Amateur Insights of a CryptoNewb: 001 - One of Us, One of Us!

Indeed, I am now one of us... Steemit, and decentralised everything, is here to stay, it seems.

I've been thinking hard about what I want to do with my Steemit account...

Of course, I want to make money from it, as does everyone, but I also recognise that focusing on getting paid for my posts is not going to get me anywhere. What will, though? The only possible answer is: good content. A froody mixture of usefulness, transparency and entertainment.

To this end, I've decided to start keeping a record of all my adventures as a crypto-trader. I will share with you the experience I gain as I go about the heart-racing business of trying to ride the volatile waves of the cryptocurrency charts, and hopefully I'll help you learn something in the process, if only by demonstrating what you ought not to do... ;P

Of course there are other passions in my life that I will share in other parts, but for now crypto has all but taken over my life (as I'm sure many of you can relate to...) so my posts will primarily be talking about cryptocurrencies and trading them. You will recognise a post as part of this series by the title.

Let me update you, then:

I bought my very first bitcoin on the 13th of December 2017. I won't reveal how much my initial investment was but let's just call it $100. It has been over 3 weeks since then. The day before yesterday, my investment reached $210 before settling down to $195.

So in three weeks, I took 100 and doubled it. Not bad, I feel , for someone who had never traded before.

What I did was, I took 60% of my BTC and bought altcoins, after doing some research (I'd been researching for over a month before I was finally verified on the exchange to be able to buy).

For long term coins, I chose ADA and XLM. Right now, I regret selling half my ADA at 2x.
For mid-term, I bought EOS, IOTA, STRAT, and LTC. I sold all my STRAT at 2x.

Later on, I bought and sold Verge twice, making an average of 110% profit.

I bought WAVES too high, and tried being patient with it but sold it in the end for 15% loss.

I've recently bought NEO and TRON. I now have zero BTC in my portfolio and am regretting it because right now, BTC is climbing and every time it moves up in any significantly short period of time, my coins bleed.

Ok, this is getting long... Let me end it off with some basic advice for newcomer traders:

• Don't spend all your BTC on altcoins. Keep at least 30% in BTC.
• RESEARCH coins if you are going to buy them. And especially in the beginning, do not try to day-trade. You will lose money because FOMO and panic-selling hit even the most resilient of us.
• Oh! Almost forgot: Do not try buy a coin just as McAfee tweets about it. I tried it with Reddcoin and got burned. I literally saw the very second he tweeted, had Bittrex open and ready, and tried to buy it. But because of the extreme, sudden volume, Bittrex wasn't updating fast enough and I ended up buying way too high. I sold for 40% loss because I wasn't willing to let that money sit in the coin in the hopes that it would one day rise up again. I made the money back elsewhere (mostly with Verge).

That's it for now. Don't worry, this isn't going to be a diary-style series, I just need to update you. And posts will not always be this long, promise ;P

To find future posts in this series, search for #mandelcrypto