Xela Finance

I know what you’re thinking, not another person telling me I should buy Bitcoin.

Well, I DON’T LIKE Bitcoin. I don’t really see the appeal and I only think it’s a successful idea if everyone and every financial system buys into it. That being said, a smart investor should be able to profit off of something even if he/she doesn’t agree with what it is. Hence why I have written this.

In the last 6 months of 2020 Bitcoin has had one of it’s massive bull runs again where everyone on social media is talking about it. Much like in 2017. Eventually this got far too annoying for me because absolutely everyone was talking about it and most of them were bulls. Now, I’m not a bull or a bear on bitcoin. I’m a sideline observer and have been since about 2015 when I first heard about bitcoin.

I was in a finance class and the teacher was talking about ‘virtual currency’ and bitcoin was the only name to talk about when it came to ‘Virtual/Cryptocurrency’ back then. At that point in time I thought, “wow, that’s quite a cool idea. But who would actually use it?” To which the teacher answered, “Well, at the moment, mostly just people on the dark web.” After this I thought, there simply isn’t enough demand for this to be a thing, and 2 years later it all took off.

Funnily enough I prevented one of my friends from becoming a millionaire in the cryptocurrency bubble of 2017. He came to me in late 2015 and asked about bitcoin (after we talked about the potential of Tesla, he then bought a position in the company), he asked if I thought it was a good investment. So, as always, I gave him my honest thoughts. Some things he agreed with and some things he didn’t. He’s a very speculative investor and thought that bitcoin could offer the volatility he desired, and was looking to invest around £10,000 into Bitcoin. As soon as he said that I was like ‘Woaaah’, at this point in time there were far safer opportunities that offered decent returns in a much shorter time period in retrospect. After a month or two of debating and thinking about investing. He decided not to, and put his money elsewhere (I believe it was between Tesla, Ralph Lauren in mid 2017 and the SNAP IPO in early 2017). If he had bought the bitcoin when he said he first thought about it, he would’ve been able to buy around 71.5 bitcoins which at the peak in 2017, would be a smidge over £1 million.

Anyway, back to the point at hand. I wanted to get a slice of this action because this bitcoin bull run presents another opportunity to make money just like it did in 2017. I didn’t want to buy bitcoin directly because I feel like if I bought in now, the price would start to fall. Also the percentage gains of bitcoin this year are ridiculous and so I don’t think they can go on for much longer. That being said, I knew there are other opportunities out there which will profit off of the massive gain in bitcoins price.

Where are these opportunities? Well, how do you get bitcoins? You mine them. Now I don’t have the capabilities or the interest to do this myself so I looked for publicly traded companies that mine Bitcoin. Enter Argo Blockchain. These guys mine around 150 Bitcoin a month. At the time I looked at them and invested, their share price was 12 pence a share. Their share price now is 35 pence per share. So I’ve made nearly 200% in less than a month. I feel like this could be a good opportunity to make money in the coming year, a bit like how SPAC’s are/were profitable in 2020. Therefore I am going to continue to research these kinds of companies and find ones that are similar to Argo. The main reason I like this idea is because, it involves everyone on both sides of the bitcoin argument. At the end of the day you expose yourself to Bitcoin without directly investing in Bitcoin. Which is why we may see more volume – from people who don’t have an opinion on Bitcoin and maybe some volume from people who don’t like Bitcoin but want to profit from it – in these types of companies.