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Day Trading Cryptocurrencies vs Long Term Investing – Main differences

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day trading cryptocurrency and the difference between short term and long term crypto investments

The trading of cryptocurrencies has started to pick up again after this market’s disappointing performance in 2022. But would it be correct to say that the market performance was disappointing? Yes, it was for those who bought Bitcoin at an all-time high in 2021 and had to scramble out of the market at $16000 in December 2022. But it was an exciting time for those who saw the coming storm and decided to short Bitcoin at $65,000 and exit at $16,000.

So it depends on what side of the coin you were on. This showcases the difference between day trading cryptocurrencies and investing in cryptos for the long term.

Day Trading

Day trading involves trades done in both directions (long or short) and has a lifespan that does not exceed one trading day. The aim is to buy in a rising market or sell in a falling market.

Long Term Investing

The long-term investors are the “HODLers“: those who buy crypto and have to hold on for dear life while waiting for their chosen crypto asset to take off to the moon. Some long-term investors believed some of the very optimistic projections in 2021 had Bitcoin hitting $100,000 a coin and even $250,000 per coin. Unfortunately, many who fell into the trap of imbibing the gospel of ever-rising Bitcoin prices did not realize that prices never move in a straight line but rise and ebb like the ocean waves. It is one thing to declare that Bitcoin would increase from $8,000 to $50,000. But the gurus never mentioned what would happen between these two price levels.

This is a question that long-term investors have to be concerned with. There is something known as time value for money. Would the returns on an invested sum of, say, $10,000 exceed returns on shorter-term investments made with the same amount of money and in the same time frame?

Crypto Day Trading vs. Long-Term Investing: Which Should You Be Doing?

Comparing cryptocurrency day trading with long-term investment should not prove that one investment style is better. Both can work well if the right motives, goals, and methodologies are adopted for each investment vehicle. For example, trying to aim for the moon using day trading will lead the trader to take excessive risks, ending badly. Similarly, long-term investing doesn’t usually end well using a speculative mindset. Remember the thousands of people (if not millions) who bought Bitcoin at such high prices believing that the price would hit $100,000? They did what they did with a speculative mindset and got burned…very severely.

How to Invest in Cryptos for the Long Term

Long-term crypto investment involves getting in at the right time, into the proper crypto, and at the best possible price. Long-term investing in cryptocurrencies works best under the following circumstances:

  1. If the trader wants to invest in cryptos but does not tolerate the cryptocurrency market’s hefty intraday volatility.
  2. Suppose the investment will be made in a cryptocurrency with real-life use cases, with the populace’s potential for mass adoption. There are already several such cryptos in the list of the top 30 most capitalized cryptos, and many are not even up to 20 cents a coin in price!
  3. The investment should be made with the lowest risk possible. This will involve aiming to either invest in an ICO featuring a project with an actual product or service already in the market or buying into an existing crypto project where prices are at their baseline levels. Many good cryptos already satisfy this condition and may not be as cheap as they are in the next two years. The best part is that you do not need to catch the exact market bottom.

If you wish to invest in cryptocurrencies for the long term, this may be the best time to do so: now that we are actually at the end of a bearish period. 2018 saw a steep crash in cryptocurrency prices, but more importantly, the crash also served to sieve out the good cryptos from the junk ones. As a result, we can expect good cryptos to perform creditably in the next few years. Again, we can draw an analogy from the US stock market in 2008 (after the crash due to the global financial crisis). Many of the stocks that crashed during that time bounced back strongly in 10 years.

An example is JP Morgan. The chart for this stock is shown below. It accurately shows how a stock with good intrinsic value but a low price induced by a systemic dysfunction could rise from the ashes.

Many other stocks, like JP Morgan, experienced such price recovery. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin have already seen some of that recovery in the last month.

Day Trading Cryptocurrencies

This is the speculative arena of cryptocurrency investing. A day trader is looking to profit from short bursts of trending or non-trending price activity, either to the downside or upside. Unlike the long-term “buy and hold” strategy, the day trading strategy can go long or short. Short-term news is a critical factor for doing this profitably, and there is also a place for technical analysis, which determines entries and exits. Entries and exits have to be as precise as possible. The day trader only needs to trade crypto, which commands sufficient intraday volatility without necessarily having value to offer in real-life use cases.

Due to the high margin requirements for day trading of cryptos (50% margin or leverage of 1:2), the risk is high and underfunded accounts will not survive this environment.

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TRADE NOW

Day trading of cryptos carries more risk but could also have a lot of profit potential. It may also deliver better time value for money, as investment capital can be moved around quite a bit and not tied down in long-term plays.

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Bogdan is a genuine outside-the-box thinker. His philosophy is never to settle and always evolve. Since the very first moment, he heard of Bitcoin, he knew it would revolutionize the world.

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