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EXPERIMENT - Tracking Top 10 Cryptos of 2018 - Month 31 -74%
See the full blog post with all the tables here.
tl;dr: purchased $100 of Top Ten Cryptos in Jan. 2018, haven't sold or traded, repeated in 2019 and 2020, update y'all monthly. July was very strong for crypto. For 2018 Top Ten: ADA finished the month on top. ETH and XRP also very strong. Overall, BTC still waaaay in the lead and is approaching break even point. Three cryptos (IOTA,NEM, DASH) have lost over 90% of value. Over three years, cryptos outperforming S&P if I'd taken a similar approach.

Month Thirty One – Down 74%

Summary after 31 months
Crypto came roaring back in July after an almost all-red June. Each crypto in the 2018 Top Ten finished July at a significantly higher value, led by ADA which ended the month +57%.

Question of the month:

Which member of all three Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Experiments turned 5 years old in July?

A) Bitcoin B) Ethereum C) Bitcoin Cash D) XRP
Scroll down for the answer.

Ranking and July Winners and Losers

Not a ton of movement for the 2018 Top Ten group this month. Cardano and XRP both climbed one position while NEM gained two, clawing itself back into the Top Thirty. Dash headed in the other direction, dropping two places in the rankings.
Considering all that has changed in the world of crypto since the beginning of 2018, it’s interesting to note that only four out of the ten cryptos that started 2018 in the Top Ten have dropped out. NEM, Dash, IOTA, and Stellar have been replaced by Binance Coin, Tether, BSV, and newcomer CRO.
July Winners – It was a very strong month: all cryptos made significant gains in July. But for the third month in a row ADA outperformed the field, gaining +57% in July. ETH finished a close second, up +55% followed by XRP which gained +52%.
July Losers – Even during a good month, NEM can’t catch a break. Its +23% gain made it the worst performer of the 2018 Top Ten.
How has your favorite crypto fared over the first 31 months of the 2018 Top Ten Crypto Index Fund Experiment?
Bitcoin still has the most monthly wins (7) but look at this: thanks to its strong 2020 including three straight monthly wins, Cardano is now right behind BTC with 6 monthly wins. Which project has the most monthly losses? NEM stands alone with 6. Every crypto has at least one monthly win and Bitcoin is unique as the only cryptocurrency that hasn’t lost a month. It came close this month, gaining “only” +26%.

Overall update – BTC approaching break even point, second place ETH in the lonely middle, NEM still worst performing.

Although it wasn’t able to keep pace with its peers in July, BTC continues to slowly but surely approach its break even point. It is down about $1,500 (-12%) since my purchase in January 2018. My initial investment of $100 thirty-one months ago is now worth about $88.
Even though Ethereum has lost half of its value since the experiment began, it is all alone in second place: no other crypto is close.
NEM seems comfortable in its usual place, down at the bottom. It has lost -94% over the life of the experiment. That initial $100 investment in NEM is now worth $5.78. Dash and IOTA join NEM as the only three cryptos in the Top Ten that have lost at least -90% of their value since January 2018.

Total Market Cap for the entire cryptocurrency sector:

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Total market cap since Jan 2018
The crypto market added about $82B in July, making up a ton of ground. The last time we saw a similar level in terms of overall crypto market cap was way back in the fifth month of the 2018 Top Ten Experiment: May 2018.

Bitcoin dominance:

Le Bitdom since January 2018
Since Bitcoin receives much of the attention in the press, it may surprise the casual observer to learn that Bitcoin Dominance dropped quite a bit in July, especially considering BitDom had been stuck at roughly the same level for most of 2020. This signals an interest in altcoins and a willingness to buy into riskier cryptos.
Some context: since the beginning of the experiment, the range of Bitcoin dominance has been quite wide: we saw a high of 70% BitDom in September 2019 and a low of 33% BitDom in February 2018.

Overall return on investment since January 1st, 2018:

The 2018 Top Ten Portfolio gained over $70 in July 2020. If I cashed out today, my $1000 initial investment would return about $260, down -74% from January 2018.
This sounds horrible but don’t hang yourself with a celibate rope: the 2018 return on investment is back where it was about a year ago. Take a look at the ROI over the life of the experiment, month by month, for some context:
Yes, you may notice that the 2018 Top Ten portfolio has finished over half of the first thirty one months down at least -80%, but it’s nice to see the low -70s for a change.
So the Top Ten Cryptos of 2018 are down -74%. What about the 2019 and 2020 Top Tens? Let’s take a look:

• 2019 Top Ten Experiment: up +72% ($1,722)
• 2020 Top Ten Experiment: up +71% ($1,713)

So overall? Taking the three portfolios together, here’s the bottom bottom bottom line:
After a $3000 investment in the 2018, 2019, and 2020 Top Ten Cryptocurrencies, my combined portfolios are worth $3,6965 ($260+ $1,722 +$1,713).
That’s up about +23% for the three combined portfolios, compared to -10% last month. It also marks the highest ROI of the three combined portfolios since I added this metric this year. The previous high was +13% back in January 2020.
Having trouble visualizing? Don’t worry, I got what you need:
Combined ROI
So, a +23% gain by dropping $1k on whichever cryptos were in the Top Ten on January 1st for three straight years, fine. But what if I’d done the same with just one crypto? Bitcoin always wins, right? Thanks to Reddit user u/sebikun for the idea for a new metric and let’s take a look:
3-year club ROI
As you can see, only five cryptos have remained in the Top Ten for all three years: BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, and LTC. Best one to have gone all in on at this point in the Experiment? Ethereum, which would have nearly doubled. Worst choice? If I went with XRP, I would have been down -23%.

Comparison to S&P 500:

I’m also tracking the S&P 500 as part of the experiment to have a comparison point with other popular investments options. The US economy continued to recover in July: the S&P 500 is back up to pre-COVID levels. The initial $1k investment into crypto on January 1st, 2018 would have been worth about $220 had it been redirected to the S&P.
But what if I took the same invest-$1,000-on-January-1st-of-each-year approach with the S&P 500 that I’ve been documenting through the Top Ten Crypto Experiments? Here are the numbers:

• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2018: +$220
• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2019: +$310
• $1000 investment in S&P 500 on January 1st, 2020: +$10

Taken together, here’s the bottom bottom bottom line for a similar approach with the S&P:
After three $1,000 investments into an S&P 500 index fund in January 2018, 2019, and 2020, my portfolio would be worth $3,540.
That is up over+18% since January 2018, compared to a +23% gain of the combined Top Ten Crypto Experiment Portfolios.
That’s a 5% swing in favor of the Top Ten Crypto Portfolios! As you’ll see in the table below, this is the first time since I started recording this metric that crypto has outperformed the S&P had I taken a similar investment approach. This is a big turnaround from the 22% difference in favor of the S&P just last month.
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3 x $1k crypto vs. S&P

Implications/Observations:

The 2018 Top Ten Cryptos have consistently under-performed when compared to the overall crypto market. This month, for example, the total market cap is down -29% from January 2018 compared to the -74% loss for the cryptos that began 2018 in the Top Ten. At no point in the first 31 months of the Experiment has this investment strategy been successful: the 2018 Top Ten as a group have under-performed the overall market every single month.
This of course suggests that I would have done a bit better if I’d picked every crypto, or different cryptos: throwing that $1k on January 1st, 2018 to Bitcoin, for example, would have lost me -12% instead of -74%.
On the other hand, this bit of diversification has served me well compared to going all in on NEM, Dash, or IOTA, all of which are down at least -90%.
The follow-on Top Ten experiments in 2019 and 2020 have seen similar, but not identical, results. There have been a few examples of the Top Ten approach outperforming the overall market in the first 19 months of the parallel 2019 Top Ten Crypto Experiment. And up until the last few months of the most recent 2020 Top Ten Index Fund group of cryptocurrencies, this approach had outperformed the overall market 100% of the time.

Conclusion:

Crypto had an undoubtedly strong month in July, green across the board. Was this just a happy blip, are we in for some consolidation, or are we on the way up? Stay tuned.
Final words: take care of each other, wear your mask, wash your hands.
Thanks for reading and for supporting the experiment. I hope you’ve found it helpful. I continue to be committed to seeing this process through and reporting along the way. Feel free to reach out with any questions and stay tuned for progress reports. Keep an eye out for my parallel projects where I repeat the experiment twice, purchasing another $1000 ($100 each) of two new sets of Top Ten cryptos as of January 1st, 2019 then again on January 1st, 2020.

And the Answer is…

B) Ethereum
Ethereum celebrated its 5 year anniversary on July 30th, 2020.

In this week's edition of DDDD (Data-driven DD), I'll be going over the real reason why we have been seeing a rally for the past few weeks, defying all logic and fundamentals - retail investors. We'll look into several data sets to see how retail interest in stock markets have reached record levels in the past few weeks, how this affected stock prices, and why we've most likely seen the top at this point, unless we see one of the "positive catalysts" that I mentioned in my previous post, which is unlikely (except for more news about Remdesivir).
Disclaimer - This is not financial advice, and a lot of the content below is my personal opinion. In fact, the numbers, facts, or explanations presented below could be wrong and be made up. Don't buy random options because some person on the internet says so; look at what happened to all the SPY 220p 4/17 bag holders. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions on what you should do with your own money, and how levered you want to be based on your personal risk tolerance.
Inspiration
Most people who know me personally know that I spend an unhealthy amount of my free time in finance and trading as a hobby, even competing in paper options trading competitions when I was in high school. A few weeks ago, I had a friend ask if he could call me because he just installed Robinhood and wanted to buy SPY puts after seeing everyone on wallstreetbets post gains posts from all the tendies they’ve made from their SPY puts. The problem was, he actually didn’t understand how options worked at all, and needed a thorough explanation about how options are priced, what strike prices and expiration dates mean, and what the right strategy to buying options are. That’s how I knew we were at the euphoria stage of buying SPY puts - it’s when dumb money starts to pour in, and people start buying securities because they see everyone else making money and they want in, even if they have no idea what they’re buying, and price becomes dislocated from fundementals. Sure enough, less than a week later, we started the bull rally that we are currently in. Bubbles are formed when people buy something not because of logic or even gut feeling, but when people who previously weren’t involved see their dumb neighbors make tons of money from it, and they don’t want to miss out.
A few days ago, I started getting questions from other friends about what stocks they should buy and if I thought something was a good investment. That inspired me to dig a bit deeper to see how many other people are thinking the same thing.
Data
Ever since March, we’ve seen an unprecedented amount of money pour into the stock market from retail investors.
Google Search Trends
\"what stock should I buy\" Google Trends 2004 - 2020
\"what stock should I buy\" Google Trends 12 months
\"stocks\" Google Trends 2004 - 2020
\"stocks\" Google Trends 12 months
Brokerage data
Robinhood SPY holders
\"Robinhood\" Google Trends 12 months
wallstreetbets' favorite broker Google Trends 12 months
Excerpt from E*Trade earnings statement
Excerpt from Schwab earnings statement
TD Ameritrade Excerpt
Media
cnbc.com Alexa rank
CNBC viewership & rankings
wallstreetbets comments / day
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investing comments / day
Analysis
What we can see from Reddit numbers, Google Trends, and CNBC stats is that in between the first week of March and first week of April, we see a massive inflow of retail interest in the stock market. Not only that, but this inflow of interest is coming from all age cohorts, from internet-using Zoomers to TV-watching Boomers. Robinhood SPY holdings and earnings reports from E*Trade, TD Ameritrade, and Schwab have also all confirmed record numbers of new clients, number of trades, and assets. There’s something interesting going on if you look closer at the numbers. The numbers growth in brokers for designed for “less sophisticated” investors (i.e. Robinhood and E*Trade) are much larger than for real brokers (i.e. Schwab and Ameritrade). This implies that the record number of new users and trade volume is coming from dumb money. The numbers shown here only really apply to the US and Canada, but there’s also data to suggest that there’s also record numbers of foreign investors pouring money into the US stock market as well.
However, after the third week of March, we see the interest start to slowly decline and plateau, indicating that we probably have seen most of those new investors who wanted to have a long position in the market do so.
SPX daily
Rationale
Pretty much everything past this point is purely speculation, and isn’t really backed up by any solid data so take whatever I say here with a cup of salt. We could see from the graph that new investor interest started with the first bull trap we saw in the initial decline from early March, and peaking right after the end of the crash in March. So it would be fair to guess that we’re seeing a record amount of interest in the stock market from a “buy the dip” mentality, especially from Robinhood-using Millennials. Here’s a few points on my rationalization of this behavior, based on very weak anecdotal evidence

• They missed out of their chance of getting in the stock market at the start of the bull market that happened at the end of 2009
• They’ve all seen the stock market make record gains throughout their adult lives, but believing that the market might be overheated, they were waiting for a crash
• Most of them have gotten towards the stage of their lives where they actually have some savings and can finally put some money aside for investments
• This stock market crash seems like their once-in-a-decade opportunity that they’ve been waiting for, so everyone jumped in
• Everyone’s stuck at their homes with vast amounts of unexpected free time on their hands

Most of these new investors got their first taste in the market near the bottom, and probably made some nice returns. Of course, since they didn’t know what they were doing, they probably put a very small amount of money at first, but after seeing a 10% return over one week, validating that maybe they do know something, they decide to slowly pour in more and more of their life savings. That’s what’s been fueling this bull market.
Sentiment & Magic Crayons
As I mentioned previously, this bull rally will keep going until enough bears convert to bulls. Markets go up when the amount of new bullish positions outnumber the amount of new bearish positions, and vice versa. Record amounts of new investors, who previously never held a position in the market before, fueled the bullish side of this equation, despite all the negative data that has come out and dislocating the price from fundamentals. All the smart money that was shorting the markets saw this happening, and flipped to become bulls because you don’t fight the trend, even if the trend doesn’t reflect reality.
From the data shown above, we can see new investor interest growth has started declining since mid March and started stagnating in early April. The declining volume in SPY since mid-March confirms this. That means, once the sentiment of the new retail investors starts to turn bearish, and everyone figures out how much the stocks they’re holding are really worth, another sell-off will begin. I’ve seen something very similar to this a few years ago with Bitcoin. Near the end of 2017, Bitcoin started to become mainstream and saw a flood of retail investors suddenly signing up for Coinbase (i.e. Robinhood) accounts and buying Bitcoin without actually understanding what it is and how it works. Suddenly everyone, from co-workers to grandparents, starts talking about Bitcoin and might have thrown a few thousand dollars into it. This appears to be a very similar parallel to what’s going on right now. Of course there’s differences here in that equities have an intrinsic value, although many of them have gone way above what they should be intrinsically worth, and the vast majority of retail investors don’t understand how to value companies. Then, during December, when people started thinking that the market was getting a bit overheated, some started taking their profits, and that’s when the prices crashed violently. This flip in sentiment now look like it has started with equities.
SPY daily
Technical Analysis, or magic crayons, is a discipline in finance that uses statistical analysis to predict market trends based on market sentiment. Of course, a lot of this is hand-wavy and is very subjective; two people doing TA on the same price history can end up getting opposite results, so TA should always be taken with a grain of salt and ideally be backed with underlying justification and not be blindly followed. In fact, I’ve since corrected the ascending wedge I had on SPY since my last post since this new wedge is a better fit for the new trading data.
There’s a few things going on in this chart. The entire bull rally we’ve had since the lows can be modelled using a rising wedge. This is a pattern where there is a convergence of a rising support and resistance trendline, along with falling volume. This indicates a slow decline in net bullish sentiment with investors, with smaller and smaller upside after each bounce off the support until it hits a resistance. The smaller the bounces, the less bullish investors are. When the bearish sentiment takes over across investors, the price breaks below this wedge - a breakdown, and indicates a start of another downtrend.
This happened when the wedge hit resistance at around 293, which is around the same price as the 200 day moving average, the 62% retracement (considered to be the upper bound of a bull trap), and a price level that acted as a support and resistance throughout 2019. The fact that it gapped down to break this wedge is also a strong signal, indicating a sudden swing in investor sentiment overnight. The volume of the break down also broke the downwards trend of volume we’ve had since the beginning of the bull rally, indicating a sudden surge of people selling their shares. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we will go straight from here, and I personally think that we will see the completion of a heads-and-shoulders pattern complete before SPY goes below 274, which in itself is a strong support level. In other words, SPY might go from 282 -> 274 -> 284 -> 274 before breaking the 274 support level.
VIX Daily
Doing TA is already sketchy, and doing TA on something like VIX is even more sketchy, but I found this interesting so I’ll mention it. Since the start of the bull rally, we’ve had VIX inside a descending channel. With the breakdown we had in SPY yesterday, VIX has also gapped up to have a breakout from this channel, indicating that we may see future volatility in the next week or so.
Putting Everything Together
Finally, we get to my thesis. This entire bull rally has been fueled by new retail investors buying the dip, bringing the stock price to euphoric levels. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been seeing the people waiting at the sidelines for years to get into the stock market slowly FOMO into the rally in smaller and smaller volumes, while the smart money have been locking in their profits at an even slower rate - hence an ascending wedge. As the amount of new retail interest in the stock market started slowed down, the amount of new bulls started to decline. It looks like Friday might have been the start of the bearish sentiment taking over, meaning it’s likely that 293 was the top, unless any significant bullish events happen in the next two weeks like a fourth round of stimulus, in which case we might see 300. This doesn’t mean we’ll instantly go back to circuit breakers on Monday, and we might see 282 -> 274 -> 284 -> 274 happen before panic, this time by the first-time investors, eventually bringing us down towards SPY 180.
tldr; we've reached the top
EDIT - I'll keep a my live thoughts here as we move throughout this week in case anyone's still reading this and interested.
5/4 8PM - /ES was red last night but steadily climbed, which was expected since 1h RSI was borderline oversold, leaving us to a slightly green day. /ES looks like it has momentum going up, but is approaching towards overbought territory now. Expecting it to go towards 284 (possibly where we'll open tomorrow) and bouncing back down from that price level
5/5 Market Open - Well there goes my price target. I guess at this point it might go up to 293 again, but will need a lot of momentum to push back there to 300. Seems like this is being driven by oil prices skyrocketing.
5/5 3:50PM - Volume for the upwards price action had very little volume behind it. Seeing a selloff EOD today, could go either way although I have a bearish bias. Going to hold cash until it goes towards one end of the 274-293 channel (see last week's thesis). Still believe that we will see it drop below 274 next week, but we might be moving sideways in the channel this week and a bit of next week before that happens. Plan for tomorrow is buy short dated puts if open < 285. Otherwise, wait till it goes to 293 before buying those puts
5/5 6PM - What we saw today could be a false breakout above 284. Need tomorrow to open below 285 for that to be confirmed. If so, my original thesis of it going back down to 274 before bouncing back up will still be in play.
5/6 EOD - Wasn't a false breakout. Looks like it's still forming the head-and-shoulders pattern mentioned before, but 288 instead of 284 as the level. Still not sure yet so I'm personally going to be holding cash and waiting this out for the next few days. Will enter into short positions if we either go near 293 again or drop below 270. Might look into VIX calls if VIX goes down near 30.
5/7 Market Open - Still waiting. If we break 289 we're probably heading to 293. I'll make my entry to short positions when we hit that a second time. There's very little bullish momentum left (see MACD 1D), so if we hit 293 and then drop back down, we'll have a MACD crossover event which many traders and algos use as a sell signal. Oil is doing some weird shit.
5/7 Noon - Looks like we're headed to 293. Picked up VIX 32.5c 5/27 since VIX is near 30.
5/7 11PM - /ES is hovering right above 2910, with 4h and 1h charts are bullish from MACD and 1h is almost overbought in RSI. Unless something dramatic happens we'll probably hit near 293 tomorrow, which is where I'll get some SPY puts. We might drop down before ever touching it, or go all the way to 295 (like last time) during the day, but expecting it to close at or below 293. After that I'm expecting a gap down Monday as we start the final leg down next week towards 274. Expecting 1D MACD to crossover in the final leg down, which will be a signal for bears to take over and institutions / day traders will start selling again
5/8 Market Open - Plan is to wait till a good entry today, either when technicals looks good or we hit 293, and then buy some SPY June 285p and July 275p
5/8 Noon - Everything still going according to plan. Most likely going to slowly inch towards 293 by EOD. Will probably pick up SPY puts and more VIX calls at power hour (3 - 4PM). Monday will probably gap down, although there's a small chance of one more green / sideways day before that happens if we have bullish catalysts on the weekend.
5/8 3:55PM - SPY at 292.60. This is probably going to be the closest we get to 293. Bought SPY 290-260 6/19 debit spreads and 292-272 5/15 debit spreads, as well as doubling down on VIX calls from yesterday, decreasing my cost basis. Still looks like there's room for one more green day on Monday, so I left some money on the side to double down if that's the case, although it's more likely than not we won't get there.
5/8 EOD - Looks like we barely touched 293 exactly AH before rebounding down. Too bad you can't buy options AH, but more convinced we'll see a gap down on Monday. Going to work on another post over the weekend and do my updates there. Have a great weekend everyone!

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