Money can’t buy you happiness. But right now, a little fiat can buy you some big, heavy bags of certain alts. Whether or not that makes you happy is up to you.
Now, the crypto market’s bearish sentiment is taking its toll on some solid projects. Imagine launching an ICO in Jan. 2018 and trading your project’s tokens for $1,300 ETH.
That same ETH is now hovering around $200. Rekt.
Unless you were smart with your holdings and did a little prudent crypto shuffling, your project’s balance sheet is a sorry sight.
The overall market has seen a bumpy, months-long downward drift, sinking an untold number of Blockfolio balances along with it. Some ICOs are certainly feeling the icy pain of the market’s decline.
But HODLers with a longterm view could give two shits about falling prices. The technological foundation for our decentralized future continues to grow.
Blockchains keep getting more secure, scalable, and packed with helpful features. Take $KMD, for example. Their chains are notarized and backed up by the hashrate of BTC, and their atomic swap platform is approaching 1M TP/S.
Looking at today’s prices on CoinMarketCap feels like a trip to Walmart. I welcome days where nearly every coin’s losses are double-digit red.
In my “oh hell no, this isn’t financial advice” personal opinion, those days offer fantastic buying opportunities.
And if you’re in my boat, you’re absolutely overwhelmed by the number of exciting blockchain projects just itching for a new token-holder.
But even if I had an unlimited faucet of fiat to trade for crypto, keeping up with forks and token swaps and airdrops and rebrands and wallet updates and… well, there’s a lot to keep track of when you have a position in a coin.
Point is, you’ve got to choose wisely. You’ll need to do some digging around before finding a crypto to ride. And remember that you’ll need to allocate a little time for monitoring every project you get involved with.
So, where do you find the coins with the most upward potential? How do you narrow your expansive list of promising coins? What’s the formula for selecting potential winners?
We’ll get there in a bit. But first, let’s chat about why some cryptocurrencies have so much to gain.
A Coiling Spring
Institutional investors are poised to inject boatloads of cash into the crypto market
Between the ETFs, OTC trading desks, blockchain patents, crypto hedge funds, custodial solutions — and more! — it’s obvious that the big dollars are gearing up to come and swim with us little fish.
Today’s overall crypto market cap hovers around $200B. And the Great Bull Run of late 2017/early 2018 saw that figure much closer to $800B.
Now, tons — if not most — coins saw their all-time highs during that run. But the candlesticks have been pointing mostly downhill ever since.
Unfortunately, the crypto market is still immature and overrun with emotion.
If the industry gets wind of important news — real or not — coins either climb steep mountains or fall into deep pits.
But all those coins reached their ATHs without any help from ETFs. Only a year ago, big banks and corporations saw the crypto space as a passing fad that posed no credible threat to their establishments.
That’s all changed now. The big dogs are hungrier than ever. The juicy profits are simply too tasty to ignore.
Now, when those institutional millions start to slosh right into the market and float all boats — which is a near inevitability due to the cyclical nature of the cryptosphere — some ATHs from the last bull run will be regained.
Once BTC finally crosses that psychological barrier of $20K, alt season will be in full swing. We’ll see plenty of projects break right through their former ATHs and go much, much higher.
This time around, it’s going to be all the institutional money that’s going to help propel our moon rockets.
And when all those deep-pocketed investors come aboard — probably not until the market’s regulatory framework is more established — the first coins destined for oversized bags are the popular, community-driven projects at the top of the ranks.
The building tension is almost palpable. Today’s crypto market has a vibe about it. We can feel something major brewing… it’s only a matter of time before the lid’s blown off.
Which brings us to our simplistic formula…
Highest Retracement Percentage + Top-25 Market Cap Ranking = Biggest Potential
There’s a good reason why the top-25 projects listed on CoinMarketCap rank so high: Popularity.
Crypto enthusiasts rally behind coins and teams they feel are going places — technologically and/or financially.
And now, I’d like to pass along a free resource that’ll help you evaluate coins. Sure, there are other sites like it but this is the one I prefer to click around on.
With it, you’re able to check, among other parameters, a coin’s ATH, its retracement percentage, as well as the time elapsed since the ATH:
The benchmark for a 10X gain, assuming a coin ever returns to its once-lofty heights, is a 90% retracement. Maybe the possibility of 10X profits is what drew you to crypto in the first place?
And as of today, a total of seven top-25 coins are at or above a 90% pullback:
- $MIOTA = 90%
- $NEO = 91%
- $LISK = 92%
- $XRP = 93%
- $TRX = 93%
- $ADA = 95%
Winner, winner, chicken dinner
The victor, $XEM, comes in at a whopping 96 percent. And Cardano, trailing only by 1%, is a close 2nd place. Both coins — so long as you believe in the underlying projects’ fundamentals — are absolute steals right now.
Final thoughts…
If you’re in the camp that believes the entire crypto market will one day return to its former glory, you’re already HODLing.
You’ve got a few bags — hopefully, filled via dollar-cost averaging on dips — that won’t see time on any exchanges until they’ve at least doubled in value.
As we patiently await the bear market’s passing, we can smile knowing what the future holds. Despite what all the agenda-pushing FUDsters may say, crypto is not dead.
Low prices may look bleak on the surface but blow the dust off and you may find a shining gemstone. Just look and you’ll find them — there’s plenty to go around.
And when you combine a top-25 ranking with a huge yet temporary fall from grace, you’ve got the makings for tokens and coins that could help you turn a sizable profit.
Now you know where to look and what to look for. The rest depends on your individual research.
Happy hunting out there!
By the way…
If you liked what you just read and need help getting your blockchain message to the masses, I’d love to hear about your project.
Even if you just want to chat about crypto, you can find me here: blockchainauthor at Gmail