It is generally not recommended to store cryptocurrencies on exchanges, but rather in personal wallets, optimally in a physical ”cold” wallet. Furthermore, it is highly encouraged to keep track of your financial bets to learn from your experience and avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. Finally, portfolio tracking is a great tool to have an overview of all your cryptocurrency assets. However, avoid getting lost in short-run price action by constantly checking your portfolio as even the strongest long-term trends become noise in the short run.
Cryptocurrencies fundamentally are assets whose prices are determined by the dynamics of supply and demand. They are usually bought on exchanges, online platforms that enable the conversion of one asset (e.g. US dollars) to another (e.g. Bitcoin). Essentially, they are intermediaries that match people who want to buy an asset with people who want to sell it. Exchanges come in two flavors, namely centralized exchanges (CEXs), which are managed by a central authority or company, and decentralized exchanges (DEXs), which operate using blockchain technology and smart contracts to enable peer-to-peer transactions. The most famous exchanges that also have the highest trading volumes are centralized exchanges. These include Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Bybit, Kucoin and so on. The most famous decentralized exchanges include Uniswap, 1Inch and Pancake Swap. Not all exchanges will be able to fulfill your individual needs: some exchanges might not be available in your country and some might not feature the cryptocurrency you’re looking to trade. Generally, it is a good idea to stick to the main players that have the highest liquidity and to avoid unnecessarily storing assets on exchanges for long periods.
There exist three main ways of storing your cryptocurrencies: hot wallets, cold wallets, and exchanges. As mentioned above, it is generally a good idea to avoid unnecessarily storing assets on exchanges for long periods. This is because you don’t have custody (control) over your cryptocurrencies and there have been many cases in the past where exchanges were hacked or have gone bankrupt. Hot and cold wallets, on the other hand, allow you to have custody over your cryptocurrencies. Hot wallets are connected to the internet, while cold wallets are offline. Thus, hot wallets might be more convenient for sending around cryptocurrencies for active trading. However, they are said to be riskier than offline wallets as they are susceptible to hackers. It is reasonable to choose a physical cold wallet to store cryptocurrencies that one intends to hold in the long run and use hot wallets for cryptocurrencies that are “moved around” more frequently. Finally, it could be a good idea to diversify the wallets one is using - whether hot wallets, cold wallets or exchanges - as at the end of the day any storage option carries at least some risk.
In investing/trading, as in any area of life, you want to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. While our platform can act as a fast-track solution that helps you avoid many mistakes investors and traders make, you will, inevitably, fall into some traps. Thus, we recommend keeping track of all financial bets systematically in a trade journal in Excel, Notion or in a physical notebook. Formulate the thesis of the financial bet (why is the expected value positive?), the invalidation scenario (at what point are you cutting your loss?), and the profit-taking strategy (when are you going to take profits?). Most importantly, after the experience take notes on any learnings or inferences you made so you can implement them into your system and don’t fall for the same mistakes again. This way, your system is improved continually as you constantly decrease the number of mistakes you could fall for with the next bet.
There are countless tools to track your portfolio, the most famous ones being CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko. These tools are very convenient, especially if you have coins in many different wallets and exchanges. Beware, however, of constantly looking at your portfolio in every free second of the day, especially if the time horizon of your bets is very long. The problem is that the short-term information about your portfolio is mere noise. Probabilistically, the closer you zoom in on the time horizon, the more random things become, even if they have a clear trend on the higher time horizon. Roger Federer, who many refer to as the greatest tennis player of all time, won 80% of matches during his career. However, he only won 54% of points in these matches. The same effect applies to financial bets. A 95% probability of success on the yearly scale slowly converges to 50% as you zoom into lower and lower time horizons. In summary, use a portfolio tracker to keep an overview, but avoid getting lost in the short-term noise.