Just bought a really big amount of maidsafecoin, i love what they do really do. I Just dont know if its the best price right now cause it might break down more but only time can really tell.
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I think you got quite a good deal if you bought in the 11k-territory or lower 12k. But let’s wait and see.
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There’s good reason for the adoption of the maxim “you can’t cheat an honest man” into trading vernacular.
I would say, as artiscience points out, that the opposite is true and traders who follow trend lines are the gamblers. Investors who buy and hold for long periods (like I don’t know, Warren Buffet ;)), buying and selling the story rather than the trend, do better and more reliably than those who try to cut corners on the story to just play the day-trading game instead.
None of us can ‘know’ the future, but that’s why the mantra is ‘diversify’. It was obvious the internet would be big, if you could have bought shares in it you needn’t have been a genius or prophet to see you were likely to see a big return on it. If you spread and diversify your investments into lost of areas and lots of educated guesses and informed research then the true gambler is the trader trying to predict real unknowns (market moods), not the investor who’s tried to understand the clear, visible, causal relationship leading to the need for/success of their investment…
Be careful of being too confident with trading… you can make good money for sure, but it is way more risky than most sensible investment portfolios - especially if you do it off things like trends instead of latest/incoming news 
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Most developers are over optimistic and most software projects overrun. Regardless, switching from one language to another, when the latter is new and the team has little experience in it? It is finger in the air stuff at best.
There are two ways to deliver software. The first is setting a date and then delivering what you can by it. The second is setting a feature set and then guessing when it will be ready. Ofc, developers attempt to do both, but it is rarely achieved in my experience - it is almost always more complex than could be reasonably be envisaged.
Maidsafe seem to be working towards a feature set, rather than a delivery date. The good news is, you will get the features promised. The bad news is, it will likely take much longer than hoped.
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Let’s say I got fooled. I cut my losses, automatically: it’s part of the strategy; story is over, next please.
If you buy and hold, when will you know you were fooled? When the stock you bought at $100 sells for $90? Or will you buy into the dip instead (such bargain!) Will you wait until it gets down to $50? Or will you stay a true investor till the end, and wait until it hits $0.01?
You assume you can’t be fooled. Maybe you really can’t, but I happen to know I sure can. More on this in a second.
By the way, your definition kinda matches trend following, where the criteria is that the price seems to have started to go up or down steadily enough that it’s worth considering the possibility that it may keep going that same way for a while. It’s much simpler than a fundamental analysis, and certainly less bullsh*tty: if price isn’t relevant, then nothing is.
I must add that I still agree that some analysis can’t hurt before buying some stocks, but it can only work in the negative direction: if you see a company is bound for trouble, maybe it’s best to stay away. Or, better: bet against it.
I don’t know about reliability, but e.g. Dunn Capital’s been around for 41 years, and all they are doing is trend following, and practically the same way as when they started. Now let’s think about how many financial crisis did they have to go through to be still around, and then let’s ask again if trend following is really that unreliable.
As for buy and hold, it clearly depends a lot on what you buy and hold. If you happened to have bought and held the best .COM stocks in the '90s, you lost a lot just after 2000. If you happened to have invested into some of the safest companies a bit later, you went bust in 2008.
Based on a large enough sample, there is simply no way there wouldn’t be one or two Warren Buffets who happened to make all the good choices, even if by chance; we just never hear about the ones who did not.
But let’s say WB is simply good at judging the stuff he buys, and that’s why he’s where he is. I’m clearly not (and I kid myself not I could ever be) as bright and insightful as such a person would be. It’s not enough to judge something well; I may judge something 100% correctly, but if everybody else judges it wrong, I’m screwed all the same. Also, who says I can get all the relevant information? What if they hide something and everything I can know is simply not enough to make a correct judgment? It’s just too much unknown to build a castle on, not to mention: time consuming, utterly boring, yet stressful unknown. Where I’m practically sure I will lose, no matter how hard I try. Facing reality is such bummer.
So, if I can’t believe in buy and hold, what else can I do? As it happens, trend following, in a sense, is glorified lottery, so it works best when executed in a rather rigid manner, but this means that it lends itself to be executed by a stupid computer, which is awesome. I like tinkering with programs, but I hate both the mundaneness of entering orders and the “the thrill of making or losing 300% a day;” thank you very much, I just wanna travel around and visit my friends at faraway places, send some of them to college or disneyland, and support an orphanage or two, because that’s nice.
As for the “glorified lottery” aspect. The whole idea is based on some simple premises, and I think it’s a nice idea to summarise them for whoever’s interested:
- markets are random: if you start randomly betting away, you’re equally likely to make money or lose money, which means that, as your resources are limited, you are guaranteed to go bankrupt over a finite amount of time
- markets tend to trend some of the time: if you’re betting on a larger move to continue, you have a slightly higher chance to win than to lose, but that’s still not enough to not go bust
- one has control over the distribution of wins and losses: this is super important; lack of prophetic power, you can’t make more of the wins, but you can sure limit your downside by cutting your losing trades before they hurt you too much; essentially, you just got rid of the bad tail of the distribution, and that’s pretty cool if you think about it
4, you have to bet on practically everything: there are few real winners, you can’t predict which are the ones, so you have to make sure you don’t miss out when one comes; effectively, most of your trades will be losers or small winners, and only the top 20% (or so) of your trades will be actually profitable - you can still go bust if you run out of money: money management is more important than your rules for selecting your trades; you have to bet small, because you don’t wanna lose all your equity before those winners come in: it’s not a “get rich quick” scheme, it’s a “don’t go bust” scheme
- if you have a winner, you have to let it run: there are no profit targets; as long as something works, you’re holding it (be it long or short) or else not only your losses would not get offset, but you’d also throw away trades that just keeeeeep going (and you’ll hate yourself and your wife will be kinda pissed, too); however, once a position turns against you (and it’s based on rules, not opinion), you sell / cover it because game of thrones
Let me contrast to this mean reversion strategies, because they do the opposite: they let the losses run, hoping it would turn around, because there’s no such thing that an instrument goes down to zero, right?
Wow, I do get a fair share of condescendence from you 
It’s the 2nd time in a row, so it’s getting hard to write it off as a slip.
NOTE: Bitcoin, however innovative, is far from historical; a mere blip on the radar, so far. I like it, I admire the idea, but let’s wait another 20 years before talking about “history.” Also, I can’t see how its history could be connected to discussing trading strategies (a much older subject), but hey.
EDIT: OH HEY I UNDERSTAND! You’re talking about the people who got rich on buying bitcoins cheap, then holding, then getting super rich!! … Shall we now forget the minor detail that if you bought bitcoins at the time when it was really cool, then you lost over half of your money by now? But of course the rhetoric is that “it will surely go back up” hahaha. It may. It may not. What if Safecoins will wipe it out, for example? You can’t count on predicting the future and, though you may call it “educated guess”, buy and hold is still ALL about predicting the future.
Word. Trend following requires diversifying all the same. Rare events (really profitable trends) occur more often in a much larger sample, and of course you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket, either.
Trend following has the awesome property that it works with anything that has a price. Stocks tend to move together at times of crashes (correlation approaches 1) so it’s good that it’s a method that doesn’t tie you to one instrument or another. In effect, you don’t have to be expert in stocks and futures and currencies and whatnot at the same time to be able to really diversify.
You’re talking about the .COM bubble, and its subsequent crash, right?
I don’t like to make educated guesses; as I have already said, I simply don’t trust myself and the world to be able to make them. I’m happy with avoiding the real stupid decisions.
I’m not sure if you’re referring to trend following when you talk about predicting market moods, but if you do, you misunderstand the most basic thing about it: it doesn’t try to predict anything. When you see something that has the potential to be a starting trend, you jump on it. Yes, you probably miss the start, because to notice it it has to already be well underway, but that’s okay: you don’t need to be there at the beginning to profit from the bulk of the ride. Also, you don’t try to predict the end of it: you wait until it turned back enough that you can be fairly sure that it really turned around. Basically, you miss both the bottom and the top of the trend, but you do have the middle section which, if only rarely, can be quite big.
In short: you don’t predict, you react, and if it was a false alarm, you jump off before the train takes you too far into the wrong direction.
No I didn’t, but I don’t see why I should repeat myself.
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But that was just a figure of speech 
I didn’t respond to you particularly (so no need to answer); I was just trying to share some stuff with those who may be interested, lest they get fooled by silly arguments.
DISCLAIMER: I’m only saying I can’t support buying MAIDs as an investment. I don’t believe such things represent sound practice because buy and hold gives you no escape strategy for when things go wrong. (I believe the chances for MAIDs are better than in most cases, but that doesn’t invalidate the previous point).
However, I wholeheartedly support the idea of buying MAIDs as a way to support the developers; if anybody can afford to do so, by all means: do it.
You don’t like to make educated guesses for investment? Wow, well I definitely do and that’s where I’ve made all the money. I used to play a lot of poker though, so maybe I’m just more comfortable and confident making ‘educated guesses’. 
yes, I know how trend betting works, i have been trading for a fair while ;). I think you need to take another look at your logic though. the trend is exactly a ‘prediction’ as trends can change in minutes. This was my point about watching for news as far more profitable than trend betting. a trend is caused by the market mood, it is not separate from the emotions of people creating the market. if there is an upward trend in telly tubbies and then they find glass in a stuffed toy or the director is discovered kiddy-fiddling you will quickly see that ‘trend’ going the other way. ‘Trend’ is just another way of saying mood. The fact that you see it as solid, reliable or a way to escape risk shows you have not put it into practice for very long.
you’re a smart guy, we all have to learn our own lessons and some of them can be expensive. trading is fun and you can make money, but trend trading in volatile and illiquid markets is not going to make you nearly as much money as buying and holding maids imo - I’d be happy to compare ROI in a couple of years if you fancy it 
Funny though, you’re talking against your own stance here. I’m sure when you played poker you placed your bets on actual probabilities, and you did have rules for when to fold. Contrary to that, educated guesses about stocks or the like are about less tangible properties, and buy and hold is about to never fold (at least there are no rules to when it’s time to do so; you can keep holding a position forever, hoping it will get better.)
The “prediction” stops with the heuristics that “if people have been buying this thing, they will probably keep buying it for a while” (same for selling.) But the method doesn’t depend entirely on this. It looks at the “mood” right now, and it reacts the moment it changes; in fact, the most important part is to know (ahead of time) when to get out. Lacking the concept of getting out is where buy and hold fails: it depends on trends to go up and up alone.
Thanks 
I understand you’ve been doing this for a lot longer than I have, and money does talk. I’m still in the process of designing my strategy; polo is indeed a crazy place, and it is hard to build something that can get things right in time frames between hours and months, and survives pump/dumps and the like. Once I go live, I’ll make sure to keep records so we can compare the numbers 
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If you buy and hold, you don’t look at the price to get to know that.
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I do understand that. How will you get past your biases though? Very rational people made very stupid decisions based on things they got religious about. Prices don’t have biases.
I’m not saying a completely rational person with all relevant information in their possession couldn’t do better than trend following. I just don’t believe we can get close enough to being such a person for it to hold true.
I could say, I’m trying to be rational about my irrationality, and all that it leaves me with is a stupid method that tries to tame the bad side of randomness.
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I think the problem lies in what the person holds. I dont want to keep mine on an exchange and definitely am not going through hell of transferring it from paper to exchange to paper by that time its all done the dip or peak is over anyway.
Sounds like you will use, or are using, Limit Orders? 
I’m not entirely sure why that is relevant, but I think they are better because they are cheaper… unless of course you need to get out of a bad situation, when market orders may be better (though some say it’s better to wait out the panic but, in the end, it comes down to how you are comfortable handling such things.) Polo doesn’t have “real” market orders outside margin trading btw, but you can emulate them with limit orders.
EDIT: Yes, you can get a slightly better price with limit orders, and that’s sure nice. Trend following isn’t about trying to get the best possible price though, because the significant portion of the profits would come from longer term trends anyway, so the initial slight advantage is expected to not be too significant. But I’m not an expert, and it’s sure suggested to go for limit orders for entries, probably because that little advantage matters, too.
so crystall ball in the end, right? Your “strategy” relies on timescales but you don´t talk about them. You say “if people have been buying this thing, they will probably keep buying it for a while”, but don´t define “while”. You say that your method “looks at the “mood” right now, and it reacts the moment it changes” but withhold that the only way to identify a pattern is to predefine a timeframe.
I think your problem is that you evaluate “buy and hold” as a trading strategy, which is indeed flawed, but investing is not trading.
I’m not even sure why I care to respond to you at this point. Especially considering your tone, which doesn’t seem to improve. Anyway, here it is.
“Time scales” simply mean that at times stuff happens fast, and at times stuff happens slow. It’s not trivial to capture both of those within a single algo: most big changes (the ones that are worth worrying about) happen over a longer period, but it’s polo, so stuff like a 50% increase over a 2-day period (or a 400% increase over a few hours) is not unheard of, and it would be awfully nice to be able to catch them. Also, a quick pump/dump can kill a strategy if it’s not prepared to handle changes at much shorter time scales even if it targets longer periods by default.
As for the “while,” it simply means: “while” In other words, “until the premise is no longer true.” The whole point is that you don’t have a pre-set target for your profits, because why limit your winnings just for the heck of it.
As an example for what it looks like in practice: let’s say you define a stop loss / trailing stop that’s 3x the current ATR: it will close your position if the price drops that much (let’s assume you’re long), but won’t care about how far up it goes otherwise. The assumption is that (if you manage your money well) you’ll have enough home runs that will offset the false alarms.
Here’s the problem (the images are quite random, from google; look at the shape, not the specifics):
If you can cut off the left tail (which you can, if you limit your losses by getting out before they grow big) then the previously symmetrical distribution turns into something like the red curve on this, with more frequent losses (which are limited, because you cut them) and less frequent, but unlimited wins:
I tend to think that the “identifying trends” part in trend following is almost insignificant, merely a slight tune-up. What really matters is this transforming of the probability distribution, and the managing of your money well enough that you live to see the few “outliers” on the positive side that will show up simply by chance. Big losses would also show up, but you quit from those before they get a chance to hurt you too much. This is where buy and hold fails miserably: once you commit, you pretend stuff will just work out; there’s no planning for failure.
By the way, I evaluate investing (“buy and hold”) as a means to profit, and I’m saying that it is flawed in that generic context.
Most likely because you feel triggered by what I said.
By tone you mean expressing my critical opinion? My whole point from the beginning was and is that you conflate investment and trading. You still do. You believe that buying and holding fails because “once you commit, you pretend stuff will just work out; there’s no planning for failure”. Clearly a trader perspective, not an investor perspective. An investor relates value to his investment, not to a third category as traders do (even though many traders blind this out but plainly referring to making “money” or “profit”). Investors are prepared to lose their initial investment. When they put it down they already signed up for something else while traders always want to trade back to what they consider a stable value. They put their money based on expected project value instead of gambling with market behaviour. Two different approaches and while you clearly favor the latter, claiming the former would be pretentious is a pretty one-eyed view.
There’s a pretty good little article on Investopedia about this.
“The goal of investing is to gradually build wealth over an extended period of time through the buying and holding of a portfolio of stocks, baskets of stocks, mutual funds, bonds and other investment instruments.”
“Trading, on the other hand, involves the more frequent buying and selling of stock, commodities, currency pairs or other instruments, with the goal of generating returns that outperform buy-and-hold investing.”
Investing assumes (for no good reason, I may add) and depends on that the price of the instruments held would generally go up, but that is only true under certain market conditions. Yes, it worked out for many, but that’s because of the current market, not because investing is a viable strategy in general. Investing gives no protection against crashes, either.
As for trading, when it’s about making money, I’d sure prefer outperforming another method, but that isn’t even the point: I’m already happy if I don’t lose as much when stuff turns bad. A good trading strategy is prepared for dealing with changes, while investors are just watching from the sidelines, hoping stuff will turn good again.
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