One of my most favorite things to do is trade. What I like most about it is to call market direction correctly and profit from it. Not gonna lie here, I get off on the action. I trade exclusively on the Bitshares decentralized exchange (DEX) and use the BitCny:Bts pair because it typically has the highest volume.
So there are a couple ways to profit trading: buy low sell high and sell high buy low. The latter involves something called margin trading- taking out a loan for an asset then trading it- typically selling or shorting it. That's one cool benefit of the Bitshares DEX, being able to borrow (with zero interest) an asset using bitshares you own as collateral. I use it all the time to margin trade in order to sell short.
This shows that I borrowed 1000 BitCny using approximately 6,240 Bitshares as collateral. It also lists all the other assets you can borrow.
The reason why I chose to go short on this pair is because I expect it to go down in price. Bitshares recently dumped in price causing a spike in the BitCny:Bts market.
As the price of Bitshares recovers, BitCny should drift lower. I want to profit from the drop in price, the way to do it is to short it. Again, I borrowed BitCny and sold it as price spiked up. Here you can see the candle I used to tell me when to sell. I sold my 1000 BitCny for 2544 bitshares.
2.254 is the target price I will buy back all 1000 BitCny and pay back the loan I took out. Since I only have to pay back 2254 bitshares for the 1000 BitCny and originally got 2554 bitshares, I get to keep 187 bitshares!
Now all I gotta do is wait it out. The risk is that the BitCny price goes up and I get stuck having to pay more for BitCny than I originally paid for them. I guess its a risk I'm willing to take. My buy order is already in so it will execute automatically.
I will use Bitshares on the rudex.org exchange to buy rudex.steem, which is tranferable to your Steemit account- pro tip: its cheaper than blocktrades. Oh yeah...don't freak... its in Russian 😀
There's tons more examples of shorting on the DEX you can search for on Steemit, people profit from this every day. Why not you?