(01-16-2017 01:30 AM)Skank_Hunt Wrote: I get what you're saying about discussing altcoins; the only reason I mentioned them was to compare market caps, and potential for appreciation relative to BTC, the point being that BTC must surely find it harder to appreciate in % terms compared to when it was priced at, say $1 or $30.
We are probably more or less on the same page here because it seems that the thrust of your comments was about bitcoin rather than altcoins...... and sure the alt coin thread may need some love, sometimes, but probably not this time... hahahaha
I am not denigrating the potential value of some of the alts or even the fact that some of them may either have decent long term potential or even the ability to be pumped in the short term to such an extent that a guy could make way more money than he could in bitcoin.
Maybe under current market conditions bitcoin gets pumped 2x or 3x in 6 months with an outside chance of a 10x pump, yet historically we saw that when bitcoin was a lot smaller, it had received multiple 10x pumps and greater, which resulted in less than a year periods that guys could have made close to 1000x if the timing was good.
Also, if we research into the matter of comparing alts, we can find several examples of alt coins that have been pumped in the past few years to a lot higher degrees than 10x, such as dogecoin, ethereum and zcash, just to name a few
So, yeah, I agree with your overall point regarding the ability for an alt to be pumped to very higher degrees with a lot less capital than it takes to pump bitcoin, but those kinds of facts do not necessarily justify getting into alt coins instead of bitcoin - except for limited purposes in which you believe that you may be able to time one alt coin pump or another or to some how strategically play the alt coin odds in order to make way better returns (and maybe even with some kind of stability) than you could achieve with bitcoin.
I really have no problem if guys want to structure various aspects of their crypto investments in such a way that they are playing multiple coins, even if their ultimate goal is to accumulate BTC or fiat, but I assert that I personally am very disinclined to such a strategy based on my own personal reasons (mostly I do not want to spend that much time trying to keep track, and I don't think that I have that level of stress tolerance or even a timeline to recover if something goes wrong with such a strategy involving multiple alt coins).
(01-16-2017 01:30 AM)Skank_Hunt Wrote: As for price potential, my basis for the $2-3k suggestion or extended correction this year is based on Elliot Wave theory. It's a bit of an inexact science and wave counts often only reveal themselves after the fact, and those who use it with 100% trust are definitely naive, but it can prove useful. There's also a lot of room for subjectivity in it.
I appreciate that you acknowledge upfront that there could be quite a few ways to read waves in order to attempt prediction and maybe even to use them in varying ways to describe the past.. which may be another way of attempting predict what is going to happen based on what your assessment is about what has happened and why.
I personally do not directly employ wave analysis, but I frequently will come across the perspectives of various posters who employ such analysis and sometimes the analysis is more convincing than other times to describe probabilities of what will happen with price short or even long term.
(01-16-2017 01:30 AM)Skank_Hunt Wrote: I quickly did a wave count of my own and found it matched that of some random trader that posted his own, which suggests our wave counts are reasonable. What I found was a complex (multiple wave and sub wave) correction could be possible, with price likely going as low as 500-600 range, before beginning the next wave up beyond the ATH.
I find this sometimes, too. I will find someone who has an assessment that is very closely in line with my own, and like you, I attempt to give the other person's assessment the amount of weight that I believe that it deserves and maybe even reconsider my own assessment based on such factors that are pointed out through the other person's assessment (whether those factors are actual facts, inferences or logic).
Regarding the $500 to $600 range, I would not hold my breath. Sure that range could happen, but I think that each of us needs to be careful and even to invest a little now (into bitcoin), just in case that does not happen and just in case the exact opposite happens.
In the end, you are coming up with some kind of probability of the $500 to $600 price range occurring in a specific time range - let's say within 2 months.. just for hypothetical purposes. Let's say best case scenario, you put those odds at 80%, but let's say I am a big skeptic, and I put the odds at less than 30%. Of course, you may consider my view and why I am coming to such a conclusion, and you may even decide to reconsider your own prediction and to lower your odds to 75%, but in the end, you are the one who has to decide for yourself about what to do, exactly to figure out how you are going to invest at this time (today) and maybe in the short term, in the event that either it appears that your scenario is becoming more or less likely with the passage of time (as you know these scenarios are not locked in and they become more or less likely based on subsequent happenings).
I am saying that if in the end, you are considering such occurrence to be 75%, then it would not be prudent for you to wait with 100% of your money that has been allocated towards bitcoin investment, and you gotta figure out what you are going to do with your other 25%. invest now or some other plan that accounts for your 75% prediction?
(01-16-2017 01:30 AM)Skank_Hunt Wrote: There was another scenario where the double top on the chart would be the AB of a "flat" ABC correction, so the C wave would require price to go as low as the approx. $150 low it reached on the last correction from the ATH. That is a possibility and would lead to a lot of fear and panic (headlines "Bitcoin is dying" etc.) but I don't see that as the most likely wave count at all, because of this theoretical ABC, all waves have to be corrective rather than impulsive in form. A is corrective, while the B wave (the latest pattern to the all time high) is a clear 5 wave impulsive pattern rather than a 3 wave corrective pattern (simple or complex). So that is why I rejected that count.
Yeah, sure there are a whole hell of a lot of scenarios and since we are talking about the future rather than the past, each of the scenarios have probabilities of occurring. There are scenarios of $150 and there are scenarios of $0, and they each could occur, even though the lower you go the less probable it becomes.
I recall that in July/August 2015, I was making very reserved predictions and giving low probabilities about prices in the $400 or $500 range in the coming year or two and going past all time high of $1,163, but after the passage of events of October 2015 through March 2016, my perspective became much more bullish and gave greater probabilities to the occurrence of the same events and even tweaking my numbers upwards. The changes in my perspective occurred based on changes in the facts but not really changes in my logic (even though maybe I may have learned a few more things during that period to help me with my logic, too?) In the end, what was possible changed and the odds of various outcomes changed based on changes in the past performance facts.
(01-16-2017 01:30 AM)Skank_Hunt Wrote: Without getting into too much detail on the most likely wave count, the current 5 wave pattern from the lows since $150 would represent a "wave 1" of a 5 wave pattern of a larger degree. Wave 1 has completed, we are now in wave 2 (corrective), and it is unknown whether this wave 2 will be complex and therefore extended in both time and shape (i.e. consisting of subwaves of waves within itself). Typically, wave 1 patterns are heavily retraced, Fib levels of 32% already reached are shallow compared to the 68% or even more often observed. That is a 400-600 range. I guess that would be the bad news.
I agree with you that if buying support is broken at certain levels then those breaks can cause further down cascading of prices due to a variety of factors including momentum and loss of confidence and people hoping to mitigate losses by selling when then had planned to either hold or buy.
Nonetheless, I think that it is a bit illogical to predict too much in one direction or another because, for example, for $600s to even be possible, support between $770 and $800 needs to be broken, and yeah, if support at that level gets broken then a lot of what you are saying about $600s and lower becomes possible, but we gotta get below that first. Second, there are quite a few areas of support below $600 too that would cause predictions of lower than even $300 to be quite difficult to achieve (not impossible, but difficult)
(01-16-2017 01:30 AM)Skank_Hunt Wrote: The good news being that while wave 2 corrections are usually deep, wave 3 (if/when it starts) is commonly the greatest impulsive wave in terms of both speed and amount of price movement. The bad news about that is wave 1 is already split into subwaves, so wave 3 is less likely to be split into subwaves and therefore less likely to be longer than wave 1, but there is the possibility of a simple wave that "explodes" past the ATH and goes to say $2000. $3000 or something ridiculous like $10000 could happen as they have happened before with BTC, but as I said it is a lot more difficult now that price is $800 vs when it was $2 or $30 or $100 going to $1000. After wave 3 another correction, followed by a final push upwards. If wave 2 correction is not deeper than to $800 currently, then the wave 4 correction is likely to be the deep one.
Reading your upside analysis in comparison to your downside analysis seems to demonstrate that we reach a lot of similar conclusions and we talk about the factors that influence those conclusions in different ways. I think that there is nothing wrong with varying ways of discussing and even giving differing weights to different factors, and it is also true that sometimes, when someone discusses a matter in a different way, then either one of us can become aware of either a factor that we were not considering or realize that we may have been giving the wrong weight allocation to one factor or another.
My analysis for up is similar to my analysis of down, and my consideration that we have to get past certain resistance points before one scenario or another becomes more or less probable.
For example, a few months ago, when prices were in the lower to mid $700s, I kept asserting my belief that we were likely to have one more correction of 15% to 25% before we broke above $800 into the $900s. When we pretty much sailed through the $800s into the $900s, I asserted that since I was wrong about that prediction, then I was fairly confident that $1,000 would not be much resistance and that our next resistance point would be in the $1,060 to $1,180 range, which ended playing out as I had predicted in the second revised scenario. Even though I had predicted correctly in the revised scenario, I don't go lording it as if I predicted the inevitable because there was also a decent chance that I could have turned out wrong in a variety of ways.. because in essence there are a multitude of factors that are unknown and maybe even unknown to others until they are actually played.. and sometimes those unknown factors can tip the balance in one direction or another.
(01-16-2017 01:30 AM)Skank_Hunt Wrote: That's my "reasoning" behind it but caveat emptor: EW as I said is an inexact science. I find it to be more useful in keeping me from losing money in stocks rather than making tons of money from them,
Personally, I have created a strategy that does not attempt to predict the direction of the market, except a kind of assumption that in the long run it is going to continue to increase in value. Accordingly, I sell small amounts in small increments on the way up and I buy on the way down. I may tweak a little bit here and there to the increments or amounts based on my assessment of the future, but I am tweaking mostly on the margins, rather than changing my overall strategy in any kind of way.
(01-16-2017 01:30 AM)Skank_Hunt Wrote: but if you're an independent investor/trader and your account is at 0 net loss so far, you're already ahead of most who lose their shirts in these crazy markets. And that's just stocks, BTC is a very volatile beast in comparison. They call the GBP/JPY currency pair "the red dragon" due to its dangerous volatility, but BTC, 35% drops in one day? Something else.
Ultimately, I think that I do tend to make a lot more money because of the volatility that is expected in bitcoin, but so far I am not cashing out of my bitcoin investment, just folding everything back into a overall portfolio that I have that is increasing in the accumulation of bitcoins even while the price is going up, but yeah, there may be some need, at some point, for me to take some of the profits off of the table in case bitcoin does go down rather than up in the longer term.
My strategy is not specifically intended to be a trader but instead just a means to attempt to offset some of the up and down volatility of BTC prices, even though along the way, I have been learning some trading strategies, and seemingly engaging in a whole hell of a lot more trading than I had originally intended.
By the way, if you don't know, I did buy my very first bitcoin(s) at $1200 with the initiation of a strategy that I more or less maintained, a kind of hybrid dollar cost averaging strategy.. that has evolved over the years, but mostly retains dollar cost averaging principles and practices. In about the past month, based on the high volatility of the price, my average price per BTC went from mid $430s to close to $410 and then back up to mid $430s and currently floating around $430, and my accumulation of coins went down about 4% and then up 8%, and currently I am holding about 3% more coins than I had a month ago even though the price is higher. My overalls strategy does not really seem to make me rich quickly but just an ongoing accumulation of BTC that does not require very much more investment (beyond what I am doing with ongoing dollar cost averaging of modest amounts and the rest is just using already invested capital to quasi mechanically (almost like a bot) employ that capital in one way or another depending on which way the price goes).