How I Would Invest $100,000 in Crypto as a Beginner (2026 Guide)

I've helped literally hundreds of people go from zero crypto experience to building six, seven and even eight figure crypto portfolios with no hype, no noise, cutting through the craziness that is crypto through this six step plan. I am going to showcase to you in this video today how I would allocate $100,000 in crypto today following this six step plan that just avoids all the craziness. It's the same plan that I've used over the last eight years in crypto to build my own portfolio up over seven figures. And how I've helped literally hundreds of other people, as I showed in today's video, the step by step playbook. So you can get into crypto and get going straight away without the nonsense. Okay, so the first thing we need to address, even if you have experience, is building the foundation. How does the foundation of your portfolio even look like? And why are you coming into crypto? So we can lay the plan of how you're going to attack the markets. When I first started in crypto, I literally made hundreds of thousands of dollars on paper back in 2017, 2018, and wrote it all the way back down again because I didn't have a plan. So many people come into crypto and are just shooting from the hip, listening to people online, all the no. And you know, they try and do it on their own and then they what ends up happening is that they realize that actually buying crypto is easy, it's selling that's the hard part because they don't have a plan. And right now crypto is actually difficult to find the outperformers of what assets to buy, what to hold because of the amount of altcoins, the amount of cryptocurrencies that are out there. So you need to have a plan, otherwise you're going to continue just chasing absolute garbage as you come into crypto. So the first thing is just thinking about the playbook. Now this is, I'm taking straight out of our client playbook. This is what we call the platinum playbook. And essentially what we're doing here is looking at the six core components. There's strategy, there's deep research, there's a risk management psychology community, and execution. Now, strategy beats speculation every day of the week. So if I was to look to invest $100,000 from day one, we want to start with a strategy. All right, so first of all we want to understand, well, what even is our goals, like what are we here for? Are you here for wealth? Are you here for Passive income. Are you here for diversification? Are you here for generational wealth, whatever it is that is going to really allow you to set that foundation? All right. And for a lot of our CL clients that come in, they're, you know, got a lot of wealth in property or they have a lot of money in the bank and they are now wanting to invest that and take a little bit more risk to increase the retirement sort of perspective, or they want to start to hand money down to their kids or whatever it is for the next step. Now, once you have that, you then need to figure out, well, what is the time horizon that you've got? I'd really recommend setting your time horizon further back. And I have a lot of clients that have joined after having shorter time expectations by hearing all the great stuff that you do in crypto that, you know, it's so easy to make money. And if you have shorter time horizons or expectations on what the market can deliver and it doesn't, that's when poor decisions happen. So we want to really build that portfolio strategy out from an understanding of what those goals are. Then once you have that, that's where we want to start to think about, well, what is the strategy structure look like once you have the goals? Ilax then reverse engineer what the portfolio structure will look like. Now, in 2025, it was quite a tough year with bitcoin was down year to date and altcoins were down on average 30 to 40%. What most beginners do when they get into crypto is they just chase coins with hype and speculative growth but no real fundamental value. And that's where 99% of tokens in 20 actually underperformed and where we were actually really able to get ahead of the market based on a couple of different pillars. And I'll show you that. And I guess the altcoins that outperformed primarily have that product market fit. They have asset value that derives itself from revenue growth from, you know, users actually using IT infrastructure, whatever it might be. These are the coins or the projects that have outperformed in 2025 and will continue to outperform in 2025. So when you're looking at building out your portfolio, no matter where you are in terms of investing that capital, you want to look at the altcoins that are generating revenue, all right? And you want to look at assets that will perform on the way up and the way down. Every coin nearly in a bull market is going to be outperforming, but it's when the market goes Sideways, like we've had for the last 12 months. Those are the assets that only have speculative value that will continue to decline. All right? And that's where you can lose a lot of money if you're not careful. All right, so really what I like to do is, you know, when I'm looking at any altcoin selection in terms of strategy, I'm looking at product market fit for the coin, I'm looking at revenue generation, I'm looking at the tokenomics that's really big if you're new to crypto. One of the parts of building out that strategy, understanding that, you know, cryptocurrencies don't act the same as the share market. All right, so we're looking at tokens that, you know, will distribute revenue or distribute value differently to how companies distribute value where there's no EBITDA margin, there's not shareholders. You know, we're looking at really is that token structure sustainable? And you know, are we just giving a lot of value to the early stage VCS that usually get exposure to the, the asset far sooner than retail? And that's where, you know, things really go astray. So outside of that, you know, what we're really looking at for me, when we're setting out that sort of strategy and what we're trying to select for our portfolio is a barbell strategy. All right, so you can look at low risk, you can look at medium risk, you can also look at high risk depending on where you're at. This is quite a lower risk strategy. I'd say low to medium, low to medium, or any crypto portfolio. I'm always looking at barbell. All right, the absolute lowest risk strategy is 100% Bitcoin. With a barbell, we're looking at having, you know, lower risk with Bitcoin and stablecoins, and on the other side we're looking at, you know, expansion high risk assets that we can look into. So depending on where you want to sit, you want to determine your strategy based on the goals, right? So if you're looking for a really high income generating passive play, you'd be probably wanting to stack more stable coins where you can earn income. Maybe you want to have some high risk token plays where you can go and stake and you can earn a yield on those tokens. But again, that's a high risk play because you need to make sure that, you know, if you're earning or staking some of these coins, like Solana or Ethereum as an example, then, you know, the market needs to be going up to actually generate income to sell. Now on the other side, if you're looking at a growth portfolio and you want to maybe be a little bit lower on the risk adjusted curve, I'd be having predominantly 80% of my portfolio in bitcoin. Then I'd probably be looking at maybe putting, you know, 10%, 15% in some high growth assets. I'd be looking at different sectors, particularly at the moment. You know, we're focusing on the layer 1 space, but the timing piece is really important about when you're going to invest. I'll share that in a second. But most importantly, when you're building out your strategy, you want to select a portfolio structure that is right for you and you don't want to go too heavy on the risk risk curve when the market isn't playing in your favor. So, you know, for the last couple of months now, actually we've been quite in a defensive portfolio. We're stacking a lot more stable coins in our portfolio. So this is something that posted three weeks ago. We're actually stacking a lot more USDC at the moment and earning a yield on that is really interesting. For me at the moment, I'm using, part of my strategy is to generate income. I'm using syrup to be able to actually earn up to, you know, a bit over 6% on my stable coins to generate some income while I'm waiting to deploy that money in the market. So you want to be able to have that strategy really, you know, watertight and you want to have that layout, right? I see a lot of people get this wrong is where they don't have that portfolio structure, right? They don't have the barbell, they don't have any sort of, you know, positioning on that portfolio strategy. And they have too much allocation to altcoins. And when the market doesn't go your way, that's when you can get in a lot of trouble because your portfolio value is going to dive. And then you're, you know, the volatility of the market can scare a lot of people. So if you know that you're just coming in to diversify against your large property portfolio or you're coming in to diversify from, you know, your bonds or whatever it might be, you want to make sure that you're not going too high on the risk curve because you don't need to be. All right, so understand, you know, how much allocation have to crypto, understand what your goals are. And that's super important. One of the clients we actually have I want to share is is Wes, you know, he's one of our clients collective shift. He actually, you know, had a lot of chaos portfolio before joining us back in 2021. He didn't really have a strategy, it was a lot of chaos. He was talking about how he's chasing every pump and getting wrecked. And then, you know, the way we deliver the strategy and the way we able to help him, gave him that structure and that's our membership finally has a plan, lets him sleep at night while his portfolio grows. That's obviously what everyone wants and it's the simple sort of one hour a week framework we call it that we teach our clients. I've actually got a bit of a training below in the description you can check out if you're interested in that. But that's the sort of structure and strategy perspective. Now the next one is the tax and account structure. This is a part that a lot of people don't think about. It isn't necessarily pretty but it could cost you literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. So being able to, you know, talk about and understand your taxes and understand the custody or structure is really important because if you make a lot of gains, if you make a lot of growth in your portfolio, but then you're not ready for the tax side, that's where you can get in a bit of trouble. So what I like to do in the tax side is, you know, especially if you're new to crypto and you're looking to invest a decent amount of money, I would have a really simple structure. You know, whether you're using trust, whether you're using, you know, your self directed ra, speak to your accountant. But you can get some really good tax benefits by, you know, investing under your balance sheet. As an example, you can use pre tax dollars versus post tax dollars. If you're investing on your salary, you know, you're waiting for that money to land in your bank account, the government's already taken the tax versus being able to invest off the balance sheet using pre tax dollars. Now one of the things I would recommend is just a simple way when you're first starting out, you can use something like Sum so S u m M and this is just an accurate crypto tax platform where you can literally log in and you can connect your wallet. So if you sign up for a Coinbase or Kraken, whatever it might be, you can plug in your wallet as a read only API and you can view all of your tax positions live in this platform. So you can do it all for you. All right, really, really cool. The other one is just using a direct crypto advisor. You know, I have one personally. I use Adrian, who's great. And, you know, just having that accountant to give me that advice is awesome because it's personalized. The other thing as well is just understanding the ins and outs of tax. Like, if you buy and sell crypto tokens, depending on the jurisdiction, that can be a taxable event. So be careful. So if you're selling Bitcoin for Ethereum, that's a taxable event. It's not money in, money out in your bank. So you need to be really careful about that. Now, step four is about, before rushing in and deploying all that money into the market, you want to have some critical understanding of the timing, all right? And timing and like, accumulating the right time is really important because those that dive in and go head first and, you know, know, think that you can kind of time the top and the bottom of the cycle tend to be found out. All right, so when I think about, like, investing in the market, all right, we want to be looking at, you know, first of all, if I think about bitcoin, Bitcoin, for me, when entering the market, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, the psychology of markets, all right? And crypto has this really sickening way of never really letting you win or feel as though you win, because the time that, yeah, most people buy is when the market's, you know, rallying really fast. When the time is, you know, boring and depressive in markets, that's where most people go away. And that's actually really the reason why so many people lose, is because they only get excited when the market goes up. All right, so what we want you to think about is like, utilizing the psychology of just simply thinking about something like the Fear and Greed index. The Fear and Greed index is really great where you can look at, you know, the sentiment of markets. And ultimately, for me, I want to be accumulating Bitcoin in periods of fear. All right? So I want to be accumulating in periods of fear because that's going to give me the conviction and the confidence that the market is at periods where there's more sell pressure than not. When building my bitcoin balance sheet on my bitcoin holdings, I always want to think about accumulating Bitcoin. Bitcoin, for me, is the best asset on the planet. I want to buy and own as much as I can of it. My goal ultimately is to build and accumulate as much bitcoin as I can to then lend against it, not pay tax, not pay my capital gains, still have exposure to Bitcoin and then lend against it to buy more assets. Right? That's the bitcoin playbook for me. So I've been buying, you know, for eight or nine years. But I, you know, accumulated a lot back in 2018 and 2019. I actually took, you know, my salary in bitcoin and I was able to do that just from consistent buys. So if you've got $100,000 right now, I would split that up into chunks over a period of time and accumulate knowing that we usually have these longer duration accumulation periods where I am not so price sensitive on bitcoin because I believe it's going to in the hundreds of thousands or towards a million dollars in the future. So you can start to build that 70, 80% portfolio allocation of bitcoin now if you wanted to. The other part is, you know, being able to have high conviction in timing altcoin plays. Now a lot of people get lost in the altcoin space because buying at the wrong time can be extremely painful. All right? So one thing I would always recommend is not deploying all your capital at once. I have, you know, a lot of my portfolio right now in stablecoins waiting for the right time. And that right time for me is when we start to see these tailwinds come through for the market. You know, we're starting to see the Fed increase the balance sheet in the US we're starting to see like money expansion, but we're still early days. We haven't had that sort of conviction or like narrative that, you know, has been able to follow the market to be able to, you know, stay above certain levels. Right now I'm looking at the 50 week moving average as the next play above 100 1000. That will give us a little bit of confidence that we're starting to, I guess, regain an uptrend. But until then I'm not going to be buying more altcoins. Now if you're starting fresh, right, you know, I've been buying for a long time. If you're starting fresh and you're wanting to deploy $100,000 in the market right now, well then you want to be looking at primary markets. Primary markets are essentially where you're actually investing in decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, where you're actually buying tokens directly on the blockchain. Now by doing this, you're getting into assets earlier, all right, than the major Exchanges, but also you're able to get in a long way before retail does. What a lot of people fail to realize is by the time, you know, some of these major tokens come out and everyone's talking about, influencers are talking about it, you're too late. All right? You need to be on the side of buying in before and then using retail to sell. So one thing I would just really be cautioned is that, you know, the market last year in 2025 was very tough for altcoins. We were able to outperform on a couple of projects, including Hyperliquid and Syrup. They were both up, you know, 85, 75%. You know, this was year to date, you know, while the market was down. We were able to outperform that because we got in a lot earlier, back in the start of 2025, before these projects were then, you know, listed on Coinbase and Robinhood. So timing and executing your altcoin buys is really important because again, remembering if you are buying when everyone else is, and there's a lot of hype, you're usually buying the top, all right? It's going to be pretty painful on the way down. Now, the other part of this is also understanding, you know, and building out where you're going to buy and the exchanges you're going to use. So depending on the jurisdiction you're at, it really depends on what coins you want to buy, how wide you want to go. The security I would probably recommend, you know, the likes of Coinbase, Kraken is great. Globally, in Australia, Swiftex, there's a range of different exchanges. Ultimately, we just want to make sure you have your security down pattern right. This is where a lot of people go wrong. You can lose a lot of money if you don't have your security right so quickly. You know, one thing, if you're buying your own cold wallet, make sure you never share that recovery phase. All right? That is a way that someone can steal your money really quickly. So please be careful. Always have two factor authentication on, across all of your accounts. That's really important. You don't get hacked. You want to make sure that cold wallets, that's a hardware wallet. You can use something like Ledger. You know, Ledger's great in terms of wallet security. This is basically where you're able to store your keys and control your crypto there. And they've got some great new products where you can actually, you know, it looks a bit more like a mobile phone, which is really cool. Store all your information on your wallets. Offline. Guys, do not keep this on your Google Drive or your camera roll anything. Please keep it offline or use a password manager. Like one password. Really, really important. Be really, really wary of phishing. All right? Alerts. You may start to get text messages from exchanges, emails, sometimes even letters in the mail. A lot of this is not real. Please be careful that, like, always double check and triple check that it's the right exchange and link before, you know, signing up or, you know, logging in anywhere. And always set up a new wallet. All right? Whenever you're sending money from crypto exchanges, make sure that you do a test transaction first. You cannot undo it. All right? I've done videos on that. If you need some help thinking about, you know, how that looks and feels in terms of sending crypto, because it can be a little bit daunting at first. Step five is around the exit strategy and planning your sales strategy. So this has happened to, you know, lots and lots of people where you watch all of your portfolio, right? All the way up and then all the way down again. And the reason because of that is because I didn't have a sell strategy. And you're not prepared for when bull markets really heat up. And most people don't talk about sell strategy. Most people don't know how to implement a sell strategy. I personally, you know, made a lot of money in crypto. 2021 was my best year where I made quite a lot of money being able to take, you know, profits at the right time because I had an actual plan. All right? This is where people get greedy and they get euphoric in times of when the market's really going hard. It doesn't last forever. All right? So when the market actually comes and when we start to get periods of time where we want to take profits, make sure you do. All right? And I'm going to help you with that sell strategy. This is a, you know, verified returns on my portfolios of the years. You know, 2021, I made over 3,000% in crypto, but I was able to do that because I actually sold or actually had a plan. All right? So the thing that I really focus on when thinking about the exit plan is that you need to be in the minority. 90% of people don't make money in crypto because they don't sell. You need to be in the minority. So you need a systematic plan to execute, and you're going to have to be the contrarian. You need to sell when everyone else is not selling. All right? That's the hard part about crypto, now for me, I'm not selling my bitcoin. I don't sell my bitcoin. This is more about altcoins. But the sell strategy really comes down to setting up some targets. And I like to use percent on the way out. A lot of people try and time the top and bottom of markets perfectly and it doesn't exist. All right. What selling actually looks like in crypto is that a lot of people try and pick the top of markets here. But the, oh no scenario happens when the market doesn't get to where you want it to and we, you know, we ride all the way down. So for me, I like to have percentages where I take out on the way up. All right, Just like I dollar cost, average it in. Just like you're adding money in the market a chunk at a time, you want to do that on the way out. So when your altcoins are up 30, 50, 80, 100%, you take some chips out, I like to put them in stable coins, and then I can, you know, start to earn a yield on that rather than just watching it ride all the way up and all the again, all right. Because when we have those retracements, when the market pulls back, it can be really, really painful. Again, the sales strategy is really about altcoins for me. Bitcoin. I'm not looking to sell my bitcoin. I want to accumulate more bitcoin. But the sales strategy will change and it's very hard to predict a long way out exactly when the market's going to top. So that's why we like to not try and pick the absolute tops and bottoms and take bits out at a time. I like to think about it like he's just kind of playing a foot in both camps where we're adjusting and rebalancing our portfolio based on what's happening. And we can take out percentages. Now the other one you can do as well is time based. You can look at taking percentages of your holdings at certain periods of time. People like to do that or just select price targets and you can do that as well. So that's just some of the sell strategy components. Really important. You have that, but again, you can adjust that over time as we go deeper into the market. The last one is reviewing and rebalancing your portfolio. A lot of people think they have to be sitting in front of their screens thinking about it takes hours and hours and hours to review crypto and it can be very painful to do that. Me Personally, I have a team now, analyst. We've got about 18 people here at Collective Shift working for us and we do a lot of the heavy lift lifting for our clients. The thing that I like to do is just check my portfolio. I mean, I'm probably doing this weekly. Just, you know, once a week I check in and review it. Ultimately, what I'm looking at really, you know, bigger parts of the year where the, the market is, you know, adjusting. So I think about in February 2025, I sold a lot of my altcoins because we weren't heading into a heavy altcoin market. So I went heavier bitcoin. Before Christmas. We predicted that the market was going to be, you know, a little bit choppy and a little bit sideways and downwards for altcoins. So we started to position the portfolio more into stablecoin in vice versa. You know, middle of last year, I added a lot of capital to Syrup, one of my defi plays. And, you know, I end up taking profits about 500 or 550 up in a matter of months because the market was in that position. So really, for me, not only am I checking it like once a week, once a month, but based on our analysis, there may be periods of time where, you know, narratives are shifting. Maybe the market is adjusting to different positions where you may want to go more risk on, all right, versus risk off. And that's where, you know, being able to adjust your profile portfolio based on what's happening is really important. Coming right back to your risk that you want to take and the strategy that you have, you will adjust your portfolio structure based on what's happening. What I say to people that are time poor or don't want to spend a lot of time on this is you want to primarily have a majority set and forget portfolio, but you want to have coins on the sideline, stable coins, especially cash, to then deploy in periods where we start to have, like, additional monetary expansion and there are going to be better opportunities for altcoins. What you don't want to be doing is over trading. I see so many people that are new to crypto over trading think that they have to make all these decisions. The more time you spend in crypto does not equal return returns. All right? You do not make more money by spending more time in crypto. In fact, I actually see the opposite of it when you're thinking about readjusting your portfolio. For me, I'm thinking about how can I earn more bitcoin, how can I grow my portfolio? But be defensive when the Market is not in great conditions. How can we basically reduce the downside risk, increase the upside exposure? By having the right portfolio construction. For me right now, it's quite heavy stable coins, heavy bitcoin. But then also, how can I generate income on those stable coins? So I'm still making money on the way down. All right. And that's where we're earning up to, you know, 7, 10 on some defi protocols at the moment based on, you know, the different yields. And then long term, I really am thinking about my goal is, you know, lending against my bitcoin. How can I, you know, start to generate cash flow for my assets without selling them? That's what all the wealthy do in every other asset class. And now it's finally here with bitcoin. So that's how I look about that. A lot of, you know, our clients, you know, think about this in terms of just being able to follow our guidance. Like a lot of clients that come in, especially a couple recently, actually shared how they actually sold a lot of their portfolio recently, actually paid off their house, their mortgage, which is really cool. I might actually share that screenshot if I can bring it up. They paid off their house because of being able to just follow the plan. Yeah. So just a personal thank you. This was from Martin. So we both retired this week. This was just a couple of days ago, had their 11th grandchild born. And today was the day they completely paid off their mortgage. Hundreds of thousands. We basically followed my personal portfolio structure. We still own multiple bitcoin. Ethan Hype, can you continue the journey with you and your team? We were totally broke five years ago. We were a very thankful, like, just epic stuff. So these guys are busy. They follow the plan. They build that structure. You guys are interested in that. You can click the link below. Got a bit of training video. You can check that out. Otherwise, make sure you follow these steps, guys. Make sure you don't come in crazy. Don't do it all at once. You want to make sure you have a structured plan, optimize it, balance dollar cost averaging, dollar cost averaging out. Make sure the timing's right and don't go too heavy on the altcoins at the wrong time. Thanks for watching. I'll see you on the next video.