This is useful for people who only found out about crypto yesterday and they want to start trading today. Is there news that Bitcoin had another huge growth? (btw, they call these bull runs) There will be a number of things that a beginner needs in order to make the first investment.

Fiat to Crypto gateway

You will need to find a platform that can change your money into one of the main crypto currencies. From country to country, this will be a platform where you can top up your account in your currency and will allow you to buy either Bitcoin or Ethereum or Litecoin. These may differ from one platform to another. When buying the crypto-currency you can decide to have them transfered into your own wallet, or to directly transfer them into a wallet on a major exchange. More about these options in the next steps.

Own wallet

This will differ from one coin to another. You will need to set it up on your computer and it will provide you with an address where you can keep your crypto currencies. The most important thing would be to have an up to date and protected operating system. Systems susceptible to attacks can log your passwords, access your wallet and allow attackers to steal your coins. Here are a few links for wallets you can use for the main cryptocurrencies.

Coin	Wallet
Bitcoin	Electrum
Ethereum	Metamask - actually a browser plugin
Litecoin	Electrum-ltc

A nice multi-coin wallet for mobile devices is (Coinomi)[https://coinomi.com/]

There are hardware wallets ensuring a much higher security, the most popular one being Ledger, but honestly, that will come later in your crypto life

An intro on how the wallets are used and how they protect your crypto assets will also come later in my life, just don't forget your private keys: the words you are given when setting up your wallet, best to simply write them on paper.

Online Exchanges

One of the largest exchanges is [Binance] (https://www.binance.com/?ref=15886987). It has grown into one of the biggest exchanges mainly due to their nice UI for trading and their very low trading fees. It will cost 0.1% when exchanging from BTC, ETH to any other coin. This fee can be reduced to 0.05% by holding the Binance Token called BNB.
If you create your account starting from this link, I will get more discounts in trading fees because of their affiliate program, so I encourage you to do it.

Once you created an account on an exchange, look for the deposit page, select the coin you want to deposit, and copy the deposit address. This will be the destination address for the transfer described in the first step of this post.

Other exchanges where you'll eventually end up with accounts are:
*Poloniex
*Cryptopia
*Bittrex

Advice from more experienced traders related to investments

It can take some reading and digging to find resources you can follow for going into one coin or another. The best place to get informed seems to be (Telegram)[https://telegram.org/] where there will be channels where people discuss the current status and their decisions. You can and you should install Telegram for both desktop and mobile.

There are two types of crypto investors:

• long term investors - they can assess the value behind a coin and they make long term decisions.
  This will need deeper study and understanding of crypto in general before a user can take long term decisions regarding one coin or another. A few useful tools for crypto in general are linked in this article
• traders - they closely follow the daily or weekly charts and they take decisions to go in and out of a trade for profit.
  My favourite channel for trading alt coins (coins other than Bitcoin) to follow is DCFreaks where DC will post his updates. He also created a channel for people to share their opinions. This has led to a few very experienced traders sharing their ideas in this group called Crypto Freaks

As a side note with a realistic touch, I refer to the first investments in crypto as fines, or beginner's fee. They will end up in loss most of the time. So until you get the hang of it, start small and invest wisely amounts you can afford to lose until you get some ground under your feet. Somebody has to lose some money so the other will gain, right? That's what the beginners are for.

If you are not a steemit user, create an account (it can take one or two weeks until confirmed) and talk to me. I'm all alone here, talking to myself. Any crypto beginners out there? Helloo!