I am pretty new in the crypto market and started with buying some ETH back in June 2017. The first months my portfolio didn't change much in value and I stopped looking at it in a daily manner.
However at the end of 2017, things changed. ETH quickly gained value and I saw that there were a lot of altcoins with gains of up to 100% on a single day. Of course I wanted these gains too, so I sold a small amount of ETH and invested it in different altcoins, basically based on their previous performance and articles that praised these coins on Reddit.
As you can image, this didn't work very well. Although, I made profit with some coins, I also lost a lot with others, mostly with XRB, which I bought at 25$ (so basically its all time high). As I am still invested in ETH, my overall gains look pretty well, but if I just had put everything in ETH, it would look even better.
So here my lessons learned:
- Don't by a coin just because on it's good performance the last days. Previous performance is no indicator for future performance.
- Don't by a coin because you red some enthusiastic article on it on reddit or here on steemit. The author/poster is probably invested in this coin as well and just wants to get you into buying it to improve his own gains.
- Instead, do your own research on a coin before buying it. Look at its homepage, read the whitepaper and find out if it has a real use case.
- Think long term and invest most of your portfolio in coins that give you (probably smaller than 100% a day but) steady gains over a longer period of time, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum.
- Try to always keep some fiat money on an exchange, such that you can buy the dip if it happens. A good strategy is to cash out a small amount of your gains when the prices are rising.
- Don't look at your balance every 10 minutes. Think long term!