Jasmine Birtles – How I Made My Money!

Jasmine Birtles 24th Mar 2025 No Comments

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In investing, one of the hardest things to do is to force yourself to be contrarian and act against the crowd.

It just doesn’t sit well with most of us.

Generally, the way humans are wired is to look for validation for our actions from those around us – ideally family and close friends to start with and then from society at large. Apart from other considerations, there are a lot of decisions to be made in our daily life and simply following what those we like and trust are doing seems like a handy short-cut to making the right choices hour by hour.

But over and over we’re shown that what ‘the crowd’ decides to do tends to be the opposite of what they should do. For example, the vast majority of the country drinks alcohol – a substance which, if it were to be introduced now, would be instantly banned as a poisonous and addictive drug.

When I was growing up, there were still news items occasionally making the startling announcement that some scientists considered that smoking was bad for you. Who’d. have thought huh? Seemed obvious to me from the time I was in nursery but ‘the crowd’ were still coming round to the idea. Even now I am staggered when I see clutches of teenagers smoking or vaping. But that’s the crowd for you.

As top investor Warren Buffett so succinctly put it decades ago, investors should “be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful” . But what do most of us do when we invest? We buy when everyone else is buying (when they are greedy) and then, when that investment tanks, we panic and sell, at the bottom of the market, when everyone else is selling (being fearful). So we lose money over and over!

I grew up in, and still follow, a ‘fringe’ religion so I’m very used to thinking and acting against the crowd, but even so, it’s still a wrench for me to invest in a way that is sniffed at by the majority. I try to make myself do it though, because, on the whole, that is the way to make money!

So I’m training myself to invest in products I like when others don’t like them…in other words, when they go down in price, It’s what Warren Buffett does. Sometimes he waits for years until he sees the price he wants – and ideally, it’s what we should all aim for.

That’s why, this month I’m going to move some more money into Bitcoin. I already have some crypto holdings, the majority being in Bitcoin, but I feel that it has a really good long-term future so I should put more in now while it is relatively cheap.

I say ‘relatively’ as it’s close to the $100,000 mark even now, having gone up to $104,000 already this year. But at the moment it is in the early nineties and I think that’s probably a short-term low. It could drop again certainly but, on the whole, I feel it will go up.

As Susie Violet Ward, CEO of Bitcoin Policy UK, told me last week, she believes that the price of Bitcoin will go up exponentially in the next two to three years. She said, on my latest podcast, that she thinks the UK Government should invest in Bitcoin heavily right now and use them as reserves, as we used to do with gold before Gordon Brown sold half of our holdings, at a knock-down price, when he was Chancellor (aargh!).

I have a fairly good history of investing in Bitcoin. I first put a bit of cash (about £500) in in 2017 after I had been to a few crypto events and picked up the excitement. I had already realised that fiat currencies (pounds, dollars, euros etc – ‘normal’ money) was fast losing it’s value and couldn’t be trusted, so I was looking around for an alternative,. Bitcoin in particular seemed to be a good replacement.

For the same reason I’ve also been investing heavily in gold but, I have to admit, as Ward also pointed out on my podcast, that Bitcoin far outpaced gold. It’s been the fastest-growing asset in the last ten years and, with Trump in the White House, the near future for crypto, and particularly for Bitcoin, is looking bright.

I have put more money into Bitcoin here and there although I have to admit that that was mostly when it came into the news again – not a good time to buy – and when it was starting to go up, so far I have made money. It’s been true for Bitcoin and gold in the last few years that even if you seemed to buy at the top of the market, that ‘top’ was beaten not to long afterwards so even going against the usual investing rules has still paid off.

However, it feels right now that we are in a bit of a lull before the storm of excitement and times feel cheap for Bitcoin so I’m going to move some money from savings into a bit more Bitcoin while it’s still low and before more governments start catching on to the fact that they could potentially mitigate their growing debt pile later on if they have Bitcoin reserves.

Aleš Michl, Governor of the Czech National Bank, this week proposed investing up to 5% of the country’s €140 billion reserves into Bitcoin. If approved, this move would make the Czech National Bank one of the first Western central banks to hold cryptocurrency assets. Even if they don’t go ahead with it it shows that what Susie Violet Ward has mooted for our government is already being considered elsewhere. If the USA starts talking about it (as I’m told they already have been behind closed doors) then all bets are off and Bitcoin could skyrocket.

I’d like to be in there with some skin in the game if/when that happens.

Nothing in the articles from MoneyMagpie.com or Jasmine Birtles should be taken as financial advice. They are for information only. Do your own research and always consult a financial advisor if you are unsure about what to invest in.