I decided to exit out of my XRP position with a small loss so that I could jump on the FUN train. I was curious as to what might be causing such a steady pump over a couple of days of this coin and it turned out the entire team was on the ground in Europe as the only cryptocurrency booth at a large gaming/gambling conference. They were obviously raising awareness and people from the conference were getting online and getting into the coin after the event ended each night and that helped drive the price up.
I was felt like the cause of this pump was pretty solid and as the conference was 3 days long I decided to jump in. I made a nice little profit on the first run. Then, for reasons that I can not reconstruct now I bought in again as it started to rebound for another go. It took a small dip on me and was starting to get some nice buying pressure to come back up. I didn't have any orders in and was watching the activity to make a decision on my exit. Then everything just stopped.
I didn't think anything of it for the first 5 minute candle. Perhaps everyone was just contemplating their next move. But when the second 5 minute candle also didn't move I started refreshing. I checked a few other coins to see that time was frozen. After about 20 minutes the twitter and reddit confirmations started coming in that something was up.
I obviously don't have to rehash what happened with Binance, but needless to say I ended up staying up all night until about 4am when trading finally started up again. I knew FUN was going to fall because the whole pump was based on real time interaction by the team at this conference and everything had been interrupted. Binance is the main exchange for the currency, so this pretty much stalled out the coin on every other exchange.
I wait for a split second just see what happen, but it started taking pretty quick. Those few seconds of hesitation cost me and instead of getting out with a 5% loss, I got out at 10% (of my entire account). ugh! I know! But I was being responsible, I had very tight margins and was watching it like a hawk with a good risk/reward strategy. I didn't count on getting froze out.
I was able to immediately recoup some of it on the excellent XRP pump and I spent today building some small gains in the turbulence. I know it happens, but that was my first major exchange "event". What a night, I fell asleep at a green light today.
Remember kids, don't trade like an idiot. But if you do, do it on Binance, they handled everything very professionally and I'm sure their night was a lot worse than mine. Good job guys!