Crypto Traders Journal: 4/30/18

So I've been playing around with YoBit and Cryptopia over the last few days and have formed some definite opinions on them both. My trading strategy for them both involves buying low and selling high--simple enough. To do this in any serious way I had to stay away from Binance and some of the larger exchanges just by virtue of the fact that their spreads are just too small and volume to aggressively high for the type of trading I'm doing.

YoBit, which I'll focus this post on, has coverage on a lot of coins that are getting decent volume and I would like access to, specifically NYC coin at the moment. I read about this coin in a NY Times article on bitcoins. I'll just say upfront that YoBit is not without its problems. Its support is non-existent, withdrawal fees are high, and I've read from CryptoCompare that people have had their bitcoins lost. That being said, I've not had any problems with getting and receiving various coins but it's concerning knowing that if anything goes wrong the recourse is nil.

One of the first experiments I was playing around with was seeing if I could do a little coin arbitrage. YoBit often had coins that were priced lower than other exchanges so I thought that I would download and sync the wallet, buy some coins, and then flip them on another exchange. Turns out that for 4-5 coins that this would be feasible for the wallets were under "maintenance" such that they could not be sent. I even found one coin that the wallet was purportedly up on YoBit but once I initiated a withdrawal request it was immediately cancelled and I couldn't get a response as to why. Oh well.

My criteria for acting as a market maker on a particular coin is that it have a listing on coinmarketcap and at least a small amount of volume so there was a possibility that it would sell after I bought it.

One such coin that qualified based on this criteria is Women Coin.

It's getting decent volume and had a bid ask of 0.00000004/0.00000003 btc.

I bought some at the bid price and put enough at 0.00000004 that I would be able to cover my purchase at 0.00000003 btc.

My plan is to do this over and over again. I like the idea of buying at 3 and selling at 4, keeping 1/4 to "HODL" onto for when the price goes up. Sure there is risk that it could go down to 2 but I'm flipping quick enough that I can handle a few 50% crypto drops in a day if I get some in the other direction as well.

The next coin I've been working with is NYC Coin.

There is coverage for most all of the coins on YoBit in BTC, ETH, DOGE, WAVES, USD, and RUR--quite a list. They have bots that make it such that there's parity between most all of the cryptos, though. With most all of the lower volume coins they have higher bid/ask spreads, affording more opportunities buy inexpensively. If you're looking for a particular coin I would put in bid offers across all six markets, you're more likely to get an order fill.

I figured in this situation that I could buy a NYC coin for 0.000083 USD and try to sell it at 0.00000001 btc, amounting to about a 15% return given the price of bitcoin was about $9400 at the time. I knew that we had about 0.15 btc of NYC coin being bought a day on the NYC/BTC market so if I could just get low enough in the line that my order would get filled. At the time there was just shy of 0.0082 btc at 0.00000001 so I jumped in and, lo and behold, it got filled a day later.

Overall I would say that YoBit has some good opportunities to profit from large spreads on altcoins. There is risk because this isn't as blue-chip of an exchange as Binance or Cryptopia but does cover some coins that others just don't.

Follow me for more traders journals and I'll help to educate you en route to a portfolio of altcoins to HODL as they rocket up!