Taking Crypto Advice on Steemit?

There is no secret that the majority of articles on this platform relate to crypto currency. There’s also no denying that we all have an interest in Cryptos since that’s what we’re paid in for the content we put out. So, when we see the advice on Cryptos in our feeds how should we necessarily act on this information?

A big part of taking advice on something’s greatly depend on the person who’s giving the advice of course. What is this person’s background in investing, what has their track record on being correct been, what is their academic background, etc.? The problem with crypto currency investing is that it is so new that people don’t actually have much of a track record. The majority of the huge gains that were made happened in 2017 when everything else in the market went up. So, how do we know who to believe?

One of the first books on investing that I read was “The education of a speculator” by Victor Niederhoffer. He was one of the traders that worked under the famous billionaire investor George Soros. In this book he talked about how his father took him for a walk down Wall St in New York. During this walk his father pointed out different buildings to him telling him what investment firm used to be located in the building and was now housing a different investment firm. This gave a perspective on the impermanence in the market and that no one beats the market forever. The part that stuck out to me in this part of the book that someone walking down the street walked up to Victor and his father and said “hey, I got some inside info” on some deal that was allegedly going to take place and was apparently offering it to them for a fee. But, Victor’s father grabbed his son by the arm pulling him away from this person and said “don’t talk to him, he’s a hoodoo!”. Victor asked “what’s a hoodoo” and basically he explained to him that a hoodoo was someone who was unsuccessful himself at trading yet was offering his advice to others. He was offering to do for you what he couldn’t do for himself, be a successful trader.

The take away from this story is that everyone has an opinion but not everyone is right. We’re are all obviously bullish in our sentiment towards crypto currency or we wouldn’t be on Steemit looking to get paid in it. That said, most of the advice is going to reflect this, preaching to the choir. Please keep this in mind when reading these articles and remember to always hedge your bets…

Image source: richdad.com