Students, Retirees, Millionaires: Who Is Buying Cryptocurrency? 🚨 This article is 6 years old...
Students, Retirees, Millionaires: Who Is Buying Cryptocurrency?
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Updated: Aug. 22, 2018 at 10:20 am UTC
Photo by Shazmyn Ali on Unsplash
Since the beginning of the ICO fervor in early 2017, cryptocurrency investing has become a worldwide trend – making and toppling millionaires each day. Of those pursuing this new digital asset class, how many are actually professional investors and how many are actually profitable?
eToro Unveils Key Statistics
Established in 2007, eToro has become internationally-renowned as the foremost social trading platform for retail investors around the world. In addition to traditional securities trading, eToro introduced cryptocurrency as a tradeable asset on their platform in 2017.
Gathering data from March 2017 – February 2018, eToro compiled an overview of which demographics are investing in cryptocurrency the most and the extent of their investment experience.
Age, Experience, Profitability
According to eToro, the majority of those investing in cryptocurrency today are males between the ages of 18-35 and are either current students or pursue occupations in the fields of Sales/Marketing, Computer/IT, and Financial Services.
Yet despite their risk-tolerance, these youthful investors are still padding their portfolios primarily with the most popular coins leading the market: Bitcoin, Ripple, and Ethereum.
Interestingly, it is evident that portfolios grow more altcoin-heavy with older investors. From this data, it’s shown that the oldest age group (55+) holds the most Bitcoin Cash, Neo, and Stellar when compared to younger groups – a contrast to the typically risk-averse older investor.
As a nascent industry both in applications and investing, cryptocurrency has attracted a wide range of users with varying degrees of experience – most of which consider themselves to be a novice or completely new to the industry.
Those with greater experience (intermediate or professional) make up a small minority of the total cryptocurrency trading population.
Given their lack of experience, it is predicted that most novice investors and hence most investors in cryptocurrency are not likely to yield huge profits. However, according to this data by eToro, it’s clear that most users have actually had positive returns from their investments on specific coins.
Although this data does not reveal duration of investment, the greatest average return appears to come from investments in Ripple (XRP) and the greatest average loss derives from investments in Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
Today, most cryptocurrency investors are young, inexperienced males but as the global setting for cryptocurrency continues to mature, it’s likely that the key demographics investing will too evolve.
Posted In: Adoption
