eToro USA LLC Cryptocurrency Trading

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There are many ways to make a profit — or lose money — from cryptocurrency. Crypto trading is one of the most popular.
This beginner’s crypto trading guide explains where to begin your cryptocurrency trading journey, how to choose a trading style, how to devise a trading plan, and what to look for in a trading platform and things to consider.
Disclaimer: This page is not financial advice or an endorsement of digital assets, providers or services. Digital assets are volatile and risky, and past performance is no guarantee of future results. Potential regulations or policies can affect their availability and services provided. Talk with a financial professional before making a decision. Finder or the author may own cryptocurrency discussed on this page.
There are five steps to getting started:
This guide walks you through each of these steps.
The first step is to decide between long-term or short-term cryptocurrency trading. Both are very different.
Long-term traders buy and hold cryptocurrencies over a long period of weeks, months or even years, with the intention of selling at a profit or using it later.
If you believe the value of a cryptocurrency will grow in the long run, and don’t want the stress of actively trading, then this might be your style, and a good first step may be learning how to safely buy and hold cryptocurrency.
Short-term trading is about taking advantage of short term cryptocurrency price swings by creating and executing a trading strategy.
It’s more active, stressful and risky than long-term trading, but it also offers faster and larger potential returns for those who do it right, and lets you profit from cryptocurrency prices dropping as well as rising.
If this is what you’re looking for, you can either read on for a beginner’s guide or compare cryptocurrency trading platforms to get started.
The second step is choosing a trading method. This is important, because all of them are quite different and require different techniques. In some cases, the same cryptocurrency exchange will offer several different types of trading.
When choosing a cryptocurrency trading platform, consider factors such as whether it offers derivatives or leverage, what kind of order types it allows and how easily it can integrate with cryptocurrency trading bots.
Before you can start trading, you need to be sure cryptocurrency trading is right for your circumstances and that you understand the risks associated with it. You’ll also need to know what all the buttons do.
Fortunately, most cryptocurrency exchanges have similar-looking market pages, and you can safely ignore a lot of the information on the page.
Here’s an example from the Binance cryptocurrency trading platform, showing the Bitcoin/USDT market with the important parts annotated.
The red and green box at the top is the price chart. At the bottom is where you place your buy and sell orders. Sandwiched between the two, in this particular case, is a place where you can click through to derivatives. It’s a completely separate market, where people trade futures contracts rather than Bitcoin itself.
Let’s zoom in on the bottom part, where you place buy and sell orders. There are two things to pay attention to here: your order type and the amount you want to buy or sell.
In this case, Binance offers three basic order types: market, stop-limit and OCO.
Market and stop-limit are the basic order types you’ll find on almost all exchanges, while OCO is a bit less common. Different exchanges will sometimes have different order types, and slightly different rules about how they can be placed.
The difference between gambling and trading is having a plan. Creating a plan is a three step process:
The basic principle of reading charts and creating trading plans is to look for patterns in previous price movements, and then using those to try to predict future movements.
Some patterns emerge frequently enough across multiple markets that they’re given their own names, such as resistance and support. But others are much more obscure, and are never given names of their own.
For example, if you think Bitcoin goes up when Ethereum goes down, or that Bitcoin rises when the US dollar falls relative to the Chinese renmibi, or anything else you can think of, that could be a pattern you can trade on.
The two basic components of a trading plan are:
For example, someone’s basic plan might be to sell 33% of their Bitcoin for every $1,000 the price goes up (taking profits), or to immediately sell all their Bitcoin if prices drop below the current support line (cutting losses). To lay out this plan, they could set up a series of stop-limit orders.
This is not necessarily a good plan, but it would ensure that the amount they gain or lose is within sensible boundaries no matter what the market does.
As traders get more experienced, they can create increasingly sophisticated trading plans that tie together more market indicators, and allow for much more nuanced trading strategies.
Experienced traders typically use cryptocurrency trading bots to execute their strategies, because they tirelessly follow complex trading plans faster and more reliably than a human ever could.
It’s good to test trading theories before throwing real money at them. Paper trading or backtesting can be useful here. Both features are often found on trading platforms.
Paper trading is a way of using fake money on the real markets, so you can test a trading strategy in real, current conditions. Backtesting is when you put a trading strategy through historical market movements to see how it would have performed.
If you’re a beginner trying to get your head around the basics of reading charts and spotting patterns, you may want to read the step-by-step guide to cryptocurrency technical analysis for a sense of how to start spotting patterns.
Compare cryptocurrency trading platforms
Cryptocurrency trading incurs many of the risks of trading on any other market, as well as some unique challenges.
Looking to invest in Bitcoin? Learn about the 5 ways you can get started, plus the benefits and risks of each.
There’s much to gain and lose in the volatile cryptocurrency market. We’ll show you how to do an in-depth technical analysis to make the right decisions.
A beginner’s guide to cryptocurrency arbitrage, how it can help you take advantage of crypto price differences, and the risks you need to be aware of before you start trading.
Can you recommend a cryptotrading guide for me? Thank you
Hi Joktan,
Thank you for your inquiry.
If you are new to cryptocurrency, you can use the information on this page as your guide on how you can buy and sell cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, to name a few. You can also check out our latest cryptocurrency guides and news to keep yourself in the loop.
There are also various beginners and advanced guides online that you can check. Additionally, exchanges and wallets’ official websites have training materials and video guides that can be helpful for you.
I hope this information has helped.
Cheers,
Harold
Good day…
How do I know if I have lost a trade?
Hi Tj,
Thanks for your inquiry.
We cannot say when you have lost a trade in cryptocurrency trading. If you’re not careful when it comes to cryptocurrency trading, you could find yourself gambling more than you’re trading, and eventually you might lose everything you’ve invested. Never invest more money than you are willing to lose. You should consider any money you put into a trade as lost.
Best regards,
Rench
what is the best platform to use to buy and sell smaller coins/tokens,
in the US ?
for example- Stratis (STRAT)
Thank you
Hi Frank,
Thanks for reaching out to us. I hope all is good on your end.
I am sorry because I am unable to give you a personal recommendation as we are a comparison website and general information service. Your decision would entirely depend on your needs. You will also need to put in the time to learn how each platform works, where each feature is, and how to utilize it. Kindly spend some time with it and continue doing your research. You may find a list of trading platforms on the page you’re viewing. You may click the green “Go to site” button and/or the links for you to read more pertinent information about each option.
Alternatively, you may view a list of cryptocurrency exchanges. You may check for the payment methods from the list for possible information on available cryptocurrencies. You may click the green “Go to site” button too.
Please note that is always advisable to conduct thorough research on any cryptocurrency before buying or investing because there are significant risks involved.
I hope this helps.
Best regards,
Judith