Author: Igor Jakovljevic

Ultimate Crypto.Com Guide

by Igor JakovljevicUncategorizedLeave a Comment on Ultimate Crypto.Com Guide

For the past 15 months I have been using the Crypto.com [1] App to manage most of my Crypto related investments. The goal of this blog post is to bring more information to the reader about this platform and to provide a strategy for maximum profit with it.

What is Crypto.Com

Crypto.com is a cryptocurrency company started back in 2017, they focus on providing the best crypto payment system to their users. Their main crypto coins are CRO and MCO.

What makes crypto.com different from other companies? Well for starters they are one of the first crypto companies that got a ISO/IEC 27001:2013 Certification. This certification is considered the “Gold Standard” for information security. Besides this certification, they have a lively community on Telegram, active AMA sessions and good communication with the whole community.

Besides their payment system they also offer a variety of services like exchange with low fees, savings accounts (Crypto Earn), investing accounts (Crypto Credit) and a crypto wallet.

Their best features are their App and the Metal Crypto Card. The card is a VISA card. You can use this card to buy like a normal credit/debit card but with additional perks. There is no maintenance cost for your account.

The Crypto.com App is one of my favourite things, because it offers a smooth experience for experts and beginners, who want to dabble in the world of crypto.

Who is it for?

Minimum Requirement: You can buy 50 MCO, now it is around 186€.

If you are inexperienced with crypto this is a perfect entry point, the app offers an easy experience and is quite user friendly. Imagine using a good banking app and the currency is Crypto, this is how I feel with this app.

For “veteran” crypto users who are searching for an alternative to Coinbase or other crypto providers, this is also a good opportunity.

Turnoffs

As me, you might think that there is something hidden somewhere in the contract. But the only things that I found are:

  • 50$ Account Closing Fee
  • 50$ Tier Upgrade Fee (Which can be negotiated)
  • Staking 50 MCO for 6 Months
  • Slow In App Support
  • Volatility of Crypto

But the 50$ Closing fee can be paid with the referral bonus, slow in app support is fixed with telegram support channels and volatility of crypto is a issue with all platforms.

The staking will be explained later.

Card Types

When joining the crypto.com community it is important to think about which card you want and how much can you afford to invest.

Each card has different benefits, but if I am to recommend one I would say the best value is the 500 MCO Stake card (Jade or Royal Indigo) and a good entry card is the 50 MCO (Ruby Red). You can see the benefits of each tier bellow. But keep in mind if you decide to switch, you have to pay 50€ for a new card. When you stake 500 MCO, you have a additional 6% return per year on those 500 MCO (simple terms: you get 30 MCO coins for staking 500 MCO), this is not true for staking 50 MCO.

Card Benefits Crypto.com
Crypto Card Benefits

You also get a cash-back when using the card, for every purchase you get from 1-5% back in MCO tokens.

Additionally if you buy at certain stores you get 10% cash-back for every card except the indigo blue

How can you get a card?

There are a few ways to get the card. One way is to go directly to the page and register, here you lose the referral bonus of 50$. But if you want to do it you can just go to [1] and do it. The second way is to create an account with a referral link.

Referral Benefits

Use my referral link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/jhc8nw9u5z to sign up for Crypto.com and you get $50 USD when you stake 50 MCO.

Just be sure you type in the CODE “jhc8nw9u5z” as the referral code, this way you get and extra 50$ when you stake 50 MCO coins. You are probably asking your self “What do you mean staking 50 MCO coins?”. Well in order to get 50$, you have to buy 50 MCO (approx. 186€) and activate the stake option. This means that you cannot do anything with those 50 MCO coins for the next 6 months. Here is where most people leave and do not go further with Crypto.Com.

But read more to learn about the benefits that crypto.com offers and learn the best way to use the app.

Topping Up – The Proper Way

You could top up your crpyto.com account with crypto and fiat (USD, GBP, EUR and more). I personally only used the crypto topup once and it was easy, you just scan a QR code with your address and the desired crypto is transferred to your crypto.com address. When I used there were no fees for crypto deposits into the crypto.com wallet.

If you are topping up with fiat, you can top up via a Credit Card or a Bank transfer. For credit card topups, you have to pay a 3.5% fee, but you topup your account instantly. With a bank account, the topup happens in 2-5 business days, but you do not pay a fee for it.

You do not pay credit card topup fees from 01.07.2020 to 01.10.2020 duo to a discount crypto.com is offering because of the whole corona situation.

Staking

I briefly mentioned staking, you can think of staking as opening a savings account. You place money in your savings account and you cannot access that lump sum until a certain period. There are a couple of ways you can stake in the crypto.com app.

The basic staking is related to staking MCO to get the metal crypto card.

Once your MCO wallet has enough MCO tokens for your selected MCO Visa card:

  1. Go to the Card page (bottom-right corner of the app)
  2. Select your desired MCO Visa card
  3. Tap the Stake MCO button and follow the on-screen instructions

Earn

A great feature is Crypto Earn, you can stake CRO tokens and gain weekly interests. In simple terms, you stake CRO tokens via the app and crypto.com pays you in CRO tokens for holding a certain amount of crypto.

There are 3 Crypto Earn modes: Flexible, 1-month and 3-months.

For example if you stake 10000 CRO with Flexible Earn mode you earn per year 14% back in CRO tokens. This means that by the end of the year your 10000 will be 11400. With the 1-month the interest rate is 16% and with the 3-month the interest rate is 18%.

I would suggest the Flexible mode, because you can withdraw your crypto currency at any time.

You can also stake other crypto currencies, but the interest rates differ for other currencies. This can be checked via the app.

Syndicate

Syndicates are special discounts events, where you can buy crypto currency 50% discounted. They happen every 2-3 weeks and they are a great way to earn some extra crypto currency, with no extra risk.

Getting Help From Customer Support

The best way to get help from crypto.com staff is to join a telegram group and ask there, besides the official staff, there are other individuals that can help you with your problems. But if a staff member sees your question, they can quickly escalate the problem.

Conclusion

If you are starting our with crypto or just want to get a fancy metal card, crypto.com is a great platform. As with everything, there is a risk related to trading and buying crypto’s, but if you are searching for something that is easy to use, crypto.com is the best way to go.

[1] – https://crypto.com/en/index.html#

Check out my other articles:

Buying Long and Selling Short
Swing Trading Fundamentals

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Buying Long and Selling Short

by Igor JakovljevicTechnical Analysis1 Comment on Buying Long and Selling Short

Introduction

When I started to research the topic of investing I always heard terms buying long and selling short. I was not sure what do they mean. For me selling short was too abstract to realise what it actually means, is it selling the stock the you own? Is it betting that someone is going to sell stocks?

The other option “Buying Long” was also not clear to me. First I thought this has something to do with value investing or with opportunity to buy stocks. I was never sure what it actually is.

In this post I will try to explain what these terms are

Buying Long

Let us start with an example for the expression “Buying Long”. Imagine you buy 10 shares of Verizon (VZ) for $40. In the investing world the term used is “Opening a Buy Position”. Then you wait some time and the stock prices rises to $41 and you decide to sell your stock. Well you are not selling your stock, but you are “Closing a Buy position”. In a perfect world (where you do not pay fees) you would make 10 dollars on those 10 shares if you decide to sell them. This is where the idea comes from that if you buy shares at a low price and sell them high (buy low – sell high) that you can make a lot of money. This idea is great in theory but it is hard to execute it in reality. The buying part of the expression refers to this concept of exchanging something that you own for something that you think is valuable.

So we have covered the term buying, but what is with the “long” part of the term. Well according to investopedia, a long position refers to the purchase of an asset with the expectation that it will increase in its value. This just comes from the investment world. If we translate “Buying Long” to normal terms you get the simple explanation.

Buying long is just buying an asset with the hope that after a “long” period of time it will return more than you have invested.

Buying is in investing terms the action of opening a position with the presumption that the price will increase.

Selling Short

The second method is “Selling short” and as previously we start off with an example. To avoid common misconceptions, selling stocks is not actually selling stocks that you own. You are “Opening a Sell Position” on a stock. This means that you do not have to own the stock, before opening a sell position.

When you “Open a Sell Position”, you borrow 10 stocks from your broker and sell them immediately. This means that at that moment you do not own the stocks that you borrowed, but you have the money for which you sold the stocks. Then you wait for the price of the stock to drop below the price that you sold them for, and you buy them in order to return them to the broker.

So if you “Open a Sell Position” for 10 Verizon stocks for $10. You immediately sell 10 Verizon stocks for 10$ each. Then you wait until the price of Verizon is less than 10$ and then you “Close the Sell Position”. In this case if the price was 8$, you would buy 10 Verizon stocks for 80$ and return them immediately to the broker and you keep the 20$ difference between the sell and buy price.

Now you are thinking, but where is the stock selling and why is it called selling short?

Each broker charges interest for every day that you owe the borrower stock. This pushes you to close the sell position as soon as possible. This is why selling is associated with the term “SHORT”.

You are basically borrowing stocks that you do not own and selling them, with the intent to buy them when they are cheaper and return them to the issuer of the stock loan.

What could go wrong? Well many things, imagine you borrow 10 stocks of company A and then sell them for 10$ each. After some time the price of the stocks jumps to 50$. You now have to buy 500$ of Stocks to return the 100$ stock loan. You might think, well okay I will wait until the stock price goes down. While you are waiting you do not have liquidity and you have to pay fees for the stocks that you borrowed, trust me this is not fun.

Also the issuer can request the return of the stocks at any time with minimal notice. This is why you usually keep the borrower stocks for a short period of time.

Conclusion

Looking at just these two basic terms it is visible how hard it is start investing in stocks or other investments. Going long is buying stocks and holding them for a longer period of time, with the hope that their price will increase. Shorting stocks is making profit on the decrease of stock price.

Another interesting thing is that going long or shorting are just terms coined in the investment world.

If you want to know more about swing trading or simple technical analysis, you can read the following blog posts:

Swing Trading Fundamentals
How to use the Williams Percent Range (%R)

Sources:

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/shortsaleclosed.asp

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/long.asp

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How to use the Williams Percent Range (%R)

by Igor JakovljevicTechnical Analysis1 Comment on How to use the Williams Percent Range (%R)

Technical analysis is used to determine when to buy or sell stocks, there are different indicators that can be used for this, but in this post I will talk about the %R indicator.

What is the %R indicator?

One of the first indicators that I found when searching for technical analysis was the Williams Percent Range or %R indicator. This indicator tracks the momentum of a stocks price and describes if it is oversold or overbought. It can be used to determine when to enter or when to exit a market. That is when to buy stock or sell them.

Oversold means that too many traders have opened a sell position on the stock and expect that the price is going to drop even more. This has decreased the value of the stock and it is a good moment to buy the stock.

Overbought means that traders have bought so many stocks that the price of the stock has risen. When this happens there is a chance that the price will drop and normalise.

How to use the %R

The William %R moves between 0 and -100, when it is above -20 (from -20 to 0) then the stock is overbought, when it is below -80 (from -80 to -100) then the stock is oversold.

On the picture below you can see how the indicator moves from oversold (pink area) to overbought (grey area). But what does this mean for an investor?

When the %R is overbought (grey area) it is a good moment in time to sell the stock and vice versa. When the indicator exits the pink area or is in the pink then you should buy the stock.

wiliams indicator graph simple

But oversold and overbought do not give 100% sure indication of trend reversal. They simply mean that the price has reached a high or a low in comparison to previous data. But when a price reaches a low it can mean that it will revert to a uptrend.

In order to have a better idea when to sell or buy, you should always use more indicators.

Example of Usage

Below you can see what I did in the case of this stock. At “Point 1” I saw a good indicator that the market is going to turn, because the stock was oversold. I bought $500 worth of stock, the stock jumped by 1.4%. At “Point 2” I sold my stocks and make $7 in a matter of 4 minutes. Then at “Point 3” I bought the stock because I though the trend is going to jump high, but it just jumped by %0.4, but this time I invested $507, so I earned an additional $2,028. Then my 30 minute slot for trading a day was gone, so I had to stop trading.

Conclusion

Like many other indicators it tries to predict future outcomes based on previous data, which does not work that good in most cases. Indicating that a stock is oversold or overbought does not mean that the price will reverse. It only means that it has reached the peak or bottom in comparison to previous data. It is important to use other indicators in combination with this one to make a better decision.

Take a look at the post about Swing Trading. You can use this indicator also for Swing Trading.

Sources:

[1] –  https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/williamsr.asp

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