When reading about cryptos, even if you’re a no-coiner, it’s essential to know the most common abbreviations and what they stand for to avoid missing context.

Truncated words are called abbreviations; an acronym is made of beginning letters from the phrase it stands for, so it becomes pronounced as a word; an acronym pronounced by its individual letters is called initialism. For brevity’s sake, “abbreviation” will heretofore refer to all of these.

‘Cryptospeak’ terms

Jargon and slang are part of every online community, including the cryptocurrency world. Members experience both FOMO and JOMO while they try to BUIDL their future through HODLing. Be aware of the important conversational crypto slang terms and vocabulary when talking with experienced chat room users:

HODL

Hold On for Dear Life (purposeful misspelling of “HOLD” usually pronounced “hoddle”: hold on to your investments instead of reacting to short-term volatility).

Origin of HODL

The word “hold” has been used in finance for a very long time as part of the buy-and-hold strategy. This method of investing entails buying a particular financial asset for an indefinite length of time and holding it. Investors should not be swayed by short-term market movements because they are looking for a long-term view.

A post with the term HODL was made in 2013 on a crypto forum (BitcoinTalk) after China’s government caused Bitcoin price to fall within one day. An intoxicated member typed out a post entitled “I AM HODLING” in response, detailing his general lousy luck with investing and his desire to keep holding onto his assets in the future.

After that incident, the term “hodling” became commonplace in communication among crypto enthusiasts, and it went into memes and social media. It became such a way of signaling that the token owner’s desire to hang onto their assets. “HODL” is generally only used to refer to cryptocurrencies and not other assets.

FOMO

Fear of Missing Out (on an opportunity or investment).

Origin of FOMO

The concept was first described in 2000 by Dr. Dan Herman in an academic paper entitled “The Journal of Brand Management”. However, the acronym FOMO was coined a couple of years later by Patrick McGinnis in an opinion piece published in 2004 in the American magazine “The Harbus”.

The concept refers to the feeling of anxiety or the idea that other people are sharing a positive experience while you are missing out. In the context of financial markets and crypto trading, FOMO refers to the fear that a trader or investor feels by missing out on a potentially lucrative investment or trading opportunity. Main risk: using emotion (the fear of missing out) instead of logic and reasoning to make market decisions.

FUD

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt: a strategy of spreading misinformation about an asset or competitor.

MOON (or Mooning)

When a cryptocurrency sees solid momentum upward, enthusiast traders describe it as going “to the moon” or “mooning”.

Don’t confuse it with crypto tokens like Moontoken, Mooncoin, Moonstar, Moonlight, etc.

LASER EYES

By 2021, Bitcoin fans began adding laser eyes to their Twitter photos to show their support for the cryptocurrency. Some famous people have taken part. These names include NFL superstar Tom Brady, Paris Hilton, Elon Musk, Wyoming senator Cynthia Lummis, and MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor. The meme is often associated with the hashtag #LaserRayUntil100K — indicating support for the cryptocurrency’s potential to break the $100,000 mark.

DIAMOND HANDS

Elon Musk’s tweet: 💎🙌 - A meme that has become popular among crypto and stock traders on Reddit. The phrase is typically used to express serious, devout adherence to HODL philosophy (see higher up). It is often used by online groups that have banded together to drive up the price of a memecoin (a cryptocurrency based on a meme that was popular around the time it was invented, like DOGE, SHIB...) or any other asset.

DYOR

Do Your Own Research, encouraging investors to complete due diligence into a project before investing. It is regarded as one of the most relevant aspects for cryptocurrency investors to not blindly trust somebody else’s opinion about what they are investing in.

Between 2016 and 2018, a wave of ICO projects flooded into the cryptocurrency space, and the term became popular. Many scams were entering the market as potential crowdfunding get-rich-quick schemes which duped investors, leaving them deceived or out of pocket. People were urged to ‘DYOR’ and investigate any potential investment thoroughly before committing money to any project as a way of combating fraud. The phrase is now widely used to encourage amateur investors in any arena. Some cryptocurrency figures often post it as a disclaimer about projects or analyses on social media platforms.

KYC

Know Your Customer (but it could also mean “know your client”). It refers to a mandatory verification of a customer’s identity, typically by financial institutions and financial service businesses, including banks, stockbrokers, and now cryptocurrency exchanges. It includes information that can be used to verify your identity, like a valid identification card, utility bills with your house address, social security number, etc.

Verifying your identity is essential for crypto traders to start trading. The point of KYC is to confirm that a customer is who they claim to be and to prevent illegal activities, such as money laundering, funding terrorism, and tax evasion. If an exchange does not perform KYC, then they could be liable for illegal activities. It is easier and less risky to buy crypto with know-your-customer regulations and requirements that are just one part of a broader umbrella term commonly called anti-money laundering (AML).

For users concerned with the anonymity and decentralization of blockchain, it’s a high price to pay. Especially when submitting their identity information to centralized cryptocurrency exchanges.

DCA

Dollar-Cost Averaging: a long-term saving strategy that implies periodically investing the same amount of money in one or multiple assets.

LAMBO

Short for Lamborghini (the term symbolizes the get-rich-quick culture that is still prevalent in the crypto trading sphere)

PUMP AND DUMP

An effort to ignite the value of an asset and cash in before dropping back down. Cryptocurrencies with smaller market caps are easy prey to pump and dump schemes. A group of traders will work together to cause the price increase in some specific small-cap altcoin. Prices rise, leading to schemers going viral with an opportunity on Twitter, Reddit, and other platforms, attracting more investors and driving the price up further. When the token hits their target value, the original group will cash out - taking big profits and leaving everyone else “holding the bag” as the asset collapses.

OTHERS

• BUIDL - “Build” (purposeful misspelling for ironic meaning)

• JOMO - Joy of Missing Out

• BTD or BTFD - Buy The Dip or Buy the F****** Dip (a trading strategy aimed at benefiting from a price increase after a recent downturn or dip)

• STR or STFR - Sell The Rip or Sell The F****** Rip (the counter strategy to BTD/BTFD, aimed at benefiting from selling an asset after an upward movement and before a decline)

• FUDster - A person who spreads FUD

• ELI5 - Explain It Like I’m 5

• TLT - Think Long Term

• OCO - One Cancels the Other

• AMA - Ask Me Anything

• TOR - The Onion Router (the TOR network is a secure, encrypted protocol to ensure the privacy of data and communications on the web)

• REKT - “Wrecked” (meaning major losses)

• WHALE - Someone who owns a lot of coins and can deliberately sell holdings to push down prices to buy again more cheaply. For Bitcoin, anyone with more than 1000 BTC is generally considered a whale. Top 100 Bitcoin addresses (out of 800,000 active) held more than 20% of all BTC in mid-May 2021.

Do you know others?

Experts are still learning cryptos abbreviations because there are so many of them. In fact, we’re starting a series with this post.

Maybe you use some abbreviations that we don’t list here? Let us know and share them in the comments!

I’m Albert López, I have more than 20 years dedicated to creating and developing Internet projects, and today I start my journey with CryptoAdvisor.club.

Why am I joining?

Clearly, one Albert was missing. Seriously, it was necessary. Really, it was.

I’ve worked with Albert Lombarte and Albert García several times, co-founding successful projects like Obolog, Splitweet, or Uvinum. Again, we share common interests, and I can complement our knowledge and strengths as a team.

What will I bring to the table? What’s my specialty?

Addition, and if they let me, multiplication. Although I come from a science background, I have specialized in digital content management and search engine optimization throughout my professional career. That is, to grow and optimize the organic acquisition channel of an online project thanks to the creation of quality content.

Goal/s

The main purpose of getting involved in the project is to implement the content and education plan that will complement the current proposal, and that leads us to the vision of the project: to help people to enter, explore and take advantage of the world of investment in cryptocurrencies, and learn in a practical way from the hand of our virtual assistant.

What’s coming

For all this, I will dedicate myself to initially defining the style guide, the editorial calendar, the management of the content in the social networks and the different subscriptions that we will provide from all the CryptoAdvisor.club channels. And someone will have to start writing (and translating) all those articles and guides you’ll be eager to discover.

I have my work cut out for me, so let’s get to work, I mean... to the keyboard! And stay tuned; there’s stuff coming.

We’ve just published a new guide to help those that are starting to think about investing in cryptocurrencies but have not yet taken the first step.

We’ve tried to cover the first steps, focusing in help you avoid missing the key points for a secure investment:

• Decide how much money you want to invest in crypto. Never invest money that you may need. Cryptocurrencies are a very volatile asset and are considered a high-risk investment.

• Think in which currencies you would like to invest. Observe them for a while and learn about them. Start with the basics: Bitcoin & Ethereum.

• You will need to create an account on an exchange to make your first purchase. Beware of commissions!

• Think about which investment strategy you are going to follow and stick with it. We can help you with that.

• Some security considerations about custody and storage of the crypto assets: your own crypto wallet.

Read the full guide 👉 “How to start investing in cryptocurrencies”

We strongly believe that the algorithm itself is not the primary value of our service, but helping our customers implement some healthy investment habits that include periodicity and objective -not impulsive- and data-driven decisions. Of course, our recommendation algorithm is an important part of the tools we use for that objective.

Still, even looking only at the algorithm itself, we try to go further: making it easy to consume its output through our bot, applying it to a full portfolio -combining multiple coins and their representativity of each one over our available funds-, allowing our customers to follow their portfolio evolution & performance VS market over time…

So, we’ve decided to openly share a tool in a Google Sheet to show you how original Lichello’s AIM works. 2

View AIM Google Sheet »

The basics

First, you’ll see two tabs, one for testing AIM with Stocks (connected to Google Finance data) and one for testing with Cryptos (connected to Coinbase API)

On the top-left side of the document, you’ll find this table. You can modify all cells painted yellow:

• The selected coin (Stellar -XLM- in the example): You can choose one of the coins listed in the drop-down or introduce the crypto code of your choice.

• The starting date for the backtesting: it will automatically update the backtesting results table below.

• Total investment: in combination with the Percentage in cash, it will determine the backtesting's starting point. Will be divided between “available cash” and “cryptocurrencies”.

• Minimums: you can define a minimum amount of coins/shares or € to generate a recommendation

• Buy/sell sensibility: the price change % that should be detected to calculate recommendations.

• Exchange commission fee: It will affect the resulting cash after a transaction, so in the case of cryptocurrencies, it considers your exchange fees in the results.

• Recommendations periodicity: You can change the time interval to decide when you want to calculate recommendations. Every month, week, or day.

After every change, you’ll see that the data table below will change accordingly.

The data table

The data table includes one row for every “execution”, from the “starting date” selected previously until the current day, following the chosen interval.

Some of the main columns include:

• Columns D-H will show you the price corresponding to the date on column C, and the main balances: assets quantity, their value in €, the amount in cash, and the aggregated value or assets & cash.

• Column Q (AIM) shows you the raw result of the AIM recommendation, without applying any limits. The minimum limits are calculated then in the following R-U columns.

• Columns V-W include the final recommendation, after applying previous limits. The recommendations are expressed both in terms of quantity of assets and amount in €.

• Finally, columns X-AA include the final action taken. Since one of the goals of this document is to execute backtesting over past historical data, we fill automatically the date in those columns based on the eventual formula recommendation.

• The last AB-AD columns simply apply the results of taking investment actions to previous balances, so the next row can take into consideration.

The results

In the top-center of the table, you’ll find the aggregated calculations from the data table, that will tell you:

1. The earnings (or losses) in € in the given period

2. The percentage profitability of the AIM formula for the given data

3. The percentage of profitability of assets if we wouldn’t apply any recommendation, simply holding the starting balance over the given period.

And finally answering two simple questions:

1. Would you have earned money following the AIM advice?

2. Would you’ve beaten the market if you’d followed that advice? That means: would you’ve earned more money following the advice than simply holding the assets?

View AIM Google Sheet »

What we liked the most from Lichello’s approach with his original formula? It adapts to mid & long-term investment strategies. It protects you against one of the main risks for average investors: selling at lows and buying at highs. Is a data-driven method, unaffected by rumors and trends. It works better with volatile assets.

And those really interesting features make us use it for several years on our stock investments, and finally encouraged us to investigate how we could adapt it to make it perform better, specifically talking about crypto assets, and fit in our vision. So we started working on what would finally become CryptoAdvisor.Club service. 🙂

If you aren’t a premium subscriber yet, you can try our service for free for two months using the discount coupon: “WELCOME”.

Make better investment decisions in crypto with CryptoAdvisor.Club »

30-seconds summary:

• It's based on a variation of Robert Lichello's AIM system, optimized on our opinionated vision of cryptocurrencies market.

• In order to generate useful and impactful recommendations, your base portfolio should match some basic rules: no zero-investment balance and minimum coins amount.

• Our bot will send its output automatically every Monday to Premium customers, and can be requested by using /advice command.

• The algorithm isn't infallible. The winner combo includes good knowledge of cryptocurrency market and focusing in mid & long term returns. We're here to help you with that.

When you subscribe to CryptoAdvisor.Club Premium 🎖, one of the most interesting features is receiving the conclusions of applying the bot’s recommendation algorithm. The bot will take your portfolio and tell you what you could do next, explaining why.

How does the algorithm work?

CriptoAdvisor’s algorithm isn’t magic; neither tries to predict the future.

CryptoAdvisor is based on the Automatic Investment Machine (AIM), a system invented in 1977 by Robert Lichello responding to the heartbreaking collapse of the great bull market of the 1960s. It’s been used by thousands of investors in the stock market since then, and today his ideas are more relevant than ever for the crypto market. We made some adjustments to make it work with cryptos and reflect our particular vision:

1. The algorithm will prioritize acquiring coins (buy) when there are interesting windows (prices drop) over cashing cryptos (sell).

2. As cryptos are quite different from the classical stock market, one of the things we have adjusted to Lichello’s algorithm is that when the crypto value goes up and up and never stops, we adjust the algorithm to reset the reference point.

How to get the most out of the algorithm?

If you want to get the algorithm’s advice, the algorithm needs to take data from the market (you have no control) and your portfolio (you are in full control). Your portfolio needs two things to make the algorithm function: cash to invest and cryptocurrencies.

👉  The algorithm does not work unless there is enough cash to invest and at least one crypto with a non-zero value.

In-depth recommendations »

I am new to cryptos; where do I start?

If you still haven't done any investment in crypto, we'd recommend you to subscribe to our Telegram channel and this blog: we share tips, news, and articles that can be of interest to you.

Meanwhile, take into consideration, as an introduction, this basic tips:

• Decide how much money you will invest in cryptos. Be cautious, don’t buy in crypto money that you might need; it’s a very volatile and high-risk market.

• Think about in which cryptocurrencies you’d like to invest. If you have no idea, choose widely known and capitalized coins like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Do not invest in alt-coins that you are not familiar with and understand the project behind it.

• You'll need an account in a cryptocurrency exchange to start buying crypto. Choose a widely used exchange like Coinbase, Kraken, Binance… The security they can offer today is much higher than you can do by yourself right now.

• Put an eye on the fees charged by exchanges. Choose to deposit money by wire transfer rather than paying with a credit card: You’ll save a lot in fees and avoids impulsive purchases. 😉

• Still, any doubts? Contact us: You can talk with us anytime from the bot itself using the /feedback command, or you can drop us an email at hello@cryptoadvisor.club.

Final words

CryptoAdvisor’s algorithm is not infallible, neither an unbeatable system and could even perform worse than the market in some scenarios. The algorithm is focused on mid and long-term results, and you should not expect to operate every week; sometimes, the best advice is to hold your assets.

We don’t have any partnership or interest in you registering to any specific exchange or buying particular crypto.

Finally, remember that today the crypto market is very volatile and considered high-risk. The only tools you have to beat this risk are time and knowledge.

Time, as the market goes up more often than it goes down, and compounding the returns during good times yields a higher overall return as long as the investment is given sufficient time to mature. And knowledge because investment needs you to know what you are doing.

We hope we can be useful in both aspects.

Today we've surpassed our first 1000 active users at CryptoAdvisor.Club, and we'd like to say a big THANK YOU to all of them: our beta testers for their precious feedback, our first customers for trusting us, and every one of our users for helping us validate this weird idea of encapsulating such a service behind a chatbot. :)

We want to celebrate it with all of you and give away 2 months of Premium service for free! Use the code "FIRST1K" during your subscription process, or add it to your existing subscription if you are already with us.

You'll find more information about our Premium service and how to apply that coupon at https://cryptoadvisor.club/premium

A passive and automatic investment mindset

We’ve been interested in passive and automatic investment strategies for over ten years now and found some products, tools, and habits on the way that were effective for that approach: Invest in well-balanced indexed funds, make periodic deposits to help establish good saving habits, and define clear criteria and strategies to design our portfolios while following a rigorous method to manage it.

The last point is one of the most important things, to avoid ending up making impulsive investment decisions on bullish/bearish market periods.

The right tools can help us attach to a methodology

Tools like Trello / Things or any other task-management solution can help you follow the Getting Things Done method. Similarly, other good tools can help you with your passive/automatic investment strategies. For instance, in the case of indexed funds, there are tools like Indexa Capital or MyInvestor that help you design well-balanced portfolios and automate tasks like periodic re-balancing to keep your chosen risk profile (removing the “emotional” part in those decisions).

If we think about stock investment, some tools (algorithms) like Automatic Investment Machine (AIM) or Twinvest from Robert Lichello can help you define criteria to analyze the market evolution and give you suggestions to buy or sell.

Trying to translate all of this into the crypto world

In the crypto world, there are many “trading bots” that automatically analyze the prices in real-time and buy and sell cryptos for you.

CryptoAdvisor.Club takes a different approach to investment and shares very little with other tools. To begin with, we don’t operate directly with the money. We want to help you make better investment decisions more easily and clearly. We want to automatize your investment decisions, not the operations. You’ll be always in full control.

What we are trying to achieve:

1. Healthy schedule. The bot recommendations don’t come on price changes and sudden changes (although you can receive alerts if you want to). Instead, it builds a healthy weekly schedule and suggests you operate when necessary after evaluating longer time windows.

2. Education & Transparency. We want you to learn from the cryptocurrency world, one step at a time, and help you build a critical spirit while walking in the path. Our bot will always justify the WHY when it recommends buying or selling a specific amount of crypto in your portfolio. Although you might expect something different, most of the time, the best advice is to do nothing.

3. Passive/automatic investment mindset adapted to cryptos nature: CryptoAdvisor.Club adapts algorithms like AIM to the high price volatility of cryptocurrencies, trying to optimize operations for the long term. We take a clear position, trusting in the future progressive adoption and price increases.
   This means that it will recommend you to get some profit in the high price rising scenarios, and will be especially sensitive to recommend you buy on price drops.

4. Reproducible behavior. We have published our benchmark, which is calculated on the fly every time applying our algorithm. Take a screenshot today and see the difference in a few days (for good or bad).

In summary, CryptoAdvisor.Club is a tool to ease the pain and trouble of crypto investment in a complicated world. And we work every day to make it even easier and more clever.

Already a user? Having doubts? We’d ❤️ to hear your feedback. Just drop us a line at hello@cryptoadvisor.club or using the /feedback command from the bot itself.

CryptoAdvisor.Club is a Telegram bot. A virtual assistant that reads the cryptocurrency market and analyzes data to give you meaningful insights to help you make better investment decisions.

You’ll be able to:

• Manage your crypto portfolio and follow its value over time, receiving notifications and alerts when substantial changes occur.

• Keep track of your favorite coins’ price changes.

• Ask for detailed insights and analysis of your favorite cryptocurrencies.

• Execute backtesting of our investment algorithm over your own full portfolio or some specific crypto, simulating our recommendations

• Receive weekly buy & sell recommendations based on your portfolio and preferences.

We will be publishing some educational articles, plus some news and information about our service.

Sign up now, so you don’t miss the first issue.

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In the meantime, tell your friends or visit our website!