First this 24-year-old tradie lost all his money to cryptocurrency. Then he tried again and now he’s rolling in cash.
A Sydneysider has made a whopping $50,000 from crypto after buying the up-and-coming coins on a whim while drunk with his mates four years ago.
Josh Ng, 24, has made back his investment five times over since dumping around $12,000 into the then experimental currency.
Speaking to news.com.au’s I’ve Got News For You podcast, the young construction worker said it hadn’t all been a smooth ride.
He lost all his money within hours and was put off crypto for years before he re-entered the market.
Back in 2017, Josh said he was in an Airbnb in Tokyo with his friends, a few drinks in, when they got talking about bitcoin and ethereum, the two largest blockchains.
“We heard a lot of hype around the cryptocurrency fad. And so we‘re thinking about investing in it,” Josh told podcast host Andrew Bucklow.
“My mate talked to like one of his mates, a financial advisor or something, and that guy was saying, ‘Oh, it can’t fail. Like it’s doing the next big thing. Invest now you can get rich’.
“So well, without doing any research, one night … we pumped a lot of money in, just sat back and went to bed after that.
“The next morning, just a massive crash, like 30 per cent of the market straightaway, which was incredibly inconvenient for us.”
It got even worse for Josh. The price continued to “trickle down to like AUD$100”, leaving him severely out of pocket.
In all, Josh sank $3000 into the failed venture, which he said was a lot of cash for someone straight out of high school.
The tradie continued living his life for the next two years not even wanting to think about crypto.
“I was quite off it for like the two years in between. I was just dead. I said ‘Nothing’s ever gonna come of crypto’.”
However, Josh might have been done with crypto but crypto wasn’t done with him.
“And then suddenly, you just start hearing in the news again, crypto’s coming back,” he recalled.
One of his mates said now was the time to buy while it was “bottomed out”.
Initially suspicious this would end disastrously like last time, Josh decided to do his own research this time around.
He could see that “crypto had gone back to its original value of when we had put [our money] in and I was like, ‘Oh, well, maybe something’s on here … why don’t we have a crack at round two’
But he entered the cryptocurrency market much more carefully.
“ I was a bit more cautious in the way I entered,” he admitted.
“[I] kind of entered more methodically, and just eventually got to a point where I could enter different coins that I knew more about, with a lot more confidence rather than dumping everything into say, ethereum.”
He put around $10,000-$12,000 into the digital coins and that’s now risen to $50,000.
Josh jokingly said he “wasn’t smart enough to day trade” and that he’s just pretty much let the money sit there and gain momentum.
“I haven‘t really put any more money in, just been watching it grow and then taking profits out and putting it into other coins,” he added.
His number one piece of advice for anyone looking to invest in crypto is “don’t listen to your heart”.
“I‘ve been trashed by that very few times, just jump into whatever my mates are telling me,” he said.
“Any Joe Blow off the street can tell you this client is going to be the next bitcoin.”
He also advised people to “do your research” – advice he didn’t heed at his initial investment.
Listen to the full episode of Crypto For Dummies here.
