UPDATE; Below is a link to an article posted today, 5/8/2021. Scroll down this page and you will find the article. Personally, I realize that Doge will have it’s ups and downs, but I think it is going to be around. Think about all of the owners of real life dogs and all of the money that is spent each year in the dog care industry from basic care and necessities to luxurious pampering of the loved companions. This is just one potential use of Doge in commerce. There are other potential uses of Doge. Again, I am not advising anyone to buy Doge, this information is just food for thought.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/topstocks/dogecoin-is-up-1-000-in-a-month-is-it-a-good-investment
Hello and wishing all of the readers of this blog, a great day. The “Dear Bob” message in this article, might be of interest and beneficial, in making decisions about crypto investments.
.Personally, I didn’t buy Doge until it had reached $.06 about a month ago. It is around $.66 to buy on Bittrex today, 5/7/2021. Even if it gets to the $1.00 mark from this point, that is less than a %40 gain. According to Coinbase, there are 129.5 BILLION in supply, compared to 18.7 Million for Bitcoin, and 115.8 Million for Ethereum. No one can predict how high Doge will eventually go, but that’s a part of the nature of investing. Good luck to you.
My only advice to anyone is; do the math, see how much you stand to gain, based on how much you invest. and decide if it is worth the risk. Finally, don’t risk anything you can’t afford to lose.
The Moneyist
I have crypto FOMO! ‘I’m too old to sit and hope I can make up for the lost time by safely investing my little bit of money’
‘I have a $3,000-a-month pension. I am living with my ill father, and I am currently not working and looking for a job. I am going to college using the GI Bill. I am almost 50, and have no 401(k)’

Dear Quentin,
I have about $20,000 saved currently. I believe I need about $10,000, or a bit less, for a six-month rainy day/emergency fund. I have a $3,000-a-month pension. I am living with my ill father, and I am currently not working and looking for a job. I am going to college using the GI Bill.
I am almost 50, and have no 401(k) or anything. I have gone through a very bad time over the last few years and lost everything. My only debt is a $300-a-month car payment at 4% interest.
What should I do with this money?
I’m feeling the FOMO with the stock and crypto markets roaring. My money is just sitting in the bank — meanwhile, if only I had put $1,000 here or there, wow, I would have made great returns! At the same time, I don’t want to be one of those who jumps in at the peak just before markets start “correcting,” and it’s a race downhill for my investments.
I’m too old to sit and hope I can make up for the lost time by safely investing my little bit of money, and getting 5% returns on it for the next 15 years.
Thank you for any help.
Broke Bob
You can email The Moneyist with any financial and ethical questions related to coronavirus at qfottrell@marketwatch.com, and follow Quentin Fottrell on Twitter.
Dear Bob,
What the News Means for You and Your Money

If only we knew.
If only we knew bitcoin BTCUSD, 3.31% was going to be the crypto currency. If only we knew Elon Musk, founder of Tesla TSLA, 0.66%, would talk up dogecoin DOGEUSD, 6.76%. If only we knew ethereum ETHUSD, 1.63% would be the surprise hit of the season. If only. We’d all be rich beyond our wildest dreams, wondering why we bother with education or work.
Actually, if we all knew, most of us would be sitting on losses, licking our chops, wondering where it all went wrong.
Remember the housing bubble before the Great Recession? I recall taxi drivers in Dublin talking about their holiday home in Bulgaria. Well, that didn’t turn out so well, until things got better. Eventually. I’m not saying those two things are comparable, but I am saying it’s a dangerous game to look back at lottery jackpots and wonder how life would be different if we only knew those five numbers in the Powerball. It’s deceptive, isn’t it? Five numbers. It all seems so easy, after the fact.
Invest everything you have if you can afford to lose everything you have. Invest only what you can live without. There are no guarantees with crypto or the stock market, although the latter has shown to yield long-term returns over time, save for those bumps in the road along the way. Here’s what Bank of England Gov. Andrew Bailey said Thursday about investing in crypto: “I’m going to say this very bluntly again — buy them only if you are prepared to lose all your money.”
‘It’s a dangerous game to look back at lottery jackpots and wonder how life would be different if we only knew those five numbers in the Powerball.’
— The Moneyist
Those caveats aside, I have some general suggestions. They’re not terribly exciting, so take a shot of caffeine. Still, they bear repeating.
Diversify your investments. But most importantly, stay true to your own risk tolerance and your own values. Seek out high-quality dividend growth stocks. Put some of your spare cash in the stock market. Dabble in crypto if you like, but again at your own peril. The same is true of the stock market. There are no guaranteed get-rich-quick schemes.
As for crypto: It’s all the rage today, while more traditional commodities like gold have had a rockier time. Crypto behaves like a commodity and, in the loosest sense that you can use it to buy stuff, it is also a currency even though it doesn’t act like one. It is also occupies the regulatory Wild West. It’s not a good place to store your cash because of its extremely volatility — and, as we’ve seen with Musk’s touting of dogecoin, it is even influenced by the vagaries of celebrity.
The most valuable commodity we all have right now, as you suggest, is time. And you are using yours take stock of your life and look after your sick father. You will never get back that time with him. You have gone back to college and decided to invest in yourself by furthering your education. That is something no one can take away from you. No stock-market rally or cryptocurrency bounce can change that.
Take a bow, my friend. You made the best investment of all.
The Moneyist: My employer paid me in crypto. It rose 700% in value. Now he wants employees to return the crypto and accept dollars
Hello there, MarketWatchers. Check out the Moneyist private Facebook FB, NAN% group, where we look for answers to life’s thorniest money issues. Readers write in to me with all sorts of dilemmas. Post your questions, tell me what you want to know more about, or weigh in on the latest Moneyist columns.
By emailing your questions, you agree to having them published anonymously on MarketWatch. By submitting your story to Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of MarketWatch, you understand and agree that we may use your story, or versions of it, in all media and platforms, including via third parties.
More from Quentin Fottrell
- My ex-husband moved in. He pays $150 for cable, his only expense, and gives me the silent treatment if I ask him to pay for dinner
- I have a ‘mundane’ First World problem: Should I buy a $30,000 bracelet during a global pandemic?
- My friend set up a GoFundMe to pay for her sick pet, instead of getting a refund on our vacation. I canceled the trip. Who’s right?
About the Author
Quentin Fottrell is MarketWatch’s personal-finance editor and The Moneyist columnist for MarketWatch. You can follow him on Twitter @quantanamo.
crypto investor as Elon Musk prepares to host ‘Saturday Night Live’
-
GOLD+0.88%▲
Musk’s SNL appearance could be a moment of truth for dogecoin, bitcoin investors.Nikki Beesetti started investing in crypto back in 2017 and paid off her final semester at Purdue University with proceeds from the sale of a single bitcoin that she bought on a whim, which had surged to nearly $20,000.
Now, the product manager for a startup in New York is dabbling in dogecoin and sees this weekend as a possible make-or-break moment for the parody coin that has seen a stratospheric, nearly 13,000% rise in 2021.
“This Saturday is going to be a total make-or-break for dogecoin,” Beesetti told MarketWatch in a phone interview.
“If he can really get the messaging right, dogecoin can really take off…or it’s going to crash to wherever it’s going to crash to,” she said.
The 25-year-old investor is one of a number of relatively young traders who are piling into speculative altcoins like dogecoin as the so-called joke asset mints millionaires and draws some concerns about a bubble forming in the nascent crypto complex.
Musk will host NBC’s late-night live television comedy sketch show, “Saturday Night Live,” this weekend and his coming appearance has already drawn cheers and jeers.
Musk has been one of the biggest cheerleaders for dogecoin and crypto broadly. The self-appointed “Technoking” of Tesla has been mostly using his massive social media following to pump up the price of doge, tweeting back on April 1 that he would use his SpaceX rockets to put a physical Doge coin on the literal moon, echoing the social media goal of taking the coin’s price “to the moon.”
Beesetti said that she first got involved in dogecoin — she also invests in technology stocks and exchange-traded funds — at the prompting of Musk’s social-media missives from last summer.
She bought dogecoin when it was trading at 3/10ths of a penny and she kept dollar-cost averaging her position in the digital asset created in 2013 even as it hit around 1 cent last August.
Musk has become a rallying point for dogecoin holders on sites like Reddit and his coming appearance on “SNL” is a hotly anticipated moment inside and outside crypto markets, which had largely been centered on bitcoin and Ethereum the two largest cryptos in the world.
Dogecoin has long held the reputation as a joke currency in the digital-asset realm but it is hard to deny that its surging value has gripped Main Street and Wall Street’s attention — at least momentarily.
Former “SNL” cast member and comedian David Spade on Thursday tweeted that he wondered if Musk’s appearance on the sketch show would equate to a 90-minute infomercial for doge, adding, perhaps tongue in cheek that he was buying dogecoin.
Oddsmakers at betting platform SportsBettingDime.com have established a number of prop bets about Musk’s appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” including which if any crypto he mentions first on the show.
Which cryptocurrency does Musk mention first:
1. Bitcoin: -200
2. Dogecoin: +600
3. FIELD: +450
4. Does Not Mention Bitcoin: +400
Beesetti said that she sold about $8,000 worth of dogecoin recently to buy a pair of Gucci shoes, an iPhone and upped her position in Ether thar runs on the Ethereum protocol but has otherwise been a steady holder of doge.
The investor wouldn’t offer specific figures but said that her holdings currently range from 50,000 to 100,000 dogecoin.
Perhaps unlike some investors in doge, she is under no illusion that it has utility but submits to the possibility that momentum could build in a parody asset to such an extent that it forges its own legitimacy.
“Doge doesn’t have intrinsic value,” Beesetti said. “The value becomes real if you and a collective group of people believe in it. And in this case, there are more groups and people than before who believe.”
That said, reality could hit meme coin holders hard come Sunday morning, at least one analyst said.
“Post-SNL, some crypto traders could abandon short-term Dogecoin bets once it becomes clear that it is not skyrocketing to the moon or at the heavily eyed $1 level,” wrote Edward Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda, in a research note.
The analyst also notes that strong conviction of dogecoin investors, known as hodlers in the crypto world, could defy logic and keep prices buoyant.
“The retail-army of traders that have been committed to Doge might remain stubbornly hodlers, so we shouldn’t be surprised if a sell the event reaction does not happen,” the Oanda strategist said.
How it all plays out for dogecoin is anyone’s guess.
“It’s just a meme currency but sometimes the most entertaining outcome becomes the reality,” Beesetti said.
That meme currency has enjoyed a spectacular ride compared against most other assets. Gold futures are down 3% so far this year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 index are up by nearly 13% in 2021, while the Nasdaq Composite Index has gained about over 6% so far this year.
-
TSLA+1.33%▲
What is Dogecoin?
Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that really was started as a joke by two software engineers at the end of 2013. It’s often referred to as a meme cryptocurrency because it was actually inspired by a meme that was popular in 2010 of a Shiba Inu, a breed of Japanese hunting dog.
From a more technical perspective, Dogecoin is an “open source peer-to-peer digital currency,” according to its website. Like most digital currencies, this means Dogecoin tokens can be sent instantaneously to anyone on the internet without a bank having to facilitate the transaction, because it’s part of a decentralized network. People can also use Dogecoin to send cash gifts.
The reason why Dogecoin is often referred to as a joke even now is that there is nothing special or unique that sets it apart from Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, which pioneered blockchain as a technology and movement. Also, while the number of Bitcoin tokens will be capped at 21 million, Dogecoin has 129.5 billion tokens in circulation and counting, so there’s no real supply-and-demand dynamic to its price.
Other tokens do offer differentiation from Bitcoin. For instance, Etherum has its own programming language, which allows coders to build applications with it that can run around the clock and without a third party. Ethereum is the technology being used to power most non-fungible tokens such as digital trading card moments and digital art.
So Dogecoin is not rising in price because of any technical differentiators behind it or the potential for uses that are unique from other cryptocurrencies. Dogecoin largely has the internet to thank for its meteoric rise.
Is Dogecoin a good investment?
In recent months, Tesla founder Elon Musk has been making jokes about the currency to his large social media following. In one post, Musk called himself the “Dogefather.”One analyst thinks that Musk’s upcoming debut on Saturday Night Live has also excited Dogecoin followers, with the thought that it could spark another run.
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban also appears to enjoy Dogecoin, saying it’s “just fun” and adding that the “joke is now legit.” The NBA team that Cuban owns, the Dallas Mavericks, also accepts Dogecoin for payment at its merchandise store. In fact, more than 1,300 merchants now accept Dogecoin for paymentThis kind of promotion from celebrities with large social media followings has given the cryptocurrency lots of publicity across social media as well as coverage by all of the big financial media outlets. Additionally, more and more exchanges are now selling Dogecoin.
Now, with all of that said, could Dogecoin ever be a legitimate investment? I don’t know if it will ever warrant this kind of a run, or the $70 billion total market value it had when it recently neared $0.70 per token. But I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, either. Since Dogecoin’s popularity took off, the asset’s lead maintainer, Ross Nicoll, has said he will make changes to the technology to improve it, Coindesk recently reported.
Mike Bucella, a general partner at BlockTower Capital, recently told CNBC said that the path toward legitimacy is not impossible. “If there becomes enough of a community around an asset, and that community decides to effectively create long-term value through some form of declining supply cap over time, that could actually equate to a valuable currency,” he said.
Final takeaway
I actually invested in a little bit of Dogecoin before this big run, but it truthfully had nothing to do with investment quality. In fact, I knew very little about the token at the time. I simply thought it would be something fun to watch during the work day and get a laugh out of. There have been a lot of instances this year where stocks have exploded with very little behind them in the way of fundamentals — GameStop and AMC certainly come to mind.
Given what we know about Dogecoin’s technology and supply, I really don’t see it as a good investment right now, and I am not sure it will ever really be able to offer any unique characteristics as a cryptocurrency. Could it eventually acquire enough of a following to make it more valuable? Perhaps. But more than likely this is a huge bubble building, so you will want to be extra careful if you are considering investing — or, really, be prepared to lose everything you put in.
SPONSORED: