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UK crypto unicorn teams upUK crypto firm Blockchain.com has teamed up with Stripe to help bolster its payment offering and get a better handle on protecting against fraud. Blockchain.com, founded in 2011 and an infrastructure pioneer in Bitcoin, is a platform that offers users ways to buy and use crypto. The UK firm says that 37 million users have created more than 80 million crypto wallets and transacted more than $1trn on Blockchain.com. Online payments giant Stripe is to bolster Blockchain.com’s payments offering, as well as help protect against fraud, and improve revenues management. In particular, the two companies said that Stripe aims to address common crypto purchase challenges, such as fluctuating payment acceptance rates, volatile reliability, as well as improving user experience. In four weeks, Blockchain.com used Stripe technology to build a new checkout flow that made it possible for users to purchase crypto using card payments.
ULong
by trucenpyte
ZEN: PATTERNS FAIL TOO!Dear Traders, Today I would like to share my personal thoughts with you in hopes to contribute to the trading community. When I was a novice trader, I used to trust patterns blindly, like they're sent by God! But I learned that the market SOMETIMES works according to patterns. Patterns are merely guides that help us explore possibilities. To make decisions, we need to take into account a variety of factors including the context, the CRYPTO TOTAL MARKET CAP, and BTC.D/ALTS.D. The context always matters. Whether the market as a whole is struggling, improving, or stagnating can tell us a great deal about what we should do. Sometimes you notice a bullish pattern, but you feel a certain degree of unease to have an active trade in the market. That's when you should slam on the brakes and keep a cool head. The CRYPTO TOTAL MARKET CAP can tell us what the atmosphere is like in the market. Even if you spot a bullish pattern, if the TOTAL Criterion spells bleeding, you should think twice before entering a trade. BTC.D in relation to ALTS.D and ETH.D could help us make decisions if we know how they correlate. Funding rates could as well help your decision-making. When they skyrocket, greed abounds in the market, and the market will have to cool its jets to sustain its health. All in all, what I have learned is that a pattern is not a forceful indicator of what's to come. Patterns work fine when you consider the above-mentioned factors and wait for confirmations to execute your trades. ZEN might have tricked some with its wicks below the floor of the rising wedge, which is a bearish sign. Add to the mix a MACD that was going to showcase a bearish cross. If you have jumped the gun, you must be in a difficult situation now. However, you can look back on this as a learning curve passed. I wish you the best and all the luck in the world. Take care! P.S: I'm no expert and this is my bit I thought I could put out to help. Certainly, there are genuine experts out there you could truly learn from. Thank you for your support and attention.
by Djawad_Afsharirad
6
Trend following - a different way.As folk who follow my posts know, I don't keep any secrets. I explain some of my methodology in this chart. It is bespoke. To be 100% clear, this will not work 'for you'. No methodology works 'for you'. You work the methodology through experience to create your advantages. I'm not saying that people should change to this way. I do not interfere at all with what traders want to do in their favoured methodology. There is no one road to the promised land. Controlling loss is the highest priority. The markets are there to 'eat you alive'. Price action is an important part of all this. As well, it is important to understand your particular market and learn its ways. Oh yes - with time you can come to figure out certain probabilities that may not be shown in the 'technicals'. What you see in this chart can be done on any time frame from 3 min to 1-day. I can't explain everything in one chart. I've done videos on this before. Note carefully: I do not sell anything. I do not do trainings or take anybody's money. I do not sign up to any services. I do not provide evidence of winnings or losses. Disclaimers : This is not advice or encouragement to trade securities on live accounts. Chart positions shown are not suggestions. No predictions and no guarantees supplied or implied. Heavy losses can be expected if trading live accounts. Any previous advantageous performance shown in other scenarios, is not indicative of future performance. If you make decisions based on opinion expressed here or on my profile and you lose your money, kindly sue yourself.
FOREXCOM:US30Education
by Captain_Walker
My Experience In A Semi-Professional Trading GroupIntroduction My experience in the professional trading field has been brief and unsuccessful however I'd like to share it with you so you can know how a semi-professional trading group look like. I don't like to talk about it in general because it wasn't that great and was a waste of time however this can be of interest for people's looking to enter into this field. So I'll talk about the structure of the group and what tools I used for trading. How It Started Sevilla is said to be the capital of Andalusia, one of most visited regions in Spain, I live near this city and I was surprised to see that a new trading group was forming and recruiting trader's. At that time I was 18 year old lacking in skills (I'am still lacking), the only thing I could do was build technical indicators. I met one of the guy who was in control of the group and he was kind enough to let me pass a testing period where I would be required to prove consistency and profitability. The Group The group would be funded from a private fund from USA, a first funding was allocated to us and another group, we where therefore in direct competition, of course the one with the best results would get a more important funding while the other group would be discarded from the project. The Structure The group although small still consisted in several departments described as follows : Department of Risk's : this department consisted in various quantitative analyst that would test the trading models of the traders, in short they would test the stability of the model and see if they where profitable using mathematical (stochastic) models. Because such step was time consuming traders in their testing period could skip it however this step is mandatory for any trader who passed their test. Department of Trading : Self explanatory, this is where traders trades, the group was specialized in high frequency trading, financial instruments used where mainly currencies. There was also another department but I'll talk about it later. Traders executed trades from metatrader 4 with the possibility of using other platforms, in this last case this would require testing and configuration and approval of the supervisor . All the data generated by traders where periodically reviewed, we could access descriptive analysis of our trading periods, I can tell you I wasn't doing great. High frequency trading expose the trader to various factors such as latency (network/devices), fiber optics where therefore used for the network. Monitors where required for fast response, for example you wouldn't use a tv screen connected to your PC as display since it would allow for more latency, it might sound ridiculous but latency can really be an important factor in trading. Proprietary System Department The funder of the group had a proprietary algorithmic trading system, actually I could learn a lot from this. When we talk about auto trading we can think of us lazing around while having something trading for us, well that wasn't really the case here, the proprietary system entered trades on its own however it still required human interaction. Basically after some time a trader from the trading department would go operate with the proprietary system, his mission was basically turn off the system during high volatility periods, most of the time economic event's, I hadn't the possibility to do that. It was possible to use the system with our own capital, this would require the user to sign a contract and provide a certain capital, it was appealing because the system showed performance of 60% accuracy (it's a crazy impressive result), profits made would be splitted. My Experience First of all let's describe the strategy I used, the strategy would consist in two filter crosses with : A main filter who aimed to provide optimal noise removal while keeping high reactivity and a signal filter who aimed to provide optimal crosses with the main filter. Those filters where based on two groups of filters, the main filter F was using : An exponential moving average, a fractal adaptive moving average, a least squares moving average and a recursive filter S described as follows : S = (p*price+(1-p)*S) + k*(F - F') Where p = running hurst exponent estimated via the rescaled range method and k = square root of p The signal filter F' was using : A least squares moving average, a simple volatility stop and a filter S' described as follows : S' = (p*price+(1-p)*S') + k*(F - F') Each filter F and F' is calculated from a weighted sum that maximized the equity function of the strategy. Because I wasn't patient I tossed aside the optimization of the filters settings and used a period of 50 for every filters in the main group and a period of 200 for every filters in the signal group. The optimization of the weights was done using gradient descent, because I was in a hurry I just used the weights found after a low number of epochs. Everything was done wrong, from picking the filters in the groups to training and testing the model. I lasted 4 days, seeing I was doing horribly the supervisor said that it was better to stop there, and indeed it was the right thing to do. Conclusion I couldn't learn much about the professional world of trading, you think it's hard but it's always harder than what you first thought. However it's really interesting to see how things are done. Now my experience is not the standard experience anyone would have, things might be different for other peoples, however in any cases no matter where, risk must always be minimized. Classical technical analysis was used by some traders, while others used more complex models that where this time well trained and tested. I don't know what happened to the group, they might have failed to be better than the other one but i wasn't there enough time to care about that. So let's summarize : I was lazy and irrational, my model could have been interesting but the choice of the filters where random, the model was badly known, a friend helped me set it up, the training and testing was horrendous, results ? A failed test and lot of shame, but it's alright. This is actually really important, when you deploy a strategy, being for automated trading or not you must understand it at 100%, every bit of it, do you plan to use a sma crossover strategy ? So you must know how a sma is calculated, what are it's characteristics, what is the relationship between it's period and it's frequency/phase response and many more. So in short : know your model like if your life depended on it, get your model tested and validated by a professional or know how to backtest it "the right way", never buy other people indicators/strategies without the guarantee of a lifetime support, creating the strategies by yourself or alongside a professional who can provide support is always better, then deploy it the right way, in mt4 it was easier. Well that's it, i'am still happy to have learned something from this experience and I hope you'll learn something from it to. Thanks for reading.
NASDAQ:AMDEducation
by alexgrover
27