Maybe so, though I have always been wary of Cryptocurrencies, and this is as good an explanation as I have heard.
I'm wary of most things financial. Banks will 'borrow' your money and give you maybe 2% and charge you 5% to lend it back to you. None of the providers are doing it for charity, and I get that there are apparently more potential risks with crypto, but isn't it just a variation on stocks and shares where you're really betting on the 'good faith' of a certificate in a system run by greedy people?
Absolutely, I guess with Shares at least you are gambling on something tangible, there is a dividend if the company is doing well, and then the share price goes up.
What I'm going to do later is set up a crypto portfolio of £1,000 on CoinMarketCap and trade it as if it was my own money. I'll post updates on here.
I bought a bit of ripple on advice from someone who was doing ok on it. Last time I checked I think it was worth about half what I put in. I wrote it off as a punt at the time, need to check it really.
If you're not desperate to take the money out I'd leave it until second to third quarter of 2025 and then sell. You may be surprised on your profit.
Crypto and similar schemes are entirely unregulated and as such are marketed deliberately as something very different from what they are. Lots of people are sucked in by well-publicised success stories and online hype, which is ultimately paid for by those who stand to gain from it. People are tricked into thinking they're buying a safe bet or a sensible investment, but they're actually buying something whose value is enormously volatile because of its value being reliant on its online trendiness. As soon as a cryptocurrency becomes uncool, perhaps because a particular influencer tweets about it in a certain way, its value will drop and people will lose money. You can of course make money if you're lucky, and you'll always hear more about those than you do about the many more who lose on it, because it's in the interest of those who make the real money from it for that hype to be spread. It's much closer to gambling than it is to investing in stocks and shares.
I wouldn't disagree with any of that,and I accept that shares are related to company profits to a varying degree and crypto isn't, but in what respect does the scenario you posted differ from the principle of most stocks and share trades?
Share prices are based on the performance and profitability of a company, Crypto isn't really based on anything tangible at all.
But the share price is also heavily influenced by media stories, world events and 'leaks' from influential businessmen and economists, which means that the fluctuation in those circumstances isn't based on anything tangible either.
In most instances yes, but your smaller "penny stocks" can be just as wild as crypto. Plus you only have to look at what happened a couple of years ago with the stocks that where heavily influenced by social media/Reddit. Gamestop I think it was that went from just under a dollar to over $80 on the back of absolutely nothing but social media / online hype..... Pump and dump happens all the time in both crypto and unfortunately stocks
Both can indeed be affected by external factors, but company values will always fundamentally be underwritten by the assets and performance of the company, crypto isn't (usually) underwritten by anything at all.
Brand Finance conducts global research on the total intangible value of publicly listed companies through our “Global Intangible Finance Tracker” (or GIFT) report. We build on this research to analyse the value of marketing intangibles as part of our other research. Our latest GIFT study shows that about 48% of the world’s stock market value is derived from intangible assets, a long way behind the US’s 90%. That figure has changed very little since we started measuring in 1996. https://brandfinance.com/insights/how-much-value-is-there-in-intangible-assets
That's a tad misleading, the Coca-Cola brand isn't a tangible asset, but without the name, The Coca-Cola Company wouldn't be worth a fat lot.
Simple brand recognition much the same as Apple . They have sticky customer bases and all the people I know with an i phone won't change to android . Massively overpriced but that doesnt seem to matter .