A crypto noob's journey since January, 2021

Hi guys, I will start this post with some context about myself. I am a 24 year old guy from India who just completed his bachelors in computer science and engineering. I interned as a full stack developer for a few months in 2020 and managed to save about 800 USDT due to working from home. Although I got placed in this company through my university, it wasn’t exactly a great workplace. When they decided to delay converting the interns to full time employees, I took the risk and resigned, considering that I could do better and that my parents were financially secure enough and supportive for this. For the next few months I did some interview preparation and courses but job hunting wasn’t easy, especially in these difficult times. It was also very frustrating to see all my friends earning and enjoying, whereas I wasn't able to do either.

Starting this year, I decided to invest into some place that could generate me some passive revenue only for my mental peace and this is when I came across cryptocurrency. Now thanks to my education I did know a bit about blockchain but nothing about how to invest and the market. So I read a bit about it and decided to invest into bitcoin, considering it was a good long term hold given the crazy volatility of this market, and to dedicate some portion of my day to learning about how to navigate this space.

I learnt that we were in a bull run and the returns from here onward would be great and the fact that there were different crypto currencies with reasonable ideas and use cases that could be bought as investments. I learnt that historically Ethereum had been outperforming bitcoin and would be a good hold in the bull run at which point I flipped all my BTC for 0.46 ETH at ~1250 USDT. I then learnt about hedging your bets and decided to look into other coins that could prove to be good ETH competitors. Cardano was pretty low at that point at ~ 0.4 USDT with a decent market cap, a planned roadmap and POS mode of governance. So I bought 540 Cardano with the remaining money.

Across the next few months I saw many peaks and dips and the net movement being in a positive direction where all I can say is, it was a game of patience and discipline. In this time I learnt about dollar cost averaging but since I had no more money to invest with, I could not do it. People also said that one must take profits along the way and keep some amount of liquidity to buy in case there is a big dip. This seemed pretty reasonable but I was too greedy to take profits and decided to remain all in. Although this did work out in my favor, I would not recommend this to anyone. DCA and timely profit taking is the way to go.

I also learnt more about the crypto space during this time such as what were wallets like Metamask, Yoroi, Daedalus etc. decided to transfer my ADA to my wallet and stake it. There were also pretty convincing reasons for why one should keep the bulk of the portfolio in a wallet if you plan to hold it. Through this I managed to earn 5 ADA after costs of transfer and staking fee. I even learnt a bit about yield farming through liquidity pools, things like impermanent loss etc. I have decided to make a USDC-ETH liquidity pool if we enter a bear market for a decent APY and low impermanent loss. I have picked Quickswap as a platform to do this considering their high APY and quick tokens being severely undervalued compared to the sheer volume of transactions they are handling. I also forgot to mention I also learnt about faucets and bridges in this process.

I consider myself mostly lucky here but I managed to timely liquidate my ETH at 3600 USDT Cardano at ~2.4 USDT. Why these limits? These are levels where the coins ended up consolidating during/after the big dip from $4200 ETH. I was already three times above where I had started and decided to not be greedy. A better approach as mentioned previously would be to DCA and keep taking a portion of profits on certain levels. A lot of my friends even complained about why I liquidated my ETH and at this point I feel it’s a sort of cultish reason to hold these coins through the losses in hopes of going up. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but it was already pretty obscene to have more than 3 times the money. Now that I had some stable coins, I decided to invest again if we dipped further, and boy we did. I bought 0.5 ETH at 2100 USDT and just yesterday 0.5 ETH at 1766 USDT. This enabled me to 1.0 ETH for the first time.

Not all of it is good though, when I started out, I made and lost some Ethereum flipping it for profits in daily trading. It can bring a lot of stress in one’s life and not to mention it is a pretty addictive and slippery slope. I have seen my friends become addicted to it and have sustained significant losses. Even recently I bought some Chainlink tokens thinking it is pretty low, only later to learn that alt coins will not perform as well as bitcoin in this stage of the market and on the off chance we go lower, they will fall significantly.

My current goals are to buy more and more bitcoin in this phase of the market, now that I have 1.0 ETH. Given the news on US treasury, inflation and the stock market, I want to hold more BTC even if it falls lower. So far I have bought 0.0105 BTC through DCA and have ~ 250 USDT liquid to buy the dips which my dad gave to me when I told him all this :) I have also lent the ETH and BTC I have for some marginal interest ~7% pa on my exchange compounding it after every 7 days. My portfolio today is ~3100 USDT and I feel crypto is the best investment if one considers the risks involved and exercises patience and discipline in their investment methods. I have also considered selling 30% again if we come close to $3000 levels on ETH and $42000 on BTC as it could all go downhill from there again.

On a personal note, I have also finally managed to land a job as a full stack developer at a decent company (after being rejected by over 30 shittier companies) with a vastly better salary than before and I start working next month. From a wealth management point of view, now that I will be having a steady income, I plan to diversify my investments across crypto, well performing stocks, SIPs, precious metals, provident funds and fixed deposits as well as tax saving schemes such as life insurance and a bit of fiat because I feel that an early start in having a diverse portfolio would help me a long way in life.

Just thought that I would share my learnings being in the crypto space for the last five months and to everyone out there who is going through a much more difficult phase than me in life, view it as an opportunity, learn new things, discipline yourself and I am pretty sure you can do far more than this crypto noob.

Although people advise against revealing your crypto holdings, here is a picture of my portfolio, as it is still relatively small. I have no other means to prove the story mentioned above is authentic.

https://imgur.com/a/bYS2sQ6

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Edit: This got removed from r/CryptoCurrency because I don't have enough karma to post there :p