Meet the Investors Who Bet Big on Crypto

Now, a group of investors and traders see it as a vehicle for retirement. However, financial experts remain cautious; they point to uncertainty cryptocurrency Rules and volatility of crypto in India.

For Priya Ratnam, investing in cryptocurrencies is the fastest and easiest way to build wealth. Ratnam is an MBA graduate and is currently pursuing LLB degree. She is the founder/owner of an IT services company that works on blockchain and cloud security technologies.

His original plan is to retire from crypto investing as he believes this asset class can deliver much better returns and has a lot of scope. “Financial freedom for me is when you reach a place where everything seems cheap. Because of crypto, I have completely achieved everything I thought possible,” said Ratnam, who has come a long way since his first investment in bitcoin in 2016.

Today, 30% of his crypto portfolio is in bitcoin, while the remaining 70% is distributed among other coins, with 10% going to non-fungible tokens, or NFT-based projects. To mitigate the risks, their non-crypto investments are in gold in the form of jewelery and real estate. She exited her stock position sometime back.

Ratnam is one of a growing breed of investors who are increasingly looking to cryptocurrencies as a fast way to store wealth for retirement.

Over the past half decade, cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether have rewarded investors much more than traditional asset classes. To put things in perspective, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, bitcoin, has risen nearly 1,000% over the past five years. While the BSE Sensex has risen almost 100% in absolute terms, gold has given nearly 40% returns during this period.

There has been an explosion in users of Indian crypto exchanges, driven by the reversal of the RBI ban last year and the sharp rise in the prices of cryptocurrencies since the beginning of the year. From about 1.5 million users at the end of December, CoinSwitch Kuber has about 9 million users today.

Also, from 1 million users in January, WarizX has grown to 7.6 million users as of today. Even so, CoinDCX recently became India’s first crypto unicorn after raising $90 million in its Series C funding round, led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group.

There are two main considerations to investing in cryptocurrencies; One is that blockchain technology will power everything from banking institutions to the arts sector (read non-fungible tokens) in the future. Another factor is the return offered by cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether, which has led many investors to this market.

27-year-old Kanav Agarwal has been trading and investing in crypto full time for the past two years. His plan is to take short breaks.

“I will never go offline in crypto permanently. I will exit the market to enjoy the gains in the short term, take a temporary break and wait for the opportunity to come back again,” says Agarwal, who spent a few years He had earlier left his practice as a lawyer.

However, for Agarwal, the journey into crypto began on a sour note in 2016; At the suggestion of a friend, he invested more than $1,000 in a scam coin, money he eventually lost. He didn’t lose hope and educated himself about the entire cryptocurrency space. Today, his portfolio is 100% in crypto, with 25% in long-term holdings such as Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, Chainlink and Polkadot, and 75% in cash.

“Cryptocurrencies are riskier than traditional assets, but volatility is the perfect opportunity to grow portfolios. As a crypto trader, there should be enough cash piled up to buy aggressively on dips,” he believes .

While cryptocurrencies have rewarded holders in a big way, not all investors are head-to-heads into this new asset class. Aakash Rajpal, a 47-year-old healthcare professional working for a business-to-business healthcare company, has 10% of his wealth in cryptocurrencies.

Rajpal, who is also an avid stock investor and has a demat account since 1997, says, “You only invest what you are losing in crypto.” Knowledge because the same underlying principles apply to crypto as well. If you don’t want to lose money, you need to be aware of technical charts,” says Rajpal, whose first investment in crypto was in bitcoin four years ago.

Unlike stocks, which are a five-days-per-week affair, crypto trading doesn’t stop for weekends or even holidays. According to Rajpal, this is one of the main advantages of the crypto market, as they do not have to worry about it during working hours. The 365-day, 24×7 nature of this industry is also enabling women to adopt crypto investing in a big way.

According to Ratnam, investing in crypto is very easy as women can easily manage their household chores and business.

While investors are increasingly attracted by the meteoric returns offered by some digital assets, financial experts have a word of caution. “One of the major disadvantages is that prices are very volatile, rising and falling very rapidly. Traders want to profit using this, but for real investors, it can be a bit more risky.

“But the major bottleneck is that cryptocurrency laws and access vary from country to country, and often they are ambiguous,” said Amit Kumar Gupta, a New Delhi-based portfolio manager at SEBI-registered portfolio Adroit Financial Services Pvt Ltd. management firm.

His advice to investors is to limit crypto investments to 2-5% of their portfolio with 1-2% for a conservative portfolio. According to Suresh Sadagopan, founder and SEBI-registered investment advisor, Ladder7 Financial Advisory, investors should not think of retiring in crypto. “It can happen to some people, but most can lose their shirts and pants. They shouldn’t head into it and think about retirement. There’s no shortcut to doing things the right way: investing properly Doing, having discipline, regularity in investing in traditional asset classes, which are tried and tested,” said Sadagopan.