I would say the summary of my trading practices thus far can be summed up into, “I’m an idiot.”
It’s up. it’s down. Oh, my gosh I could have made $10k. Oh, no I’ve lost $300. Ack! What does everyone else think?… Just an average day in a Cryptocurrency trader’s life. But not for the above average trader’s life. Much of the same advice you’d get from a financial planner is applies to Bitcoin and other currencies.
Research the Company
Who are the developers of the Currency you’re thinking about buying? Who are their investors? Have they successfully launched a currency before? Have previous projects they worked on failed in a spectacular fashion?
There are a lot of motivations for attempting to create a new Altcoin. Notoriety, solving social or economic problems, or greed are some of the most popular themes of Cryptocurrency. Following the successes or failures of a development team will guide you in figuring out what motivates them. Don’t get stuck into thinking greed is bad motive. Several self-interested projects made a lot of money for the development team and early investors who knew when to sell.
Research the Product
The development teams are going to market their Cryptocurrency to garner investment interest, adoption, and higher trading prices. That makes it easy to find information like what problems are they trying to solve or new Blockchain technology are they trying to introduce? Are they trying to bring a solution to Apple products or Mobile devices where others aren’t?
Invest for the Long Term
If you’re full time job is staring at charts and day trading, you can still do that with cryptocurrencies. You just need to adjust to the increased volatility. By Volatility I mean 40% up or down in a day… 30 minutes even. But if your trading on the intraday bumps you might find a higher portion of your profits going to fees and splits. So, I say invest for the long term. If I had followed the advice in these sections, I’d have a lot more disposable income.
Personal Stories
I met a guy while working at Dell that told me a story of the $300,000 240 MB Hard drive he bought. Yes, MB. Well he cashed in some of his employee purchase plan stock for a new hard drive when the stock wasn’t worth all that much. At the time of telling me the story the Hard Drive was worthless and the amount of stock he sold for it was worth $300,000. Oh, how we laughed. And now I’ll relate for you the story of the guy who bought a pizza with Bitcoin when it was worth pennies and now that Bitcoin would be worth Millions. You’d think I’d learn from others, but I too have purchased a $700 tablet for $4,000 worth of Bitcoin at today’s prices.
But I think more disappointing are opportunities I missed due to fear.
Stratis is an Altcoin someone pointed out to me in December of 2016. The price was under $0.05. I thought well let’s wait and see what happens. The interesting thing about Stratis is the development team’s partnership with Microsoft and building their platform on the .NET framework. This means that the products a developer would write to interact with their Blockchain technology can run natively on Windows Operating Systems without a lot of additional translation code or “wrapper” code. The price went up to something over $0.07 and I said, “Ok I’ll buy some.” And invested $300. I woke up one morning a few weeks later and the price is over $0.30, and has been hovering between $0.40 and $0.50 the last two weeks. The currency had a lot of earmarks of something I thought was a good investment, and I kick myself for not putting in $1500 or more at the $0.07 price.
DASH, which was launched as Dark Coin, I used to mine. The name Dark Coin certainly sounded cool to the kids and it was marketed as the first truly anonymous currency because the network had the function called mixing where your bitcoin cold be split up and mixed with fractions from other Dark Coin on the network without additional entries in the blockchain thus removing the traceability of the transactions. When fintech investing in Blockchain technologies started becoming serious business they grew up and changed the name to DASH. I had mined 8 DARK when I had a hard drive failure and said well I won’t both with that currency any more. At that time, Dash was only worth around $1.00, so I was out maybe $10. At the same time Stratis had its big jump DASH goes to $100 and has stated above $50. Now why didn’t I keep mining when the difficulty was low and amass a vast fortune? I was able to restore my Dark Wallet from a backup and retrieve my 8+ DASH, but I could have had 100 over the course of that year.
Check out the stellar raise of PIVX. I looked at it when it was less than $0.03. It’s trading at $1.38 today… $1,500.00 would be worth over $100,000, and it happened extremely fast.
Stay tuned!
Wikipedia – Bitcoin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
Bitcoin Forum – The most popular place to discuss all Cryptocurrencies
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php
Cryptocurrency Trading Charts
Most Profitable Mining Calculations
http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency
Some Exchanges
Wisdom from the Stache 