Howdy y'all, I have been working on this for a few days to try to help inform my future investing as I try to get my money off exchanges and figure out what coins to simplify down to. Don't totally know how to format for forums so maybe this will look uuuugly. Anyway let's get to it!
I did this by hand so naturally it is already "badly" out of date. But I wanted to do a pretty in depth analysis of the market changes since the cap has escalated so drastically. I used the coinmarketcap snapshot for April 02 2017 as the starting point and the numbers are from sometime like midday June 03 2017.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_y5lJeWYX8MAFXpZy_4Il4yq96aWz96RxKxzVKVJ-cc/edit?usp=sharing
Lots of little notes! Anyway:
The symbols paste as the name a second time, so that is why the names are like that.
When I couldn't find a coin on CMC anymore, I just didn't bother following up, since it can be awfully hard to tell. Also when values were like 10^8 etc and throwing me a #VALUE error, I just 0ed those out. Both of these things probably make the lower ranks look worse than they are, but it just reflects to me how chaotic buying and holding all of that is - have to use silly exchanges, deal in low volume/liquidity, etc...
I left tether out of the top 50 since it's bound to stick close to an unchanging value by being pegged purposely to USD. It would get too messy to remove all the "bitCNY" types, so I didn't do anything to those.
One final VERY important note is that the way CMC sorts (I'm not even 100% sure), it has like the low volume, then the ? cap things, and so things with higher values, higher caps can be lower on the list than they should be! I think obviously based on the value it wouldn't affect much as far as top 200 placement goes, but is just one more thing making all this analysis harder.
For my money it makes me reassured that probably buying some more ICOs is good, and holding a lot of top 50 coins is good (top 10 is more confusing). Of course past performance is no perfect predictor of future behavior - maybe next it will be the coins 51-100 who pump the most on average!
So if you average out returns, it looks like this
#1-50 6.3X
#51-100 6.4x
#101-150 6.3x
#151-200 7.2x
#201-250 6.3x
#251-300 4.5x
#301-350 4.9x
#351-400 5.4x
#401-450 12.3x
#451-500 5.4x
#501-550 5.1x
#551-600 4.6x
#601-650 2.6x
#651-700 3.0x
#701-751 2.7x
However, if you take out say the single best result from any category it looks more like this
#1-50 5.6x (removed STRAT)
#51-100 3.6x (removed DGB)
#101-150 5.3x (removed RDD)
#151-200 5.7x (removed XVG)
#201-250 5.1x (removed BLITZ)
#251-300 3.9x (removed BITB)
#301-350 3.7x (removed ANC)
#351-400 4.1x (removed INSANE)
#401-450 6.3x (removed ICASH)
#451-500 2.9x (removed CADASTRAL)
#501-550 4.2x (removed NYC)
#551-600 3.9x (removed XCT)
#601-650 2.2x (removed LDCN)
#651-700 2.8x (removed BCF)
#701-751 2.1x (removed CBD)
No matter what I encourage you to stay diversified (at least 5 coins! going all in can work out wonderfully, but also leave you eating dust). Hopefully this gets actual commentary going, and maybe in the future someone smarter than me will find a way to automate all this type of stuff. Cheers!
One incredible quirk I noticed was that every animal coin seemed to have done spectacularly well in value. No stopping a minnow, dolphin, whale, or catfish!