The popularity of crypto world is rising in an incredible speed. Bitcoin is appearing on mainstream TV channels, in news, in newspapers.. Yet, it’s an ambiguous void for many people.
I’ve been recently receiving “how am I going to kick-off?” question from family, friends, random people, mailman, butcher, hairdresser… If you’ve already joined the crypto world, think about the beginning, you were willing to kick-off but it was seeming like a hard, complicated world, with full of anxiety. So, I decided to write articles for the people who are willing to join the crypto world to make them feel comfortable about the process. Crypto world is easy, simple world and there is nothing to be afraid of.
Let’s Start! — giphy
This article will be a comprehensive article for laymen to learn the essence and the crypto people for reviewing the fundamentals. It will be ELI5 again. I hope you’ll enjoy! Here’s what will be going through:
- The Basics
a. What is an Exchange?
b. Orderbook — How price moves?
c. Understanding the Chart
d. How to literally read the prices?
2. Exchanges
a. Poloniex
b. Binance
c. Bittrex
d. KuCoin
3. Fundamental Sources
a. Coinmarketcap
b. Coinmarketcal
c. News
d. Twitter/Telegram/Discord
1. The Basics
a. What is an Exchange?
NY Stock Exchange Trading Floor — Forbes
•An exchange is a marketplace in which financial instruments are traded. For example in NYSE you can trade options, equities etc. In FOREX you can trade foreign exchanges, commodities, indices. In the Crypto exchanges you can trade coins and tokens.
•A market is a group of buyers and sellers of a particular good or service.
An analogy is always better to understand the concept, so let’s go with a one. (I’ll specifically talk about crypto exchanges, stocks are different in some ways) Think that you are living in a crazy town which has several crypto shopping malls called Polneix, Binenace, KoCoin, Bitirex, CoinBese … swh. Those shopping malls have only crypto shops, such as one selling Ethereum for Bitcoin, one selling ZCash for Bitcoin, one selling Monero for USD, one selling Bitcoin for USD… So, for buying Bitcoin, you need to visit the shopping mall and go to the Bitcoin/USD shop. Then you will buy Bitcoin by trading your USD. For selling it, you again will visit the shop and this time you will trade your Bitcoin with USD. In this case our shopping mall is the Exchange which embodies the shops and the shops are the Markets where buyers and sellers are gathered.
The above photograph was the first thing thought to me during my work in an asset management company by my manager. It is one of the early time photographs of NYSE and a crucial photograph to understand the dynamics of trading. Let’s think about our example. The photograph is actually similar to our example. The trading floor in the photograph is the shopping mall in our example. People are trying to buy/sell stocks via direct interaction. Phones and mails are the ways to communicate with outside world. The graphs are made on the blackboard with chalk manually. This is how an exchange works, like a bazaar, like a shopping mall. Today, we have computers and internets running the exchanges in the same mentality.
b. Orderbook — How price moves?
Shell with a pearl — weheartit.com
First, some Economy 101
- Quantity supplied is the amount of a good that sellers are willing and able to produce / bring to the market. Sellers determine supply.
- Quantity demanded is the amount that buyers are willing and able (have the resources — money) to purchase. Buyers determine demand.
- The price is the tool through which the market is cleared. It adjusts to bring the quantity supplied and the quantity demanded into balance.
- If the quantity demanded>the quantity supplied then the price will rise, vice versa, price will fall.
— Think about a pearl market. There are people who are trying to sell a pearl and people who are trying to buy a pearl. Each seller owns only a pearl.
Scenerio 1: There are two sellers and ten buyers. The buyers will race with each other to buy the pearl. One will say 10 dollars, other will tell 15, other will tell 100. Because the pearl is precious.
Scenerio 2: There are ten seller and two buyers. The sellers will race with each other to sell the pearl. One will say it costs 10 dollars, other will come and say 9 dollars, other will come and say 1. Because the pearl is not precious.
orderbook snapshot of DGB from Poloniex
- Price shows the offered price of 1 DGB in BTC.
- DGB shows the amount of DGB accumulated at that price.(It’s the total value, not a single person’s offer)
- BTC shows the amount of BTC accumulated at that price.(It’s the total value, not a single person’s offer)
- Sum shows the cumulative amount of BTC accumulated at that price.
— Let’s go back to our shopping mall analogy; we are visiting the Polneix shopping mall and entering the DGB/BTC shop. The above picture is showing us the buyers and sellers. On the Sell Orders, we see people who are trying to sell DGB for BTC and on the Buy Orders we are seeing people who are trying to buy DGB with BTC. The cheapest DGB available costs 439 satoshis, and only 2886 of DGB are selling on that price. On the other hand the highest buying offer is at the price of 438 satoshis and the total demanded DGB at that price is 88362. So, there will be no exchange, because sellers don’t want to sell under 439 sats and buyers don’t want to buy above 438 sats. Let the war beginn!! This is the most fun part of the trading for me. People who don’t know each other will fight for buying or selling on web. There needs a concession in order to have a compromise.
In a price increasing scenario, market needs some environmental factor which triggers it in a way that DGB appears more “charming”. So, buyers will believe that the price will increase and if they will buy at 439, they can sell it higher in the future. So, someone will say, “I will buy at 439”, another will come and say “I will buy at 440". People will believe that the price will rally and try to buy DGB as soon as they can, so they will put the buy order above the previous one. In the meantime the sellers will put their selling orders on higher prices and buyers will chase the lowest rising sell order to guarantee their trade and DGB will pump, until market reaches equilibrium. 440, 442, 450…
In a price decreasing scenario, market needs some environmental factor which triggers it in a way that DGB appears “unattractive”. So, DGB owners will think that the price will go down and will want to sell their DGB as soon as possible. One will sell at 438, the other will sell at 437.. In the meanwhile the buyers will decrease their offers and sellers who think the price will be lower than the current price will sell their DGB in lower and lower prices. So DGB will dump, until market reaches equilibrium. 437, 435, 420…
c. Understanding the Chart
Japanese Candlesticks — just simple Photoshop
Charts may look complicated at first, you may recall Hollywood trading movies or traders with tens of screens in front of them and seem like they are solving the secret of the universe. No, believe me, the chart is really, really easy to read and understand, and once you are comfortable with them, you have the essence of trading. Trading is managing your risks and understanding the price-action.
Let’s start with the candlesticks, the fundamental unit of a chart. A chart shows us the data of transactions for a desired market. For representing the price-action, one can use various tools but Japanese Candlesticks are one of the most reliable tool to show the price-action. It is different from the whisker-box candlestick representation in statistics, Japanese Candlesticks are simpler. It shows maximum, minimum, open and close prices within a desired range. The whiskers show the maximum and minimum prices and the rectangle shows the open and close prices within the desired time period. If opening price is lower than the closing price, it means that price has increased so mostly green color is used to identify the candle. If closing price is lower than the opening price, it means that price has decreased so mostly red color is used to identify the candle.
DGB/BTC chart from Poloniex
Now we are ready to understand what’s going on on the chart. The above picture is a snapshot of a DGB/BTC chart from Poloniex. The theme of the chart may differ in different platforms but it should generally looks like this one. This chart uses Japanese candlesticks for showing the price. First thing that we should look in a chart should be the timeframe. Timeframe determines the interval of the candlesticks. In our chart, I selected 30-min, so each candlestick shows 30 min interval. My favorite timeframes for crypto are 4h, 1d and 30min. Larger timeframes will give you better overall picture for the general trend, slower timeframes may be biased since crypto markets are highly volatile. In Poloniex we have Zoom option, which determines the time period shown in the graph, some graphs automatically determines it, some graphs allows you to manually zoom in and zoom out. Again, small time periods will not give accurate results for mid-long term trends. The grey rectangles are showing the volume. Volume is an important parameter for making analysis. For example, the price may go up %5 with 10 bitcoin worth of transactions, also it may go up the same percentage just by 1 bitcoin worth of transactions. It is important to determine the momentum and strength of the price movements to predict the possibilities. I will talk about volume, price action and TA in detail in the future articles. The red and green rectangles below the volume is showing the MACD indicator, which again, we will be talking in detail in the future articles.
d. How to literally read the prices?
Some Markets From Poloniex
It may seem too basic but reading the prices is confusing in the beginning. Bitcoin is divisible to 8 digits and the last digit is called 1 Satoshi/Sat, like one cent. What I suggest is creating your own reading style for each currency. The higher the price gets, the easier the last digits moves so the more unnecessary the last digits become. As you follow a coin for couple of time you’ll get used to with its price and will determine the useful digits. Let’s go with a case study.
Here’s how my inside voice reads the examples; XRP is twelve thousand and two hundred, ETH is nine ninety five, STR is four thousand five hundred and sixty seven, ETC is two hundred seventy nine, ZEC is five hundred sixty two, SC is two hundred eighty two, DGB is four hundred nineteen, LBC is four thousand and two hundred.
2. Exchanges
This section will be covering the UI, buying&selling, tracking and tips from couple of major crypto exchanges. Most exchanges work on a same logic pattern, so if you are willing to work on a different exchange, I believe that, this section will be still helpful for you to understand the workflow.
The exchanges that we will be covering don’t directly support FIAT (Government money) / BTC pair so, you should be buying cryptocurrencies from your local exchanges, which support FIAT transactions. For example, I use Turkish exchanges for buying crypto in order to transact FIAT from my bank accounts, US residents can use RobinHood, Coinbase or Bitstamp or any other that you like to use. You can look below for buying/selling instructions, the dynamics will be same.
I will be covering some basic concepts in the (a) section, so I will not repeat them on other sections, you might want to turn back to (a) if you have any issues.
a. Poloniex
Balances, Poloniex
Poloniex is a US based exchange. It takes %0.15 fee for makers and %0.25 for takers. (makers put orders in the orderbook, takers directly buys or sell from the orders in the orderbook)
After you signed up to Poloniex, you need to verify your account with a legal document for trading. (Inside the “MY PROFILE” page) In order to do that you need a browser camera, If your computer doesn’t support it, you can use your smartphone to verify. After the verification and before trading, I strongly recommend you to enable 2-Factor Authentication for the safety concerns. You can enable it in the “Two-Factor Authentication” page located in the dropdown menu under the “wrench icon”.
After setting-up the account, it’s time to deposit crypto coins to your Poloniex account to start trading. You should open the “Deposit & Withdrawals” page located in the dropdown menu under the “BALANCES”. In this page you see your balances and you can deposit or withdraw crypto. As I said, first you need to buy crypto from your local exchange with government money, then to deposit, you need to click deposit button next to the desired crypto. Then your wallet address will appear. You can transfer money from your local exchange to that wallet address. Vice versa, in order to withdraw crypto from Poloniex, you need to click withdraw and enter the address and amount that you’re willing to send.
Exchange, Poloniex
Here’s our main page. Let’s start from top to bottom and cover almost everything.
- Exchange Page is your main page where you can see the chart, markets and orders.
- Margin Trading and Lending is simply allows you to exchange with borrowed money and borrow your money. It is not suitable for beginners in my opinion, so I recommend not to start with those.
- Under Balances; Transfer Balances is where you transfer your money to Margin Trading account, Deposit & Withdrawals are where you can deposit and withdrawal your crypto, History shows you the Deposit & Withdrawal history.
- Under Orders; My Open Orders shows your waiting orders if you have any, Your Trade History & Analysis shows you every trade you’ve performed in Poloniex.
- Wrench and profile icons are about security and profile settings, the moon icon switches to the dark theme.
- On the left side we see the chart. It was explained in 1.3.
- On the right side we see the MARKETS. On the top you can choose the exchange pair, such as BTC, ETH, XMR and USDT (Tether USD). After you select you trading pair, you’ll see the coin symbol in the first column, the latest price in the second column, 24h volume in the third volume, 24h change in the fourth column and the coin name in the last column. You can select fav coins and use “show star only” to show fav coins only. (less coins will make the exchange faster)
Buying and Selling, Poloniex
We covered the basics, order book, price movements and chart and now it’s time to learn how to buy and sell. There is one simple rule, buy low and sell high. Here, I clicked the ETC/BTC Market. As you can see, the lowest sell order is 0.00281 and the highest buy order is 0.00280. “BUY ETC” and “SELL ETC” panels are for limit orders. Limit orders allow you to put orders in the order book. For example you can make an order to buy btc at 1USD, hoping that it will apparantly reach to that price. The order will be appearing on the bottom of the order book. Vice Versa, you can put a sell order at a price of 100k USD, hoping that it will reach 100k USD.
Price is the price that you want to buy or sell. Amount and total are showing the amount of ETC or BTC that you want to sell or buy, you can play with both. If you want to buy or sell directly you can put a price below the highest buy order or above the lowest sell order and it will match the order on the top directly.
STOP-LIMIT feature allows you to create “if-then functions” with your orders. It allows you to trade safely while you are away from the platform. Let’s study with examples.
- Selling with Stop-Limit;
Stop: 0.0024 BTCLimit: 0.0023 BTCAmount: 10 ETC
IF the highest bid drops to or below 0.0024 BTC — >THEN an order to sell 10 ETC at a price of 0.0023 BTC will be placed. (You can put your Limit higher than your Stop as well.)
- Buying with Stop-Limit;
Stop: 0.0035 BTCLimit: 0.0036 BTCAmount: 10 ETC
IF the lowest ask rises to or above 0.0035 BTC — > THEN an order to buy 10 ETC at a price of 0.0036 BTC will be placed. (You can put your Limit lower than your Stop as well.)
Market Depth and Orders, Poloniex
- Market Depth Graph is a useful graph to understand the accumulations and distributions on a specific coin. It is volume of orders vs. price graph, which enables to analyze the sell or buy walls. (Article 1) The steep inclinations in the graph mean the accumulation on that price, which means there is a wall of orders to get over in that specific price.
- My Open Orders allows you to track your open orders on that specific market.
- Trade History shows the market trade history updating instantaneously and your trade history on that specific market.
b. Binance
Deposits & Withdrawals Page, Binance
Binance is currently an internationally registered company, formerly based in Hong-Kong. It’s a new-born exchange with an incredible speed of popularity. Three months after it’s launched it was in the top 10 exchanges by volume. Now it’s the first exchange by the 24h exchange volume. The secret sauce they’ve been using is affiliates + customer services. They had a great affiliate service so everyone was sharing it in the beginning moreover their customer services was awesome that, people were connected to the exchange. Plus, they have mobile app and desktop app as an exchange.
Unlike Poloniex, in Binance you can trade without verifying your account. In a case where you haven’t verified your account, you can withdraw up to 2 BTCs a day. If you want to withdraw more than 2 BTCs a day you will need to verify your account from the “Account” page by following a similar process like Poloniex verification. Again you should activate your 2-Factor Auth. before start trading, you also can activate that on the “Account” page.
When you’re ready to deposit crypto to your Binance account, it’s time to enter Deposits & Withdrawals page in the dropdown menu under the “person icon” (click Estimated Value) In this page, the process will be similar to Poloniex. In order to deposit crypto, you should click deposit next to the coin/token that you’d like to deposit and you’ll be seeing the deposit address. Vice Versa, in order to withdraw a coin/token you should click withdrawal and enter the transfer address and amount.
Home Page, Binance
This is the home page. Let’s cover everything starting from the top.
- Exchange, is where you trade. Binance has two options of Exchange UI, basic and advanced. We will be covering them in detail.
- Labs is a blockchain technology incubator for pre-ICO’s. It will not be concerning the normal traders. They provide; advice, funds, listings, launchpad, ideas, resources, etc.. (like startup incubator)
- Launchpad is a way to invest ICO’s listed on Binance Launchpad, those ICO’s will later be listed on Binance Exchange.
- Info is a too new feature (just released yesterday, I guess, swh) My first impression about it is, it looks really identical with Coin Market Cap dot com and it has lot’s of bugs. Let’s see what will come up.
- Funds simply shows you your Balances, Deposit & Withdrawals and your Deposit & Withdrawal history.
- Orders shows you your Open Orders, Order History (All of them, even the cancelled ones) and Trade History.
- Join Us — Careers , Support — FAQ and Submitting a request, News — Announcements, person icon — account, settings, account balance, deposit & withdrawals (they put a lot of link to reach that page, swh)
- In the banner, you can see the important announcements, news, competitions, etc...
- Below the banner, you can track the market data.
Basic Exchange, Binance
Binances includes two different exchange pages as Basic and Advanced. They are functionally almost same platforms (advance includes Technical Analysis tools), the only major difference between them is the UI. You can use the one you like to trade, no difference.
On the right side we can see the Markets panel. From top of the panel, BTC, ETH, BNB, USDT pairs can be chosen. You can see the symbol of the cryptocurrency, current price and the change. You can star coins and show only them. Below the Markets panel, you can see the trade history of the market and yours as well. Here in this page we see DGD, DigixDAO / BTC Market as an example. Left side is the order book. The red and green colors visually show the accumulation. The graph is placed in the middle. You can adjust candlestick time in the top. You can open the volume depth graph from the top as well. The pink and the purple lines are indicators called “exponential moving average” lines which we will be covering in the future articles. Below the candlesticks, we see the volume. Below the volume, we have another indicator and again we will talk about it in another article.
Buying and Selling, Binance
Although there are nuances between Exchange’s Order Mechanism, Limit, Market and Stop-Limit Orders will have same fundamental dynamics in all exchanges that we will be covering. So I will be majorly focusing on nuances rather than the fundamentals. (You can refer to section 2.a. for fundamentals)
First of all the fees and the rules... Binance applies %0.1 trading fee, and if you use BNB (Binance Coin) for paying the fees, you’ll have %50 discount in fees in Binance’s first year and will be %25 in Binance’s second year. Binance has markets consisting trading pairs of BTC, USDT, ETH and BNB. It has irritating trading rules such that, you have a minimum order value of 0.001BTC for BTC pairs, 0.01 ETH for ETH pairs, 10USDT for USDT pairs and 1BNB for BNB pairs. For this reason, I choose BNB to trade altcoins in Binance, mostly there is no arbitrage between ALT/BTC and ALT/BNB pairs.
- Limit Order allows you to buy or sell with a desired price and a desired amount.
- Market Order will directly buy the highest sell order or sell to the lowest buy order. You just need to enter an amount.
- Stop-Limit Order allows you to create if, then functions with the order. (sec. 2.a)
Open orders will list your open orders (unless they are completely filled) and below you will see your 24h order history.
Advance Exchange, Binance
Let’s quickly overview the advanced view as well.
The major difference is the UI and the graph. We have a bigger graph including indicators and technical analysis tools which we will be talking in depth in the Technical Analysis articles. You can monitor Markets by clicking the current pair’s name; in this case DGD/BTC (on the left top corner) On the left we have an order book and current transactions. On the bottom, we can monitor our funds, trade history, order history and open orders. The Order panel is placed on the right bottom of the screen and it is similar with the basic view. (a nuance: you can’t enter bitcoin value in limit order in advance view, but you can enter both trading pairs’ value in the basic view)
c. Bittrex
Account Balances, Bittrex
Bittrex is a popular US based exchange. About the fees, all trades have a 0.25% commission. You can deposit money and trade in Bittrex without verification but in order to withdraw, you need verification. Hence, verifying your account before start trading in Bittrex is highly recommended (otherwise, if the verification is unaccepted, your money will be locked inside) Also setting up 2FA is highly recommended for account security.
After you set-up your account, you can deposit money by clicking Wallets. This page shows your account balance and allows you to deposit or withdraw cryptocurrency to/from your account. For deposit, you should click “+” and generate new address. For withdraw actions, you should click “-” and fill up the address and amount. In this page you can also monitor Pending Withdrawals/Deposits and Withdrawal/Deposit History.
Home Page, Bittrex
Among the crypto exchanges, Bittrex has a unique UI. I feel “different” about the UI every time I use it. Never mind, let’s turn back to the topic, Here is the Bittrex’s Home Page. Again, first, let’s cover everything from top to bottom.
- Clicking ฿ Markets, opens a drop down menu and allows you to monitor BTC markets.
- Clicking $ Markets, opens a drop down menu and allows you to monitor USDT markets.
- Lab concept of Bittrex is different from Binance. It allows users to become beta users to their planned new features. So, they test the new ideas, new features with candidate test users, and use them in the future if the feedback is positive.
- Orders shows your Open and Completed orders.
- Wallets page is for monitoring Account Balances, Pending W_ithdraw_als / Deposits, Withdrawal / Deposit History. You also will deposit or withdraw from this page.
- Settings — Settings, Help- News, About, Fees, miscellaneous stuff..
As a banner Bittrex shows four leading markets as a slide show. Top Volume x2, Biggest % Gain x2. Below the banner, you can monitor the Markets. Bittrex includes BTC, ETH and USDT markets. From left to right you can monitor; Market’s symbol, currency name, volume, % change, current price, 24h high, 24h low, % spread (% difference of bid and ask) and added date.
Information-Trading, Bittrex
So let’s move on to the chart. Bittrex’s chart includes adequate feature to do a decent TA on it, by choosing Timeline, you’ll be seeing the chart. From the top of the chart;
- time, you can adjust the candlestick time
- chart, you can customize the chart style (representation of price) and activate the log scale
- studies, you can activate various indicators
- settings you can change the chart theme (light/dark)
- select tool, you can draw trend lines/levels on the chart.
Choosing Order Book will show the market depth graph and choosing Wallet will open the deposit and withdrawal windows for the cryptocurrency.
Trading, Bittrex
Trading Panel is compact in Bittrex, it allows you to enter different order types by dropdown selection menu. Let’s go from top to bottom;
- Units, is the amount of cryptocurrency that you would like to issue, by clicking max, it will select all of your balance for that currency
- Bid/Ask, is the price that you would like to create your order.
- Type, limit is the limit order and conditional order allows you to create stop-loss orders.
- Time In Force, “Good ‘Till Cancelled” will fill the order until it’s fully filled and will not be cancelled unless you do so, “Immediate or Cancel” won’t accept partial fills for your order and if your order can’t be filled monolithically, it will be canceled.
- Total is the amount of BTC, ETH or USDT that you would like to issue, you can play with this or units for the amount.
Below the trading panel, there is a detailed order book, and below that, there is Open Orders, Market History and My Order History.
d. KuCoin
Assets, KuCoin
KuCoin is a China based crypto exchange with trading fee of %0.1. It is a really new exchange and it is fairly small in total volume from the other ones. For me, it is like the little brother of Binance. (Maybe, because of the UI and similar Marketing) In the beginning, like Binance, they prioritize the refferal system and customer services and their strategy was pretty successful. Moreover KuCoin lists new cryptocurrencies often and the currencies which they are listing are mostly post-ICO currencies with nice mid-term potentials. Overall, I think its a nice Exchange with the present markets and future potentials, so I’d like to include it also in the article.
KuCoin doesn’t require verification to trade or withdraw. So you can start after setting up 2FA. Assets page shows users’ asset overview, estimated value of the account, available value (not in order), in order value, deposits, withdrawals, open orders, trade history, reward history and referral bonuses. In order to deposit, you should click deposit on the right side of the currency and generate the address. Vice Versa in order to withdraw, you should click withdraw on the right side of the currency and fill the amount and address.
Markets, KuCoin
Here’s the Markets Page. Let’s cover everything from left to right.
- Home is the home page, showing the announcements, news, competitions, etc. in a fancy way. It also previews the markets in a card view.
- Markets shows the markets in KuCoin. KuCoin includes, BTC, ETH, NEO, USDT, KCS and BCH market pairs. In settings you can arrange which parameters to monitor. The “Hold” symbol appears when you hold that currency in your assets greater or equal than the value that you determined in the settings. As a preset, the value is 0, so there is hold symbol in every market. You can only show favorites and you can oly show hold’s.
- Assets, we talked about it in the beginning of the section. Simply, your account balance.
- Account shows the account settings and miscellaneous stuff like 2FA etc.
- Discover has two features: KuCoin Bonus is a program which gives you Bonus as you’re holding KCS on KuCoin, (like an interest rate) you can calculate the amount that you’d earn from kucoinshares dot com. Vote for your Coin is a program, which KuCoin asks the community that which coin should they be listing next, so you’ll have a voice for determining the new listing.
- News shows the announcements of the exchange.
- FAQ is the KuCoin Help Desk, where you can find Online Support, FAQ, submit a request or find documentations on the API.
Exchange, KuCoin
Here is the trading page of KuCoin, I like the UI, it’s compact, useful and more importantly, they use TradingView chart. TradingView chart is the most professional chart for crypto-trading that you can find, I’m thinking about making a dedicated article for how to use TradingView later, so I’m going to pass this for now. For beginners, its fundamentally working on the same dynamics with other charts that we’ve covered. (Candlesticks, volume, etc..) You can monitor the markets by clicking the name of the current market (in this case ETH/BTC) On the left side you can monitor the order book and recent trades. On the bottom, market depth graph, open trades and market history is placed. Trading panel is placed on the right bottom of the screen. KuCoin doesn’t include stop-loss order, which is one of the biggest flaws of the exchange. You only can limit order in KuCoin by entering the price and the amount.
3. Fundamental Sources
A crypto-trader must monitor what’s going on with the crypto markets. Further than monitoring, a crypto-trader should master the news and the rumors for becoming successful. You need to surf the waves, you can’t swim against them. So, I will share my favorite sources to follow the feed, I promise when you start following them and create your fav-list, they will be enough to make you a more confident trader with more control over the markets.
I will be basically overviewing the platforms in this article, because I’m planning to create a comprehensive article on FA, we will talk about them in depth in that article.
a. Coinmarketcap
CoinMarketCap
This site is our main source for cryptocurrencies. If you see a coin or a token and if you want to learn about it more, this site will be the first site you should go and look. The site includes really useful information about markets, about overall situation, exchanges and about coins and tokens. In crypto, market capitalization means, circulating supply × the price. Hence, when you’d like to compare a cryptocurrency to other cryptocurrency or when you’d like to find out it’s either overvalued or undervalued, you should be looking at its market cap. You can also find the chart data for a coin, from which exchanges you can trade the coin, volume information, supply information and various links about the coin.
b. Coinmarketcal
CoinMarketCal
CoinMarketCal is a lovely community-driven web site for tracking the cryptocurrency events. Posts are created by community and with the votes, proofs and sources it’s verified. You can sort the events by date, coin, category and the Hot Events. From my experiences; airdrops (free money hype), partnership (increase in potential and popularity hype), exchange (new buyers are coming hype), hard forks, “mind-blowing, great, amazing announcements” possibly may create a hype and a rally in the price. So keep having an eye on them.
c. Blockfolio / Delta
Stock image, Blockfolio
After a point Blockfolio became like my organ, I found myself checking Blockfolio in random places, in random times. First thing when I wake up, check Blockfolio, last thing before I sleep, I check Blockfolio. Blockfolio is a decent app for tracking your portfolio and setting price alerts. I don’t like shilling so I also added its competitor, Delta app, you can check that out as well.
— How to use Blockfolio?
- In order to add a market, click “+” in the home page and choose the market. If you just want to monitor the market, choose “Watch Only”.
- In order to add a transaction, click “+” in the market’s page. Fill the trade details manually. If you want to keep your holding in continuity, choose “deduct from holdings” or “add to holdings”.
- You can add notes. Notes will make you learn your mistakes on a trade if things will go wrong, important.
- In order to add alerts, choose alerts in the Market’s page. Click “add alert” fill the allert settings, and press save. (1 time will send an alert for one time when the condition is true, persistent will send every time when the condition is true)
c. News
You can find various Blockchain / Cryptocurrencies news sites on web. I personally follow Coin Telegraph and Coin Desk and skim the articles daily.
d. Twitter / Telegram / Discord
Especially Twitter and Telegram is crucial for crypto world. They allow the community to collaborate with each other moreover they connect the developers, business members, traders and investors. Crypto community is unique for accessibility, if you have any questions about an ICO you can directly ask your question to the CEO, if you have any trading questions you can send your charts to people. I’m sure that the community will improve you a lot in various skills. Moreover to everything, I love the fun part about crypto community, unlike any other financial community, the amount of quality memes and gifs are enormous.
- Twitter; the most important mindset in while you’re following Twitter community is being skeptical. It is impossible to know what will happen in the future (as far as our technological development, swh), so people on Twitter will make, and making lot’s of false predictions. Let’s understand our main goal on crypto Twitter, “having opinions about what’s going on and starting a thought ignition.” You’ll need to filter people and filter information. What I do is, I created a filtered feed, I filtered people by using some filters such that, hilling, sharing refference links without implying or explaining, sharing biased knowledge as a pure knowledge, being disrespectful to others. Then I’m using my feed to obtain inspiration. If I see anything same from various people, I go search for it. If I see something exciting, I go search for it. If I see a different TA technique, I go search for it. For who to follow, I don’t want to shill in this article, so you can actually go on my Twitter account (Its written on the bottom) and look the people that I’m following. It shouldn’t be me, you can find a profile that you like and search its followings for inspiration.
- Telegram; First of all, I love crypto Telegram Sticker Packs. Telegram is the most corrupted place for crypto in my opinion with ref links, shillings, false news etc… There are lots of groups on Telegram for crypto that you can join such as, the coin groups, the ico groups, the signal groups, the pump groups(do not join them), shilling groups, airdrop groups, community groups… Extremely high thought filtering is required to follow crypto Telegram. The most useful groups are the official ico, coin, token groups where you can obtain news. You can find the groups from web.(I really don’t want to shill Telegram groups in this article, swh)
- Discord; Discord, Slack, etc. is also used by crypto community a lot. The paid groups mostly use Discord to communicate. Moreover, Discord groups are more like a sub-community in crypto. You can also find them if you search them on web. Again, there are lots of biased content flowing around the Discord groups.
farewell time
Thanks for reading! I hope it was helpful and you’ve enjoyed!
So, what’s next? I’m planning to write articles on Candlestick Patterns, Accumulation-Distribution-Volume Analysis, Common Reversal and Continuation Chart Patterns, Commonly used Indicators, How to Read TA, Portfolio-Money-Risk Management, Systems, Fundamental Analysis. If you’re interested in those topics, you can follow me.
You can read my first article “crypto 101 | The Glossary” from here.
And finally, you can follow me on Twitter, I’d be appreciated-> @cryptorocket_