Blue Chip Crypto’s Mark Smith and his journey from FOREX to Cryptocurrency

Mark Smith, Co-Founder of Blue ChipCrypto, talks about his successful journey from traditional finance to partnering in one of the nation’s fastest-growing Crypto Portfolio Builders / Education and Consultant companies.

With his Finance Degree from Michigan State in 1988, Mark set out to prove himself.  Mark started out in Engineering School at MSU but always had an affinity to business.  A truly diverse course load included, finance, accounting, economics but his favorite class was investments.  Mark started with The Equitable right out of college.  Selling insurance and mutual funds.  But after purchasing the workbook “Trading Commodities”, charting and trading really piqued his interest.  He loved this book learned all about technical analysis.  Since this was before the internet, Mark needed to purchase a weekly chart book that arrived on Mondays and update manually.  There were also some smaller charts too in Investors Business Daily. 

After 6 years Mark set out for new challenges.  He went on to get 5 more securities licenses and became Chartered Financial Consultant and Chartered Life Underwriter.  He specialized in active money management strategies.  After significant research, Flexible Plan Investments rose to the top.  Out of thousands of representatives, Mark became a Golden Eagle (20 million dollars under management) in 2000.  The company had great success for his clients, so Mark decided to go work with the company as a Regional Vice President to recruit, train and support other advisors.  This is where he met David Torres.     

The like-minded individuals decided that they would build a securities branch of other reps.  Mark brought his licenses and trading ability and Dave his attention to detail.  Dave could design a plan like no other. They are a formidable team that has brought great success. During this time Mark also was heavily invested in learning to trade the Forex market.  Mark worked with a software company and began to travel (no zoom back then) to do presentations for other trading groups.  Recruiting, training, and trading was Mark passion.  This eventually led to Mark leaving the branch and David. Mark said, "The great thing about the Forex market was that you could trade 24 hours a day 5 days a week, but staying up all night in trades leads to burnout; and so, I was fried."

In college, Mark was an intern for the largest health insurance companying in Michigan. I took my recruiting and training skills to this market and built a group of Agents that sold the brand new ObamaCare product.  Although challenging, it was another successful endeavor.  Even though Dave and Mark went in different directions, they never lost touch.  During this time is when Dave ventured into cryptocurrencies.  Each lunch and conversation brought more crypto talk and Mark wanted nothing of it.  In the rally into the winter of 2018, Mark was watching prices skyrocket and was getting an itch to check it out.  Following the downturn in 2018-19, crypto returns came back to earth, but the seed was planted and Blue Chip Crypto was born.

The more Mark studied the market and learned, the more fascinating it became. The beginning of institutional adoption and maturing of the market created a perfect storm to get involved in this new asset class. Although he has only been in the market for 18 months, Mark has the trading and technical skills to tackle this arena, and now, combined with Dave Torres, the sky is the limit for Blue Chip Crypto.  “Buy Low – Sell High.  Prices will never be lower than they are now, and mass adoption will create a tsunami of institutional money like we have never seen before.  The greatest transfer of wealth is upon us.”

Dave Torres and Blue Chip Crypto launch bold new strategy in cryptocurrency and blockchain on a mission to create the new era of millionaires

With his mechanical engineering degree in hand, Dave Torres started his working years as a manufacturing engineer at the Ford Motor Company.  While working at Ford, Dave earned a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Michigan.  Although his career was progressing quite well, he had the urge to work for himself and decided to leave engineering in 1994 to start his own financial planning practice.

For 26 years, Dave has served as a financial consultant helping individuals and businesses develop sound financial strategies for their retirement.  He used his engineering problem-solving skills to help his clients build bridges, just now with a much different set of tools than he had originally had in his toolbox.

In 1999, feeling that the equity market was near the top, Dave started searching for a system that could provide indicators to his clients that would signal when to take profits and move to the sidelines with their investments.  That search brought Mark Smith into his life.  Mark was working as a wholesaler for a company that marketed such systems. They soon joined forces and became partners in a branch office for several years and over the last 20 years; Dave and Mark have joined forces on many endeavors, which have allowed them to refine their skills in finance.  Dave usually managed the design process while Mark typically handled the technical analysis. 

Their diversified skills is what they feel has prepared them for the coming shift in the financial systems which will include a mass adoption of blockchain assets.  Blue Chip Crypto is their latest collaboration and what they believe will be their pinnacle achievement.

In 2002, Dave and Mark had the pleasure of meeting a Mutual Fund manager from a prominent Wall Street firm in New York.  This manager explained to be successful in the financial markets you need to follow the money.  They learned that there are only two types of investors in the financial markets.  They are composed of Institutions and Individuals.  Institutions are the big players such as pension funds, large money managers like a Fidelity or Blackrock, insurance companies as well as our Federal Reserve.  These institutions control trillions of dollars and make up 90% or more of the financial markets.  The other 10% is made up of individuals such as us who control absolutely nothing. Some of these individuals may have a million or two in the market but they don’t have any control of the market’s direction. 

Individuals are just along for the ride, similar to a pilot fish swimming next to a shark. The Mutual Fund manager said that if you want to be successful in the financial markets you have to follow the institutions and put your money where they put their money.  That totally made sense to Dave in 2000 and it makes even more sense today in 2021when he looks at digital assets and blockchain technology.  After nine years of studying cryptocurrency, it has become clear that we are experiencing a wealth transfer from traditional markets to digital markets. We believe that this wealth transfer is a transition from one system to the next and will be more of an integration between systems rather than a replacement of one to the other.

In 2013, Dave bought his first bitcoin at $100.  Then in 2017, Dave bought his first Ethereum for $17. Dave has experience in purchasing crypto on multiple exchanges, Dexes,  soft wallets, and swap sites. He has used several hard wallets for storage such as keepkey, trezor, ledger nano, and bitfi.  

Dave credits his success in the cryptocurrency space to his engineering approach to building a cryptocurrency portfolio.  When solving an engineering problem every engineer knows each problem is unique but will then follow the same process. To solve the problem one must first approach it from an understanding of what is currently known about the problem, and more importantly, what is also unknown about it.  Engineers understand that the risks will come from what they don’t know about the problem rather than from what they do know about it.

Therefore, if the problem we are trying to solve is to build a cryptocurrency portfolio that survives mass adoption of this new asset class, then we must have a process for building that portfolio.  The portfolio we build must be based on the information we currently know about the cryptocurrency space at that moment in time but must include strategies to navigate through changes that will happen during the adoption process.

This approach to investing in cryptocurrency is not about a “get rich quick strategy”.  However, by understanding the space and implementing a process to build a sound portfolio, we as Blue Chip Crypto believe, that one can ultimately get rich in the process.

Dave also credits his success in the crypto space thus far to his understanding that change is constant. He believes, wholeheartedly, that the universe always favors a prepared mind.  As a result, he has learned to embrace change rather than fight it.  Having a never-quit attitude, 25 years experience in finance, a wife of 33 years, and an understanding that all successful technologies will follow the same s-shaped adoption curve has helped Dave be patient and stay on course throughout what has been and will continue to be a volatile adoption process. 

Dave has made mistakes along this crypto journey and offers his "failing forward" experience and especially his mindset as a gift to those looking to start or continue their journey into this new asset class with Blue Chip Crypto.