There’s no surprise 2021 has already been a wild ride. We have explosive growth in crypto and stocks have begun to favor the average investor over hedge funds. There is so much opportunity going on and honestly, it’s quite scary.
So where have I been? I’ve been on this couch watching it all go down. I had debt and no investments at the time with only my opinion and this blog. It was quite intimidating, and I felt almost embarrassed to be writing these posts without any real proof I had this knowledge. I felt like a phony.
The past few months have been life changing for me. My wife and I finally bought a house! We move in May and now have the dreaded packing up our house. Never realized how much stuff we actually crammed into this two-bedroom apartment. We’ve got our work cut out for us!
Crypto has become my new obsession. I’ve always loved reading about it and anticipating throwing some money in there for fun, but it’s become more serious and I’ve seen quite a nice return so far.
Stocks have become a strange place to be. WallStreetBets came in, turned the market upside down and then moved on. Some people made millions off AMC stocks and others, while some, like Hedge Funds lost millions. It was a whirlwind of excitement and it got a lot of people in interested in stocks, which is a good thing! But with all these stocks getting massive gains, will it come crashing down?
Crypto World: My Investments and The Future
The past two months I finally started investing in crypto. Bitcoin had already pushed past a reasonable price point where I could buy a full one, but there was enough room for its growth to still invest anyway. Since I currently live in New York, I’ve found there are a lot of restrictions on what crypto I can buy, so I stuck with the standard coins for now to build up my portfolio. My current breakdown is Bitcoin at 72% and Ethereum at 28% giving me a total of 125% return so far this year. Not too shabby!
I know this insane rise in price won’t last forever. From the experts I’ve read from and all the YouTube videos I’ve watched, we’re looking at the end of the current bull run probably at the end of Summer. This means either we buckle in and wait it out for the next bull run to take these prices even higher or we cash out as close to the top as possible and buy back in real cheap when it crashed 60% or more. That’s up to you! Just remember cashing out or even transferring coins will mean paying taxes.
I am currently dollar cost averaging a bit each week to steadily grow my holdings, but may start to slow that down and focus on my other investments. Alternative investments are supposed to be a smaller portion of your portfolio. Whoops.
The Insanity of WallStreetBets
I’m not going to talk much about this topic here since the moment passed for now and it was covered everywhere. So I don’t want to be a broken record. I’ll just add in my 2 cents.
This was pretty crazy to watch. I was definitely tempted to buy in when I first heard about it, but then remembered to stick to my original plan. Safe and calculated investing every month in carefully researched stocks, bonds and index funds. The boring way/my way.
Seeing a stock jump up to such extreme gains made a lot of millionaires. People are now obsessing about stocks and finding the next AMC stock that will give them the same returns. So far we saw Dogecoin and GameStop do the same. But this isn’t investing. It’s so risky and while many people gained a lot of money, even more lost it. I’m not talking about the hedge funds that needed a bail out because some kids did the same thing they do, only in greater number. I’m talking about those that are uneducated in investing and kept their money in the stock too long and saw the short squeeze end, along with their investment plummeting down.
While it’s very exciting and there’s an adrenaline rush when involved in these types of plans, it’s very risky and I would recommend sticking to a more planned out approach to investing.
My Current Investments
Right now I am still in the beginning phases of building my portfolio. Like I said, I have to slow down on my alternative investment allocation of crypto so I can build up my brokerage accounts. I am working on maxing out my retirement account and then I will be starting a normal brokerage account. I plan for this brokerage to account for a majority of my investments. The breakdown will be pretty simple and straightforward. Index funds covering the US stock market, international, bonds and some low cap stocks. But I also plan to invest 10%-12% of the portfolio in individual stocks, including major staples like Apple and Amazon.
We will be putting a small portion into 5-10 stocks we truly believe in. But there are a few stocks I want to throw some money in because I see their potential. The 2 main stocks I plan to jump into is Carnival and Coinbase. I’ve already written a blog post about my upcoming risky investment into Carnival. There should be a Coinbase IPO offering happening within the next few months and I am ready to jump in. I think this stock will do very well in the short term, looking at the recent media obsession with Bitcoin and its future. Long term I will need to see, as more competitors enter the market and see how well Coinbase is received by the public. Like I said, these 2 stocks are gambles, but I’m only investing enough where it won’t hurt me if I lose everything.
Remember to invest wisely and do your research before investing into anything.
