The Crypto Trader

How anyone can make money trading Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

Glen Goodman

• Publisher: Harriman House
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780857197184
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Finanzbuchhaltung

The real-life trades and strategies of a successful cryptocurrency trader Glen Goodman's goal was to retire young and wealthy, escaping the daily grind. He taught himself how to trade everything from shares to Bitcoin and made enough money to realise his dream and quit his day job while still in his 30s.In The Crypto Trader, Glen will show you exactly how he made huge profits trading Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and more, so that you can do it too - without risking your shirt.Glen publicly called the top of the market in December 2017 and took his profits before the crash. But there are still tons of trading opportunities out there and Glen continues to trade crypto successfully.Inside you'll see his multi-hundred-percent gains on a raft of cryptocurrencies and learn how he builds his profits and holds onto them. Glen reveals all his trading strategies, the proven methods and rules that make him one of the most followed traders in the world on social media. (He is also frequently interviewed by the BBC, Forbes and LBC, and is a contributing expert on cryptocurrency at the London School of Economics.)It took Glen years of study and trial and error to become a consistent money maker. He learnt his trading lessons the hard way - so you don't have to. With The Crypto Trader by your side, you'll learn how to grab opportunities, make money - and keep it.

PART 1: What’s it All About?

Chapter 1: Cryptomania

“So how much exactly have you made? Enough to pay off your student loans? Enough to buy a house? Enough to never have to work again?”

The giant shabby hobo in front of me lumbered from foot to foot and grinned sheepishly.

“Um… never work again?”

Lars was a painfully shy Dutch post-grad student who’d started mining a ton of Bitcoin on his laptop when it was still worth just $3 a coin. Then he watched, bewildered, as the price rose to $100, $1,000, $10,000. What a jammy git! But I just couldn’t bring myself to hate him. He was too damned lovable, even with all his undeserved riches.

“I guess I’ll just travel around to some more of these blockchain conferences and have a few drinks and chat,” he chuckled, handing me a business card which contained nothing but an email address: dx8j_-^[email protected]5

The crypto revolution

I started trading Bitcoin in the aftermath of a big price collapse, but probably not the collapse you’re thinking of. In 2013 excitement about this new funny money quickly turned to disgust as the world’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, was hacked and 850,000 Bitcoins were stolen. The price of Bitcoin fell from a high of about $1,200 per coin to a low of $160, a fall of more than 85%. In 2014 I dipped my toe in the water for the first time, buying and selling around the $300 mark.

Now, if I’d had a crystal ball, I’d have held Bitcoin from that moment until the end of 2017 for a 6,000% profit and this book would be called Cryptadamus: The Prophetic Bitcoin Billionaire. There are probably a handful of cryptadamuses writing books right now. But the truth is, in the aftermath of the Mt. Gox robbery, putting more than a small chunk of your portfolio into Bitcoin was tantamount to handing over your life savings in exchange for a fistful of magic beans. The Financial Times’ highly respected correspondent Izabella Kaminska wrote at the time:

“We’re going to stick our neck out at this stage and call this the end of Bitcoin.”6

That was fair comment. There was a very real danger Bitcoin could collapse altogether or go on to become no more significant than E-gold. (Remember that one? No? Exactly.)

So, I was trading in and out of Bitcoin, making nice little profits for a while, but as crypto technology developed and improved, I realised cryptocurrencies were going to be the real deal. Steam engines, electricity, telephone, computers, the Internet, cryptocurrencies. This was going to be a once-in-a-generation paradigm shift from old tech to new tech and there was no way I was going to stay on the sidelines and miss out.

What is a cryptocurrency?

A cryptocurrency is a currency that only exists digitally. It has no physical notes or coins. You can usually only acquire it or spend it over the Internet, which involves transferring it from one account to another. There are over a thousand different cryptocurrencies, and some are worth a lot more per coin than others. Here are the prices of some of the major cryptos at the time of writing:

Back in 2014, all the talk was of Bitcoin one day becoming a major world currency, maybe even replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency (the main currency used for international trade). My attitude was maybe it will, maybe it won’t. However clever the technology was, world domination still felt to me like wishful thinking, a dream scenario for people annoyed about seemingly endless money-printing (‘quantitative easing’) by the world’s main central banks.

But then came Ethereum. Far more than just a currency, it was designed to be a decentralised world computer. Suddenly the possibilities were endless: new apps could be written on top of Ethereum’s code to solve countless world problems that had nothing to do with money. This invention completely blew my mind (man). It was my lightbulb moment.

When Lambo?

In 2017, the rest of the world caught on. Interest exploded and so did the prices. My Facebook page became a haven for hundreds of thousands of people desperate to know what was going on and how they too could grab a piece of the action, because everyone was saying Bitcoin’s price was heading “To the moon!”

Newly minted crypto millionaires were spending their cash on fluorescent Lamborghinis to show off on Instagram. So now whenever a new crypto coin was launched (in what is called an ICO – or initial coin offering), all anyone wanted to know was how soon after buying some tokens would they be able to afford the car. “When Lambo?” went the popular cry.

Source: ilovecryptocoin.com

Unfortunately, as with all booms and manias throughout history, by the time most people got interested, the peak was already within sight. I cautioned my followers constantly that these were exciting but dangerous times, that if they insisted on buying Bitcoin they should only invest money they could afford to lose. Some listened, some didn’t. The latter were generally focused on achieving huge, quick wins and there were plenty of unscrupulous con artists happy to sell them that false promise.

FOMO

In late 2017, my inbox was swamped with an unending stream of people demanding to know the secret to infinite riches. Telling them they’d probably already missed the Bitcoin boat just didn’t cut it. The power of FOMO had taken a firm hold. FOMO is the acronym that launched a thousand memes. As you may already be aware, it stands for Fear Of Missing Out.

At least the memes proved there was a modicum of self-awareness among the people who were thr...