I Recovered 100% of My Almost-Broken Portfolio in Less Than 1 Month
I’m back in the game, less than a month after a severe drawdown, in which I risked almost my entire portfolio because of basic human errors that I myself taught here at Square how to avoid. I recovered by doing what’s right: eliminating the human factor from decisions by abandoning manual mode and letting my bot work with very well-defined criteria. If you’re just starting out—or have been in this equity market for a while but still haven’t prospered—it was certainly because you didn’t make a rigorous plan and/or you let emotion take over instead of reason. That’s why you need to identify the rules that work for you (or at least for most people) and follow them to the letter, never letting greed get the best of you, like I did a month ago. I don’t teach courses on how to get out of the dark, but I can and should share with you the foolproof rules that several successful professional traders spread—and that we don’t believe or ignore at first glance: 1. Invest little per position, never more than 3% of capital, and preferably try to invest at most 1%. 2. Never break rule #1 or you’ll be the one who breaks. There are even bets among professional traders about who will be the next idiot to go broke for not listening to this warning. By the way, the question isn’t really who will go broke, but when. 3. Don’t open a bunch of positions at the same time. So don’t enter everything that shows up—wait for the best opportunities to appear, even if it means going a few days without trading. The best opportunities always give clear signals, like prices being extremely stretched compared to averages, candles shrinking in size, wicks that indicate rejection zones, extreme funding rates, etc. Build a set of triggers, and if they aren’t met, don’t enter. This is where you have to eliminate your intuition the most and rely only on concrete elements confirmed on the screen. 4. Be careful with leverage—it’s wonderful when you win, but terrible when you lose. If you can’t afford to trade without leverage due to a lack of own capital, then at least dose the leverage so it’s as low as possible, never exceeding a factor of x6. For positions you’re not very confident about (e.g., lack of data in recent tokens), use x2. For positions with medium risk, use x3. For tokens with plenty of history, favorable statistics, and painfully clear resistances and supports, use 4x and so on. 5. Have an emergency button to bail out if something goes wrong, and bail out without hesitation—don’t hope the situation will reverse, because in general, it doesn’t. Many people use a pure and simple stop, like 20%, 30%. It’s up to you. My personal button that works is 100% of 1%, meaning that right at entry I set the maximum I’m willing to lose: 1% of my total capital—and I invest exactly that amount per position, with no additional stop. For example, if I had $1000, I’d invest $10 per position and leave it without protection, because the protection is already built into those $10: if something goes wrong, I still have $990 to continue playing. It sounds small, but if you have $1000, you apply $10 to an x3 leveraged position and the price moves 33% in your favor—which is extremely common in many altcoins—your profit will be about 100% on the $10 in a few days, giving you roughly 1% profit on total capital per trade. With a maximum allocation of 1%, you can open 100 identical positions simultaneously! If you have a bot that scans every token each hour—or even every minute, like I do—you’ll have dozens of profitable trades daily. Greetings.
A major upward movement is starting to take shape in $PLAY . The symptoms are low and increasing RSI, price following the rise, and an increasing long/short ratio in the three modalities available on Binance. Important: these movements come with an increase in volume. Another noteworthy fact is that open interest (the number of open contracts) remained constant, suggesting it may be a coordinated move by a small number of investors. It doesn't look like a bull trap.
O $SKYAI está announcing an imminent explosion. He is very close to the bottom, with room to fall a little more, since the stretching has not yet reached extreme percentiles. However, what stands out is the fact that pure volatility has dropped along with the price, while percent volatility has increased linearly. When pure volatility falls together with the price, it indicates progressively smaller candles in the decline and, therefore, a loss of selling momentum that usually precedes a reversal to the upside or a sideways bottoming range. But notice that percent volatility increases as the price and pure volatility fall, meaning that even though volatility is lower, compared to the price it is becoming increasingly important. In other words, the price is becoming so elastic that any upward move will be able to shift it abruptly. I believe we will see a big vertical green bar to the upside very soon. I already doubled my bet.
You might think you know how to measure price stretching. But if volatility isn’t part of your calculation, you haven’t learned it properly. If I have two altcoins A and B and both rose 30%, you’ll probably say they stretched the same amount. But if A’s volatility is 5% and B’s is 15%, then in A the price stretched 6x the average volatility, whereas in B the price stretched only 2x the average volatility. For A, this is an extreme stretch, but for B it’s fairly typical. In other words, A’s price is close to reverting, while B’s is far from it. So you have to learn to get volatility first above all else. The Binance app itself, in Trading View mode, lets you do this. But you can also calculate it separately. Extra tip: download historical candles via API and calculate the daily stretch. Then analyze statistically the distribution by token, since a 2x stretch might be considered high in some specific cases.
With Python you can easily achieve this result: build your own scanner, powered by the Binance Klines API. You just need to download the candle data and the calculation of indicators and graph generation is done offline. You can run the program on a PC, Android, or iOS and generate the output in filterable HTML.
I took another hit. But it’s part of my current trading strategy since I'm on isolated margin. In other words, my stop is the total liquidation (100%) of the position, which corresponds to 1% of my total capital. The times I got wrecked, I was on cross margin and without a stop, operating with a small position relative to my total capital, so the impact on my portfolio would theoretically be small. Cross margin without a stop can actually work well for a position going against you. But if two or three positions go against you at the same time, you're relying on nothing more than luck. All risk management collapses if those two or three positions move 60%-90% against you, even if you start with a small margin and low leverage. I've blown up about three times because I didn't believe that sometimes getting out of a trade with a small loss is way better than staying in the trade hoping it'll reverse, while your portfolio turns to dust.
My scanner is now multi-exchange. I can scan all tokens from 12 exchanges in one go. They're all read via API. For now, I only place automated orders on Binance. Soon, the bot will execute automated orders on all 12 exchanges simultaneously. I'll keep track of the total balance and open positions in a single HTML table. The upside of trading on multiple exchanges is that the token supply more than doubles. When one of them is stagnant, there are always good options on the others.