Crypto crash: how a teacher’s dream investment turned into a nightmare loss
“If I’d sold everything, I would’ve had a quarter of a million pounds,” Duncan* says ruefully of the staggering worth of his cryptocurrency holdings at the start of this year.
Like lots of amateur investors, the 47-year-old former primary schoolteacher got into cryptocurrencies in a big way during the coronavirus pandemic, ploughing his life savings into a portfolio that was ballooning in value and that he believed would enable him to get on the property ladder.
“I wanted to get to $500,000 (£414,000), then take half out. I had over $300,000 around Christmas,” Duncan says.
However, speaking from his home in Edinburgh, he confesses to having lost almost all of it in the recent digital assets market rout. He is left with a portfolio worth (at the time of writing) about £4,000 – a fraction of the estimated £40,000 he poured in. He remains sanguine: “I’ve got friends who have lost eight-figure sums of money.”
Duncan is one of a growing number of Britons investing in digital assets. At the start of 2021, an estimated 2.3 million people in the UK had crypto investments, according to Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) research published last year that is arguably still the most comprehensive official study of its kind. Clearly the number will have increased since then.
The FCA said then that the profile of crypto investors was skewed towards men over 35 and from the AB social grade, with the median holding at about £300 – suggesting a lot of people had only “dipped their toe in the water” as opposed to investing their life savings.
The study revealed cryptocurrencies had become more normalised, with fewer people seeing them as a “gamble”, and more as an alternative or complement to mainstream investments. While ownership is rising,
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