Zigzag
HOW-TO GRID TRADE (Tutorial #1) Trade While You SleepHOW-TO GRID TRADE:
HIGH PROFITS - LOW RISKS - TONS OF FUN.
Trade While You Sleep
Let’s be honest, trading is risky, especially trading crypto. We all know it’s just matter of figuring out if market prices are going up or going down, but isn’t it funny how the market seems determined to go in the exact opposite way you pick? Especially when you have money on the line!
It’s great that markets trend 30% of the time, we attempt to catch the wave (up or down) and cash in when we’ve called it right. But the often overlooked reality is, markets go sideways, they consolidate, they squeeze, they get stuck in ranges over 70% of the time. Just when you thought you were catching a trend (to the moon!) , now you’re stuck waiting for the market to do something. It zigs a little, it zags a little, smaller moves, up, down, but nothing too exciting, right?
If we only could get paid for watching charts wiggle in a range, not having to predict whether things are going up or down… THAT’S what would make you smile . Agreed? Especially if you could automate this “wiggle for profits” idea and reduce your risks to a bare minimum. THAT’S what this article is about. Grid Trading, or how to wiggle your way to high profits without losing your shirt.
Let’s learn and have some fun!
GRID TRADING STRATEGY
Trading bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies with an automated solution has become a very popular plan-of-action because it guarantees 24/7 trading activity. It reduces our addiction to chart watching and lets us eat, sleep and be merry. It allows you to exploit trading opportunities around the clock, manage your risks without emotions and follow a predefined trading pattern that often beats the ROI (Return on Investment) you're getting from other hands-on trading strategies.
While all this is true, it was another factor that brought me to Grid Trading initially. It was the fact that even though I loved to get in the trenches and trade chart patterns, indicator signals and often unsubstantiated “hunches,” I found that the capital I was NOT actively trading was just sitting there, doing nothing. The bulk of my capital was sitting in USD, or USDT or BTC . Because I risk manage and rarely enter a trade with more than 5% of my total available money (per trade) , more often than not… 50% to 80% of my investment capital was NOT realizing any return at all.
THE LIGHT GOES ON
One day, after testing a little known, little used strategy of trading within a pre-established GRID range where every tick-up and every tick-down had the probability of making me money, the light switch within my head went on. Why not take my some of my “reserve” capital, place in a Grid, automate the process, and let it earn a little “side-money” while I continued my regular trading activities?
As this “side-money” project took off. I started noticing that it would many times make more of a ROI than my regular trading. I’d look at my Grid results and often see 2%, 3%, 8% over a 2 or 3 day period - these were serious returns, with far less the risk. Annualized I was looking at gains of 300%, 500% even 1000%+ if I just focused on Grids. uh, HELLO!
Truth be told, Grid Trading is not a panacea of all wins and no losses. It’s also essential to know that a grid trading strategy does not guarantee a stable income in all market conditions. If you want to successfully utilize a grid crypto trading strategy (like I can teach you) , you must understand the fundamentals of trading, the current market phase, how to find grid trade opportunities, how to set-up grids for maximum gains and how to manage the risks.
HERE’S THE GOOD NEWS
Grid Trading is no harder than what you’re already doing and in fact, the learning curve is far less challenging. Most people can have their first grid up and running within a day or two. You can do grid trading while you continue your other trading pursuits (as it requires little time or effort). If done right, your odds of making money are much better than almost any other trading strategy you explore.
LET’S START WITH A CRAZY LOOKING TRADINGVIEW CHART
GRID BOT EXAMPLE
THE PATH TO PROFIT IS NOT A STRAIGHT ONE...
You’re looking at (in the chart illustration) is a 23 HOUR period (15 min. chart) with a grid range of 5.48% (bottom to top) . Had you been lucky enough to have bought at the bottom and sold at the top (just a regular trade) , you have pocketed roughly 5.48% on a single trade. However, with an automated GRID trade strategy, every zig down BUYS and every zag up SELLS all in incremental and equal portions of your capital. So the more zigs and zags you have, the better! Just as an example, you can turn a 5% gain into 8% if the path zigs and zags along its way.
Keep in mind that in this example, we are only trading LONG, yet we profit from the up and down price action as prices cross each grid line triggering a buy or a sell. Once any transaction is complete, the automation resets a new grid line to replace the previous one that was hit. And so it goes, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching!
UP? DOWN? WHO CARES!
Grid trading is a type of strategy generating earnings from the market movements in a specific price range. It loses its power in a strong trading market (for example when pump or dump happens. The grid trading technique explores to its benefit natural price volatility within a defined range. It does this by opening buy and sell orders regularly at fixed intervals above and below a market price.
The advantage of grid trading is that it requires little forecasting of market direction (though you are best to seek out sideways or upward ranging market periods). In addition, it is easy to automate this strategy and run it continuously. The biggest drawback is if there’s a sudden price drop without retracement outside your pre-defined grid range. This drawback is best managed by adhering to good stoploss placement and smart observance of support structure and trend tendencies when setting your grid parameters in the beginning.
BECOME A CRYPTO GRID MASTER
Learn how to grid trade properly and you’ll experience one of the easiest, safest and time-tested trading approaches ever devised. Stick with it and in the long run, become a "Grid Master" and you can enjoy substantial results.
FIRST IN A SERIES OF GRID STRATEGY EDUCATIONAL TUTORIALS
I hope this tutorial series helps increase your bottomline!
HOW DO I LEARN MORE?
1) Review my related IDEAS and TUTORIALS (linked below)
3) Explore my GRID INDICATORS (linked Below)
HOW DO I AUTOMATE MY GRID STRATEGY?
Explore further help and links at the bottom of this tutorial.
PLEASE HIT THE LIKE BUTTON (and follow me... lots of great stuff in the works!)
As always, I appreciate your support. Please share with others.
ENJOY!
Dan Hollings
Master Crypto Grid Trader
Please Explore My Other Indicators, Scripts, Grids and Educational Ideas.
@ DanHollings on Tradingview.
Week in Review: Hidden GemHonorable Mentions
Some very nice work has been done this week again by the Pine community. Shout out to Covax for publishing an attractive "Bitfinex Sentiment Index", beautifully rendering longs and shorts with some creative code; mortdiggidy's "Fisher Transform MTF" includes a unique function for the MTF Fisher, which, if I'm reading it right, solves the upper timeframe repainting that's oft associated with studies; and "Relative Derivative" by byteboi is a simple modification of the RoC that's comparable across assets and smoothed with an SMA.
Dr. Do-a-lot
A scripter that some, but not enough, users of TradingView will be familiar with is RafaelZioni. He's been a user for ten months and in that time he's amassed a huge library. RafaelZioni's strengths can be seen in the details of his work and as such his broader body of work may go underappreciated, but it's worth venturing deep into some of his work if you want to learn tricks-of-the-trade. His most recent work, and the script that will be highlighted this week, is "zigzag%".
Zig-Zags in the Bag
A very famous and useful scripter by the name of RicardoSantos has published a slew of scripts for realising zig-zags on the chart, so what make this one special?
Well, for a start (and as far as I can tell), the zig-zag paints in real-time and with no lag. It can also use upper timeframe data with (as per description) no repaint. But that's not where the value lies in this script.
A problem with Pine is that we can't realise some strategy functions in studies. TradingView doesn't accommodate for this and we need to think out of the box in order to achieve fidelity. So if you look carefully in this script you'll see that RafaelZioni has done just that. We can set the backtest date, set the take-profit levels, stop-loss levels and more. For anyone who's trying to turn their strategies into studies so that they can get alerts for each action, look here for some great insight.
The script is actually an implementation of a trading strategy too. Here's an example of some results you can get.
What Else is in the Bag?
It's a jungle out there, but there's treasure deep in the dark. I advise everyone to get down and dirty with RafaelZioni's scripts. There's a very RicardoSantos-feel from his ideas and I expect that they're only going to get more creative in the future.
His "Bollinger ratio" was included in the honorable mentions list last week and is a creative way of merging Bollinger Bands with the MACD.
The eloquently named "net volume of positive and negative volume buy and sell alert" is also a fantastic way to view volume, and it comes with buy and sell alerts.
Want to learn?
If you'd like the opportunity to learn Pine but you have difficulty finding resources to guide you, take a look at this rudimentary list: docs.google.com
The list will be updated in the future as more people share the resources that have helped, or continue to help, them. Follow me on Twitter to keep up-to-date with the growing list of resources.
Suggestions or Questions?
Don't even kinda hesitate to forward them to me. My (metaphorical) door is always open.
Honorable Mentions
RafaelZioni: www.tradingview.com
Covax: www.tradingview.com
mortdiggidy: www.tradingview.com
byteboi: www.tradingview.com
Practical Exercise - The ABC PatternThe ABC Pattern is derived from the ZigZag concept from Elliott Wave, and the 1-1 concept from Harmonic Patterns.
Practical Exercise
1) Identify a corrective move that look like a ABC Pattern, it can be any currency pair, any timeframe.
2) Using Fib expansion, measure the ABC Pattern.
3) Record down where does this ABC Pattern completes.
4) Also, record down where does price move after the completion of the ABC Pattern, and how far it travelled.
5) Post your exercise on the comment section in this thread.
6) Repeat this practice to gather a total of 10 examples.