Alright, confession time. I’ll admit it, I finally bought cryptocurrency last week. Never did I touch it until then. I bought Ethereum (ETH-X). Why didn’t I say anything? I suppose a superstitious belief that the millisecond after I said anything, it was go plunging to $0. But a bullish base is a bullish base, and it’s not an accident that I’ve been marveling at the quality of the pattern. But there’s more to it than that.

I was getting really frustrated with gold. Yes, I still believe precious metals have a potentially strong future. The long-term charts I’ve presented endlessly are unbroken. Could gold be $5,000 per ounce in a few years? Maybe. But as a short-term trading vehicle, gold is not great.

Advantages of Crypto over Gold

1. Extremely tight bid/ask: Whereas the bid/ask with physical gold is a mile wide. Want to buy 100 grams of gold? Sure, that’s $6216 as of the time of writing. Want to sell it back one second later? Sure, here’s $5993 as of the time of writing. An instant $223 loss.
2. Around-the-clock: I am typing this late on a Sunday morning. If I desperately wanted to sell my gold bullion, well, I'm out of luck. The best I could do is wait until a dealer opened on Monday, in about 24 hours, and sell it for whatever the price happened to be. With cryptocurrency, I could sell it this very moment, no matter the time.
3. Cryptos actually are appreciating: Unlike gold, which has been floundering while just about every other asset has been ripping higher. It’s only been a few days, but Ethereum is up nearly 20% since I bought it. And the pattern looks fantastic.

Advantages of Gold over Crypto

• You can hold it in your hand. That’s really about it.

Besides the beautiful saucer pattern, what finally pushed me over the edge was watching the video on the Federal Reserve last week which I shared with my readers. It really got me thinking about the nature of money. And, with that new perspective, I felt more comfortable moving forward. Besides all of that, I have been more or less at the cutting edge of technology my entire life, so I felt a bit left out sitting out of the whole cryptocurrency scene.