Adnan on Investing

When did you start investing? How did you start? What sparked your interest in investments?
I would say I started investing in autumn 2015. I had just discovered Kickstarter and was helping crowdfund new inventions, technologies and awesome projects in particular, just for fun. Keep in mind, crowdfunding (a form of alternative financing) offers no returns; just the satisfaction of knowing you’ve helped contribute to the success of a cool project –– and maybe a few new awesome gadgets as rewards. That was enough for me at the time. Going into 2016, I wanted to start getting monetary returns on my investments, so I began where I believe every novel investor should; talking to a financial advisor (who helped set up my first mutual fund account) & reading everything. I started following a lot more news and articles ranging from science, tech, politics, to finance and housing. In the same space, I was also learning how to analyse financial market data.
To hone my newly acquired skill set, I would analyse a company’s news and financials and make bold speculations about the trajectory of their share price on Twitter. If I turned out right, I knew I had made a great read. I kept at this for most of the year. When I considered myself versed enough to dive into day trading (around late 2016), I downloaded a few mobile app trading platforms, funded them, and started investing. I discovered cryptocurrencies shortly after. Quite frankly, the feeling that I could convert free and easily accessible information into returns, along with the fear of missing out on the current bull market run* motivated me to start investing.
What are some of the tools you use in investing?
Articles. A lot of articles. Those are my tools. Information is vital to investing. Other important tools I use are financial data platforms and terminals such as Scotia iTRADE FlightDesk, Money.Net, TradingView, NASDAQ quotes, Bloomberg, Bullboard app, QuestTrade and Wealthsimple (for “investing on autopilot”) etc. For cryptocurrency, my go-to platforms are CoinMarketCap, Bittrex, Gemini & Coinbase.
What are some of your favourite sites for articles?
I like to read articles from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, MarketWatch, Business Insider, Associated Press, Reuters, TechCrunch, Futurism, Seeking Alpha, Coindesk & ZeroHedge. I am a big fan of Twitter, because it collectively provides all these sources to me directly.
What is the best advice you can give to someone who wants to start investing?
To anyone considering investing in the future, my best advice would be to understand what you’re investing in, use the product/tech/service as often as you can, and learn to move on from losses quickly, because you are going to experience a handful of them in the wild world of investing.
Any other information you would like to share?
Yeah. A few dedicated of mine and myself have just brought an awesome new events and ticketing platform to market which uses artificial intelligence, aided by machine learning, to help provide people with a feed of events around them they are most likely attend. Look us up at Jangubuzzapp.com
Also follow me on twitter at @adnanaldo (if you do not mind seeing the occasional use of profanity on your timeline).

*Bull market is a term used to categorize stocks that are rising or expected to rise.

Adnan is a pre-law undergrad and non-accredited investor. He is also the CFO at Jangubuzz (I featured them in this post). His current interests are astrophysics, aircrafts, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, genome editing, tech startups & the technological singularity. Random fact: He is a music lover and plays football in his free time.