Stats given cover closed trades for the 17th September - 23rd September
My total realized profit from the past week is -3.66% Overall the portfolio is up 2.08%
Profitable trades closed: 27
Unprofitable trades closed: 13
Most traded instrument: $AMD (14 Trades)
As I’m sure most of you are already aware. This week was not a great week for realized trades. -2% of the -3.66% this week was from just two trades in $XRP that went very quickly against me. The second position was called at 0.74, almost the highest price it hit before falling back down to 0.50. On top of this I also closed several other deep red crypto trades in an effort to reduce exposure slightly ahead of some great opportunities in the stock markets
Some interesting news this week around stocks, $AMZN is set to open up to 3,000 Amazon Go stores by 2021 having just opened another in Seattle. Amazon Go is the first example of cashierless stores outside Asia. Unlike its rivals in China and Japan though, Amazon uses much more advanced technology, opting for Cameras over RFID tags. I first discussed this technology back in late 2016 and again last year, but it appears Amazon is gearing up to roll it out further. Having searched for real customer reviews and feedback I am very bullish on this section of the company and will look to expand my current Amazon position while the price is still below 2000
$NFLX also had some interesting news this week after they tied HBO for Emmy awards. This is the first time a streaming service has taken the top spot in a major awards ceremony, with 23 trophies in total. From my own experience using Netflix, there has never been so many things I want to watch before. We know from their earnings calls that they are not planning to slow down, and clearly the content is of a very high quality. Last quarter was not great for Netflix, but as we approach the holiday season I can see this stock performing very well
$BTC faced some major drama this week after a critical bug was reported leading to two major vulnerabilities. Only one of these two vulnerabilities was disclosed to the wider public, a form of denial of service attack affecting nodes. Within a few hours a patch was pushed out to fix the issue with all miners and full-nodes urged to upgrade immediately. After over 50% of the network had upgraded (rendering the attack near-impossible to carry out) a second disclosure was made. One of the core developers discovered that the reported bug also had potential for an attacker to create additional Bitcoins over the 21 Million hard cap. Nobody carried out either attack and it is now impossible to do so, but this demonstrated that even with Bitcoin’s elite development community major bugs are still possible. Hundreds of other coins which used Bitcoin’s code were also affected, the biggest, such as Litecoin were patched almost as quickly as Bitcoin. Aside from Bitcoins stored in Lightning Network channels no Bitcoins stored in any wallets were at risk
$XRP’s surge is also worth mentioning. The crypto rallied by almost 200% in just a week before correcting back down to the half-way mark. The rally appears to be fueled by hype surrounding the launch of xRapid, the upcoming Swell event and the usual speculation of who’s next to partner with Ripple Labs
Cryptos
$XLM - 4 trades, -16.9%, -21.3%, -19.2%, 10.2% - A mixed bag of results with $XLM. A few positions were closed well before the recent breakout rally at minor losses as a precaution to protect against a bigger move down towards 4k on Bitcoin. The final 10% gain was closed after the rally which followed $XRP
$EOS - 1 position closed just below break even again to reduce overall crypto exposure
$ETHEREUM - A reasonable profit of 4.3% after $XRP flipped past Ethereum. To me it was clear that, although weaker recently, Ethereum would fight back a little $XRP - 2 shorts, both hit -100% and wiped completely. As mentioned earlier the second trade here was the one that really upset me, closing near the very top of the price movement. There was no way of adding additional funds to move the SL further up resulting in a liquidation. I wrote a longer post about my reasoning behind the trades, along with one in $BCH and a few closed positions mentioned above and below, you can read it here: https://www.etoro.com/posts/0__entry__50bf61da-d805-4a4b-95ba-f67ed2066198
$ADA - -66.6% loss realized in an effort to reduce overall exposure to crypto slightly
$BTC - Another -70% loss realised on Bitcoin for the same reason as above
The reason for reducing exposure so drastically and taking those hedging bets is that I strongly believe a move lower is still possible (although the breakouts by XRP and XLM make it less likely now). On top of this upon digging into my trading results and analysing what’s going on I feel my stock trading on my core stocks has been strong recently and could benefit from higher exposure at the cost of crypto. Effectively I’ve taken the decision to stop running a 50/50 split between Crypto and Stocks, but skew it a little more heavily towards stocks, at least until we see the bear market turn around
Stocks $MU - 2 trades, 2.3% and 2% after a “Buy the Dip” style trade
$ATVI - 1 trade for a profit of 0.4%
$AMD - 5 longs, between -3% and 2.1% and 9 shorts between -10.3% and 4.7%. The end result was slightly below break-even in AMD trading. This was primarily due to a few positions hitting stop losses when the market opened as the price spiked by around 4% in just a few minutes before falling again. Unfortunate, but a lesson in ensuring I remain on top of pre-market price fluctuations and looser SL’s
$SNAP - A small “buy the dip” long for 0.5% profit
$BIDU - 0.7% profit after unloading this position that I was not too confident in
$SQ - 2 trades, 2.1% and 1.8% - I’m still trading Square cautiously as I do not want to reduce exposure and risk missing the boat as the stock grows
$GOOG - 0.8% profit from a reasonable trade over a week
$SEDG - 2 trades, 2.8% and 5.7% Some nice catches from a sharp drop in Solar Edge for healthy profits in a very short period of time
$ETSY - 0.6% and 16.3% from two positions. Similar to Square I’m being cautious not reduce exposure too much
$WIX - Again, some reasonable trades for 0.7% and 1.4% profit each
$NVDA - 1 trade closed for 1.8%
$NTDOY - 1 trade, 0.5%, just a small day trade
Looking Forward
Blockchain Live on Wednesday, hopefully I’ll write up a small piece about what I discover from the event.
Earnings season is coming again in a month. I will be looking to begin trading less actively and take up positions to hold through the period.
Comments and questions are welcome!