In cryptocurrency trading, there are different types of trading strategies like investing and holding, spot trading, intraday trading, day trading, range trading, swing trading, and scalping. Day trading refers to carrying out transactions within a trading day. Day traders may scalp the market, trade ranges, or open trades for a short time but they always end their trades within the trading day and not into the next day or several days. Crypto day trading differs from forex day trading in the sense that forex day traders can trade into the next day according to the timing of their trading session.

How Day Traders Make Money

To understand how the day traders make money, it is necessary to know how scalpers trade. Scalpers are traders who seek short-term trades to enter and exit. Scalpers enter trades for a short time, ride a few profits, and exit before the position closes on them. Scalpers typically hold positions for minutes of a few hours and can open multiple positions within a short time.

Day traders are just scalpers who leave their positions for longer periods, typically within a day. Doing this means that they can ride the loss or profit more, increase their risk and reward margin, and do more in the market than scalpers. Day traders mostly make money by using take profit (TP) to exit trades once their desired price is reached within the trading day. Thus, they perform analysis on the higher time frames like the hourly and daily timeframes.

The goal of day trading is to make a profit from the short-term movement of price on any market; typically enter at a price and wait for a movement in the right direction before exiting. Day traders are also known to favor leverages to improve their profit within a day’s trading session.

Strategies For Day Trading In Crypto

There are several strategies for day trading, but they are all based on one principle; buy low and sell high. Each day trading strategy helps traders to find favourable positions just before a major or minor market move in the right direction. Here are a few strategies:

News Analysis/Trading

This is also called trading the news or fundamental analysis. Traders who trade the news are those who make trading decisions based on their interpretation of the impact of relevant news reports on the crypto market. For example, the recent announcement by the Chinese government to ban cryptocurrencies and declare them illegal in China had a negative impact on the crypto market. Barely a day later, bitcoin, ethereum, and other tokens dived to lower prices.

Technical Analysis

Technical analysis involves studying historical price movement and making trading decisions based on the analysis. Technical analysis is done using charts, indicators, and charting tools. This strategy is based on the theory that future price movements will reflect historical price movements.

Range or Swing Trading

Traders who range or swing take advantage of certain resistance and support zones to enter and exit positions. Range traders study candlesticks and patterns to determine the best support and resistance zones where they can place trades.

Trading Bots

Day traders can also utilize trading bots as a strategy. Trading bots are intelligent programs designed to make market decisions based on available data and analysis. Bots are programmed to act like human traders, buying and selling when the price is low and high respectively.

Scalping

Scalping means trading short-term positions and making quick profits -or losses. Crypto scalpers typically do futures or leveraging to increase their profit margins. This is as risky as it is rewarding; traders spend time making accurate analyses.

How to Get Started With Day Trading Cryptocurrency

To get started with day trading, study the strategies and decide which is best for your trading plan. Besides the trading robots, every other strategy requires dedication to learning and studying charts. You’ll need to:

1. Day trading depends on the volatility of the market. If the market is not volatile, there will be no sudden price movements and profits will be slim. Coins with higher volatility offer better prospects in day trading.
2. Study the movement of price: The market respects historical charts and will most times repeat a previous movement. If you want to swing, begin your analysis from the daily timeframe and down to the hourly charts. Determine the most important support and resistance zones and wait for the price to reach either before opening a position. If the price hits a support zone, you should open a long/buy position and when it hits a resistance zone, you should open a short/sell position. Remember, other factors affect trading decisions. Make sure to analyze the charts properly before trading.
3. Take profits as they come: The market is and will be, long after you exit a position. If you are scalping on a day trade, learn to take your profits as they come. Although as a day trader you have a larger risk margin, never allow profits to ride beyond your risk level. If the price moves in a very different way from your prediction, cut your losses and wait for a better opportunity.
4. Allow the market to come to you: Never enter a position based on a baseless assumption that the market will behave in a certain way. Analyze your assets properly and allow the price to move towards your analysis.

Advantages of Day Trading

The following are the advantages of day trading:

1. Proper risk management: Day traders typically enter trades for a shorter time than traders who leave traders for days or weeks. This protects their funds from the risks of overnight price movements which can cause losses.
2. Faster filling of orders: Day trading has the advantage of faster filling of market orders. Where other traders may not have their market orders filled, volatile day markets can trigger orders for day traders.
3. Volatility: Day trading presents the highest volatility in crypto. For traders seeking high-risk trades, day trading presents excellent opportunities. Big news could cause a major market movement that presents a huge trading opportunity to day traders.
4. Trading with robots: Robots on the crypto market are designed to make the most of day trading. You can get the best out of your trading journey by deploying robots. The robots follow your instructions and trade according to the set parameters.
5. Open market: The crypto market is open all day long. You can take advantage of this to day-trade different assets according to your plan. If your regular trading tokens are not volatile enough, you can simply switch oher tokens.
6. More profits than scalpers: Day traders can make more profits than scalpers because they typically leave positions open for a longer time.

Disadvantages of Day Trading

Day trading also has some important disadvantages that you should consider before you begin trading:

1. Market manipulation: Day traders may become victims of market manipulations. Market manipulations are known to happen in the crypto space. For example, a major influence can make a statement aimed at influencing trading decisions of millions of traders. When this happens, the market prices can make sudden volatile movements that may affect day traders negatively.
2. Dependency on whales: Closely related to market manipulation is the dependence on whales for volatility. Sometimes, day trading is boring and uninteresting due to little or no volatility and day traders will have to wait for a whale to trade or move a huge amount of cryptocurrency to re-invigorate the market. Depending on whales for this limits the profits of day traders.
3. Exposure to pump and dump schemes: There are hundreds of pump and dump schemes in crypto space today. This increases the risks of day trading. As a day trader, you have to be careful of tokens that rise exponentially within a short while. If you do decide to trade them, make sure to close portions of your profit at intervals to avoid being caught in a pump and dump scheme.

Conclusion

Day trading is one of the best ways to make profits on crypto exchanges. You need a good strategy to trade with; consider technical analysis or fundamental analysis to accurately predict price movement. There are several important benefits of day trading but the risks are just as important. Test your strategy repeatedly until you have a good setups to enter and exit positions at the right time.