This blogpost contains summary points from a course on Udemy titled ‘Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency Trading’

Bull market and bear market cycle last 18 month to 2 year cycle
Stealth - Awareness - Mania - Crash phases. BTC will go through a bull market in 2020 and 2021
Nov 2020 - Paypal opens crypto services to account holders in US
Cryptocurrency
- Digital currency
- Stored on the Blockchain
- Decentralized
How to own cryptocurrency ?
- Buy on an exchange
- Mining
- Staking - Help run Blockchain for dividends
- Rewards - Masternode/platform actions
Bitcoin
- McDonalds of the cryptocurrency universe
- Unit of value - Pay someone in currency
- One can buy other altcoins
- Most likely to be adopted by mainstream
- consistent growth
- future forks will become more precious
Ethereum
- Software platform
- Smart contracts
- crowd funding platform for ICOs
Altcoins
- Any other coin than bitcoin
Coinigy - Technical analysis tool
Binance is one of the best exchanges to buy altcoins
Bittrex can be used to buy altcoins
As of [2021-12-23 Thu] the top 12 crypto exchanges by volume are
- Binance
- Coinbase exchange
- FTX
- Kraken
- KuCoin
- Huobi Global
- Gate.io
- Bitfinex
- Binance.US
- bitFlyer
- Bybit
- Gemini
What drives value ?
- Market News
- Demand
- Marketing
- Product
- Team
- Community
Successful trades
- Ripple (50x)
- Bitquence(28x)
- Blitzcash based on stratis Blockchain (21x)
- B3 Coin (14x)- Staking
- NEO (12x)
Crypto types
- Staking - NEO, OSW
- Currencies - Bitcoin, Litecoin
- Privacy coins - Monero, Komodo
- Masternodes - Dash, Stratis
- Platforms - NoLimitCoin
- Builders - Ethereum, NEO
Decentralized exchange
- Who is the custodian ?
- Third party is in control of your money, for centralized exchanges
- Decentralized exchanges are non-custodian. You own the cryptos
- Uniswap - Can trade ERC20 based tokens
- one can interact with Uniswap with metamask
- If you want to interact with Binance decentralized exchange, you have to set up binance chain on metamask wallet
- Get the official contract address for the coin trading on a dex.
- On Uniswap, you can put in the currency pair, and then you are taken to metamask. You are shown the gas fees and you have the option to set the gas fees
  - Gas fees goes to liquidity providers and other parties relevant to the crypto currencies
Metamask is a ethereum based wallet and hence one can other crypto tokens based on ethereum to buy other tokens
ICO flipping
- Demand
- Join crypto groups
- Community size
- Project
Top ICO Criteria
- Is there community ?
- Available supply and price for the token
- Superstar team member or advisor
- Uniqueness
- What does the vision - pain/scale of the solution ?
IDO - Initial Decentralized offering
- Polkastarter: Ethereum or POLS token
- BSC Pad : Launching pad for Binance
- Ignition PaidNetwork
- ICODrops
- Cypher Hunter
- IDOs do about 10x
Narratives
- Bitcoin(2011) - Digital cash/decentralization
- Ethereum(2015/2017) - Ecosystem/ building
  - Technology to develop blockchains to enable business activities
- ICOs boom(2017/2018)
  - Ethereum enabling new businesses
  - Utility tokens
  - Most of the ICOs have ERC20 tokens
- DeFi boom(2020-2021)
  - Birth of Dexes
  - NFT
  - Digital collectibles
  - Enables people be their own bank
  - Yield farms: Stake your crytocurrencies and you can make easily 10 percent
  - Massive demand for DeFi
- Subtrends
  - Polkadot starters
  - Gas fees are high on Ethereum - People are moving towards lesser gas fees. Search for other eco systems that has less fees
    - Uniswap is Ethereum’s decentralized exchange
  - Speed of processing transactions
  - Security token offerings - designed to give financial returns
    - Tokenize physical assets and have fractional ownership
What are the narratives for the 8000 odd coins ?
DeFi NFT + Binance Block chain - Refinable token
Trending
- See what’s spiking
- Look for cheaper alternatives
- Anticipate the high, don’t chase the high
Forks and Market crashes are good situations to buy Alt coins
Buy the rumour, sell the news
- Rebranding date
- Listing on a major exchange
- Wallet going to be released
- Buying the announcement
- Can drop one day before the news
- When the actual news hit, it is better to dump
- Despite the technology or whatever is behind crypto, it is better to buy the rumor and sell the news
Community profiting
- Watch youtubers - anticipate dumps
- Pump and Dump groups
- Own groups - 20(whales) - 10,000(smaller)
- Price manipulation
Swing trading
- Trading price swings
- Buying oversold, selling overbought
Margin Trading
- Available on GDAX and Poloniex
- only available for large investors
Launchpads & IDOs
- Decentralize the way to raise the capital
- Ethereum, Binance and Polkadot - these are the ones on which there are launchpads
- Polygon (MATIC) has given an investment 1000x in one year
- Initial Dex Offering - SuperFarm is a polkastarter token
- Polkastarter focuses on cryptocurrencies on Polkadot chain
- BSC pad - Binance smart chain ecosystem
- PAID concentrates on Ethereum and Polkadot ecosystem
- Occam finance concentrates on Cardano’s ecosystem
- Cardstarter on Cardano
- Kickpad is on Binance smart chain
Guide to IDO Launchpads
- Polkastarter - No way you can get more allocation than other
- BSC pad
- IDO - before the currency goes on to a Dex
- Launchpad - Place to buy Cryptos at IDO price
- Tiers - Option to get higher allocation
- Allocation - $ amount that you can buy in IDO
IDO Guide: One needs to have minimum amount of tokens

Coin	Eco	Tokens	Price	Allocation
Kickpad	BSC	2500	$294
Polkastarter	Polkadot and Ethereum	250+	$475	Lottery
Paid	Polkadot/Ethereum/BSC	1000+	$700+	Lottery
Occam.Fi	Cardano	75-150	$750-1500	Guaranteed
BSCPad	Binance Smart Contact	1000+	$1300+	Guarantted

BSCPad Walk through- How to get coins in an IDO ?
Spherium - the one talked about has already crashed
Top IDO performances
- Superfarm - $0.025 (IDO) - $4.74(Launch) - $1.18(today)
- Polylastic - $0.003 (IDO) - $0.9(Launch) - $0.0004(today)
- Ethernity chain - $0.27(IDO) - $74(Launch) - $9.46(today)
- Refinable - $0.03(IDO) - $10(Launch) - $0.2544(today)
- BSCPAD - $0.02(IDO) - $7.45(Launch) - $1.31(today)
Features of High gains
- Value prop
- Impressive VCs
- Relevant trendy during narrative hype phase
- Top Marketing - Youtube/influencers/
- Launched on polkastarter or BSCPad
How to prevent losses ?
- Bittrex market - Stop loss orders, Good till cancelled,
- Day traders 5% to 10% each day
- News/Speculation 20-50% gain and exit
- Trending crypto currencies
  - One particular class of crypto is trending and then you get to something that hasn’t trended
Profit preparation
- Join communities - Follow all the major coins on twitter
- Understand the pulse
- Set up alerts/google alerts/ coin desk/mashable/ cryptocurrency news
- Have money ready on bittrex
  - Most of the cryptocurrencies are traded on bittrex
- Don’t risk more than you can afford
- Decide your out point and stop loss
Technical Analysis
- Use MACD to spot bear and bull markets - M pattern for bears and W pattern for bulls
- MACD
- Bollinger bands - Identify the periods of high volatility and low volatility
- RSI bands - Indicator that is overbought or oversold
- Breakout and Breakdown indicators
- Spotting trends
- Trend lines
- Most people use candlsticks for analysis
- Bittrex used to see the order book
How to get the latest news ?
- Follow cryptocurrency coins and token twitter handles
- YouTubers who are likely to pump
- Join as many communities as possible to get a handle on crypto news on facebook
- Privacy coin - Are people pumping money ?

Takeaway

Most of such educational material is all about turning YouTube content in to a format that can be monetized in to some other platform. This course is one such example. My takeaway is that courses such as these give you a sense of tools, methods and techniques that retail traders are using in crypto spacing. As long as you do not fall in to the trap that there is easy money to be earned, as long as your intention is to merely understand the tools, courses such as these could be marginally useful.