I've made both mistakes and good decisions during the recent HIVE pumps. Most mistakes came in the beginning, so it was a race to recover from them, but I eventually did, without losing my head, but with some stress and self-doubt at times. Didn't make significant profit, only about 150-160 HIVE, which is low considering the amount of liquid HIVE I had at my disposal and the possibilities, but I am happy with it, under the circumstances.
To be clear, I "saw" the pump coming even before it came, so I was prepared for it. I was up at midnight UTC which is 2am my time just to see it in action for the first time.
I had my sell orders in place. First BIG mistake: I was overly cautious when I should have been greedy. I had my orders set from something like 30% price increase down to 11% or something like that. I should have set them from 30% upwards, especially knowing how previous pumps went. Lesson learned!
Also price gaps between orders were too low, not accounting for wild scenarios. Another lesson learned.
From my observations of the "classical" Upbit-led pumps, they mostly lasted for half an hour, at most for an hour (but very rarely) in their full-force mode. I remained awoke for one and a half hours to see what happens (that's 3:30am). It didn't seem to have the strength to push through the 45c resistance, once again. I even moved one of my furthest orders inside that range, thinking it had no chance of being hit. As you all know, I was so wrong on that!
It eventually pushed through the resistance and had a victory pump all the way to 64c. I should have anticipated such a big pump if it broke the resistance!
While I was asleep, one of my buy orders got hit, which was good, even if only one of them got triggered. Few others were very close! Good move to set the buy orders, even if only one got hit. So I wasn't doing only mistakes in that first night.
When I woke up and saw the price already retracing from 64c, you can imagine my disappointment, but still... I thought this was it. I had more liquid HIVE on other accounts and on Hive-Engine, and decided to dump them at around 55-54c. Turned out it wasn't a great price after all because more upward action followed, but not terrible either. So, this was a so-so action. It was probably a mistake to act hastily about it, but I worried the price would tank since that was what was going on at the time.
From now on, I think I made mostly good decisions. I took a minimum profit, but a profit on two of my Hive-Engine accounts. Ended up taking a small loss on the other two, after waiting for another 24 hours or so for things to turn around. Maybe this one was a mistake, since it would have been a profit if I had waited until now, for example. But at the time it wasn't clear where HIVE was going, and I wanted this settled. Sometimes it is important to take a loss, rather than incur more potential losses. Especially if there is a very good chance to make profits in the close future after that move is made.
At first, I held my ground and wanted to not lose anything on my main trades from the night before, so I set buy orders that were very unlikely to get hit. And left them like this for a good while, because I wasn't ready to take the loss on them.
Then, I made some profitable swing trades. One of them was even on the last push upward from yesterday night, when my 64c sell order got hit. Another smaller order I forgot about almost got hit too, but the push stopped right there close to it.
In the meantime, I decided to bite the bullet, and moved the sell orders for my initial trades, initially around 48c (that level might still be in the cards), but later to around 51c, thinking 50c might hold. One good thing about those initial orders was that they were of progressive amounts, with higher amounts at higher prices. So I incurred smaller losses, on average.
So, my takeaway from this, for the following pumps, which we should expect quite soon, but probably not this week:
- results are based on all the activity, not on individual trades
- sell orders much higher percentage-wise, and updated regularly (already do)
- bigger gaps between sell orders, and set even some audacious ones (note: dollar-wise, at a higher HIVE price, smaller percentages mean more cents; example: there's 20% growth between 50c and 60c, and only 14.28% between 70c and 80c; that means the higher it goes, the sharper it is on a normal scale)
- always set buy orders, as long as my goal remains to have HIVE, expecting it to go higher (note: I won't expect only that during this bull market, which means, at times, I might prefer to hold HBD); while this may not be great for maximizing profit, I think it's important to not be too greedy with the buy orders, especially if you don't know the trajectory of the price (the end goal is to have more HIVE at the end of the "action")
- better take a loss on a buy order, than risk holding HBD while HIVE keeps pumping
- if you made some bad decisions, don't discourage; adjust, and make better trades while the action is still hot; if you continue to lose, stop, or you risk losing more ("live" to fight the market another day); trading is not about nailing all your trades, is about being in profit at the end
- don't watch the 1min price movements on Binance much for indication of where the price is going; they can start small, insignificant waves, to ride them with leverage.
- account for slippage and fees if you want to swing trade on Hive-Engine
- the action in the general crypto market doesn't seem to hold much influence in the HIVE pumps anymore; they may still start while the market is calm, slightly in the red even, but afterwards, it didn't matter that BTC pumped, or that BTC and alts were falling; the HIVE pump had its own independent, undisturbed action.
I guess that's it. Note that these are my takeaways, based on my actions and goals. Your might be different, even opposite.