EOS

Feb 16 2020

BRED vs. Balance – Which Portfolio Wins 2020 So Far?

Well, this has been an interesting few weeks, huh?

It seems, at least to this reporter, that every time you look up someone is saying “this is the LAST TIME you’ll see Bitcoin under $10,000! BUY NOW! HODL!”

10K BTC Price Movement — Okay, that’s just one week…

Well, then…this *is* quite the development, in that the $10,000 resistance level is something that CT (“Crypto Twitter”) will tell you is really really important for short-term price spikes. So maybe there is something to be said for the fact that once BTC goes above $10,000, it holds for a little and then swings downward and then who knows what happens next?

But What Does That MEAN???

As you know, we’re less about trading crypto and more about investing in crypto. It’s about long-term projects — you can find a whole host of others who will tell you about short-term gains — and we did what we thought was a pretty decent post called Playing the Long Game a few months ago.

In the interest of talking about those long-term investments, we told you a few weeks back about the 2020 Balance Portfolio. Today, we’re curious about that portfolio, how it’s doing, and whether or not it stacks up against BRED, the stalwart we started tracking in 2017.

Let’s Go to the (Crypto) Videotape

Actually, before we do that, two things. ONE: THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. DYOR = DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH. We’re not responsible for your success or failure or anything in between. TWO: HERE IS A SPONSORED LINK: If you haven’t gotten yourself some crypto, we highly recommend Crypto.com. That’s our affiliate link and you can get a bonus by using it if you make a qualifying purchase.

A little foreshadowing: when we wrote the post on the Balance Portfolio a couple weeks back, we didn’t think we’d see the results that we’re seeing. We thought both would be up a little — but we didn’t think we’d see the winner that we saw.

First, the 2020 Crypto Balance Portfolio:

Two rather pleasant surprises here: ONE is that ETH has nearly doubled. (And, if you were following over the weekend, it had more than doubled before pulling back; prices were north of $280 a couple of times.) TWO is a big wow around EOS. That’s a little crazy, right?

So yeah, if you had invested $10,000 in this Balance Portfolio, you’d have nearly $15,000.

And you would have lost this little contest to the BRED Portfolio.

This one popped because of two factors: ETH (nearly doubled) and Dash (nearly tripled).

Another “Wait, WHAT?” moment was the fact that a $10,000 investment would have given you an 88 percent ROI.

Evidence It’s a Bull Market?

Not one asset in either portfolio is down Year To Date. Not one.

The worst performer of any of the assets was PAXG, which is tied to the price of gold.

What can we learn from all this? Not much, actually — it’s a Bull Market and stuff is up six weeks into the year. Some of the stuff is way up.

Might be time for the “Crypto Dartboard Portfolio:” we’re not going to tell ourselves we’re any better at this than someone randomly selecting crypto projects — but maybe there’s SOMETHING to picking a few potential winners, sticking with some old stalwarts, and hoping for a positive outcome?

As always, maybe staying interested in long-haul opportunities is really the way to go.

Jan 18 2020

A Balanced 2020 Crypto Portfolio

We struggled with this one for a little while, and you can’t really blame us: 2019 was a meh year for crypto, and our typical portfolio wouldn’t exactly be the way to go for 2020. Plus, a bunch of new entrants — both projects and categories — caught our eye last year.

Our first question: Does the BRED Portfolio makes sense anymore? Given the fact that Bitcoin had a good year and the others didn’t, does the mix of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple’s XRP, and Dash still give you the kind of portfolio that will propel your crypto investments into the stratosphere?

ALSO, it may not be about the “into the stratosphere” anymore for you. And that’s okay. In any event, we have to figure out if there’s another way to do this.

First Up…How Did BRED Do?

Glad you asked: weird year for sure. Let’s look at the numbers:

2019 BRED Portfolio — Down a shade, but not insane, but…

So, in the interest of consistency, here’s what the 2020 BRED Portfolio would look like.

However, we don’t think this is the kind of portfolio to focus on for the year(s) ahead. We’ll give a couple reasons why we *think* there’s a rebalancing ahead.

Bitcoin still makes sense, but Ethereum less so.
Ripple is working on a ton of partnerships, but hasn’t grown like before.
Dash didn’t catch fire on the consumer-facing front.
Way too much else going on.

Let’s Follow the Trends and Create a New Portfolio

Without further ado, here you go: the 2020 Crypto Balance Portfolio.

So, what have we done here?

First Up, MOAR Bitcoin

If a stock went up 90% in a year, would you still want it in your portfolio? Or would you take profits?

Good question, and we address that at least a little by (a) keeping BTC in the portfolio and (b) ratcheting it up to 30% of the overall $10,000.

While I wouldn’t go so far as this commentator who thinks Bitcoin will go to $400,000 after its “halving” (when the mining rewards for Bitcoin are cut in half) in May, Bitcoin has cemented itself as the blue chip of cryptos during the past couple years.

You’ll also see that, in this Crypto Balance portfolio, we’ve ignored the forks. If there are notable forks this year, we can take those into account; but “forkening” isn’t that much of a deal the past couple years.

Ethereum, Still, Has a Role

We’ve done some writing on these pages about projects like Megacryptopolis; you can’t play with any of those NFTs, and you can’t trade any assets on OpenSea without ETH that’s in a Metamask wallet (or some other ETH wallet).

Ethereum is really a two-sided coin (ha!) — with quite a few bearish cases on the internet, and a few bullish ones, too. We think the bullish case outweighs the bearish case, though. We’re keeping it in, but dropping it down to 20%.

About the Other Five…

If our goal is a “balanced” portfolio…uh…what the heck does that mean?

In our case, we achieve some level of balance with the other 5 assets in this portfolio, each at ten percent:

XRP — The coin from Ripple still aims to underpin bank transfers, a la SWIFT. Also, if you still believe in the long-term prospects of the project, under a quarter per coin is not a bad deal at all.

MCO — We lurrve this coin. (That’s a technical term, like HODL.) Not just because you can get some for free just by jumping through a couple of hoops [DISCLOSURE ALERT: AFFILIATE LINKS IN THAT ARTICLE] but because they are doing the regulatory thing correctly. We’re American, and bank laws are pretty important to follow.

EOS — I’ll admit to still being really skeptical, but also see the benefits of owning some EOS as an anti-ETH.

VeChain (VET) — This has potential, thanks to the Toolchain, to be the standard corporate “Blockchain-as-a-Service” solution. Partnerships right and left throughout the world. Tremendously undervalued.

VET Website Screenshot — VET’s website tells you what they’re up to.

PAX Gold (PAXG) — One really clever idea is to tie the price of a coin to an ounce of gold — so it’s like Tether, but with gold behind it. Also helps the “gold bugs” get into crypto while helping the crypto bugs get into gold.

And…There You Go

Whether this will catch fire like the 2017 edition of BRED or stall like the 2018 edition of BRED or do nothing like the 2019 edition of BRED…all that remains to be seen. But the plan is that we’ll track both all year and see what happens from there.

Stay tuned. 2020 should be interesting.

May 28 2018

Get Ready for a Wild Week

Here’s why you’ll see some interesting things happening on the crypto markets.

EOS – June 2 Election of Block Producers

It’s a process that we’ve endeavored to understand here and we’re not totally there yet; but, suffice it to say, there’s about to be a whole lot of interest in what happens with EOS.

Why? Well, the crypto project that Dan Larimer is behind has a unique process where its users vote for the “Premier League” of 21 companies that become “block producers.” These “BPs” are incentivized with EOS tokens to keep the system running. (We’ve met a couple of the BP candidates in our crypto journey. If you want to learn more, suggested sites to check out include Block.one, EOS42, EOS New York, and EOS Canada. (Heck, there’s even a BP candidate in Oklahoma.)

The election – voting is also rather complicated – takes place on June 2, though the votes won’t be tabulated for a few days. Then, the continued jockeying begins – those that are in the top 21 need to stay in the good graces – so their systems can’t fail. If they do, 100 backups are ready to take their place.

It’s the culmination of a year-long EOS ICO: and it’s probably going to mean some serious movement – up, down, and sideways – in the cost of the EOS token.

(Thanks to CoinMarketCap.com for the above chart.) Right now, we’re looking at a 30-day price range of $10.77 to $19, with the price holding steady around $12 or $13 the past couple days. But the math behind (1) becoming a block producer and (2) the ecosystem and the apps being worked on will probably drive speculators into the market this week. And next. And beyond.

No price predictions here – and DYOR, we don’t provide legal or investment advice – but don’t be surprised to see some extremes.

EON – Exscudo Could FINALLY Launch

Delays in projects are inevitable, and the Exscudo ICO didn’t raise a TON of money, so it’s not completely surprising to have seen this one stall a couple times. However, the developers shared the latest update on their Slack channel and…

It appears that the Exscudo exchange will launch by the end of the month. Which gives them a few days. We’re holding on.

We got interested in this project a year ago, invested a tiny amount in the ICO, and helped out with the bounty program. So we’re a little invested in its success. Fingers crossed.

ADA – Cardano Has Been AWFULLY Quiet

Here’s the all-time chart.

On January 3, ADA traded at $1.22. It’s now trading at 18 cents. That could mean that the market was frothy at the beginning of the year, and now it’s a lot less so. It could also mean…well, it was a new project then – launched last fall – and maybe it’s still getting its sea legs.

Could it be the Ethereum killer? Maybe, maybe not.

Is it trading at a deep discount? Quite possibly.

And Two Projects We Helped/Are Helping With…

Quick update on both POW and Empowr.

First, POW – they put the brakes on their latest developments to fix some system issues. So it’s thinly traded and the “bridge” that will let those who claimed tokens using their Facebook credentials move them over to the Ethereum blockchain was paused while they worked in the background. There’s confidence from the developers, though.

While we’re still bullish on the possibilities, we did pause our firm’s work with them in the interim.

Empowr is currently trading on an exchange called Token.store. The price has stabilized as of late; but, like POW, it’s still really thinly traded.

With the downward movement this past week of Ethereum shares – dropping into a low-$500 range – each Empowr coin (EMPR) is worth about $1.30.

You earn coins on their system by engaging with other users on a site that looks a little like Facebook; but, it’s less intuitive, so if you do sign up, take advantage of the tutoring on the site from the “Success Coaches.”

Dave from Metacoin remains on the advisory board of Empowr. A project with some potential.

We predict a wild couple weeks on the crypto markets. Buckle up!