There are some basic concepts to know:
1) Know your market:
The cryptoassets world is pretty funny. Is very volatile but also is very predictible.
The crypto world follows the same rules of the stock markets but is much more "innocent", its traders are much more naive and predictable, so you can more easily estimate their supports and resistances.
Now, since January is in a strong bullish cycle, so there are two ways to calculate the target prices: through its total capitalization or through its price in relation to bitcoin. The dollars are not very useful to assess your success. You need a stronger reference: the BTC.
The first, then, is to know your market and there are three places to start investigating interesting assets:
b) https://www.worldcoinindex.com/
c) https://www.cryptocompare.com/
I follow basic rules, if I investigate an asset related to the transfer of purchasing power, I use a maximum of 10-20% of the daily FOREX market to calculate the maximum capitalization and estimate the possible maximums.
If I research an asset related to Internet of Things (IoT) I think of a maximum of 15 trillion in three or four years.
The same applies for assets related to bets, social content, etc.
Soon you will see that cryptoassets are a not so big world, but related to specific things of consumption, especially those that require a controlled and reliable accounting, or the use of data for EVERYTHING.
2) The intrinsic value of your assets:
This aspect is fundamental, the cryptoassets, unlike other assets must have certain unique characteristics:
a) They must be safe. That is, the resistance to being modified, deformed or altered. Bitcoin has become so valuable because it has proven that neither miners, developers, nor large investors can modify its DNA. But bitcoin is just the tip of the iceberg, there are many other safe assets, with an unbreakable cryptographic architecture.
b) Scalability. It is the Achilles heel of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Scalability refers to its practical use in everyday situations, ie how easy you can transfer those assets at the lowest price, is a relationship between the speed and security with which your asset is transferred.
c) Fungibility: That is, the ability to replace an asset of the same nature with another of the same nature. For example, an ounce of gold can be exchanged for an ounce of gold without any problem, they are identical, indistinguishable. On the other hand, bitcoin is not. Suppose you acquire a bitcoin: it is possible to trace the origin of that bitcoin and know what it was used for -to buy drugs, to launder money, etc-; that is to say that there is a trace in the bitcoin.
Instead there are other assets that it is virtually impossible to know in what or how or where they have been used without implying that it is a triple entry accounting asset that can be confirmed in the blockchain.
Which brings us to the most important feature:
d) Triple Entry Accounting: The triple entry system allows you to verify that there is no duplicity, that you do not incur a double expense and makes the system extremely secure. VISA and Mastercard have good scalability and can be very safe, but they are still centralized and therefore easily subject to manipulation by bad actors. With cryptoassets this risk is diminished in an infinite way. The third counter is, of course, the ecosystem -that is, anyone who decides to have the account book on their computer and lends the power of their computer to verify that security (ie the miner or the stakeholder).
The greatest triumph of the cryptoassets is to keep the accounts in the public domain and make it inviolable. This has been achieved by:
1) Domain public software.
2) Universal mathematical rules.
3) Global distribution of the Proof of Work and Proof of Stake.
How to know these characteristics:
In githubhttps://github.com/ you can, if you know programming, check the code. But since we are not experts in programming, just read the specialized people.
Ie:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
https://github.com/monero-project/monero
e) The economic model of the asset:
Inflationary or deflationary.
The distribution of assets.
The generation of assets.
Its scarcity or abundance.
3) Where to exchange your assets:
Here there are many options and it depends on where you live. Most platforms have a decent trading software, but if necessary there is a fairly complete one called https://www.tradingview.com/ to do technical analysis.
*I posted this as treath in Trade2Win: http://www.trade2win.com/boards/cryptocurrencies/227480-how-trade-cryptos.html#post2994010