With Bitcoin smashing new levels by the hour I am sure for many it is getting hard to put your phone down or to stop staring at your device. The constant greens, good news for crypto and all around excitement is hard to deny. Unfortunately, many of us feel like we missed the boat or maybe we have made the wrong trades. You might have itchy hands as you pour over your available trades and prepare a "quarters for crypto" drive on your local street corner. While these feelings are valid most of us need to take a step back and realize we aren't playing with stacks big enough to get lambo rich. Sure you might get lucky and buy into a shitcoin at the right time to see it moon and you get out at the right time but the odds of this are not great.
What you should be focused on is preparing and learning. I went the hard route during the last rise and fall of crypto. Got in early but did not learn a single thing and overtraded, stuck with the wrong coins. I ultimately got frustrated with some of my moves and left my coins on exchanges where I could have lost it all. Luckily I stuck with the larger exchanges and logged into my accounts often enough my crypto was still there. I failed to properly take the identification processes seriously and got stuck in a backlog of thousands of other users trying to accomplish the same thing I was.
All of this led me to sour on crypto and shelf it for years. I dabbled with reading and checked prices but I failed to prepare myself for the next rise and fall of crypto. It might sound like I lost thousands of dollars but in reality I am more upset over the lost opportunity. I am still up in the overall sense but instead of saving my fiat and preparing to buy during a crash in crypto I went off to do other things and arrived a bit too late at the party again. For now I will make my minor trades, save my money and ensure I am in a position to move in and out of the market when need be.
Step number one to being successful in crypto trading is controlling the addiction. Stop checking your portfolio constantly, learn how to use the market tools on your exchanges to your advantage. Rather than turning it into a constant addiction make it a gambling game you only play when you are in a good financial head space.
Step number two to success is preparation. Make sure you are verified on exchanges, know how to move crypto in and out of your wallets and how you will be securing those wallets. Pick a couple of exchanges to trade on and learn them inside and out until you know what you are doing. (If you manage to figure all that out let me know I could use a hand)
Step number three is going back to school. You need at least some knowledge in how the entire system works and why and when you should be trading. Learn about the major coins and exchanges, read articles and watch videos until you have some idea or no idea what is going on but you learned a lot of cool terms to throw around.
Step number four is learn what kind of a trader you are. Do you shake every time you look at the buy and sell screen? If you are a set it and forget it kind of trader than making high risk trades is not for you. You have to be on top of the market for these to pay off. Looking at the past few years if one had simply bought some of the most popular coins and forgot about them they would be quite far ahead indeed. Most of us small stackers are looking for moonshots which are tough to time and tough to control. If you miss out on too many you will start to add up those losses in your head and go down a road that could FOMO you into back mistakes.
The plus for me after all of my trading and not trading? I didn't FOMO myself into that bad mistake and lose thousands like so many others have. In fact I am now in a better position financially in the "real world" because I stepped back from crypto and focused on other things. You can have a lot of fun and make a decent amount of money playing the crypto game but make sure to protect yourself mentally and financially during the wonderful wide ride of crypto currencies.
