As we approach the new year, the cryptocurrency markets are booming once again. It seems like all major altcoins are surging, and Bitcoin itself is approaching $20,000. At this point, my cryptocurrency purchase experiment is approaching the five month mark. I had purchased coins in three separate batches, but now I’ve just added a fourth. I had some cash that was just drifting in a Scottrade account, so I decided to move that into cryptocurrency. I’ve now got 35 total coins involved in this experiment. Before I go on about this update, let’s touch on some background.
Previous articles on this cryptocurrency experiment:
I originally purchased 16 different coins in August 2017. A few weeks later, I bought five more bringing the total to 21. At the beginning of December, I moved some money that was languishing in a Scottrade account into Bitcoin, and made two more purchases of six and seven different coins from that pool. Adding the Bitcoin Gold I received from a BTC fork, that brought my total to 35 coins! Quite a few more than I initially planned, but I feel pretty good about this collection now. There were some coins, like Ripple, Waves, XLM, ADA, XSPEC, and others, that I just couldn’t stand by and not purchase; there was too much positive buzz on forums about them.
Because I now have such a wide spread of purchases across several months, I decided to refine my graphs a bit. The percentage change and dollar value change graphs are still sorted by purchase date from left (oldest) to right (newest), but now have time period groups at the bottom. These charts are still color-coded, with orange representing “the big boys” (primary trading coins), blue for potential windfalls (cheap coins I bought a lot of), and gray for everything else.
Figure 1. Dollar value change from initial purchase to current value (as of 12/16/2017), sorted and grouped by time since initial purchase.
Figure 2. Percentage change from initial purchase to current value (as of 12/16/2017), sorted and grouped by time since initial purchase. Note: This may differ significantly from dollar value change, as coins were purchased in highly varied amounts.
As you can see from these graphs, some of these new coins have already started booming. As I mentioned above, there were some coins that were being recommended and discussed broadly across many forums; these are the coins that are spiking now. In only three days, a couple of them have grown as much as my coins from a couple months ago. I’m starting to get the impression that, while some random threads about a coin might not mean anything, to see something like Ripple being talked about in every forum you visit is a great indicator for possible growth.
Figure 3. Left: Current percentage of holdings based on USD value, as of 12/16/2017. Right: Percentage of holdings at the time of purchase based on USD value.
I’ve included pie charts for my overall portfolio above, showing percentage of holdings currently and at the initial purchase. Comparing these two should show how growth has changed the distribution of what I’m invested in.
I have also developed a new visualization, which is very similar to my percentage and dollar value growth charts. Instead of sorting and grouping by date purchased though, these new graphs are sorted by total market capitalization (as provided by Coin Market Cap) and grouped by large, mid, and small cap amounts. These new market cap/growth graphs are featured below:
Figure 4. Dollar value change from initial purchase to current value (as of 12/16/2017), sorted and grouped total market capitalization. Market capitalization values obtained from https://coinmarketcap.com/.
Figure 5. Percentage change from initial purchase to current value (as of 12/16/2017), sorted and grouped total market capitalization. Market capitalization values obtained from https://coinmarketcap.com/. Note: Percentage may differ significantly from dollar value change, as coins were purchased in highly varied amounts.
I’m not sure if there is much that I can extrapolate yet from this market cap/growth setup. It does seem like the biggest percentage growth coins are coming from the medium sized market caps; these might be the best coins for potential windfalls (large number of coins, smaller USD investment). In terms of raw dollar value growth, it’s more of a mixed bag, but it seems most comes from the large market cap coins.
The final item I wanted to mention was an Android app I’ve been using to watch my investments. It’s already fairly popular I think, but I just learned about it. The app is called “Blockfolio,” and it’s very well done. If you have a variety of coins spread across multiple wallets as I do now, it’s helpful to have one place to view market changes. I really like that Blockfolio doesn’t ask for any account or wallet information, and doesn’t require any permissions from Android. It’s just a manually populated value tracker, which is perfect. I love that you can also sort by name, total value, or percentage change. Even accounting for multiple purchases over time, it will even tell you your overall profit or loss. I track the same information in a spreadsheet, but it’s nice to have an app that does it as well.