How to invest in cryptocurrency (without losing your shirt) – MoneySense

Upfront, I should disclose I personally started to dabble in this asset class for the first time in the autumn of 2020, having sat out the first iteration of bitcoin mania in 2017. But this time, growing institutional acceptance seems to have brought back an even stronger wave of enthusiasm and euphoria, buoyed in part over the frustration of minuscule interest rates and inflationary forces unleashed by endless money printing by central banks in the U.S. and the rest of the world.

For me, the impetus this time around was the Profits Unlimited newsletter, edited by Paul Mampilly. I have found Mampilly so insightful with his recommendationsit was he who first twigged me to the actively managedARK ETFsthat focus on the innovation economythat I decided to take a flyer on two of his suggestions for how investors could buy trusts that track the price of bitcoin and ethereum, which trade over-the-counter.

Rather than suggest pure native exposure, which involves setting up complicated wallets that hold pure crypto and other minutiae, he felt it was easier for casual investors accustomed to buying stocks online to use trusts like Grayscale, which trade over-the-counter on U.S. stock exchanges, but are available to most Canadian investors. These trusts roughly track the price of the crypto they target, but often trade at a discount or a premium to the actual price of the native currency.

Mampilly suggests taking an equal-weight approach to more speculative investments, so my first try was to put several thousand dollars into each of theGrayscale Bitcoin Trust(GBTC/OTC) andGrayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE/OTC). I hold these in non-registered TD Direct Investing accounts.

I soon experienced just how volatile these can be. ETHE quickly doubled butpreferring not to trigger taxable gainsI stood pat, only to watch it plunge below my original cost. Still, I kept holding and continued researching the field, and it eventually reached the level it is right now, well above cost.

I next realized I wanted to hold these experimental positions in registered portfolios (RRSPs and TFSAs) so that the next time I got a double or tripleif indeed they materialized rather than comparable lossesI could book the gains with no immediate tax consequences. I soon discovered the closed-end funds of Toronto-based3iQ Digital Asset Management. First, I tried The Bitcoin Fund [QBTC/TSX], just before the new year, in time to experience a quick triple. This time, I was quick to take partial profits, seeing as there were no tax consequences. Many advisors suggest getting back your cost base, which I did; then you can sit back and watch it run, playing with the houses money.

My third experiment was inspired when Mampilly started to recommend his readers move from the ethereum-tracking ETHE trust to actual native ethereum, or ETH. He suggested buying actual native crypto from places like Coinbase and Robinhoodconvenient for his mostly American subscribers, but less so for Canadians.

I discovered that Canadian company Wealthsimple had launched a way to buy native bitcoin and ethereum:Wealthsimple Crypto. Since I now had some bitcoin through the registered 3iQ funds, I put a few thousand into Wealthsimple Cryptos ETH. This is conveniently accessed as a mobile app and is easy to fund from Canadian financial institutions. However, I soon learned there was not yet a way to hold these two Wealthsimple cryptos in registered accounts, so I was back to the taxable dilemma. Soon enough, I learned that 3iQ not only had a bitcoin fund but also an ethereum fundThe Ether Fund [QETH.U/TSX], which was a way to again hold ethereum, like the Bitcoin Fund, in registered accounts.

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How to invest in cryptocurrency (without losing your shirt) - MoneySense