Found a backdoor way to earn dividends from Ripple. Taking another swing at the Bank of Japan and their interest rates. And running out of patience with Australian bank, ANZ. Trading robots have a tough time on a see-saw Bitcoin ride.
Portfolio News
Gun Control Dick's Sporting Goods (DKS) took action on gun control with a bar on sales to people under 21 and a commitment to stop selling AR15 rifles.
Walmart followed suit. On a day when the markets dropped around 1%, my options on DKS went up. Clearly the markets have decided that the positive flow into sales from taking action will be greater than lost sales from guns.
I watched part of the round table discussion that Donald Trump had on gun control. He surprised a lot of people with a very pragmatic take on having to do something. He is a pragmatist that will change direction depending on which way the wind of popular opinion is blowing. Will he do what he often does? Bend one way and then come back to his original position. I hope not.
Bought
SBI Holdings (8473.TK): Japan Financials. I am not a great fan of Ripple as a cryptocurrency because of its centralized nature. An article on Steemit identified a way to own Ripple and get dividends by buying into the companies that have big holdings of Ripple. One of these is a Japanese company owning 10% of Ripple and that is investing in a range of blockchain ventures.
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@getonthetrain/how-to-own-ripple-and-get-dividends
Tick 1. The next is the shape of the chart - strong push up and a pullback in the selloff. I added a small parcel.
Thanks 
https://ripple.com/insights/sbi-virtual-currencies-to-exclusively-list-xrp-at-launch/
Sold
ANZ Banking Group (ANZ.AX): Australian Bank. Signal came from research house to take profits. I was looking to exit anyway as price had not done what we expected and on a down day in the market, price was up. As it happens that is what the research house had been thinking too. Trade covered trading costs by less than $1 but not CFD financing costs.
Shorts
Japan 10 year Government Bonds (JGB). I have been patiently watching the charts. The Bank of Japan announced a change to their buying of long dated bonds (20 years plus). This flowed through to 10 year bonds - I added another short position when the bar went red. Will it make red two days in a row? Time is getting tight with futures expiry coming up on March 10. I need this to move hard from now for a day or two.
Cryptocurency
Bitcoin (BTCUSD): Price range for the day was $809 (7.3% of the high) which is around standard volatility. The day was up and down characeterised by the 4 or 5 highs and then a pullback (on a one hour chart). I made no new trades in either of my trading accounts - the bots were busy.
The patterns are starting to repeat - 4 or 5 higher highs and then a pullback with 2 or 3 lower lows. Patient trader waits for the last of those lower lows and then scales in when the turn is confirmed.
CryptoBots
Outsourced Bot (BTC Pairs): I added a new robot to force trades to open. The setup of the software is limited in that one cannot change the funds allocated to a robot to get it to open new trades. One has to create a new bot - even if it is exactly the same as the previous one (the only variable is choosing 15 coins or more). The new bot (v4) says it made a 1.42% return - it closed 4 trades (OMG and XEM) the best of which was 2.0%. It now has 3 trades open but no problem children.
Problem children (>10% down) list was added to in a few places and now counts 12 - ADA, ETC, XLM, STRAT, ICX, ENG, EOS, GAS, ETH, ZEC, DASH, ETH.
I opened up a new robot this morning to take the robot up to its full allocation. The plan allows up to $2500 of traded positions open at a time. With a $500 annual access fee one has to produce trading profits of 20% annually to cover costs - say 2% a month - that should be easy depending on how many problem children come along. With 12 problem children worse than 10% down the robot now has to deliver 140% minimum which is getting closer to 0.5% per day.
Work to be done on reducing the chances of the robot selecting coins that are going to drop more than 10% and deciding if a stop loss strategy should be deployed.
Profit Trailer Bot The bot had a quiet day with only 5 trades closed for an average 1.17% profit (overall 1.55%). Only one of the trades did not come out of DCA (dollar cost averaging) and the LUN trade was DCA'ed 3 times - from problem child to winner through a programmed DCA process feels kind of good.
It is a little unnerving to see postions doubled down on trades that are not looking great in the first place. The art here is to make sure there are no bad coins in the trading list and to space out the DCA thresholds. The key tool the software gives is it does a trailing buy - so if the price keeps falling it does not trigger the buy until there is a positive pullback.
The DCA list has climbed to 9 (from 8). NEBL and LUN left the list and ETH, GAS, MCO joined. 5 got worse and 1 got better (LSK). 3 went to level 3 DCA which is set at -12.75%. Price entered could be worse then -12.75% as there is trailing buy. This is the uncomfortable side of trading bots - doubled down 3 times - but it is where the leverage comes when things rebound.
Overall profit from a week's trading and assuming the DCA list comes out flat is 25% of the cost of the software ($300) and covers 7 months of VPS costs. The software must run in a continuous environment for which I use a VPS
New Trading Bot (USDT Pairs) I made some more changes to the new bot to allow it to open more than one trade per coin (two max) - now has 7 open postions. Bot closed 2 trades for average profit of 1.95% bringing overall average to 1.62% out of 23 trades.
Current status is somewhat negative after a strong day for Bitcoin dragged other coins down.
The developers have added some key new features - viz, trailing buy (where bot trails price after an entry trigger to try to capture the bottom) and dollar cost averaging. I have added trailing buy straight away
Currency Trades
Forex Robot closed 12 trades (0.57% profit) and is trading at a negative equity level of 10.2% (higher than prior day's 10.3%).
Cautions: This is not financial advice. You need to consider your own financial position and take your own advice before you follow any of my ideas
Images: I own the rights to use and edit the Buy Sell image. News headlines come from Google Search. All other images are created using my various trading and charting platforms. They are all my own work
Tickers: I monitor my portfolios using Yahoo Finance. The ticker symbols used are Yahoo Finance tickers
Charts: http://mymark.mx/TradingView - this is a free charting package. I have a Pro subscription to get access to real time forex prices
Crypto Trading: get 6 months free trades with Bitmex for leveraged crypto trading. http://mymark.mx/Bitmex
February 28, 2018