You probably know a lot about investing in stocks and bonds, but most people don’t know anything about crypto investing. Cryptocurrency is what we call digital money, like bitcoin and ethereum. Over the last few years, it has been rocketing in value. At the end of 2017, bitcoin was worth about $1700. Today it’s worth about $4500. Ethereum has gone from about $13 to about $834: a huge increase.
You’re probably thinking that if you put all your money into bitcoin or ethereum you’ll get huge returns. But you might be wrong – maybe you’ll lose most of your money instead. That’s because there are no guarantees on cryptocurrency…
Why do investors recommend putting all your money into crypto? Because they think that this amazing technology will change the world. And when someone changes the world, you can expect that big companies will want to make deals with them…
Crypto is already changing the world, and big companies are already doing deals with crypto-investors – but not the ones you would expect.
If you want to see what crypto investing can do for you, just give me a call…
It is a truism of investing that you can’t make money without taking risks. But this is not the whole story. There are many investments that don’t involve taking risks, but instead just give you money.
In fact there are many investments that don’t involve taking any risks at all: stocks, bonds and bank accounts fall into this category. So does real estate, which is why it is often called “the greatest investment ever”.
But the other side of the coin is that these investments aren’t free. If you buy stocks or bonds or an apartment, you must pay a price to someone else for it: the price of a piece of paper with a number printed on it or a check in your account.
There are people who buy these investments at prices they can afford to pay and then hold them, hoping to sell them again when they’re worth more; this is what Warren Buffett means when he says that his “investment philosophy is to buy things I don’t need with money I don’t have.”
Cryptocurrencies are different. They are designed so you can use them as payment for goods and services, and in return for their value you get coins that can be used to make purchases online. This means the more people use them, the
Cryptocurrency has a real chance of going up in value. But that’s not why I’m putting my money in it.
I’m investing in crypto because I think it’s a great investment. If I were to put all my money in the stock market and then buy one share of Apple at the current price, I’d be incredibly lucky to get my money back, even after taxes. A few years ago, that kind of luck would have been enough to make me rich. Now it isn’t even enough to make me very rich.
That is because returns on stocks have been going down for many years. Stocks are getting riskier. And unless you are a genius or lucky enough to know something nobody else knows, they are not all going to go up at the same time.
Cryptocurrency is different. It’s hard to understand how it could go down in price; it’s more likely to go up than down. It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand how cryptocurrency works; it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand blockchain, bitcoin, or ethereum; it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand how governments will react when they realize cryptocurrency can defy them and their taxes and regulations; it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand
Cryptocurrencies are new. New things can’t be predicted, and they don’t have a well-known track record. You can’t know what’s going to happen. So you can’t predict whether investing in them is a good idea or not. In normal circumstances this would be like buying an unfinished house; it could turn out to be unoccupied for fifty years, and it would cost you a fortune to fix up.
But there is something different about cryptocurrencies, which makes them more like investing in stocks than in houses. First, you get a lot of information on them from the government and other people we trust. The more information we get, the closer we come to knowing how useful they will be. Second, as more people discover how useful they can be, their value goes up. They are like stocks; if more people start using them, the price goes up.*
*Investing in the stock of a company that hasn’t yet produced any profits might seem crazy now, but just wait – it will eventually pay off!
So you don’t have to wait until the price rises before you begin making money; you can start making money while there’s still plenty of cheap stock left…
I’m not the only one who’s noticed this. Most high schools and colleges do not teach finance.
The general view is that you can’t get rich investing in crypto, but then again, you can’t say the same thing about a lot of other things.
Crypto is new and therefore risky; it may also be hype and therefore even riskier. But if you look at what some people have made in crypto, it’s not hard to understand why people are excited enough to risk their hard-earned money on it.
I have some opinions too. I’ve written before about the state of the market, and I’ll probably write more. But don’t let this discourage you; I’ll leave most of that to another post.
The first thing to know about investing in cryptocurrency is that it is not the same as investing in stocks. A stock is a share of ownership in a company–the same company, with the same assets, in the same business, operating under the same rules and regulations. The only reason you can see your gains and losses as a percentage of your total investment is that it is easy to compare different companies’ shares of a common stock.
A cryptocurrency, on the other hand, is just another kind of asset, like gold or oil or real estate. It has value because people think it will be useful one day. And those who buy those assets don’t always know exactly what they are buying into.
It’s like going to McDonald’s for lunch instead of home cooking. You can order the same thing you always have; but if you do, you won’t be getting exactly what you’ve always got.
Cryptocurrencies are extraordinarily well-suited to the kind of investing I recommend. They’re particularly good if you like to trade, because you can make money by buying in when others panic and selling when they’re happy.
Cryptocurrencies have some features that are strange and even a little bit frightening. Bitcoin is like a giant speculative game of chess, in which only very smart people can win. But it’s also a financial system designed for cash transfers. The payments are invisible to the players, but they happen automatically, without any central authority telling them what to do. And it’s all recorded on the blockchain—a database that can’t be changed or corrupted, and whose integrity is verified by everyone in the network.
So far as I know, no one has ever thought of using this technology for anything other than making money.