A genuine market sniper and hidden gem is the focus of this latest installment of the Trader Spotlight series. Dr. Gonzo Trading explains his trading journey, market insights and advice he has learned to improve his trading. Even better, this trader has been flying under the Crypto Twitter radar for quite some time. At the time of publishing this interview, he has a Twitter follower count of just under 250 accounts. 

He has verified his trading performance in this CMM Verification Page. 

An Interview with Dr. Gonzo Trading

What was your life like before trading? What got you into trading?

Dr. Gonzo: Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. I saw the 2017 ICO craze as an opportunity, took to trading like a duck to water, and went full-time crypto at the January 2018 peak.

Is trading your primary source of income?

Dr. Gonzo: Yes

How long did it take you to become consistently profitable?

Dr. Gonzo: Well, that depends what kind of trading we are talking about here. I was solely an altcoin spot trader in 2017, almost always 100% exposed to alts, 0 to BTC. I was pretty much always profitable trading alts at first, as you could be in a bull market. With enough patience, and the right amount of greed, you could book some serious profits with ease on just about any coin.

I did fine trading shitcoins, but when I was introduced to margin trading, the whole thing changed for me. Once the BTC balance became my focus when trading with margin, my spot alt trading really went extinct for the most part, but I wasn’t consistently profitable with margin trading until probably last year, largely due to the big run up to $13,800.

Talk about how you developed your trading style and how you got to where you are today.

Dr. Gonzo: My style initially was no charts, just watching certain coins on Blockfolio and getting a feel for “normal” price ranges, and buying or selling based off these loose ranges in my head. I started to learn technical analysis (TA), but was still clueless for a good while into 2018. You can look at my early tweets and see some real garbage.

Once I got introduced to supply and demand breakers and trading psychology stuff from Mark Douglas, I started to see a real change in performance. TA doesn’t really matter that much what you use, just whatever makes sense to your brain. Horizontal zones are just non-negotiable, I understand them. Patterns and trendlines, to me, are too subjective. I’ll talk myself into seeing whatever pattern I want to be true, but I can’t argue with a horizontal, price is either above or below it or bounces off or breaks through it.

Usually, I know I’m on the right track when other traders with different approaches come to the same predictions. “Managing the downside” was the biggest change in terms of how I approached trading with leverage. De-risking and taking profits as they come, ditching the losers quick, yada yada yada. It’s not huge things that you haven’t heard before, it’s the cliched “boring” shit that makes you profitable, I think.

How long have you been using CMM? How has it affected your trading?

Dr. Gonzo: Started using it about seven months ago I think, and it was a lot easier than the spreadsheet methods I was manually inputting every trade into. I remember it blowing my mind when I first started using CMM and I had like a 43% win rate but I had 3xed the account. I was super proud of that shit. I mean, you could really flip a coin for long or short and manage it correctly and be profitable. TA helps us pick better spots of course, but those numbers were the proof of that theory to me, which I found really cool.

CMM saves me time more than anything else though. I worked to make spreadsheets with formulas to display a lot of this data for myself, but they quickly become a mess and a pain to manage with my frequent trading style.

What trading advice would you give yourself when you started trading?

Dr. Gonzo: Keep it simple stupid. Do more hallucinogens. Stack corn.

Do you have any final trading thoughts to share?

Dr. Gonzo: Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives... and to the "good life", whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.

Dr. Gonzo's Last 14 Trades