UPDATE: I do not recommend paying to enter a Cryptocurrency mastermind group – I’ve tried a few and found the ROI to be disappointing. I am now focussing on growing my portfolio passively utilising a cryptocurrency trading bot, the renowned Notorious Bot. Having a bot that trades for me, without emotion, using an advanced algorithm, allows me to grow my portfolio in the background without it cutting into my time or stressing me out. You can familiarise yourself with the basics of cryptocurrency trading bots here.
The most common mistake people seem to make is investing solely based on the price alone and its short term historical trajectory, and nothing else. The second mistake is investing in assets that they don’t actually understand or believe in long term, are not planning to hold for at least 5 years, and will be tempted to sell if the price begins to fall in the short term. The third mistake is believing that they’ve already missed the boat on the most established and successful cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin and ethereum, and that consequently they should invest in much less established, much more speculative ‘altcoins’ to achieve truly outsized gains, for no truly good reason besides the fact that the price/market cap for the altcoin is a lot lower than bitcoin’s, and seems like it has more room to grow. The fourth mistake is day trading, and trying to capitalize on short term market movements. I’ll address each of these in turn, and why I believe them to be mistakes.
It didn’t take a genius to see a clear arbitrage opportunity here, and I wrote up a quick blog post detailing this opportunity and fired out a single Facebook post telling my friends about it. From that post and just a few hours of work, I ended up earning almost 17 bitcoins entirely for free — worth over $45,000 today. I had plans to scale this strategy en masse, but singlehandedly ended up killing the program almost as soon as it started, when Coinbase finally came to its senses and realized just how much money it was hemorrhaging here with no hope for eventual recoupment (at the time, the lifetime value of the average customer was only something like $25 to Coinbase — a far cry from the $75 they were offering).
You won’t always have time to buy once the price starts recovering (or to sell when the price starts dipping). With the last point in mind, sometimes cryptos can rally or correct by 10% or more in a matter of moments after a harsh dip. It can be next to impossible to buy into some rallies once the price starts recovering or to sell once it starts dropping (without a market order and some slippage at least). It is from this perspective that it can be a solid strategy to mistime the bottom rather than waiting for the price to go back up. Sure, it is more conservative to wait for a trend to be confirmed, but this method can work much better after a very harsh dip down to a key support level you think the price will rebound off of quickly.
If the analysis shows that you can take bigger risks, then crypto trading may be for you. Should you decide to enter the crypto market, you will need to choose the exchanges to trade on. There are currently almost 200 cryptocoin exchanges, so you will need to conduct additional research to pick the best option. Usually, traders analyze commission, overall reliability, jurisdiction, and financial stability of the trading platform.
Always create a profit/sell ratio for Bitcoin, because most of your profits from altcoins will first be turned into Bitcoin. Use the initial price you paid for Bitcoin for this, because if you use the price of Bitcoin when you took profits, you’re misleading yourself and increasing your risk exposure. This is because the price of Bitcoin has likely increased as well during the time it took for your altcoin value to increase.
If you don’t have an account at TD Ameritrade, you need to open an account and select that you plan to actively trade during the sign-up process. You will need to request that margin and options trading be added to your account before you can apply for futures. Please keep in mind that the full process may take 5-6 business days. Once you have been granted futures approval, contact the Futures Desk at 866-839-1100 or email us to request access to /XBT.
