Trading Technical Primer?

[Aldanga]

I'd like to start playing with the crypto markets, but am woefully underprepared. Do any of the traders here (presence, newbitech, etc.) know of good primers for trading basics, i.e., patterns in trading? I'd love to get a better technical understanding of these things and begin to do some day trading.

Cheers.

 

[brandon]

Go to a casino it will be more fun.

bitcoins are poorly suited for day trading. Low volume, few market makers, trade lag, no derivatives, unreliable exchanges, and the constant threat of having the feds seize your account.

 

[kpitcher]

I'll agree with brandon on most things other than worrying about the feds. If you want to play with currency exchanges there are plenty of forex markets to get into.

The exchanges can be lagged - the biggest can be bad at peek times - and transferring real world money to and from exchanges is not quick and simple. With all that said BTC-E has a number of alternative crypto currencies. Most are me-to coins but they do have far faster micro rises and falls. It's a smaller group of users so no real trend spotting that applies to other markets. I'd be surprised if anyone can survive day trading with any success.

 

[muh_roads]

and the constant threat of having the feds seize your account.

How do you seize an account that exists in the cloud?

If a bank experiences DDOS, you can't use your funds. If an online wallet goes down, you can still access your funds with private keys. An advantage banks can't compete with.

Your "zzzzzzzzz" needs to be changed to "I sometimes offer inaccurate comments as it relates to BTC".

 

[brandon]

How do you seize an account that exists in the cloud?

What do you mean "exists in the cloud"? I'm not talking about a wallet, I'm talking about your bitcoin brokerage account. For trading your account exists with the exchange and contain a combination of whatever currencies you are trading. Maybe that would change sometime if decentralized p2p exchanges are created, but they don't exist now.

 

[muh_roads]

What do you mean "exists in the cloud"? I'm not talking about a wallet, I'm talking about your bitcoin brokerage account. For trading your account exists with the exchange and contain a combination of whatever currencies you are trading. Maybe that would change sometime if decentralized p2p exchanges are created, but they don't exist now.

Fair enough. My apologies. I have a knee-jerk reaction to those that think the feds can seize bitcoin wallets...it doesn't make any logical sense if more understood how the system works.

I'm not sure how an exchange can be decentralized since you need a central server of some kind helping you transfer from one party to another while updating a price. Satoshi only intended for people to send to wallets only. Necessity will create a solution if the Feds start power-grabbing. e.g. Exchanges that exist within the Tor network if it comes to that. I'm simply not worried.

But I agree with you to an extent, I would only keep funds in a wallet you control. Not a gox wallet, for example.

To the OP, day-trading browser plugins that work with Gox exist. I haven't used them though...modifying them requires you to geek out a bit...