5 Crypto Mistakes Nobody Talks About

Scammers, gurus. Yep, they are everywhere in crypto. So many people are the pretend experts in crypto because there is zero qualifications you need to put out crypto in content. And this is what leads me to mistake number one, not getting professional advice in crypto. I made the same mistake when I first started getting out in crypto. I found my favorite influencers online. I followed them on Twitter, followed them on YouTube. I waited for them to put out a new video or a new piece of content just so I could barrel in and buy that old coin that they spoke about. But over the course of the many years I've been in crypto now I've learned the valuable lesson of understanding incentives in crypto. Understanding why the person online is doing what they're doing, how are they making money, why are they talking about what they're talking about? And for so many influencers online, unfortunately they have misaligned incentives to you. The way they make money is through affiliate fees, through advertising, through paid promotion, through pump and dumps. And this has been backed up by a number of people doing blockchain research on some of the influencers accounts. You can see them day after day ruining their followers through their business model. So they are optimizing for clicks and audience versus professional advice, which comes from an independent nature. So who are these independent people you can talk to? They might be your accountant, they might be a financial advisor, it might be a crypto research company like Collective Shift, the company I founded where we have over six analysts actually providing quality reports on chain analysis, technical analysis to help you navigate the markets. And knowing where that information is coming from and why they're creating that information is super important. If they have aligned incentives to you, if they win, you win. And if you win, they win. That is the right partnership that you want to take on. You don't want to follow someone online that doesn't have the right incentives as you. So make sure you're getting quality professional advice. Some other professional advice might be your tax accountant. By getting professional advice as well, you can get the right structure, your company structure. How are you investing into crypto? Understanding the tax, understanding, the way you're investing into crypto can save you tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars down the line. I made the mistake when I first started getting into crypto by not structuring my investment entities correctly. And later down the line as I had to move things around, I lost out on capital gains tax because of that structure. And that's all purely because I didn't know these things before I started. So yes, you can go out on your and figure all these things out on your own, or you can tap into the expertise of someone that's done that before, that's made those mistakes, that spent the 10,000 hours in the space already and capture that information to fast track your journey. The second biggest mistake I see so many people make, and I speak to hundreds of investors every week, is they buy way too many altcoins. People think that Bitcoin and Ethereum are boring. So they go to the altcoins, they go down the list, they're trying to find that next hundred X, the next thousand X. And I think back in the ICO days, back in 2018, 2019, there were those moonshots. There still are some moonshots nowadays. There was one that we spoke about recently, Pendle, which was a defi project that was up 500% this year in a bear market. But they are few and far between. It's because of the space is maturing and because of where we are in the cycle. So if you're holding 20 or 30 or 40 old coins and you've woken up with a portfolio with so much different stuff that you don't even understand what they do, they might be down on their prices, you don't know where it's going on their roadmap, it's time to readjust and think about that strategy. During this last bear market, if you look at most of the altcoin pairs against Bitcoin and Ethereum, Bitcoin and ethereum has outperformed 95% of altcoins in the market just by holding Bitcoin and Ethereum. I talk about meat and potatoes in your crypto portfolio all the time. Your meat is your Bitcoin and Ethereum and your potatoes can feel the outside. But you've got to have that core structure. Two years ago when we flipped Bearish, I sold most of my Altcoin portfolio into BTC and eth. Just because of that decline, it's going to protect a lot of the value in your portfolio. So in a bear market, I like to stick with mainly Bitcoin, Ethereum and having maybe 5 to 7% of my portfolio in Altcoins. And as we flip, Bullish again, starting to rotate back into Altcoins as I know they have a lot more upside potential. And that leads me to mistake number three, not considering the Bitcoin and Ethereum pair. So many people look at altcoins based on their value or potential value. By their token price, but the token price has actually zero impact on the upside or downside potential of a cryptocurrency. You've got the market, but you've also got how it's bought and sold. And for most altcoins, their most common pair is Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now, it's important to understand this because the crypto market is hugely volatile and we look at Bitcoin as the leading cryptocurrency to understand the performance of the market. Yes, you can look at it in USD dollars or AUD dollars and that's going to give you the realized value of your portfolio. But against Bitcoin Ethereum, that's going to give you an indication of how your portfolio is actually compared to holding Bitcoin Ethereum, which is the main cryptocurrency market. So, for example, you might be down 80% against USD or AUD in this bear market, but you might only be down 30% against Bitcoin. So if you were to hold Bitcoin, you wouldn't be less down on USD, you'd actually be up compared to where you are now. So that Bitcoin and Ethereum pair is super important when you're looking at the portfolio structure and also performance of how you're tracking against the entire crypto market. Now, mistake number four, not having enough Bitcoin and Ethereum. And I touched on this a little while ago. I spoke to investor recently who was coming towards Collective Shift to get some advice and he held 85 altcoins and no Bitcoin Ethereum and his portfolio was down 70, 75%. How did you even get into this spot? I asked him. Well, he listened to people online who was giving him the next moonshot Altcoin, and he barrelled into all of these thinking and hoping he was going to make a lot of money. And this is a common mistake I see people make. They get this idea in their head about how much money they can make through these altcoins. They look at something at $0.01 and think, oh, if it could get to a dollar, what that could do to my portfolio. The reality is, emotion takes over and the logic gets completely evaporated. And it's one of the problems back to mistake number one of listening to the wrong people back in the day, back in 2017, 2018, I invested really heavily into Bitcoin. When Bitcoin crashed towards that $3,000 level back in 2018, we had that huge crash. And yes, you could have invested into a lot of altcoins at that point in time. But during bear markets, altcoins are the ones that bleed the most. Altcoins are a of retail hype and speculation and foaming. That's what drives a lot of altcoins, a lot of speculation. But we know with bitcoin and ethereum, their roadmap, the value proposition, the asymmetric upside. But also they are the least risky of the most risky. So having predominantly bitcoin ethereum in your portfolio can allow you to ride these long bear markets and position yourself to add more altcoins as we go back into a bull market. Because in a bull market, retail investors come flying in and they don't want bitcoin or Ethereum, you know, they want altcoins, the ones that are going to do that 100x. So they are the ones that add the new capital in that we can have exposure to and start to sell as the bul market comes, not be holding altcoins all the way through. And mistake number five is not having a plan. I see this with so many investors because I made the same mistake in my first cycle. I didn't have a plan. I bought any altcoin that came across my desk or across YouTube, but I didn't have a sales strategy. I didn't know when I was going to sell, I didn't know how I was going to sell. And I went through that cycle not selling anything. And for so many people I know because I speak to so many, you've gone through a cycle, you've gone through two cycles and maybe you haven't sold or maybe you sold at the wrong time because you missed the top, it came down and you bought back in too early, or maybe you sold too early and then bought back in too early, right? So you double loss. So having a plan can really help you execute without emotion. And you can execute no matter the market. It's going to help make the difference of you winning and losing. So my plan in the last cycle was I had all my tokens laid out. I knew exactly my goal that I was trying to get out of the crypto market in terms of the amount of money I was trying to make. I knew the sell strategy in terms of what price was going to sell each token at and at what percentage level. And I knew exactly how I was going to exit those positions, into what currency, out of my ledger, into what exchange, etc. Etc. Etc. So by having a plan, documenting it, even printing it out or having it on, your notion to execute will be the difference in my opinion of winning and losing. In a bull market. So as you can see, there's quite a few common pitfalls in the cryptocurrency space and these are my top five. So to recap, make sure you seek out professional help. Don't barrel into too many altcoins, look at the Bitcoin and Ethereum pair as the performance indicator. Have a lot more Bitcoin Ethereum in your portfolio that you probably currently have. Make sure that's the meat and potatoes of your portfolio and have a plan. If you can navigate these five, you're going to be ahead of 90 to 95% of crypto investors out there. So that's it. I hope that's been really helpful. My name is Ben, the founder of Collective Shift. If you'd like to see more videos, I'd love for you to comment in the comments below letting me know what you think. Did you agree with these five? Is there any five you've missed? Let me know in the comments below and I'll see you on the next episode.