In today's article, I'm going to share two valuable things about investing in crypto's.

The first is about the difference between trading volume and liquidity, and why you've got to know the difference if you're thinking about buying a token. Any token.

The second trading tip I want to share is a simple trading practice, that will put you in the top 10% of all crypto investors, human, and bot.

It's simple, but not practiced.

Okay, first let's distinguish between volume and liquidity.

Coin Market Cap, until very recently, only reported trading volume. The trading volume they reported, came from hundreds of exchanges across the net.

Many exchanges encouraged, or tolerate wash trading.

Now, wash trading is what happens when you set up a couple of accounts on an exchange, and just trade back and forth between those accounts.

It's tolerated because; exchanges make money on wash trading volume, exchanges are ranked by their daily trading volume, and exchanges don't pay any fees to execute wash trades...

Since, trading is done on their internal ledger's, and not on the blockchains themselves, which would trigger mining fees, or require staking. So there's no cost to them - to push fake volume.

There are many ways to do wash trading, some methods are easier to spot than others. But it's all bullshit! The thing you have to keep in mind, is that wash trading is rampant in crypto exchanges.

But how bad is it, you ask?

A crypto research firm did a thorough analysis of wash trading behaviour, for just one coin, Bitcoin.

According to the firm (Bitasset), 95% of all Bitcoin exchange volume, is wash trading.

When you evaluate who the exchanges are, that are reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in daily Bitcoin trading volume. You can see it just isn't believable. So you get what volume means. And now you know that it's massively manipulated. This matter's because, if you aren't aware of wash trading, you may mistakenly buy a token that will be difficult to sell at a later stage.

So liquidity is the antidote to fake wash trade volume.

Liquidity, is a measure of how many tokens you could really sell on a particular exchange, at a price near the bid ask spreads.

This is what you really want to know, not the fake volume on coin market cap.

You want to know - how much can I really sell right now?

Coinmarketcap recently added their own version of liquidity. You can go to coin market cap now and check it out, for any particular token. The difference between trading volume reported by the exchanges, and the real liquidity for that token, is what they call adjusted volume.

Coinmarketcap doesn't reveal how they calculate liquidity, which is another issue to itself.

Coinmarketcap doesn't sum up the details, so you have to compare the difference between the reported volume, and the adjusted volume for every individual exchange, not in total.

But it's immediately obvious that most reported volumes are fake.

And if you're interested in knowing the real trading volume of a token, there's a better and more accurate site that does a good job of reporting volume, messari.io.

What's the difference between coinmarketcap and messari.io?...

Tron, $1 billion in trading volume, which was the volume reported by all the exchanges. But messari.io says Tron's real trading volume is closer to $3 million.

That's 97% fake volume!

Ethereum, $16 billion in reported trading volume. But messari.io says it closer to $42 million.

So, if you want more accurate data that isn't fake, check out messari.io.

And keep in mind, that for Bitcoin and all the Alt-coins, coinmarketcap's reported volume by the exchanges - is 100% fake!

Only look at adjusted volumes on coinmarketcap. Or, go to messari.io which provides more accurate information.

That'll give you an idea of real liquidity.

Onto investing tip number two, that you should really follow.

When buying or selling a token on exchange, do so slowly.

Never place an order all at once.

So if you're placing an order for, say $1,000 of any token, except for Bitcoin or Tether, do so in small amounts, during sub-trading windows.

You'll see that, with just about any token, on any exchange, where someone got a worse deal than they needed to. You can solve this problem by breaking your trades up into smaller sales or purchases.

You may think that you're being efficient by rushing in and filling an order all at once, but you're setting yourself up for failure. You'll be in a worse-off position than before.

If you're selling, you'll fill your sell order at a lower price than you needed to.

If you're buying, you'll pay more to fill your order than you needed to.

It's really that simple.

Follow what was presented, and you'll be better off than most investors and traders.

Happy investing.