Note: This post is written as an entry into the CryptoMood Content Competition hosted on Trybe. Why don't you make a note to enter it yourself? Prizes are pretty decent and you have until the end of October to check CryptoMood out and to write your own review.
The competition rules state that this post/review “should be written as an answer to the question “What would you have done if you had access to CryptoMood 3-5 years ago?” “
I’m going to make things really simple by answering that question immediately. My answer is this:
“I would use it the same way as I do now.”
I’ve been trialling CryptoMood for well over a month now, and I can happily report that it has passed the Brain Test.
What’s the Brain Test?
Like most ancient people (I’m in my 40’s), I’m stubbornly set in my ways: I like what I like and I don’t want to move outside of my comfort zone. I stick with what works for me.
But: I’m also well aware that technology moves ahead at a rapid pace, and that you neglect it at your own peril. I look in dismay at Octogenarians in my own family at the moment: at risk of being cut off from the world because they can’t send a simple e-mail message or operate a touch screen phone.
True story: A year or two back, I setup a laptop for a certain old lady. ALL she had to do was turn it on - one button. I configured it to boot up, connect to the internet through her cellular dongle and open her e-mail program for her, all without displaying any pop-ups or screens where she had to click "Okay" or "Yes" or anything like that. It was still too confusing for her, she still managed to get it wrong.
Trying not to end up like the poor little old lady I just spoke of, I make a habit of continually trialling new things. I keeps me abreast of the latest developments and teaches me how to use them. It also gives me a good idea of what is unique in the market, what works (or doesn’t work), and most importantly: what I should continue to use (and what I should just ignore).
This last part is the Brain Test. To have 'passed the Brain Test', means that something has been used by Bit Brain throughout the trial period, and now continues to be used by him. CryptoMood has passed the Brain Test.
Look, I’m not here to shill products, you know me better than that. I’m not saying that you must use CryptoMood. I’m not saying that it is my number 1 crypto tool or even that I use it daily. My primary crypto TA tools remain the raw charts. For monitoring the prices of coins, I still use CoinGecko. My primary FA tool remains the many crypto news sources which I check continuously.
What I’m saying is that CryptoMood does have value to me. Like most tools, there is more than one way to use it, it certainly offers more than just one function.
Personally, I use it mainly in two ways:
CryptoMood does this very well, in fact, it’s designed around it. The app correlates news stories about different cryptocurrencies and then obviously performs some sort of quantitative algorithm on them - thereafter allocating each a score of “positive”, “negative” or “neutral”. That’s not really the part I use, as I already read most of the important crypto news reports (or in some cases just the headlines). The part I like are their sentiment charts:
The sentiment charts are a graphic format of the above-mentioned news analysis, as well as a chart of social media interaction.
To me, there is not that much value in tallying up number of positive or negative news stories about a coin. Obviously if a coin is, for instance, openly discovered to be a scam, then all the reports will be negative and that will be indicated as such. But in general the news reports we read tend to be subjective. It is more important for me to read the context of such information in the full news reports and to ignore the extremely large number of very poor crypto journalists out there, than what it is to see such information correlated into a single positive or negative news sentiment score. Mainstream financial journalists are notoriously poor at any form of crypto reporting.
Of much greater value is the social media score. There is a direct correlation between how often a coin is mentioned on social media and how popular it is at that time. For example: Chainlink has been trending lately, and we saw how that affected its price (even though it ended up climbing too high and “bubbling” a bit). Ravencoin would be a similar recent example.
Because markets are fickle, that which receives the attention at the time has got a far greater chance of rocketing up in price than what other coins do. For this reason, when social media sentiment on Cryptomood goes up, then one can expect the price of a coin to follow suit. Obviously the rise will not last forever. Social media trending will remain high as FUD sets in, and will continue to stay high when the bulls and bears fight each other during the inevitable price correction - so a modicum of common sense is still required when interpreting the charts.
Nevertheless, I find this feature to be very useful and it is one which most often prompts me to open my CryptoMood app.
Though I read a lot of crypto news, I don’t read all of it. I also don’t follow every news service. Some days, when the market looks very dead (as it has done a lot of recently), I don’t even bother reading the news at all. This is when CryptoMood once again becomes very useful.
CryptoMood consolidates important news and presents it in a format that I can easily use to get myself up-to-date. It does this in various ways and you can pick which of them suits you at the time.
You can catch up on the days headlines, the latest social media posts or the trending headlines. Even better, you can select which one of the major coins you want to see news for, or you can see the news for all of them at once.
It is worth nothing that CryptoMood doesn't have news for all the coins, but it does a good job of catering to most of the big names. You can make a Watchlist of the coins you are interested in, and then select which one you want to see news about from your homescreen. At the moment there are 18 coins to choose from. Note that the focus is definitely skewed towards the bigger name coins. For example, there will be no lack of Ethereum news, but you may struggle to find much happening in the Ontology feeds. Hopefully the smaller coin newsfeeds will be developed over time. In addition to giving you the news from your watchlist coins, CryptoMood will also tell you which coins are trending in the news, which is a useful feature in its own right.
Those are the two main things that I use CryptoMood for. But before I go, I should mention that there is a feature which allows you see the amount of crypto sent to exchanges vs the amount of crypto withdrawn from exchanges to wallets in the past 24 hours. I'd be lying if I said that I used this, but for regular traders this could be invaluable information.
CryptoMood forms a part of the very small group of crypto apps which I keep on my phone. That alone is high praise coming from me. I suggest that you check it out if you haven't already done so. It's free and easy to use, so what have you got to lose?
Attribution: all screenshots from the CryptoMood app. Available on Google Playstore. Featured image from https://cryptomood.com.
"The secret to success: find out where people are going and get there first"
~ Mark Twain
"Crypto does not require institutional investment to succeed; institutions require crypto investments to remain successful"
~ Bit Brain
