My First Week As A Crypto Bro

Last week a little forum on Reddit known as //wallstreetbets screwed a hedge fund and countless others out of billions by banding together and inflating the price of Gamestop (GME). But you already know about that. It however also brought alternative coins (also called tokens) into the mainstream. Most notably Doge, a meme coin based on a Japanese Shiba Inu named Kabosu. The stock started rising a week and a half ago and had a huge pump (price jump) when Elon Musk, Tesla owner, Grimes’ baby daddy and twitter king started tweeting about it at 3am PST, causing a fun day of ups and downs for all holding it, myself included.

Now let’s go back a bit so we can talk about the main character of this story, ME.

When I was reading about the GME fuckery, I was pissed. If these reddit dweebs can make absolute bank off essentially trolling the market, why can't I? More importantly, where was my invite?? Do I use reddit? No. But my main character complex is immune to logic.

Since it takes a couple days to open an investment account, I decided to start my journey in crypto first. Banks were already apologizing for having large volumes of applications and I wanted to get my hands on some of that sweet Doge coin.

I had friends posting about how their Doge stock was skyrocketing (they’ve owned shares for a while), and some people hopping on the bandwagon around the same time as me. Now I’ve never been in a band but boy do I love a good party bus, especially when it’s allegedly mi going to the moon!

With the help of a friend I opened a Shakepay account, as well as a Binance account. You e-transfer your money into Shakepay, then carefully send that money to Binance, and voila, you're ready to buy crypto or whatever your heart desires.

Shakepay is the easier wallet to get funds in and out of, just a quick e-transfer. However here you are limited to buying and selling Bitcoin & Ethereum.

Binance is where all the fun stuff happens, buying & selling, hundreds if not thousands of alt coins, and oh my GOD is it overwhelming.

I bought some Dogecoin (DOGE), Decentraland (MANA), and most recently Yearn Finance (YFI), as well as some Bitcoin (BTC) to round it all out.

Here’s what I learned this week:

You’re going to want someone who’s more experienced helping you out.

People to avoid:

Condescending pricks

Forex bros trying to recruit you for their pyramid scheme

ONLY use the money you're okay with losing completely. I’m serious. Pretend it’s already spent. Since I was going to use that money on booze and drugs anyway, parting with it was easy. This way you're a) not going to lose your rent money and b) it’s a lot more fun to learn when you're not stressed. The only trading adjacent stress I want is which disgusting mega yacht I'm going to buy in 5 years.

Whatever platform you decide to use for trading, watch the tutorials. Then go to YouTube and watch their tutorials. I know gentlemen, it's the equivalent of stopping to ask for directions, but you don't really have a choice here.

This is what put me off of trading when i was initially thinking about it as a career: You need to know so bloody much, about each company, and how they relate to each other. Wrong. THERE ARE SO MANY WAYS TO MAKE MONEY IN TRADING. My mind was blown in the best way possible. For some reason I thought you had to read the news and be informed on all Fortune 500 drama. NOPE.

Joining a discord or some kind of chat group is important. Go listen and read what experienced traders have to say about that stock or the market in general. Someone in my discord a couple days ago said DOGE will probably go up to .053 or .054 that evening and you know what I did? Put a sell limit (which is basically a request saying if the stock goes up to a certain number, i want it sold that price) at .0538 and sure enough it was sold an hour later, only reaching a high of .0543 all evening. Long story short, find a community where people know more than you, and steal their tips. Much like real life, you never want to be the smartest person in the room!

Trading is simple, but it is not easy. I’ve definitely been lucky this first week but I only did a couple trades thanks to some help with timing, and the rest I'll chalk up to beginner's luck. It takes a lot of practice, this is not a get rich quick scheme, though the fellas skyrocketing GME made it seem otherwise.

A great website I found is coinmarketcap.com. It gives you a list of “gainers” and “losers”. I scanned this all week getting familiar with their names and standings. Can’t remember shit off the top of my head right now but at least when I see it again, I'll be familiar with it.

Investing in an alt coin because you like the name isn’t the best investment tip, but hell it works for me when I'm betting on ponies and with just slightly more research it worked for me this week. Check how it’s been doing the past 6 months, and slowly work your way towards the 5 minute graphs. If it’s been historically going up, but maybe dipped down a bit today, maybe it’s something worth buying. Just seems like common sense to me anyway.

If you’re ready to learn a bunch of confusing business terms and stare at numbers flickering all day, congratulations, you may qualify to be a crypto bro too.

And yes, women who trade crypto are also crypto bros.

Ill be posting as much as I can about my journey in crypto, my education RE trading, and anything relevant to this field. cOmE oN tHiS jOurNey wItH mE.

Xoxo CryptoBro