This thread got me thinking. As long as we're discussing trading, I looked back at some of my old trades.
I still have many screenshots from my stock trading days sitting in a folder on my main computer because a friend and I use to trade like crazy and then have competitions to see who could buy more of AMZN or GOOGL or whatever in a given day.
Here is one from one of my accounts, in 2015:
When you buy 1000 shares of a stock like GOOGL it sometimes takes a bunch of little fills to fill it.
So, yes, I made about a grand on each trade, WHEN IT WENT WELL (which wasn't always) and that used to be my goal...$1000. a day, which that day in March, these two trades, I made $1200., but if I'd just held those 1000 GOOGL until now I'd be up...well, more than I care to calculate, with NO effort!
And sometimes I would get stuck and have to hold a half million or even over a million dollars of AMZN, GOOGL or whatever waiting for it to come back, and be down ten twenty thirty or more grand, just waiting until it went back up, which was no fun at all.
Oh, and another thing...SEC fees? those "little tiny" few pennies per dollar? Well when you're selling a million dollars worth of stock and you notice they just snatched around twenty bucks out of your trade, you call your broker and ask, wth? I thought my commission was under ten bucks, why isn't this adding up?...and then after a long pause he comes back and says, oh yeah...SEC fees...those can actually add up when you're selling at that level. So over time, thousands of trades, THAT all starts eating into your profits too.
I still traded some in 2016, but in 2017, I've traded very little, more position trading and buy and mold. My accountant will be happy too because now he'll be getting 1099s with mostly dividends reported and not seventy pages of trades! which the brokerages have a hard time keeping track of your basis when you trade that quickly, such as if you hold some shares long term and day trade the same stock, so you're constantly arguing with them over FIFO and LIFO bases for your trades.
So, having learned the hard way that sometimes buy and hold is best, I choose...to continue to hodl BTC!
Don't get me started on trading again! I'm not going down that crazy path with crypto.
Good luck to any of you who do choose to trade cryptos. I'll be holding instead.