If you are completely new to the cryptocurrency market and are interested in getting started, or are just curious about it, here are some of my tips:
To monitor the markets, download the Blockfolio and/or Delta apps on your mobile. When you run them, you can add different cryptocurrencies and 'watch only' and you'll get a stock exchange style screen showing you the price for the last day, week, month, year etc. You can select which currency pair to watch and which exchange to pull the data from.
Follow as many different coins as you like and watch how the prices rise and fall minute by minute, and when you make investments, you can track them with those apps easily. Note that you cannot make trades with these apps - they are just apps to show the price history, where you can make a record of your transactions.
There's a full list of cryptocurrencies listed on https://www.coinmarketcap.com plus a supporting app. This is another good place to get a birds-eye view of market changes on cryptos that you might not be aware of.
Some cryptocurrencies to follow and potentially invest in include NEO, EOS, ZCash, Ripple, Stratis, Litecoin, IOTA, Ethereum, Dash, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Cardano, Elixir and many more.. There are so many cryptocurrencies now - and most of them are scams and have no real strategy behind them - but research into companies and their whitepaper will reveal which are worth investing in, and which ones to avoid. Stay up to date with the news and ask more experienced people what they are interested in, and why. Please stay informed about scam companies and ponzi schemes - Bitconnect is one that has already crashed after being exposed as one. Stay away from shady cryptocurrencies that are rising in price by up to 300% in a day - as the cryptocurrency market is still unregulated, there's a lot of pumping and dumping going on, and you are sure to lose your investments if you try to jump on the hype wagon.
There are various different exchanges where you can deposit and withdraw EUR/USD plus buy and trade cryptocurrency - the most common and reliable ones are Kraken, Bitfinex, Poloniex, GDAX, Cex.io, Binance and Bittrex - but none are 100% bulletproof, and hackers are always trying to hack them and steal people's keys. Always use 2 factor authentification! If you use a password only, it could get compromised.
If you're in it for the short term, it's a simple trading game - buy low, sell high. You can place automatic buy and sell orders when the price reaches certain limits, so you can lock in profits and minimize losses. If you are playing the long game - be patient and keep your investments in particular cryptos that you think will increase in demand/value over time, and make sure that they are stored off the exchanges and in an offline wallet.
It's best to have an offline 'wallet' such as the Trezor or Ledger Nano, that you can use to store your keys so they can't get stolen from the 3rd party exchanges. Every transfer will cost you a small fee. These wallet doesn't hold all types of cryptocurrency, for example, at this time the Trezor only holds keys for these coins listed here: https://doc.satoshilabs.com/trezor-faq/overview.html#which-coins-are-currently-supported while the Ledger Nano has capability to store more, listed here: https://www.ledgerwallet.com/cryptocurrencies
But the community request for other coins to be supported, which may be supported in the future.
If you want to trade, you'd need to send cryptocurrency into one of those exchanges and trade with it. Every trade will cost you a small fee. When you are satisfied with your trade, you can send it back to your hardware wallet so it can't get stolen if the exchange gets hacked.
Right now, most cryptocurrency exchanges are experiencing heavy traffic because of social media hype, so webpages come up with errors often, and making trades can be frustrating, slow and sometimes fail to process. This is going to cause panic if/when Bitcoin crashes, as people will be scrambling to get their money back, or trade into alternative coins.
Don't invest anything that you are not prepared to lose.
Don't leave your money/cryptos on exchanges.
Don't gamble on unknown coins that are skyrocketing in price.
Good luck, and have fun!
