Personal stories from experienced crypto traders are always valuable educational tools. 

This conversation between the CMM team and EZCharts explores his career trading crypto, how he developed a profitable trading system, his mistakes and experiences in the market, and how he sees the future of crypto. 

Enjoy!

A Conversation with EZCharts

Where did your crypto trading career start?

I’ve been trading crypto since 2018. I got into the space in 2017 during the bull run, but I just never fully invested until December 2017. Obviously, I bought the top of that altcoin season – I actually ended up buying TRX at $.20. After that, the market cooled off and I took a bit of a break from crypto until mid-late 2018. A friend of mine made the case to me that bitcoin could go to crazy high prices in the future. I became convinced and wanted to actively participate in the market, so I began day trading. 

My first two years as a full-time day trader were horrid. I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and knew close to nothing about trading or investing. I had poor risk management. I would spend 10-15 hours a day staring at charts trying to guess what the next price move would be. 

But in the end, all this screen time is actually what helped me build my edge in finding small things in the charts outside of traditional technical analysis. Developing my own edge and becoming profitable did take some time because I continued to struggle with proper risk management. But one day everything finally clicked. 

How would you describe your system for trading crypto?

I keep a fairly simple approach in trading the markets. 

I have tried many indicators and other tools over the years, but these have not worked as well for me as simply understanding liquidity and using simple technical analysis tools like support and resistance, deviations, ranges and, of course, gut feeling. Gut feeling and intuition is hugely important as a trader because it allows someone to have conviction and not to overthink their position. Conviction from instinct helps me to just allow a trade to play out. 

Trading may seem easy on paper, but emotions are a huge part of profitable trading. I think emotions come down to trusting my system. Without confidence in my system and setups, I’ll probably mismanage positions and give back a good bit of profit.

I mainly focus on trading bitcoin and ether, but during bullish environments, I do play a good bit of altcoin setups as well. My system is mainly built around trading bitcoin because I have always felt the rest of the market revolves around it and its price movements more than anything else. 

What’s your key to long-term success in trading crypto?

I continue to search for new edge day in and day out as the market is constantly evolving and know that no edge lasts forever. Any trader needs the ability to adapt to an ever-changing market – that’s what will allow them to be profitable year over year. Fail to adapt and they will fail to survive. I swear by this.

What was the biggest obstacle you overcame in learning to trade?

For me, the emotional side of trading was the hardest to get a hold of. This problem was mainly due to oversizing positions early in my trading career, and it’s why I preach on Twitter and elsewhere that there is no reason to risk significant capital trading until you are consistently profitable for months at a time trading with a smaller account. 

Some traders argue that they perform worse with smaller accounts and position sizes because they’ll hold onto trades longer to seek larger profits. But I truly believe that if someone cannot trade a small account up to a larger size, they will never be able to grow a larger account. Traders should build a proven system first, then they can size up and focus on emotions and other aspects of trading. Having a core system with data to back up its success and results builds confidence and it lowers the difficulty of handling emotions when participating in the market.

What do you see for the future of crypto markets?

Looking to the future, I am bullish on cyrpto for the coming five years or so. It is why I am still in the space, and I believe one day BTC will trade near $100,000. I think we will have one more crazy bull run for almost every crypto asset. It’s hard to predict the future, but whatever happens, this next cycle will likely be my last in crypto. I think the opportunity to make life-changing money will diminish drastically, and there will be better opportunities in other markets outside of crypto to park capital.

Do you have any other final trading advice to share?

If someone is just starting their trading career today, here are a few things I’d say. 

• First, play small and collect data on all setups you enter. Study the data to know the probability of a setup hitting before entering. This means using trading data, studying win rates and setups, etc. 
• Also, practice strict risk management and do not size up until you see multiple months of consistent profitability. 
• New traders should build their own system from spending hours upon hours watching charts. There is no secret system to trading well. Find what works and add some elements of traditional technical analysis. 
• But always be looking to improve. Never get comfortable. Edge can diminish before traders can even identify it.

Every trader – novices or veterans – should step out of their comfort zone. For example, over a year ago I lost huge from being long with size into a CPI data release. I swore to never trade news again because I lost big. But I quickly changed that mentality to: “I'm going to develop an edge for news trading.” So, I studied price action for all relevant news events and how price reacted to certain headlines, whether they be bullish or bearish. News trading ended up becoming my most profitable trading setups from that year. The moral here is to not discount any opportunity in the market just because someone cannot trade it successfully the very first time they try. 

The solution is to study, keep trying, and build an edge.