Who says investors have to be business tycoons? Muhammed Raza, senior, has been investing in multiple crypto currencies and stocks since his freshman year of high school.

“I started investing back in 2018. I was in the mall and saw the Bitcoin machine there,” said Raza. “I wanted to know what it was, so when I went home I searched [crypto currencies] up. That’s when I first found out about Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, NFTs, and meme coins.”  

Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, NFTs, and meme coins make up the majority of Raza’s investment portfolio. Bitcoin and Ethereum are digital currencies without a central administrator that can be directly sent through the Internet to other people. XRP is a crypto currency token that acts as an intermediary when exchanging two other currencies.

NFTs (or non-fungible tokens) are units of data stored with a digital item (for example, an NFT Raza bought was a picture of a fashionably-dressed monkey. Meme coins, as the name suggests, originate from Internet memes and are bought and sold as a joke for fun (an example includes the wildly popular DogeCoin).

Raza has had several highs and lows throughout his investing journey. A notable high for Raza was when he had a 900%, or “9X” return on an XRP investment. However, the stock market is notoriously fickle, and later a lawsuit was filed against Ripple, the majority owner of XRP.

This was a difficult time for Raza, and as he recounts, “all of my gains went negative and I was down a couple thousand dollars. I looked into what was happening to understand [why Ripple was getting sued], and found out it wasn’t that bad. I knew that XRP would recover and that the lawsuit wouldn’t cause too much harm. Two months later [the lawsuit] got resolved and XRP went up 1000%.”

Despite his success in the market, Raza is not content with sitting back and reaping familiar profits, but is keen on adding to his portfolio, citing the new metaverse as potential opportunity for even more profits. The metaverse is a proposed 3D virtual space using technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, in which crypto currencies are mainly used for transactions.

In Raza’s opinion, “the metaverse coins are also gaining traction because a lot of companies are getting into NFTs. Recently, Facebook changed their name to Meta because they’re excited to get into the metaverse… I think these metaverse coins will explode [in value]. I think they’re going to be big in the future.”

Raza’s investment philosophy is definitely centered around the future. “I do a little bit of short term trading when I have free time, but I mostly stick with long term [investing]… You should look to hold [a coin] for at least one year because if you hold for less than a year you have to pay capital gain taxes. [However], you want to get out at the top [sell when a currency is at peak value]. You don’t want to keep holding the bag.”

When asked about the benefits of investing, Raza said that the main quality he gained was perseverance.

“You don’t want to just quit [when the market is down], you should keep going and motivate yourself to do better. Nobody will tell you to keep it going, you have to do it yourself,” he said.

Raza’s plans for the future are (not surprisingly) pursuing a career in finance or business. Raza stated a future goal of his is to open a hedge fund (a pooled investment fund concerning multiple parties); judging from the plethora of success he has already achieved, Raza is in a very good position to fulfill his dream.