This post is part of my trading crypto futures series. You will receive my latest results and insights. At the end of this article, I will share some of the lessons I learned. I hope you can take something from this post and that it helps you on your journey to success. This has been the first week of my trying to establish some routine and discipline again.

 If you missed my last post, here is my last update.

What did I do trading crypto futures last week?

I was busy trying to get myself to trade regularly and with a disciplined approach. I joined a community of traders. It is called TradeMania – it is a German-speaking community. As I told you in the last post in this series, I joined it to join the leaderboard. Additionally, they distribute cashback for the top 100, and you get access to a trading journal. So my future posts will contain stats on my trading progress in the form of their analysis. Here is what this will look like:
[TODO: image calendar.png]


I also subscribed to TradingView because I need access to more alerts. The free plan was holding me back. Because you can only have 3 Alerts at a time, and you don’t have access to some indicators like the VRVP. More on why I need more than three price alerts in a later part of this post.

My 20×25 altcoin strategy

I want to benefit from the altcoin season as much as possible. So I try to find entries for these coins:

• SOL
• HBAR
• ETH
• SUI
• XRP

I am sure they will have good gains, due to the fact that they are US-based coins and have good community sentiment. If you haven’t heard it, the US-based coins will be favored by the current administration of the USA.
So I try to get into these coins as early as possible, but I don’t want to bind much of my capital. That’s why I use a 20x leverage and $25 of my own capital for each coin. If I get into a trade with one of the mentioned coins, I take partial profits as fast as possible and put the SL above my entry. Now want to let the trade breathe for a while, and if the price moves for a while, I will start to compound the position. I will describe this approach in a later post in detail. In theory, this will yield really good gains for the bull run top with little to no costs on my side. To be transparent, in reality I my positions have been closed repeatedly over the last few weeks. Either because of me thinking the entry would be hit or because the market is flushing down again and again.

So I need to get good entries on the alts. That’s why I needed the TradingView upgrade, so I have enough price alerts to notify me when certain price levels get hit.

How I analyze Bitcoin before trading 

As part of my commitment to trade professionally from now on, I do the following market analysis of Bitcoin every morning. I put my findings in my trading journal and mark up the chart.

Economic Events

I use this economic calendar to find the macro events taking place on the day. I only use events of the highest impact. Economic events are visualized by a yellow vertical line.

Liquidity analysis

The markets try to find new liquidity all the time. Liquidity can come in different shapes.

• Liquidations of traders
• Liquidity in the form of limit orders (passive orders waiting to be filled)

To find out where positions get liquidated, I have a look at coinank’s heatmap. I traverse through the 1 week up to the 12-hour aggregations to find important levels.

I use BookMap to check on resting limit orders. The following image illustrates how clusters of limit orders are visualized.

Market structure/sentiment

To check the market sentiment and therefore develop a feeling for the market’s direction, or if it is overheating or cooling down too much, I use the following metrics. 

The fear & greed index. It is a measure of how the market participants are in emotional terms. You know the only thing moving the markets is Fear and Greed! The Funding rates show the long-to-short ratio. Exchanges calculate whether there are more short or long positions. Positions that are the majority have to pay fees to the minority. To find out the current funding rates. Exchanges display these mostly at the top of the chart. Search for something like this:

When combining the funding rates with the Open Interest, you get a pretty good feeling if the market is in a healthy trend or needs to cool down soon.

Additionally, I check the ETF flows of the day before. They show the commitment of the institutions. If there are outflows, one has to evaluate whether the market is falling soon and vice versa. 

But the most important part is Market Structure, you can directly see in the charts where the price is heading. My current approach to finding setups is the Smart Money Concept (SMC). To find the Order Blocks and Fair Value Gaps fast, I use the SMC indicator from LuxAlgo.

After my market analysis, the chart looks like this:

This is how my trading journal top part looks like after my morning routine:

I hope you don’t mind my German scribbling below the metrics, which are the focus of this image.