Disclaimer: in the following post I will be talking about my personal experiences with investing in cryptocurrency.  All investments are risky and you should only take action with money you are willing to lose.  I am not your financial advisor nor should you make purchases on my recommendations without doing your own due diligence.  Also, you should assume any links in this blogpost are either affiliate links or links to my own personal products.  I only recommend products that I whole-heartedly endorse and any commissions earned from your purchases do not increase your costs.

Cryptocurrency.

The very mention of the word used to give me the heebie-jeebies.

As a self-taught investor who subscribes to way too many financial newsletters, I have been hearing about Bitcoin for years.

At first it was just chatter.  I wasn’t sure how to buy any, so I mostly ignored it.

I think there was a lot of chatter in 2017 when Bitcoin made a move in price from around $1000 to nearly $20,000 by the end of the year.

I definitely heard about it.  And I definitely was developing some FOMO  (fear of missing out).

I could just tell from all the talk that Bitcoin was probably going to stick around and investing in it sooner, rather than later, would probably bring some hefty financial rewards.

But I still didn’t know how.

The Ignominious Start

In the spring of 2018, one of the financial newsletters I subscribe to mentioned a new way to buy Bitcoin.

At that time, the only way I knew to own Bitcoin was to mine it (how in the world do you do that?!) or to somehow figure out which crypto exchange wasn’t a scam and then figure out all the terminology and tools (how to access wallets and keys and not succumb to the dangers of hackers and lost passwords).

It sounded way too hard and I was busy raising a family and working multiple jobs with a little investing on the side.

But now there was the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, which was basically an ETF invested in Bitcoin and something that I could purchase through my normal brokerage.

Well, I had a bad case of crypto-lust by then and I really wanted to be invested in Bitcoin.  So I bought 100 shares to see what would happen at a price of $15.30 in April.

Sadly, this is what happened to Bitcoin that year:

Picture from this website: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/price/  (great history of Bitcoin's price over the years!)

By December, my $1530 investment in Bitcoin had turned into $410.  It was the end of the year and I needed to harvest some tax losses to offset my significant gains so I sold out of it on December 11.

(Way to go to me on timing!  According to this website, Bitcoin hit its low for the year just four days later.)

At least I hadn’t invested very much so I hadn’t lost very much in the grand scheme of things.

So much for my Bitcoin investing career.

Trying Again

In October of 2019, another of my newsletters suggested buying in again, assuring me that the shenanigans of the previous year were over and that Bitcoin was now in a “sustainable bull market”.

Well, what the heck.

I bought another 100 shares the next day for $10.25 each.

And then I held on and DIDN’T sell it.

My original investment in GBTC is now worth $3774 almost two years later, a 368% return.

Not bad.

Except I’d have made a lot more investing in Bitcoin directly  since a coin back then was valued at approximately $8000 and is now worth almost $47,000. (A 588% return, for those of you who know how to do the math.)

Still, what is a person to do if they don’t know how to get started in coins, wallets, and exchanges?

A Better Way To Invest?

Over the last eighteen months, pretty much every financial newsletter and service I subscribe to has put out a special newsletter with crypto recommendations, but I haven’t bought into any of them.

Everything still sounded too hard.

Until I started hearing some rumors in my affiliate group.

See, I belong to this company as an affiliate that promotes higher ticket classes and “business-in-a-box” type solutions such as The Wholesale Formula, which teaches one how to make a living selling for Amazon, the Experience Product Masterclass, which teaches one how to make and market your own digital courses to profit from the online education boom, or Quiz Funnels, which teaches you how to find customers through quizzes.

But there was some chatter from the owners of the company that they were testing a crypto investing strategy.

And it was awesome.

My ears perked up.

I really respect the products that my company promotes, which is one of the reasons that I joined up.  If they were interested in a crypto investing class, I wanted in!

They invited us to join a Discord channel where some of the early students were posting their results.  The teacher of the class, Dan Hollings, was charging $10,000 a student to tutor them in his method that he had spent the previous three years perfecting.  (The same three years that I had been invested…..but he managed a lot more success after a LOT of trial and error and quite a lot of money invested and lost!)

Jealously, I watched as the students posted positive results.  Nobody was losing.  Could I scrape up $10,000 plus the amount I would need to start investing?

It was then that they announced they were putting together a beta class for the course.  I watched avidly.

The Verdict

Now I’m one of those people who buys a lot of things from webinars, but I almost never buy during the webinar or even in those many hours and days between the webinar and cart close.  I nearly always buy during the last hour or two of a promotion, because why spend that money when I can put it off a couple days (and maybe push the purchase to next month’s credit card bill)?

Not this.

I was buying into the course before the second hour of the webinar started.

And I haven’t regretted it!

What Dan teaches in The Plan is not only the basics of getting started.

(There are tutorial videos and checklists that help you figure out how to join a cryptocurrency exchange that works well for your country, how to get money into your account, and all the other set-up stuff that scared me off before.)

He also explains the awesomeness of Dollar Cost Averaging.

So one great investment strategy to build your position in cryptocurrencies is to just pick one or more of your favorite currencies and set up an automatic investment of a small amount daily or weekly.

Sometimes you’ll buy in at higher prices, and sometimes you’ll buy in at lower prices, but over time your investment will grow while your average price overall will be lower than you would probably pay trying to time the market.

(Check out this calculator to play with your returns of investing $10 a day or even $10 a week over time:  Dollar-Cost-Averaging Calculator)

I love the clear and thorough explanations that Dan gives for how to get started, a good strategy to diversify your portfolio (so you never have all of your crypto eggs in one basket to get smashed by a nasty market), and all the guidance a new crypto investor could hope for in getting started.  He also has a great introduction for how to get started with crypto savings banks that can pay interest rates you would not believe on the assets you are Hodling (a cryptotrader’s favorite word: a misspelling of Holding by a drunk early trader typing in a forum has become a term that means to buy and hold crypto for as long as possible.)

Not to mention the awesome support desk that answers questions!

But the cornerstone of the class is really Dan’s bot trading strategies.