2) having a pre-determined exit

However, the strategy you describe is called mean-reversion and, while it may actually work, it comes with a limited upside and an unlimited downside. In human speech that means things will look quite spectacular until it suddenly won't: you'll keep winning small amounts quite regularly, and then you'll lose it all (and more) in one go. That is, unless you always set a stop-loss, but stop-losses erode the edge of mean-reversion strategies, so I doubt you could make it both working and secure. Unless you can compound very very fast, in which case maybe it'll work.

More robust are the different momentum strategies, maybe augmented with some mean-reversion to smooth out the equity curve and increase the win-ratio.

You can't avoid "falling into the wrong trade" (unless you can see the future, but then what are you still doing among us mortals?) but you can avoid staying in the wrong trade. The secret is known as stop loss, and you decide where it goes before you enter the trade. How far you put it should be inversely related to your position size, which in turn is a function of your risk appetite (a.k.a. sanity) and is computed from the implied volatility of the market.

Trading is gambling: you work with odds, not certainties.

Markets are almost random. Now, a truly "efficient" market would be completely random, because prices would reflect objective value; winning and losing would be purely by chance, and nobody could make money. However, the markets are somewhat inefficient: news don't get incorporated into the price right away, and market participants are neither rational nor perfect computing machines; everybody has their own idea about the "perfect price" right now, and it is always different from the "true" price, which can never be actually known.

Trading is not about luck. It is coming from the above: if the markets are not completely random, then we may find a way to do better than luck.

Trading is about finding a mathematical edge: to win a little more (not necessarily more often!*) than lose, on average. The one who can guess what most of the other players think has exactly such an edge; if he exploits it well, he can win on the long run.    (*) in fact, winning too often is usually a sign of a left-tailed return distribution: a few huge losses hiding in your future

Crypto v.s. the rest. The difference between crypto trading and the "real" markets (such as equities, futures, forex, etc) lies in that crypto is an immature market, so there are a lot more inefficiencies left to still exploit.

Here's my post in another thread with sources of good info where you can learn about trading in general. Trading crypto is not fundamentally different from trading anything else, though it's like the Wild Wild West: tread carefully.

Holy fucking shit. You're so eager to start scamming people it's outright creepy. I'll just assume you misunderstood what you responded to.

Organizing a pump-and-dump scam on Skype is NOT "trading" or "strategy" but criminal activity.

If you join in with their shitty schemes, that would prove two things about you:

  1) you're the same kind of immoral scum they are (no question there)
  2) you're a fucking idiot and a gullible fool (see explanation below)

Why would you think that the petty criminals who organize your awesome little Skype group would have more respect to pitiful moronic you than to the general public? They will use you to help them push that price, but (unless you make it to the inner circle: you won't) they'll forget to tell you when the dump happens. Or, they'll tell you just late enough that it would seem like an honest mistake; they want your pathetic self (more like: your shitty coins) around next time as well, after all.

I hope you realize it's not a good idea to join those Skype groups.
I hope you realize it for the 1st point: it's fucking immoral.

Check out the resources from my post just above, and you'll learn about trading, not scamming. The good thing is that trading is much more interesting, and has much more depth to it, than scamming people, which is pretty easy, considering the amount of fools out there.

I have no illusions this post will make much of a difference towards the general state of things. This moral filthdump of humanity always flocks at the promise of quick money even at the price of deliberately wronging others. Crypto has zero effective regulation, it's perfect to bring out the honest self (which is usually the selfish criminal) in everybody.

Let me start with this: crypto trading is insane. Most coins have such a low market cap that just one or a few players can drive the price up or down significantly. It's the Wild West of economy: buying a variety of dormant coins and then waiting for the next pump may actually be a viable strategy. I can't decide if trading crypto is the best or the worst idea, to be honest. With this out of the way...

Read some books from actual traders. For one, Nassim Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness" can help to develop some "understanding about the misunderstandings" about trading (among other things in life, I may add.) Read the classics: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Market Wizards. Listen to Podcasts, too: Better System Trader and Chat With Traders are really good.

Avoid crap from those who are not traders. Or those who went bust, which includes Nobel laureate economists behind the Modern Portfolio Theory, who piloted LTCM to the ground, prompting a few banks to bail them out just to save the world economy; "smart money" isn't all that smart, after all. In general, most who write about trading have never traded, haven't traded for decades, or went bust; do yourself a favor and ignore whatever they say (no matter how famous they are; it's all about marketing, after all.)

Investopedia is another cute thing that you may not want to bet your life on. They have really good content but they are trying to please everyone, so they write nice things just about anything, which includes all of the idiotic mystical bullshit that happens to be popular because people love idiotic mystical bullshit.

As for this forum, it would be hard to find more immature, ignorant, and generally abysmal trading advices than here. You have been warned. In fact, this post, however introductory and simple, is still complex enough that I doubt many here will even try to understand; it's kinda sad, actually.

Learn about fat-tailed probability distributions: the difference between a left tail and a right tail, why that matters, and how they are related to the two two fundamentally opposing approaches: trend following and mean reversion.

• left tail, mean reversion, buy low/sell high: your upside is limited, your downside is unlimited, so you'll win small amounts quite often, but you'll lose a lot every once in awhile; the challenge is to compound fast enough to recover from the last bust
• right tail, trend following / momentum trading, buy high/sell higher: your downside is limited, your upside is unlimited, so you'll slowly bleed, then you'll win a lot; the challenge is to not bleed out before the next big win

Any actual strategy is probably a mix of those two; read Laurent Bernut's post from Quora, because he explains it really well, and his "Common Sense Ratio" ties up the two sides very nicely: it has two components, one which measures the mean reversion ("Gain to Pain Ratio") and one that measures the trend following ("Tail Ratio") component of a given strategy.

Interestingly, a Quantopian study (here's a summary) mentions the Tail Ratio as the most dependable predictor of out-of-sample results for the numerous strategies they verified from their community. This also suggests that trend following is a more robust approach than mean reversion.

As for mean reversion, one sure way to lose a lot of money is "doubling down" on your losses, hoping the price will turn around. Let me break the bad news: if the price is crashing, there's usually a reason for it, and the best thing you can do is to get out of that market ASAP to cut your losses. Stop losses, set before you need them (which means, set before you enter), can help you with that. That is, if you don't override them (which you shouldn't, ever.)

Forget about "predicting" the price (and don't believe anybody who says they can; they are charlatans, each and every one of them). Embrace the uncertainty of the market (which is the only way to stay out of excessive risk), and learn to think in terms of probabilities instead of absolutes. You can never be certain about winning, but you can learn to recognize the moments when you have a slight edge. The smaller your edge, the less of your capital you can risk on it; check out the Kelly criterion, though it's not always directly applicable (it works with a normal distribution, but the markets are far from the Gaussian, so it's better to stick with "fractional Kelly.")

Trading isn't "art." We all know artists can't explain why they do what they do, why it works and why it isn't, they go hungry more often than not, and they can't handle money even if it's poured down on them. It's not supposed to be fun, either. Trading for a good trader is like sex is for a good prostitute: business.

Chart patterns: some (like the above mentioned higher highs / higher lows) are obviously good, but the most are just fancy bullshit. "Heavenly Cloud Cover" my ass; excuse my French. Fibonacci everything (retractions, fans, arcs, whatnot), Gann theory, Elliott waves: mystical bullshit without exception, with zero edge.

Many have started out with testing whatever was possible to test (how would you formally define a particular "wave"? ... exactly!) to see if they work, you know, just in case, but: nope. Feel free to waste your time and money on them, but you have been warned.

Forget about magical indicators or looking for the "perfect" entry, and focus instead on what's really important: position sizing, risk management, money management. Exits matter: that's where everything is decided; therefore, never trade without stop losses.

Do check out Laurent Bernut's stuff. I can't emphasize this enough: they are probably the best intro to the most important aspects of trading. He was the dedicated short-seller for Fidelity ("the" Fidelity) for the Japanese stock market (the longest bear market in recorded history) for 8 years; if that doesn't convince you about him, nothing will. Links:

• Alpha Secure Capital
• Laurent Bernut on Quora
• Laurent Bernut on Better System Trader podcast
• Laurent Bernut on Better System Trader podcast, again

You may also want to check out Ed Thorp, Andreas Clenow (http://followingthetrend.com/; he hates bitcoin, btw), Ernie Chan. But I'm sure you'll find many others who are worth to listen to.

Stick with simple signals: complex is unreliable, simple is robust. Here's a simple one for starters: higher highs and higher lows suggest the price has a higher chance to keep going up, and lower lows and lower highs suggest the opposite. So, start with simple and obvious stuff like that, then mold it into a useable system that you can verify.

You need a system. That is, if you don't want to lose all your money. Don't buy strategies; those are scams. Learn enough about trading so you can build your own strategy (yes, it will take time.) Learn how you can test it (google "walk forward testing", and let me again remind you of the Tail Ratio and the Common Sense Ratio), and if it's working, verify it for some time while only paper trading it (i.e. you pretend you're trading, and log the imaginary results), and only if it's still working should you start trading.

It's a long road: trading is not for the impatient; losing is.

As for a site with a large variety of altcoins, Poloniex is not too bad. However, if you want to trade for a living on the long run, you may want to check out larger markets. Crypto is tiny, so the capacity of any strategy will be pretty limited. As comparison, the daily FOREX volume is several hundred times as much as the crypto market cap, and there are over a hundred individuals around the world with a higher net worth than all crypto combined. This may change, eventually, but we're far from it yet.

That's cute but what about the time when it doesn't happen? There's no rule that says "the price has to come back up." Ask those who held onto their Enron stocks...

No, it does not make sense. CHF had very low volatility. THB had very low volatility. Please explain to me how they were not risky.

Appeal to authority does NOT prove anything. Investopedia says awesome things about Fibonacci magic as well. I rest my case.

Volatility can't be "measured" unless your distribution is normal (but you won't find that in finance): the sample mean and volatility are useless to estimate population mean and volatility in the presence of fat tails, because you can only see the tip of the iceberg, and you have no way to guess how big is what's unseen. That is, from the sample mean and variance; you can still use MLE to get a guesstimate on the tail exponent, but the margin of error is monstrous, so you can only see that you need to be cautious, not how cautious you need to be.

Basically, standard deviation is a cute concept, but it has no significance to finance, because it applies to more restricted probability distributions than what financial returns follow. You can't even mathematically define the concept of volatility for some parameter ranges of those distributions!

Return distributions aren't stationary, either. Volatility tends to cluster (the volatility of volatility is higher than the volatility), so you're even worse off: if something big happens, chances are something huge (that your clever standard deviation said can't happen in a trillion years!) is about to be happening soon. But I'm not sure why there is still an argument about it after stuff like LTCM and the flash crash and the likes of them.

As for investing. There are some hedge funds with several decades of solid track records that pack so much volatility that you'd run out screaming. Yet they are still around, with awesome compound returns, while those low volatility funds routinely blow up after a couple years. (Yes, LTCM is again a prime example; did I mention it was led by some of the most prominent members of the financial literature you were talking about?) If volatility equals risk, this should be the other way around, correct?

Case closed.

Not this again. Volatility DOES NOT equal risk. It's like saying "high temperatures are bad"; well, try to cook a meal in cold water...

Another random thing I thought is that liquidity is a near non-existent for crypto with $14ish billion market cap, while forex is THE most liquid market on the world with $4 trillion volume/day.

Basically, forex deals with roughly 300x more money on a single (week)day than there are cryptocurrencies in existence; crypto is insignificant to the level of maximum global irrelevance.

Now, I'm not saying it can't prove to be a historic invention, eventually; we're just not there, and there are problems to be solved *cough* scaling *cough*

Okay, now bring on the hate!  

Actually, the same goes for ECN brokers like LMAX or Dukascopy, where you pay commission and they are not part of the trade (i.e. they don't widen the spread, like Oanda, for example.) As for how low those crypto commissions are, Poloniex charges 0.25% for the taker (in their most expensive tier), while LMAX charges 0.0025% of the notional value of the trade. Granted, volatility is lower than crypto's (so you'll need larger positions), but not 100x lower...

It's complicated enough that you can play around for as long as you want and it will still be risky; there are just too many subtleties involved to pick up on all of them by yourself.

Let's follow Wall Street then, they can't be wrong, right?! Sharpe ratios, mean reversion, averaging down, fundamental analysis, all that crap. However, Wall Street has no incentive to make money on the long run, because they get rich in the short run (and then they blow up their customers' accounts, but who cares when they already got their bonuses?) So, let's not follow Wall Street... But who, then?

The problem I found was that most information out there are from clueless idiots such as myself. It took months to find a few sensible sources, and they are invariably people with institutional background (i.e. they actually did what they are talking about), who then de-institutionalized themselves and fared well on their own (i.e. they actually know what they are talking about.) They are the people to listen to, not the charlatan mentors who will sell you their crappy strategies full of Fibonaccis and wave theories and 6-month plans and other mindblowing idiocies.

Aaaaand this is the most important reason that I'm for algorithmic trading: I do NOT have that kind of personality, but I can sure formalize a strategy and leave up the stressful task of executing it to a machine.

I heard it from multiple sources that even the some of the brokers themselves manipulate the market to trigger the stop losses of retail traders, and it was about big (internationally big) brokers, though obviously only ones that are MMs themselves. I read it from a systematic forex trader that his bot doesn't place stop losses for this reason, but follows the market and executes them manually.