“First understand what Bitcoin is, then what investment is”: YouTuber Wendy O about her start in crypto and online hate

Crypto Wendy O is a blogger from LA. Wendy has 173k followers on YouTube alone, and 308k people also listen to her opinions about the crypto industry on Twitter.

For Wendy, blogging is a full-time job “from 5 AM to 5 PM”. And she has been working very hard to be competent in the area she’s talking about.

How did she manage to do it without a technical or financial background? And what do you have to do if you want to follow her path? Crypto Wendy O tells us in her interview for buidlbee.

“I was interested in controlling my own money”

“I don’t like to have just one title: I do a little bit of everything. I am a crypto investor and NFT investor, a trader, a content creator, and a mom,” Wendy says when I ask her to identify herself. She adds that she also has a marketing consulting agency. “To take advantage of many different opportunities in the space.”

Wendy entered this space at the end of 2017. Two years later, she started her YouTube channel.

“I didn’t have a technical or financial background — I worked in healthcare — but I was interested in controlling my own money. Being able to invest when I wanted to invest,” explains Wendy. What she wasn’t able to do with the traditional market, she found in crypto and blockchain. She claims that all her expectations about the industry — freedom, decentralization — met reality.

For those, who are also at the beginning of their investment path, Wendy advises only one thing: learning.

“If you have $100 in your pocket, Bitcoin is a great place to start. Read Satoshi’s white paper, understand what Bitcoin is, and then go to Investopedia to understand what an investment is,” Wendy recommends.

She insists that you should know more about different investment strategies and terms like disposable income, dollar cost averaging, and limit orders. This will help you see the market in general and understand some associated risks.

“Bitcoin is a volatile acid: it could go zero tomorrow and pump to a million dollars in next day. So just because you put your money in doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to do well,” Wendy says. “Dropping to 0, of course, is not a likely scenario, but still possible — due to some catastrophic event, for example. And you should always have a bearish scenario in your investment plan.”

As for the bearish scenario, Wendy has a definite opinion.

“I don’t like to call the current situation a crypto winter. I like to call it a protect-your-capital market”

Wendy says she was prepared for it.

“I knew a bear market was coming, and I was very adamant about taking a profit from it,” she says. “Of course, I still lost some money — everybody loses money.”

There was some project Wendy couldn’t make a profit fast enough, but she is comfortable with it: “It’s what happens. We’re human, and we can just work on preparing ourselves and becoming better investors and traders and learning from our mistakes.”

She calls crypto winter “a protect-your-capital market” — that means you have capital that should be disposable income.

“I say disposable income and mean that you’ve practiced some sort of budgeting. You know, whatever capital you want to invest in the market, you could potentially lose,” Wendy explains.

Here are her tips on how to work with disposable income:

1. Decide what amount of money could be a disposable income for you — and where to get this money. Maybe you need to make budget cuts: don’t buy a cheeseburger or coffee one day. The point is if you lose that money, it’s okay.
2. Research before investing and create bullish and bearish plans. It includes how much you want to invest, how you want to divide your portfolio, why you want to do it this way, and why you are investing in these projects. Investopedia can help to answer these questions, too — it is a 100% free and extremely handy website. The goal is to be able to react properly so that you can protect your capital.
3. Don’t rush. There is a thing called “no action” — when you are unsure about your predictions because of the volatility of the markets. So you want to take a step back, analyze the market differently, and not do anything for a while.

Wendy doesn’t know when the crypto winter will end and warns not to expect anything to happen immediately.

“I know that Bitcoin generally follows a four-year cycle due to Bitcoin mining economics. But now we also have inflation, a global recession, and all this conflict happening on a global scale. So it’s kind of hard to determine a specific time.”

“I am still figuring out where I want to be, but I am very passionate about crypto”

Wendy is very calm about her popularity.

“I just don’t feel like that,” she admits. “It took three years to find my style and gain subscribers. And I am still figuring out where I want to be. I think I’ve got much more growing and learning.”

She works on her blog every day except weekends from 5 AM to 5 PM and combines it with investing, trading, and consulting. In addition, recently, Wendy started a free newsletter about crypto. And on YouTube, she also publishes news, as well as talking about charts, interviewing founders, doing reviews, and discussing crypto and traditional financial markets.

“The good thing about being a YouTuber is that it helps me learn more about crypto. Also, I get other opportunities behind the scenes to do consulting and to speak on different events,” she shares. “And the hardest thing is probably getting a lot of hate online. People being derogatory because I am a woman or because I have a different opinion than they do.”

But Wendy continues to work because she is very passionate about crypto and the industry’s possibilities. Among her wins, she recalls catching a ride with a profit of up to $20k.

“I also had and have fiascos. My biggest one was not taking profit on various altcoins. I missed a moment of the highest hype where I needed to sell assets, and eventually, the project ended up dumping significantly.” “So I continue learning and try to stick with myself. This is the reason why I don’t watch other bloggers.”