Digibyte

Sep 04 2017

‘This Bloodbath is Your Next Opportunity’

Thus began an email that arrived – as if on cue – about an hour ago. It doesn’t quite matter that they were talking about a completely different subject; it was from one of the scores of services I subscribe to and it is so a propos to what has gone on this morning.

Prices of Bitcoin, Ethereum Drop…

But why?

Just last week, I was mentioning on Steemit that I saw a real possibility for Bitcoin to hit $5000 and Ethereum to hit $400 (again, it was already there once) by the end of Labor Day weekend. It seems, though, that China had other ideas.

China Says NO to the ICO

This is not totally surprising – China rumors have been out there for a few weeks, and what looked like a coming crackdown at the beginning of the weekend turned into an actual crackdown early this morning, as Chinese regulators – SEVEN OF THEM – said that ICOs were, in fact, illegal under Chinese law.

We can’t explain it as well as Coindesk can, so go check out their article.

This impacted Bitcoin because it’s the main currency that lots of people use, or are chasing, or have as the basis of their portfolio.

This impacted Ethereum because it seems to underpin the vast majority of ICOs and “token sales” – so of course it would drop.

This Will Impact Your Portfolio…

Just how much it will impact your portfolio remains to be seen, and depends upon how much China exposure you have, too.

For instance, one of our favorite new exchanges is Binance, and its BNB coin/token powers the exchange. BNB has been on a little bit of a roller coaster, and our own holdings have gone from 19,000 Satoshis up to 60,000 Satoshis (and then some) then back down into the 12K range today, before trading at 21,000 or so as we write this.

SIDEBAR: Here’s a REFERRAL LINK to a new exchange coming called Altcoin Exchange. Worth checking out, as you can potentially share in the trading fees if you refer enough users.

We’re prepared to weather this particular storm, but you may not be so inclined.

What About Other Altcoins?

Pick your poison: every coin on Poloniex’s list is down…except for BURST.

It might look like a bloodbath – and maybe it IS a bloodbath – but now we’re back to the point of this article…

This could be that buying opportunity you’ve been waiting for.

Ripple? 4685 Sats. (“Sats” is short for “Satoshis,” in case you’re wondering. And a “Satoshi is .00000001 Bitcoin.)

Digibyte? 420 Sats.

Bitshares? 2725 Sats.

It’s possible – possible, but Do Your Own Research – that these coins could be in ranges that they may not be in ever again. If you read up on each project and spend enough time on the forums, you could possibly convince yourself that any one of these coins might be poised for a rebound, and taking off for heights unknown.

Place Your Bets (and Hedge Them)

We have, since day one here, advocated spreading your risk around. It’s one of the reasons that we recommend the Passive Income Platforms like Bitconnect (AFFILIATE LINK over there) and Control Finance (another AFFILIATE LINK).

It’s also why we recommend having your coins on several exchanges if you’re trading, and storing them somewhere like a Trezor (AFFILIATE LINK) or in another cold storage solution if you aren’t.

AND it’s why, once you get started (usually with Coinbase – hey, whaddya know, another AFFILIATE LINK over there!), it’s never a bad idea to have your holdings spread out between multiple coins with multiple uses. (It could be one reason why the BRED Porftolio has done so well this year: four different coins, each with four different use cases.)

Is THIS the Buying Opportunity YOU Were Waiting For?

It could be. In any event, if you’re looking for a time to get off the sidelines and into the action, this might be that time.

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.

Jun 02 2017

How’s Your Bitcoin Hedge Fund Doing?

We like the concept of diversification here – so we’re never going to say to put all your eggs in one basket. In that spirit, we launched our own “Bitcoin Hedge Fund,” which aims to provide a combination of established and emerging cryptocurrencies that can act at least a little like your own index fund.

You can read more about our Hedge Fund here – it’s hypothetical, of course, and you should certainly get professional advice and counsel when coming up with something of your own.

Yesterday, we shared the June 1 update of our BRED Portfolio, which is on fire this year. It had a four-month head start, so of course its results – up 19 times – will be better than our one-month-old Hedge Fund.

Hedge Fund Investment Recap

Here’s what the numbers looked like on May 1.

Now, here are the numbers from June 1, with Coinmarketcap.com‘s prices at around midnight GMT.

The fund tripled – and then some – in just a month!

This leaves us with a few questions:

Can Digibyte keep rolling? Obviously, a 16x multiple is not really sustainable, is it? (If you compare it to, say, Ripple, whose YTD multiple is 36, it looks paltry by comparison. However, Ripple has kept chugging along.)
Ripple, Dogecoin, and Ethereum – not bad one-month performance for each, right? The worst of the three tripled. Can those continue, too, or are we in a bubble?
If even the laggards like WeTrust and Dash are up 30-plus percent, ARE WE IN A BUBBLE?

And that’s the point behind this “Hedge Fund”

The idea is that it’s NOT your entire investment portfolio. Is it 1%? 10% 25% or more? That’s up to you…but, really, the point of any hedge fund is to hedge your bets. One asset class goes up, another goes down, and your overall portfolio weathers the storm.

We’ll keep tracking this, and our BRED Portfolio, and there’s much more coming. For now, though, if you haven’t gotten some Bitcoin, what are you waiting for? Visit our Coinbase AFFILIATE LINK and you’ll get a bonus with a qualifying purchase (and you can buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin there).

May 22 2017

Signal to Noise Ratio: Be on the Lookout

It was a busy weekend for cryptocurrency. And, with Consensus – the largest event in the Bitcoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency industry – getting started this week, you might be in for a crazy ride of hype, more hype, and even more, uh, hype.

Today, we’re going to talk about the “signal to noise ratio” – expected to be heavily weighted this week in the direction of NOISE – as well as what to potentially look for coming out of the event.

Weekend Headline #1: BTC and ETH

First, Bitcoin and Ethereum jumped over psychological hurdles ($2000 for BTC, $120 for ETH), then pole vaulted over the same hurdles, with prices for each reaching all-time highs that might have seemed folly just a couple of weeks earlier.

In fact, we looked at our own screenshot from April 26, where we saw that Ethereum was in the 50s and we thought…WHAT?

This is not unexpected, however: for every case out there that “Bitcoin is overvalued” or “Ether is just a me, too technology,” there seem to be dozens of stratospheric projections – some based on math! – that both coins are only scratching the surface.

Weekend Headline #2 – Altcoin Roulette

Meanwhile, the “Altcoins” – those non-BTC coins that are highly volatile – were also doing some rather odd things in the markets. Take two of the more interesting cases from one of our hypothetical portfolios: Digibyte and Dogecoin.

Here’s a screenshot from our “Hedge Portfolio,” with the three-week growth of those two coins highlighted.

Anyone else think this all looks eerily like the late 90s? Instead of a high-flying Internet stock tip, it’s a high-flying cryptocurrency bet that could go from, in the case of Digibyte, $1,000 to $15,304.77?

The flipside of the late-90s argument is the “how are these used in the wild?” argument. Digibyte went “Segwit” before the other mainstream coins. Doge is called by some “the world’s tip jar.” With real use cases and actual nine-digit market caps for both coins, it’s not that you’re betting on cocktail-napkin business plans.

Signal to Noise

We’ve talked for the past several weeks about things like “fundamentals,” and business plans, and use cases, and white papers. And, the fact that we spent so many years in financial services and fintech marketing and communications means, frankly, that we can see through a lot of the BS that accompanies any launch.

This week, as the industry gathers in NYC for Consensus, we invite you to be on the lookout for BS. For hype. For marketing double-speak – which, it should be no surprise, exists in the blockchain and crypto universe, too.

Honestly, and this is not trading advice and you should of course seek your own counsel, fundamentals are what attracted us to investments such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Digibyte, and Dogecoin in the first place. Sure, each has its fanboys and fangirls on the various chat boards, but the reality here is that each has the fundamental potential to make serious noise in this emerging industry.

We invite you to do the same: watch for the “check out this COIN, bro!” posts vs. the announcements of actual news from the businesses. See what looks like an engaged, active community online vs. a coin with lots of questions but very few answers.

And as always, stay grounded. Do your research. Don’t dive in with more than you can handle.

Have a Great Week!

PS: two things we recommend here, and these are AFFILIATE LINKS, so we may be compensated if you make a purchases using them. But we’d recommend them even without the affiliate relationship.

Thing one: Coinbase. It’s the easiest way to get started and, if you want to dip your toes in the water – a distinct advantage of cryptocurrency investment vs. stocks, bonds, or mutual funds – you can buy a little bit. Like $20. Seriously.

Thing two: Trezor. You don’t want to mess around with storage solutions that might fail you. Trezor is the only hardware we trust. We break it down on the site, and this is the best deal we’ve seen to date on it.

May 02 2017

Your Own Bitcoin Hedge Fund

If you look around the internet, you can find quite a few investment funds that aim to capitalize on Bitcoin and emerging blockchain technologies. However, it’s awfully tough to get into them: you’ve either got VC (venture capital) funds that rely on high-net worth investors for their capital, or you have hedge funds that are out of the reach of most mere mortals. (And they don’t really invest in Bitcoin and altcoins yet; thanks in part to the US SEC requirements around funds.)

Then there are the ETFs that we keep waiting for the SEC to approve, as well as the mutual fund industry: do you think they’ll jump into the pool yet? Probably not.

So, what’s an investor to do?

Easy: start your own Bitcoin Hedge Fund.

Okay, a few caveats first: we’re not investment advisors, we’re not registered with the SEC or FINRA. This is not individual investment advice. Use and follow at your own risk. Seek legal, accounting, and other individualized assistance before investing.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s begin.

It’s not REALLY a “Hedge Fund”

That’s right…we’re not actually advocating starting your own “Hedge Fund.” We are advocating starting a fund that “hedges” against ebbs and flows in the overall markets.

This is akin to the precious metals people – the “gold bugs” – who claim that you should have somewhere between 90 and 100% of your money in gold. (That’s a joke: some experts, though, will tell you that you’ll miss out on the potential for explosive growth unless you have 10-20% of your money in gold, silver, and other tangible assets.)

AND the other important part of this equation, which the gold bugs will tell you over and over again, is that you want something outside of the US Dollar in case things hit the fan.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies might help you there, too: since they’re outside the US Dollar, they’re also a tremendous way to avoid having to worry about whether the dollar fares well against the Japanese Yen or the Euro.

Your Own Hedge – Gold, Crypto, Whatever – How Much?

Now we get into your own soul searching. You need to figure out what makes you comfortable. (We realize that a good chunk of this is counterculture stuff – if you walk into your investment advisor’s office and say “I want to put 10% of my retirement in Bitcoin,” they may look at you as if you have three heads.)

So we’re going to create a hypothetical character – “Herbie Hedge,” who, though conjured out of thin air, does not have three heads – and we’ll manage a hypothetical fund on Herbie’s behalf.

Hypothetical Investments

To make it easy, we’re going to say Herbie has $100,000 to invest, and the OLD Herbie – as of twenty minutes ago, before he read this post and decided to create his hedge fund – had his liquid-ish investments (stocks, bonds, mutual funds and cash – since they’re between ordinary investment accounts and IRAs, 401(k)s and the like, we’re calling them “liquid-ish”) distributed like this:

50% S&P 500, DJIA Index funds (or, 50% in an overall stock portfolio that looks like the overall market)
20% Growth, international, value, and the like
20% Bonds
5% Gold, silver, precious metals
5% Cash and cash equivalents.

Pretty simple, right? And he was planning on leaving it there. But now that he’s taken a look around this site, and maybe he’s learned a little bit about the “BRED Portfolio” and the “Coins that May Quadruple,” he’s ready to re-consider what he’s doing long-term. Plus, there’s FOMO to worry about: what if this Bitcoin or these other altcoins or cryptocurrencies really do take off?

Speaking of FOMO, didja see what the BRED Portfolio did over the first four months of the year? Whoa.

Herbie’s Hedge Fund

First up, let’s re-distribute his portfolio, the $100,000 he has to invest.

Let’s say Herbie is still a believer in the overall market, might think he can lessen his reliance on bonds, and wants to keep a little in gold and precious metals. BUT he’s also ready to jump in with both feet – to a certain extent – and invest in Bitcoin and its ilk.

We’ll redistribute his (hypothetical) portfolio like so:

40% S&P 500, etc.
20% Growth, etc.
20% Bonds
10% Herbie’s Hedge Fund
5% Gold, etc.
5% Cash, etc.

Voila, Herbie is ready to invest $10,000 in his very own hedge fund.

A Visual “Map” of Herbie’s Hedge Fund

The way we’d propose setting up this “hedge” fund shouldn’t be a surprise to readers of this space.

Bitcoin is there because, well, duh. It is the centerpiece of this new economy. It’s the one that started it all. And, not only do we recommend it in our BRED Portfolio, we also recommend it as one of those four coins that could quadruple. (Yes, we like linking to our own content multiple times in the same post.)

The next 30% is comprised of the other three coins in the BRED portfolio: Ripple (XRP), Ethereum (ETH) and Dash (DASH). To keep it simple, let’s do 10% of our 10K in each.

Following along, let’s aim for the mid-tier: semi-established coins with semi-large market caps. 10% each in Litecoin and Dogecoin.

Finally, there needs to be at least a little that aims to take part in the explosive growth of (some) ICOs and brand-new or new-ish coins. We’re setting aside 10% for two of those: Digibyte and Trustcoin.

Here’s the result:

We grabbed the values from Coinmarketcap, it’s denominated in US Dollars, and of course its value will fluctuate. Heck, as of this writing, Bitcoin was on a mini-tear and was trading – depending upon the market – between $1450 and $1600.

What if I don’t like these individual coins?

Here’s where we go back to the old saw that we don’t provide individual investment advice, trust the professionals in your circle, and past performance isn’t indicative of future results.

But again, let’s go back to why hedge funds were created: the market ebbs, and your hedge fund flows. And vice versa. You’re going to see results that run counter to the results in the overall market – within reason – and that’s okay. Also, within the individual fund, you will see some altcoins do well and others not so much. So if you don’t want to hedge your bets with Digibyte (which I’ll admit didn’t pop like I thought it would after the Segwit rumors and Segwit news), research another coin.

The goal is to spread your risk overall – remember, only 10% of our liquid-ish portfolio is in this fund – and to spread your risk within the fund itself.

What if I don’t have $10,000?

No problem – actually, the beauty of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency investment is that you can get started with very little. (This is a great time to remind you that you can get started over at Coinbase, and if you use this link and make a qualifying purchase, you get extra Bitcoin…and so do we. So yes, that’s an ADVERTISEMENT.)

So you can borrow liberally from our approach with whatever amount you think makes sense. $1000? $100? Test it out over time, see what happens.

What we’ll do here…

We plan on tracking the results of Herbie’s Hedge Fund over time. We’re curious to see how it does against our BRED Portfolio, and we’re also interested in how it does against the overall stock market.