After 3 years, 3 months and 3 days of teaching myself and practising the art of day trading and technical analysis of price charts, I can say that I’m beginning to make progress. When serious yogis want to go deep or put their years of training to the test, they do a retreat for exactly that length of time. They lock themselves up in a cave room and simply meditate, while a student brings them simple meals once every few days. I didn’t have to go to those lengths but I have just spent that amount of time almost daily on my passion for trading, with similar focus and conviction, and this month I have the results to show for it.

I started this current day trading challenge for myself at the beginning of March and now that the month is about to end tomorrow, I can look at my results and declare that I have made just over 500% profit after 30 days. I took a small amount of bitcoin and I traded it daily in and out of only one single altcoin on Kucoin exchange, buying low and selling high, and now sit with 500% more bitcoin than at the start.

So it looks like easy money to 5x your investment in a month, but remember that it took me over three years to acquire these skills, with constant research, practice and occasional losses, all through the bear market of 2018/9 and through 2020. During those years I occasionally went through phases of attempted day trading and learned a lot. The best way to learn is to dive right in with your own money invested and try your hand at it.

There are varying styles of trading but you need to find a system that works for you. I used to look at the prices on the exchange and try to choose setups from all the various altcoins versus Bitcoin, Ethereum or a stable coin pegged tot he dollar, and so trade various random coins. But this time around, I wasn’t looking for a trade setup. I was researching NFTs, (non-fungible tokens) my current interest as an artist. I have been minting my original artworks into NFTs to sell on the blockchain and so looking at the various platforms that facilitate this.

One of them is called WAX, so while looking at the project, I took a look at the price chart on Kucoin, one of the exchanges where they are listed, and it was there that I noticed that WAX coin price chart has a unique pattern, consisting of noticeable price spikes or long wicks on the candles. It was that pattern that I felt could make a tradeable setup. And I was right. It’s not that WAX coin is a long term trade or showing bullish momentum. In fact it has occasional pumps but mostly trades in a range sideways.

So I’m not riding a bullish trend as normal, to profit from any uptrend. I’m simply trading the daily range because this particular coin shows a noticeable pattern of bouncing between support and resistance with repeated regularity. It is this pattern that looked to me like a tradeable pattern, as a range trader, or sniper trader. As I say, you need to customize your trading style to suit your personality and time constraints. Your style may be different from mine, based on your overall lifestyle.

But once you find a style that works for you, as well as a chart pattern that looks reliably tradeable, then you simply put in the buys and sells and ride the bounces in price. I don’t plan on accumulating WAX long term at all. I am accumulating bitcoin, and using the WAX coin to grow my bitcoin stack. In this case I had a little bitcoin on Kucoin exchange, a popular Asian exchange with loads of small altcoins. So when I saw this attractive price chart pattern, I decided to experiment, and the results have been record breaking for me so far. This is my best success rate to date.

The price of WAX coin goes up and down, but it always keeps a regular range within which I can trade on a daily basis, making on average one or two trades a day, one buy and one sell, or more if I’m lucky. Each trade is making me anything from 4% to 10% profit. That’s how big the price spikes are in this low market cap coin with high volatility. It helps that there are some whales noticeable in the order book, placing their massive buy and sell walls among the other small trades. I simply set my order just before theirs, and like clockwork the price will come to meet their order and be stopped like a car hitting a wall. My trade is filled and price bounces back in the other direction.

With these basic yet crucial ingredients in the price chart, I can structure my trades around the whales and within the repeated range, and ride the trend. I do this by looking at the 15 minute chart, as well as using the Stochastic as an indicator of trend direction. I carry on with my usual work on the computer throughout the day, researching and writing, but I will have the exchange open in a tab with the others and keep an eye on price movements. When my order is met, a little bell goes off from the exchange, and I can then reset my next trade back at the other end of the range.

Because I have a lifestyle that facilitates being able to keep an eye on my trades throughout the day, I can be aware of the details and trade accordingly. After all, sometimes the whales move their walls or orders and my pattern is pushed out of place and my order then also needs to be adjusted to sit just before the wall at a new price. So fairly constant monitoring is required, although I still take time to sleep peacefully at night, as well as go out for hours long activities in nature, which is another favorite pastime of mine, to keep fit and healthy.

The initial massive 10% spikes and profits that I first saw at the start of the month are lessened and I’m only going for around 4% profit per trade lately, but all of this is compounded profit and accumulates into the amount of bitcoin I have to enter each successive trade. As a result I use one of the most powerful forces in the universe, according to Einstein – compound interest.

So with the small trade fees on Kucoin for each trade, along with the perfect price pattern and chart setup, I have found a system that I can decipher and that works for me personally. You can do the same, in your own unique way as a trader. That 500% profit in a month is waiting for you. Who else can say that they can achieve such results, regardless of the conditions of the overall price and trend of bitcoin and the altcoins, not from long term investing but from day trading? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. I will continue my day trading challenge and keep you informed on my progress as in the coming days.