There are lots of different ways of making a profit (or losing money) from cryptocurrency. Trading is one of the most popular.
This guide explains where to begin, including how to choose a trading style, how to devise a trading plan, what to look for in a trading platform and things to consider.
When choosing a cryptocurrency trading platform, consider factors such as whether it offers derivatives or leverage, what kind of order types it allows, and how easily it can integrate with cryptocurrency trading bots.
There are five steps to getting started:
This guide walks you through each of these steps.
The first step is to decide between long term or short term cryptocurrency trading. Both are very different.
Long-term traders buy and hold cryptocurrencies over a long period of weeks, months or even years, with the intention of selling at a profit or using it later.
If you believe the value of a cryptocurrency will grow in the long run, and don’t want the stress of actively trading, then this might be your style, and a good first step may be learning how to safely buy and hold cryptocurrency.
Short-term trading is about taking advantage of short term cryptocurrency price swings by creating and executing a trading strategy.
It’s more active, stressful and risky than long-term trading, but it also offers faster and larger potential returns for those who do it right, and lets you profit from cryptocurrency prices dropping as well as rising.
If this is what you’re looking for, you can either read on for a beginner’s guide or compare cryptocurrency trading platforms to get started.
Trading means accumulating more crypto or fiat currency through repeatedly buying low and selling high.
If you do it right, your funds grow. If you do it wrong, your funds shrink over time, as bad trades and changing markets eat away at your holdings.
The value of your cryptocurrency will rise and fall, but there’s no risk of immediately losing all your money to a bad trade.
Before you can start trading, you need to be sure cryptocurrency trading is right for your circumstances, and that you understand the risks associated with it. You’ll also need to know what all the buttons do.
Fortunately, most cryptocurrency exchanges have similar-looking market pages, and you can safely ignore a lot of the information on the page.
Here’s an example from the Binance cryptocurrency trading platform, showing the Bitcoin/USDT market with the important parts annotated.
Warning: Binance offers cryptocurrency derivatives which the regulator banned from sale to UK consumers in January 2021.
The red and green box at the top is the price chart. At the bottom is where you place your buy and sell orders. There are two things to pay attention to here: your order type and the amount you want to buy or sell.
In this case, Binance offers three basic order types: market, stop-limit and OCO.
Market and stop-limit are the basic order types you’ll find on almost all exchanges, while OCO is a bit less common. Different exchanges will sometimes have different order types, and slightly different rules about how they can be placed.
Warning: your capital is at risk. The value of investments can fall as well as rise, and you may get back less than you invested. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. This information should not be interpreted as an endorsement of cryptocurrency or any specific provider, service or offering. It is not a recommendation to trade
The difference between gambling and trading is having a plan. Creating a plan is a three step process:
The basic principle of reading charts and creating trading plans is to look for patterns in previous price movements, and then using those to try to predict future movements.
Some patterns emerge frequently enough across multiple markets that they’re given their own names, such as resistance and support. But others are much more obscure, and are never given names of their own.
For example, if you think Bitcoin goes up when Ethereum goes down, or that Bitcoin rises when the US dollar falls relative to the Chinese renmibi, or anything else you can think of, that could be a pattern you can trade on.
The two basic components of a trading plan are:
For example, someone’s basic plan might be to sell 33% of their Bitcoin for every $1,000 the price goes up (taking profits), or to immediately sell all their Bitcoin if prices drop below the current support line (cutting losses). To lay out this plan, they could set up a series of stop-limit orders.
This is not necessarily a good plan, but it would ensure that the amount they gain or lose is within sensible boundaries no matter what the market does.
As traders get more experienced, they can create increasingly sophisticated trading plans that tie together more market indicators, and allow for much more nuanced trading strategies.
Experienced traders typically use cryptocurrency trading bots to execute their strategies, because they tirelessly follow complex trading plans faster and more reliably than a human ever could.
It’s good to test trading theories before throwing real money at them. Paper trading or backtesting can be useful here. Both features are often found on trading platforms.
Paper trading is a way of using fake money on the real markets, so you can test a trading strategy in real, current conditions. Backtesting is when you put a trading strategy through historical market movements to see how it would have performed.
If you’re a beginner trying to get your head around the basics of reading charts and spotting patterns, you may want to read the step-by-step guide to cryptocurrency technical analysis for a sense of how to start spotting patterns.
Compare cryptocurrency trading platforms
Cryptocurrency trading incurs many of the risks of trading on any other market, as well as some unique challenges.
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