Cryptocurrency investor Ariel Fox, 29, doesn’t have many regrets about getting into buying and selling coins. Unperturbed by the recent crash, Fox’s portfolio is still worth more than the initial dollars she invested into it, and she finds buying and selling cryptocurrency to be preferable to being a retail investor in the stock market.
“There are a lot of people who have access to information about stocks in the market that the average retail investor may not have,” said Fox. “But if you get in at certain crypto projects at the right time, you are able to profit from that. It is somewhat speculative, just like stocks — but it’s also very interesting to me. It’s exciting, it’s growing.”
Fox first heard about Bitcoin all the way back in 2009 when it was first released, but she didn’t start investing in crypto until late 2020. She said that she’s learned a lot along the way.
Fox said that the smartest thing that she did with her coins was invest them across different websites in order to earn more interest on them.
She originally kept her Bitcoin holdings primarily on Coinbase, but then “scattered it across some different marketplaces in order to invest in other coins. Eventually I collected it all together and put it into BlockFi where I earn interest on those holdings.”
Fox added that her returns on interest is why she keeps a big chunk of her portfolio in the Gemini stablecoin (GUSD)— which is backed up by US dollars and is pegged to the value of the US dollar. Currently, she steadily earns anywhere between 7% and 9% interest on her GUSD holdings.
One choice that Fox regrets making with her cryptocurrency portfolio is selling certain coins early because they spiked in price, not realizing how much higher they would later go. If she could do things differently, she would have “held some back for myself, just to watch and see how it fluctuated.”
That said, Fox added that it’s really hard to time the market in general, and that she doesn’t recommend it. Sometimes the chips fell in her favor for selling early.”There are other times where I sold, and the price dropped not too long after, and that was a smart sell for me,” she said.
Another regret that Fox has was that she didn’t learn about “gas fees” sooner. In cryptocurrency trading, a gas fee is a cost an investor incurs when they are trading or converting coins on the Ethereum blockchain. It requires a lot of computational energy to convert coins on this blockchain, and the gas fee at any given time can vary depending on many factors.
“When I was investing in a project, I had to convert Ethereum to this other coin and I had to pay a fee to convert it,” said Fox. “You can time it so that your gas fee is lower. I didn’t know.”
Fox added that she “spent so much money on gas fees that I did not have to spend because I did way too many transactions, and I did it in a very busy time at the market.”
Check out: Personal Finance Insider’s picks for best cryptocurrency exchanges
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