Dash

Sep 01 2017

Coins on Fire: The September 1 BRED Porfolio Update

So, how was your August?

If you’re one of the four coins in our BRED Portfolio, your August was rather good. When we launched this portfolio in April, we backtracked our hypothetical investment to January 1, 2017. We took four coins – selected not just because they made for an acronym, like FANG – and put $2,500 toward each. Then, the theory goes, we left the investment alone.

It took off.

Here’s where the BRED Portfolio is today, with prices pulled from Poloniex at the stroke of midnight, UTC.

Okay, we have the advantage of hindsight here – of course, in April we were able to look back to January and think “wow, these coins would have been great to be in!” Still, though, what this tells us is that there could be something to the “buy and hold” strategy. More on that in a second.

August Performance: For the Record Books

That’s right, in the month of August, Dash doubled, Bitcoin Cash doubled, and the other three almost doubled.

If you remember the “chaos” leading up to August 1 – BITCOIN HARD FORK SEGWIT BITCOIN CASH OMG – you might have had the following approach:

But, as it turns out, a wait-and-see approach to all of the noise could very well have led to quite the portfolio growth.

IN FACT…

Let’s, just for snicks, rebalance the portfolio, starting anew on August 1, with equal amounts of Ripple, Ethereum, and Dash, plus $2,500 worth of the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash combination (accounting for the “spin-off” on August 1).

So you could have picked up an easy 83.5% bump in your holdings?

What’s Next?

THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE, DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH, SEEK ADVICE AND COUNSEL OF TAX AND INVESTMENT PROFESSIONALS…

One way I *could* see this going is that the sideline money will stop sitting on the sideline. Especially if Bitcoin hits the $5,000 milestone – which *could* happen by Labor Day.

I alluded above to there being value in the “buy-and-hold strategy,” and the BRED Portfolio really does show us that. Plus, by holding – or HODLing – coins, you’re better able to weather storms caused by emotion and lots of trading back-and-forth between winners and losers.

Getting Started

If you haven’t gone to Coinbase yet, use our AFFILIATE LINK to get rolling – they’ll give you a $10 bonus once you’ve made a $10 purchase. (We’ll get a bonus, too.)

But if you haven’t gotten any Bitcoins – or Ethereum or Litecoin, the other coins that Coinbase can get you – now might very well be the time. Once you’re in the game, you can just let your coins sit there…and possibly keep adding value in this crazy economy.

In any event, it was quite an August, and it’s been quite a year for the BRED Portfolio.

Aug 07 2017

Crypto Hedge Fund Update

One note before we dive in: we’ve actually made one minor tweak to the “Hedge Fund,” which you’ll see below. We’ll also explain why, but suffice it to say that this is a space that’s always shifting, and we thought this shift was important.

Hi! How was your weekend in Cryptoland? Oh, you didn’t visit?

Wait, you don’t know how to find Cryptoland? You must be new here.

Anyway, sit back and relax. Let’s take you on a little journey to the small corner of Cryptoland we call the DIY Hedge Fund.

***DISCLOSURE: As always, do your own research. This is not investment advice or financial advice. We aren’t responsible for gains or losses. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.***

Why We Invested In What We Invested In

The main reason behind the hedge fund was…well, to act as a hedge against other things happening in the world economy. As we mentioned back when we launched this fund, this was (1) hypothetical and (2) based on an assumption that someone has net investment funds of $100,000. That’s how we arrived at the $10,000 figure – 10% of the overall funds.

We gave it variety – didn’t want it all in Bitcoin, and we needed to have a couple emerging coins, too.

Plus, we wanted at least one recent ICO, leading us to WeTrust – which we’re actually getting out of in this hypothetical fund.

So we’ll have to change that fun graphic. But that’s not as important as telling you about the results…

First, where we started

Here’s how the initial investment, made on May 1, broke down.

Simple enough, right? 30% in BTC, and the rest split between those categories – “Established,” “Growth,” and “Emerging”) we talked about above.

(You could argue whether Litecoin should move into the second category of “Established” altcoins – it’s not a Growth coin anymore, and it’s one of the Crytpo Unicorns now, with greater than $2B in market cap – but let’s keep these categories as is for now.)

Now that we see where we started, let’s see what it looks like today, August 7, with the prices from this morning (as close to midnight as we could find, GMT, pulled from CoinMarketCap.com).

Not too shabby, right?

Actually, if you could get those sorts of returns from any asset, you should probably take them; any time you take $10,000 and turn it into nearly $40,000 inside of three months, it’s nothing short of staggering.

But We Had to Make a Tweak

That’s right, we ditched WeTrust, since we didn’t like the fact that it was our only negative return. We replaced it with Tierion, which is an ICO that – full disclosure – Dave personally invested in.

We simply swapped the dollar value of the WeTrust coin for an equal amount of Tierion, which was priced at $0.071 by the coin’s management team.

And we are now off to the races…again.

We’ll keep tracking this fund – as we do our BRED Portfolio – and we’ll let you know what happens as we continue our journey through Cryptoland.

BTW…

We’ve also been telling you about Bitconnect – the lending platform backed by the Bitconnect coin. Click on the banner ad below to get started; it’s our affiliate link but, if you join and get others on board, you can share in referral fees, too.

Aug 03 2017

The BRED Portfolio Update: Still Doing Okay

Since April, we’ve told you quite a few times about the BRED Portfolio: our own specially selected basket of currencies. Artisan, GMO-free, and tasty! Actually, no…just four of the cryptocurrencies that you would have done well with, had you invested $2,500 in each of them and left the basket alone.

Whether or not they’re the coins for hipsters or they’re the tokens of the future is beside the point: the idea here was to create an index of sorts. This basket was selected for its simple diversity:

B – Bitcoin. The crypto that started crypto.
R – Ripple. Their XRP token is taking on SWIFT, the international banking and money transfer protocol. (This is the closest thing to investing in a Silicon Valley startup you’ll find in cryptocurrency, as it’s an actual Silicon Valley startup.)
E – Ethereum. The smart contract underpins so many of the ICOs that have burst onto the scene.
D – Dash. Dare I say it still has the best community, and it is still the closest thing to a consumer-friendly cryptocurrency being used in the wild.

Before we share the updated results, a word on the fork.

Ah, the fork. The spinoff. The creation of Bitcoin Cash, which came “out of nowhere” this week and became the third-largest cryptocurrency on the planet. By market cap, at least – though, due to the nature of the beast and the system, price was all over the map and volatility was everywhere and some people have yet to find their coins.

For the purposes of this portfolio, we are going to assume that we held all the keys for all of the coins. Thus, any sort of fork would have given us the same number of BCH coins as the number of BTC that we started with.

Other than that move, nothing was done to the portfolio. Nothing pulled out, nothing added in.

So, How Are We Doing?

Yes, had you invested $10,000 in these four cryptocurrencies at the beginning of the year, you would have turned that basket into a rather large basket, growing it to 17 times its original size.

But, as you can see from that chart over there, we’re actually below the highs for the portfolio, and below even the June 1 levels.

What gives?

The combo of Ripple and Ethereum are both down from where they were, with each having hit all-time highs earlier this summer.

But we’re still way above the starting point – both Ripple and Ethereum took their original stakes and multiplied them 20-plus times.

The Question: Is Buy-and-Hold the Way to Go?

Only you can answer that question, and we encourage you to do your own research. And seek legal and financial advice from professionals, too.

We’re just here to share ideas and let you do what you want with them.

And one thing we did hear loud and clear this week was that different strategies to manage through “the fork” could all possibly work. Some traders we follow buckled down and held their Bitcoin and didn’t do much with it, other than wait for their Bitcoin Cash tokens to manifest themselves. Others dumped their Bitcoin and doubled down on altcoins – those cryptocurrencies that are lower on the totem pole and, in some cases, highly speculative investments.

The BRED Portfolio is likely somewhere in between – you’re holding your BTC, but you’re also holding some other coins and tokens that aren’t necessarily altcoins.

So this is one way to potentially manage through the Bitcoin and crypto universe – with a semi-diverse basket of four coins that have done pretty well this year.

Jul 11 2017

How to Catch a Falling Knife

Timing is everything in just about everything everywhere.

Case in point: the cryptocurrency markets of the past 48 hours. A bloodletting of epic proportions? Or just a slight pullback?

If your timing was such that you bought into the BRED Portfolio at the beginning of the year, and you didn’t sell, you would still be up 1718%.

So, if you did do that – and congratulations to you for doing that – you would not have paid any attention to the numbers from July 1.

Just ten days ago. The ones we link to in the blog post above.

These numbers.

Perspective, playas. One person’s OMG is another person’s $63,000 pullback.

Which brings us to the point of this post – as well as a music video.

Catch Me, I’m Falling

One man’s overrated pop tune from 1987 is another’s evocative trip down memory lane.

Pretty Poison was the band, and I don’t think they did much after this (and, considering I’m in the 99th percentile when it comes to 80s pop music knowledge, it’s a safe bet your trip to Wikipedia for the Pretty Poison discography won’t yield anything of note).

Story time: I worked at a mall clothing store, back when both were things, in the late 80s. I was successful enough to keep the job for most of a year, and I think part of the reason was that I kept things moving. I also kept the Top 40 station on and, during the holiday rush, that helped a ton. Dance-ish poppy music played on 2-hour rotation started to stick in your head, so even the bad songs became okay.

We kept busy because we had customers and there was merchandise that had to be moved and because the manager liked to joke “If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.”

There was one point, though, when…whatever you were doing at the time, you had to stop doing and pretend to scratch a record like a DJ. That point was at 2:21 of this song.

I queued it up for you there.

To this day, hearing that song takes me back, and the 2:21 mark gets me pretending to scratch records.

Timing is Everything

I’m watching the markets closely because I’m ready to move in at such a point where I think it might be safe. But I won’t know exactly – and neither will you, and neither will the experts.

So all you can really do is guess, right?

Yes, and no.

Yes, you’re guessing that whatever coin you’re going in on won’t continue falling – the proverbial attempt to catch a falling knife. If you catch the handle, you’re okay, but anywhere else and you start bleeding.

Some picks – DYOR*

So we went live with a few potential bargains the other day and…they’re all still bargains. Even moreso than they were when we posted.

Siacoin is up 3x and then some this year, but it has dropped precipitously over the past couple weeks. Floor may have been 253 Satoshis yesterday. We actually took some coins back. But we’re still HODLers.*

Stratis dropped a bit, too, and it’s below the “hey you should buy up to 200k Sat” level that we talked about – let’s be honest, it’s WELL BELOW that number, and sitting at 130k Sats. (HODLing that coin, too.)

We’re long on those two, but we took back SC – actually made a profit, if you believe that – and moved that into Bitconnect. It’s a lending platform coin thing and we’re watching it rather closely – even if our coins/funds are locked up for a whole ten months. [THAT’S AN AFFILIATE LINK. So if you try it out, we might get compensated. To be honest, we set up an account there two months ago, and kept watching the action. Yesterday was when we pulled the trigger.]

* DYOR = Do Your Own Research; HODL = Hold On (for) Dear Life. A HODLer is one who exhibits HODL-type behavior.

Next?

Well, that’s the other point – we don’t know what’s next, really. We keep watching ICOs, we take a look at some of those coins we invested in that we’re waiting to see trade – like Exscudo, for instance – and we’ve got one eye on the August 1 Segwit hubbub that we honestly don’t totally understand.

This knife-catching stuff is tough.

And this market? Well, it’s like…pretty poison.

Jul 02 2017

Six Months In: The BRED Portfolio Continues Its Tear

You could actively manage cryptocurrency trades. You could chase ICOs. Or, you could just take a chunk of money, invest it equally in four of the biggest – yet also four diverse – coins, and see what happens.

In the case of the #BRED Portfolio, which we started tracking earlier this year, you would have done pretty well, thanks.

How It Works

Step one of our BRED Portfolio was to take four coins and invest $2,500 into each. The coins were selected, we’ll admit, with the value of hindsight and because they fit an acronym; but we also chose these because of their perceived diversity. You were getting a diversified portfolio because…

B is for Bitcoin – and let’s face it, the word “Flippening” hadn’t even entered the equation until last month;
R is for Ripple – sorry if the XRP ticker symbol would have made this “BXED,” but Ripple, the company behind the coin, is taking on SWIFT and has a shot at actually winning;
E is for Ethereum – “smart contracts” as an alternative network/platform onto which ICOs seem to be launched everywhere;
D is for Dash – we credit folks like Amanda B. Johnson for actually showcasing the consumer value AND the community value of Dash.

We “backtested” this portfolio in that we just went back to January 1 at midnight GMT and checked the USDT value of each coin. The result was a portfolio that started like this:

We decided early on that we weren’t going to rebalance the portfolio. We weren’t going to take profits, we weren’t going to cut losses.

Since it was a hypothetical portfolio, we can do that – we can also ignore things like psychology, ebbs and flows, actually need for income that people might have, etc.

We mentioned above the value of hindsight – note that we came up with this idea in early April; had we chosen a different date, Ripple may not have been on the collective radar just yet, and Dash wasn’t yet a top five coin (which it was when we launched the portfolio).

Nevertheless, our experiment was underway. Now that we’re six months in, let’s check the results.

Oh. My. Goodness.

So, you’re telling me, a “set it and forget it” portfolio, of just four coins, equally weighted and left alone, would have grown to 22 TIMES ITS ORIGINAL SIZE???

Yes. Yes it would have.

What if I waited and started April 1?

That portfolio would have looked a little different, obviously, but, if you started with equally weighted amounts of each coin on April 1 and left it alone, you’d be looking at the following:

In other words, had you waited until April 1, then invested and left your coins alone for three months, you would have gone 5x. FIVE TIMES YOUR MONEY.

What we can learn…

Not sure – all these coins have grown, some are more on fire than others, and the whole space remains all sorts of volatile.

What we’ll do in the days to come is this:

Keep watching these coins, sharing updates as we can over on Twitter (where you should totally follow us)
Share the results of the other hypothetical portfolio we’re tracking – our own “Hedge Fund” – and see how it is doing
And, of course, make changes to our own holdings as we see fit.

We’ll also encourage you, dear reader, to get in the game if you aren’t already: it’s easy and, if you use our Coinbase affiliate link, you can potentially get a bonus of $10 with a qualifying purchase.

Final Note!

Of course, your experience may vary. This is a hypothetical portfolio – making 24x your money is rather unprecedented.

In other words, invest in cryptocurrency at your own risk. And don’t invest more than you can afford to lose. You could end up with 24x returns, or your entire portfolio could get wiped out. Neither is out of the realm of possibility.