I scraped together the little money I have and dove into bitcoin. My ambition is to make money trading altcoins and keep a bitcoin reserve. Can I even make it anywhere starting with such a small amount of money?
Not anywhere, more over there:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=224.0 you posted inside the wrong board.
The amount mentioned is too small, of course, for everything. Maybe he can stuff those pences into electricity, mining some altcoin?