Trading with your Steem

I hope you are all still blogging diligently. As I tell my kids, do as I say not as I do. May goal is to blog at east 7 times a week. You could easily blog 15-20 times. If you are earning a dollar a blog, that could be as much as $20 per week. That is not a lot I know, but if you power up as I discussed last time, your vote for yourself alone could become significant. I make 3 to four times that a post with ease.

If you do not have to use the money, and you are happy with your steem power, you still hold crypto tokens by blogging on steemit that you could use to make more money. But this involves trading and investing. Let me start by saying, if you do not know what you are doing, be very careful. You can lose all your money, either through bad choices and strategies, or by thieves stealing money through false promises.

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My advice if you want to dip your toe into this space, which can be massively lucrative, is read a lot. Then take a small amount of tokens and just test the waters. The best way to go is to first just do test trading using a spreadsheet. You can follow the market that way and then work out your strategy.

You have two investment choices in my view. Either speculate with tokens or look to buy cheap in ICO's that offer bonus tokens. If you have enough cash to play with try both.

Speculating

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In order to buy and sell tokens, you need an account on an exchange where these token pairs trade. A token pair are the two tokens you speculate with, the one you hold (Steem in this case) and the one you want to buy. The two largest exchanges that you can trade Steem on are Bittrex and Poloniex. However you can trade on any exchange by converting your Steem to Bitcoin (BTC), and then moving the Bitcoin to those exchanges.

You need to decide if you want to buy and hold or do you speculate in the short term. If you trust the long term value of the coin, buy and hold is a good strategy. But there is a lot of money to be made buying and selling, especially in volatile tokens. You want to buy at a price and sell at a margin repeatedly. This is hard work and risky. AS with the BTC run over the last few days I have not been able to trade at all. I have bought some to hold though.

Find a few tokens, follow them and read about them. Talk to people on forums. In the right situation you can easily double your money every few months, BUT remember you can lose it if you make trading mistakes.

ICO or token offerings

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Here it gets even more tricky as your risk is higher, but your reward can be massive. You need to do solid research, have a little understanding of crypto economies and business. I suggest you find our more about the following before you make any significant investment:

1. Who are the people. Are they real. Do they have a track record in the space they are operating. Google them. Check social Media etc.
2. Is there a workable business behind all of this. An ICO is a fund raiser, but to be able to sell your tokens in short or long term, you need to get buyers that will pay a higher price. For this you need the token devs to deliver and be able to grow value. The "sexiness" of their story is a start. Followed by their ability to grow market value and market perception.
3. IS the token economy they are proposing viable. Aspects such as coin minting, inflation management and tradability. The latter is key. If they are not on any exchanges selling your token will be very hard.
4. Do they have good governance. Watch out for pump and dump. Many projects create hype and then sell as many tokens they can in the short term. ICO 's that are willing to hold in the long term and have governance in place to enforce that and protection of the token and the project are better projects.

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In essence, be careful, but your returns could be 10x or more. You can turn $1000 into $10 0000 in a few months if you get the right ICO.

Happy blogging and remember, it is only scary because you do not understand it. Once you do it it becomes a lot less scary.