With the passion of bringing people together in order to knowledge share, Harvi Sadhra has successfully grown a high quality investing chat community over the past 18 months.
Hashtag Investing is now one of the highest quality online networks of diverse global stock and cryptocurrency traders where members can learn, share, and discuss investing strategies in a real-time group chat.
1: What attracted you to digital currency and when?
It’s actually a funny story. I was at first intentionally ignoring it for the longest time as I felt it was just a bunch of hype and not a real investment strategy. My goal was to strictly keep Hashtag Investing a stock investing community focused on strong business fundamentals and technical analysis. The members are quite grounded and intelligent when it comes to long-term investing. I saw cryptocurrency as the exact opposite and thought it would compromise the culture of the community.
This changed around mid-2017. The cryptocurrency hype kept growing and it was impossible for me to ignore it any longer. Many of the members at the time began discussing it and started making small but meaningful plays into a few of the prevalent coins. After a while we created a channel dedicated to crypto trading. A month later, I changed the marketing content on the website and began creating introductory blog content to see if I could attract more crypto traders.
It was during this time a plethora of new knowledgeable crypto traders joined and I began learning more and more about what it was. What attracts me most to digital currency is the blockchain technology. I also see it as a universal trend that started at the invention of currency. From the large metal coins, to paper bills, plastic bills, credit cards, and now mobile NFC payments. The concept of currency is driving towards something that is entirely digital. Blockchain is a technology that may be able to scale to support a fully global digital currency.
2: What’s your digital currency investment strategy?
To be honest, I have a very small and nominal stake in cryptocurrency. I still believe that there is too much hype in this space right now and am waiting for things to settle down/correct. Similar to the dotcom bubble in the late 90’s. I can see a few players from today survive to become the next big global giants. I live by the Warren Buffett quote, “Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful”. My investing strategy is more aligned to that of a value investor and therefore will keep to that strategy myself. Many of the Hashtag Investing members are using other strategies and are making handsome returns so there is still definitely a way to benefit in the current state.
3: What do you see in the future for Bitcoin?
In terms of a overview of cryptocurrency and not just Bitcoin. I honestly do think that digital currency is the future. It just makes natural sense for a capitalistic society to reduce paper cash and move towards a deregulated currency system. I am not sure how long this will take as governing bodies will want to control and ensure their currencies are protected.
Similar to any disrupting technology, just like the internet, there will be growing pains and lots of legislation to occur. At the end of the day, if the technology itself is useful and beneficial, which I think blockchain is, then the future will likely see some type of digital currency as a standard.
4: What’s one thing you’ve learned since you got started with digital currency?
Many new members joining Hashtag Investing come from other resources and communities like Facebook groups, Telegram groups, and Discord groups and all say the same thing. There are so many trolls and people exploiting novice traders. There are also a lot of groups doing pump and dump type strategies. There is a lot of misinformation and false promises. Like any fast growing industry that attracts the masses, you get the best of both worlds. I didn’t really realize how much BS was out there until I got in the space.
5: What do you wish you knew before starting your business?
That cryptocurrency wasn’t just a quick hype or temporary trend which I had thought at the time of launching and growing Hashtag Investing. For 12 months I had entirely focused on stock investors and was targeting messaging and marketing towards them. While it was still successful, I feel if I had cryptocurrency tied in from the very beginning I would probably have 100 times more members in the community.
A few other things like being told how much effort it requires to grow a sustainable and value providing resource. Persistence and a slight obsession is quite important when starting and growing. There were a few times early on where I was close to quitting and giving up. A few early members kept me going by always being active and mentioning that they were getting value from what I was growing.
If you’ve enjoyed this interview, be sure to connect with Harvi Sadhra by following him on Twitter or reaching out to him on LinkedIn.
