To give you a quick background, I've been doing web development and search engine optimization for the past 5 years. While I've had a lot of success with my business, in the back of my mind I intuitively felt that one day I'd end up trading stocks like those Wall Street guys. Apart from learning stuff here and there over the years and learning about technical analysis, I never ended up breaking into trading. Why? Because I would need an @sston of money to invest in order to make a decent living, that's why! Ain't nobody got time for dat... Haha
Things changed though the magical day I learned about cryptocurrency, specifically how HOT it is right now. My buddy turned me on to Minergate and he showed me how you can mine "DASH" with a computer and make an @sston of money. Well... cough... no. What ended up happening is that after we got all excited and thought we were gonna make $200 a day, we learned that the currency we were mining wasn't DASH, but instead was Dashcoin, which is worth little to nothing. I was devasted. I was like phucccc, here I thought I was gonna be making $200 day and... phucccc... Yeah, it was pretty depressing. I was depressed for a good 2 days after that and ended up drinking a lot of beer haha. So yeah, wasn't all that "magical" now that I look back.
Despite learning that I couldn't make $200/day running my sh*tty computer to collect "DASH".. cough... Dashcoin, a seed was still planted in my mind. I was like dude... why don't I start trading this?
Another week or two passed and I started learning about trading cryptocurrency. I finally was like phuc it... I'm gonna pump $500 into Coinbase to buy Etherium (they only let you put $500 if you're using a debit card; bank transfers take longer).
I might as well quick throw in the fact that if you sign up here, you and I each get $10 back from Coinbase if you purchase over $200 in coin from them:
https://www.coinbase.com/join/596fead811bce401dc191a98
But anyway... I quickly transferred the $500 worth of Etherium I bought to Poloniex, the most popular cryptocurrency exchange. Once my funds were transferred to my Poloniex Etherium wallet, I was ready to roll and was immediately struck by how mind-boggling this whole thing was... I mean, we're talking about thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, possibly MILLIONS of people worldwide speculating with cryptocurrency. I saw numbers portraying cryptocurrencies' values flashing and I became fixated. In fact, I legit didn't talk to my girl for a good 3 or 4 days and have ignored all my friends ever since I joined Poloniex haha.
At any rate, I was ready to make my first trade. Since I was a complete rookie, and I somewhat still am - a damn profitable rookie, might I add - I figured the safest way to invest would be to choose 6 coins and evenly distribute my $500 into each of them. I chose: DASH (the real DASH hah), Ripple (XRP), Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC), Bitcoin (BTC - duhh, had to) and I thought, heck, might as well save some of my Etherium (ETH).
I let these coins sit overnight and I woke up to a 6% profit - aka, roughly $30. I was like sheeeiiittttt, that's not so bad haha. So I let them sit another night - I woke up to 5% more profit - aka, roughly $25. Again, I was like sheeeiitttt hahaha.
Now that I had made some gains, I began to get a little bit more aggressive and was trying to scalp little 1-2% yields within a very short timeframe, only to realize that I was losing in most of them. I quickly realized I had pissed through $20 of my gains and was like, damn, I'm going back to diversifying my coins and actually holding them. This time I chose 7 coins, two of which were very obscure alt coins. My logic was: hey, one of these phuckers might go up 20% or so in a day, which will offset losses and possibly catapult my gains.
I went to sleep that night with my trades in. I woke up to little under a 6% gain and was like, SH'WEEETTTTT. Between little losses here and there and some gains, I basically was at or around $550 (aka, $50 ahead). I didn't know what to do at this point, like if I should diversify again or get ballsy with something. So I pretty much hung out with my girl over the weekend and drank beer, watched Game of Thrones yesterday (Sunday), etc. In that time period I had lost a little, gained a little and was miraculously able to stay around the $550 range. Last night I noticed that DASH was pretty low and that it usually fetches $194, even $196, so I was like hmmmm... Why don't I go balls deep in DASH and see if I can pick up a quick 2 - 3% gain, right?
Well today I woke up to DASH hitting $215! $215! So bammmm, got basically 10%'ish overall from my trades and am now at $600. Correction: the dollar value of my gains is a good $15-20 under $100, so figure $80 or so... But in terms of actual Etherium (ETH) I traded back into, I basically have 1/2 of an etherium extra now, so do the math. Coin-wise I gained over 20%.
The reason I switched over to Etherium (ETH) is that Bitcoin keeps fluctuating and even if things get settled by the time of August 1st/the potential fork, Bitcoin could go down significantly in value. Also for simplicity's sake, I figure I could just sell the $100 gain back in Coinbase and transfer it to my bank account to familiarize myself with the process.
So there you have it folks: a $100 gain, give or take, off of $500, WHILE being a totally noob. [Picture below from my Poloniex page]
What does this mean? It means that I'm currently transferring A LOT more money to Coinbase haha, which I will then transfer to Poloniex. It means I will be allocating at least 2 hours of pure study time into trading each day. It means that if I can keep getting gains like this, especially on LARGER sums of money, that I can tell 2-3 annoying clients to phuc off so I can dedicate more time to this lol.
It also means that I will be sharing things as I go, so that anyone who is a straight up noob like I was a few days ago can check out updates and follow my progress.
By the way, I just joined Steemit community, so any love you show will be greatly appreciated. I promise I will start making great content to chronicle my adventures with cryptocurrency. I also will be making some rad videos to keep you in the loop. So any steem love you show me will help me out a lot! :)