Buying & Trading
7 guides and tools on buying & trading.
Exchanges, order types, fees, spreads and the practical mechanics of getting in and out — plus the behavioural traps that cost the most money.
How to Buy Cryptocurrency Safely
The mechanics take twenty minutes. The decisions you make before you start are what determine whether it goes well.…
Buying & TradingUnderstanding Crypto Exchange Fees
A '0.1% fee' exchange can easily cost you 2% on a small trade once the spread, the deposit and the withdrawal are counted.…
Buying & TradingWhy Crypto Is So Volatile
Bitcoin has fallen more than 70% from a peak on at least four separate occasions. That is not a malfunction — it is the normal behaviou…
Buying & TradingCrypto Market Cap: What It Does and Does Not Tell You
Market cap is not money invested, and it is not what the project is worth. It is a multiplication, and a fragile one.…
Buying & TradingCrypto Order Types and When to Use Them
Using a market order in a thin market is one of the most common and most expensive beginner mistakes.…
Buying & TradingHow to Read a Crypto Whitepaper Critically
A whitepaper is a marketing document that borrows the format of a research paper. Reading it as the latter is how people get caught.…
Buying & TradingSurviving a Crypto Bear Market
Every crypto bear market has felt terminal at the time. Planning for the next one while things are calm is the only version of this tha…
About this section
The mechanics of buying cryptocurrency take about twenty minutes. The decisions made before and after are what determine how it goes.
Two things consistently surprise people. The first is cost. An exchange advertising a 0.5 per cent commission can easily take four to five per cent of a round trip once a card deposit, the bid-offer spread on both sides and a withdrawal fee are counted — which means the price has to rise by that much before a single unit of profit exists. Almost none of that appears as a line item.
The second is volatility. Bitcoin has fallen more than seventy per cent from a peak on at least four separate occasions, and recovery has historically taken years rather than months. Smaller tokens have fared far worse, and most from each previous cycle never recovered at all. That is the normal behaviour of this asset class rather than a malfunction, and position sizing is the only control that reliably works.
These guides cover choosing a platform and verifying its regulatory status yourself, what the fees actually total, how order types behave in thin markets, how to read a project's own documentation critically, and what market capitalisation does and does not tell you. We publish no price predictions and no recommendations to buy anything.