How I’d Rebuild a $1M Crypto Portfolio from Scratch (If I Had to Start Over)

I built a seven figure crypto company making over a million dollars per month. I've helped thousands of people across the world scout their own portfolios. I've been able to make millions of dollars personally through crypto, all by the age of 26. But if I lost my multimillion dollar portfolio tomorrow, how would I start that again from scratch? That's what I want to cover today in this video. I'm going to break it down step by step to help you understand exactly the steps I would take if I lost it all today, how would I build it back? Now, there's three main ways to grow your crypto portfolio, right, and really grow your wealth. This is pretty straightforward. It's how I first started out. When I first started getting investing in crypto nine years ago, I didn't start with anything. My parents aren't rich, I didn't have some trust fund. I literally started out with nothing. I shared a bunch with my brother till I was 18. So I had to figure this out on my own. All right, Very straightforward. Number one is you need income, okay? You need to buy more crypto. This is where you add more money into the portfolio. A lot of people try and take shortcuts. They get into meme coins, they take high risk, they get into trading, they start buying in AI bots. And this is all nonsense. Do you actually think if people were selling courses on how to trade, how to use AI bots, that that would actually be something that would help people make money? Do you think if people were really making money off it, they'd be selling that to you and I? Absolutely not. The best traders in the world are not going to give you their algorithms and their bots to help you beat them, all right? If they've got the secret sauce, they're going to use as much capital as they can to grow their portfolio using their own mechanism and not sell it to you. People that get sucked into these things are retail, like probably some of you or some people you know that are trying to make money quickly. If you are trying to make money quickly and you start to take shortcuts, this is where you go down in a dark, windy path of using high risk stuff to try and grow your portfolio. Maybe it works for a little bit. Some of these defi stuff, the yield, you can earn a little bit of income. Potentially it works for a little bit, but then it stops. More people get used to it, more people start to get access to it and then it fails. That happens time and time again. And I've seen It. For the last nine years I've been in crypto. If you're chasing these pumps, if you're chasing these high risk things, this always leads to gambling, speculation and losses. I've seen it time and time again. When I first started getting out of crypto, you know, nine years ago, I was there, I didn't have a lot of money. I was trying to use these fast methods to trying to shortcut growing money. But guess what? There is no shortcut way to growing your wealth or making money. If there was, everyone would be doing it. Remember, these are markets. There's buyers and there's sellers. There's winners and losers. This is not a game. You're not on GTA 5 playing a game where you can use a cheat code to grow your capital. It's not an existence. If it was that easy, everyone would be doing it. And there's a reason why they're not. Most people look at crypto as through a gambling lens, through complete speculation. It's not worth anything. They're just going to throw a bit of money at it and just hope for the best. All right, you can use that strategy, but you're probably most likely actually not going to make any money. Or if you do, you're going to round trip because you don't have a strategy. All right, you're going to grow your capital all the way up, all the way down again, and you're going to get lucky. You're going to think you're a champion, you're going to think you know what you're doing and then you're going to round trip it. All right, there's three main ways to grow your crypto, as I mentioned, all right, Number one is you need to find new cash, new income. When I first started out, literally nine years ago, I started my own business. I was doing events, I was making sports uniforms out of China and selling them to sporting teams. All right, I was, I was fixing iPhones, I was refereeing basketball back in the day. I was doing anything I can to generate more cash because my parents didn't have money to give me. I need to find a cash on my own to buy and invest in crypto. I started my sportswear company when I was 16 selling sports uniforms and I was investing the balance sheet of my business into crypto to get exposure. I was using any methods I had to find more capital to put into crypto. And I just continued to buy and buy and buy. It is very, very boring. It feels as though that it's going to Be slow and it's going to take forever and. But that is the beauty of compounding. As I've gotten older and I've gotten more capital, more wealth, I am looking to either bring in money from my dividends, from my company, through my income, through my business bonuses that I'm able to take, and I'm growing my businesses, my different ventures, my investments. To grow my crypto portfolio, I need to find additional income. And that has been a consistent method over the last nine years to add to my portfolio when I can consistently over time. And going heavier in the dips. That is how you grow your portfolio. If you're starting out with nothing, I get it, you, you're going to want to try and take a bunch of risks, but ultimately what happens more often than not is you're going to lose that money because you're going to go to high risk. All right? So find new capital, find new income and get the automated buying. That's how you get started. And that's number one. Number two is the growth actually planning the cycles and buying in and out of the right times. Right. Crypto has this beautiful thing where you have bull and bear markets and it's not like the property markets, not like the stock market where you have multi year bull markets and multi year bear markets. You actually have this four year window. All right, in the four year cycle, yes, it's not absolutely 100% bang on, but essentially what we have traditionally is we have one year of huge growth. We have two years of basically sideways movements and one year of down. That is a four year cycle usually builds around the halving mechanism, but ultimately it tends to happen around macro liquidity cycles. And in my point of view right now, based on Trump's presidency, because he wants to really push the economy and he's printing money. All right, so playing the cycles, you can get up to 40, 50, 60, 70% compounding growth on Bitcoin. Bitcoin's compound at 100% compounding over the last 10 years or so, depending on what time frame you use. So if you were just to buy and hold Bitcoin, you're doing extremely well. Now the altcoins, buying and selling at the right time is really important because you have really, really euphoric periods when the market really erupts. And you also have bearish conditions where the market gets more depressed. This is because it's a 24,7 market. 90% of people don't understand it. And there's a lot of different variables that trigger the markets to grow and decrease. Alright, very simple strategy is just use the fear and greed index and you can literally buy when it's red, sell when it's green. Easier said than done because it's human psychology. And when the market's going up, you don't want to sell, when it's going down you don't want to. But that is a really, really simple way where you can buy the lows, sell at the highs and accumulate. For me personally this is where I made a lot of my money. Even back earlier in, you know, this year, 2025 when the market was down because of the tariffs and, and Trump was basically plummeting the markets trying to get the economy together. You know, some altcoins were down 70%, Solana hit $90. I was buying and accumulating as much as I could and I was putting those alerts out for our members sharing that I was dollar cost averaging. I was not trying to time it perfectly but I was using my dollar cost average strategy to accumulate as much as I could when the market was down. And that's where you get the growth. So many people also say, Ben, what do we do in the be cycle? That's where the best investments are. So you want to grow your portfolio now I still believe there's many months to come in this cycle considering where we are in the macro liquidity and Trump and the big beautiful bill printing more and more money we want to utilize now. You are not too late, now is the time to continue to start to accumulate. But then you want to sell near the top and then rebuy at the lows and that's how you can really compound your growth even further. Number three is just timing the right buys and sells and actually dollar cost averaging and buying into the right assets. So you know, I got an investment wrong earlier this year. I was actually late last year I started to go pretty heavy in the gaming sector. I allocated 5, 6, 7% of my portfolio. The gaming sector. I thought gaming was going to be a big narrative this year. We haven't seen that play out just yet. And I took a loss of about 30% on a couple of gaming projects because the narrative just really wasn't there. Now in previous cycles when I first started, a lot of you probably think that idea of when you're down you're just going to hope it's going to come back. You don't change, you hope because you know, in every other cycle it all comes back and that fear or that, that feeling of taking a loss is really really painful. Psychologically, losses feel way worse than gains. All right, so if you were to lose, let's say $50,000, $50,000, that, that loss of that $50,000 will far outweigh the gain. Alright, so I understand when you're losing it can be very difficult, but I actually took a 30, 40% haircut. I shared that with our members, that I was taking a loss and I was rotating into a new layer, one which was hyped. Pipe then proceeded to 280 and the gaming projects have continued to go on down. All right, so instead of taking a 30 or 40% haircut and rotating into which I did, I took 30, 40 of my gaming projects rotated in hype. It's now nearly 3x. Since I did that, what most people do is continue to hold those projects that are going down and now those are down near 50, 60% and now I've essentially made nearly 400% growth, 300, 400% growth in comparison to if I was to just continue to hold that asset all the way down. All right, Hope is not a strategy. Crypto is moving faster than ever. There's so many more altcoins. So timing your buys and sells and getting the right assets is the third way you can really grow your portfolio. Now, all of these principles apply where you've got $10 to invest, $5,000, $500,000, 5 million, it doesn't matter. All these principles apply depending on your wealth levels. But ultimately to grow your portfolio, the biggest strategy that I've used is to get income. You need to put money in the markets and then you can use the research and insights from the market, from ourselves, from collective shift, to help you time, compound and grow. If you just go straight in, try and time the market and compound and don't have a lot of money, you're going to end up just gambling on meme coins and it's all going to break down. So this is the foundational level to grow your portfolio. Now, if you've got under $50,000, this is how I think about it. Ultimately, if you've got under $50,000 and you don't have a lot of capital outside of crypto. So it's really important to first of all understand when you're thinking about your strategy in crypto, not only how much you have in crypto, but what is that as a percentage of your entire net worth. Because I've sat down with a client recently who had 70 or 80% of his portfolio in an altcoin, which for me, looking at that externally is very high risk. Now, after I got into conversation with him, he actually said the crypto portfolio of his was only about 5% of his entire portfolio. He had millions and millions of dollars invested in other assets like stocks and property, et cetera. So his crypto is actually a small amount. So that altcoin, although it's 80% of your entire crypto portfolio, is a very, very small amount of your entire net worth. All right? Now if you've got under $50,000 of your entire net worth and you're investing into crypto, you're trying to grow your worth, all right, or your net worth, you're going to probably want to use high conviction, high risk. If you are in that camp, I would start to think about taking high risk, calculated investments. All right? Now again, make sure you don't invest more than you're willing to lose. If you have less than $50,000, again, I don't recommend you go and do this, but let's say you've got less than that amount of money and you're trying to grow it. You don't care if you're losing it. That's how I'd consider it. If you've only got $10,000, don't go and put $10,000 in your crypto portfolio, right? Don't put all your savings, don't put too much more than you're willing to lose. I, when I first started nine years ago, invested too much that I was, you know, I needed to actually, you know, use it for food and lifestyle. And I over invested in crypto. And it's volatile when the markets are volatile and you're trying to sell when the markets are down. Super painful, right? Because now you're selling at a loss. It's just not helpful, right? So make sure you're not investing more than you're willing to lose and take calculated investments. You're always going to feel as though you're missing out. All right? When you've got a little bit amount of crypto and maybe you're not winning, you're not getting those investments, you see all the best stories. You only hear the good stuff. Try not to be bought into that fomo, all right? FOMO is going to draw out emotion. It's going to make you try and start to chase investments. That's what I did when I first started chasing investments. One of the biggest losses I made, potential biggest gains I could have made, was not being patient enough. In one of the early investments I made back in 2018, it was Synthetix before it was called synthetics, held it for a year after I sold 100% of it. Because I gave up. I wasn't across the investment. I did multiple. Multiple X's would have been worth millions of dollars if I held on to any of it. But I didn't have the patience. All right, but it was the right investment. I just didn't have the patience. Now, how did I know was the right investment? What was the right risk to reward? When you're taking calculated high risk plays, you need to look at the risk to reward. If you're betting on a meme coin, that's very, very high risk. All right. Does it have the reward profile that's going to return what you're putting into it? So let's say you're putting money into a high market cap meme coin. All right? It is high risk, but it's probably not as high risk as a very low cap meme coin. All right? So when you're thinking about allocating to your portfolio, I'd probably look at balancing higher cap and low cap meme coins because the low cap, there's so many of them, they're narrative and the amount of time they stay in the market is very, very short. And it's very difficult to understand which meme coin is actually going to be here for a long time. Okay. The bigger cap meme coins, eth based ones, for example, I'm bullish on Pepe is one that is a meme coin that we know that is still high risk, but it has not as high risk as the lower meme coins. And the return profile is still good. All right. We still think the return profile on meme coins is positive when you get retail investors. All right. So looking at these things like, like meme coins, I'd also be looking at layer ones. But more importantly for higher risk players that want to look in that space, that don't want to take all the risk. All right. I still think defi is an underrated sector. I'm bullish on syrup. You've got Uniswap, you got aave. These are fundamentally quality projects that I still think are undervalued that are going to have a little bit of time to run as the market continues. During this bull market, you're just not going to be taking as much risk as betting it on meme coins. All right. You've got also got AI coins. So many in there. Like, you know, AI16Z, which I own SPX6900. Again, you need to know that these are super, super risky. Their time frames are short, but they will potentially give you the reward that you're after in that high risk space. So again, understand the smaller caps have bigger upside, but bigger downside as well. If Bitcoin drops 5, 10%, expect these altcoins to go down 30, 40%. You need to be able to stomach that if you're chasing coins and you're chopping back and forth, it is a fast way to lose money. Try and remain patient, but also don't be holding losers hoping they're going to come back. Yes, the idea of making high reward is attractive, but it is actually far harder to execute. And this is not how I made money when I had less than $50,000 in crypto. I mean, I was buying ETH since $80 bitcoin in the low thousands made a lot of money on the metaverse. Before it was really the metaverse, it was more about getting into sectors before they blew up. What are those sectors this cycle? I do think it's meme coins, I think it's AI. But the higher reward profiles with a lower risk is definitely for me around those layer ones defi and obviously bitcoin, you know, if you're just trying to take lower risk and build up your portfolio over time, continue to stack bitcoin. I definitely recommend building bitcoin as your saving stack, but it's just not going to give you as much reward as the lower caps. But the risk isn't there. Okay, so so many things to think about. Again, try and understand that cut losers fast. You need to have fast execution. If you're looking at the smaller caps, but understand that their life cycle is really, really short. If you like this approach and you have less than $50,000 in crypto, we do have some services available for you. Ultimately, our services are best for people that have more than $250,000 in net worth. All right, so if you have more than $250,000 in net worth, exc could be your property, stocks, retirement fund, whatever it is. And you have less than $50,000 in crypto. Doesn't matter how much money you actually have in crypto. We have services for you. The platinum membership is where we work with you one on one. We bring you into the WhatsApp community. We have live training sessions. We help you if you are busy. If you're low on knowledge, you don't have the time. We help you with your strategy, help you with live coaching sessions. We have in person strategy days both in Miami and in Australia. Depending on where you're at and what you need, the Platinum service is for you. So you can book in a session, work with us one on one. You do need to apply, however, it's not for everyone. All right, you do need more than $250,000 in net worth. But if you're just starting out in crypto or you've been in crypto for a long time, it's definitely a great program. There's so many success stories you can check out below. All right, now you're in the perfect spot to take some more strategic biggest swings to really grow your wealth and capital. The next step is to dial in your larger portfolio strategy. This is if you have more than half a million dollars in your crypto portfolio, somewhere between half a million and a million. After you've really successfully deployed that early stage capital and you're growing towards these bigger chunks now, you're starting to look at wealth preservation and wealth diversification, not concentration. Right. If you're over allocating and concentrating on growing your capital, usually the best way to do that is to concentrate. All right? And you might have a couple of coins, you might have three or four coins, all right? But when you're starting to think these bigger numbers, this is where you need to start to think about wealth preservation. You don't need to be taking all the risks as you were when you were in early on, trying to make it in your portfolio. Right. When I see people do this, ultimately they are too greedy, the expectations are too high, and they're taking risks that they can't afford. I've seen this time and time again when, you know, I spoke to a client the other day that signed up. He had close to $6 million in SPX, 6,900 out of a $10 million portfolio. All right, the number doesn't matter. It's about the percentage. Had 60% of his portfolio in an AI project. Now, that could pay off for him. He could make a lot of money, but also he could lose a lot of money in the same process. Now, for him, that $10 million was only a relatively small percentage of his entire net worth. So again, that's okay when you think about that. But if you've got your entire net worth, let's say you've got $10 million in total, 10 million that's in crypto and 6 million of that's in an AI project, your risk is super, super high. And there is a huge likelihood that that's going to draw down massively in a bear market. So if you don't get your exit strategy right, you can lose a lot of that capital. So for me, when I'm growing a 500k to $1 million portfolio, it's really, really important to have a good stack of Bitcoin. I try and have at least 50% of my portfolio in bitcoins because this is the new digital gold. It's the asset that we know that's got the lowest risk with consistent upside. It's the only coin I know that's going to be here for years to come. And I'm so bullish on Bitcoin as a reserve asset. Bitcoins are also a great way to diversify and offset your other investments like your stocks, portfolio, property, etc. And then I'm going to start to look to stack layer ones. I like to have at least 20 to 30% layer ones. The reason I like layer ones is because there is a lot of competition, but it's where the VC capital goes. All right, Layer ones are essentially the App Store and you're investing on top of the App Store. You've got the likes of Sui, Solana, E Type. These are all really quality layer one projects. You've also got things like Cardano. You've got older projects as well that have been around for a long time, chain link, etc. These are different layer one protocols that you can invest in and get good allocation to. All right, I do genuinely think the layer ones is like investing on the App Store before the apps really arrive. Right. Because we still don't have those killer apps yet. And this is where the VCs invest because they know there's liquidity and they know this is where you can get great returns. Right. Outside of that, this is where I've got some defi. I've got 5, 10% of my allocation in Defi. I'm super bullish on fundamental projects in crypto, projects that are really producing real world value. And I like Defi because it produces revenue and the tokens generate revenue back to the protocol holders. Defi has been really, really undervalued over the last few years because of the unfortunately just the oversight and the regulation with the SEC and now DeFi is really breaking through. So that's kind of the major portfolio. Then you can start to add some AI and memes if you want some higher risk on the inside. I would also really, really recommend to hold good amount of cash or stablecoins the sidelines whenever there's good dips or there's opportunities in bull markets. These are phenomenal times to accumulate. I've always got a stack of cash and stables on the side to reinvest and take advantage of those opportunities. And the last bull market, we had 13, 10% plus corrections on the way from 3000 to 60,000. All right, and now we've gone from 60,000 to, you know, 110, 100 and 1500, 20,000. There's going to be a lot more corrections on the way to 200. These are great times to accumulate. I don't try and time buys and sells in the middle of a bull market. I try and time macro cycles and accumulate during those corrections. Once you've got this portfolio right, all right, this is the strategy. The next piece to think about is your structure. You really need to get your structure right. If you're in Australia, if you're in the US Depending where you're at, there's different structures that are going to give you better tax advantages. Right? Whether you have the right entities, trusts, companies, personal locations, you want to make sure you've got the right tax allocations because this is where you can lose out a lot of money when taking profits and when taking money out and giving it to the tax man. All right, so if you're your own company as well, it's really important to understand how you're flowing capital from your main income, whether that be your company or entity or your employment, into your crypto portfolio. I like to think about this as different ways we can, you know, offset the tax. You can keep the tax down the road depending on different structures. We don't pay it straight away. You can use different entities and structures to do that, and you're essentially being able to invest more capital now rather than paying the tax up front and then pay the tax down the line. Now, if you are doing that, there is risk because obviously there is a debt that you owed at some point down the line through your tax. And if you're investing that, you've got that volatility. But if you do it right, you can still get exposure to the right assets and not have to, you know, basically give away 30, 40, 50% of your income or your investments before you actually invest. You can kick it down the road two years, let's say, and then pay it back. So make sure you speak to a tax accountant and agent first before looking at this. But structure is really, really important. Also, if you're investing on your retirement fund or your smsf, this is a great way to obviously get allocation to crypto. Again, speak to a Tax accountant know first before getting into all these. Now, when you're growing your capital at this level, it's not about chasing the hype. It's not about doubling down your portfolio each and every week. You're trying to compound your wealth without losing it all. All right, so you really need to have that portfolio strategy in line. Stop looking short term the more time you put in. Crypto does not equal the rewards. This is not a job. You don't get paid by the hour. And this over time is how I grow my portfolio. The sales strategy is something I've covered in other videos and I'll continue to cover it. But ultimately when you're growing your altcoin positions, it's ensuring to make sure you actually outpace and outperform Bitcoin. If your altcoins are not outperforming bitcoin, then why are you holding those altcoins? One reason I hold altcoins coins and that is to outperform bitcoin, sell it down as we go up in the bull market and stack more BTC or to then diversify into other assets that generate income. That's why I do what I do. I don't continue to try and double my portfolio when I'm over that million dollar level because there's no reason to be taking that much risk in this cycle. All right? And also when you're that wealth level depending on your different goals, and we've spoken about this on different videos, those three wealth paradigms, 1 million, 5 million, 10 million, that's what we're aiming for, you don't need to double down and do it every year. Once you're at that level, you're really looking to just preserve the wealth and not risk it all. Now with everything I've just said what I would do differently, there's one thing that if I was to do it all again, start tomorrow, the one thing I would do differently is to keep it simple. Don't over trade, don't listen to people online that are feeding you all sorts of different insights and crystal balls. That is not the honest truth. All right? I've been doing this full time now for nine years. I have winners and I have losers, all right? But I'm ultimately trying to have more winners than I have losers. People that are selling trading bots, people are selling you to quit your 9 to 5, become a trader. It is just absolutely nonsense for 99% of people. You can make a lot of money in crypto by holding good assets and holding and compounding those Buyers and continually accumulating over time and it will way outperform you. Trying to pick up trading, getting in front of the charts and living this, you know, amazing lifestyle, it is just not reality. Do you think if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it? All right. It takes a very special person to be able to trade and not have those emotional ties to, to crypto. I, I got sucked into it when I started nine years ago. It is not for me, all right? And I made a lot of money just by sitting and holding and buying good assets over trading. So if I was bringing all together, I'd over simplify, not over complicate, just buy good assets and hold and get into sectors where I can accumulate over a long period of time. That's where you're going to grow your wealth. So what I really learned to scale your portfolio is to have that strategy, all right? Have a good stack of Bitcoin. If you're above that half million dollar level, if you're below, yes, you do need to take a bit more risk. Crypto is risky, all right, but it's about understanding the risk, understanding what you're buying, having conviction and really letting the assets do the work. The fundamental insights and research that we do at Collective just the on chain analysis, this is not available any in any other market. There's no other market where you can actually look and see who's buying and selling on chain and you can look at the tokenomics and that's where we structure our portfolio to get into investments before they go trading. And technical analysis is good to give you market direction, but doesn't give you when and what assets are going to go and grow and increase in the future, all right? It's like investing into early stage startups, alright? Someone's got an idea and they pitch to you an idea. You can't do technical analysis on an idea, right? That's where fundamental value comes in, that's where tokenomics comes in. That's where market research, the team, the future, the narrative, that's where all of those things come in and that's what's given me the edge. And that's what we teach at Collective Shift and that's why our clients succeed, is because they actually have an edge in the market. They're not just following gurus online. Alright? And last but not least, don't think because there's other people online that are making money and they're growing their portfolio that you've missed out. You cannot be in every single asset, alright? Don't Chase markets, don't try and chase the fomo, don't chase narratives, especially if you're busy chasing and trying to jump in. All these sorts of things is just going to end up creating a huge tax problem. You're going to have a bunch of assets in your portfolio, have no idea what they are and don't know what they do. And you're going to lack that confidence and knowledge. And most of you probably already invested in crypto and most of you probably gone through exactly what I've just mentioned and now wondering what you should do. Keep it simple. Follow conviction. If you need assistance, I'd really simplify who you listen to because that's where most people get go wrong. So how would I really build a portfolio to over a million dollars if I started again tomorrow with nothing brick by brick? I will keep it very simple. All right, start with income first, where you're getting your income. You need to grow your income first to grow that portfolio second. Get your structure right, get your foundations right and your portfolio allocation, that's what's going to give you a massive advantage. Then allocate with majority Bitcoin and spread your layer ones, spread your defi, spread your risk across the smaller amounts as you go down the list. That's where you're going to get those growth levers without risking your entire portfolio. You need to think about simplicity. Use collective shift. This is why I built this company. We're nearly five years old now with one of the world's leading crypto research insights companies. We work literally with Coinbase, Coinspot. We have thousands of clients around the world. Use our research to help you. If you are time poor, you're busy, this is where we can really give you an advantage to keep that portfolio simple. And we can work with you one on one to coach you through this, secure your assets properly. All right, I'm going to do a different video on this, but make sure you have two factor authentication on, make sure you have good passwords or move it to a cold storage wallet. Super, super important. But here's the final rule that you really need to abide by. Crypto is not a short term players game. People didn't come to crypto and make a bunch of money overnight. It is not reality. Build your assets, stack them long term and grow your wealth over time. That is what's going to grow your crypto. Not trying to trade and make massive bets to gamble and speculate your portfolio to millions overnight. It is not reality. So there it is. That's my full breakdown of how I grow my portfolio to back to a million dollars overnight. If I'll start again tomorrow. Make sure you follow this process. It's really going to help you out. If you need support and assistance, you need coaching along the way. Book in a call to see if you're a good fit for our platinum program. We'd love to see if it's a good fit. We work with you one on one. We do WhatsApp community. You can work with me, you can work with our coaches. Come into our in person masterminds and we'll help you with your portfolio. Book a call below. Subscribe you like these videos and I'll see you on the next YouTube episode.