re: Official CryptoTalk Thread

New to the crypto game here and needing some info please folks. Forgive my ignorance. I'm sure the answers I'm looking for are somewhere in this thread but at 280 pages strong I don't have the fortitude to spend hours finding it.

So I've gone through the process of setting up my coinbase account and buying some ETH. I've also decided to go through Polo and successfully moved the ETH over to Polo.

Question 1: How in the heck do you buy alts with Polo? I see the "buy/sell/stop limit" boxes but they are locked, for lack of a better term. It says in the boxes the ETH is available, but it won't let me input any info to actually make an order.

Question 2: If I want to transfer back to USD (say, if I'm trying to wait out a market dip) do I need to bring the coins back to coinbase and transfer to USD, or is there a way to do that in Polo?

Question 3: Is this a decent way to manage a crypto portfolio or am I a complete noob and going about this all wrong? Want to get setup right and learn the ins and outs before I put any serious money in here. For now I've only got about $1k of 'play money' invested while trying to figure this all out, so I won't be devastated if Skynet ends up with all my $$$.

TIA