308 - Monkey See Monkey Do

When I see a dangerous trend that impacts lots of people who listen to this podcast, I feel it’s my duty to create an episode to explain what I am seeing in hopes that you will take pause and dig a little deeper before you jump off that cliff.

 I’ve done my best to keep you up to speed on trends I discover that end up trapping good people into difficult situations.

When I first got started, I followed the herd-like most of us do.  I flipped houses first, then later wholesaled for a while.  While I made some serious cash doing these things, I also wound up paying far too much of my earnings to the IRS in the form of tax.  I also overpaid mailing houses, sign companies, call centers, software salesmen, and asset protection lawyers that said I needed a bunch of LLS’s, trust, and other nonsense.

Recently I’ve been learning about investing in / trading cryptocurrency.  I’ve read books, watched YouTube videos, read forums and chat groups, and dabbled in it myself.  

I still have lots to learn (tech analysis), discovery and rationalization of trends, and so forth.

I have discovered that public opinion or group thinking is often the driver of cryptocurrency performance and not so much the technology.

There are groups of people who spend their days and nights offering unsolicited advice on crypto without any sort of credentials being presented or discussed.  For all I know I could be talking to some teenager in his mom’s basement.

When Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, Robert Kiyosaki, Logan Paul (YouTuber), Gene Simmons, and Snoop Dog speak, what they say influences the financial markets of cryptocurrency.

I gotta say, such a phenomenon does not make me comfortable with cryptocurrency in any way shape, or form.  In fact, it keeps me from investing any large amount of money in this space.

I’m not saying crypto is bad, evil, shady or anything like that I’m just saying before you leap in, might want to swim around in the shallow end and get a feel for your risk tolerance before proceeding past your comfort zone of loss.

When you invest in anything be sure to never invest more than you are willing to lose.  I decided my magic number was $5,000 for crypto.  Although the investment has grown quite a bit, I also realize that if Snoop Dogg can’t find weed because of the supply chain issues then it’s likely he may tweet out some nonsense to wipe out my profits.

As I dig into learning more about the chart analysis of crypto, the more I see and come to understand how market cap and trading volume impacts the price of crypto, unlike stocks, those are generally the two metrics available to track.  Please note both of those are directly impacted by emotion and the public consensus on the very second a crypto buyer executes a trade.

The bottom line is that we all need to do our best to avoid playing monkey see monkey do when it comes to investing.  Take a time out to learn about what you plan to invest in, how profits are derived, know the risks and only invest that which you are willing to lose until you get to a place where you feel comfortable taking bigger steps.