There are generally two schools of thought when it comes to investing in cryptocurrencies. The first is that there are plentiful opportunities, and it’s almost impossible not to make money buying and selling crypto assets on the leading exchanges. The second is that cryptocurrency trading is the “Wild West” equivalent of conventional investments in stocks, shares, and commodities and shouldn’t be touched with a barge pole.
The reality is somewhere in the middle between these two polarized views of the crypto space. By abiding by the following do’s and don’ts of cryptocurrency investing, it’s possible to give yourself the best opportunity to make money from the crypto markets.
Don’ts of Cryptocurrency Investing
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Don’t Invest Simply Because a Cryptocurrency’s Value is Low
One of the biggest rookie mistakes you can make in cryptocurrency investing is buying an asset simply because its value is incredibly low. In many cases, cryptocurrencies have a low value for a reason, and you haven’t just discovered an asset that’s hugely undervalued.
A typical reason for the low value of a cryptocurrency is its circulating supply. There may be hundreds of millions, if not billions, of this coin in circulation. With market values still driven largely by supply and demand, if demand far outstrips supply, it’s hard for an asset to grow in value.
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Don’t Fall for Spoofers That Attempt to Inflate a Crypto Asset’s Price
One of the biggest scams in the cryptocurrency markets is the ability of fraudsters to “spoof” a market. Cybercriminals can work together to try to inflate (or deflate) the value of an unknown cryptocurrency. This is achieved using fake buy or sell orders that can create immense volatility on the crypto exchanges. Beginners spot the value soaring and unwittingly gravitate to buying these effectively worthless assets.
Some other crypto scammers will attempt to plug their assets heavily on social media, promoting it as the “next big thing” to inflate its value on the supported crypto exchanges. They then sell their coins at a higher price and disappear into the ether, never to be heard again.
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Don’t Lose the Private Key to Your Cryptocurrency Wallet
If you choose to store your long-term cryptocurrency investments in cold storage, via an offline wallet that looks like a USB stick, you’ll need to keep your private key to this wallet. Without your private key, you’ll not access the funds online. Should this happen, you would lose your assets forever, as the cryptocurrency is secured using these cryptographic keys.
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Don’t Invest in a Cryptocurrency Without a Defined Stop Loss
Whether you’re day trading or investing in cryptocurrencies for the long term, you should always take full advantage of stop-loss orders on the exchanges. Stop losses help to remove human emotion from your cryptocurrency investments. By setting your stop loss at an acceptable loss – usually a small percentage of your overall capital – you can define your maximum loss and allow the investment to run.
The worst-case scenario is that it will trigger your stop loss, the trade will be closed, and the best-case scenario is your trade will run and accumulate a substantial profit to boost your capital.
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Don’t Be Impulsive and Suffer From FOMO
Profitable investors in cryptocurrency (and other assets) are rarely impulsive types. The “Fear of Missing Out” (FOMO) is real in the cryptocurrency markets. All too many newbies to crypto trading are desperate to take a position on the most popular assets and don’t look at whether their values are at the top or bottom of their range.
The key to successful cryptocurrency investing is to hop aboard the gravy train of the next crypto-asset before it even departs the station. This requires extensive research and you just can’t rely on other so-called “experts” to tell you what’s good.
Trading with a crypto bot offers you a more reasonable strategy. When the chart goes in the direction you don’t need, you become unintentionally emotional, and when you trade emotionally, you always lose, since all of your carefully prepared methods and game plans can be tossed out the window, and you begin trading recklessly.
Do’s of Cryptocurrency Investing
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Do Diversify Your Investments Outside of the Crypto Space Too
Just as it’s important to diversify your investments across multiple crypto assets, you should also spread your risk further still outside of the crypto sector. According to Freetrade, diversification of your investment portfolio into stocks and indices across multiple nations and industries is hugely beneficial. Regulated brokers also offer benefits, such as access to the stock exchanges. It ensures your portfolio is never reliant on one asset to enable it to grow and compound over time. Beyond stocks, you can also invest in Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs), Real Estate Investment trusts (REITs), and investment trusts to help diversify your portfolio.
It’s a similar case with investing in cryptocurrency assets and conventional assets like stocks and commodities. Be careful not to put all your eggs in the crypto basket. It’s still a largely unregulated industry and no one can wholly predict what the future holds – even if it does like bright!
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Do Implement a Risk Management Strategy to Safeguard Your Overall Capital
Risk management goes hand-in-hand with using stop-loss orders when buying cryptocurrencies. If you are serious about growing your capital and giving it the best opportunity to grow over the long term, you should limit the amount of risk you take per investment. This means you should only commit a small percentage of your capital on each trade you make.
This could be as small as 1% of your overall capital. This is something that tried and trusted financial traders employ, as it’s very hard to go broke this way. You’d need to have 100 successive losing trades to even come close to losing your entire capital. As your capital grows, you can also compound that growth by increasing your trades on a sliding scale in line with your capital. 1% of a trading bank worth $1,000 is much less than 1% of a trading bank worth $3,000.
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Do Your Own Research on Cryptocurrencies Before Investing
Even if you’ve read multiple articles about a particular cryptocurrency and the potential for its value to soar, don’t be tempted to part with your money there and then. Take some time to sit back and assess the cryptocurrency yourself first. Read up on the overall project that the cryptocurrency is involved in. Does it have longevity? Does it solve a problem in the crypto/blockchain sector? Have you downloaded its whitepaper to discover its future plans? Only once you’ve uncovered all there is to know about an asset can you make a well-informed investment move.
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Do Use Cold Storage for Housing Cryptocurrency
We’ve already mentioned that losing private keys to a cryptocurrency wallet is a cardinal sin and a one-way ticket to losing your crypto assets. Terms of cryptocurrency wallets, there are several types of wallets.
The most common are “hot wallets” and “cold wallets”. Hot wallets are typically housed within centralized cryptocurrency exchanges, which means the exchanges themselves have your private keys and could therefore access your crypto assets. Cold wallets are devices that house your public and private wallet addresses offline so that cyber-criminals cannot locate your keys and move your cryptocurrency without you knowing.
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Do Expect Volatility in the Cryptocurrency Markets
Although the cryptocurrency sector is not the “Wild West” in trading terms, there is still an inherent level of risk in trading all crypto assets. That’s large because no one truly knows the ceiling for cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. This makes it hard to know what a “value” price is for certain assets. It’s not uncommon for assets to experience huge volatility daily. We’re talking 10% moves in 24 hours, not just 1%.
Those with carefully researched crypto investments and risk management strategies will be best placed to ride out the volatility and stay the course.