“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing…”
First off, this course is NOT financial advice! I am not a licensed or practicing hedge fund manager and I have no classical training in economics other than basic collegiate-level courses. What I do have is four years of experience in the cryptosphere and about three years of personal growth and study on the subject (yea, deployments are a long time to be stuck on a ship). Basically, my expertise on the subject has come from hard work, personal development, and a lot of costly learning sessions on them trading streets. In the spirit of full disclosure, I got into crypto in the middle of 2017 for X amount of dollars. I watched as my portfolio went from X dollars to X/40 dollars over the course of a year and wanted to learn everything I could about how to ensure that wouldn’t happen again. Over the next three years, I spent countless hours reading everything I could on the subject of crypto, charting, swing trading, market caps, etc., and even essences of Game Theory, epistemology (the theory of knowledge), psychology, and human tendencies that directly relate to a publicly-traded asset. I got serious about swing trading about a year ago and worked my X/40 dollars back up past original investment rather quickly, with no further investments added.
This course will attempt to pass along everything I have learned in that journey in an easy-to-digest manner. I am not going to cover much of the fundamentals as that would require way longer than a single course. What we will do is dive into what swing trading is, what is most important to understand to be successful as a swing trader, why that is the case, simple trading metrics, indicators and charting patterns, the types of orders we can utilize in our arsenal, how to handle a market that never closes (overnight trading), and wrap it up with some Game Theory, epistemology, psychology and human tendencies to understand in the journey.
Before we go any further in this introduction, let’s quickly talk about what cryptocurrencies are and why that name is somewhat misleading. Cryptocurrencies are a decentralized ledger, if you will, utilizing proof of work concepts. Let me explain because that could sound foreign to most. Take a bank, for example. A bank has a single ledger (sheet of balances, transfers, money movements, and holdings). This ledger is managed by a single entity. That entity represents a centralized system. The technology of cryptocurrencies utilizes multiple avenues to create a unified web, tangle, or chain of proof of work. Each user, or account, is its own ledger. A transfer from one ledger to another ledger (or a storage of data or the internet of things (IoT) or machine learning and machine-to-machine communication or any of the countless other real-world use cases or applications of the technology) requires a proof of work function to validate a transfer of any of the aforementioned cases. In most cryptocurrencies, this is called a “block.” A block is a snapshot of the entangled web of all ledgers. In order for a block to be accepted, all ledgers must match (basically, since every account or user carries their own ledger, a transfer from one account must be verified as received by another). If the “block” is verified as accurate, it is added to the “chain,” or the sequential order of all previously verified blocks. This is where the term “blockchain” comes from. Now, there are other forms of proof of work, such as IOTA’s (MIOTA) tangle, which grows outwards as more blocks, or verified snapshots, are added as opposed to the more linear and sequential blockchain, which most simply refer to as a “web.” There are also many different spinoffs of the original technology, Bitcoin.
Mining is the act of validating blocks and adding them to the chain. Rewards for blocks being added to the chain are given in the form of the cryptocurrency itself, hence people “mining,” or utilizing energy and computing power to have supercomputers do this work. That’s about as deep as I want to get into the technology of cryptocurrencies. I highly recommend doing an in-depth analysis of individual projects, identifying specific use cases and utility, prior to entering long positions as a lot of the projects that are on the market today will not be around in ten years.
The name “cryptocurrency” is somewhat misleading, in my opinion, as it masks the true utility of the technology – which is why we should be so enthused, as opposed to viewing these assets as a pure currency or store of value. The currencies of most of these projects are simply monetized aspects of the technology themselves (looking at you, DOGE, which simply has very little utility… I digress), whereas some utilize the currency part as a means of “paying” for proof of work, staking, or things like monetization of machine-to-machine communication or the transfer and storage of data.
The best place for US customers to swing trade for various reasons (low fees, most coins available to US customers, ease of deposits and withdrawals) is Binance.US. Follow the link below to create an account (this is my referral link and gives me a cut of all trading fees on their platform; this is by no means a begging request, and I will never solicit empty requests, but if you feel like giving back I would greatly appreciate it – might as well keep a small fraction of trading fees from going to the books if nothing else!).
The quickest way to get into crypto for those without any existing accounts is through Coinbase. Coinbase allows users to deposit small amounts of money prior to account verification.
If you have any questions on where to go to create a crypto account, how to transfer from one wallet (ledger found on a trading platform) to another, or anything else pertaining to crypto, we will be creating a private Discord channel for all OWS members that purchase this course (please email support@oneweekseason.com with your Discord username for access). I will be hanging out in there to answer all crypto/Topshot related questions as well as posting my personal trading plays and up-to-date Topshot ideas!
Finally, if you are looking to get serious about technical analysis and charting, I highly recommend checking out TradingView. TradingView allows you to chart specific value ranges based on Fibonacci levels (we’ll cover those shortly) and quickly get a visual representation of predictive metrics. It is not required, and I’ll cover how to identify swing trades without using it in this course, but it is definitely helpful for those that want to take swing trading seriously.
Now that we have a wavetops understanding of what cryptocurrencies are, and why we should care, let’s talk about what swing trading is.
