How I Got Into Crypto & Why I Love Bot Trading

Before I got into cryptocurrencies, I was introduced to traditional market trading by my late uncle. After many years of my uncles trying to get me to go to one of their annual camping trips, I finally submitted by urge to decline and took my step son with me on a trip to meet the land of giants.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see or hang out with my family. It’s simply because I’ve always been so busy with so many irons in the fire in need of being turned. However, something inside me said I needed to go and I thought it would be a great opportunity for my step son and I to have some “guy time”. All of my uncles were there including several of my cousins and that evening, we gathered around and began talking. My uncle Mike, former Navy mechanic and the closest thing I had to a father figure growing up began discussing his heart condition. He had an expanding aortic valve which he was told needed to be operated on, but not yet as the risk of surgery wasn’t worth it as the condition hadn’t become life threatening yet. He explained that he knew he could drop dead at any moment and that if he did, my aunt and cousins would be taken care of. He had been building a portfolio of dividend stocks for years based off of the Motley Fool Newsletter. When they said buy, he did. When they said sell, he did. He had amassed a respectable portfolio and while not necessarily one that a family could live off of in terms of dividend yield, it was enough to make life much easier. He got me thinking and I began researching stocks, IPO’s and began trading penny stocks on the Robinhood app to learn the ins and outs.

We concluded the gathering the following day as my step son got sick and we had to cut things short, however, it was a great time and I left with a new found knowledge-base that would ultimately change the course of my life forever. Not too long after this camping trip, I got a call from one of my aunts…”Mike, just died.” My hands struggle with even typing these words as I hold back tears in efforts to see my screen. My uncle called his doctor to get permission to take a vacation trip with my aunt to China for a week. He was concerned about such a long flight and if they would affect his heart in any way. The doctor said it would be fine, so they went. While in China, at dinner, my uncle began acting a little funny and suddenly fell forward and died. I’m pretty sure they weren’t even a day or two into their vacation. To make matters worse, the Chinese government tried holding my uncle’s body for ransom. They wanted a large sum of money in cash to release his body. Luckily, the CEO of Continental Airlines whom my uncle worked for was able to remedy the situation and get my uncle home. He arrived to a full welcoming ceremony you would expect of royalty or a high ranking government official. A shame he didn’t get to see any of it.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because to me, everything about this situation sealed in me the idea that I was supposed to take much more away from this than I may otherwise would have. After a decade of declining the invite only to finally submit and go. To learn about the value of investing during what would become the last time I’d ever see my uncle. It was a powerful message I heard loud and clear.

During my research into traditional markets and IPO’s I discovered cryptocurrencies and ICO’s. I found a video by Ian Balina that broke down what ICO’s were and how they were helping non accredited investors turn small fortunes from next to nothing and I dove in. I followed the rabbit hole into blockchain technology, mining, trading, you name it. I couldn’t get enough. I began buying books and watching youtube videos all day, every day. For 30 days, I didn’t have a thought that wasn’t about cryptocurrency.

That was back in July of 2017. I ended up maxing out 3 credit cards to build an Ethereum Mining Rig and began investing what I mined into ICO’s. My wife thought I was partially losing my mind. I was like a manic mad scientist. That was, until I paid off all of our debt excluding our house fairly quickly. By November of 2017 I had launched my Youtube Channel and began sharing my perspectives, opinions and lessons learned as I continued diving deeper into the crypto arena. After all was said and I done, I realized that my biggest weakness in all of my efforts was my lack of technical analysis and trading experience. I based all of my work on fundamental research into projects and utilized a buy and hold mentality that I still believe will prove very fruitful by the next market peak. However, I had a strong desire (and still do) to become fluent in a variety of TA indicators to help me become a force in scalping and swing trading. I’ve made some decent money using both of those tactics but I also discovered that to be effective at scalp trading, day trading or swing trading, you have to live and breath the charts day in and day out. You have to plan and executive on a dime based on the ebb and flow of the market and the more trading pairs you’re trading, the more intense, stressful and demand it is. I knew there had to be a more effective way.

That is when I discovered automated bot trading. Aaah yes, the holy grail. At first discovery I thought it was too good to be true. All I had known about bot trading was that it was something only the very wealthy institutional traders could afford and certainly not something a retail trader could do. I was wrong. I first discovered Gun Bot, which was insanely complicated to use. I bought a license and within 2 days I was searching for something else. I experimented with Leonardo bot that was basically a manual bot and that didn’t solve any problems for me. I then discovered Profit Trailer. Profit Trailer was a beautiful piece of software that took me some time to learn but I was able to generate some solid profits from using that software. However, it too was pretty complicated. I began teaching people how to use Profit Trailer on my Youtube channel and distributed my settings freely. If I spent a few days fine tuning a profitable strategy with custom settings, I would do a video about it and give my settings to my viewers so they too could profit. The problems I had with Profit Trailer though were in the fact that even with me explaining how to use it, giving away my settings, etc, people still struggled to get it setup or change their settings. Many would also accumulate bags because if they were trading with lower budgets, they weren’t able to dollar cost average out of those bags quickly which would stop them in their tracks. I used to think, this is great, but there has to be something better out there.

I began setting out to find something new. Something that resolved these issues and I discovered a brand new bot being offered by a group that I had worked with before. They had created an add on package for Profit Trailer called Profit Trailer Feeder. The long and short of it is, I ended up investing some of my own money to buy a 50% ownership of the bot and would re-brand it, help guide it’s functionality and development and release it to the world when it was ready and teach everyone how to use it. The bot, CrowTrader.

CrowTrader is a crypto trading bot that answers many of the questions left by Profit Trailer and refines things in a very easy to use way. A brand new user can setup the bot and have it running in a couple of minutes. It offers backtesting, (the ability to create a custom strategy and test it over various time periods using various candles to see how effective the strategy would have been in the past 7 day, two weeks, month etc). It also offers paper trading (same as backtesting but working from now in real time, showing you what your bot would be doing in the current market without hindsight) and then of course live trading.

To help people with smaller budgets, there is a feature called Crow Guard which ultimately helps to stop the bot from making riskier trades when it thinks you have a higher potential of ending up with a bag. CrowTrader also makes it VERY easy to save settings and distribute them to users. If I come up with a solid setting/strategy combination and I want everyone else to be able to use it, all I have to do is save it, share it and post a fairly small piece of text. Another user can copy it, paste it into their Load settings and away they go.

There is so much more that I will go into in the future, but the point is, algorithmic bot trading has become a very lucrative and fun hobby for me overall as it takes the emotions out of it and frees me up to be able to do everything else I want to do while the bot looks for entry and exit points while accumulating my base pair over time. CrowTrader at the time of this writing is in Beta 4 and available for .05 BTC and currently trades on CoinBasePro. Binance trading is coming back to the bot soon as are a slew of additional features that will truly distinguish CrowTrader from the rest of the bitcoin bot trading market.

My goal for CrowTrader is to empower a new user to be able to setup the bot and be able to profit from its use within minutes without having to baby sit it, change it daily and be able to know and understand everything the bot does and why without having to take a college course. I expect house wives, young people, grandmas and grandpas and everyone in between to be able to run CrowTrader with ease and enjoy what has treated me so well.

The biggest trick, which we are working on now is adding functionality the will empower users to profit during a bear market which has been the deathknell to trading bots to date. That is being worked on and should be in the bot by it’s first official live release.

Overall, I hope you’ve learned a little bit during this ramble and my first big post on Medium. I wish you well and look forward to your comments and questions.

Thank you for reading.

Crow Your Coins.

#blockchain #crypto #bottrading #crowtrader #Bitcoin #cryptocurrency