Steve McDonald: Hi, everybody. I’m Steve McDonald. This is your Market Wake-Up Call. Our guest today is Adam Sharp, the co-founder of First Stage Investor and friend of The Oxford Club. He’s here to talk about the crazy profits people are making in cryptocurrencies - in bitcoin to be specific. Welcome, Adam. Adam Sharp: Thanks, Steve. Steve McDonald: Why are these cryptocurrencies so attractive? The upward movement in them has just been crazy. Adam Sharp: So we’re seeing a bunch of different factors come together here. The first is the fact that cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, are what we call decentralized. So there’s no central government or bank that controls them. There’s nobody that can print more of these digital currencies. So there’s a strict cap on the number of these things that can be created. That’s one of the most attractive things about them to me, and that’s probably the reason why bitcoin has risen from less than $1 six years ago to about $6,000 today. We’re seeing the growth and the birth of a brand-new type of money, essentially. It’s very secure. You can transfer it person to person without any issues across the world. You could send $100 million across the world, and it would take just a couple of minutes. It costs you only a few dollars to send that money. Whereas, with traditional cash, you need a clearing bank, you need to go through all sorts of regulatory problems, and you need to deal with sending money across borders. With cryptocurrency you just send it and it’s done. Steve McDonald: It went from less than $1 to $6,000 per bitcoin in six years. Where does this thing go from here? Adam Sharp: Well, I think we’re still extremely early in the game. If this were a baseball game, I’d say we’re in about the first or second inning only because there’s still just a tiny, tiny fraction of the population that owns any of these at all. So far, less than 1% of people own any cryptocurrencies. So I think that we’re still very early in it. Institutions have not gotten involved yet. We’re just starting to see some hedge funds get involved in this space. About 85 hedge funds have launched this year dedicated to investing in cryptocurrency, but that’s the very leading edge of technological innovation. So I think we still have a long way to go. We still have the possibility of ETFs (exchange-traded fund) in the future - different ways to invest in these things that institutions can do. As of now, most large institutional financial firms cannot invest in bitcoin because it’s not recognized as a security. So once they are able to do that through an ETF, I think we’re just going to go orders of magnitude higher. Steve McDonald: Now I have to tell the Members watching... You have been right about this topic since the beginning. There have been a lot of naysayers. I was one of them! We’ve all been wrong. How do our Members play this now, or is it too late? It doesn’t sound like it’s too late. Adam Sharp: No, I don’t think it’s too late at all. The nice thing is you can start out small. You don’t have to buy a whole bitcoin. You can buy a tiny fraction of a bitcoin, and one of the main concerns that people have when they get into this is there’s too much volatility. So what you can do through a site called Coinbase.com is schedule your buys out over weeks or even months. So you can say, “I want to buy $50 a day for a month or $50 a week for a year.” You can really average in to the position, and you’re not going to get hurt too much by volatile price spikes. Steve McDonald: Now you’ve got a report about this. It’s available, is that correct? Adam Sharp: Yes, we do. We have a comprehensive guide for everybody who joins First Stage Investor, and we have five cryptocurrency recommendations. There are thousands of these things, but we’ve narrowed them down to our top five. Steve McDonald: Adam, thank you so much. I’m just stunned. I don’t even know how to describe the movement that we’ve seen in this thing, and you have been on the right side of it. Adam Sharp: It’s a really interesting time. I think it’s going to get even more interesting over the next couple of years. Steve McDonald: Thank you again for being with us. It’s always a pleasure to have you. Adam Sharp: Thank you, Steve. Steve McDonald: And for everybody here at the Market Wake-Up Call, I’m Steve McDonald. Thanks so much for being a part of this. Make sure you take a look at that report. I’ll see you next week. [End of Audio]