profit on Bitcoin You must be able to understand a crucial truth: Your goal isn't the the higher price, but a higher quantity! What does this mean? Lets pretend You have $10K to spare and at this point You can buy 1BTC for Your money. Your final goal is ultimately making more money so You want the price to go up but that isn't the whole truth. Lets say Bob has also $10K to spare and he got in with 1BTC too. You decided to wait until the price goes high enough to make a good deal and sure enough 1 year later the price is $20K and You are up 100% in profit. Congrats! Meanwhile the price went down and up multiple times and Bob didn't waste his time and made multiple transactions. When the price was $12K he sold his 1BTC and then the price dropped to $6K and he got 2 BTC for his money. So every time the price went straight down he bought more and more BTC and at the end of the year he hot 4.5BTC and then he decided to sell like You did, but he got more BTC for his initial deposit of $10K so now at the price of $20K he has $90K.
What's the point here?
Your ultimate goal is acquiring more coins at the end. Because there are other factors involved, like time. When You are holding the coins You are loosing precious time for trading. Lets reveal all possibilities: You bought at $10K and at the end of the year there are 3 possible scenarios. Either the price went up or down or remains unchanged. If The price went up You got more money to spend but You missed out all the opportunities bob managed to profit on. If the price went down You have two options - You can either sell and loose Your money of You can wait for the price to go back up and loose Your precious time. If the price remained unchanged You simply lost Your time.
Understanding the above scenario is the key to crypto trading and it applies to all crypto currencies out there and not just for Bitcoin. However we have to be fair and mention that the more transactions You make the more chances for making a wrong decision on the way and then You end up in one of the above situations again. On the other hand the crypto market is pretty straight forward and when the dip is happening You need to be patient for a bit and then the price goes back up. So if You are patient and use some time to study the market fluctuations You can predict the graphics very well.
There is one other possibility we didn't mention to cover the whole topic and that is the arbitration trading. Arbitration trading takes advantage on the difference in prices of the same coin over different exchanges. So You can buy Bitcoin on one exchange and immediately sell it on another exchange at a fair profit some times well over 30-40% in a couple of clicks within literally a couple of minutes. Using this method reduces the risks making a wrong investment significantly and is almost 100% profitable. In the rear cases when it happens to loose a couple of bucks You just need to make the same procedure ones more and You are back with a profit.
The arbitration might sound easy but it requires sophisticated methods of transferring currencies and money because some exchanges deny certain transactions and some governments have strict regulations regarding moving money away from the country.