Simple Tips that Will Help You Trade Bitcoin (and Other CryptoCurrencies) Without Making Rookie Mistakes

Here are some basic tips and tricks for investing in and trading Bitcoin (and other cryptos). It covers how to avoid fees, what orders to use, and more.
TIP: The tips and tricks below shouldn’t be mistaken as professional investing advice, instead this is basic friendly advice to mull over. If you want professional investment advice, consult a fiduciary.
To keep it simple, let’s jump right in to some Bitcoin investing and trading tips and tricks:
• Use an exchange, not a broker. You’ll save money on fees. For example, buy and sell with GDAX and not Coinbase.
• When you buy/sell via an exchange, try to use limit orders (try not to use market orders). Limit orders generally have the lowest fees, market orders generally have higher fees. On GDAX, limit orders are free as long as they don’t fill immediately (meanwhile, market orders result in a .3% fee, that is better than the 1.4% Coinbase charges, but not as good as 0%… especially if you are day trading).
• Figure out if you want to go long or short. Are you going short with every penny you have to invest, or are you going to go long with some and short with some? Long term investors will pay a lower tax rate if they can hold for over 12 months, but as a trade-off they WILL have to sit through corrections (likely seeing their balance go down 50% plus on paper as often as they see it go up). Short term investors can avoid corrections if they are nimble, but they’ll owe taxes on the profits from each trade they do along the way (see: how taxes work with cryptocurrency to understand how the long term and short term capital gains tax work with cryptocurrency).
• If you are going long, consider dollar cost averaging. No better way to avoid making a poorly timed trade than to dollar cost average (buying incrementally instead of all at once and thereby buying an asset at its “average” price over time).
• Consider laddering your buys and sells. In others words, instead of buying or selling everything in one chunk, set incremental buy and sell orders to buy when the price goes down and sell when the price goes up.
• Remember Cryptocurrency is a 24/7 Global Market. In other words, the market never sleeps. Since you do, consider automating your investing strategy using limit orders, stops, or even APIS (AKA “trading bots”).