It seems more and more of you are tuning into my channel because of my crypto trading articles. That’s humbling and wonderful at the same time.
It’s also completely unexpected.
While I’ve worked hard to level up my trading skills, I really only started sharing what I’d learned because that’s what I love to do, share knowledge. I love open sourcing my ideas. I grew up in the open source software world and now I’m doing my best to make knowledge open source.
That’s why I share everything I’ve learned right here on Medium, Hacker Noon and Strategic Coin.
To make it easier on you I decided to sit down and round up my greatest crypto resources in one place to help you in your quest to get stronger and stronger at trading.
Let’s do this!
The Best of the Best
By far the mostly widely read trading article of mine is Mastering Shitcoins, The Poor Man’s Guide to Getting Crypto Rich.
The title is one of my personal favorites. It’s a parody of the fantastic book, Mastering Bitcoin, by the unparalleled Bitcoin guru, Andreas Antonopoulos.
I think it’s the most popular because everyone wants a chance to cash in on the crypto boom but not everyone has the time to sit in front of a monitor all day. If you’ve got a family, a full time job, pets and kids, you just don’t have the time to stay glued to that flat screen. If that’s you than Mastering Shitcoins is the one you want. It’s a breakdown of my long term buy and hold strategy and it’s the best choice for a busy lifestyle.
My latest article, How to Crush the Crypto Market, Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Do Whatever You Want for the Rest of Your Life, exploded out of the gate and it’s quickly creeping up on Mastering Shitcoins. It’s probably the exact opposite of that article and focuses exclusively on crushing the parabolic swing trade, the ultimate trade in any market. If you love trading, pouring over charts and white papers, all while prowling Discord and Slack channels then this one is filled with some hard earned wisdom.
Going back a bit, we come to the first article I ever wrote on trading, The Cryptocurrency Trading Bible. It’s still a strong read but if I’m being honest I still had a lot to learn. I had the mentality right and the psychology but I was still over trading and taking too many dumb risks, even if I didn’t really know it.
In fact, it’s safe to say that no matter how good you get at anything in life, there’s always another lesson waiting for you around the corner.
There’s an old Zen proverb that fits this perfectly:
“What does the student do? Chops wood and carries buckets of water. What does the master do? Chops wood and carries buckets of water.”
In other words, just because you learn something doesn’t mean you get to stop doing the work. You have to keep grinding, keep pushing to get smarter and faster and stronger. You have to strive to see yourself clearly, to see your mistakes without judgement and get them fixed fast.
The second article in the series, Cryptocurrency Trading Bible Two: The Seven Deadly Sins of Technical Analysis, was a power boost up for me. It marked the beginning of my personal breakout. I stopped looking at patterns I’d learned in various TA books and started looking for my own patterns. I realized that a lot of patterns are bullshit and that almost everything is a channel that goes up, down or sideways.
Once you can start to see your own patterns, instead of relying on the ones handed down to you, the whole market changes.
Books, Books, Books
A lot of books have helped me along the way. I’m betting they’ll help you too. Developing a life long love of learning is the way to get better at anything you try your hand at in this life.
Hands down my absolute favorite book on trading is Insider Buy Superstocks: The Super Laws of How I Turned $46K into $6.8 Million (14,972%) in 28 Months by Jesse C. Stine. This guy made millions in the regular markets, delivering the kind of returns rarely seen outside of the modern crypto markets. It’s my current bible and it forms the foundation of any good trading education. Don’t even think about it, just grab it right now. It will blow your mind.
Way of the Turtle, the Secret Methods that Turned Ordinary People into Legendary Traders by Curtis M. Faith, one of the original turtles, is a masterpiece of understanding market psychology. It’s not enough to conquer the fundamentals of entries and exits. Far more important is mastering your emotions and your ability to look deep into the future with great patience.
To master trading you have to master yourself.
There’s also the companion to that book, The Complete Turtle Trader, by an author who studied the Turtles and their story extensively, Michael W. Covel. While Way of the Turtle is more about the emotional journey, Covel focuses on their mechanical trading system, which is a basically a heuristic rule set designed to take the emotions out of trading and put statistics to work in your favor over the long run.
Covel is the only author with two books on this list. His other book, Trend Following: How to Make a Fortune in Bull, Bear and Black Swan Markets, goes well beyond the Turtles and looks at other fantastic trend followers. Trend following is a very specific style of trading that doesn’t try to predict reversals in the market. It just looks to confirm them and run with them. Let others figure out if Bitcoin is going to $11,000, $8,000 or $4,000. A trend follower just hops back on the rocket after it turns around for good.
We’re Going Back to the Future
But I don’t just look at the markets. As a futurist, I spend a lot of my time gazing into the misty depths of time, trying to figure out where all this crypto stuff is going.
What does it mean for the world? Is it good? Is it evil? Is it both? Does it really matter and why?
If you don’t do that, how will you have any idea what projects have a good chance to succeed and which ones will crash harder than a lead zeppelin?
That’s why I poured all my thoughts into a series of articles that focus on what Bitcoin and crypto will become as they morph and change over the coming years. Those articles rippled out and touched many people on a totally different level. Because of these little musings of mine I’ve had the privilege to meet some of the most amazing people on the planet and I’ve had a chance to consult on some incredible projects.
That brings us to the two most widely read articles I’ve ever written. These are really sister articles. They go together and form the foundation of my theories about the future.
The first is Why Everyone Missed the Most Important Invention of the Last Five Hundred Years. While it may seem strange, the most groundbreaking inventions in history aren’t the Internet or the steam engine or the car or the smart phone.
Believe it or not, it was an accounting breakthrough that sent merchant ships surging around the world in the 1500's, brings goods from near and far.
Accounting innovations are super rare. In fact, there’s really only been two in the entire history of the planet.
Until now.
Bitcoin marks the beginning of a new era in accounting: triple entry accounting.
And every time there’s a breakthrough in accounting, it’s accompanied by a parabolic surge in innovation, creativity and economic complexity.
Math moves civilizations.
The follow up to that article, Why Everyone Missed the Most Mind-Blowing Feature of Cryptocurrency, is my most far reaching piece by a huge margin and for good reason. In it I outline how we can not only print money without a central authority but distribute it in a totally new way. It seems simple on the surface, but it’s an idea that can change everything that’s wrong with the world, if we get it right.
Following on the heels of that article, I laid out practical steps for exactly how a company or project could go about distributing money far and wide across the economic playing field with Gamifying the Delivery of Money. This article has inspired dozens of projects and it’s the foundation of how we can build a parallel economic operating system for the world, one that brings an avalanche of new players into the great game of economics and life and bootstraps our civilization to an incredible new level.
After ripping through that mind-bending monster you may need a little break to catch your breath. When you’re ready to come back you can check out Reflections on the Best Blockchain Tweets Ever Written.
I’ve followed Naval Ravikant’s tweets and talks for years. He’s one of the thinkers I most admire in this space and others. No question, he’s a genius, even if he’s too humble to admit it. After an epic tweet storm that took my breath away, I just knew I had to write an article reflecting on all the wisdom he’d dished out in under 140 characters like a Haiku master.
Lastly, What Will Bitcoin Look Like in Twenty Years is my most comprehensive look at the future and it’s filled with everything I’ve ever imagined for crypto and technology. It’s the type of article that will look profoundly prophetic or tremendously foolish in twenty years but I took a chance, put myself out there and wrote it anyway.
The Most Important Article I Ever Wrote is the One Nobody Reads
If I’m being honest, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in this life.
One of my fans jokingly called me Master Yoda the other day but when I look back at my life I see anything but a master. I see a long, strange trip with a lot of screw ups.
I spent a huge chunk of my life angry and bitter at the world, I chased phantom riches, threw myself into work I hated instead of focusing on what I love, wasted time, money and relationships, threw away countless opportunities and so much more.
I know I’m not alone. That’s the journey of life.
But I no longer look back in regret. All these mistakes made me who I am and I wouldn’t change it for anything.
Yet there is something different about me these days. I’m enjoying life and the people around me and focused on the things I love, as well as giving back to the Universe for all it’s given me.
And when I think back to where things really started to change for me, one moment comes to mind:
It’s where I finally realized that giving is the best way to receive.
It’s an old cliche, the kind you step over and ignore on the way to looking for something more complex. But this simple truth made me an “overnight success” after a decade of false starts and tears and sweat.
Once I understood that the great economic pie of life is not fixed in size at all and that we don’t all have to fight over every scrap, and that the pie grows constantly, that’s when I started to really turn my life around and when people finally listened to what I had to say.
In the past I only imagined I had something to share but really I was trapped in my own spiral of self-delusion and negative belief systems just like so many poor suffering folks on every corner of the Earth. It’s only when I let these useless thoughts go, when I focused on giving away everything I’d learned without reservations or strings attached, when I forgave myself and others, when I saw other people as people and not objects or obstacles to step over that all of life really started to open up to me.
It can happen for you too, if only you change how you see the world.
That’s what this article is all about, changing your mind to change your life.
Medium liked it so much they recorded it for me for free. The link is right at the top so you can listen to it if you like.
If you only read one article, read that one. It’s not about trading but it’s a heck of a lot more important if you want to succeed at whatever you want to do in this crazy fun house called life.
Thanks for listening.