During the pandemic, I, too did a little trading. Only in the most conservative beginner way (no leverage, no futures). I’ve also since mostly moved away from it, but I spent some time learning a few things rooting around in the morass of grifters, thieves, cons, and vaporcoins. I didn’t go broke, so here are a few takeaways:

Actual day trading wasn’t it for me. I like being a buy-and-hold-trader. In part because I’m cheap, so in order to feel comfortable buying something, the amount diligence I needed put a cap on the amount of trading I can do. I may lack the risk gene to make it big on Wall Street.

That said, WarriorTrading is a good company/guy worth watching for learning actual, real day trading. I considered taking his course.

After trying other platforms I ended up just settling back into using RobinHood for “traditional” swing / buy-and-hold / longer-term stuff. It’s just so easy. I treated crypto more like day trading though and did it on a crypto exchange. Crypto exchanges are not to be trusted, so saying which one I used is pointless – as far as I’m concerned they’re all unstable and untrustworthy. Put money in, trade, and get out. If you want to hold crypto, listen to everybody telling you to use a wallet.

TradingView.com is where you can learn how to use charts and some pro-grade tools for free. There are a ton of tools and indicators. I had a friend recommend CM Super Guppy and Cuban’s Reversion Bands – these are the two I like and settled on mostly. There’s also a ‘social component’ to TV I never used, but the idea is interesting.

The basics of financial trend analysis can be applied to crypto because that’s what everyone else is doing, so it’s possible to ride this bandwagon- but there’s a hard stop to applying anything but rudimentary analysis to crypto – because it’s crypto. The youtuber Tom Crown does a good job of teaching this and more importantly staying firm on the limits. His discord was also good as of Q1 2021.

Crypto twitter and discord are kind of surprisingly good tools for learning, but go slowly and build up awareness. Scammers are everywhere, and they are constantly growing in sophistication. Learn how to spot them immediately before doing anything. Lurking for a while on discord servers allowed me time to suss out who to pay attention to.

I made an alt identity to trade crypto with because that’s what I’d seen others do. I’d recommend this mostly for security reasons but I also found I enjoyed the freedom it gave me. This could also be a reason why crypto bros are so obnoxious.

Three Crypto YouTubers I like:
– for trading- Tom Crown, and Crypto WendyO, and
– for Crypto education- the Coin Bureau can be a bit of a libertarian wingnut, but he has a lot of depth to his expertise.

Let’s see, other opinions…

I have yet to see the application that will make the “metaverse” cross the chasm to mass adoption.

Defi is a whole other post. I will say the internet computer project is a crazy concept and I remain skeptical. At one point I realized that defi basics could be explained as being a bit like escrow- with the blockchain as the third party, everybody can watch what comes and goes, and it’s programmable.

That’s about all the primer I can offer. I never staked enough to speak to it, I only got one air drop, and there’s so much more that I could stand to learn… but there’s the summary of my spring 2021 toe-dip into trading and crypto.