I have been trading daily for almost two months now and I’ve had my ups and downs. I’m only using a few hundred dollars so it isn’t as difficult to accept when my position takes a hit. And what I’ve learned from the experience, so far, has been a revelation. So I will just be making a short post about it to help me get back to writing.
It’s been a roller coaster ride. I had a good run of buying and selling XRP. Mostly trading it from around $0.25 and cashing out half of my stash when the price hit $0.62 and buying some other tokens to day-trade. I’m long-biased when I trade but don’t really set stop loss to minimize risks. The price is currently at $0.44, and I’ve been watching the price drop for a couple of days now. I bought it at the $0.53 level so it’s not that big of a drop in dollar value but the 17% drop in price got me thinking about setting stop loss for safety.
Learning Moment Set a stop loss. This is a good thing for me. I’m quite lazy when setting stop loss because I believe that the price will eventually go up. My reasoning behind this is that Ripple isn’t going anywhere. It will still have value because it has good fundamentals and utility.
I personally use it for my personal transactions to send money to and from exchanges, to transfer money to another account, etc. And because I still can’t use HIVE to convert from my native currency pesos (PHP) to USD, I use XRP for the low fees and fast transaction. It’s basically my gateway token / coin to the crypto world.
So, the learning that I got of this XRP experience is to set stop-loss on every pair that I trade with. I did not lose that much money with the XRPs that I have since I cashed out most of it earlier in the month when the price shot up, but the stop-loss would have done its job of, well, stopping the losses for this trading pair and preserved the gains I made. I am now thinking of a 5% stop-loss limit with the aim of getting out of the token and minimizing the impact of sharp drops in price to my portfolio? And, to veteran traders out there, is this good level for a stop-loss amount percentage-wise, I have no idea, but I will start with it and see how it works out.
Rookie Mistakes
Still awake late one night after a long day offline doing chores and some late Christmas preparations, I decided to visit the Hive Engine and do a little trading. I was on the HIVE-LEO pair and wanted to sell some LEO that I bought earlier. I absentmindedly put in all the information on the BUY column instead of the SELL column. 50 LEO is a small amount so I am not worried about it. I can always stake it or put it in the Liquidity Pool if it doesn’t rebound, which is highly unlikely, but it annoyed me that I did it twice. LOL
Hive Engine
Been getting good results from my trading on the Hive Engine though; I traded 16 times on the HIVE-SIM pair and took profit 15 times, with only 1 turning a negative. I only buy and sell from 1,000 to 9,000 SIMs so the profit amount in dollars isn’t life changing. But, the experience itself is.
Conclusion I now believe and have proof (a tiny bit of evidence from my short time doing it) that it is possible to win in the trading game. With the still limited time and small amount that I have on my portfolio, I have already gotten good results both using the HIVE platform and on exchanges outside of HIVE. I just hope that we can have a better experience with the Hive Engine or LeoDex (wink, wink). And from my recent blunders, I hope that we can have a stop-loss order function in the near future.
That's it for now. I am going out for a lunch date with family to celebrate my Pops’ birthday as is the tradition in the #philippines.
Have a blessed day everyone. Mabuhay!
Thank you so much to 
