How Much Do The Best Bitcoin Traders Make?
By Rob C on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
I’m sure by now most have heard of someone somewhere getting rich off bitcoin. Countless headlines detailing the life of crypto millionaires. Most of these crypto millionaires got their bitcoin when it was relatively cheap, allowing for exponential gains, sometimes as much as 5000%. We don’t hear too much about the actual traders though.
That could be due to the fact that it is incredibly difficult to be consistently profitable. In fact, the chances of you actually making money trading are very slim, with most figures pointing to only 20% of traders pulling it off. This means the best traders are few in numbers and highly concentrated at the top.
I created a tool to gather data from BitMex’s public leaderboard. It then charts the data onto graphs so we can get a better idea of their equity curves (and of course how much they make.)
So how much do the top 25 traders actually make? Well, during the month of September, one trader was able to make $5,000,000 in a span of 2 days from an 18% drop in bitcoin’s price. Another trader seemed to be on the other end of that trade, only losing around $160,000. The rest made anywhere from $1,000,000 to $10,000 over the course of the month, most being made during that 18% price movement.
You can see the data table for yourself below.
I also would like to point out that some might notice there are traders with huge changes in their equity curve and traders with a small, constant upwards or downwards movement. I’m going to take a guess that these are traders that make many trades over the course of the day, effectively “compressing” their equity curve. It looks like this works really well for some, while not working so well for others.
It’s also interesting to note that Jade-Platinum-Legs and Hot-Relic-Fancier are the same entity. The different curves just playing with different position sizes, the results remain correlated.
All in all, it's pretty impressive the amount of money these traders are able to generate. In terms of pure realized gains, it still has some room to mature, relative to equities or futures trading.
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