It’s hard to know who to trust in trading, especially crypto. A selection of the dangers include:
- Fake websites and social accounts
- Viruses, malware and spyware
- Reviewers promoting projects only for money
- Exit scams
- Education that teaches you to overtrade, earning more commission for brokers
- Expensive courses that aren’t worth it
- Free advice that isn’t very good
- Unrealistic claims including overfitted backtesting of scripts
- Pump and dump schemes
And a special shoutout to crypto Twitter – an echo chamber of myopic monkeys swinging constantly between euphoria and panic.
So I’ve collected a few people and organisations here who seem to me honest and competent.
Trading mentors
If you really want to get good at something, you need to pay an expert to teach you. There’s no shortcut. Or rather, that is the shortcut.
- Mr Anderson @TrueCrypto28. I joined his study group. I know from this experience that he’s an expert trader and a dedicated teacher. I doubt you can find better.
- The Wolf Of All Streets @scottmelker. An interesting, skilled and even-minded trader. I subscribed to his newsletter.
- @rektcapital. Non-flashy crypto analyst with emphasis on macro cycles. I subscribed to his newsletter. I haven’t yet taken his training.
- @SecretsOfCrypto. Secrets is an investor not a trader. He does not do training or mentoring but gives out information on Twitter, including some valuable, easy-to-digest infographics about cycle investing.
Exchanges
Exchanges are where you keep your precious Bitcoin, trying to trade it to get more of it. For the time that it’s on an exchange, it’s not safely in your own wallet. Not your keys, not your funds. The entire exchange can just up and lol and exitscam, or they can have poor security that allows someone else to steal your funds.
Problems with exchanges that I’ve personally had include: lost funds, websites not working, apps not working, poor interface design costing me money, transactions taking forever due to too-low transaction fees, profits getting smashed due to too-high transaction fees, poor liquidity, and the infamous “Bitmex overload”, where you watch helplessly as they lock you out and their market makers take all your money.
I was caught out by the FTX scandal and lost my trading funds there. I previously recommended them (sorry!) and I – and everyone else, to be fair – was wrong. I’m not going to recommend an exchange for trading at this time. Leverage traders that I know use ByBit, Phemex, and BingX, among others. Spot traders I know use Kucoin and gate.io. These are not endorsements.
Solely for getting fiat currency into and out of crypto, I use Coinbase. It’s good to have at least one fully KYC’d backup exchange in case you have problems with your main one. Coinbase can suffer from reliability issues, but it is heavily regulated and insured in the state of New York so is very unlikely to have problems like FTX (which was registered in the Bahamas).
Design
David Owen
David is a professional illustrator and designer. He did the Simple Crypto Life logo. Find him on Instagram at @davidowen_illustration.