Cryptocurrencies have changed the rules of the investment game. With them, the Internet has become a kind of trading floor where virtual currencies are bought and sold. With a peculiarity: they are encrypted from origin to destination, so that these movements flow totally free, without control of the states, or interventions of the banking systems. They are another way of investing.
Unlike other traditional means of saving, cryptocurrencies – bitcoins, altcoins or tokens – are open to all types of investors. Most arrive seduced by the stories of new millionaires under 30 years of age whose fortunes have been made with cryptocurrencies called Ethereum, Binance, XRP (52,000 million), Polkadot, Cardano, Dogecoin, Tether, Litecoin, Stellar and a long list of ‘cryptos’. ‘ which grows every day.
Getting rich is within everyone’s reach. Losing many thousands of euros overnight due to investments that are too “passionate” in unstable securities, too. Those who have been investing in cryptocurrencies for some time encourage them to launch themselves, but little by little and diversifying.
When Andrea, at 41 years old, was informed of her promotion and a considerable increase in salary, the first thing that came to her mind was that she was comfortable with her life and that she did not want to change it too much.
Neither car, nor change of house. “I was going to have more income per month, so he could rethink how I save. I looked at my five-year-old son and thought how he could play with that extra money so that he would have a good mattress in college. I have always been an investment with little risk and that now barely pays off, so I had to go for something different. So I dared to invest in cryptocurrencies”, he explains.
He first played it safe, investing in Bitcoin. “It is where I have the most money, along with Ethereum. Over time I have also dared with Litecoin, Cardano and Polkadot”, he explains. At first he came in every night to check the prices in real time.
It is a vertiginous universe where at the end of March there were more than 18,000 cryptocurrencies and in which you can check the trading volume of the last 24 hours (money moved in trading operations of each currency), the price, the possibility of mining that cryptocurrency or the number of outstanding shares.
For generation Z and the younger millennials, digital natives, little friends of ties and contracts, and reluctant to control by large institutions, investing in cryptocurrencies is a natural step. It is the case of Carla. In 2018 she got to know the crypto world during her Erasmus stay in Utrecht (The Netherlands). She was 21 years old and had a digital banking account with 900 euros. She was all she had left of her summer earnings as a lifeguard after paying her college tuition.
“I played it by investing 300 euros. I didn’t need them in the short term and I said ‘let’s go there, see what happens’. And she happened that in a short time she had quite a lot more. Since then I have been investing whenever I have some money, although I always leave something in my checking account ‘just in case’.
His profile is a common case among these new investors. They are half capitalists in the new style, half young people with a desire to have fun and with the passion for risk typical of age. To their credit, they consume information in digital environments with real voracity and that is where the clues about how the crypto market is doing are found. Not having mortgages or children also plays in your favor.
Against him, beginner’s own mistakes that, as Cofidis points out, can occur when launching with any type of investment. From overconfidence to putting all the savings in the same asset –in this case bitcoins or other alternatives- instead of diversifying, or investing all your cash without taking into account the volatility of this market. “A friend put everything he had. He went down a lot and lost almost everything. We have had to lend him money for school books. The moral is that you cannot invest thinking of recovering it tomorrow, because tomorrow it will not be the same. But it may double in a year. This works like this, you have to be ‘bullish’ (long-term investor with bullish intentions) ”, he explains.