A year ago I started to invest in crypto. This is also how I found out about Steemit. Steemit was a very great help for me to experiment with crypto. I was a bit scared to use certain exchanges and to send crypto to addresses and wallets. But the free money I got from Steemit was the perfect opportunity to let me experiment with everything. It gave me the opportunity to invest in every coin possible and learn how to invest in crypto. I want to share a little bit of this experience with the crypto newbies.
When I first started trading on smaller coins I noticed that a coin with even good fundamentals could go up a lot, and a few days or weeks later come back completely. This was a horrible experience as sometimes I made 300 % gains but a few days later it came back and suddenly I had 0 % gains. This gave me the incentive to start flipping coins. And yes, this actually worked to some extent. So I started to make gains.
Crypto Bubble
Now, a year later things have changed substantially. I noticed that every coin I once owned went up much more than the total gains I made. Due to the recent boost in crypto it is better to hold longer than to flip coins after having made some profits. At least this is the case for people with not much trading experience and a full time job. It is painful to see that coins on which I took 50-300 % profit, jumped like x20-x60.
At the same time, it is a valuable lesson and in order to be successful you need to adapt to the circumstances. I do believe we are currently in a crypto bubble. There are some coins that a sane investor would never invest in though their price absolutely skyrocketed. An example is Bytecoin. I read an article that claims Bytecoin has an error in its code that can be abused to generate as many Bytecoin as you want. This error has not been fixed yet. Still, the price has skyrocketed and Bytecoin managed to enter in the top 10. This clearly shows that investors don't know what they are doing and are just pooring money into random coins. This kind of behavior is typically know to lead to crypto bubbles.
Being in this bubble is not necessarily bad. You can use this bubble into your advantage. I am pretty sure the bubble is not about to pop yet. Why ? People I know are starting to get into crypto but they can't get their accounts validated on the exchanges yet. I have some friends that tried to make an account on Kraken 3 weeks ago, but they still aren't validated by Kraken and so they can't buy crypto. So my guess is that we can still go a lot higher from here and I want to exploit this as much as possible to gain as much as possible.
Now, how can this bubble be maximally exploited ? I am not claiming to be an expert but I looked up a lot of information about bubbles and combined with my experience I am going to explain the newbies how I think maximal benefit can be achieved. The most important thing is to be sure that you protect yourself from the bubble getting popped. Therefore, only invest the biggest part of your money in coins that are really used a lot in real life. Everyone has a different opinion on which these coins are but for me the most secure coin to have your main amount of money invested in, still is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is getting worldwide adoption and being legalized. In Japan Bitcoin has become an official currency recently, in Australia Bitcoin will be legalized this summer. I went to a blockchain conference this week and one of the hosts said that even Mercedes is accepting Bitcoin as means of payment. So if you want to avoid a dotcom style 90 % collapse of the value of the currency you are holding, Bitcoin is your safest bet at this moment.
However, only buying the topcoins backed with a lot of usage isn't the most optimal way to exploit this bubble. Now is the moment to take some risks and also buy some smaller coins. But only use a small amount of your investment money for that. You don't want to be in these smaller coins when the bubble pops. I didn't do a full research about all the small coins because I simply don't have the time for that. But I will share with you some coins I found that could be good investments and I will also explain why. These are coins that I think are worth holding. Don't make the mistake to sell these coins after 200-300 % profit. In this bubbly environment much higher gains can be made if you have patience and hold a bit longer.
Steem
I don't think I need to explain this to anyone here why you need to hold Steem. Steemit has very great fundamentals. So don't sell the Steem you get here but hold it long term.
Ubiq
Ubiq is a quite new coin with a still low marketcap. As Ubiq is the stable entreprise version of Ethereum, my guess is that this one still has a lot of upward potential. In the recent days its value has been increasing very rapidly and my guess is that this will only go faster.
Synereo
Synereo is an interesting social media project that will launch this month the beta release of the product Qrator. I think it has the potential to one day be as great as Steemit. Many people see Synereo as Steemits competitor but I just think about them as two projects in a similar space that can perfectly live next each other like Facebook and Twitter.
PIVX
PIVX is a recent fork of Dash. The people were not happy about the instamined Dash and therefore made a more honest fork. A few weeks ago PIVX skyrocketed into the top 10 and then had a serious correction. It has came back now and my expectation is once they add the zeroknowledge proof to it, it will go on another run. The coin was also advised as a possible very rewarding speculative investment by TheDollarVigilante and Trace Mayer:
Stratis
I recommended this coin on Steemit a year ago:
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@diego24/cryptotrading-alert
Since then it went ballistic. Unfortunately I already sold it. This is one of the big mistakes I made. I am back in it though because I believe it can still go higher as it has the same purpose as Ethereum. Stratis actually has certain advantages over Ethereum and therefore I think its upward potential is still gigantic:
I know there are plenty of other great investment opportunities out there. I didn't investigate them all. But for me, given my current knowledge, these are the most interesting ones I discovered. Don't forget to do your own research before you invest in any of them !