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- Poker & Trading Grind -

By Trend Mentors

I come from many years within the poker world* and we have a terminology called grinding, it
roughly means to play tightly and win consistently.

A grinder is in fact someone you avoid on the tables, he is always there every night just putting in
the hours, folding more than he calls. Its rather boring, and I struggled with it as I like action but to
grind something makes you humble to money and the feeling of reward is beyond amazing. And as
boring as it might be - a grinder wins consistently and its rare you take his money. In the long run –
you will never take his money.

I feel there are so many things in Poker that helps me in crypto trading, such as, bankroll
management, strategy thinking, and mental preparation so I figured one need to be able to be a
grinder in crypto too, so I wanted to share with you my version of that.

But to mention grinding without also involving the mental part is not possible, I had an enormous
help from my poker experience to faster getting the hang of various aspects of trading. It’s not
random that many of the top-level poker players in the world today also trade crypto, there are
many similarities.

One important would be to quickly understand how to handle the stress and losses, and how to push
the emotions aside and focus on facts, this was already in my backbone after so many years on the
felt, emotions can mess your head up bad in poker.

* Annie, @AC_C4Q

Telegram Link: https://t.me/TrendMentors


Time allocation

Playing poker comes just as trading with an incredible number of hours invested behind a good
result, for example, take the WSOP (World Championship of Poker) held every summer in Vegas. You
need to play 10 days of your best game being fully 100% focused and reduce your mistakes to a bare
minimum to finally win, and every coinflip you need to be on the right side so basically you need to
walk on water – Easy right?

Well it surely doesn’t end there, because on top of that you need to face many people along your
way to glory. WSOP 2018 had 7874 people participating, but keep in mind that the amount of people
and many hours of exhausting concentration is NOT the only struggle, but also the various level of
people.

You will meet, Ronaldo and Neymar as well as Negreanu, Hellmuth and even Doyle Brunson himself
and you will absolutely meet rookies. In all these variations you must remember they all play
different and very few of these people have you played with previously. You have no info, no history
or previous chart to look at, so you need to be well prepared with your own game – each hand you
play needs to have a plan for various scenarios and many things can change – you can’t lock your
mind, but instead necessary to follow the development – just as in trading.

All this sounds a bit complicated, but after some time playing, the base of it comes automatic and
then you adjust. You will be braver, and you will add on the flair and colours depending on what
players you are facing. Same as in trading, being able to adjust to the market makes you the winner.
Many traders now compare to 4 months ago have seen themselves necessary to move to leverage
trading to get enough ROI out of their trade. That is adjusting to current market sentiment.

Some of the players you would meet in a tournament like WSOP are also very inexperienced,
perhaps reached the tournament by qualifications, or just well set in life, with not a care in the world
to spend 10 000 USD to toss around some cards. These things matter more than one might think,
even though poker is a game with few rules its full of strategy and psychology and sometimes when
you are clueless on what your opponent are doing or what they are holding its very important to
control the situation. Because if your initial plan is invalidated, it can take a big dent in your stack.

After all, AA pre-flop is easily beaten by any two cards in the deck, only preflop is it unbeatable, and
there are 5 cards to go so a lot can happen. One can’t fall in love in cards, nor trades and your TA
and plan can always get invalidated no matter how good it looks pre-flop. So, if we are not sure, we
need to be ready to change the action, increase the risk or let go.

In poker we pot control – in trading we use stop loss.

Telegram Link: https://t.me/TrendMentors


Trade journal.

I really would urge you to keep a trade journal where you list all your trades, red as well as green,
but more importantly write down other things too and you will soon see a pattern on the trades that
are successful compare to those who are not. Then you use that info to discover black on white your
weakness and strength and know what to start working on.

For example:
- how did I plan this trade?
- how did I feel taking the trade?
- how confident were I that it was a good trade?
- did I sell to quick due to fear?
- did I sell to quick due to not having enough time to watch my trade?
- did I sell to late due to being greedy?
- did I sell to late due to not being by the computer?

What I try to highlight with these examples is that it’s very individual what we need and what we can
do, trading is a very personal thing, it’s an interpretation game of same facts that millions have, but
our results are different.

Losses and wins

Most people don’t track loses a good as they track the wins or even talk about them much, but it is
incredibly important to do this to improve yourself, so you need to do this, in poker as well as
trading. The denial we are doing in regards of losses even has a name, it’s called loss aversion.

It means that the mental impact of losing 500 USD is much higher than gaining 500 USD, this is a big
reason to why we hold on to trades rather than cutting them lose. Therefore, it’s so important to
have a plan for your trade before taking it.

Let the ego go, it will not do you any good in trading.

Telegram Link: https://t.me/TrendMentors


Grinding an investment

Right or wrong, compare to the time it takes to grind something, well that’s up to you to decide,
because trading is only going to work well for you if you find a way to do it that suit not only your
financial situation but also your personality and keep you intrigued and interested. Money alone is
not a drive force enough in long run, but feeling you are beating the game, and developing – that is a
thrill to get addicted too!

There are often project we like to invest in but we don’t really want to allocate a lot of funds, or
perhaps you are just starting out trading crypto and as you know, never invest more than you can
afford to lose so then you could try to apply ‘grinding’, meaning accumulating by trading the peaks
and lows of a coin, and if you trade against bitcoin and it appreciates you will have received even
more value. Should bitcoin be decreasing, you would still have made more of a return than you
would have by sitting in Bitcoin! You get it?

One can call it a mix of scalping and short-term trade but with the goal to hold mid or long - see
what I did there, I got it all in one go!

So, what does it mean precisely?


It is in fact quite simple but a bit of time consuming.

We enter with a low amount with the aim to grind the coin, buy low, sell high, to accumulate
repeatedly with ‘original amount + profit’ to build up and amount of coins without investing more
than we initially did. For a grind to be successful you need to study the coins movements, luckily, we
have historical charts to do so, not like on a poker table full of strangers where you must navigate
and take your decision based on the present data, only.

So, when we figured out where its most likely to swing and plot it clear so there is not much to think
about when it comes to support and resistance then you can set your buy and sell orders. Far from
all coins have clear and good swings for a grind, and it’s also well depending on market, and you
need to choose one that has the movement that you need or stick to a favourite coin and perhaps
do it on a longer term if that coin doesn’t have regular waves. In this play we are not after nailing the
exact bottom or perfect peak, since it’s not the end goal, this is the work we do to build our stack
and finally let the coin rest and pay out for us further down the road.

On big market cap coins, you can always use Fib lines and Bollinger bands to sell on top and renter
on bottom to accumulate, but on low cap coins that might not always be so accurate. I am rather
obsessed with volume changes and track that for the coins I am in and especially if doing one of
these grinds, I am saying ‘one of these grinds’ because it is not something I do always since its rather
time consuming to get it right, but I really recommend it for those starting out to get a bigger chunk
of a project you like and it’s a great way to learn how to see a coins movement and utilize its
potential.

Telegram Link: https://t.me/TrendMentors


Personal preference

My preference is to do this with long term holds to make it more worth the time I put in. But
obviously you can do it for any reason and time frame. Nothing moves in straight lines and catching
the swings and accumulate can be well worth it, and then the profit is so much faster and bigger
when the right growth comes.

I had good success doing this with coins like ZRX, UUU and SS, the intention was to keep the grinded
amount of coins for long term but with the Alt market bleeding since May I had to let them go – but
it was still worth it. For me, doing this was also a way of learning TA and feeling inspired to do so,
and big thanks to my mentor in trading who kicked this off in my head back in April as he did it with
a low cap coin cap we both were in, it triggered me to experimenting on my own, and it’s when I
realised there are many similarities to something I already knew well – Poker. To grind in trading or
poker, for me have the same goal, repetitive actions with aim to increase my coins or stack.

So now, 1,2,3 … go! Pick a coin with good regular movements, study it, see where the swings usually
are, plot your support and resistance, buy the lows and sell the highs, and see where you end up in
the end.

Using limit buy and sell is important, often the low cap coins don’t stay long on each level, and I
learned doing this was the best way to improve the holdings and free up my time.

Observe - Plan - Execute.

Telegram Link: https://t.me/TrendMentors

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