How can I use your indicators?

The TrendTrading Studio indicators run on Tradingview. So you need to sign up for a free Tradingview account to be able to use them. After that you can order a subscription. Don't forget to mention your Tradingview account name during the payment process in order to unlock the indicators for you. Finally, you will be able to apply them to any Tradingview chart you like.

Are there any limitations when using your indicators?

You can use the indicators as long as your subscription is running. Once you cancel your subscription and it runs out, your access to them will be revoked. You can use the signals of the indicators as you please. They are only meant as a help for making trading decisions. They don't suggest 100% reliable trades all of the time, so you should be aware of the risks and the possibility of losing money. You yourself are ultimately responsible for the trades you do.

You are not allowed to resell the signals of these indicators. If you do anyway, your access will be revoked and legal steps considered. You can post or tweet screenshots of the indicators if you mention this website or the BitcoinEcon twitter account. If you should publish every single signal, access will be revoked, so please get in touch to avoid that. Access to the indicators can be revoked at any time for other reasons. In that case you will receive a refund of the money that corresponds to the remaining period of your subscription.

Will I quickly get rich if I follow your indicators blindly?

No, but you will have a higher chance of making more money and not giving back most of it again. Provided that you use the indicators as intended and apply proper risk management.

As no algorithm is 100% correct (even if backtests may suggest that), you should not risk all of your money in one trade. Even if it works 1 or 2 times, it may fail the 3rd time, which means that the first 2 profits will heavily decimated. I will provide some risk management tool in future, but a rule of thumb is that you should have at least 3 or 4 chances of making up for your losses, so that would mean to not bet more than 40-50% of your money at a time. Less during bear markets.

I just subscribed and noticed that one of your indicators is already green? Can I go in now?

No. You should only go in when an indicator just switched from red to green if you want to go long. Or just switched from green to red if you want to go short (Please note that shorting is much more risky than going long). If an indicator is e.g. green for 10 days, it makes less sense to go in. If price already ran up and goes down again, you may lose money doing so, even if you would have made a profit if you had entered when it switched from red to green. If you are sure that it is the start of a bull run, it might nevertheless make sense to go in. Decide for yourself. The risk is yours.

What types of trades do your indicators perform? On which time frames?

The currently available indicators are meant for swing trades which last one to multiple weeks. This is a rather relaxing way to trade as it is fine to look at a chart once a day. Indicators for more short term trades are not offered yet, but might be in future.

Long term investing makes less sense as there is always a huge crash in crypto every 1 or 2 years. The often propagated hodling is a recipe for financial disaster and deep emotional distress because a lot of people sell the bottom after a crash. Only very few people get it right this way.

Why should I not simply use TA instead of your tools?

Technical analysis (TA) is basically a set of rules just like algorithms. The big difference is that TA rules are experience-based and loosely defined. They are weighted against each other to help traders to come to a decision. Traders using the same rules and charts may take very different trades, because they reach different conclusions by interpreting the data differently. Algorithms consist of precisely defined rules which always result in the same trades. They can be statistically tested to make sure that they worked reliably in the past. Depending on the quality of the algorithm and parameters they will function more or less reliably in future too.

TA is very prone to confirmation bias. This means that you might only see things in charts that you want to see. Human perception can be very selective. A trading algorithm might tell you to sell now while you are still enthusiastic and expect 50-100% more gains.

Additionally, professional traders need years of experience to do trades like some algorithms. Many give up before reaching such a level because they lost too much money. High quality trading algorithms gives you a head start and let you gather experience while you avoid losing or giving back too much money to the market while still learning.

Why should I use your indicators and not freely available ones or those of other services?

Feel free to check out free as well as commercial indicators before making a commitment. From my own experience 99% of free indicators are really bad: ineffective, confusing and make you lose money. Commercial indicators not always suggest better trades. But they may be less confusing and you may get help to avoid the biggest pit falls

Coming up with really simple and effective algorithms is 10 times harder than coming up with complex and less effective ones. This is why most are that way. When looking at my indicators from 2019, I get really upset at myself. So I understand why most indicators are ineffective, because I made the same mistakes in the past. My current indicators were constructed from the ground up and based on principles that make them robust, more or less future proof, effective and as reliable as possible.

How can your indicators help me improve my trading results?

The biggest factors why people lose more money than they win are: Inexperience and emotions. Inexperience means that they do trades that have a low chance of producing profits. The indicators here suggest trades that have a higher probability of succeeding. They give an asset some leeway, so they let the price run up a bit before they enter and also endure some drawdown in order to increase the probability of higher gains. This is why they do not enter at the absolute bottom and exit at the absolute top. The longer a signal is delayed, the more reliable and less risky it is. As long as it is not delayed too long, which again unnecessarily cuts profits.

Indicators cannot magically let you stay rationally all of the time and always make good decisions, but they can assist with keeping your emotions in check. You should try to develop some confidence and trust in them by examining their past trades. This trust can help you to better keep your emotions under control in difficult situations. Of course, you should not trust them blindly, but if you are in doubt you can ask me or our trading community for help.

The indicators are meant to help you to make better and faster buy and sell decisions based on mathematical rules instead of fear, risky overenthusiasm or dubious social media calls. You can use them to shield you from the "noise" that is all around you.

Do you have any tips for improving my trading other than using your indicators?

The best books on trading are the ones of the old masters, e.g. Jesse Livermoore, Gerald Loeb, Nicolas Darvas, William O'Neil, Mark Douglas, Curtis Faith. The rules of this game never change. They were the same 100 years ago as nowadays.

One of the biggest mistakes that rookies make is to start with too much money. If too much money is on the table, emotions unnecessarily go wild and produce bad decisions. Only if you have enough practice you should gradually increase your stake. Only if you do not lose it all quickly, you will manage to become a successful trader.

Trading is often described as a fight between bulls and bears or a war between support and resistance zones. I don't really like these analogies. They direct your focus of attention outwards whereas you need to be focused on yourself. Trading is better compared to dancing. You have to concentrate on doing the right steps and correct yourself while listening to the music and rhythm of the market. That is basically what my algorithms do. They dance, focus on the present and don't think about the future and the money that is on the line. This is what every trader should do. Another good analogy is to do trading like a kid that plays an interesting game and forgets everything else.

It is more about not overthinking it and not doing too much. Less is more. Only using the methods that works. Not overloading your brain with noise from social media or lines on a charts. These are all things that many people are not too good at, because it contradicts the normal operation of the human brain. So it is only possible with a lot of practice.

How do I achieve success at trading?

Trading success means finding the right balance between going in and out too fast and delaying the entry and exit too much. The best approach is to delay a trade decision long enough to be sure that it is valid, but not too long to avoid making too low gains or even losses.

In the case of an algorithm, you have to choose a good lookback parameter. Choose a short lookback and it reaches a too fast decision. Choose a too long one and it reacts too slow. The algorithm needs to collect and analyze the right amount of data. This time span is what I call the rhythm of the market. The time the market needs to reach a consensus over which way to go. Up or down.

If a trader is too greedy, he enters too fast. Gets burned and loses money as the trend turns quickly. If he is too fearful, he enters too late and misses out on profits or again loses money. So, the right balance between reacting too quickly and waiting too long is important. Collecting just enough data to improve the quality of the trade decision, but not too much to avoid delaying it too long. However, you cannot always get it right all of the time. The rhythm of the market quickly change sometimes. You only need to get it right often enough for profits to outweigh losses. Patience usually pays out.

My experience tells me that you have to use different strategies at different stages in a market cycle. This also means waiting longer/shorter depending on the stage. E.g. you should get out fast at the top after a bull run. But take much more time to enter at a bottom. These are the nuances I try to teach my algorithms to achieve better trading results. Doing the same all of the time is ineffective. Adapting the strategy to different market conditions increases success.

What do you think of Bitcoin price models, on-chain data and news events?

There are a lot of Bitcoin price models with unrealistic predictions. They are designed to be spectacular and are like an advertisement to draw new people into crypto. Don't take them too seriously. On-chain data is a bit better, but too noisy, slow and often delayed. You may be able to use one or two of such on-chain metrics for long term investing, but they are inferior for trading. Some of this stuff may appear to work great sometimes, but if you flip a coin you are also able to guess head or tails correctly 50% of the time. That is called randomness.

News events are ambiguous. Bad news that don't influence price or make it go up are bullish. Sometimes very good news are reasons to "sell the news". Like the Bitcoin futures news in December 2017 or the Coinbase IPO in April 2021. The Covid news in early 2020 only made price decrease slowly until there was a flash crash. So listening to price is more effective than listening to news.

Effective trading only makes sense with fast price data accompanied by volume data. Fundamental data (or even on-chain data) can confirm a trade, but does not have to, because it is misleading sometimes.

Does it make sense to trade crypto? There is so much manipulation going on.

People overestimate the level of manipulation in crypto. Higher time frames cannot be manipulated effectively. People using their intuition, bad TA rules or ineffective trading systems tend to blame manipulation instead of their own bad methods. This is called external attribution and can be a very big mistake. It can keeps you from getting better at trading.

So my fundamental trading credo is:
1. You can't make money in the long run if you listen blindly to others.
2. You can only succeed if you stop blaming others or the market.
3. You can't win without taking full responsibility for your decisions.
4. You can only consistently make money if you analyze your mistakes, find strategies to offset your weak spots and improve your trading system.

My trading algorithms would probably work less effectively if all manipulation would instantly cease (Not gonna happen!). So they need "manipulation" to work. This manipulation is already accounted for and part of the market. So you can relax and don't need to think or worry about manipulation anymore. It has no effect on trading with these indicators.

What is your background? How and why did you come to offer these indicators?

I did various stuff. Been psychologist, photographer, book author. I mainly developed image processing algorithms for 25 years. I developed my first software at the age of 13 and love solving practical problems with maths since then. I started trading in 2018. Before that I was a risk averse person, but Bitcoin luckily changed that as it is a great combination of technology and financial asset.

Name any trading or investment mistake. I made it. Except for blowing up my account. I started as a hodler until I hodled too much and March 2020 came along. Luckily I got out hours before the crash. Cured me from hodling. Did various successful short and long term trades and thought that I would be able to intuitively trade successfully. Then May 2021 came along and cured me of this notion too. Intuition can be very deceptive as emotions are running high. This ultimately led me to develop my third generation of indicators after I finally understood what works and what does not. Every mistake I made ultimately kicked me one step ahead and helped me to improve my mental as well as digital tools.

The indicators were inspired by various people and I would very likely not have come up with them alone. So keeping them to myself and only using them for my own trading did not seem like the right decision. By making them accessible I can help other people more effectively to improve their trading. By informing others about them and getting feedback I understood them better myself. This also helps me get better at trading and improve the algorithms further. Offering a subscription also provides me with more time and motivation to work on these indicators. So it seems like a win-win scenario for everyone involved and promises to be more satisfying than trading on my own.