An Education
Something I've learned recently - HODL!
Yeah, I've basically been in crypto for two months, started with a ton of coins that got me nowhere, and I thought of myself as some dynamic daytrader who was a wolf of wall street.
Yeah, I lost money, lack of research and lack of patience do not make for a profitable venture.
Then things changed, I came to the conclusion that constantly selling was a stupid idea, to just hold the coins and up it will go.
Learning to HODL
I invested £400, bought digibyte, golem, waves, xem and by June 10th (about 3 weeks later) I was up to £8000! I was in Japan at the time and all my coins were in England in hardware wallets, by the time I came home, they were down to £5000
Still, thats a big profit! Now I am around £3000, thanks to the current market. But...since coming back I've redistributed, bought new coins, sold some. I am ready for the next moon.
The moral is this, Had I carried on as I was, there is no way I would have seen £8k, nor £3k, in fact I probably would have given up in frustration. If you don't give your coins time to rise you will get nowhere.
If I hold my coins until January 2018, where will I be? Do you really think I will be down?
What if I had held from June 2016 to June 2017? I probably would have £50k.
Holding is the best and safest way of making money in crypto.
Of course, there is never a guarantee, but it takes away a lot of stress.
Researching
Consider this an addendum.
Always do your research before you buy. Find out what is popular, then ask yourself why. Check out whitepapers, bitcointalk ANNs, coinmarketcap, and your own intuition. If something doesn't seem right, then maybe it isn't. FOMO (Fear of missing out) can also be a factor in making bad decisions, and it can overwhelm the fear of losing that may just keep your money in your wallet and not someone else's.
If you are a user of 4chan's /biz/, you often see the effects of FOMO, lack of research, and downright manipulation. There is also a lot of FUD (Fear uncertainty and doubt) fostered by unscrupulous users, for example, when Digibyte began to rise, people were constantly calling it a "sh*tcoin" and saying it would drop like a stone, and blaming everything on whales.
When it began to decrease in value due to the bitcoin super-dip, they targeted this particular coin, until it was panic sold from 2600 satoshis, to 1100 in less than a week.
Today it sits at around 760, but is on an upward trend, and will quite probably be back into the four digits within a few weeks.
If those users who bought into DGB and were now panic selling, had actually stayed calm, and bought for a reason other than "moon, moon", then digibyte may never have dropped as far as it did, and may have actually rose a little . But people are fickle, and reactionary. Instead of investing more money (buying the dip), they sold, even those who bought at 2600 - they sold because they didn't research and see the potential.
I hope my ramblings are helpful to you!
If this post was of help to you, please upvote.
Also please consider voting for me (christoff5221) as a witness
http://steemit.com/~witnesses