A daytraders guide to currency trading in PoE (long post)
Good day, Exiles! Long time reader, few times poster here. With so much interest in the stock market this past week I thought I’d share some real life currency trading strategies - translated to PoE - to help you get rich! This guide is mostly meant as fun and educational, but if you wanna try your hand at this, feel free. This guide is very long (sorry!), and also contains a little math and a few financial terms (I have tried to keep both at a minimum). So let’s get started with a few mechanics and market fundamentals of the PoE market:
First, most of these strategies are based on Fx-trading (foreign exchange) and centered around making arbitrage profits. What is arbitrage? It’s being able to exploit the differences in price of the same asset in different forms (or markets, but since PoE only has a single market this is not relevant). On top of that, arbitrage profits are guaranteed, there is no gambling involved or making predictions. When you execute the arbitrage trade you are in profit.
Second, arbitrage does in theory not exist on perfect markets. But is the poe market perfect? Nope, far from.
Third, I’m sure you are all familiar with the theory around supply and demand so we’ll not go deep into that however this also applies to PoE. But what’s interesting about PoE is that we have an endless supply (of most things) and unlimited demand (of some things). We use this to our advantage.
Fourth, a difference from real life markets is that buying and selling larger amounts of an asset in PoE raises the price. You could in theory argue that the same applies to the stock market for example but then we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of shares while in PoE these larger numbers are in the 10s and 100s and can be acquired by anyone.
1. Exploiting the bid/ask spread
Theory: In foreign exchange, market makers buy and sell currencies at what is called the bid and the ask price. They bid one price to take the currency off your hands, and they ask another price to give it to you (you’ll see this in airports for example). The actual price of the currency is somewhere in between. This spread is how foreign exchange firms make all their profit. Description: Ever tired selling and buying exalted orbs? We can all agree that the price of an exalted orb is 80 chaos, however when buying one we seem to sometimes be paying 81 chaos. And when selling for chaos perhaps we only receive 79 chaos. This gives a bid/ask spread of 2 chaos. To benefit from this price difference we have to act as the market maker by SELLING our currency instead of exchanging (buying) it. This plays directly on to the fact that there is an unlimited demand in the market. Execution: Instead of visiting the trade site and proceeding to whisper sellers you act as the seller by listing your currency at a slightly higher price than it’s worth. Never be the buyer! Profitability: Low (but rises with high volume, see section 5). Works for: Mainly chaos/exalt
2. Pure arbitrage trades
Theory: In real life you find pure arbitrage trades by noticing price differences on currencies or assets on different markets. For example, you could buy Mexican peso in the US market and instantly sell it in the London market should there be a price difference. Description: Arbitrage trades in poe can be done with any currency that has either a divination card or a vendor recipe. It’s quite simple, take the chaos-exalt currency pair as an example. What you do is simply buy divination cards like The Saint’s Treasure or Abandoned Wealth for chaos orbs. The cards are essentially exactly the same thing as parts of exalted orbs. The Saint’s Treasure currently trades around 14-17c (minimum stack size 3). So by buying 10 of these at the lower price levels (let’s say 15c), we get two exalted orbs for the price of 150 chaos. Proceed to instantly sell the two exalted orbs for 80 chaos each, and by doing so make a 10 chaos arbitrage profit. Execution: Buy divination cards that give exalts, fusings, alterations, regrets, scourings (at a lower price than the actual value of the card) - turn in the cards, sell the currency from the cards on the market for chaos. Alternatively, using the vendor system, you buy Orb of Augmentation, Jeweller's orb or Chance orbs in the market at a price that is lower than ¼ (the vendor price) of an Alteration, Fusing or Scouring respectively, then exchange these with the vendor and sell the refined currency in the market for chaos orbs. Profitability: Medium, requires some math and some time. Works for: Anything that has a divination card or vendor recipe and a price discrepancy.
3. Exploiting cross-rates
Theory: Cross-rates are a triangulation method used in order to make an arbitrage profit on Fx-trading. By taking a currency pair like USD/GBP and involving a third currency, a “middle hand” like the Euro, you can make an arbitrage profit by exchanging USD into GBP, GBP into Euro and Euro back into USD. In the real world discrepancies occur occasionally but are very small and adjusted quickly. Description: How do we calculate cross-rates in PoE? Well, exactly how we do it in the real world market ofcourse. With math and the following formula: A/B * B/C = A/C. The answer in this calculation is what the price of an asset should be. So let’s do some math with Chaos orbs, Exalted orbs and Alterations as the middle hand. A = Chaos, B = Exalt, C = Alteration A/B = 80/1 B/C = 1/320 Which gives us a theoretical price of A/C (Chaos per Alteration): 80/1 * 1/320 = 0.25. Buying alterations for chaos currently costs about 0.22-0.24c per alt. So we have a discrepancy from what the price should be. Execution: We sell 1 exalt for 80 chaos, we buy alterations at the price of 0.24c per alt which yields us 333 alterations. We then proceed to sell 320 alterations in the market for 1 exalted orb. Our profit is 13 alterations = ~4 chaos. Profitability: Medium-High (but complicated and time consuming). Works for: Chaos orbs and exalted orbs along with a third currency.
4. Carry-trades
Theory: A carry trade is a trading strategy that utilizes the difference between interest rates in different countries. Let’s say the USA has low interest rates and Britain has high interest rates. You borrow USD, exchange for GBP which you deposit in the UK and let the money grow with the british interest rates while you pay the low interest on the USD you borrowed. You then sell back the GDP to USD in the future using a forward contract today (this is called hedging your position). Your profit is the difference between interest rates minus the fees from the short forward contract. Description: This exact method does not really translate to PoE as we don’t have any interest. However with some game knowledge you can still utilize carry trades early in the leagues by investing in various things like Orb of Alteration. In the first week of any league chaos orbs are scarce and everyone wants them. So you sell yours for Alterations (which was trading at 7:1 the first week of the new league). Deposit the alterations in your currency tab and sell them back to the market one week later to the current 4:1 price. Execution: Invest early in currencies that will become more expensive the longer the league goes on. Let time (our interest) do the work for you. Profitability: Very high (but these kinds of trades are limited to early league) Works for: Alterations, expensive div cards, expensive prophecies.
5. Volume trading (aka “flipping”)
Theory: Volume trading basically revolves around using high volume to make small gains (in percent) become substantial in nominal value. Description: Remember the bid/ask spread-exploit? What if you sell your exalted orb for 81 chaos and then again proceed to sell 79 of your chaos orbs for 1 exalt. You’ll end up where you began with 1 exalt but also an extra 2 chaos orbs. Now imagine following this pattern 100 times and you have made 200c. The secret to get rich from this is using more than 1 exalt. If you start with 20. You’ll make 40c profit, at least, as you are now a bulk seller you can increase your spread to 3c, so you’ll make 60 chaos, from flipping your exalts one time. Do it with 100 exalts, and you’ll make 300 chaos, or 5 exalts. Execution: Sell chaos for exalts and then exalts for chaos and then chaos for exalt. Use a slightly highelower price for the conversion. Use high volume and print chaos orbs. Profitability: High (if you got the volume). Works for: Chaos/Exalt mainly.
6. Value creation
Theory: This is quite different from the rest of the strategies but creating value by refining a product or raw material is essentially the business model for many, many, companies. So why wouldn’t it work in PoE right? Description: The idea is buying raw material, enhancing products, and selling the finished product at a higher price. But remember; we don’t gamble. So for example, Shavronne’s Wrappings is selling uncorrupted for 38 chaos right now. However a 6-socket version of the chest is selling at around 70 chaos. So we could theoretically buy 350 jewellers orb for the current market price of 21 chaos. Use the crafting table to 6-socket our Shavs with our 350 Jewellers orb and voíla; we made a profit of 70-38-21=11 chaos orbs. Execution: There are a large number of things you can buy, improve and sell. 6-socket chests as in our example. Prophecy items (require base unique, prophecy and a map) usually make a fine profit as well. I won’t go into more detail but value creation is something you can just always keep in mind. Profitability: Medium Works for: Gear, prophecy uniques, jewels affected by divine orbs, alternative quality gems and more! Edit 1; Some typos. And I wanna mention once again that these strategies work best if you trade in bulk (high volume). An average player would probably make more currency from just mapping. However, it can be very usefull know some of these mechanics, even if you don't utilize them.
I am 35 years old, make $56,000 ($231k combined), live in Seattle, and work in higher ed administration
Note: I was technically supposed to post this earlier this week, but noticed that no one was signed up for today (plus I was super busy earlier), so I'm posting a bit late, under a throwaway account! Fair warning: I'm VERY verbose, so this will be long! Section One: Assets and Debt As I mentioned above, I make $56k per year as an administrator in higher education. My husband (K) just got a raise to making $155k per year. He works as a lawyer, has been in the workforce for about 12 years. I won't get into too many details but he works for a small boutique firm, not Biglaw. He also sometimes gets a yearly bonus of around $10k-20k but it's not guaranteed or anything like that. K and I have totally combined finances, so the below numbers are for both of us. I have a humanities PhD but I decided to leave academia and find an alt-ac job. My current position has good work-life balance (I never work past 5 pm), but pays terribly and my university is very badly run. I'm hoping to leave higher education all together in the future and am currently enrolled in a certificate program to try to make a career transition to instructional design. The big elephant in the room is that my husband, K, makes a lot more money than me. When we first met, he was paying off massive amounts of student loans and making much less, and I was debt free with a lot of savings, so we both spent about the same amount. Now he makes 3x what I make and we are both debt-free, so the difference is much more noticeable. We do argue about money sometimes (more in the past), but the reality is that I have a humanities PhD and will likely never out earn him, and he knew that when I married him, lol. Because of all the labor I do around the house and in our lives to support him as he works a much more intense job, I was very clear that I believed we should split our finances equally as soon as we got married. We don't have separate accounts and we generally check in with one another whenever we are planning to spend more than $100. This system works for us for now. I also want to address the question about parental or family support. Although I technically paid all of my own bills since I got my Bachelor's degree, my parents supported me a lot by paying for my flights home to visit at Christmas or in the summer as Xmas presents/birthday presents. My parents also paid for my undergraduate degree (and K's parents paid for his undergraduate degree as well). They also gave us about $15k to pay for our wedding. Finally, my parents recently gave me $20k as an "early inheritance." They told me they plan to do this every year (depending on the stock market). We put this money into a brokerage. I don't consider my parents rich, as they both worked hourly jobs in health care my entire life (as a nurse and respiratory therapist - both with only associate's degrees). We never owned a new car, when we went on vacation we stayed in hostels , and shopped almost exclusively at Goodwill. But they scrimped and saved and now they have over $1 million in a retirement account. So I want to acknowledge my financial privilege in that I came from this kind of background. K's parents are similar. Retirement Balance: $186k (combination of 401k, 403b, 457, 2 Roth IRAs, and taxable brokerage account). Equity: None, we rent. Savings account balance: Approximately $45k. Checking account balance: Right now, around 8k. Credit card debt: Right now, around $3k. But we pay it off each month with our checking account balance. Student loan debt: $0. We finally paid off my husband’s law school loans (around $130k), last year. I didn’t have any student loans from undergrad (parents paid) and my MA & PhD were fully funded. Section Two: Income Income Progression: I’ve been working in my current field for 3 years. I started off making about $53k and got tiny 2% “merit increases” twice. Then in July my payroll title was changed, which triggered a required raise of about $2k. (I am dramatically underpaid). Before my current position, I was in academia. I worked as a visiting assistant professor for one year at my alma mater (made $50k for 9 months of work) and before that I was a graduate student for 7 years. I was paid $18k-21k in stipends each year and my tuition & benefits were covered. Luckily, I lived in a very low cost of living area and this was enough for me to live on without going into debt. I got my PhD in 2017. Before I was a graduate student, I taught English in Japan for three years and made around $36k per year. In high school and college, I had random jobs that provided grocery/spending money, but I was lucky enough to have parents that paid my tuition and my rent in college. I’m currently trying to make a career change (as you will see in my diary) and enrolled in a certificate program which runs from Autumn 2020 to Spring 2021 in order to help with that. Main Job Monthly Take Home: $7,634. This probably seems low relative to our joint income, but we max out our 401k (K) and 403b (me). I work for the state government, which means I’m also eligible for something called a Deferred Compensation Plan (457b). This is basically the same as a 401k but you can withdraw contributions and gains from the account at any age without penalty (of course, you still have to pay taxes). I also max this out, and the limit is the same as a 401k/403b - $19.5k. Also this number is before K’s raise is accounted for. It won’t increase until his end of February paycheck. Other deductions - I have health insurance taken out (about $80 a month for me, K’s firm covers his premiums) and taxes. WA has no state taxes, so it’s only federal taxes. I used to have to pay $50 / month for a bus pass (K's was free), but I don’t pay any longer because I’m working from home during COVID. Final note - the sum I mentioned in the headline includes a variable bonus my husband gets. My base pay is $56k and his is $155k (as of February 1). This year he also got a bonus of $20k, which is set up a bit strangely. About $4k of this was structured as a 3% matching contribution to his 401k and the rest was taxable income. In small law firms, it’s unusual to get any 401k match so this was nice. Side Gig Monthly Take Home: None. Any Other Monthly Income Here: We get some interest from our savings account… like $25 a month. Section Three: Expenses Rent: Rent comes to approximately $2,050 total for a one-bedroom apartment. Rent itself is $1886, then we have pet rent ($25 per month), bicycle parking ($15 a month) and water / sewage / gas, which is usually $120-150 (variable cost). Renters insurance: $157.76, paid annually. $13 a month. Retirement contribution: In addition to the 401k, 403b, and 457, which all come out before taxes, we max out our Roth IRAs. That means $500 each per month per person (for a yearly total of $6k each). As I noted up top, we match out our 401k and 403b (19,500 each) and our 457. My employee also offers a 7.5% match. K's employee offers a 3% match but it is included in his yearly bonus so it's not guaranteed (confusing). Savings contribution: We put $500 per month into our emergency fund. We also put about $860 a month into our “sinking fund,” which covers large and small annual or sporadic purchases such as vacations, gifts, Amazon Prime renewal, car insurance and renters insurance, etc. Investment contribution: $875 per month into a taxable brokerage at Vanguard. In total, we save about 47% of our gross income. We can do this because we keep our housing cost low relative to our high income, we don’t have any debt remaining, we don’t have any kids or parents who need financial support, and we’re very privileged in a lot of ways. We are hoping to FIRE within 10 years. Debt payments: None. Donations: We budget $100 per month for donations, which includes one-time donations as well as some reoccurring donations. My husband does pro bono work as well. I would like to increase this by quite a bit, but I still have a hard time budgeting for donations because I spent 7 years living on approximately $20k a year. To go from that to making more than 10x that amount within 3-4 years is obviously something that I am very privileged for, but it is still hard for me emotionally to comprehend at times. Electric: ~$50-100 (billed every other month) Wifi/Cable/Landline: An extortionate $87.12 for slow internet that only works for Zoom calls about half the time. Do I really live in one of the tech cities of the future? Cellphone: $170 (This includes both service and paying off two new iPhones. We could have paid them off up front, but it was actually cheaper by like $50 to go on a payment plan.) Subscriptions: BritBox ($7.70), Spotify ($16.50), HBOMax ($16.50), We Hate Movies Patreon (my favorite podcast - $8.81). My parents pay for Netflix and my sister pays for Hulu, and we all share. Gym membership: None. K and I both run and do yoga with YouTube videos. Before the pandemic, we went to yoga classes pretty frequently in person. I’d like to do some online synchronous yoga classes but find it hard to make time. Pet expenses: Varies, but I budget $50 per month and also include an emergency fund for my cat’s vet bills in our sinking fund. She’s 11 years old and probably asthmatic, so I know her vet bills are going to increase over time. Car payment / insurance: We own our car outright. Insurance billed yearly is $2,097, about $174 per month. Regular therapy: $0 Paid hobbies: Nothing regular, sporadic language classes and art supplies. Other expenses: Right now I’m doing a certificate to hopefully help with a career change. The total cost for tuition is about $5k and we already saved it up (included in our 'sinking fund') basically through spending less during the pandemic. I’ve paid two quarters so far, and the last quarter (due in March) will be a bit more - about $2.3k. __________ Day 1 Morning: I wake up at 5:30 am. Ever since the pandemic, my sleep schedule has been shot. At first, I was so happy not to have to leave the house at 7:15 for my 45 minute bus commute and I slept in a lot. But the stress (and maybe getting old?) has made me an early riser, no matter how much I try to sleep in. I do value my early mornings with just me, my cat, and my coffee, though. I start work at 8 am and begin by triaging my emails. I have a bunch of deadlines this week, so it’s busier than usual. My job tends to be very seasonal, and sometimes I have a ton of work and sometimes I have none and can work on other longer-term projects. I have a piece of toast for breakfast and place a Whole Foods delivery order for the following day at 10:30 am. We made a meal plan and put everything in the cart the day before ($117.36, including tip). Afternoon: I have my lunch break from noon to 1 pm. It doesn’t really matter when I take my lunch break, since I’m salaried, but the others in my office are hourly so in the before times we used to always close our office during the same time. I have a piece of leftover delivery pizza and some spinach risotto that I made a few days earlier. I also have half a brownie – the last one from a batch I made a few days ago (K gets the other half). He also has leftovers for lunch. I should say at this point that both K and I are lucky enough to have been working almost entirely from home since early March. An area near Seattle was one of the first places to get hit by COVID-19, and my state and both of our employers have been taking it very seriously ever since. Working from home hasn’t always been easy since we live in a 600-square foot apartment. Also, there is a three-story townhouse being built directly next door to us and I can hear the pounding in my dreams at this point. Around 2 pm, I go for a 2-mile run. I feel like some money diarists tend to toss off things like “oh, I went for an easy 7 mile run,” at the drop of a hat, so I want to be clear – running for 2 miles isn’t easy for me; it’s exhausting, annoying, sweaty, and generally gross. Also I am very slow. But it has kept me sane during quarantine. Meanwhile, my husband goes to our local pet store to get an enzymatic cleaner (our cat peed in one of our suitcases… I think it’s probably a lost cause, but it was basically brand new, so worth a try) and special weight-loss cat food. Our cat is an 11-year-old rescue from the Humane Society and she is a chonky girl. We had to sign a waiver when we adopted her, saying that we understood that she was very overweight, lol. Our vet recommended a special diet food, rather than just restricting her intake as we have been doing, so we will give it a try ($78). My husband also stops buy our local wine store and picks up two bottles. We’ve been doing a dry January, so this will be our first drink for a while ($27.53). I have a phone interview scheduled for 4 pm – just a preliminary interview with an internal recruiter. It’s the first ‘corporate’ job interview I’ve ever had, since I’ve been in academia my entire life. I’m trying to make a pivot into instructional design / training and development. I’m just excited to get an interview. It seems to go pretty well, but who knows. They tell me they will probably get back to me by the end of this week. Evening: My husband whips up a random meal of fridge remnants – pesto pasta with sausage and a fridge salad with feta and bell peppers. It’s pretty tasty with a little Sauvignon Blanc. During dinner, we play a card game we call gin rummy, although it bears no resemblance to the actual game. After dinner, I make a chocolate cake with orange buttercream frosting and we watch Cobra Kai. Daily total: $222.89 Day 2 Morning: Up early again, a piece of toast for breakfast (very exciting). We’re out of eggs until our Whole Foods order arrives. I’m working on creating some tedious but necessary spreadsheets this morning. Noon: Our Whole Foods order arrives around noon. Excitement! They’ve given us a half-rotten bag of romaine lettuce and substituted pecans for hazelnuts. I should probably just double mask and go to Trader Joe’s myself (our regular spot, only a 5-minute walk from my apartment). I’m just getting anxious about these new variants. I have leftover meatloaf and spinach risotto again for lunch. Lots of meetings and more organizing spreadsheets in the afternoon. Around 3 pm, I go for my daily ritual - a 20-minute walk around my neighborhood. It’s still raining slightly but I need to get out. Halfway through the walk, I get an email from my apartment manager telling me the apartment will no longer accept debit card payments, direct deposit, or credit card payments for paying rent. In other words, only checks or money orders (?!). Ugh. Our lease is up in 4 months and we will not be renewing our lease. Our last apartment manager was a gambling addict who may have been stealing people’s identities, but by God, he kept things working. Ever since they fired him, this place has been going downhill. Evening: I check my bank statements to update my budget spreadsheet and realize that I have been billed the wrong amount of rent. They actually charged me less than they should have. I don’t trust my apartment manager not to start charging me a late fee or something for this, so I call them up. They are baffled by how to fix this, which you would think would be the one thing you would want to get right, if you’re renting out apartments. K cooks dinner – steak with a Roquefort sauce and glazed brussels sprouts. It’s from a French cookbook we recently bought and it is delicious. I work on classwork for my certificate program while he cooks. After dinner, I do the dishes and buy the 13th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I watch the first episode – lots of shocking twists and turns! I’m planning to watch the rest of the episodes together with my younger sister, M ($22.01). Daily total: $22.01 Day 3 Morning: K has an 8 am dentist appointment, so he takes off early. He already paid for the work last month, so there’s no charge. I have a piece of toast for breakfast and get to work checking my emails. It’s 8:20 am and the construction crew building a townhouse next door is blasting mariachi music. I’m glad someone is having fun. At least the sun is coming out. Someone at work has made a critical error, but it wasn’t me, thank God. I was the one who found out about it, but it’s still going to cause a big old headache for me. I’m ready to be done with this job. K and I go for a run so that I can exhaust myself enough to no longer be furious about said careless error. Noon: I have leftover spinach risotto and meatloaf again – exciting. I’m busy at work but frankly, not a lot going on other than that. Still no word about fixing my rent payments. I’m not really willing to pursue this any further at this point. Evening: I start making chili (Turkey Chili from the NY Times) and cornbread (from my new cookbook, Jubilee). K is doing some work on our investments when he announces that, somehow, a transfer was scheduled from our checking account to our savings account of $55k (?!) We obviously don’t have $55k in our checking account, so we start frantically trying to figure out what’s going on. Numerous phone calls later, we still don’t know if that was a hack, if my husband somehow mistakenly scheduled the transfer himself, or if the bank messed it up. Either way, it doesn’t seem like any harm was done since the bank with our checking account just declined the transaction. But it seems really strange and worrisome. We get to work changing the passwords on all of our accounts, just in case it was some kind of hack. After dinner (and chocolate cake), I have a Zoom happy hour with a local friend. We occasionally see each other outside but it’s nice to have a longer chat from the comfort of our living rooms. We both love murder mysteries, so we signed up for a service where a company sends us letters with clues and we try to solve the mystery together. It’s a fun way to stay connected and look forward to something during the pandemic. The service costs about $15 per month, but I paid for it in lump sum for 3 months, so it’s not included in my budget above. I drink some wine and we vent about work (we work at the same place) before getting started on the puzzle. Daily total: $0 Day 4 Morning: I sleep in a bit, which is nice. Get up around 7 am. My parents are both getting their 2nd vaccine today – they’re both in their 70s and I am so relieved. I send my mom a “congratulations on being vaccinated!” text and we chat for a bit. I have leftover cornbread with honey and butter for breakfast – soooo good. Work is not particularly exciting today, but someone sends me a last-minute request for something that does not need to be so urgent. I feel annoyed. Still no word from the interviewers on Monday, and I’m beginning to suspect I wasn’t selected to move forward. Too bad. K pays for a Wordpress website for the year (it’s a work-related website, but sadly his work doesn’t reimburse him). It costs $92.48. Noon: The mariachi music is particularly loud today. I stand out on my balcony in the sun for a while and watch the workers. It’s been interesting seeing a house go up next door in real time, especially since I’m at home all the time. The workers are balancing on the top of the third story wall without, as far as I can see, anything like a safety line. It seems unsafe, but I presume they know what they’re doing. We booked a cabin for the upcoming weekend in the Hood Canal region of Washington to do some hiking and birdwatching. I want to be as safe as possible and not go to any grocery stores or risk spreading COVID in any way while I’m there, so I place another grocery order with Whole Foods just for some special treats for the weekend. The cabin has a small kitchen and a grill, so we’re planning to make a fancy steak salad on Saturday. I order chips and hummus, some fancy cheese and meats, Tate’s cookies (I’ve heard a lot of good things about these), a baguette, and the ingredients for the steak salad. I also order a few staples I forgot in our last order, like sweet potatoes, more coffee, and half and half. It comes to $87.41, including tip, but that does include like $30 worth of steak. For some reason, I can’t order a small amount of steak online, so I’m planning to freeze half of it for later. (I include this purchase in our vacation fund budget, rather than under our regular grocery budget). Around 2 pm, K makes a quick trip to our local wine store to buy an Oregon pinot noir and some port to enjoy at the cabin ($59.45). This store has an outdoor walk-up counter where you can tell the owner what you’re looking for, and he brings you some options (the store is way too small to allow customers to enter during Covid). It’s fun to chat with another human being, even briefly. Evening: After work, we spend a little time rebalancing our investing and retirement accounts. We decide to put more money into bonds and a little bit into REIT’s as a hedge against a potential crash or recession in the future. Then I start making dinner – Broken Eggs (Huevas Rotas) from the NY Times cooking site. You basically cook the potatoes in a skillet in water, spices, and olive oil, and then sauté them to crisp them up once the water evaporates. Then you add onion, lots of garlic, and finally some eggs. It is delicious. I eat it with leftover cornbread while watching RuPaul’s Drag Race season 13 with my sister – we watch the first two episodes. It’s full of twists and turns. A note about this – we have an elaborate procedure for watching shows together developed during quarantine whereby we start the show at the same with an earbud in one ear, while FaceTiming. I also have chocolate cake, of course. Later, I get an email that I’ve signed up for HBO on Amazon Prime. I definitely have not. I text my mom, who shares my account, and she tells me she signed up by mistake. I cancel right away and luckily they won’t charge us for it. Meanwhile, K is doing an online Japanese language class over Zoom. He’s been interested in learning ever since we went to Japan last January. I lived in Japan for 3 years so I was able to take us around to a lot of more obscure places and he really enjoyed the trip – it was a blast. K starts a YouTube yoga class (from Do Yoga With Me – my favorite channel) and I join him for part of it before bed around 10 pm. Daily total: $239.34 Day 5 Morning: I get up around 7 am and we go for a run first thing. I prefer running early in the morning because there are fewer people to avoid during COVID. We do a different route today – it’s longer (3 miles) but has fewer hills. It’s a slog, as always, but I feel good when I get back right around 8 am. I jump straight onto my computer to start checking work emails and my husband makes us avocado and egg toast for breakfast - it is absolutely delicious. We talk about how our bathroom smells distinctly mildewy (yay for being a grown-up because I guess this is what we talk about now) and we buy two big buckets of DampRid on Amazon ($26.60). I’ve found this to be a necessity in Seattle. Mid-morning, I take a break from work and start packing for our trip to the cabin. Noon: I have leftover potatoes and cornbread for lunch, and my husband has the leftover chili. We finish getting ready to leave and head out right after lunch, taking a half day. The only problem is that I have attend a meeting at 3:30 pm, so we head out hoping to get there in time. Our cabin is near Quilcene in the Hood Canal region of Washington, about a 2 hour drive or a 2 hour ferry ride + drive. We are initially planning to take the ferry both ways, but realize that we mistimed the ferry departure, so we drive the whole way instead. Luckily, there’s little traffic mid-day, and we arrive at our Airbnb around 3:00 pm. The Airbnb is beautiful! It’s a small cabin handmade by the owner, whose house is next door. It’s very rural, with a beautiful view. It’s tiny, but has a little kitchen and a waterfall-style shower with river rocks on the floor. It’s a great place to get away for a short time. Luckily, it also has good reception and I’m able to sit in on my meeting with no problems. My husband also does a little work, and then at 5 pm we’re free! In our planning, we decided to get takeout on Friday night, since the little kitchen isn’t designed for any serious cooking. We call ahead to a local restaurant to order burgers (one of only 2 restaurants in the whole town). It’s around 5:30 pm and the place is deserted. It’s a microbrewery, but they tell us they haven’t been making beer since COVID-19 hit. None of the workers are wearing masks when I walk in, but they put them on when they see I’m wearing one. I pick up our order - a few bottled beers and burgers and fries ($49.52 including tip). Back at our Airbnb, we watch Big Trouble in Little China and enjoy our very messy, but delicious, burgers (it costs $4.39 to rent). The movie is very campy but fun. I love silly action movies, as you will see with my other viewing choices. We wrap up the night in a very exciting fashion, eating chocolate cake and watching old episodes of the original Star Trek. Daily total: $80.51 Day 6 Morning & noon: When we wake up around 8 am, the weather is looking thankfully clear and even sunny! We were expecting rain, so we’re really glad. We decide to go hiking today, and we head out before even having breakfast, with snacks and lunches packed. Our first destination is a hike called Mt. Zion, but unfortunately, we run into enough snow 2 miles before the trailhead that we decide to turn back. We don’t have any traction for our Subaru and don’t want to risk getting stuck on a very narrow mountain road. Instead, we drive another hour or so to the Lena Lake trailhead, a very popular and less strenuous trail. It’s about 7.5 miles roundtrip with 1200 feet of elevation gain. By this time, it’s around 11:30, but luckily there is still parking. It’s a great hike up, and we run into relatively few people. We always mask up whenever we pass anyone, as does about 50% of the people we meet. The others… not so much. Around a mile from the lake, we start to run into snow. It’s turned into a beautiful sunny day, and I’m loving seeing all this snow! It’s a bit slippery, but not too bad. We make it to the lake mid-day, and it’s super jammed – there’s only a small viewpoint accessible, so everyone is crowded in there. I feel a bit uneasy with all the unmasked people, but we manage to find a spot away from the crowd and sit down to eat our lunch of apples, chips, and energy bars. There are a ton of robber jays there (Canada Jays) which try to eat our chips. It is fun watching them, but I’m annoyed to see some kids feeding them – it’ll just make them that much more aggressive. Bad trail manners. On our way back down, we get stuck behind a group of 5 unmasked adults, who refuse to cede the narrow trail to faster hikers. I’m a slow hiker myself, so, to be clear, I’m not angry at slower walkers being on the trail but have some self-awareness and let people pass! especially if you’re going to go hiking in a big group during a pandemic! We finally get back down and head back to our Airbnb. Evening: Back home, we explore some of the trails our Airbnb host has set up around his extensive property, and then relax on the deck. The sun is breaking through the clouds and it feels wonderful to sit out in nature and feel the sun on my back. We open up a bottle of wine and have a few pre-dinner snacks (more chips and hummus). For this night, we brought ingredients to make a steak salad. Our Airbnb host has kindly set up a charcoal grill for us, so we grilled the steak and toast some bread on the side. We eat dinner while watching the truly terrible Jean Claude Van Damme movie Bloodsport and finish up the very last of my chocolate cake. It’s amazing that anyone ever let Van Damme act… or should I say ‘act.’ I also have a Tate’s chocolate chip cookie or two, accompanied by a little port. My husband and I are truly very old people at heart, so we finish up the night watching a few episodes of Columbo. Daily total: $0 Day 7 Morning: Unfortunately, K had insomnia last night, so he sleeps in pretty late. I drink coffee in bed and enjoy looking at the view out our big windows. Once he’s up, we get packed up and write a thank you note for our host. It was a great stay. One of my big hobbies is birding and K enjoys wildlife photography, so we go out to look for some lifers! (The first time you see a new species of bird). Did I mention we are very old people in (relatively) young bodies? We first go to Dosewallips State Park and see some bald eagles, great blue herons, lots of various ducks, and a flock of Canada Geese, which, strangely, includes a domesticated gray goose. He’s much larger than the Canada Geese and seems to be watching over them. It’s kind of cute. Unfortunately, a lot of the birds are too far from shore to be seen clearly. Our next stop is Point No Point (I love all the sad & disappointed names that early Westerner explorers gave places in the Washington/Oregon coast), a popular birding spot. We see a ton of birds here, and I can understand why it’s so well-known - Red-Breasted Mergansers, Western Grebes, Common Goldeneyes, Pacific Loons, and a few others I can’t identify yet. Most excitingly though, we see a whole pile of otters! They’re lounging around together on a rock just offshore and a ton of people are watching. We watch as they all slip off the rock and go hunting in the shore. It’s my first otter sighting in the wild, and it’s so cool! We also see some seals and possibly a sea lion. It’s a great spot for wildlife. We eat some snacks (hummus, chips, some sliced meat & cheese) before we head out. I really want to come back to this area another time and explore further, but K has decided that we need to get back home in time for the Big Game. We take the 3:00 pm ferry back to Seattle ($16.40) and get home around 3:45 pm. I veg out at home while my husband watches football. He’s a Patriots fan but he still loves Tom Brady (??) so he’s happy to see Florida win. I don’t understand sports team loyalties at all, but whatever, I’m glad he’s happy. We order from a new Indian place called Spice Box and get vindaloo, roganjosh, and vegetables pakora – so tasty ($53.96). Happily, there’s enough left over for lunch the next day, since I have no plans for what we will eat yet! I’m really dreading work the next day, as I know that it will be obnoxious. I want to get out of my job so badly, but it doesn’t look like I’m going on to the next interview stage for the job I interviewed no back on Monday. I’m feeling kind of down about it. I try to stay positive and promise that I’ll apply for at least 2-3 new jobs next week. I bake up some frozen cookie dough I had in the freezer and feel sorry for myself. We end the night by watching another episode of Columbo. Daily total: 70.36 Food + Drink: $395.23 Fun / Entertainment: $26.40 Home + Health: $26.60 Clothes + Beauty: $0 Transport: $16.40 Other: $170.48 Grand Total: $635.11 I think this week was pretty normal for us. Obviously we spent a bit more than usual due to the weekend cabin trip, but nothing outrageous. Our largest consumer spending category is definitely food and drink – we live in a very busy area of Seattle with tons of restaurants and bars so believe it or not, we actually used to spend even more on eating out. We still try to support our local places by getting takeout or delivery during the pandemic and even occasionally getting a few drinks outside. I spent more than usual on groceries due to stocking up for the weekend away.
I was going to just let my Simple account roll over to the new bank to see how they handled it but since my card started getting declined all over the place for no reason and support was no help, I decided to jump ship. After Envel breaking and lot letting me sign up, and Schwab turning me down for lack of credit history (I've basically lived off-grid in terms of debt all my life), I settled on SoFi as my first trial for a new primary bank. Since I really wish there'd been more posts like this to help me compare options, I'm making one for SoFi. I'll go through the big Simple features one by one and make a comparison.
Goals (Vaults):
Vaults are, for all intents and purposes, identical to Simple Goals. You can create an arbitrary numbers of them. You can set a goal amount. You can schedule monthly contributions to a Vault. You can turn on AutoSave for a Vault which will allow you to automatically funnel a dollar amount or percentage of your direct deposits into a Vault. You can also turn on Roudup Transfer to select a vault to grow with your round ups. You can decide to automatically draw from Vaults when your spending balance runs out, or you can disable this and your card will be declined if all of your money is tied up in Vaults. You cannot have protected and unprotected vaults like you could in Simple. It is all or nothing. The feature I liked from Simple that it's missing is the ability to only contribute X amount each day if you have disposable income, or money in Safe to Spend. Since there's no direct 1:1 comparison to Safe to Spend in SoFi, this is not possible. I liked the idea with Simple that when I have extra spending money, I'm also saving extra.
Expenses
There's no analogous functionality to this in SoFi though you can schedule regular bill pay.
Spending Categories
You can categorize your spending and review it at a glance in SoFi much like you can in Simple. There aren't as many fine-grained categories, but you can also create arbitrary custom tags to drill down with as much detail as you want. The part where SoFi really shines is you can track spending in more than one account, similar to Mint or YNAB. More on that later.
Joint Accounts
You can set up a joint account simply by inviting someone. It's as easy and powerful as Simple. SoFi does not currently support owning a joint and individual account, but the FAQ says it's on their roadmap as a feature.
Sharing
Just like Simple, SoFi supports instant transfers between members. It also supports sending money to anyone via their email address or SMS. No idea how this actually works or looks on the receiving end. It's poorly documented.
Checks
You can order paper checks, or, like Simple used to support, send a check from the app by using the Bill Pay interface. You can deposit checks through the mobile app at $25,000/day.
Cards
Just like Simple, you can lock your card or change your pin instantly through the app or website. That's it for Simple features. The only big thing missing is the concept of Safe to Spend and expense automation.
Things Simple didn't do
The big one for me is the Relay feature. This is an all-in-one dashboard for your net worth. You can add any account or asset to your SoFi account to track its worth. If the account supports Plaid, you can also see transaction history. This lets you see and categorize your spending on just from your SoFi Money account, but any account you have connected. This lets you track or spending similar to Mint. You can add bank accounts, credit, investment accounts, loans, cars, real estate, or arbitrary assets and liabilities. Seen this all in one place and automated is very satisfying. Investment accounts. This is what made me try SoFi in the first place. I just recently started taking investing seriously and actually paying attention to my 401k. In SoFi you can open an Active Investing account similar to Robinhood where you can buy whole or fractional shares in stocks and ETFs. You can open IRAs (including SEP for self-employed people or anyone with side-gig money). You can open joint investing accounts. You can open "Auto Investing" accounts that operate similar to ETFs where you set an aggressiveness goal and they manage your investing for you. This is a good replacement for a savings goal. Just create a conservative automated investing account and you can earn much better interest on your money while you save it up. You can also buy a handfull of common cryptocurrencies. This is all wrapped up in an attractive UI with guided wizards to help you choose the best options for your investment accounts based on your goals. They will also cover up to $75 in transfer fees to transfer investment accounts to SoFi. They support personal loans, home loans, and student loans. There appear to be interest perks for members who set up autopay from their SoFi checking accounts. They have an invite-only credit card program with various rewards that are tied into other features in SoFi. Free access to financial and career advisors online along with a whole slew of other financial, life, and career resources. Their GetThatRaise tool will ask you about your salary, your seniority, your job title, what kind of success you've had, and will help you put together a proposal for a raise based on average salaries in your area for your position. Local offers lets you browse businesses with promotional SoFi deals. If I go to Quiznos right now I get 10% cash back if I run my SoFi card as credit. Your Vantage score is always available for free and tracked. Referal bonuses can be had for getting people to open investment accounts or get loans. There are a bunch of partner offers similar to being a AAA or Costco member. They have a bunch of articles to help you learn as you go.
Things I dislike
A lot of features like the GetThatRaise tool are not really obviously exposed anywhere. I've found things by digging around FAQs and documentation where are not linked anywhere else on the site that I can find. They're not really doing a great job of pushing their features in front of the user. No opening links in new tabs. This is a big quality of life annoyance. I can't click a stock and open it in a new page. If you get a few links deep looking at stocks you can't just go back to where you were. You have to start over and search again instead of going back to your previous results. This is incredibly annoying. Feedback isn't always great. For example if you open an investment account, there's a pending approval period. This is not listed anywhere on the web site. The mobile app indicates a pending approval. But on the website the only way to know it's not approved is your initial deposit hasn't gone through yet. There are a lot of other little things that could be better documented or better communicated to the user. Screenshots: Dashboard Vaults Investment Dashboard Relay Dashboard Relay Account Listing ...continued I'm very happy with SoFi so far. I'm still digging up features. Being able to invest through my bank app is awesome. I'm going to screw around with some fun WSB-style gambling with disposable income in active investing, and set up longer term and lower risk accounts for savings. The APY on the Money (checking) account is 0.25% but I don't really care as all I'm going to keep there is my spending money and my emergency fund in a vault. I plan to keep as much of my money as possible in some level of investment account and "high yield" checking/savings accounts have been a complete joke for some time. If you're using one of the other common banks people are jumping to, feel free to post a breakdown like this to help others decide.
20Cogs - I've earned £344 (and growing)! Here's my referral link, screenshots of confirmed money and a description of how it works
I've received my money in to my bank account from 20Cogs and can confirm for certain that it is a great way to earn some easy free money. My first withdrawal proof: Screenshot of bank accountScreenshot of 20Cogs account earnings in November 2020 PROOF of £340 earnings: Screenshot of 20Cogs account earnings as of today Jan 30th 2021 This post is a walk though my experience of it, some helpful info and some proof screenshots.I want to share my referral link as using this site has been really positive for me and paid some bills this winter! When you sign up using my link you get a £5 bonus:referral link. We both benefit from you using my link as I will receive the value of 5% of your earnings too. I hope you find this information worthwhile, and I am happy to answer questions and provide more screenshots in the comments. **How it works:*\* Starting at Cog 1, you select from a choice of offers and complete a sign-up to unlock the cog. Once complete you move on to the next. Each completed cog earns you money. You cash out when all the cogs are completed. You can speed through (like me) and earn less, or you can play the slow game and wait for better offers. Average is apparently around £200. Examples of my offers: Download the Yolt app - £5 reward Amazon Prime free trial - £5 reward LottoGo deposit £1.00 - £7 reward Free 14 day Ancestry trial - £2 reward Screenshot of cog examples I had heard of and trusted basically every site I signed up to. Some of the offers you can spend money on, but you don't have to. I prefer not to. For instance, you can pay £1.99 for a Graze box and 20Cogs rewards you £4. You always have around 5 offers to choose from so there's always an option to not spend any money. I spent £1 on the lotto offer as the reward from 20Cogs is £7. Then I won a fiver! Boom. You can complete more than one offer on each cog, but I advise doing that at the end once each cog is confirmed and Cog 20 is unlocked ready for cash out. Once you have completed 20cogs and cashed out you can continue to earn and cash out repeatedly as long as earnings are over £5. GREAT news! Since collecting my £169.98 I have earned a further £174.34! Screenshot of two complete tasks on one cogScreenshot of my 20Cogs account earnings It's definitely worth it for a slow but steady earner. I checked mine quickly for new offers each day and chose to complete a new cog roughly on a weekly basis. It works well on both phone and desktop. I started on 15th August 2020 and received my first payment on 25th November 2020. Info:
Some cogs take 30 days to confirm, but most are pretty quick. However, this doesn't affect the speed you can move on. Once you have clicked the cog link the next cog unlocks. In theory, you can unlock all 20 cogs in one day and complete all the sign-ups, then just wait for them to confirm.
Be sure to read the Cog T's & C's. They are very clear, very helpful, and placed right next to the Cog info: screenshot. In the example 20Cogs state: "Your monthly payment [to Great Magazines] will continue if you do not cancel your subscriptions. Subscriptions can be cancelled in the My Account section.". I love this as they actively help you in the T's&C's to cancel sign-ups and ensure you are not charged ongoing fees.
Customer service are really helpful. One of my links went to a site that didn't work, I messaged them with info and screenshots and they apologised and turned my cog green. (Avoid the MrFreeSlots sign-up).
Make sure to use an account that you can verify if needed, just like gambling sites they may ask for ID (driving license / passport / utility bill). They did for me because I was cheeky and tried to set up two accounts which you are not allowed to do. But they had no quibbles accepting it and I received the money 3 days later.
Ultimate Casino Cashback Guide - Earn over £500 - Every Offer Explained!
This guide aims to outline all of the best gambling cashback offers available over a range of sites, following this guide you should be able to make over £500 in cashback Note - Cashback often takes a while to payout, bear this in mind when completing offers as you may have to wait to cashout your earnings When completing these offers don't chase any loses as the cashback will give you a profit with nerly every offer A short review of each site and some referral links Topcashback - Cashback will show as tracked within a few days, can take a few weeks to become payable, in some cases even longer, asides from gambling they have great offers for car insurance and mobile phone contracts, worth taking a look to save some extra money! Ref - Extra £5 when you make £10 cashback Non-Ref - No reward Quidco - Much the same as Topcashback Ref Non-Ref Minimum payment - £10 Ohmydosh - Faster Payouts but less offers Ref - Extra £1 Non-Ref - No reward Minimum payout - Any Cashback Earners - A lesser known site in need of a fresh look, this site also has some bad reviews, referal income is paid to the site on a monthly basis with the dates for each site being different, offers don't seem to show as tracked until the website receive their payment, cashback should appear in your account within 1 month of completing an offer. Cashout amounts are specific, its best to build up a balance and then withdraw. Payment takes around 3 weeks. Ref - Sign up bonus £6.5 Non-Ref - Sign up bonus £6.5 Minimum payout is £20 Payment Proof - Payments for all sites can be seen here, quidco isn't shown as i have signed up for all the casinos on offer through topcashback
How to Maximize Profit - IMPORTANT - READ THIS
For the majority of these offers you want to play blackjack following the chart found here Any blackjack game will do, look for a normal version of the game at the site you are playing on and make sure it is a non live game as the hand sizes will be lower. When playing blackjack there will often be more than one spot that you can bet on, allowing the player to bet more than one hand at a time, Its important to only bet on one spot at a time as it reduces the variance of the game and will ensure you get the maximum return possible from the game, stick to £1 hand sizes when playing and dont be tempted to bet larger amounts as you will be getting a nice amount of cashback from every offer Through playing blackjack this way the player will get a return of around 98%, meaning for every £100 staked you will lose around £2. If you make a loss on a casino site after completing the required wagering amount, withdraw your remaining balance, don't chase loses as the cashback will make up for loses and give you a profit in most cases. All offers are updated fairly regularly, make sure to check the terms for each offer as information in this post may become outdated. Also check for other offers every now and then as new casinos are added!
TopCashBack Offers - £400+ Profit
Topcashback Referral - Get an extra £5 - See the Ref Link at the top of the page! If you dont already have an account at top cashback, you can sign up through my referral to get an extra £5 added to you account once you make £10 cashback Lottoland - Cashback £15 Add £11 and play 11 separate £1 hands, following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. Betfair Casino - Cashback £70 Note this is not the poker offer Add £50 to your account and play 50 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. Quidco are offering £100 for this offer Party Casino - Cashback £26.5 Deposit and play 30 single £1 hand son blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. Tombola - Cashback £24.5 Deposit £10 and open the tombola roulette game, choose a £1 chip size and choose 5 spots, repeat this twice, withdraw any remaining balance, you will likely lose money here but the cashback will give you a profit Coral - Cashback £46 Add £10 and play 10 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. Bingoport - Cashback £3 Sign up to bingoport to get an easy £3 Ladbrokes - Cashback £42 Add £10 to your account and play 10 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. Pokerstars - Cashback £32 Add £25 and play 25 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. STS - Cashback £21 Add £30 to your account and play 30 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. William Hill - Cashback £54 add £25 and play 25 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. Megacasino - £15.75 Add £25 - Play 25 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. LottoGo - Cashback £3.18 Buy a euromillions ticket Slingo - Cashback £24.75 Add £10 play 10 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. PaddyPower Games - Cashback £20 Add £10 play 10 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. The Football Pools - Cashback £24.75 Sign up for the £10 a month subscription, cancel this after 30 days Lottomart - Cashback £18 Add £10 - Play 10 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. Genting Slots - Cashback £25 Add £30 play 30 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. OhMyDosh - Cashback £40+ Referral gives an extra £1, sign up through the ref link at the top of the post to get the bonus! Gala Bingo - Cashback £17.50 Deposit at least £5, you'll get a £10 slots bonus and 100 free spins, these carry hefty wagering requirements, Open any slot and play the minimum spin size, play until you lose all of the money in your account or complete the wagering requirements on the bonus funds. Withdraw any remaining balance. BGO - £10 Cashback Deposit at least £15. Play 15 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. DONT ACCEPT the welcome bonus from BGO. Lottosocial - Cashback £4 Sign up to Lotto Social - Use your correct phone number when joining as it is the only way to login to your account. Purchase 10 lines for £1, after making a purchase go to your account page and find the list of syndicates your are in, leave the syndicates to avoid making any more payments. Cheeky Bingo - £10 Cashback Deposit £10 and get a £40 welcome bonus, just play bingo with all of your funds and hope to get some wins, bonus has 4x wagering requirements.
Quidco - Cashback £100+
Quidco don't offer a sign up bonus, find my ref link at the top of the post if you want to help me out! All of the offers on quidco are much the same as topcashback, the only offer worth noting is the betfair casino offer which pays £100 Betfair - £100 cashback Add £100 and play 100 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance.
Cashbackearners - Cashback £180+
Sign up Bonus Get a £6.5 sign up bonus, think this works with or without the ref link, links are at the top of the post! To find these offers just search for casino on the site. All of these offers state that you only need to make a deposit, its best to play through the deposit 1x to ensure that the cashback is paid. LuckyMeSlots - Cashback £15 Add £15 and play 15 single £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. Spin Genie - Cashback £12.5 Add £12.5 and play 12.5 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. Cashmo - Cashback £10 Add £10 and play through £10 on any slot staking the minimum amount per spin. Don't spin the wheel that pops up after signing up or accept any other bonuses. Ice36 -Cashback £15 Add £15 and play 15 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. Spinhill Casino - Cashback £15 Add £15 and play 15 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. Galacasino - Cashback £30 add £30 and play 30 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. Casino765 - Cashback £12.5 Add £12.5 and play 12.5 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. Casinosuperwins - Not recommended, bad site, awful support Casino2020 - Cashback £15 Add £15 and play through £15 on any slot staking the minimum amount per spin. Keep track of spins and quit the slot after wagering the required amount. Don't spin the wheel that pops up after signing up or accept any other bonuses. Pocketwin - Cashback £10 Add £10 and play through £10 on any slot staking the minimum amount per spin. Keep track of spins and quit the slot after wagering the required amount. Don't spin the wheel that pops up after signing up or accept any other bonuses. The Sun Vegas - Cashback £15 Add £15 and play 15 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. DrSlot - Cashback £10 Add £10 and play through £10 on any slot staking the minimum amount per spin. Keep track of spins and quit the slot after wagering the required amount. Don't spin the wheel that pops up after signing up or accept any other bonuses. MrSpin - Cashback £10 Add £10 and play through £10 on any slot staking the minimum amount per spin. Keep track of spins and quit the slot after wagering the required amount. Don't spin the wheel that pops up after signing up or accept any other bonuses. PrimeCasino - Cashback £15 Add £15 and play 15 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. ConquestAdor - Cashback £10 Add £10 play 10 £1 hands on blackjack following the strategy outlined at the top of the post, withdraw any remaining balance. MFortune - Cashback £10 Add £10 and play through £10 on any slot staking the minimum amount per spin. Keep track of spins and quit the slot after wagering the required amount. Don't spin the wheel that pops up after signing up or accept any other bonuses. Thanks for reading, hope this of use to some people, happy earning!
Up to £219.11 profit in cashback through gambling offers with TopCashback, Quidco and OhMyDosh
Up to £219.11 profit in cashback through gambling offers with TopCashback, Quidco and OhMyDosh TopCashback, Quidco and OhMyDosh always have a number of gambling offers available, with the offered amounts often changing daily or weekly. There are currently quite a few offers available on each where the cashback amount is more than the required deposit or wager amount. I've done most of these and always keep an eye out for when the amounts increase, to make sure I can get the most for my money. The offers they have on at the moment are some of the best I've ever seen for them. The first step is to sign up for the cashback sites if you haven't already. If you use a referral link to sign up then you can get an extra bonus once your cashback becomes payable:
Then the next step is to work through the offers. These are all only available for new customers, so if you already have an account with one of the sites then you won't be eligible for the offer from them unfortunately. It's also worth checking the terms as some have specific wagering requirements, for example Betfair Casino must be completed within 3 days of opening your account and low risk roulette bets (covering 25 or more of the 37 outcomes) are excluded from counting towards the wager. Offers
Notes If you complete all these offers then you should make £207.11 cashback in profit through the offers alone. If you are new to the cashback sites and sign up through referral links then this will be £219.11 instead. There's also a chance you can make a profit on any or all the offers and walk away with even more. There's also a final few key points:
Make sure you have all adblockers and tracking protection switched off as otherwise this may lead to issues with the cashback tracking correctly.
I've listed the highest paying in terms of deposit/wager to cashback offers here, but if you have a preference for one cashback site over the other then they often offer very similar amounts if you'd rather go with the other instead.
Similarly, some sites (OhMyDosh in particular) offer a lower cashback amount but also a lower deposit/wager amount, which may be more appealing to some.
Some of the offers may require a premium subscription to receive the mentioned amount. I wrote a guide to maximising cashback that explains these.
I don't like to say the cashback is guaranteed as all the cashback sites say it never is, but I've never had an issue with any of these sites, whether through gambling or other offers.
Please be aware that these all these offers all are gambling, so I'd highly recommend depositing and wagering only the mimimum amount required to get the cashback, then withdrawing any profit you may have made.
Up to £244.55 profit in cashback through gambling offers with TopCashback, Quidco and OhMyDosh
Up to £244.55 profit in cashback through gambling offers with TopCashback, Quidco and OhMyDosh TopCashback, Quidco and OhMyDosh always have a number of gambling offers available, with the offered amounts often changing daily or weekly. There are currently quite a few offers available on each where the cashback amount is more than the required deposit or wager amount. I've done most of these and always keep an eye out for when the amounts increase, to make sure I can get the most for my money. The offers they have on today are some of the best I've ever seen for each of them. The first step is to sign up for the cashback sites if you haven't already. If you use a referral link to sign up then you can get an extra bonus once your cashback becomes payable:
Then the next step is to work through the offers. These are all only available for new customers, so if you already have an account with one of the sites then you won't be eligible for the offer from them unfortunately. It's also worth checking the terms as some have specific wagering requirements, for example Betfair Poker must be completed within 3 days of opening your account and low risk roulette bets (covering 25 or more of the 37 outcomes) are excluded from counting towards the wager. Offers
Notes If you complete all these offers then you should make £232.55 cashback in profit through the offers alone. If you are new to the cashback sites and sign up through referral links then this will be £244.55 instead. There's also a chance you can make a profit on any or all the offers and walk away with even more. There's also a final few key points:
Make sure you have all adblockers and tracking protection switched off as otherwise this may lead to issues with the cashback tracking correctly.
I've listed the highest paying in terms of deposit/wager to cashback offers here, but if you have a preference for one cashback site over the other then they often offer very similar amounts if you'd rather go with the other instead.
Similarly, some sites (OhMyDosh in particular) offer a lower cashback amount but also a lower deposit/wager amount, which may be more appealing to some.
I don't like to say the cashback is guaranteed as all the cashback sites say it never is, but I've never had an issue with any of these sites, whether through gambling or other offers.
Please be aware that these all these offers all are gambling, so I'd highly recommend depositing and wagering only the mimimum amount required to get the cashback, then withdrawing any profit you may have made.
My 1 Year Anniversary of Full Time Day Trading. 3 Years In The Business. What I Wish I Could Tell Myself Years Ago.
This industry has a lack of transparency so I'm more than happy to say I will provide lots of that throughout this post with screenshots. There are LOTS of imgur links to back what I say so it's not just words on a post expecting you to just believe what I'm typing. This post I suppose is "Part 2" my post back in April, "After 2 years of Daytrading. 7 months full time. Here's my advice". I'm doing this to update everyone who came/comes across this in the future. Yes, it is possible. No, it won't be easy. You will pay homage to the rite of passage into this career. I'll also provide some examples of styles of trading so for the newer aspiring traders, there will be some things I rarely see discussed on forums. So here's to 1 year of Full Time Day Trading TL;DR - You'll become desensitized to trading. Stubborn to other strategies (There are biggebaddemore lucrative strategies. Don't chase them. Why fix what's not broken? I know what works for me and I'm content with it. No strategy is better than another. It's a personal choice. ). Losing individual trades won't faze you, they're inevitable. Profiting certainly feels better. After a while, you won't be as enthralled to trade every morning, it'll become just another part of your day). Trading is just managing your money through a statistic and the medium to execute it is trading on your platform. Think: "If. Then. Because". Your trading plan should be that black and white. Ask "Why" for everything you do and use. If you can't answer it with documented results, drop it. I get a bunch of messages all the time from people asking - . Out of those who follow me and chat me seeking further tips through my previous posts. I'll be answering the FAQ's and addressing things I see frequently in this sub as far as trading axioms Disclaimer: I won't sugarcoat anything. I'll share my experiences and add pieces of advice I'd give to those who are currently experiencing the same thing becoming a full time day trader and what day to day life is like, the occasional distress, (DRAWDOWNS). Some of you follow my Twitter for the past few months where I post my daily watchlists with a snippet that reveals my DayTradingBuyingPower. I do this not to brag but to demonstrate that the account does yield growth, I pay myself, and there are days where the balance does not move because there was no edge. I also do this since nobody else shows their account performance. (Yes. You, Mr. YouTube gurus and wannabe gurus). We do this for income, the numbers on our accounts are real. Treat it as such. Get your initial capital out of your account THEN try to "Scale your account" with your profits AKA The Market's Money. I'll go over: •FAQ's that I get in my inbox (I'm still welcome to further questions if I don't answer here) •Decision Fatigue (You will experience this) •The previous year (2019-2020) of ups and downs •How to use my watchlists that I post on Twitter in the morning to your advantage •The pivotal moment that changed my trading career (NFLX 10-17-19) •The road to becoming a full time trader. (It won't be fun unless you're handed the money) •You'll have a better grasp of my strategy (Between ProTip 4 and 5. ProTip 8.) There are 10 "ProTips" throughout the post that I wish I could tell myself years back and I'll periodically throw them in here as the post goes on. I make posts long in order to segregate those serious about this business and those who will just become another statistic in the failure rate of this business. At the end of this post, I'll go over the frequent questions I receive such as: (Answers to FAQ at bottom of post.)
"How do you prepare for a trading day?"
"What would you go back to tell yourself?"
"Books?" (The most abused question, but I get it. I could start a public library with just trading books I bought over the years)
"What is your background?"
"What is a normal day for you?"
"How did you discover your strategy?"
"What did you do/How did you get started?"
"What is your % return?" (Not a fun question since a trading account is not an index or investment account. Intraday traders do not measure performance in %. Most are measured in "R".)
"Is enough to start trading?"
"Why do you need so many monitors"? (This one is rarely asked but I do see it discussed on platforms and people trading on mobile phones love giving flack to anybody who trades on multiple monitors. Hint: Everyone's different. Whatever works for the individual. There are no rules in trading. The only rule is that it works.)
My story:
Background: I heard about daytrading during the 2008 crash while in high school. We all want to make more while working less. I entertained day trading from time to time but always realized I never had enough money. Horrible mindset because I could have still researched WHILE saving money to put into my trading business. 2015 -I opened my first trading account with Scottrade while in the Marines. Apparently if you have a net worth of over $1,000,000 you can get out early (Biggest rumor ever). I frivolously bought crap penny stocks. In short - I was a hair away from gambling. What made it NOT gambling was the fact that at least I owned something tangible (Securities of a company) and anything can happen. Buy low sell high was my strategy. Didn't work obviously. No idea what I was doing. I'd buy and hold hoping to wake up to the stock price being way higher and it never happened. •ProTip #1 : If you hold a trade overnight... It is not daytrading. Stop turning into an investor because you can't admit a minor defeat. 2017 - I started taking this business seriously while working in the oilfield as a Logistics Planner (If you're wondering what company since I am asked this from time to time, Google: "World's largest oilfield services company"). No kids, girlfriend/wife or financial obligations. I worked 10AM - 7PM CST and would trade the open from home for roughly 1 hour. Later I was offered to be a Data Analyst... Only downside was... I couldn't trade since I had to be at work now at 8AM CST during the market open. In the moment of signing the offer letter, I was bummed thinking, "No more trading," That wasn't the case though. You can still build your trading business with a 9-5 and while never making one trade. The data is there. •ProTip #2 :We all see the same data. It's there forever. Many strategies show their edge both live and in hindsight the same. (Especially if you trade patterns). You CAN build your business as a trader without even taking a trade. You CAN build your strategy while working a 9-5. Just because you're not trading, does not mean you can't build your business through research. You won't know how you'll react to the losses but at least you can diagnose the raw data with a large enough sample size for assurance and confidence. If you have a 9-5 and want to go fulltime into this business. Stay for a bit, save, live so far beneath your means that it is almost miserable, (depending on your expenses, area you live, family etc) and get a few hundred sample sizes of your strategy! And for your PTO/days off... trade the open. I sacrificed my vacation days to trade. After 2 years in corporate America, eating cheap food, never going out, saving relentlessly, I made the decision to just do it and resigned. I went straight into the ring of fire known as trading. That was on: September 23rd, 2019 ""(Sound familiar?) When you hear these types of comments.. your response should be: "Nobody put the time I put into this. The 90%+ who fail, don't have it all written out, computerized backtests, manual backtests, statistics, SOP manuals, JUST like the job I have which is a business, I'm just another cog in their wheel. I'll just be wearing all the hats in my trading business. Instead of Oil&Gas, it's just for trading". One thing I see here a lot is people saying to trade X amount of months/years or make X. •ProTip #3 -Think in man hours, not calendar. Example: Trader A puts in 1 hour of study/work/research everyday for 1 year. (365 Hours) Trader B puts in 12 hours of work every day for 4 months. (~1,450 Hours) Trader A lives in a major city while Trader B lives in the middle of nowhere. (Think cost of living) 2 totally different living expenses and 2 different calibers of dedication. I'd put my money on Trader B because he put in more man hours. (~1,000 more hours on the clock to be more exact). ProTip #4 - Have a cushion in your account AND your personal bank account. Having a strategy is great but you won't know entirely if you can fulfill and execute your plan until you experience the ups and downs both short and long term. A strategy is constant over long periods of time... there will be days, weeks, and perhaps a month here and there where you aren't making much money. We hear all the time, "Trade like a casino". Casinos don't make money day after day but the odds are in there favor over the long haul. Month 1 of full time trading was great: Immediately after going full time, the first month (September 2019 to October 2019), I did super well. Business as usual. No stress. Everything going as planned. No turbulence. At least not like I had ever experienced... The 2 prerequisites I had before resigning was:
Show consistency in returns. Consistent Sharpe Ratio.
Make a 4 figure trade (I achieved this while short 100 shares on ROKU September 20th, 2019 and even made a victory post if you scroll down my profile's posts.)
First life-changing trading lesson learned as a full time trader: That money printing spree ended on NFLX October 17th, 2019. Less than 1 month of being a full time trader. Deviating and going against my plan I actually made $500 in a matter of 4 minutes. If you follow my watchlists on Twitter, I always trade with the direction of the gap. If I notate, "Long Watches" that means I will only trade it IF (and only IF) I see a long biased pattern. Likewise I will only be looking to short my "Short Watches". Plenty of times I'll call out a ticker and it immediately goes the other way. No harm no foul because there was no long biased pattern to confirm my thesis. On 10-17-2019, I went against my plan and it worked.. NFLX gapped up to resistance and I went short when it tanked off of a short pattern.(This is known as fading). The market gave me a free lunch and then some. So now I'm walking on air in my mind: "I'm an absolute unit" "I'll do it again and clear another $500 to make it a 4 figure day before 9:30AM Central" "Should have quit my job way earlier being this good." Within 30 minutes of the open. I gave all $500 back. Yes I wanted to trade it back. Never have I had the desire to smash anything but I do understand those who do! Yes I stood there and felt like each passing second was wasted opportunity. The next 24 hours were long! ProTip #5:It's circumstances like that that help you in the long run. FunFact: I never once deviated from my plan since. Not ever again. "I could have paid for my groceries and electric for the month after 4 minutes of trading if I just took the free pass the market gave me" I felt dumb but in hindsight, I'm glad at what happened. It was this exact instance that married me to my strategy/business plan. The next day and the 7 trading days following. I didn't make 1 profiting trade. My longest ever drawdown - 11 straight trades. While researching I found out this was Decision Fatigue (I'll go over this shortly below) Put yourself in that situation... You have bills and your income is strictly trading. I don't care how much a robot you think you are or how strongly you believe in probabilities, when you were in an office less than a month ago making almost 6 figures sitting in an air conditioned office knowing direct deposit is on its way every other Friday no matter how well or poorly you performed at work.. Now you're in the hot seat. Its a bottomless feeling. Now all of your friends and families words are ringing in your head. But just like a boxing match.. you gotta take a hit to get a hit. Win some, lose some, shake hands and get back to normal life. Water under the bridge. Mind you: •No guaranteed direct deposit every 2 weeks. •No more medical/dental insurance. •401K retirement is no longer being matched. 11 trades is nothing. You only require ~5.5 trades at 2:1RRR to make it back OR 3.5 trades at 3:1RRR. It's nothing especially in your research because you can easily just scroll a little more and see, "Oh that's just a drawdown. No big deal". How will you react in real time? Will you buckle or choke? But the thing is, I was skipping trades out of fear and JUST so happened to be picking all of the unsuccessful ones. (Decision Fatigue) Think about those 2 weeks of being in a drawdown. Half of the month. You're not just stagnant, your account is bleeding slowly but surely. Next time you're looking at your spreadsheet/backtest/predictive model/research.. try to put yourself in those days of drawdown. It's not just 11 boxes of red with "-1R" or "Loss" in them. The screenshot above on Imgur is just a recent example. Think about your daily routine, going to the gym, hanging with friends, grocery shopping, cooking, going to bed, waking up, doing a routine, then losing again.. and again.. and again. Try to think of life during those 300+ hours (Weekends too) of, "I haven't made money. I've lost money. And I still have bills. After paying them, I'll be closer to my set Risk of Ruin". Here's a lesson you won't learn before going fulltime but I'll do my best to emphasize it here: Pick a strategy. And stick with it. It can literally be anything. Don't spread yourself thin watching 20+ tickers and be a jack of all patterns/tickers. Be a master of 1 pattern and master of 1 circumstance. There's this real thing called "Decision Fatigue" which explains exactly why what happened.. happened. The article explains that the 2 outcomes of this mental strain known as "Decision Fatigue" is:
Risky Decision-Making
Decision Avoidance
Sound familiar? Does it kind of make sense now? As a new trader you have YouTube, Facebook, StockTwits, Twitter, "gurus", books recommended on Amazon, all throwing their ideas/strategies around, the market has opportunities littered all over.. Decision Fatigue is inevitable for the unprepared. Decision Fatigue happens in every profession. If you mess up at your 9-5, its just a blunder, your paycheck will remain the same. Just a slap on the wrist and move on. With trading, you make a mistake.. it's less food on your table, lights don't stay on, and/or water isn't running. That pressure adds up. No wonder so many fail... The signs of Decision Fatigue: •Procrastination. •Impulsivity. •Avoidance. •Indecision. When you find what clicks with you AND its either statistically or performance proven, have the courage to risk a healthy sum of your capital into it. There are strategies/patterns/styles of trading littered all over the internet: Very broad example: "IFcircumstance happensTHEN"Execution". Stoploss is XYZ. Target is XYZ.BECAUSEover a series of Y trades, I will make $X,XXX.xx". ProTip #6 :Strategies are all over the internet. It's your account/money, backtest it. People share their strategies here all the time and although I don't agree with them because I know what works for me, it's something to chew off of for you newer traders. YouTube is a harbor with people who give just enough info to figure their style out.You will lose trades. Sit for some screen-time and pay homage to the edge that you discover. All in due time. Insert key metrics and find correlations. This is how you create checks and balances to create/formulate a black and white trading plan. When I first started doing this, my spreadsheet(s) had so many columns it was annoying and would kill my desire to continue working. You'll find things that are imperative and some that are unimportant. For a lack of more colorful terms: "Throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks"Trim the fat. Rinse and repeat.
Here's some things I used to remind myself of and perhaps it'll ring some bells for you:
•Surrender your capital to your edge. If you truly accept the risk and trust your proven edge, losses don't feel like anything nor do profits. Although we're not here to put on losing trades and yes it does feel nice to profit. I still from time to time will excited when I hit target after a series of multiple profiting trades depending on my mood. •If you're nervous or your heart starts beating quicker when you hear the sound effect of a trade getting entered/filled. Be honest with yourself and ask yourself if you're truly accepting the risk. •Things you can't take to the bank:
RRR.
Win-Rate
Number of trades.
"This one great trade that I hit target in less than 30 seconds and I got filled better than expected"
All of these are integral metrics. But you're trading to make money. It's up or down, green or red, profit or loss, TRUE or FALSE. So with that said, find what works flawlessly and is easy to follow. Checks and Balances. Then allocate a good sum of risk into it. I read it here all the time, "Don't risk too much" and that's great and true for new traders. But don't sell yourself short. Push yourself over the edge and admit that you know your stuff. Think of Trader A and Trader B. If you've put the time in.. don't sell yourself short. You've built enough courage to learn a business so many fail at. This business has such a negative connotation. But remember that not everybody can handle meritocracies and that's exactly what the market is. Don't try to be the best, just work harder than everyone else and the output of your input will be relative. ProTip #7:YouTube trading ads from gurus... they're subconsciously making you think you're a novice trader.It's in their marketing. They study marketing psychology. The EASIEST things to sell:
Health
Wealth
Happiness
People that are desperate for those things are the most vulnerable and these "Traders" marketers are fantastic at portraying all 3 of those things at once. •ProTip #8 (Broken record alert) :Write a business plan. Your strategy shouldn't take longer than 4 sentences to explain to another trader. When you have a plan that's proven through a statistic and WAIT for it to happen, you feel100Xbetter taking the trade. You don't even care too much when it results in a loss. Because that was your plan, you accept it much better, and you know it was just an expense for a winning trade. Want my strategy? "I scan for stocks with a market cap of over 250M, 10k shares premarket, gapping to support or resistance, priced over $10, and I look for a pattern biased to the direction of the overnight gap. It isn't rocket science. Check my Twitter, look at the dates I posted, and you'll notice the gist. Yes this is an edge but not the entire edge. How fast can you sift through 15 time frames? How long does it take you to fill out your order ticket? Your Fibonacci time extensions with 5 EMA's and Bollinger Bands aren't helping you. They're lagging. If they work for you, great. In my experience, they hindered my visibility. Pro Tip #9: Yes statistics are highly applicable to trading. Patternsdowork. All patterns do is tell you WHEN to enteexit, and how many shares. Humans will never think differently of money. Be the frontrunner of the market's emotions. Nobody remembers the indecisive leader. Risk taking is a commonality amongst leaders. Trading requires courage and it's O.K. to show a bit of confidence as long as you also have the humility to admit when you're in a bad trade.(Notice how I didn't put, "wrong". You're only "wrong" when you deviate from a proven strategy.) ProTip #10:Risk management is 24/7. I've never heard anyone mention this but think about it a little bit. Having financial obligations can become stressful regardless of how you earn your income but its far more stressful while running a business. Not just any business, but a business where you can go to work on your A-game, do every single last thing right, trade without emotion etc... and still walk away with less money than what you came to work with. Meanwhile somebody who JUST started trading made a 4 figure profit not knowing what the heck the difference betweenETB, HTB, or NTB. Think of it like this, a JV high school baseball player can hit a homerun off of an MLB pitcher once.. but how will he fare at the end of the season? Traders don't predict stock prices, traders predict the outcome over hundreds of trades. People chat me asking what TO do rather than what NOT to do. You don't learn labor intensive jobs or how to fly a plane by what to do.. you learn what NOT to do to stay alive. That's all I have. Once you have a trading plan underway and you're executing it, you don't have much time when your hobbies are cheap but I still do respond to chats/messages. I do get asked from a previous post when I'll build a website and to answer that: I'm learning how to build a site on rainy days. Can't put a definitive date on it. I will say that its coming, if you don't give up on this business in the next year or so, you'll see it. What I plan on putting on there:
RiskReward Calculators
Position size Calculators
EV Calculator
Dictionary with examples
I just don't want some generic WordPress site. I want my website to be stellar and a great resource for aspiring traders. Something I didn't have learning this business. I want it to be something I'd consider a staple in a trader's resources. Perhaps one day it will be referenced on this sub frequently. FAQ:
"How do you prepare for a trading day?" I get behind the computer about 20 minutes before the bell. Reason being: "If you study long. You'll study wrong". If the chart isn't grabbing my attention and gets me excited, then I flick to the next ticker. I don't even know the companies I trade half the time nor do I care about a news report some journalist wrote. Also there is no magic news outlet that lets you know about "Major events that affect stock prices". If there was, I wouldn't be here because we're all subscribed to the same edge nor would I be trading my style.
"What would you go back to tell yourself?" Get more data. Save a little more, your hairline and sleep schedule will thank you. Take only perfect trades and don't feel forced to trade. There will be days you don't touch an order ticket. And days where you are busy and have tunnel vision. Next thing you know its time to shut it down for the day.
"Books?" - I try to humble myself when answering this but off the cuff, they're all mediocre. Andrew Aziz's was ok, definitely get it, it's only a few bucks on Kindle. Just don't expect it to give you strategies BUT it will give you ideas. If you're brand new, it is good as it will teach you the common vernacular of a day trader. Mark Douglas was interesting but his YouTube seminar recordings are much better. No book, Facebook group, YouTube channel is going to be the end all be all perfect strategy. Expect losses. Don't be a one hitter quitter after suffering a few tiny losses/paper cuts. Stick to it. Most books will help you familiarize yourself with the common vocabulary amongst traders and will hint ideas. It's your job to formulate the strategy and template for research.
"What is your background?" I was a logistics planner for a major oilfield services company. Later I then became a data/buyer analyst so yes, data analytics/research was a 2nd language for me entering trading. I did have that upper hand and did shave off months if not years for me.
"What is a normal day for you?" I'm always done trading after 10:30AM Central. I will hold onto a trade until right before the bell if it hasn't hit either target or StopLoss by the time I leave the house but it is absolutely closed in entirety by 2:55PM Central. After I trade, I enjoy the day. No I'm not riding around in my Lambos posting IG/Snapchat (I have neither) stories of my profits with my private jet waiting on a runway trying to sell an $7 eBook or a $100 membership (HINT HINT). I grill/cook, read, workout, ride my motorcycle, attack my other sources of income (small businesses I'm building), hit the driving range, shoot guns, etc. I live in Texas. Life is cheap and fun here.
"How did you discover your strategy?" I bought TradeIdeas premium, went through all of their computerized backtesting patterns, tested them. Then did what I mentioned earlier... Tried to find correlations in metrics. It distilled the trades to a strict criteria and here I am. I post on average 4-5 tickers on my watchlist. 7 max. I do not like spreading my attention thin across multiple tickers. I do not recommend buying TradeIdeas, it does have lots of bugs.
"What did you do/How did you get started?" Was a data analyst, was good at research and applied it to trading. My incentive was, "I could have made more money trading rather than sitting in 2+ hours of roundtrip traffic and 9 hours in an office. The data is there. Everybody sees the same charts all over the world. There are ways to make this possible"
"What is your % return?"(Not a fun question since a trading account is not an index or investment account. Intraday traders do not measure performance in %) I trade to make money AND pay myself, so my equity curve will look like a small loss or small gain after I pay myself. % return? I measure my account's performance in Sharpe Ratio and Risk Units. My Sharpe Ratio is ~1.85. While I yield roughly .8 - 1 R per trading day. Some weeks I make 10R. Some weeks I lose 2R. Yeah one week I might make $2,500. But the next week I might lose $300. The following week my strategy will yield $0 and the last week I might make $1,000. Some weeks suck. Some weeks are great. But overall. Just shy of 1R per trading day. Some days I'm super busy taking trade after trade. Some days I'll shut it down after 5 minutes without even filling out an order ticket. Some days I won't even see the open because there is no edge for me.. Keywords... "For me".
"Is enough to start trading?" Depends on where you live. Are you restricted to PDT? If not then how much are you obligated to expenses? I live in Texas. Things are cheap here. If you live in NYC or The Bay Area your expenses will be astronomical compared to mine. A $30,000 account is totally doable for a single Texan with low monthly expenses. Now if you're in California or New York? I'm sure you'll fall below 25k if you have 1 bad month. Also depends on if you have other sources of income or a full/part time job. I encourage every trader and aspiring trader to have multiple sources of income, don't rely solely on trading. Not just for the sake of mitigating pressure but also for sanity. If you have a family to provide for, I don't know what that's like, you never know when Little Johnny is going to randomly pick up Trombone lessons for a school program/play while little Suzie needs transmission work in her car because a simple solenoid went out. $1,700 later.
"Why do you need so many monitors?"I use 3 for trading. The 4th is for music. The other 2 are useless while trading. That's for trading though. When I made the decision to go full time, I knew I was about to go off the chain with research. And sifting between spreadsheets, a platform to see multiple timeframes for a pattern to backtest. My attention span is short, I'll lose my train of thought before I open the other tab to input data. But the main reason was for research. It's such a time saver and is a headache repellant when doing research while everything is laid out in front of you. Now that I have a system. I'll most likely be treating myself to 2 ultrawides for Christmas.
As always, thank you to everybody who takes time out to message me and letting me know some people read these and show appreciation. I would say, "Good luck" but there is no luck in trading. Just statistics. Remember that! In conclusion: Yes. Full time trading is possible, depending where you live/monthly expenses and obligations. You're more likely to become a profitable trader than a professional athlete. There is a level of uncertainty each day, perhaps each week, doubtful each month, and definitely not each year. If I ever want a raise, I just consult my business plan and financials, then decide if I can handle it mentally. If you have medical issues, get a part time job for the benefits. If you're healthy, just be careful. All the best! -CJT2013
Hi, over the course of 4 weeks I’ve made a total of 1800$ and lost it in the span of 2 weeks. I started with a 10$ deposit on a gambling site and I played multiple games until I eventually made my way to 200$ on live casino games then down to 60$, where I tried slots and made a total of $1200. I ended the night off with 960$ from 10$ and was fucking stoked and feeling the best I ever could. I withdrew it and over the course of 2 weeks it never came in my crypto wallet and I can’t really file for support because they would ask for my KYC and then I’d prolly not even get the funds and my dad would kill me if he found out I was gambling (especially since now i lost everything). Following this I opened 650$ worth of csgo site gambling, csgo cases, and more gambling in general using my real money (I’ve been saving for months and my birthday just passed). I built up a 1200$ cs inventory and this past week I couldn’t hold onto it and deposited it back into these sites and have gambled it all away because I couldn’t really cash it out into real money and the rates I was getting the crypto equivalent was worse than me 650$ initial deposit so my brain told me to gamble it till I was in profit and little by little my whole inventory disappeared and I now have nothing. This has taken a toll on me mentally and physically. I use to workout everyday and keep up with my social and now I haven’t in a week and respond to everyone every 10 hours. My schoolwork is up to par but I’ve always been a consistent student and I don’t want to slack. I didn’t think I’d be addicted to gambling as I’ve done multiple other things just as bad that haven’t affected me like this but it was probably due to the fact I made it to such an insane number from 10$ I thought I could do anything. Now here I am sharing my story and hopefully never going to gamble again (yes I’ve already started a plan to stop) and I am kind of thankful it’s happening to me now and not when I’m a working adult who could potentially be a crippling gambling addict (although 650$ is a lot of money but if it’s saved me from a future of debt I’m thankful). Now initially I was gambling for the thrill because my profits way exceeded my deposit but these past few days I’ve chased my losses and tried to actually make money (which was never the intent I always knew it was a losing game) because I was delusional to think that I could make it all back easily. So here I am 1800$ profit down the hole and 650$ of my own money down the hole. I’ve been gambling little amounts since quarantine because I was bored out of my mind but they would be at intervals of like 10$ every other week or so (which is still bad but not even close to as bad as this month). I’m also physically and mentally drained and I haven’t felt worse in a long time. The craziest thing is that no one knows besides who I told that I’m even like this right now and I seem completely normal. I dont have any cravings to gamble right now and hopefully I won’t in the near future as I have accepted my losses and started to do online work to get it back (without gambling). It’s also a test of willpower to see if I relapse or not which I hope I don’t Now your probably asking me why I wouldn’t just cash out my 1200$ inventory and I can’t even give you a proper answer to that one. It’s mainly because I saw that I’d be selling it at 60-65% lf it’s marker value which breaks even with what I spent and then you have to add in the commission from the website and the fact that crypto is really high rn so the amount I’d be getting isn’t as much as it could’ve been (although I could just hold it it’s bound to go up long term ETH and BTC specifically). So I thought that if I could deposit all my skins on the gambling sites (they take it at like 70% of the market value) and then proceed to gamble it all the way up till 1200$ I could cash it out without losing that humongous chunk of profit because I’m very greedy and pessimistic when it comes to settling down for a reasonable price. Then it went downhill and I lost everything. My luck in every game was horrible I was literally losing every game I played (which doesn’t surprise me it’s like these websites know when your desperate and when your not). Moral of the story is don’t gamble and if you do use an amount your comfortable with losing. If you do and you lose don’t go back in and if you do and you win cash out and don’t go back in because once you win you get this feeling that you could profit if you just put in a lil more and this is when you’re sucked in. There are better ways to make money (I invested in Bitcoin when I was younger and my profits r insane but I will never touch my btc wallet for money because it’s a long term investment). Don’t chase your losses either if you lose accept that you’ve lost and you won’t be digging yourself deeper in a hole you can’t get out of. I actually hope that you lose the first time you gamble because you’ll probably stay away from it which is way valuable than any sort of winnings you would’ve had. I should say though that not all of it is your fault (most of it is tho). Online gambling is as enticing as ever especially during a pandemic, and although most of these sites always say “don’t go on unless your 18+” they know that a lot of underage people use their website. These big sites like csgo case opening sites are filled with shiny bright coloured cases with a price tag on them (I’m not saying that they encourage youth gambling but I am saying the layout of the website is appealing to children). Youth are attracted to these shiny colourful cases and they as a result are more likely to deposit these shiny looking cases (this sounds like a stretch but this is my opinion so feel free to disagree). It’s also the fact that it’s SO EASY to deposit onto these sites and withdraw. Since most teenagers have a debit card (or even buying prepaid cards works on most of them), it takes a quick 3 minutes to put on a few hundred dollars if you really wanted to. The withdrawals aren’t usually restricted either unless it’s big amounts in the thousands (which most kids don’t have in the first place) meaning it looks like an easy way to make money and cash out. Most of these sites won’t push for age verification because it’s easy money when teenagers deposit money. And before they even go on these websites, games like csgo and dota 2 have BUILT IN GAMBLING SYSTEMS. These case and cosmetic openings in the game usually cost a small sum of money but are usually the start of thjs gambling interest especially when they get something good from the case and want to put more down. I’d call myself a lucky person considering I’ve unboxed 2 knives, and a red and multiple pinks in a kind of small amount of cases compared to the average person and this just drove me to try my luck on all these gambling sites since I had good luck in the game. These websites and games aren’t “anti- teenage gambling”. If you read all this and are looking for a reason not to gamble, I hope this helped you and if u read thru all this thanks for listening to my story TL:DR I’m a 16 year old who made 1800 gambling, then used all my savings after losing some, and am at 0$ currently and physically and mentally drained
Hey guys, I have been reading this thread al night and everyone’s stories have made me realize I am not alone. For the first time in a long time I have some hope that I can still fix things in my life. You have all inspired me to share my story. I am 23 years old and I have been gambling since I was 16. It all started when a couple of my highschool friends decided to open up a book. At first I kept my losses to a minimum but I was hooked from the start. At the start I was only losing around $100 a week ( a lot of money to a 16 year old) but as I got older the losses began to grow. My friends being my bookie definitely strained our relationship when I was late on payments. Mostly every week I would max out my account and I couldn’t wait till first thing Monday morning for my account to reset so I could bet again. By the time I was graduating highschool I already began to have a reputation for loosing money but so did a lot of my friends so I didint really think too much of it. Throughout college I was lucky enough to have my parents send me chase periodically to spend on food/ social life. Most of this went straight to gambling as bounced from bookie to bookie trying to cover my losses. At this point I was a junior in college and things started to get pretty serious. I realized I had a problem but was unable to stop. I was chasing after my losses every week. Once I would go on a hot streak it was like I would forget all abt what it was like to lose and all my problems would go away. All my summer jobs income would go straight to fueling my gambling. I hit rock bottom multiple times in college, owing bookies hundreds of dollars while my bank account was at $0. Each time I would tell myself I was done gambling and I would slowly pay off my debts. My all time low was when I had to call up my mom and ask to borrow money to pay off a bookie. She was very disappointed in me and I felt awful. She made me promise to never put myself in this situation again. Looking back at my college experience I feel like 90% of it was spent being stressed out abt paying someone back or avoiding a bookie. Once I graduated and was starting a real job I told myself I would use this as a fresh start and give up gambling. At first I was able to give it up for a little bit, I was starting to build up my bank account every week thanks to my new job and I was feeling good about the path my life was going down. For the first time in my life I was not broke anymore and I had the power to spend money as I pleased. I was able to use my money to book flights to visit my girlfriend/friends back in college and life was good. Then came the legalization of sports online sports betting in my state. I decided to open up an account and deposit $100. This quickly spirald out of control. After every loss I would deposit more money and my bank account shrunk after each week. It got to the point where I was gambling away each hard earned paycheck days after it hit my account. I felt so shitty abt this because it was like I was working for free. Then came a win streak where I was able to win abt $4,000 in 2 weeks. Everything was good again and I forgot all about my problem. When COVID hit I was out of work and no longer had a stream of income. My bank account was at about $8,000 which would of been enough to live off of until I could start working again. After my heater my bet size grew tremendously I went from wagering $50 a bet to $100 then to $300 on some bets, eventually there were some bets where I would wager up to $1000 dollars on if I was up on my account. No matter how much I won I never was able to keep it. I quickly burned though the $8000 in my bank account and was broke again. I was so embarrassed and the last thing I wanted was for my girlfriend to find out. I hit a new all time low when I stole $2,000 out of my moms bank account to cover some debts/ gamble again. This was about 2 months ago. I immediately felt horrible for doing this and had a panic attack. I came clean to my parents about everything. I told them how out of control this had gotten and how I needed help to stop. I told them I was scared and I wanted my life back. They were not mad at me but were very understanding and supportive when I first told them. I promised to stop and you would think this would be the end of it right? I really wish it was. After coming clean to my parents everything began to feel so real. The gravity my addiction finally set it. I was so embarrassed and I could not believe I let myself get to this point. I quickly fell into a depression and was put on medication to help. I wanted to use this a fresh start. I was broke but did not owe anyone any money. I wanted to earn money the right way and leave this all behind me. I knew I had lost a ton in this past but I was ready to leave that in the past. This was about 3 weeks ago. Since then I stopped using the legal sports sites because my parents were monitoring my bank accounts. However, a friend of mine from college had a book and I opened an account with him. The first week I quickly lost $1,000. I was devastaded and so dissappinted in myself that I fell back into this hole. I couldn’t stop tho I was determined to win it back and start fresh again. The second week I lost another $1000. I wanted to stop but I couldn’t. My bookie was my friend I was worried he would tell all my friends back at school about my losses and worse, he would tell my girlfriend (she has no idea abt the extent of my losses). This week was my last shot to win my money back before he returned to school from break and saw my friends and girlfriend. I was using this week as one last shot at saving myself. Of course it did not work and I lost another $1500. My girlfriend is returning to school this weekend and she will be sure to hear about my losses and I’m so ashamed. This brings us today. If you are still reading I really appreciate it because I never told anyone abt the extent of this. I am at a loss for words, i do not know what to do. My back account is overdrawn by $2,000. I have two maxed out credit cards, and now after last night I owe my friend/ bookie another $1500 on Monday. I do not sleep anymore, I barely eat, my moods are constantly dependent on my bets. I take my frustrations out on the ppl I love the most. After reading everyone’s posts on this thread I think I am ready to finally leave this all behind me. I’m done chasing my losses. I need to accept the fact that I’m in a huge hole and I need to be and adult and work my way out of it. I am going to come clean to my girlfriend tomorrow before she returns to school, I want her to hear it from me and not my friends. I am ready to take the first step to recovery but I need your help. How can I block gambling out of my life, every time I watch tv/ listen to the radio it’s another commercial about a gambling site offering a new promo to entice people to join. Every time I hangout with my friends they are talking about what games they are betting on, every my own brothers have began to sports gamble. Every where I turn gambling is being shoved in my face, the adds on my social media’s are all about gambling. The people in my life who gamble have more self control then me. I need to stop but I cant avoid it. I don’t know what to do and I could really use some advise because I’m at the end of the line here. If I can’t give this up I don’t know what I’m going to do. Gambling has destroyed my reputation, friendships, relationships, my finances, my happiness, my sleep, my weight, I have given everything I have to gambling. I simply have nothing left to give....
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Bovada is an online sportsbook and casino established in 2011. The platform offers betting on most major US sports leagues and horse racing. It has slots, table games, blackjack, and a variety of other casino games. Plus, Bovada offers live online poker tournaments with players from around the world. What you will need to do is sign up through my referral link. Make a deposit, and pm me with the deposit amount, and bet through your deposit one time and I'll receive 200% of your deposit up to $100. (You can easily hedge your $100 bet on another Sportsbook to churn through your 1× bet through. Feel free to ask me questions if you have any.) I will receive 200% of your deposit up to $100. Example, if you deposit $50, I'll receive $100 and send you $25 back. Minimum deposit is $20 and max payout from me is $25. Note that you can't withdraw your funds right away or I will lose my referral bonus. After 24 hours, to ensure you don't just withdraw and I lose my bonus, I'll send the money. STEPS: *Comment $bid *I'll send you link to my referral to sign up or you can use the link below. *Sign up and deposit $20 or more to receive your payment back from me.
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SportsBetting is a one-stop-shop for nearly every popular type of gambling – legal sports betting, casino gaming, horse racing betting, and poker. Headquartered in Panama, the site initially launched in 1999 but was acquired by BetOnline in 2012. Since the acquisition, SportsBetting has become one of the top legal betting sites for players from the United States. It is one of the few legal betting sites that remained in the US market after Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Act (UIGEA) of 2006. The federal law has no impact on the legality of online sports betting, but is essentially a banking restriction on unregulated payment processors. SportsBetting is well aware of this law and they have created ways to make sure that bettors can still safely and efficiently receive their winnings. SportsBetting has remained committed to U.S. players and is today one of the best betting sites that accept residents of all 50 states. SportsBetting offers the complete package for every type of player in the US, and you will find that the site truly outshines the competition in certain areas. Huge bonuses and promotions, the latest betting odds, quick registration, and reliable banking are just some of the strong points of this particular betting site. The overall variety, whether it be the selection of sports or the catalog of casino games, is quite impressive at the online gambling site. In our legal SportsBetting review for US players, we will go into detail on these topics and more. What you will need to do is sign up through my referral link. Make a deposit, and pm me with the deposit amount. Bet through your deposit one time and I'll receive 200% of your deposit up to $200. (You can easily hedge your $100 bet on another Sportsbook to churn through your 1× bet through. Feel free to ask me questions if you have any.) Example, if you deposit $100, I'll receive $200 and send you $50 back. Minimum deposit is $25 and max payout from me is $50. Note that you can't withdraw your funds right away or I will lose my referral bonus. After 24 hours, to ensure you don't just withdraw and I lose my bonus, I'll send the money. STEPS: *Comment $bid *I'll send you link to my referral to sign up or you can use the link below. *Sign up and deposit $25 or more and bet through your deposit once to receive your payment back from me.
I'll send out payment via Cashapp, Venmo, PayPal or Chime.
I have been playing at SportsBetting. Join today and get a 75% bonus to bet on sports... https://sportsbetting.ag/?RAF=AD4XWFF3&product=SPO I also have other offers on my profile posted for other Sportsbook that can guarantee yourself a few hundred dollars if you sign up before Super bowl. Please feel free to contact me regarding those offers.
[OFFER] #Sign up with my referral link from Bovada or Sportsbetting.ag. Make deposit and receive 50% match of your deposit from me via PayPal, Venmo, Cashspp or Chime#
Bovada Sportsbook:
Bovada is an online sportsbook and casino established in 2011. The platform offers betting on most major US sports leagues and horse racing. It has slots, table games, blackjack, and a variety of other casino games. Plus, Bovada offers live online poker tournaments with players from around the world. What you will need to do is sign up through my referral link. Make a deposit, and pm me with the deposit amount, and bet through your deposit one time and I'll receive 200% of your deposit up to $100. (You can easily hedge your $100 bet on another Sportsbook to churn through your 1× bet through. Feel free to ask me questions if you have any.) I will receive 200% of your deposit up to $100. Example, if you deposit $50, I'll receive $100 and send you $25 back. Minimum deposit is $20 and max payout from me is $25. Note that you can't withdraw your funds right away or I will lose my referral bonus. After 24 hours, to ensure you don't just withdraw and I lose my bonus, I'll send the money. STEPS: *Comment $bid *I'll send you link to my referral to sign up or you can use the link below. *Sign up and deposit $20 or more to receive your payment back from me.
I'll send out payment via Cashapp, Venmo, PayPal or Chime.
SportsBetting is a one-stop-shop for nearly every popular type of gambling – legal sports betting, casino gaming, horse racing betting, and poker. Headquartered in Panama, the site initially launched in 1999 but was acquired by BetOnline in 2012. Since the acquisition, SportsBetting has become one of the top legal betting sites for players from the United States. It is one of the few legal betting sites that remained in the US market after Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Act (UIGEA) of 2006. The federal law has no impact on the legality of online sports betting, but is essentially a banking restriction on unregulated payment processors. SportsBetting is well aware of this law and they have created ways to make sure that bettors can still safely and efficiently receive their winnings. SportsBetting has remained committed to U.S. players and is today one of the best betting sites that accept residents of all 50 states. SportsBetting offers the complete package for every type of player in the US, and you will find that the site truly outshines the competition in certain areas. Huge bonuses and promotions, the latest betting odds, quick registration, and reliable banking are just some of the strong points of this particular betting site. The overall variety, whether it be the selection of sports or the catalog of casino games, is quite impressive at the online gambling site. In our legal SportsBetting review for US players, we will go into detail on these topics and more. What you will need to do is sign up through my referral link. Make a deposit, and pm me with the deposit amount. Bet through your deposit one time and I'll receive 200% of your deposit up to $200. (You can easily hedge your $100 bet on another Sportsbook to churn through your 1× bet through. Feel free to ask me questions if you have any.) Example, if you deposit $100, I'll receive $200 and send you $50 back. Minimum deposit is $25 and max payout from me is $50. Note that you can't withdraw your funds right away or I will lose my referral bonus. After 24 hours, to ensure you don't just withdraw and I lose my bonus, I'll send the money. STEPS: *Comment $bid *I'll send you link to my referral to sign up or you can use the link below. *Sign up and deposit $25 or more and bet through your deposit once to receive your payment back from me.
I'll send out payment via Cashapp, Venmo, PayPal or Chime.
I have been playing at SportsBetting. Join today and get a 75% bonus to bet on sports... https://sportsbetting.ag/?RAF=AD4XWFF3&product=SPO I also have other offers on my profile posted for other Sportsbook that can guarantee yourself a few hundred dollars if you sign up before Super bowl. Please feel free to contact me regarding those offers.
I would say that I'm relatively new to Reddit and the one thing that surprised me is the number of people that still play on Bovada, Ignition, Betonline, MyBookie, etc. Don't get me wrong, great sites for sports betting and poker, but absolutely horrendous when it comes to slots and live casino games. Hitting 1,000x on a slot on Bovada is like a once in a lifetime achievement and the live dealer provider is... awful. Over the past month or so, I have seen this Reddit flooded with random users promoting a bunch of shitty no-name crypto casinos that have been around for like 3 days. So I figured it was my duty, as somebody who has no ownership interests in any of these online crypto casinos, to share my thoughts regarding the ones that I believe are trustworthy. All of which is based on first-hand experience and countless hours of research. First off, for those who aren't familiar with crypto casinos, the one thing that you need to know, as an American, is that you'll need to access these sites via a VPN. Personally, I use ExpressVPN and connect to Canada (or various other regions depending on which slot provider is available). The nice thing about ExpressVPN is that you can download the app and play on your phone. All of the casinos listed below allow VPN usage. Apparently NordVPN is pretty good too, but I cannot vouch for them personally. Second thing, KYC is not required. Honestly haven't looked into this too much, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that KYC is not required in order to register or withdraw funds. All you have to do is confirm your email address. Some people have said you get KYC'd if you try to withdraw more than $2k, but again, I can confirm that it's not true (specifically for the casinos listed below). Just make sure that you only deposit/withdraw via crypto and you'll be fine. If you think this is sketchy, then please, continue making your credit card deposits at Bovada to random shell companies based out of China. Also, DO NOT USE COINBASE TO TRANSFER TO AND FROM THE CASINO. They banned me. It hurt. Don't make the same mistake. I recommend using BRD as an intermediary between Coinbase and the casino. Since being banned from Coinbase, I have been using crypto.com to buy and sell crypto. Nothing but good things to say thus far. Finally, I have wagered roughly $3.5MM in total across the sites below and have spent countless hours researching them, so I'd like to think that I somewhat know what I'm talking about. In no way am I an expert and in no way am I a high roller or a whale. Just a regular guy that enjoys gambling. Now the common theme amongst the below casinos is that you have access to game providers such as Evolution (live games), Pragmatic, NetEnt, Thunderkick, Push, etc. that you'll never find on the casinos advertised as available to US players (such as Bovada). As I'm sure you know, Betsoft slots can get old after a while. Just a few of my personal favorite games that I recommend you check out... Live Games: Crazy Time, Monopoly, Evolution Blackjack and Evolution Speed Baccarat Slots: Dead or Alive 2, Money Train 2, Lil' Devil, Sweet Bonanza and The Dog House Site #1: Roobet.com (Best for casual gamblers) What I like: Instant withdrawals, huge selection of slots and live games, generous rakeback system, instant bitcoin deposits (they will credit your account before receiving any confirmations-- this is really nice), every so often they'll run a 24 hour promotion where if you hit 100x on slot betting at least $1 you'll be "King Roo" (basically King of the Hill) and accumulate ~$20 per minute until you're dethroned What I don't like: Rakeback system only allows you to collect every 24 hrs/1 week/1 month, no clarity surrounding VIP status (assuming you need to be a whale), there was one instance where I won $36k on a $40 bet playing Reactoonz and was told I can only withdraw $10k per day (this was 6 months ago and never had an issue withdrawing since), lack of sports betting My largest withdrawal (at once): $9.9k Deposit/Withdrawal Methods: BTC, ETH Referral link to enable rakeback system without having to wager a shitload: https://roobet.com/?ref=hkgambler13 (you can also use code "hkgambler13") Site #2: Stake.com (Best for medium-high rollers) What I like: Instant withdrawals, huge selection of slots and live games, incredible VIP and rakeback system (weekly/monthly bonuses, rakeback can be claimed whenever, daily/monthly challenges to earn extra cash), active and friendly chat community, multiple crytpo deposit options where your account is credited in that currency (meaning your balance equivalent in USD will swing with the market-- could be seen as a con), enjoyable "Stake Original" games that have a higher RTP than 3rd party slots, averages ~2k users online at any given time What I don't like: Can be overwhelming for first time players (Roobet is much more straight forward and easy to use) My largest withdrawal: $13.2k Deposit/Withdrawal Methods: BTC, ETH, LTC, DOGE, BCH, XRP (highly recommend-- cheap transfer fee, if any at all, and confirmed within seconds), TRX, EOS Referral link to instantly enable 10% rakeback: https://stake.com/?c=6c2f1c60 Site #3: Gamdom.com (Best for gamers) What I like: Instant withdrawals, huge selection of slots and live games, newly implemented rakeback system, constant "rains" in the chat (which is free money if you join in time), ability to instantly deposit and withdraw via Rust and TF2 items (could spend an hour talking about this-- generally caters to those who cannot get crypto or have to use a CC to buy crypto), averages ~1.5k users online at any given time What I don't like: Prior to the newly implemented rakeback system rains and level-up chests were the only "rakeback", your balance is denominated in coins (1500 coins = $1 USD), browsing through their slot selection can be a pain in the ass My largest withdrawal (at once): $7.4k Deposit/Withdrawal Methods: BTC, ETH, BCH, LTC Referral link to receive a free chest that could be worth up to ~$53: https://gamdom.com/chase (you can also use code "chase") Final parting words: PLEASE DO NOT GAMBLE WITH MONEY THAT YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO LOSE. Gambling is not a money making method and you will lose in the long run. The purpose of my post is to make those aware that other trustworthy online casinos are available for Americans that will (hopefully) make gambling online a bit more enjoyable!
If you are new to CSGO gambling or just trying out a new casino sites, then the no deposit free coins bonus is a great deal. Since you can take all the risks that you want without any chance of losing your own money. You can win big from CSGO Crash, Dice, Roulette and many more games. Free Skins There are casino sites that never give out any free spins no deposit, but then there are a lot of them giving out huge amounts of no deposit bonuses. In this list we have covered some of the most generous free spins casinos when it comes to giving out no deposit bonuses: 888 Casino; Leo Vegas; Mr Green; Casumo; BGO; Hello Casino; Bet365; Play OJO; Paddy Power Free spin bonuses are a type of no deposit casino bonuses. These bonuses grant the player the possibility to play a certain number of spins on selected slot machines. The amount the player wins is then added to their player account as bonus money, and wagering requirements need to be met to be able to make a withdrawal. Free money no deposit mobile casino offers are widespread. Some of the bonuses come with no wagering requirements. Even though the mentioned pros are convincing enough, a few minor flaws should also be mentioned, including: Seasonal character of no deposit promos on some gambling websites. Wagering requirements might be too high. You simply need to head over to the online casino web site (so-called free money no deposit casino sites), which offers free signup real money bonuses. Today, there’re quite many virtual Internet casinos, which promise money for registration an account with no need to make a deposit . Essentially you are getting something for nothing and a no-risk gambling experience. Compare Top Rated Sites While the invitation to open an account, and claim a free no deposit bonus is very tempting, it is vital to choose your sportsbook wisely.
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