There are a lot of factors at play so no one situation is the same. However, presuming you've researched the ICO wisely you'll often find it's better to buy during ICO in a bull market & better to wait & buy once listed on an exchange during a bear market.

I've encouraged a lot of friends & family to research & understand crypto. I wont directly encourage someone to invest as I feel that needs to be a decision they make on their own, but many of the people I have exposed to crypto have ended up investing themselves.

I think it's important to realise the long-term potential of cryptocurrencies & understand that this market is still in its infancy. With a long-term mindset you learn to ignore the day to day price swings. I'm willing to hold & wait for a few years, so if we're still in a bear market by 2020 then it'll be time to reevaluate.

Hardware wallets are a must have for anyone with more than about $200 worth of crypto IMO. Currently they are the most convenient way to store your crypto safely.

We are nowhere near a bubble IMO. The global market cap for crypto is still tiny compared to traditional markets, with so much room for healthy growth.

Let's hope so! Price has been holding steady recently, so hopefully this new support level is established & we can kick on from here.

I think we're still a long way away from stability. I'm expecting price volatility (both up & down) to continue for quite a while yet until the market has matured considerably more. I do have high hopes of a sustained bull rum for the second half of this year though. Maybe not as crazy as we saw at the end of 2017, but it'd be nice to have the bear market behind us for a while & creep our way back up towards ATH's again.

Easy decision for me - NEO all the way. I just find it an overall better project with better underlying tech & bigger ambitions.

Yeah there's a few factors at play here. After the sucess of ICO's in 2016 & 2017, I think a lot of people saw making an ICO as an easy "get rich quick" scheme. This coupled with the market pullback has meant the ICO market has become very saturated with quantity over quality & dropping valuations making it very difficult to invest in a successful & profitable ICO.

Never really been a fan of Litecoin if I'm honest. We;re always hearing how Litcoin is supposed to be the Silver compared to Bitcoin's Gold. I'm not really interested in investing in any project that actively targeting second place.

It has lost a little steam but there's certainly no reason to panic. The future looks very promising for OMG, even if we have to show a little patience

The single best decision you can make to secure your crypto better is to get a hardware wallet. I know you've mentioned you wanted security advice for those who cannot afford a hardware wallet, but the wallets aren't very expensive nowadays, so if you can't afford one then the value of the crypto you are holding can't be worth much anyways.

Basic security common sense should apply always: 1. Keep your private key secure & don't share with anyone 2. take extra care when clicking on links to avoid phising sites 3. Avoid scams.

It's nice to see some sustained recovery for the first time in a while. I'd anticipate a bit of a healthy pullback soon, but hopefully it's not too much & the bull run can continue

Any steps towards mass adoption has to be good for the overall crypto market. So yes, I'd say this is good news indeed.

I certainly agree with you that patience is key! It's normally one of the first & also hardest lessons alot of us learned when we first starting trading crypto

Things can move fast in this crypto space, so who know. At this moment in time, breaking the ATH market cap looks a long way off! At a guess, i'm predicting we'll reach those levels again sometime during first half of 2019.

There's certainly more risk, but hey theres a decent amount of risk involved in buying top 100 crypto also! Market cap is one of the things to consider, but shouldn't be the pure deciding factor on whether to invest in a crypto or not. If you've done your research & like what you see from a project outside the top 100 & you'd like to invest, then why not?

Just think of it this way. The big fish want those impatient weak hands to lose their faith in crypto and sell to them at these super cheap prices. Then sometime in the future when crypto is booming again & your enthusiasm has returned, they will sell these same coins back to you for a hugely inflated price

If nothing has fundamentally changed within the crypto market (regulations, alternative competing technology etc) then there is no reason to lose faith, so hold & wait.

Stop losses are a good feature to protect your investment, although you need to be careful at what levels you set them & be happy with the risk that a sudden quick spike downards could stop you out before price pumps again. There's certainly money to be made in trading in a bear market, but that should be left to the pro traders. For the majority of us, it is better to either just hold fiat & wait on the sidelines until evidence of a bull market cycle starting, or just hold your crypto & ignore the day to day prices for the time being.

NEO is my main hold for 2018, although I do have holdings in about 15 other cryptocurrencies that i'm holding too. I'm hoping that when the bulls finally show up, my patience will be rewarded