What I learned my first year of crypto trading.

December of 2016, I got my first taste of crypto trying to put money onto a poker site. The only option at that time was to use something called bitcoin. I had heard of it before this but shrugged it off and never looked into it. I made my account at coinbase and bought an entire bitcoin for $850 “fee included”. I figured I might as well have some extra because like most people I lost my money on ACR pretty fast playing 5-10NLH ha! After losing $500 in a week or so I went back into my coinbase account and saw this new thing called Ethereum ETH for $10. I scratched my head and bought 30 just because I could sell it back to CB for BTC later if I wanted. Low and behold I forget about it and month later its over $30 each. Right there and then it hit me. This stuff goes up in value?

At this point I’m looking into crypto currencies with a wide-eyed amazement and total lack of understanding. So, I turned to YouTube and started searching for anything crypto. I was soon downloading the #BTC white paper and reading about the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto and his world changing programming of Bitcoin. I was quickly deciding that this was going to become my other full-time job. I’ve been wanting to learn day trading long before I heard of crypto and this desire kicked me in the face the second I learned you can trade it on exchanges!

My first mistake making trades in crypto was learning that trading a coin vs the BTC pair of that coin was confusing to me. So much so the first few trades I made I lost money time and time again quickly learning that the dollar value was secondary to the amount of BTC you gained on the trade. So, after only losing a few hundred dollars I decided I MUST learn how to trade properly before doing this again or I was going to lose my shirt fast! So, to YouTube I go and my journey began again. This time I told myself I would do this for one year and go all in. When I do things, I go big and give myself a timeline to follow. It has suited me well all my life and this was no exception.

First thing DO NOT fall for the get rich quick scams ALL over YouTube. There are infamous MLM scams out there like biconnect-control finance etc. etc. There are promoters of these scams ALL over YouTube telling you how they made massive gains just by giving site XXX your bitcoin and signing up your friends. Pyramid scams/schemes are everywhere and its nothing new. The ONLY winners are the ones at the top of that pyramid signing up new suckers with their promoted ads all over YT. When they go down “And they all will eventually”, people will be completely crushed with no recourse. Cloud mining is NOT profitable unless you are the ones signing people up under you. It has been proven mathematically that just HODLing your bitcoin will make you MUCH MUCH more in the long run.

Learning the basics of trading is a MUST! If you aren’t familiar with markets then prepare to read my friends. I highly recommend reading “Bloomberg Market Essentials, Technical Analysis and Demark Indicators.” Google it, and if you are savvy you can find it online for free. If this book scares you and you think it’s too technical well it should. A whole lot of smart people since the inception of freely traded markets wrote this. Will you understand it the first time you read it? Probably not, but do like I did and re read it and treat it like a test for a job. Eventually it sinks in trust me.

Once I understood some basic fundamentals on how trading works I started shorting smaller ICOs with emerging patterns that made it fairly easy to make some quick gains. Since then I have tried to learn from the best and the brightest in the crypto sphere. Learning from people smarter than you is the only way to get better at what you are not good at. Between that and failing often, learning from that mistake and not doing it over and over again will make you a better trader or HODL’r.

I think being very flexible in your understanding of the markets is a must. Meaning, what should you HODL and what should you trade? Excellent question. Too bad I can’t answer that for you ha! But I can tell you what I do. I HODL; BTC-LTC-ETH. Why? Because they are the core 3 and if you have been doing this for any amount of time you should know those are the staples. I TRADE when trades can be made. I trade up and coming ICO’s that have technical merit and are something that serves a purpose! It MUST make sense to invest in something first right? It seems trivial but the sheer amount of crap coins and scams out there should scare you into doing RESEARCH!

My best advice is as follows.

1. Research everything you invest in. If you blindly throw money into a rising ICO you may get burned.
2. Learn from people smarter than you! Here is a list of people whom I take their advice seriously, as they have been proven right WAY more than wrong. Tone Vays, Kenn Bosak, Jimmy Song, WCN Network, Adam Meister, Jsnip4, Omar from Cryptos news, Bitesize bitcoin, coinmastery, and many more.
3. If the investment has a twitter, Facebook, or any other social media platform follow it! You will know quickly when something happens that may affect the price.
4. Study any market guide you can that teaches you about candles/volume/RSI/Ichimoku/MACD etc.
5. The best trades you will make aren’t done daily or weekly. They are the trades you enter once and leave once with your profit. I don’t technically “day trade” I trade when a trade is to be made!
6. PATIENCE is key to making bigger profits. Watching the market for dips and obsessing over every 5-minute candle is going to drive you nuts. Enter your trade when you decide it’s the best time. SET A STOP LIMIT and go workout! Leave the trade at the value you wanted to hit. If you believe in the project your fundamentals shouldn’t drive you out because it dips.
7. BUY THE FLIPPING DIPS PEOPLE! People are inversely getting this wrong. Thinking oh its going down now I’ll wait to get in….smfh. THIS is when the whales buy buy buy! Have some conviction and get after those cheap coins.

I hope this helps people. It took me a few months to get a mental picture of what a good trade is before I felt confident enough to make much bigger trades. Good luck to all and I hope you make a million bucks!