Now i decided to write down some basic advice to avoid mistakes.
1) only play with money you can afford to lose.
2) NEVER EVER make a buy or sell that is triggered by a feeling of 'not wanting to miss out on a sudden development'. also known as fomo: fear of missing out. Invariably, you will make bad decisions if you do.
3) never buy on a sudden upswing. Especially if you don't know why it's swinging up. You may be buying into a hype curve triggered by other people's fomo. When that happens, you'll lose big in the correction that follows. The one exception is if you see a spike and then also find a good reason. When segwit was finally locked in for bitcoin, all the uncertainty ended and the price shot up for a very good reason. Jumping on that train can be a good decision.
4) when you finally take a profit and sell, walk away. Don't keep looking at the price. If you do and you see it going beyond the sell price, you may be tempted to jump in again and take a bit more profit. Not only do you pay 2 extra transaction fees, but you will also risk buying into an overshoot which corrects 2 minutes later, and you lose the profits you realized 5 minutes earlier.
5) understand that by playing carefully and with consideration, you may actually miss an occasional coin suddenly increasing in price. that is not to be helped. However, it also means that you are not making a lot of blind gambles that will cost you a lot of money.
6) do some research, and only buy into projects for which you actually understand the purpose and which you believe may work in real life. a coin needs more than fanboys shills to be valuable long term.
7) be very carefull when buying during a time period when there is a lot of euphoria and all coins are going strong. If the entire market is going strong, all coins do well, even the shitty ones
learn to recognize pump and dump cycles and avoid them. the saying in poker is: if you don't know who the sucker is, it's you. don't be the sucker.
9) look at the long term prices and use baselines, triangles and fibonaci and try to think of what you think the correct value to buy is. with some basic effort you can figure it out and set the buy order and walk away.
10) Do NOT try to play the game of buying and selling dips. buy dips if you want to play that game, but don't sell with the idea of buying back shortly after to game the dip. this is a good recipe for disaster. If you were holding NEO 2 days ago when it was 0.0039 BTC and sold with the idea of buying back at 0.0033, you'd be cursing yourself badly now that it shot up to 0.0064
11) when buying, don't just look at the timeline, also look at the order book. If you see big sell walls that are not balanced by buy walls, it may be better to wait for the price to drop some more.
12) doing the things above takes time and consideration. you will miss out from time to time by waiting to long, but you will also not make catastrophic errors. Also long as your positions are string, you can continue to keep playing the game.
Ok this was more than I had planned to write down, and nothing in it was rocket science, but it may help beginners. I surely did not start making decent profits until I started doing this.
