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I'm new to this site and so far it's great. Could someone tell me how to get into crypto? What do you buy (stock, symbol???) and how do you monitor it?

If you want to buy bitcoin via the U.S. equity markets you can do so via the ticker GBTC. It actually holds about 1.7 million coins I was told. I'm tracking the progress via my blog and just exited half my short position yesterday...but then upped that to a full short position later in the day. I also posted the price for "actual" bitcoin this time so that you can see how it actually follows the path being made by GBTC. Buying actual bitcoin has many inherent problems and the biggest one is that the buy and sell orders can't be matched up quickly enough by the data miners. Therefore, during fast market rallies or drops, although there may be 20000 buyers and sellers "willing" to match up and complete a transaction, only 7 of them actually get executed. This is why the coin exchanges all shut down during "fast market" conditions. With GBTC at least you know you will have your sell order executed within a few seconds during fast market conditions, although teh spread between the bid and asked price is often wide. So you might still end up with less than what you are happy with. But it still beats getting "trapped" and watching your sell order at bitcoin $2300 get executed $500 lower, which can happen trading actual bitcoin.

Great info!!! Vertical learning curve for me. Lots still to learn with cryptos.

Lots for everyone to learn. The problem is that anyone who already owns is about to learn teh hard way. :-) It's actually the best way to learn though. It's how I learned to monitor investor sentiment to predict price movement. Instead of throwing in teh towel after an ass kicking, try and study the price charts (using only the true "sentiment" readings like DMI, RSI, and OBV as I use on teh charts I post) and see if you can figger out what went wrong. Price movement is a direct function of human emotions. And human emotions swing between periods of extreme fear and greed. If you can learn to buy/sell ONLY at the extremes it is actually pretty difficult to put up consistant losing trades.