How Did I Start Investing?
I am a frugal person for as long as I can remember. After I started making money, I started saving regularly. My money was increasing, but there seemed to be a problem. I was able to increase it very slowly. I know, it happens to everyone. We can call it the paycheck-to-paycheck life cycle. I didn’t have the slightest idea about investing. In fact, I saved some money from the student loan(read my story in detail if you want) I took during my university years and bought dollars by asking myself whether I should buy gold or USD with it. I also knew about 10 years ago that my country’s currency was crushed by inflation. For many years, I thought I was investing by holding gold or dollars 🙂 Yes, I can’t believe I was so stupid back then.
In mid-2017, with the help of a friend, I decided to invest in cryptocurrencies. So my investing journey started with that. In the beginning, our aim was to arbitrage. In previous years, I had made a lot of money(for students of course :)) from sports betting with arbitrage. In the future, I will write about how I made money from betting during my student years. Anyway, in those years there could be 10-15% differences between local crypto exchanges and global crypto exchanges, and this was true for all coins.
After entering this market, I met charts that I saw for the first time in my life. I was trading without knowing anything. Of course, I had set aside very little of my money. As I said, I was the guy who liked to keep the money. At the beginning of 2018, not when BTC first crashed and kinda recovered but in the second crash, I panicked about 16k and then sold it. I was quite lucky. Then for a long time, I did not have a shit with investment. I continued to live on my cash. In fact, I was able to increase my money a little in a period of 6 months when I invested in the market. However, I couldn’t enter again this for those years.
In my opinion, once a person starts investing, it is absolutely impossible to quit. Especially if he can earn money, he becomes addicted. Over the years, my interest has grown exponentially. In early 2020, I entered both stock exchanges and crypto markets again. As a matter of fact, this time I was able to earn good money with more experience. I used to be unable to make any money in my life with a zero-risk plan, but now I am far from that point of view. Unfortunately, there is nothing to do in an environment where the price of everything is increasing. The money system is a dirty game. I think we need to invest to protect our efforts.
Should You Start Investing?
Well, while I praise being an investor so much, I would like to discuss a little bit about whether investing is for everyone. In my opinion, everyone should be an investor. You can even invest by borrowing money. Yes, this is necessary. However, one should be able to analyze his own character very well. Real estate investment is a blessing for people with low-risk tolerance. When we think about the return, you are not really rich, but you are not poor either. The risk-reward ratio is reasonable.
The important thing is to invest without fear. There are ways to overcome fear. Unfortunately, people who cannot manage risk and do not have a plan lose their hard-earned money. I have come across a lot of people around me who went bankrupt like this. Investing in capital markets, in particular, requires a great deal of patience and calmness. If you don’t have these two, I would definitely recommend staying away. If you say that I will diversify, I will not trade on margin, sooner or later the markets will increase again, some of your shares will increase beyond expectations and you will increase your money. The important thing is to always stay invested. Never turn all your money back into cash. Cash is an illusion. Your assets have always beaten cash in the long run or at least some of them.
Stay invested.
Peace