Jul 19 2017

Ten Days Later: How About Those Five Coins for Bargain Hunters?

Earlier in my business career, I worked for a company that was part of a paradigm shift of sorts – in the way that health care plans were delivered to corporations. Then, the “high-deductible plan” was foreign. Now, these things are everywhere.

The company I worked for was in the unique position of trying these plans out on a few of their employees, and these same employees would report back to prospective companies “warts and all” on the pluses and minuses of using these plans.

The saying at the company was pretty simple:

We eat our own dog food.

In that spirit, I’ve decided to “eat my own dog food;” or, more accurately, share an update on the “Five Coins for Bargain Hunters” that we told you about ten short days ago.

Why am I doing this?

One of the things I’ve noticed in this emerging cryptocurrency trading and investment space is that analysts, coin-pickers, token fans and others are extremely quick to tell you when they went 10x or better on a pick. But they’re awfully slow to tell you about those errors in their ways. I’d rather do this “warts and all” – you can’t take this site seriously if all we do is share our winners.

A Lot Has Happened In 10 Days

Just this afternoon, word broke of a huge theft of Ether from unsecured wallets – a potential huge blow to a coin that is serving as the backbone of so many ICOs.

And this is after price drops in what we call our BRED Portfolio.

This same portfolio, you may recall, was $224,000-plus just 18 days ago.

So…those five coins…where are they now, and would we still buy them?

And before we share this update, this disclaimer. DYOR means “Do Your Own Research.” In other words, we like our ideas, but you are at your own risk if you decided to invest in any or all of these. We are not responsible for any losses. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.

Library Credits – LBC

Ten days ago: accumulate at the 17-18K Satoshi range.
Today’s price: 12910 Sats.
Recommendation: Still a BUY.

This is one of those long-term plays. I don’t plan on swing trading this one, am more thinking that it has the potential to be very much like YouTube for a wide variety of content. I’m still bullish; accumulation at this price point could pay some serious dividends down the road.

Steem – STEEM

Ten days ago: accumulate up to 60K Sats.
Today’s price: 50K Sats.
Recommendation: STRONG BUY.

We give this a “STRONG BUY” in ALL CAPS because we’re in love with the platform and spend at least an hour a day there. It has engagement that’s off the charts and it reminds us – as we have said before here – of the early days of Twitter. Except you can potentially profit from it, unlike Twitter.

Give it some time, though. Some pundits are suggesting a price of $10 – which would mean growth of 8x where it is now, and would also put it into the crypto unicorn club, as its market cap is around $250m right now.

Stratis – STRAT

Ten days ago: accumulate up to 200K Sats.
Today’s price: 175K Sats.
Recommendation: STRONG BUY.

Actually, this appears to be the one coin that could benefit the most from the one-two punch of Bitcoin’s Hard Fork/Segwit uncertainty, and Ether’s afternoon follies from today.

Yesterday, it actually went above 200K, and it’s only down around 5% today. We love the project and are HODLing this coin.

Antshares – ANS

Ten days ago: accumulate at 285K Sats.
Today’s price: 260K Sats.
Recommendation: STRONG BUY.

Okay, why are three of these five coins now STRONG BUYS in ALL CAPS after ten days of tumult? Simple – these are good projects. Though I was corrected on Steemit by a friend who suggested that Antshares is actually the Chinese Ethereum and not the Chinese Bitcoin, I still stand by it. And you want some variety in your holdings – known as “hedging” – so having some exposure to Asian markets is a really good idea.

Bitshares – BTS

Ten days ago: accumulate at 8000 Sats.
Today’s price: 4700 Sats.
Recommendation: HOLD.

This is the most “meh” of our picks. I’m not going out of my way to pick more up, and I’m possibly going to become a “bagholder” here.

BUT…it could pop again – it’s below its one-month highs of 12,000 Sats. It’s just not a project I am in love with, so I’m giving it a HOLD recommendation.

Next Steps?

Well, similar to the others we talk about here, we’ll keep watching these as they emerge. There will likely be more blog posts like this one down the road.

And we’ll keep eating our own dog food.

Jul 15 2017

Get Your Crypto Bingo Card!

I mean, really…would any sort of industry be complete without a BINGO card? We’re talking about all the lingo that’s out there – and, especially for the next two weeks or so, with the Bitcoin fork/not a fork/SegWit discussion…

Anyway, feel free to download this Crypto Bingo card. And use it carefully.

Jul 13 2017

DIY: Your Bitcoin Hedge Fund

It’s time to update our Bitcoin Hedge Fund, which we told you about back in May. Before we do that, though, this reminder: we DO have a Facebook page, we ARE on Twitter, and we’ve been spending a ton of time over on Steemit. We’d love to have you join in on the conversation in any or all of the three.

And away we go…

Hedge Fund Background

First of all, the typical standard disclaimer: do your own research. We’re not responsible for gains or losses. Get legal, tax, and accounting advice. Don’t invest more than you can lose. These are volatile-as-f markets, y’all. Really volatile, especially the past several days, where there was at least a little bloodletting and panic.

Anyway, our original post said we’d park a small amount – in our hypothetical fund, we chose a guy named “Herbie” and his hedge fund (“Herbie’s Hedge Fund”) had $10,000 to invest. We chose this amount as ten percent of his investment capital. Is that a good amount? A bad amount? Too high? Too low?

Heck, that’s for you to decide. If you’re Wences Cesares, you’d put 1% of your net worth in Bitcoin and leave it there for several years. That may turn out to be good advice, or it may turn out to completely fizzle.

What We Started With

Our hedge fund had a nice mix of established coins – the BRED portfolio, of course – as well as some emerging coins and a recent ICO. Here’s what it looked like then:

If you have more than a passing understanding of the markets we’re in, you might think every one of those coins has gone up since May 1. And you’d be almost 100% right: using today’s prices, grabbed from CoinMarketCap.com, here’s what you’d have:

Some notes on what we see here:

Bitcoin: Holding Steady

Bitcoin is doing well enough, and it started as 30% of the portfolio – for reasons detailed in May, but, if it’s becoming the reserve cryptocurrency, then yeah, you want a good chunk of it.

What will be interesting, though, is where it goes in the next 20 days or so. Hard Fork, Soft Fork, stuff that even we admit we’re paying attention to but not studying THAT closely – the August 1 deadline date for Segwit-related movement on the part of the BTC-hemoth will mean movement in price not only of BTC, but perhaps of others in the BRED portfolio…and LTC, too.

Timing on LTC, DGB, XRP: Not Bad!

From the “blind squirrel” department, all three have done well. Litecoin was, indeed, a defensive play – you could argue that it belonged in our BRED portfolio – some folks have told us so – but it’s (in our eyes) a bit like Bitcoin and a bit like Dash. But it’s also seen as a Bitcoin alternative, so that’s why it’s here. And it has nearly doubled in the past five weeks.

And some of our success is a little bit of luck – we thought we could be too late to get into Ripple’s XRP token, but it turns out that quadrupled for us.

Digibyte went on a tear, then pulled back and is now back down to Earth – if Earth is an 11x growth in its price.

And, About Our Laggard

Win some, lose some. WeTrust is still a good product/coin/token/system/platform. And we’ll keep it here because we do think that it has tremendous potential.

But two things do jump out at us here at Metacoin HQ:

We picked the wrong ICO.
We are also missing out on a number of these ICOs because we’re in the USA.

A Word on ICOs

Initial Coin Offerings used to be all the rage a couple weeks ago. Then Ethereum pulled back and cries of bubble were everywhere.

THEY’RE BACK.

Tezos $XTZ pic.twitter.com/zswITrHUiY

— BambouClub (@BambouClub) July 13, 2017

That’s one we missed out on entirely because we’re in the USA and these will not let Americans get involved. You have to wait until they are traded on an exchange…

That could actually be a good thing – if an ICO is oversold, overblown, and overhyped, it will more than likely fizzle once it hits the markets, creating a buying opportunity for mere mortals, er, Americans.

But, and this is a message for Congress as they look at tax reform, and maybe, too, a message for the SEC: as long as there’s a ton of caveat emptor attached, what really *IS* the problem with these ICOs being open to American investors? How are they any different from, say, my deciding that Blue Apron is awesome and I want to bet my IRA on the Blue Apron IPO?

Food for thought.

Two More Things

One – our hedge fund actually looks a bit different today than it did on July 1.

Yeah, $7,000 down since July 1. This is why we updated the numbers on July 13 – it’s a more accurate picture of what’s happened over the past 12 days.

Two – your own hedge fund. We told you before that this is a hypothetical experiment and you can use this as a guide for creating your own. However, we like the basic principles here: some big coins, some smaller coins, maybe an ICO or post-ICO coin or token or two. The general idea, as always, with a hedge fund is that you want to hedge your bets.

Overall markets – stocks, bonds, mutual funds, precious metals, pork bellies – those could tank tomorrow, or explode tomorrow, or trudge along. If you have all of your eggs in one basket, you’re likely going to have trouble someday. And if you have all of eggs in the wrong basket, that could spell trouble, too.

Love to hear your ideas! Tell us on Twitter, or in the comments below.

Oh, if you HAVEN’T gotten some coins to get started, pop on over to Coinbase, use this Affiliate Link, and you’ll get a Bitcoin Bonus with a qualifying purchase.

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 09 2017

Five Coins for Bargain Hunters

Happy weekend, party people!

Oh, not the happiest of weekends? Red numbers got you down? Been watching the crypto markets a little too closely? Afraid of becoming a bagholder?

Fret not, we’re here with an idea or two (or five): coins that might fall into bargain hunter territory.

First up, though, a word or two (or fifty) on some of the big boys and their performance during the past week.

Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin Holding Their Own

It’s been interesting to watch the scuttlebutt and listen to the pontificators asking about what August 1 – when Bitcoin’s big Segwit situation gets sorted out – will do to the BTC price. And it’s also been interesting to hear what the thinking is on Ethereum and the ICO marketplace and the fact that tons of coins seem to be getting tons of money out of nowhere, all built, it seems, on the Ethereum platform or raising money in Ether. And whether Litecoin does anything huge in the interim.

BUT…all three seem fine.

While BTC has stabilized in price at around 2500, we should note that, while both LTC and ETH are also stable, there’s a bit of a difference in where ETH is relative to its 2-week range.

BTC: High of 2720, Low of 2168. It’s a range up/down of 552. Its current price is right around 58% of its range. Close to that Fibonacci level of 61.8%.
LTC: High of 55.40, Low of 32.37. Range up/down is 22 bucks, and its current price is at 68% of its range. Sticking around there for a little while, maybe…
ETH, however: High of 318, Low of 204. Range up/down is 114. Right now, it’s at around 31% of its range. Key Fibonacci levels are 23.6% and 38.2% – 31% is right at the middle.

UPSHOT: WATCH THE ETH PRICE. Watch for support either above or below those percentages: 230.79 on the low end, 247.75 on the way up. These could be good levels to buy on the way up, or to sell on the way down.

Now, let’s return to the regular programming.

Five Coins for Bargain Hunters

1. Library Credits – LBC

Open source YouTube competitor? Democratized payouts? Sounds just a little like Steemit to me.

But I’m game on the product – if you want to sign up on the wait list, you can use this referral link to do so, and we might move up in the line. But then again, you’ll get your own referral link and you might move up in the line, too.

From an *INVESTMENT* standpoint, though, this one, we think, has some serious potential. Here’s why:

It launched in July of 2016 at north of 120,000 Sats. Then it popped – heading to 280,000 Sats before coming back to Earth. Then it stuck around in the four-digit Satoshi level until May of this year, and flirted with 25,000 Satoshis until recently.

The reason for its climb of late: it’s starting to come into its own as an actual site with merit – not just as a coin that could have potential. In other words, past its growing pains as a startup, it’s now ready for prime time.

You can get LBC for around 17-18,000 Sats. Anywhere below 20,000 might be good to accumulate.

2. Steem – STEEM

Steem is the coin. Steemit is the platform. Steem can be converted to Steem Dollars, too.

I’m on this platform daily and, to be honest, I don’t totally “get” it yet. HOWEVER, I see it moving northward from here, and I’ll give you three reasons why:

Controlled, stable growth. Despite the fact that the site is adding around 5000 users a day of late, the site still only has somewhere in the neighborhood of 250,000 users worldwide.
Active community that gets paid for content. I haven’t profited much from the site just yet, but, to be honest, that’s not why I’m there yet. I’m there because it feels a lot like the early days of Twitter to me. Less negativity, and more content to sink your teeth into.
Bagholders that need the site to come back. Yes, I said that out loud – quite a few people are there because they were on the site early, had tons of coins when they were worth 500-650,000 Satoshis each. They now trade at 60,000 or so – with recent highs of 80,000 Sats.

60-80,000 Satoshis would still be a bargain when compared to last year’s prices. The question is whether it will get busy enough to head into 100K territory and beyond.

BTW, sign up for an account now. Go to Steemit for more details.

3. Stratis – STRAT

How could a coin that has gone up from 7300 to 171,000 be a bargain?

Well, this coin’s team has hit pretty much every development milestone. In fact, 171,000 is today’s price; 435,000 was the price just six weeks ago.

We think the recent pullback is mostly because of the overall market pullback.

It’s also an “enterprise platform coin” – in other words, the coin/token fuels the platform for corporate and enterprise clients. So those big corporates looking to get into the blockchain can – and do – call up the Stratis people and say yo.

Say yo yourself at somewhere below 200,000 Sats.

4. Antshares – ANS

It’s the Chinese Bitcoin.

Full stop.

It has gone from 15,000 Sats to 367,000 Sats – 24x – before pulling back to 285,000 or so today.

If there’s one project that could potentially have another 24x up its sleeve before the end of the year, this one may be it.

5. Bitshares – BTS

This is a mysterious platform – to me at least – and it has been around for nearly three years. Most mysterious: the price now is around what the price was in late Summer 2014.

This looks a little like Stratis and a little like Ripple and a little like…well, it’s kinda sorta an enterprise blockchain thing meets a trading platform.

That price, tho: 13,000 Sats a couple months ago, 6000-range now.

Considering we’re now below where the coin was in September of 2014, you might consider accumulating up to 8000 Sats.

Final Thoughts:

Remember, do your own research. We’re not responsible for any gains or losses. Seek professional counsel for things like legal and tax ramifications. Stay woke.