Intro

I made this post as a sort of noob guide into crypto also, because now I have a lot of people that are asking me what to do, and how to do it. I just want to share this one with them and be done with it. Feel free to share it with your friends if you find it helpful.

I will start with this Warren Buffet quote:
"Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful."

To which I will add:
"You can always count on people to be greedy."

And also one more rule I closely follow:
NEVER invest more than you can afford to lose.

---

I finally took the plunge with crypto. I was always thinking "now is not a good time, the market seems very volatile, blablabla".
But the market IS continuously volatile so I stopped being a chicken for once and put some money in it.

Why did I put moeny? Why didn't I try to mine some coins, you might ask?
If I mined with my current laptop for a month, without stopping ... I would've made...25$ in the best case scenario.
So yeah. Best way to make some decent money was by investing.

Where the actual journey starts

Day 1

I started trading about a week ago. But I found out about steemit two days ago. So for a short while, the Journal will be one week behind.
Now, I was a complete beginner regarding how crypto worked. I was just staring at Coinmarketcap.com for some time and that was it until about a week ago.
SO
In Bucharest, where I live, we have some kind of ATM machines where you can pay different kind of bills and where you can buy BitCoin for cash.

*Note: at that time BitCoin was pumping(rising) so I really really wanted to get some fast thinking it would reach 10.000$
But, ok. I have money and I want BitCoin. How do I get said BitCoin?
Easiest way for me was to make an account on blockchain.info where I created a BTC wallet.
Once the wallet was generated I wanted to "Receive" bitcoin and I was given an address made of seemingly random numbers and letters.
With that address I went to bit.co.in which basically binds a bitcoin address to a name you specify.

Once in front of the ZebraPay machine (bills ATM) I put my address in using the alias made with bit.co.in. And that was it. I had BitCoin in my blockchain.info account. I WAS READY TO GET RIIIIICH.
But yeah. That's not how it works, sadly (or thankfully).

Side note: Of course, you can also buy BitCoin with your card, but the comision is 10-20% of your total sum, from what I've found. Of course, you can buy cheaper coins, which fee less and convert them to bitcoin and that's what most people do, from what I heard.

If I kept the money in Bitcoin and would've risen to 10.000K I would've made a 30-40% profit...Which wasn't so much for me. I invested 60$ to trial out. I wanted something that would grow a lot and quickly.

I was looking for a coin that suited my needs. Naturally, I went to coinmarketcap because I was familiar with it. I went to the Recently Added page and I was looking for a coin to make me filthy rich with 60$ invested in it.
Hey some dude did it with 27$ back in 2009. I could also do it, right?

Now, I may be a new trader. But I'm not to much of an idiot. So I was looking for a new coin with a good at least 1 million $ in trading volume AND under 0.10$.
Why?
Well, I know of the so called "whales" that have a lot of money and they can easily move the price around. So, something with a very low trading volume can be easily manipulated. Also, high trading volume signals that the coin/token is popular and will be able to *cough* *cough* make me filthy rich.

And there it was. It was looking right at me. Power Ledger (POWR). It had over 2mil. $ in volume and was 9 cents.

So great! I wanted to buy it! But...how? Then I saw this:
"Power Ledger is available on those markets: [...]" (Binance back then - Now also Bittrex & others)

Markets

A market is the sort of place where you trade some stuff for some other stuff. That's basically where people meet to trade things. And that's exactly what a crypto market is. People trade some crypto stuff for some other crypto stuff
So I had to make another account on Binance to which I had to send some money from my wallet to a new wallet on their market.
I directed 40$ to Binance and made another account on Bittrex to which I sent 20$.

*BTW, making an account on Bittrex is a pain and to get your money out you have to give them your personal info which they will background check. If your info is incomplete/not found they will ask you to send them a picture of you and a picture of your ID for identification :)

Until my money was transferred (BitCoin has a really slow "standard" transfer) Power Ledger was already 0.11$
But I bought 20$ worth of it$. Then it rose to 0.13$ and I bought in with all the money I had (40$).
Never invest 100% of your money without research. And even with your research done, you should diversify your portfolio --> invest in more than one crypto currency

Power Ledger could've been a flop and I could've lost a large percentage of what I invested. I didn't do any research. I was just looking at graphs and numbers. #yolo kind of trading. You should never put ALL your invested money into ONE thing. NEVER. Unless you are prepared to lose it all. Diversify, diversify, diversify.

You can never know in this volatile market what will happen. Something can go up by 50/100 even 800% or tank/fall by 60% in less than a day . That's crazy.

Day 2 and Day 3

The next couple of days I was just basically looking at Power Ledger and watching it rise.
Made almost double my initial investment in 3 days.
So I did not have a reason to quit.

Day 4 - Here comes the Price Correction

Invested 40$...Now I had 72$.
What could go wrong?

A price correction is the market's way of saying "You can't pump Steroids then go to a Fitness Competition, Jack. So calm down for a bit. And you're also having a penalty for it".
So the market (basically the people activating in the market) started to dump my steroid coin because they made their profits and I panicked .
So I dumped when I had 50$ left on my wallet. (Now I would've had almost 100$ If I had patience).

At this point I had +10$ in my wallet and I wanted to make more. I thought Power Ledger was a fiasco - that was it, Good Game, Well Played, bye bye, move to another one. I didn't know back then what a price correction is and when to expect one.

So a started TRADING to make money. (and get filthy rich, of course)

To be continued

I will talk about my first trading experiences in the next post.
I will talk about what mistakes I made and how to avoid them and how to use the tools and indicators presented by most markets.

My first two days of trading were without any knowledge about it whatsoever. I was just looking at the price and traded volume and made a guess.
Somehow, I didn't loose too much money (I was basically at 46$ after my first attempts at trading, coming from 50$ previously to trading)

Afterwards I I started learning about tools, indicators. Basically I learned about:

• Bitcoin Walls
• Predicting (for the very short term) when something is about to go down or up.
• When to buy and when to sell
• How to tell if the price is stable or very chaotic.
• How to use more common tools.

But I will talk about them in the next post. Stay tuned if you liked it!