Editor's note...

An informal letter sent to a friend during 2017-2018...

"Hi [ Name Redacted ]! So! Like I said... I'm starting a company in this space - it's too risky.. cos even you can create a currency in under 2 hours... you can treat a coin, as a company like Facebook's or Apple's shares and value the share price (coin price) based on : founding team, developers, product idea, which other big investors have invested in the venture etc .. Here's an outdated article :

https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/19/100-cryptocurrencies-described-in-4-words-or-less/

The coins mentioned in the article above may be good because they raised a lot of money just based on the novelty of their idea ( Quite a few lost money later on as well ).

I have used exchanges such as Bittrex and Polo but I am not sure if they are functional anymore as better exchanges have cropped up...

Since you reached out for advice... I would say, try trading stuff that you have in-depth knowledge of, in order to get your feet wet first.. like blue chips and IT company stocks ... you will need to read quarterly financial reports ... wait let me just copy paste what I advice I have already sent to others, who reached out to me before you:

I used to look into stocks one or 2 years ago... Only invested long-term and added money into stocks only once in 4 months. Following it more frequently than that is time consuming.

1) I have heard Robinhood app is good to trade stocks on ... I think you can click a button and copy paste the stocks your friends buy on it - I am not on Robinhood .. I used Motif Investing but unlike Robinhood it had fees to trade. 2) For investing Ideas, I mostly directly googled "Undervalued stocks of 2016".."top value stocks of 2017" and so on... 3) I follow Forbes, Fortune , WSJ, CNN Money on Facebook - they provide very generic news on new IPOs... "Bloomberg Markets" is my all-time favorite news site in this category. For more specific information I follow Investopedia page on Facebook and also Marketwatch page on Facebook. For more professional folks, there are : "Seeking Alpha", "The Motley Fool" and similar paid guest article, submission websites... Barrons is a great magazine with good info but you would need to pay for it. 4) I have a few friends who do this (investing) for a living and they generally just handpick a few companies and read up on the companies quarterly and annual financial reports... 5) 2 simple rules in investing : a) Diversify (price of one asset should not affect price of another) b) Generally speaking buy when stock price is low and sell when it is high and read up on any general investing advise if you do this on a regular basis (this includes minor things such as effect on taxes, annual cycles of up and down of stocks) 6) Buy index stocks of companies like Vanguard instead of individual stocks - Index stocks, ETFs - read up more on these terms on Investopedia site when free...

Now finally coming to Cryptocurrencies - they are a bit of a risk... markets are too volatile and some of the cryptocurrency stocks (known mainly as alt-coins, tokens, coins) might turn out to be scams (For example, someone may claim 'I will start a new Apple company'

- they issue their stock.. take all the money raised from the stock listing on an exchange and then run away)... But this field is for CS guys.. just as Real estate, Oil industry, Energy sector, commodities is for businessmen... the learning process is time consuming...risky... no risk no reward... You will only learn its risky "after" you lose money - not before 🙂 That's the case with stocks as well...if picking stocks was easy, everyone like you and me would already know about the art ..it is not a get rich quick scheme... but if this turns out to be your passion, go ahead.. Biggest problem would be the requirement to monitor markets 24 hrs with risky volatile assets such as like oil. Anyway - there are deeper concepts like futures trading etc but those are for people in the field, and people who do this for a living..

Install Blockfolio app and add coin symbols to monitor token/coin values on it and check price often ... Usually only few coins are available on local exchanges...As for the rest, one may have to use an exchange abroad which may require additional legal compliances to be followed."

Letter sent 5 January 2018.