Monthly Update — Jan 2018
The correction
This past month was an amazing run up for crypto, capped off with a huge correction.
Early and into the middle of month, I followed up on almost all of my token holdings (except DATA) and added two new tokens: POE and ZRX.
Because things were going well at first, I was super bullish- too bullish possibly- on everything. Now that I’ve seen a bit of reality, I’d like to consolidate a bunch of my token holdings into the ones I feel are really legitimate.
This has motivated me to do much more serious research. I’ve read the whitepapers and followed the updates for everything I own, but now it was time to re-read, slowly, and understand. I’ve also learned a lot since I originally looked into some of these companies, and the new knowledge creates new perspectives.
Deals Memos
One of the keepers is Quantstamp, and I recently wrote a deal memo for them. I’m going to do this as a series that I’m calling Deals Memos. (“Deals” because it’s not really one deal.)
In his book Angel, Jason Calacanis emphasizes deal memos as a way to look back and assess your investing and decision making. I was using this monthly update as a form of that, but I’d like to get a lot more detailed. My idea is I’ll set up a Deals Memo post for each of my investments, and I’ll update it over time as my ideas evolve (while preserving updated portions for historical reference). Here’s the first one:
MJ Hybrid
I branched off of crypto for a bit with MJ Hybrid, which is a SeedInvest crowd deal. I’ve been meaning to get back into other investment vehicles, and the dip in crypto over the past couple weeks really hammered home the importance of diversifying.
I was on the fence on this one for a little while, but I liked what I was seeing, and a couple non-direct signals (owner persistence, CA marijuana laws) finally compelled me to pull the trigger on the last day of their crowd raise.
I now have this, Lendsnap, and Commerce.ai from SeedInvest. Plus public stocks. Plus crypto. So a couple different options going, and a few more in the works.
POE and ZRX
In crypto news, I picked up both of these at the height of the token market in January, and while I do believe in both projects, I may not have thought carefully enough about the usefulness of the tokens themselves. Specifically, in each case, the token velocity issue they’ll each have… there’s not a good reason to hold the tokens, so the token value won’t go up even if the products themselves are amazing.
Other groups are handling this issue in different ways, but to my knowledge, neither of these are addressing it yet.
I won’t sell them because I like both projects, but I doubt I’ll buy more right now.
ZRX is in a particularly interesting area that I want to invest in, too(decentralized exchanges), and of all the players, I like them the best (It’s called 0x Project). Still… the token doesn’t have much incentive to rise in value, so I’m a little conflicted on owning it.
Options
Robinhood started offering options trading, and I finally got access. I have very little knowledge and no experience with this, but I’ve been playing around. Along with reading charts, I’m trying to open myself up to as many options as possible to make money, even if ultimately I don’t pursue some of the more “trader” stuff like this.
I also came across Trading View this month, so I have a lot of new information to study.
Wrap Up
To wrap up, I bought more Bitcoin and Ether this month, despite (because of) the dip. I’m still bullish but more cautious than I was a month ago. I also did a lot of research on some of the other larger cryptocurrencies.
I’m looking at those, but sticking to the weekly BTC and ETH investments for now. It’s especially important to buy now if I have faith in the future, but it’s been tricky to buy as it’s been dropping, haha. In any case, after the recent senate hearing, I fully believe the market just corrected itself, and it will grow more naturally now… but grow a lot.
One last thing is I found the “free” Bitcoin Cash that I got when it forked. I was using Bread Wallet at the time, and I didn’t realize I had a one-time BCH transfer in the app hidden under “advanced settings.” I’m not a big BCH fan, so I held it for a day or two before I traded it for some BTC and ultimately some LEND.
