The sky is falling!! Actually, the market is. But it's not as bad as some, or most might think. Crypto markets rise, they fall, they're volatile. It's what cryptos do. High risk, high cost, high potential reward. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. The trick is to weed out the trash and move assets around into investments that are sound based on team, product, and potential.
So, who's to say one coin is trash over another? How do you weed out the weak when the entire market seems to be flushing down a toilet of never ending liquidity bleed out? Well. Here's a trick, and anyone with a computer and access to a layer-friendly image application (Photoshop, Gimp, etc) can do.
Visual Comparative Analysis
Let's take two market favorites: DGB and STRAT. Now, I'll go on record with this one: DGB is (in my book) a complete waste of money. The team isn't trustworthy, the tech isn't unique, the platform isn't sound, and most of all - the manipulation of their value in the markets is so painfully apparent it's been classified as "sub-F" by my team and I (and our scale stops at C). Somehow, people love it - I'm assuming they're people who haven't researched much passed the charts and financial history of it on Poloniex. Regardless, it's a solid baseline for the falling market, more so than the hype-machines like Ethereum and Bitcoin themselves. You need to compare apples to apples, in a way, and alt-to-alt in this sense.
STRAT is one of our class-B, decent hold coins, we've followed the trends and market analysis of STRAT, understand the tech-stack, have researched the team, and it's a well-structured development project with a good amount of potential. In other words, the only thing STRAT and DGB share is their general market trend. They're not even the same volume, but as you can see in the chart below - that doesn't much matter when it comes to their comparative analysis:
What the hell is that?!
Here's the legend version:
What we're seeing is a generalized market response rate to the shifts in trading in the Etherium and Bitcoin spaces affecting the values (in BTC) of their respective alt-coins. When it comes to spotting a dud (especially a sub-penny alt like DGB) you'll witness a wasteland of artificial market inflation in the form of high volume pumps followed by short-gain wins by those volume holders as they dump their volume on FUDs or FOMOs looking to ride a wave of quick earns on a "day trade".
...another quick word about Pumps:
Pump & Dump
Taking people with less than $1000 in volume for a ride in cryptos that have attention is EASY, especially when "all I see is red in my Blockfolio! OMG! I'm going broke!" is running rampant everywhere on days like this.
Don't be this stupid.
All someone (or someones) has to do with a low price, high volume coin is - buy all the low cost Ask orders, then buy up a few more Ask orders and the price starts to turn. Do this at volume, and you have an upward trend. Mix it with a tweet or a Facebook post, "XYZ is on the move!" and all the FOMOs come out swinging their cryptos into some random ass coin that has actually little-to-no value other than "it's now trending on [insert some random ass exchange or reddit thread here]".
I'm not saying this is always the case; but in cryptos, news and rumors and social media upvotes can drive a currency through the roof. Hell, a sticker pumped ETH a couple weeks ago. Really. Let's also not forget that the second Antshares mentioned NEO was their new ticker symbol, there was a mad dash for NEOS on Bittrex and other exchanges... and that's not even the new Antshares crypto!
The point I'm making in this tangent is a pretty simple one: Slow the f**k down a few minutes before making some dumbass decision that's going to cost you actual money, but I digress
Spotting the Trends
Trends are easy when they're as apparent as a complete market slide in any direction. These past few weeks have made it incredibly easy to spot quality movers in the space that command higher volumes of shares. This is the silver lining, it means these coins that are actually valuable are inexpensive to get into.
This isn't to say all the coins out there are going to be moon-shot "lambos" for all, but you can use this kind of breakdown to see that "Antshares is crashing! OMG!" isn't that big a deal at the moment because "so is everything else". If you're into a coin that is crashing when everything else (or at least a lot of other coins) isn't, then worry. For now it's just business as usual. Count your chickens before they hatch and don't sell yourself, or your cryptos short, just because you don't have USD or BTC value in something today. The volume you hold in the cryptos you keep is what will give you the leverage you need to make solid trades after this storm blows over.
Anyway, here's some meat and potatoes about what we've deemed worthy, and on 'sale' during this downtrend:
Summer Sale Picks (Top 3)
Siacoin (SC) - easily one of the most undervalued coins on the market. Great tech, solid team. There's a reddit thread floating around right now about a hard-fork, but that statement is marked as conjecture (bad rumor) that's driven the price even further down, making this a steal at the moment. Otherwise, SC is as close to market trend ratio as we can measure. We're confident it will rise with the tide as the market rebounds after this landslide to it's new normal.
Antshares (ANS) - dubbed as China's Ethereum, but we think this is going to be much more than that. This vehicle will help build a conduit between the People's Bank and the global crypto-markets. The current disconnect between the Yuan and cryptos is leaving a door wide open to allow the Chinese to bypass the $10,000USD quota on annual international funds transfers outside of business contracts. The trend analysis on ANS is awkward due to manipulation that we're still researching, but the potential in ANS (soon to be "NEO") is huge.
Golem (GNT) - distributive rendering is a game changer in our eyes, and Golem is more likely to achieve this feat than most in the space these days. That said, aside from the technology being sound, the trend analysis indicates that it's an "actual value provider" cryptocurrency, with the occassional fat-cat pump, but for the most part, it's in-line with market expectations at a .99:1 ratio (basically meaning that it follows along with the rest pretty damned close)
Runners Up
- MonaCoin (MONA)
- SynereoAmp (AMP)
- Startis (STRAT)
- TenX Pay Token (PAY)
- Verge (XVG)
Happy trading, kids.