What’s the right amount to hold?

Yeah, the title might be a bit vague, sorry about that! Just trying to figure out what's too much when it comes to holding funds. So, I recently jumped back into trading, focusing on short trades. We all know leaving a bunch of money on a centralized exchange is a pretty bad idea, right? Totally agree with that! But since I'm trading now, I do have a fair amount sitting there for a reason. I've actually managed to double my original portfolio so far! With that total amount going up, I'm wondering what to do next. Should I pull out half and lower my risk, considering it’s a CEX and they can just decide to pull some crazy stuff at any moment? Or should I just leave it all there and keep trading? I'm really curious to hear what others think. For those who have traded or are trading now, how do you handle this kind of situation? What's a safe amount to hold, in your opinion? And just like the title asks, what’s too much from your standpoint?

How much is too much should be considered based on how much the person is worth. There are those who consider six figures as a small amount that they can easily gamble on, which means they don't mind even if they lose that amount in trading or in an exchange crash. We also have those who consider it as very huge amount so the amount you should consider as too much to me should be base on your worth, but ordinarily for me $10k is too much to be left on a single exchange. As a trader, you need money to be able to trade your pairs and depositing and withdrawing all the time will cost you grease, which will take away most of the profit you will make, which is while we prefer to leave funds on the exchange to make it easier, but for the fear of the unknown, I will advise after taking off some profit out from exchange I will go with the idea of keeping part of my asset that am actively trading in different exchanges to reduce the risk, as I consider the higher amount one have in an exchange account the higher the risk.

If every thing goes sideways you would be the only one that faces the consequence. You can't let others standard influence yours cause at the end of the day we all different. How we react to loss, deal with risk, experience, skill among others. You in a better position to ask same question for yourself.

This post should be in the trading discussion section in the forum, Anyway, if I were you, I would send 80% of my total portfolio to my dex and the remaining on the cex for more trading in increasing my value, but this period I will not rush the process but gradually as I was doing. Because, the emotional tension then before sending to dex would really be altered to excitement, and too much of it will affect the next trading habit positively or negatively.

I am certainly not someone who owns anything close to 6 figure. As for keeping 10 grand, nope, there is no way I'll be keeping that much there. I have made quite the profit, traded around 350+ times, and as the amount increasing so does my fear! Btw you mean like using multiple exchanges? That's seems like a lot of work for me, I have to continuously monitor all the CEX's.. You have a fair point mate! To be honest I haven't set any limits on how much I should trade with! When I'm trading I'm going all at once sometimes, yeah quite risky, but that's how I am doing things now! Thank you for your honest opinion, it surely does makes sense now!

You are the one to know how much is too much for you. Any amount that you may lose if the CEX exchange goes crazy or you they get scammed/hacked and the loss affects you negatively financially and emotionally then that amount is too much to leave on the CEX exchange. You have good reason to keep your funds on the CEX exchange but no reason will make sense if you lose a reasonable part of your funds so you have to.be very careful.

I keep a few hundred bucks on a cex and that’s it. I do that to catch some nice altcoin deals. You could say I am gambling with alts  and a few hundred bucks all I can have for that task. Keeping anything above a thousand bucks on a cex is not smart imo. Especially if the exchange don’t operate in your country officially. I mean if they don’t have a local office in where you live, good luck with having your back when things go south. It is a very big and real risk. I keep my coins in a cold wallet. Safe and sound. It makes me sleep well. If you can’t sleep at night thinking about your coins which you keep on the exchange, it means you are doing it wrong.

The irony is Crypto is banned here at Bangladesh ! So obviously these CEX's don't have any official connections to my place! But the govt doesn't take any strict actions against crypto, and the CEX's are also operating their services without any issues (so far, and hopefully in the future). As for keeping anything, I have around +- 800-900 give or take, and playing with them mostly (with alts), it's fun. Anyway, I'll keep in mind about the things you said. Btw, I don't sleep much at night, mostly because I work around those clock. It's 2 AM, and I'm still awake, working, trading...

You can actually move this post to the trading discussion section.. Then back to your question; for me if you fund around $200 for instance and you have managed to secure around 300$ in total as you are trading you move out around $150 then you can trading with $150 and leave it in that exchange since you said you are gradually making profits from your trades which I also believed that you can as well turn up 150 to where around $200 or $250, as time you keep withdrawing some of the profits to you wallet to secure your funds since it's already said that "Not your key not your funds" and I wouldn't want you to have a very ugly experience while trading.

You can keep few on the exchange if you think you can multiple it again just as you did initially, don't risk yourself keeping fund on the centralized exchange which are not trusted and are much vulnerable to hack. What you can do right away is after you finished trading you can move your funds to a non custodial wallet, to secure profits because nowadays funny things happens with exchange which cause heavy lose on the exchange, I will also say you can just trade with the amount you can accept to lose on the exchange even if they get hack it wouldn't affects you that much, though this depends on the exchange you are dealing with if you are also using a reputable exchange that prioritized security that much you may keep trading till when it gets to few thousands or something higher then you can withdraw it from the exchange.

I am trading whenever I can however I can! There isn't a specific time frame. So I don't think I can move the funds multiple times, the fees would become overwhelming I guess. What I can do is, accumulate an amount and move that portion wholly and never be using it for the time being. Btw, I am using a reputable exchange, the one with the yellow logo (u know what I mean)..I forgot to mention, I'm also cashing some using p2p from time to time... Already moved!

I think it's similar to how some people suggest you should only trade with the money you can afford to lose. So if you have a capital worth of $1k, and you think losing $500 overnight is bad for you, maybe you should reduce the amount of capital you use for trading to $400 or lower. As others have mentioned, there are no rigid rules about this since everyone is different. Personally, I keep my capital for trading/speculation less than 30% of my total portfolio because I don't have enough sources to quickly fill that up if I lose everything. Especially when we're dealing with exchanges that requires KYC and so on.

The choice is your to make, because you knows exactly what you are using the money for; if it’s mainly for trading, you can keep them in centralized exchanges, but it will be good if you take half of the money which happens to your profit according to your explanation to your personal wallet where you can control your funds yourself. Leave them there and keep adding more if you gain more profit from your trading so that that will be like your DCA investment and if you keep gaining profit you will be surprised with amount of Bitcoin you will accumulate.

If you are an active trader, to my mind you need to risk a little bit and keep your money on exchange but at the same time, since you doubled your money, if the amount of big and something that you can't afford to lose, if I were you, I would withdraw half or at least 30% of it to my own crypto wallet. If you can do that, that's a very good choice because if you keep all the money in an exchange, not only there is a chance that something happens to an exchange and you might lose your money but I'm sure there is a big chance that you'll lose your capital during trading. Believe me, it happens more often than imagined.

I believe you’ll get same answer because you’re the one in charge, every trader with a different choice and management. The common advice is risk the amount you can afford to lose, trading market can be tricky sometimes and when you think the market price is in favour of your budget the market can just take a different turn so it’s left for you to decide what happens when you don’t get the expected profit either emotions, depression etc meanwhile the best amount remains the price you’re comfortable with.

It is okay to take some profit from your trades and move it to a safer place if you wish, or maybe still keep it on the platform and add it to your trading capital. With a higher capital, you will not need to use a high leverage in trading. This is a question that the answer will be unique to every trader. There are traders who have a large account size, and they have their reasons for it; there are others who will not keep more than a specific amount on their trading accounts, and they also have their reasons for it. For every trader, their reason is valid. I say keep an amount of money that you can risk losing.

If you hard mentioned the actual figure you have on your exchange wallet, that could have been better to point us to the right advice on what level of risks is ok for you, but since you mentioned that you made that deposits with aim to trade with, it then means that balance on the exchange is not your entire portfolio, so for sure you are still at a safe zone regardless of what may happen in the future, but I advice that you never rely on exchange wallet, not your keys, not your wallet, get that right.

You made mention of doubling your portfolio which you said you have already doubled it and it keeps increasing, to answer your question, you have to answer mine (maybe not by writing a reply to me) too. How much do you intend to he trading with any time you open a position and how often do you also trade? I will give you a clue; let's assume you started trading with $500 and you have doubled this money to $1k and counting... If your portfolio has increased like that, there should be a specific amount that you should decide to be using for your trade, while the excess should be withdrawn out from the exchange. If you decide that it's now $1k you want to be trading with always, you should withdraw every profit you make on top of the $1k.  If you don't also trade always, for example you trade just ones or twice in a month, you don't need to keep money on the exchange, only make deposits when you want to trade but if you are a day trader, that will be stressful for you to make deposits every day.

DEX means you are holding your funds to your non custodial wallet and you will just need to connect your wallet to DEX and trade on it without your funds leaving on your wallet so you don’t really need to send fund on DEX or else it’s not a real DEX. What do you mean by excitement to DEX? Both CEX and DEX is just a same trading platform.

If I were in your position, I would withdraw 100% of the profits and only leave the initial trading capital there, considering that I would continue trading. If I wanted to temporarily end trading, I would choose to withdraw everything. This management approach is to help you think that your trading funds are always limited, so that you do not take greater risks because you believe you still have profits.