When you clicked on this title you might have thought what will this guy be telling me? How can I become rich in 30 days? How to achieve financial freedom with these easy three steps? Well, no. There exists no such thing. Or at least not without massive risks and gambles. I am here to tell you how I entered the world of investing and why I think every teenager should do the same.
It all started when at the age of 18 there was this big hype around cryptocurrency. Some people considered it stupid and saw it as a new form of gambling your money online, including myself. I thought it was a rather stupid way of spending my money. But the people close to me started putting money into Bitcoin. And after a while of resisting and not wanting to do it, I decided to give it a shot. Just a small portion of money, even for me at the time. Just to try it. To see it for myself.
There was something special about this. But it wasn’t the 8 euros I lost or the 6 euros I won. Instead it was the process. I had to learn how to create an account on a trading platform. What a trading platform entails. How do you even buy these shares of Bitcoin? And what is it that I own? Do I even own anything? I got into the world of trading/investing. I watched all kinds of videos about how to trade Bitcoin. What do all the digits on the screen indicate? I delved myself into this world. I was intrigued by the whole system behind trading. All these words that I have never heard before in class. Blockchain, fiat currency, digital wallets and much, much more.
Thus, with the decision to invest some of my money, I had to delve deeper into how to invest. And now you are of course all expecting me to say that I have made loads of money, but that is not the case. In the end, I did win only a little bit, but I won a large portion of knowledge. Knowledge about trading and investing. Knowledge that has let me to explore other, debatably better, investing opportunities. I started investing in the stock market, which has some similarities with the crypto market, but now it is all about real-life companies you are investing in, instead of online currency.
The advice that I would want to give to you, the reader, is to do the same. Invest some money into the market. That can be the crypto or the stock market. Start small. Just invest 100 euros or even 10 euros. Again, this is not about gaining money really quickly and becoming a millionaire in 3 months. It is about learning something you aren’t thought in school. Something that is rather useful for your future self. In fact, I think you should discover trading as young as you are allowed. See it as an investment in yourself. 😉
PS: The links below are links to the online platforms DeGiro and Bitvavo that allow you to trade on the stock market and crypto market respecitively.