Ripple

Dec 14 2017

50 Weeks Later: The Jaw-Dropping Returns of the BRED Portfolio

We run the risk of saying “I’ll just leave this here” and, well, just leaving this here. But it deserves some context, so we won’t do that.

The Metacoin “BRED Portfolio” is on Fire

Our original post on BRED was a couple months into the year, but we decided to back-test and figure out what would have happened under the following scenario:

Someone has an extra $10,000 sitting around;
They divide that equally between four of the big coins: Bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereum, and Dash;
They leave it alone.

The result is something like this:

Can Anyone Explain?

We’ll hazard a couple guesses as to what is really going on here:

FOMO – “Fear of Missing Out” – is bringing new money off of the sidelines and into Bitcoin, especially; with a huge chunk of the Bitcoin growth during the past three months. (Bitcoin’s price was at 3400 three months ago.)
Coinbase – which has more users than Charles Schwab. (Yes, that’s a REFERRAL LINK over there, and we’ll both get an extra $10 in BTC with a qualifying purchase if you use it.)
Tulip Mania – since everyone’s comparing this Bitcoin and crypto bull market to the Dutch Tulip Bubble, people are acting as rationally now as they did back then.

So Then…What’s Next?

We’ll of course do a year-end wrap-up on the BRED Portfolio, and will run the numbers throughout 2018 on the original BRED, a re-calibrated BRED, and probably a couple other portfolios, too.

In the meantime, if you were wise enough to invest in these back at the beginning of the year AND hold them to now, congratulations to you.

And if not, well, you’re in the vast majority of investors.

Nov 26 2017

My Morning Bitcoin Ritual

There’s a certain power to morning rituals, to routines, and to doing the same thing every day – you find yourself ready for a variety of challenges, and, if you’re a morning person like me, you can hit the ground running by 8:30, with your priority list or to do list on the road to being conquered.

If you’ve followed any of the self-help gurus on the internet over the past ten years or so, you know there is almost a cottage industry built around productivity. So take these with a grain of salt…what works for me may not work for you.

In any event, here’s the ritual I follow, with the specific crypto mantra that has helped me in the past eight months.

Before you ask “who are you and why should we listen to you?” – let’s just say that I’m pretty happy with the little crypto empire I’m starting to build. But I have a lot to learn…which is why you’ll see a good chunk of this devoted to research.

Step One: Fire Up a Specific Set of Sites

I have the following sites set to open up on Chrome:

Gmail
Google Finance
Metacoin – yes, this site is one of the first things I check, to get statistics, read any comments, etc.
Twitter – where, in addition to the Team Metacoin account, I spend most of my time tweeting under my Area 224 account, where I have tweeted for close to ten years.
Poloniex (more on that in a moment)
CoinMarketCap (which gets ripped on by quite a few people, I know…as it appears they really don’t vet their ads very well)
LinkedIn (checking in on professional network stuff there)
ESPN (well, duh), and
POW Token – as I’m semi-obsessed with this one getting off the ground. That’s an AFFILIATE LINK over there. Use it and I get some bonus tokens, but, if this one gets to a penny a token in the next year, they’re handing you a few hundred dollars.

Step Two: Open Up Your Spreadsheet(s)

You of course have a system for charting your holdings – I use Excel, but there are scores of ways to keep track of what you hold and that’s okay.

In my case, though, my Excel systems have helped me to chart everything that’s important in crypto:

What I hold
What I paid for it
What I sold it for
What revenue has been realized from any Passive Income Programs (PIPs).

YOU HAVE TO HAVE THIS INFORMATION FOR TAX PURPOSES. IT IS PART OF YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.

I’m an American: I’m not going to get into a debate here on taxation and cryptocurrency – and, as always, we have advised you to get professional help from an accountant and tax advisor. Don’t take this responsibility lightly – if you want the RIGHT to get into cryptocurrency, you have the responsibility to pay your taxes and do everything that is legally required of you. Soapbox speech over.

Step Three: Go Line By Line

Here’s where I go down the list and track where my investments are. The ones that aren’t PIPs can be tracked by a combo of Poloniex and CoinMarketCap.

My holdings might change, but my HODLings aren’t changing very often. Here’s a list of the ones that I track currently:

Bitcoin
Ethereum
Ripple
Litecoin
NEO
Walton
ChainLink
COSS (to buy this one, you need to go to coss.io).

Weekly or so, I update the BRED Portfolio – I’ll tweet results and sometimes update the blog, too.

Next, I check the PIPs that I’m currently involved with. Note that this list is MUCH SHORTER than it used to be:

Bitconnect. That’s an AFFILIATE LINK; however, I’ve begun divesting from my holdings there, using a three-step process to take profits. Instead of reinvesting daily profits, I’m (1) taking them in Bitconnect coins, (2) trading them for BTC, and (3) moving that BTC to another wallet.
Hexabot. We talked about this on the blog and had our AFFILIATE LINK REMOVED ON DECEMBER 5.
Chain.group. Another one I just heard about, and I have a small stake. Another AFFILIATE LINK.

I track all of my results in the main spreadsheet, and keep track of my total once per day – any more than that and you’re gonna drive yourself nuts.

One thing that I include on my spreadsheet is my tally on BTC Heat – which, yes, is a BTC game. Use that link to get started and it helps me grow my number of spins.

I mentioned POW Token above (still time to get yours with this AFFILIATE LINK) and one other thing that I’ve done to add to my stake is “validate” users. This can be an investment of a half hour or so; but, lately, they’re slowing down how many new users they bring in, so there has been less validation to be done.

I also check the price of POW on EtherDelta; if there’s more of a pullback or I’m feeling frisky, I’ll grab a few more for cheap.

Step Four: Twitter & Research

These two, believe it or not, can go hand in hand. That’s right: “Crypto Twitter” is great, and you can get great ideas about what coins you might want to research. Take it ALL with a grain of salt – you’re not going to get rich just because one random person tweets a coin’s cashtag and tells you it will “moon.”

People that I follow:

Sherlock – this guy is good, clever, and on the cutting edge with quite a few trades
Bambou Club – somewhere near the Adriatic; he’s also active on Medium with a periodic update on what’s going on in his world
Notsofast – trader, miner, lover of altcoins (though he uses a different word for them)
Tiffany Hayden – knows XRP backwards and forwards, but shares info about the tech side, too.

I could go on (and reserve the right to update this list down the road) but the point is that you pick a few people that share cool stuff and start hearing what they have to say. And, in my case, that means researching coins and platforms they are talking about.

Try to use a “10th Man” approach, too – if you see quite a few people talking about how great a coin is, or how this next ICO will make people rich overnight, figure out what could possibly go wrong with it. You might end up talking yourself out of making a semi-foolish investment.

A Note on YouTube

Right now, I can’t recommend any YouTubers that talk crypto. Why? My feed seems to be dominated by certain people who talk incessantly about their favorite passive income platform – it’s getting old, getting annoying, and extremely one-dimensional.

I’ll make more videos of my own in the future, but I actually want to add value when I do so – not just talk about my own multi-level marketing abilities.

AND…You Can Do All This In 30 Minutes!

That’s right, whether crypto is your day job or just a side hustle, you really only need to spend 30 minutes on this exercise. It will put you in the right frame of mind and get you ready to build your crypto fortune.

Go get ’em!

Oct 09 2017

It’s October, and Time to Check In on BRED

Followers of this site know that we talk about a diverse set of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency-related topics, and we’ve actually been doing so for seven solid months. (That seems like forever in crypto – in some respects, this hyper-warp-superspeed in the industry is actually unlike anything else we’ve ever seen.) And, while it may appear that we’ve zeroed in on Passive Income of late – we have, to an extent – we don’t want to forget about one of the “innovations” we created in April: the BRED Portfolio.

BRED is Like FANG for Crypto

FANG – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google – gives investors exposure to the internet, social, digital, and the web, acting as a quasi-index fund for those who invest in that group. BRED aims to do the same: take a group of four cryptocurrencies that give broad exposure to the market, but each does its own thing:

B is for Bitcoin (the “well, duh!” piece of the portfolio)
R is for Ripple, which aims to upend SWIFT as the industry standard for interbank transfers, globally
E is for Ethereum and OMG it seems like every ICO is using Ethereum’s smart contracts as their backing
D is for Dash, whose consumer focus and community caught our eye from the get-go.

We started with a simple premise: a non-weighted fund that bought $2,500 of each of the four currencies and left it alone.

So, how is our hypothetical $10,000 doing?

September Was a Down Month

This is good, right? Your YTD growth is 2416%; you would have taken $10,000 and turned it into $250K.

Yes, you would have. But you also would have witnessed a bit of a pullback from the month previous:

But what’s $61,000 among friends?

Really, Though…Quite a Year!

Here’s what your month-by-month looks like:

So, if you want to talk about a “buy and hold” strategy for Bitcoin and its ilk, you may want to consider the BRED Portfolio.

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.