If you are a typical American looking to grow your savings portfolio, chances are you may be ill equipped to begin the next step in this financial journey. The Federal Reserve Board has found that about half of Americans are investing in even the standard stock market. Beyond that, younger Americans are avoiding potentially lucrative investment opportunities in the market altogether at an alarming rate, with the 2008 crash cited as the largest motivating factor for their wariness.
Investing is a risky game – there is no doubt about that – but the reward, especially for younger investors who get into the market early on can be enormous. All told, the Dow Jones has been steadily increasing in value over a hundred-year lifetime, even with the series of major and minor crashes that have seen stock values and consumer confidence in the market plummet. The success of the DJIA has given rise to other mediums of investing, the most popular being forex trading and now cryptocurrencies, which functions as a hybrid of the two. However, with the novelty of cryptocurrencies still settling on many investors contemplating the jump into this new market, it can be difficult to identify the best cryptocurrency to invest in for 2019 and beyond.
Cryptocurrency trading is a lot like standard commodity buying on the stock market: Price shifts tend to take the form of stock pricing movements, and you can even buy crypto on many stock exchange trading platforms.
Where cryptocurrency differs is really everywhere else. Bitcoin was launched as a proof of concept in 2008 and quickly gained a following for its security and unique take on social and financial interaction. Put simply, Bitcoin — as well as its progeny in this space — are financial assets that can be used to make purchases, much like the dollar or Euro, but these assets exist as decentralized commodities. This means that there is no central bank issuing and controlling the value of cryptocurrencies like there is behind the national monetary instruments that countries around the world do business in every day. The best way to visualize how these assets are maintained is a Google Docs page. You and your coworkers or friends all sign in to see the document and can all see changes made to the page at any given time by any participant. This is how genuine transactions are validated in the blockchain and false coins are prevented from being added to the pool much in the same way that inventive anti-forgery devices are built in to the bills printed by a federal mint.
Instead of relying on a single authority to assign and maintain the value of a Bitcoin or Ripple, the coins’ value is based on the strength of the blockchain and consumer speculation. This is where cryptocurrency becomes interesting for the investor.
Like all commodities, events in the real-world affect price levels, and these can fluctuate rapidly or yaw slowly over time. Crypto pricing tends to move wildly, making for increasingly opportune gaps for investors to get in at friendly price points before seeing the value rocket back up.
While the crypto market can take longer to recover than the traditional stock market, the ability to buy and sell coins is not limited to any specified trading hours or regulations that bind day trading. In fact, many investors use an automated trading bots like Bitcoin Lifestyle that predicts positive patterns in the market and makes great profits daily, without the necessity to keep changing settings and placing the trades yourself. This means that you can build your knowledge of the market’s reactive habits over days or weeks rather than months, and begin to grow your investment faster than in a traditional stock trading setting.
Cryptocurrency is the new frontier in wealth building. Even ten years on this mode of trading has not been fully integrated into mainstream investing, but it is primed to lend explosive growth to a smart portfolio of investments.
