Hello hello

 

Goldlotus here again, It is February 12th and I've been away from the markets for a few weeks. This next issue was supposed to be my December 2017 recap issue but I have procrastinated sooooo haaaaarrrd!!! I may not end up doing recaps at all, or I may just do them quarterly, I dunno we'll see. This issue is just to touch base and get back in the swing of things, so let's get to it.

 

Just early in January I was up nicely (more than double) on my small crypto trading account. But I still wasn't utilizing a proper trading plan or anything, so I lost a couple hundred bucks. Not the end of the world because the account size is so small, but it still represents a decent portion of the account so it still really sucks to lose. After that loss I decided to step away and refocus, come back when I have a plan. I didn't really pay too much attention to what the markets were doing, and I didn't have the urge to trade at all. It felt good to know that I could step away. I was planning to use the time to figure out my capital gains for doing my taxes this year, get caught up on my blog posts here on Profit.ly, build a proper trade plan template I can use for each trade, as well as focus on getting my brokerage account open to start finally trading stocks. I've been only partly successful.

One reason for this is that me and math don't really like each other. And looking at lines and lines of numbers and finding exchange rates and converting everything to CAD $$, my brain just hates doing stuff like that. So each time I sit down to do it, I look at the screen and I start looking around for reasons to get up and do something else, anything else! To go sort of hand in hand with this first reason is reason number 2, I smoke weed. Reason number 3 was right around this time the Kraken exchange also went offline for a few days  so I couldn't access my account to go through my trade history.

Eventually kraken came back online, I laid off the weed for a bit, and I got all my December trades' fees and balances worked out in US and CAD $$ the best that I could. But I still now had to go through and calculate the capital gains and losses for each trade. This part I'm sure I will screw up somehow, so I'm thinking of just taking it all to someone else and let them figure it out with my taxes. Of course this will probably come at what I consider an unreasonable cost cuz I'm a cheap ass. So then I figure there must be a website that does this all for you, I mean come on.

So I found one that looked great but of course you gotta pay the equivalent of $225 CAD in Bitcoin, no thanks I'm cheap remember. And then I found another site with lots of graphs and charts and you can import your data from all the major exchanges plus they have a capital gain and loss calculator and create tax reports for you, perfect!! Again, they want you to pay but to my delight they do offer free tax report building for free account users up to your first 100 trades!! I did just shy of 60 trades through December so I can actually use this, I will gladly pay for their service next year once I likely have hundreds upon hundreds of trades. The one problem I have is that when I figured out all my balances in USD and CAD on paper, the exchange rate I used from the web does not match what their website uses. Im a bit OCD with certain things so not having the tax report numbers match what I wrote down will drive me nuts, but the other part of me hates the idea of going through all the trades one by one and updating the numbers to what I have. It took me soooooo long to get it this far, and I know I'll end up going through it 8 times over another 3 weeks making sure It's all right, and it still won't be....

 

As for the blog posts....yeah....well, here we are...quite...a....break...

 

I did play around with a template design that I can print off or fill out on the computer which incorporates the "Sykes Sliding Scale" and acts as my "trade plan" (also a great backup for record keeping!). I am not proficient though with word processing apps so it's been a painstaking process trying to figure out OpenOffice and I'm still not totally happy with what I've got. I am confident though that a little more tweaking or a quick overhaul will produce something very usable.

 

The one thing I actually did complete was I got my stock trading account open, funded and ready to go right at the beginning of February. I'm just watching for the first couple of weeks to get a feel for how things move. I'm actually glad that the markets have been down and not much happening, it makes it easy to stay on the sidelines. But I want to be starting to try a couple of trades here and there before the end of this month. I'm really excited to trade stocks, the crypto scene is tough. I feel like because the markets are open 24/7 and because the regulatory framework is still being developed world wide, plus all the fake news and scams happening I'm really unsure of myself trying to play off of news. So I don't, I've just been looking for anything that looks like it might be setting up for a breakout and then jump in. Usually not looking back at longer time frames, usually buying at the wrong time, getting scared out when I shouldn't, etc. Basically all the rookie mistakes, but I do make sure I follow rule number 1, cut losses quickly!

The other day I had tried a couple trades on XRP again, I'll detail them in a future issue. I just wanted to get in and trade something, XRP is my go-to I guess because I prefer owning whole numbers of coins instead of just a fraction of a coin. I lost about $45 then made back about $80, got greedy and got right back in cuz it looked like it was taking off (it was a top) and gave back most of what I had just made. So in the end I was down like $20, not painful at all but I'm mad at myself for not quitting while I was ahead and protecting my gains. I really need to learn more patience with these things and pick my entries properly. Even if I'm not really playing off of news, the pattern and price action is saying a lot more than I've been listening to.

 

That's it for now, I'm trying to stay off the weed where I can but insomnia is a bitch! Hopefully I get my ass in gear and get these blog posts caught up like I should have weeks ago. And finish my trade template, AND my monthly recaps, AND my taxes, AND AND AND...

and as always thanks for reading, stay safe out there!

 

thanks

Alex