First and foremost, I must make it clear that this is not financial advice and I am not a financial advisor. I am simply sharing what I did, what works for me, and my thoughts on the topic of Cryptocurrency.

Alright I’m going to start at the beginning, with the basics. In later posts I’ll talk more about reading charts and go into more detail about day trading and more advanced tactics. For now, let’s talk about the ground rules

Only invest in money that you can lose. A lot of people hear this and immediately get discouraged because who really feels they have money to lose? Most people live pay check to pay check and sometimes barely scrape by at. But even if you are one of these people, you do have some money you can lose. One of the times you’re going out to eat, don’t go and instead stay in to save the money. Even if there isn’t really anything you feel like eating at home. Or hold back on buying that video game or playing that game of golf. However little money you have, you spend some on entertainment and you just need to temporarily sacrifice that money to get started. You’re not losing it, you’re investing it and it will be very worth it down the road. Alternatively, you can make extra money through affiliate marketing and invest that. It takes zero investment to get started in affiliate marketing. I’ll discuss that more in my next post.

Do your research! It’s good to listen to friends, Facebook groups, YouTube videos, blog posts, etc. for which coins to buy. There are a lot of people out there with wisdom to share and if you don’t take advice from people who are more knowledgeable on a topic than you are, you will always be farther behind in life than you could be. But you can’t just take their advice and run with it. You need to pull every resource you have available to you, apply critical thinking, and then make the best decision possible. A good place to start once you have some coins in mind is Coin Market Cap click on the coins that interest you and go to the official website. Read about the developers behind the coin, read the white paper, the road map, their successes so far then decide if the coin really has a future. Is it solving a problem or improving upon other coins in some way?

Once you have decided which coin you want, I recommend going to Coinbase to buy some Ethereum, even if you intend to invest in Bitcoin specifically I suggest starting with Ethereum because it is cheaper to transfer and I do not feel Coinbase is a safe place to store your coins. From Coinbase, transfer them to https://www.gdax.com/ gdax is the parent company of Coinbase so this will be free and it’s cheaper to transfer to Binance from gdax than it is from Coinbase. Once you finally arrive on Binance, you can use their exchange to buy the alt coins you want. They have all the major alt coins that you will likely choose. If they don’t you should be comfortable enough transferring to other exchanges at this point but what you ultimately need to do is get your coins on a hardware wallet. Your computer can act as a hardware wallet, but what you really want something like a Ledger Nano for the highest level of security.

Use a 2 Factor Authentication such as Google’s Authenticator and print out your authenticator code incase the device crashes. Put the code somewhere safe in the physical world (like a safe!). The reason a lot of people fail to use an authenticator is because they are afraid they will lose the device and the code and therefore the coins. This is a scary thought but as long you take the right steps, you are not at risk. If you do not use an authenticator, you will always be at a risk of being hacked and losing your coins. E-Mail or Text 2FA is not safe enough!

HODL!!! Hodl originates from this post The gist of it is HOLD. Even if you day trade, this applies to you. Generally, when you’re day trading, you’re bringing your profits back to either Ethereum or Bitcoin for a bigger long term investment. Even if you day trade to earn a profit that you bring back to fiat (such as US Dollars), this is going to apply to you because the thing with Cryptocurrency is the market is HIGHLY volatile. There will be times when you wake up in the morning and find the value of your portfolio halved and at first it will feel like a punch in the stomach. Or you will watch the value of your portfolio drain throughout the day. This makes most people panic and want to sell right away to save what profit they have left. But you must hodl! The market always bounces back and usually reaches new heights. Sure, alt coins will fail from time to time and you need to be aware when to pull back to Bitcoin but do not sell when you are at a loss! When you see the market crash, get excited and invest more fiat because it is a tremendous opportunity.
With these 4 steps, you will be well on your way to becoming a successful Cryptocurrency investor. It takes some time to get fully adjusted to the roller coaster ride that Cryptocurrency is. You must make yourself somewhat emotionally detached to be successful with it, but anyone can do this.
In my next post, I will discuss Affiliate Marketing so that you can start a cash flow that enables you zero risk for investing in Crypto.