In this episode of CoinGeek Weekly Livestream, Chief Market Strategist Gareth Soloway shares valuable insights on becoming an effective swing and day trader in today’s digital currency market.
“Anyone can be an investor,” Gareth points out. When he first started investing in digital currency, he admits having to learn the hard way. “I fell into the same issues early in my career, chasing, doing everything wrong.”
As he tells host Kurt Wuckert Jr., he eventually adapted several more effective approaches than primarily listening to his peers and colleagues.
Trust the charts
Gareth admits to being on the losing streak at the beginning of his trading career. He ascribes to “following the momentum” as one of the causes. After years of trial and error, he stressed the importance of knowing your source of information. He is keen to point out that investors only trust impartial sources.
“The only thing that’s impartial that doesn’t have an agenda is the chart, it’s the purest form of truth out there,” he says.
Be a diversified investor
Gareth considers himself to be a diversified investor. Before trading digital currency, he traded stocks and commodities. For his part, it’s essential to be aware of financial market trends as they affect digital currencies. For instance, he mentioned the recent drop in equity markets and Walmart’s recent announcement slashing its profit outlook. He says trends like such creates a risk-off atmosphere in technology stocks and the stock market, which could affect the bitcoin market.
He also puts stress on investing in other commodities such as gold. As he points out, “it [gold] is not the greatest of charts, but it sure protected you from massive downside on bitcoin as well as the stock market here over the last six to eight months.”
The shotgun approach
Bottom fishing refers to investing in assets that have experienced a decline. When an opportunity presents itself, Gareth uses the shotgun approach—investing in several entities as opposed to one specific entry. By doing this, he says investors are eliminating the emotional aspect that often comes with investing a large percentage of investment capital in just one bet.
“The shotgun approach is the best approach. It’s just the hardest one because the investor mentality is, oh my goodness, what if I only do one-sixth and then it goes to a million? I’m losing out so much money. But the pro approach is, let me do one-sixth because I want to protect my capital in case it goes down. That’s a totally different mindset,” he explains.
Defensive investor vs. aggressive investor
Gareth emphasized the importance of being a defensive investor. He believes proceeding with utmost caution will increase profits by ten folds. He points out the importance of analyzing risk before investing.
“Always focus on risk first versus reward. If you focus on the reward, you’re always going to want to do the trade but focusing on risk works,” Gareth points out. For his part, acquiring this mindset is a safer way to go as it keeps the investor in check.
Doing research also plays a big role in investing, he says. “When everyone else hates something, you want to be a little bit more bullish, doesn’t mean you buy, but you do more research and kind of decide for yourself, always think about going against the kind of the masses out there and you’ll generally be safer.”
Be a robot
Gareth stressed how human emotion is a key driver of how investors trade. His word of advice is to stay clear from being an emotional investor.
“If you’ve had a bad day and you’re upset, or you’re angry, or you’re sad, don’t even look at investing because you don’t want to let that emotion carry over into decision making, you’ve got to keep it separate, no emotion, be a robot when it comes to investing 100%,” he concludes.
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