When I’m not out hiking on the cliffs by the ocean nearby, or meditating, I spend most of my time seven days a week researching and writing articles. It’s a lifestyle choice for me which has been working well for the past three years or more. Ever since I came across bitcoin in late 2017, my interest has been focused on learning all I can about it.
Some of that study and research led to teaching myself all about trading. Over the same past three years I have been practising day trading with varied success. Initially I learned technical analysis, which is reading price charts. It’s all about time and price. As a total novice in finance, I entered with keen interest and learned by trial and error.
This is the best way to learn the art of day trading – with some skin in the game. In other words it’s when your own money is invested in your decision making, that you pay more attention and remember the lessons, particularly the losses or mistakes. And there will be losses. We can’t get it right immediately, even with all the theory under our hat.
Eventually I gave up investing too much time in day trading because it does require time and attention. I focus now more on writing as well as my artwork. Making paper collage art pieces is a hobby which I have returned to in the past six months, so my time is more involved there. And I sell my collages as NFTs on the Hive blockchain, which is a fascinating new outlet for creativity as well as a new income stream, since some of them actually sell.
Nevertheless, while sitting at the computer all day, reading, writing and minting NFT artworks, I also obviously follow the prices of cryptocurrencies and research new projects. And that’s how I got back into day trading. And it looks like I have had a breakthrough. One of the NFT blockchains I found is called WAX, with their own token. I looked at the chart one day, while doing an article and review of the WAX NFT platform, where one can mint and sell artworks. And I noticed that the price chart had some major volatility, as well as distinct trends.
All of my three brief years on learning TA and actually practicing for days and months on end full time, led me to cultivate enough pattern recognition to see what looked like a tradeable setup in the WAX chart. Now I wasn’t going to speculate too much or invest in small cap altcoins at this stage of my game. However, I saw that WAX is traded on Kucoin exchange, where I have an account with a little bit of coin just sitting there.
On rediscovering that I had 6987 sats worth of bitcoin still on the exchange, I decided to experiment and trade the WAXP/BTC pair, as a fun pastime. Now 6987 sats or 0.00006987 bitcoin is not much of course. It’s about $4 at present. So I traded the setups I saw in the WAX price chart, using support and resistance, and over the past 21 days I have basically tripled my money.
The volatility in the chart, along with the patterns, overall in price movements, and the super cheap fees for each trade (10 sats average) enabled me to go from my initial 6987 sats to my present 20 076 sats. So I’m up just under 300% in 21 days. Not bad hey? The point is not that I made much money. $12 is not anything to celebrate. The actual point is that my day trading skills enabled me to triple my investment in a month. By practicing here using such a small amount, my emotions were taken out of the equation and I wasn’t sweating over each trade or the possible loss of large sums. I was just having fun.
And that’s part of the secret to trading and to life as a whole. If you are able to relax, remain psychologically detached from the result and basically have fun doing what you love, then you will succeed. This months’ day trading experiment proved it to me. While sitting at my computer, I would check my Kucoin exchange account and observe the WAX coin price in the morning, and then set a buy or sell order, and go on with my other work on the laptop.
So the trading was going on in the background without too much time and attention required. Each time my buy or sell order was hit and my trade executed, a little bell will ring from the exchange, and I could go and check up on my trade and set the next sell or buy order according to the TA of the chart. In this way I made 60 trades over three weeks, or 30 buys and 30 sells. I lost perhaps once or twice and all the rest were profits of between 2% - 10% per trade.
Therein lies a few trading secrets for you. The biggest one is the law of compound interest. Even Einstein apparently praised that law. I kept my profits in the trade and so each successive trade was with a higher amount to invest. And so the percentage gain included all the past gains and compounded each time. Now can you imagine if I was trading with ten times or 100 times the initial investment. I would be up 3x whatever my trading stack was. And that is pretty powerful trading, even if I say so myself. No leverage or margin trades, purely spot market plain and simple.
Being a massive Asian market on Kucoin, situated in the Far East, I missed out on the Asian trading hours since I was asleep at that time, being in Africa, though I tried to catch some of it in the early morning hours. Timing is everything in trading, but despite missing out on the volatility of the Asian trading hours, my simple buys and sell orders were executed 24/7. Now this is the way it is with trading. I can play around and make significant gains. But if I go in heavy or increase my initial amount invested, I may end up losing. It could be karma or something like stress that blocks the flow when big amounts are involved. I will have to meditate on that one for a bit longer.
Nevertheless, my years of trading practice seem to be paying off, and even though the volatility in the WAX coin price has flattened and the trades are not earning a massive 10% or 8% any more, I’m still able to swing trade every day and make 4% on average. So after three weeks I’m up almost 300%. I just need another one or two trades to bring in the remaining 1000 sats and then mathematically I will be over 3x.
So the conclusion is that life is a process and not a goal. It’s about the journey and not only the destination. If you are process-focused and not goal-focused, you can make more progress along the Way. And if you allow time to be your friend, and have patience, as well as being detached from the result, you can find magic is possible while you execute the process. Let the goal be in the hands of fate or whatever you wish to call it.
In my process over the past three weeks, I have gained significantly, and feel empowered based on my day trading skill. My wallet has little externally to show for it - $8 in profit – but the process has been awesome and massive theoretically and proportionally. Now I may simply carry on with my 20k sats and see how much more I can grow it, or I may add to it and see if I can maintain my 300% gains in three weeks. I will keep you informed in further day trading diaries in days to come so watch this space.
