PSA: Limit orders can save/make you a lot of money

Just a heads up, if you’re already using limit orders, I’m not writing this with you in mind, so I’m just letting you know that now so that I don’t waste your time.

I considered putting this in one of the more beginner subs since a lot of people who’ve been into crypto for a little while already know about them and it’s not the most advanced concept on the planet, but it’s not exactly the first thing I’d introduce to someone brand new to crypto either.

I see a lot of posts about DCA and that’s a great concept, but I see quite a few people in comments here who weren’t even aware Coinbase pro is free (I didn’t either for my first couple months), and not a lot about limit orders, so I thought I’d share this here:

First of all, as mentioned, Coinbase pro is free, and the fees are significantly cheaper, so even if you don’t want to do limit orders after you know what they are, if you’re using regular Coinbase, you might want to consider switching over. You don’t have to make a new account. If you use another exchange, most of them have this feature too.

But if you’re checking the charts compulsively hoping you luck into coming across the best time to buy or sell anything (or god forbid, trying to catch the bottom or top of a wick in real-time), limit orders are gonna save you a lot of time and stress since you’ll be able to buy and sell almost passively, and take a lot of the emotional temptation out of the equation in the process.

If you’re new to buying and selling like this, it can seem a little daunting at first, so you’ll probably want to pull up a quick tutorial (just search limit orders and your favorite exchange on youtube and there should be plenty), but believe me, it’s going to be worth the 10 mins of time invested. But if you’ve never heard of limit orders, basically it’s a way you specify the price at which you want to buy or sell something, and then you can just set an order and then just go about your day, go to bed, whatever, and if the coin hits that number, your order gets filled.

Basic strategy ideas:

Personally, aside from saving me quite a few late nights trying to stay up for the best prices, I find the most utility in the short term with setting a couple ridiculously high or low orders (around 10-30%) above or below the current price, because especially with alts, and especially with BTC pairs, you’re probably well aware prices flash up or down for a time so short there’s virtually no way you could catch it manually. But with limit orders you can, and now if you set an order at the right level, you have the opportunity to either catch a buy and almost instantly be 10+% up, or sell on a wick and almost instantly be that much closer to profitable reentry point if that’s your thing, or you can just take your profits and move on to the next thing more efficiently.

As for the longer term, in anticipation of pumps or dips like the one we had recently, if you think the price will ever hit a certain level, you can more or less just set it and forget it. I usually like to do some super basic TA and look for support and resistance levels. If it’s a buy, I’ll set it barely above support, if it’s a sell, I’ll set it just barely below resistance.

This way you can spend a few mins looking at the daily chart, split up your buys like a DCA, and set up everything you’re ready to spend in one sitting instead of trying to time the market, and it’s more potentially profitable than just a blind automatic DCA at regular intervals.

After you’re all set, you can cut the amount of times you have to check the charts down to a fraction, and at the same time you’ll almost definitely notice you’re more profitable than when you were compulsively checking the charts every 5 mins (although no guarantee you still won’t).

At that point all you’ll need to do is check the status of your orders much less frequently and then either reassess what you want to do in the short term as things change, or if you’re just investing for the long haul, kick back after you’ve made the move you want to make.

That’s pretty much it, just wanted to let anyone know about this who didn’t already since I wish I found out about limit orders much sooner than I had. Thanks for reading and happy trading.