Ibian
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March 18, 2018, 04:32:02 AM

She keeps going down. Hard dump this weekend. Wish my short was bigger.

Long to 7900

Fight the good fight!
I am using this small margin short as a hedge against an ugly crash.
I'm already long with all my stash. No leveraged margin. Actual btc. Long to the moon.
Is it mathematically viable? If the price goes down you make money, yes, but if it goes up do you make more than you lose on the short, only to make a new short higher up and repeat?

As you suspect, it's necessary to prop it up as bitcoin rises, otherwise what you gain on a dip, you lose on a climb. That's what I call babysitting or nursing. One good way to go about it is the 2J-ladder, which in a nutshell means to sell on the way up (make your short larger) and buy on the way down (make it smaller, profiting a bit).

The alternative is to just set up a largish insurance as a one-off expense and forget about it until it's worth redeeming. This is much easier on the nerves and doesn't require that much labor. However, there are issues with this brutal approach: you need to close it (on a loss) as soon as bitcoin rises too much, and reopen it higher (so a bit of monitoring and labor is required after all); it doesn't pay off with small profits when decreasing the size; finally, it should be done near a maximum to start with. If we were that good at spotting maxima, life would be easier, wouldn't it? But then, the very point of such a hedge would be moot.
Wouldn't it be easier to just sell a small percentage of your stash, buy lower if it drops and eat the loss if it goes up?