1) Firstly one of the biggest mistakes new people make when buying coins is to look at prices in USD, in my experince its essential to start looking at coins btc(sats). Well btc is generally considered the most risk free cryptocurrency (relatively) and many would argue that if you cannot get a higher return from an alt reltive to btc than why take on that additional risk of buying the alt. Further in my experince most alts will always trade within a particular btc price range and it gives you a better indicator on valuations. (for exampe LTC during its peak fomo in december 380$ highs still did not break its ATH in btc from 5 years ago)
2) Another important thing that ive personally seen when trading is never to fomo or buy the hype. You will often find people on twitter and reddit shilling coins or promoting icos however most will not disclose that they are most likely getting paid to do that or are already holding that particular coin. Often people will say either to buy it now or miss the opportunity forever but ( 9 out of 10 times) no what if you have missed the initial rally or when charts simply show a straight arrow up, you're better off holding your btc then taking a plunge into that alt.
3) u often hear a lot of people talking about day trading and people will often say that if can make even 1-3% a day you can make your 100$ in to 100's of thousands over a year. However most people will always loseout day trading and will simply end up parting with their btc. Most people will be better off avoiding it.
4) If you are new to Btc and crypto trading than the you might think that returns on alts will far outweigh the returns on btc. However its important to also look at the risk of buying into an alt and potentially losing your entire investment. It is therefore advisable to stick to btc for your first crypto investment, until you get a greater feel of how crypto market work(4-6 months but varies person to person). Also when you do take the plunge, start small.
5) Trading and investments are not the same, you are making an investment into btc but you are always trading an alt (you can make money of the hype but will never beat the long term returns of btc). This means that you should have a proper strategy in place before initiating a trade ( have a stop loss and have a target price to take profits). In practice it never makes sense to hold an alt for a long period of time, so if an alt you hold sky rockets you should always take profits. Dont get Greedy
6) Remember to look at volumes and market caps. Low volume coins are where the most manipulation aka pump and dumps takes place. You can move a 10 million market cap coin to 100 million with less than 100-200 btc.
7)Generally you should always divide and allocate your portfolio. As rule of thumb set aside anywhere between 50-70% of your portfolio aside into a long term hold stack, this long term stack should then ideally consist of BTC (atleast 70%) followed by quality coins like ether/monero. Now with the balance 20-30% thats left of your portfolio you could allocate towards creating a trading stack and maybe keep another 5% for high risk investments( ICO).
ICO's just dont do it. Most of ico's are just people trying to cash in on the crypto hype. Some are outright fraudulent and even those that are actually interested in doing something will often make bold claims and promise the world without actually being able to deliver anything ( if you look into it i dont really think there are more than 10 ICos that have yet delivered an actual product. If Someone has some some stats on this please post).9) Again with ICO's yes there are some gems out there are some icos that are very hyped (for example kyber for instance from last september because vitalik). Ideally try and research heavily before putting any money into ico's and even then approach it with very heavy skepticism.( Assume that the any ICO investment will be worthless i.e. invest only that which you can lose. And again never allocate more than 5-10% of your portfolio for total ico investments.
10) When you do make trading profits always remember to allocate your gains again. For example: say u have sold something at a 80% profit, ideally you would put your capital back into your trading portfolio. As for your profits ideally you should add at least 30% of your profits into your long term hold coins, add 30% into your trading stack,and maybe convert 20-30% into cash. (remember taxes are payable on trading and you dont want to put yourself in situation where you cant afford to pay your taxes because its btc value has now gone down. Search for some cases on reddit and you will now what i mean). And assuming your lucky enough to be in a country where its not taxable than its still advisable to convert some profits into cash( live a little)
11) Dont buy into something something because everyone on twitter/reddit or some influencer is telling you to do so. You will often here people telling you this or that coin is the next bitcoin but trust me nothing will ever be the next bitcoin.
12) Dont be a perma-bull respect market cycles and know that trends will always change . Never listen to the 'this time its different argument'
13) Take your losses, a 10% move in crypto is nothing, its better to take a 10% trading loss especially on low market cap alts and ico's than hold it and see it drop another 60-70%. In that case you would be stuck holding a shitcoin for an extended period of time as well as lose out on opportunity costs
14) Yes TA is useful, but dont make all decisions based on it. it will only give you an indicator of what could or may happen, not that something has to happen. In general you can also avoid trying to use complex TA strategies, often times using basic trend lines can give you the best indicators.
15) Never over trade, and dont be arrogant or emotional people often let wins get to their heads only to lose it all or invest to much on the next trade.
16) Never even look at the 10 min - 5 min or under charts when trying to analyze patterns. Ideally you should look at the 4 hour or 1 day charts which are much more accurate and shorter time frames will always be inaccurate or unreliable
17) Remember that trading money which you keep on exchanges doesn't really belong to you but to the exchange. And money kept on exchanges will always be subject to risk of hacks/theft/fraud and so on. Ideally maybe split your trading money over 2-3 reputable exchanges to limit risk. Also money kept on exchanges is not anonymous, exchanges will most likely provide your information to authorities if pressured. Bitfinex and bithumb have both recently introduced mandatory kyc in the last 2 weeks. SO again remember to pay your taxes.
18) Your also better off avoiding margin trading (bitmex). Most people will think its easy money and most people will end up losing their shirts. If however yo do have sufficient expertise in margin trading try to limit yourself not not more than 3x-5x leverage and its best to ignore the 50x-100x options( where a 1% move will liquidate your entire portfolio)
19) Never buy into a coin just because its price seems low or is under a dollar, Yes u get more coins compared to something that is priced at 1k, but its imperative that you look at the market cap of a coin. Just because bitcoin today trades at 8k doesn't mean your shitcoin will also one day be 8k. A lot of people during the December madness bought ripple and other coins because they thought it was cheap at 3 dollars and that it too could one day be worth 10k like bitcoin. You need to see that at 3 dollars it had a market of over 100 billion and a circulating supply of 40 billion tokens and yet another 60billlion held by their company. A great indicator in this situation is to calculate what the price of your token (in this case ripple would be ) is if it had only 21 million coins maximum supply ( divide market cap of your coin with 21 million maximum supply of btc to get a fair price comparison). If you do this for ripple taking its peak market cap of 120 billion in December you would get a price of around 120billion/21million = $5714/ripple. So can u really say its cheap then.
20) Also one of the last points to keep in mind is that even though markets have come down quite a bit they can still go significantly lower. In May of last year there were less than 300 different tokens listed on Coin market cap today there are about 1600. Now a lot of these coins are just utter bull shit/ fraud/ dead project and again even amongst the working/legitimate ones, a lot of them are likely to fail. IMO a purge will come at some point that will result in over 95% of these coins completely failing. While said purge could take down the market for a while the long term trend(5-10years) of crypto is very bullish. Remember 1 BTC will always be 1 BTC and in a downtrend you would want to be holding 95% of your portfolio in btc.
21) Lastly and most importantly remember that if you dont own the keys the coins do not really belong to you. Always keep your long term coins safely in either a paper wallet or Hardware wallet and follow best practices.( there are a couple of great articles explaining wallets in more details on bitcoin talk and i strongly suggest you read it up)
Thats it, hope that this can be of some help to people here, just my 2 sats.