3 Weeks and still dropping

So here we 3 weeks after I took the plunge and it seems all my predictions have been wrong. Bitcoin and Litecoin have followed an almost identical path downwards whereas Ethereum which, if you remember, I stayed away from because it was looking like a worse performer has actually been a lot more stable... and No I don't know why. Anyone ?

So the question is do I hold fast and wait in the hope of a recovery or pull out of Bitcoin and Litecoin and plough it all into Ethereum in the hope of at least holding onto some dignity and maybe a small climb to offset my losses?

I'm thinking that when the total value of my gamble drops to £100 I need to do something to save face but for now i'll nervously keep my nerve.

So for now I am going to ineptly sit back and hope for a miracle... or of course a lottery win 😓😓😓

Total Invested so far = £189.16p

13/01/18 - Bank Transfer to Coinbase £185.16 + Bank Charge of £4

Crypto Values

Bitcoin £70.03

Litecoin £56.72

Total Current Value = £126.59

One week in...

Well after the first week my initial £189 investment gamble is now valued at approximately £134. While this is not good its something I can live with for the time being.

Reading all the online speculation the gloommongers are saying the bubble has burst. But others are not so gloomy so I conclude no one really knows. Its interesting that some still think Bitcoin will fly and some still have faith in Ethereum. Personally i'm not so sure and feel that my buyin was a bit rash and I should have held back but being 'Inept' I am going with perceived advice as I have no indepth knowledge myself so was gouing with the advice that the CCs would bounce back. My instinct was that it would drop further which has proved to be correct... Just goes to show !

At this point i'm not sure what they are going to do but the trend to drop seems to be across the board so i'm holding tight with the hope that at some point the market will recover taking ALL the CCs with it.

I've still not decided what to do about Ripple because I can't find a trading platform that I think I understand or that i'm comfortable with. But with the trend for all the CCs to head south i'm not too worried at the moment but if I decide to indulge I will have to act quickly if the trend starts to rise significantly.

So for now i'm holding my nerve !

Total Invested so far = £189.16p

13/01/18 - Bank Transfer to Coinbase £185.16 + Bank Charge of £4

Crypto Values

Bitcoin £75.83

Litecoin £61.87

Total Current Value = £137.83

A rough first couple of days

Well that was a rough ride. The first couple of days of my investment (or gamble as many would call it) have to say the least tested my nerve. The first thing that happened after i'd made my purchase of Bitcoin and Litecoin was they started to drop, or should that be plumet.

 

In my innocence i'm not entirely clear on the cause and to be honest all i've seen by way of explanation is a lot of wild speculation. But the cryptos seem to have recovered a little. The worst total for my investment that I saw was £124. So its probably a good thing that i've been otherwise engaged.

I've actually been on a driving course to retake my LGVC (HGV2) licence which I initially failed back in December '17. Driving trucks is much harder than I ever envisaged and I have been driving large vans for far more years than I care to remember. The parallel here being that trying to fathom the crypto performance is just as difficult although driving a truck is far more physical.

Your allowed to drive a truck for 8 hours with a 45 minute break half way through the shift so i'd better get a driving job soon if cryptos are going to continue this wild ride in order to keep me occupied and not sit here sweating as I watch my modest investment drop through the floor.

 

Just to prove that I wasn't actually hiding behind the sofa as my money evaporated away here I am proudly holding my hard won pass certificate.... :-

I'm currently researching Ripple which can't be traded on coinbase. Kraken has been mentioned as the platform to use but its nowhere near as user friendly as coinbase and I need to do a bit more work.

Cryptos are operated on a system called blockchain. Now this appears to be some sort of file handling system. The best analogy I can find is that its not so much an operating system its a bit more like Microsoft office. Blockchain is a software entity that manages or facilitates file handling and storage and thus crypto mining and trading. If i've got that wrong then please tell me and i'd also like to know if you have found a simpler system to trade Ripple than Kraken.

I had intended to transfer another few hundred quid to coinbase with the intention of buying Ethereum but for the moment will hold fire while I research a platform for buying Ripple and other newer cryptos which may be a better route to take. There are reports that Ripple is being taken up by some big corporations and banks and that Blockchain is the Windows of the future.

In the mean time whilst others are running for their lives I am going to ride out the current drop for now and hope the drop is short lived and Bitcoin and Litecoin recover at least to the value of my initial gamble investment.

 

 

Total Invested so far = £189.16p

13/01/18 - Bank Transfer to Coinbase £185.16 + Bank Charge of £4

Crypto Values

Bitcoin £83.27

Litecoin £69.69

Total Current Value = £152.96

First Crypto Buys

 Yippee !

I had an email from Coinbase this afternoon telling me the 200 euro had arrived in my coinbase account. So I took the plunge and purchased 100 euro of Bitcoin and 100 euro of Litecoin. Because Coinbase take a charge of 1 euro for each of these transactions I actuall purchased 99 euro of each. With me so far and sitting comfortably ?... Good, I will continue...

So (due to prevailing exchange rates) in proper money I have purchased £88.88 of Bitcoin and £88.88 of Litecoin.

No i'm not sure I fully understand either but lets hang in there and see what happens.

Now if you look at the very bottom of this post you will find a running total of the current state of play of my account using figures from my Coinbase Account.

This is slightly confused because i've added in the bank charges for the transfer to coinbase and if someone uses the referral link to coinbase to open an account (in the right hand column of each blog page) we both recieve £7.23 credited to your Bitcoin balance (subject to conditions). I have recieved one of these referral fees which has helped my Total Balance Value. 

You know who you are i'm sure so thank you :-D

You may well ask why no Ethereum ?

Coinbase provides charts for each crypto currency and whilst Bitcoin and Litecoin are on a downward trend at the moment Ethereum is at a peak so I will hold on a purchase of that at the moment to see what it does. Obviously no point in buying at the top of the market.

I'm on a course for a few days so there will likely be a corresponding gap in updates until I return but when I do I will likely make a further deposit from my bank account of 100 or 200 euro so that I have an available balance in the Coinbase account so that I can react quickly should Ethereum suddenly take a dive. After all its earning nothing in my uk bank account and bank transfers to coinbase, as I previously commented on, take a few days. Lets face it with such a volatile speculation/gamble/investment (delete as applicable) anything could happen and best to be prepared I think.

If you look at the charts for Bitcoin and Litecoin they have seen some quite spectacular peaks and troughs on there way down from the heights of December 17th-20th.

Just one niggle to report about coinbase. They do not have an app for windows phones which is a pain in the fundamental orifice. Still its a driving course so I won't be sitting there watching the bottom fall out of my world (or of course watching my fortune being made) before my very eyes.

I will also have an update about another avenue of investment which is paintings but thats another story for another page....

Until next time enjoy your own journey and don't forget to use the coinbase link on the right if you decide to have a dabble !

TTFN

The Inept Investor


 

Total Invested so far = £189.16p

13/01/18 - Bank Transfer to Coinbase £185.16 + Bank Charge of £4

Crypto Values

Bitcoin £91.20

Litecoin £84.37

Total Current Value = £175.50

Waiting...

Having signed up to a Coinbase account and paid some money in I am still waiting for the email from Coinbase to say the money has been credited to the account so that I can start investing.

Some of my research highlighted a lot of frustration with Coinbase due to the long time it takes to verify your identity.


I provided my driving licence. This was a simple process of recieving a link on my phone which wjen opened fired up my camera and I was prompted to take pictures of the front & back of the licence. Having read all the negative comments I fully expected this to take about 5 days at least. I'm pleased to report that it took less than 5 minutes so I am happy with that although the Coinbase website does indicate that some trades are taking a long time to process.

The big advantage over many of the other services is that Coinbase deals in UK pounds. I have also found that if you do small trades straight from the Coinbase dashboard small trades are charged to your credit or debit card and the cost is considerably higher than investing using money credited from your bank account. I will wait until the bank transfer has completed until I actually purchase any cryptocurrency.

Hopefully some of this stuff is useful but if theres anything you want to know about i'll see if I can help. Once you subcribe to this blog you will be able to comment.

Thanks for reading....

The Inept Investor


Current Status of my Investment :-

Bitcoin = £0.00
Ethereum = £0.00
Litecoin = £0.00

Total Value of investment = -£189.16p

13/01/18 - £185.16p transferred from bank account to Coinbase account + Bank Charges of £4

The First Post...

Firstly… Hi… and welcome to the first post of this new, for me, blog.

The title of this blog has possibly given you a clue as to what its about but if not, in short, I am the worst sort of person to be investing in anything.

I currently have a very small amount of money to ‘play’ with. When I say small I mean a few hundred. Well ok I could stretch to £500 so thats where i’m starting from. However my financial position means i'm going against everything the experts tell you to do. I’ll provide more in due course so keep checking back.

I’ve been interested in Bitcoin for quite a while but no money has not helped my investment journey but a few hundred has come my way so i’m giving it a VERY speculative go. I’ve heard all the hype and ignored all the get-rich-quick scams on farceberk and the like as you should also but I have done some research and some of the websites I turned to are listed below but by no means all of them so you need to give this bit quite a lot of time and attention as I have.

So putting all the research to, hopefully, good use I have today opened a Coinbase account.

Incidentally if you use these Coinbase links to open an account we both get a $10/£7 bonus when you’ve bought or sold $100 (£72) of digital currency. (So thats a win win for us both)

Being in the UK this was an interesting experience which involves linking your phone and bank account (cheapest option on fees). I have a sort of spare and rarely used current account with HSBC and I used the online banking app to do a transfer of 200 euro which works out to £185.16 at todays exchange rate and there is a £4 fee imposed by the bank as this is an international payment… to Estonia (Shock Horror !).

Now I know what your thinking. What about all the alarm bells ?

Yes I agree, money I can’t afford to lose with me being unemployed, a company (Coinbase) that I had never heard of until recently and has not had the greatest press due to delays in its service etc, payment to Estonia (where the hell is estonia anyway ?) and this new style cryptocurrenty with all the experts warning the bubble is due to burst at any moment, I know nothing about investing etc etc etc (Oh My God !)…. but sometimes you just have to throw caution to the wind.

So, as I write this on 13th January 2018, I have made the payment above and the HSBC website tells me it could take 2 days for the transfer to take place. Coinbase website says I will get an email when this has happened so i’m waiting impatiently for this to happen.

Having looked at the charts on Coinbase i’m interested in 3 cryptocurrencies at this point. Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin. As the charts stand Ethereum is on a high so I will wait until a fall to buy but Bitcoin and Litecoin are at a low (relatively) so I will probably buy those when the money is available in my Coinbase account. I intend to buy £100 of each to start with and see what happens. Obviously all this is subject to change. The volatility of cryptos is not lost on me. So I will report back as things happen….

A few points of research :-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s0qnk

https://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2017/11/30/invest-bitcoin-four-things-need-know/?_ga=2.13484087.1684192244.1513183055-519748436.1512207861

http://bittybot.co/uk/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0952svj

https://noviceinvestorblog354019743.wordpress.com/

Sign up for future updates….

And if you use these Coinbase links to open an account we both get a $10/£7 bonus when you’ve bought or sold $100 (£72) of digital currency. (So thats a win win for us both).

Current Status of my Investment :-

Bitcoin = £0.00
Ethereum = £0.00
Litecoin = £0.00

Total Value of investment = -£189.16p

13/01/18 - £185.16p transferred from bank account to Coinbase account + Bank Charges of £4