The first thing I want to talk to you about is please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please do not pay over the buy-up-to for the recommendations. It’s really not necessary.
I know it’s very frustrating when we put a recommendation out and it immediately runs up to the top of our buying range and sometimes goes above it. But, if you observe these charts, every single time after that immediate rush, you get a sell-off. Every single time.
Now I can’t tell you it will continue to happen all the time, but so far, every single recommendation I’ve put out, you’ve always had the opportunity to buy it cheaper.
I’ll give you a prime example: Cindicator, which shot way above my buy-up-to price, and I could see obviously people were buying it. And then we had that little kind of sell-off in the market right before Christmas, and guess what? Cindicator went from I think, nine cents, down to 3.8 cents, below where it was when I put my initial recommendation out.
So, this is crypto; that kind of stuff happens all the time. You saw the same thing with Stellar. I put a buy-up-to on Stellar on I think it was 24 cents, I think. And then Stellar just boomed up, went above that, and then Stellar came all the way back down to 18 cents. Of course, it’s much higher now; both of them are much higher.
My point is, is that if you are patient, if you will put your order in beneath the market, it will automatically get done when the market comes in. You shouldn’t have to worry about that; you know you’ll get filled probably while you’re sleeping. So, it’s really important.
You know, price discipline is incredibly important, and by now, you should have been with me long enough to see just how wildly volatile these cryptocurrencies are and that if you are patient, even though you may not be able to get in on the first day, typically within a few days, sometimes it might even be a few weeks, if you have your order in, it’ll eventually get hit.
So, this is why I always say let the game come to you. Maybe I should change it to, you know, let the price come to you, right? There’s an ebb and flow in markets and there’s an ebb and flow in prices, and you want to make that ebb and flow really work for you.
And so far, the methodology that we’ve adopted, being disciplined about buy-up-to’s, telling folks to put orders in beneath the market if the market is getting away from you, is working, right? The proof is in the pudding. The advice is working. So, I would say, just listen to it.
New Recommended Exchanges
So yesterday, I put out a couple of alerts over the last couple of days to tell you about different exchanges that I wanted to add to our list. And you know, the standard language in those emails I realize afterwards is, “Hey, I don’t have a coin right now, I just want to give you an update on some exchanges.” And then yesterday, I sent out three trades, and some of them are on these new exchanges.
So that normally doesn’t happen. Normally if we find a new exchange, we want to kind of add to the mix. We like to give you the heads-up, just so we have the flexibility to recommend new and different coins. In this case, just yesterday I got exposed to a few different ideas that looked very interesting to me.
And as you know with the short-term portfolio, you know, we’re not doing a deep dive on that initial recommendation. All right. We’re not, you know, ripping apart the team to find out everything about the idea. Usually, there’s either something that I think is about to happen or something about the idea intrigues me and I want to get into the idea before it, you know, starts to take off. And then we do a deeper dive, and then we make a determination: Okay, is this something we’re going to keep for a little bit, is this something that’s going to migrate to the long-term portfolio, or is this just maybe an intermediate-term holding?
So just bear that in mind. When we put out short-term trades, the level of research we do on them is, you know, quite minor. But there’s clearly something about the idea that we like enough to recommend, and then, of course, you know, we do a deeper dive afterwards.
Network Fees
Okay, what else? We got a couple of questions in here about the fees that are being charged on the bitcoin and Ethereum networks. So, this is just the nature of where we are right now. The bitcoin and Ethereum networks are completely overwhelmed, the way that AOL was overwhelmed back in the ’90s when everybody was trying to get online.
You get over a million transactions a day happening on Ethereum right now, and Ethereum just can’t handle that. And so, you’re going to have high fees. This is just the nature of the beast where we are right now.
You know, scaling, as you know, is one of our themes that we invest along in. We do think that Ethereum will scale at some point, but nobody really knows when exactly it will scale, and so we’ve made some bets in the portfolio where we think, you know, if Ethereum can’t scale fast enough, these are some other names that will benefit should Ethereum not be able to scale.
And so, some of those names like EOS, which I think we’re up like six, seven, maybe 800%, something like that. And so, we’ll be looking at some of those kind of areas that will benefit from some of the overflow from Ethereum.
Now what’s interesting is I speak to a lot of projects, as you know, and they all launch in Ethereum, ‘cause Ethereum is a great platform to raise money on. But everybody that I’m talking to is telling me that they are looking to port their project to something that can scale and something that’s cheaper. So, on Ethereum, you can’t really run a consumer-facing application that, you know, is gonna do millions of transactions, because it’s too expensive. So, something like EOS is a lot more interesting in the sense that it can scale; it’s a lot cheaper. But there are also many other names out there.
I think NEO is going to be a major beneficiary of this migration of Ethereum, and you know, NEO I still think is wildly cheap. It’s, of course, you know, way above our buy-up-to’s, and you know, we’ve owned it as low as 13 cents. But I think NEO has got so much more upside in it, guys. I mean it’s going to be ridiculous. It’s the reason why, you know, I have not trimmed that back even further.
We took some profits in NEO in the early days, but, you know, NEO could be—I’m going to get so much flack for even saying this out loud—but NEO could be a $400 billion project, right? If NEO can—if China—and let me qualify that, right. So, if China, and even if China doesn’t do this, I still think NEO benefits, but maybe not to that massive degree. But if China does embrace NEO and say, “Okay, look, you’re our state champion. Anybody that wants to do an ICO or issue a token has to do it through your platform.” I mean, oh my goodness, you know, that’s huge. That’s absolutely huge for NEO.
Now look, we don’t know if that’s gonna happen or not; it’s definitely speculative. But even if that doesn’t happen, NEO, I think, is worth a lot more than the current $6 billion market cap that is on it. And I also think that the usage of the NEO network is going to go up a lot, and I think the demand for Gas is going to go up a lot, which is why I upped the buy-up-to price on Gas.
Beware of Scams
Okay, what else? One warning I would give you is there are a lot of scams out there. So, BitConnect is a scam. It’s a pyramid scheme. The state of Texas has basically told them, “Hey, you can’t promote here and you have to shut down your ICO.” Whether they’ll listen or not, nobody really knows.
But just, you know, buyer beware, okay? There’s a lot of scams out there in the space. Do your due diligence. I understand you’re not just going to buy coins that I recommend. That’s fine, but just do your due diligence. Make sure that you’re studying the idea, studying the team. You know, where is the team located? If you can’t find any information about where the team is located, that’s a major red flag. You know, what has the team done in the past?
No credible team that I talk to is ever going to say, “Oh, you’re going to make a fortune buying our token.” Right? No credible team will say that. So, it’s typically, if I read something or meet a team and the first thing they’re doing is telling me about how much money I’m going to make on their token, I immediately just write them off.
I’m more interested in, okay, how are you guys going to change the world? How are you guys going to disintermediate existing players in this space? You know, what are your token economics? How are you locking up your tokens? Are your tokens freely traded right away? These are the kind of questions you want to ask when you’re doing your own research.
