Crypto trading novices are most likely to be found pounding the keyboards on Saturdays and Sundays, the least popular days for professional investors, according to a survey from crypto trading platform Overbit.com.
While widespread work from home practices meant more novices had the freedom to trade in the week during the pandemic, with more trading daily, the overall patterns still held.
Overall, the survey of 3,000 respondents spanning 87 countries done in late March found that 56% of crypto traders took on a higher degree of investment risk during the pandemic.
Bitcoin and Ether are their favorite options, though while Bitcoin ownership remained unchanged from a year earlier, almost two-thirds of respondents said they held Ether compared with 50% in 2020.
“In the face of rising inflation and falling interest rates, investors are increasingly looking toward growth assets such as Bitcoin,” said Overbit CEO and founder Chieh Liu. “It is therefore no surprise that trader risk appetite has grown significantly over the past year.”
Both coins more than doubled in the first quarter, yet over a third of respondents expect more upside in crypto assets. Both Bitcoin and Ether reached records after the survey — the former in mid-April and the latter about a month later — though have fallen back since and are now trading around half their peak levels.
Nearly two-thirds of respondents prefer to store their tokens on an exchange while about 25% prefer to use a cold wallet — a hardware wallet that’s not connected to the Internet — for such assets.
Other findings from the survey:
- 11% of respondents said they lost access to digital assets held in their own private wallets
- 32% of novice traders made no investments outside crypto over the past year, suggesting cryptocurrency represents many individuals’ first ever exposure to managing personal investments
- Optimism was the highest (44%) among cryptocurrency users with one to two years of trading experience; novices and professional traders were less bullish
Source: Bloomberg.com