Looking Back

I took some time this week to do a retrospective.  I pulled my trading history and sorted by volume pulling the largest transactions on the top.  A look back at my buying history has uncovered many shorts I might be able to take advantage of.

First off, as far as I see it, there are two kinds of trades that can be properly called a “short”.  One of which I believe should be made illegal (even in the legacy trading world) and the other is what I expect I’ll be able to do over the next month or two.

The benign use of the term “a short trade” references the selling of an owned asset to (hopefully) re-purchase that asset at a discount, thus pulling out value from the decreasing asset.

To me, if you actually rightfully own something, you should be allowed to sell it.  And conversely, if you have the financial ability to purchase an asset, you should NOT be prevented from buying it.  So, uncovering my old sold assets I’m attempting to re-buy them for less.

The type of “short sell” that IMHO gets in the way of healthy market formation is usually called a “leveraged short.”  This is where the trader borrows the asset they are shorting, sells that asset, and re-buys the asset at a lower price to pay back the amount of that asset to the borrower.  This creates situations like what happened with Gamestop and such.

Anyhow, rant aside as I looked through my historical transactions, I found all these nuggets.  Harvesting the larger of the transactions I’m able to see when I sold at quantity or liquidated in completeness.

The thing is, even if your trading history has long since passed you, that doesn’t mean you can’t harvest it for some easy gains.  Afterall – gains are relative to both sides of the trade and they don’t really care how much time has elapsed in the middle of each side.

Constellation is back in my bags (hopefully)

Constellation is a funny little project – not really sure what’s up with it lately, but as I took a look at older trades I could capitalize on I found my selloff of all my remaining DAG back in November of 2020.

DAG is Constellation’s coin and something that I think I could get back into at a gain. I think eventually DAG could perhaps become a network utility core coin, so to me it’s an ok hodl and I know it’s good for bots.

It looks like I sold off at 0.251382 USDT and as I went fishing I cast my net down deep to see if I could recover my DAG at a really good gain.  I placed three bids and hopefully at least two of them will get filled, I highly doubt all three will be filled.

I’m only spending 100 USDT on this, so I’ll get back less DAG than I sold.  100 USDT seems the lowest I can start a bot with.  I had many exciting bots with the DAG volatility over time and I hope it’s price markup didn’t kill it’s momentum swings.

It looks like it’s still a crypto contender but it’s really all up to the project community to take it from here. To me, it’s just another asset I can BOT with.  It’s still priced below a quarter of a dollar each, so I can get a pretty decent amount for my 100 USDT.  So long as I’m getting in lower than where I sold, I’m making a gain to get back into DAG.  The theory here is that this is my same original bag bought many years ago, as it truly is.

I honestly don’t remember what I originally paid for my DAG bag but it was during the 2020 Covid crisis and DAG prices were around $0.006 and I had so many more then I had when I sold the last bit.  I remember holding it for a very long time before any real move happened. It was a losing position for many months and one of many depressing 2020 purchases I made back then that have proven to be wise to hold onto now.

Once DAG started to move up, the volatility was phenomenally predictable.  And, as the rest of my portfolio started to take off as the prices increased.  My DAG bag value increased until my bag value was too much of a percentage of my portfolio based on what I saw project progress was at the time. So I sold a bit off at a time over the first push up and I kept using the balance for bots.

After all the selling I was left with 900 or so DAG.  I finally capitulated at 22 cents and I have hated not having a DAG bot rolling since then.  As I look back now, I watched DAG grow to a healthy 40 cents and is back now under a quarter – I see an opportunity to resurrect the dead.  Those who know me know I have a fond affection for holding DAG – so here’s hoping by some miracle all my bids get filled.

This is the challenge of having many assets; it’s often hard to pull the needle out of the haystack and almost impossible to sell market highs properly.  This is why I now keep everything I buy because for me it’s better to lose occasionally than to deplete my bags prematurely.  This is one of the things I learned from selling my DAG.  I missed out on the bots after that point, so to me the cost of not owning DAG was a factor also.  Everyone’s strategy is different.

Choice and Kingdom Trust

I have been back and forth with the Choice / Kingdom Trust people for a few weeks now.  At this point they collected all the information they needed from me and submitted the transfer.  They got a rejection and asked me for clarification – turns out I answered a question incorrectly.  I needed to correct my application so they could resubmit it.  Fingers crossed it goes through this time.

I continue to play Blinko each day and earn free bitcoin!  I now have 0.0005615 BTC for free – it’s worth $24 as 1 BTC is now worth $44,447.  I encourage all to do this because many of us see a future where these small amounts of bitcoin can be worth far greater amounts of US dollars then they are now.  Plus, this is FREE!  Click here to access and join me in my daily Blinko sessions 😉

ADA / Cardano, oh my…

Cardano is a bit of an interesting project.  I honestly don’t know what to make of them as there are an amazingly large amount of confusing signals making it into my brain. 

The funny thing about Cardano is that it’s one of the oldest crypto projects with a top 10 Crypto Market Cap yet, as a whole, has yet to deliver on many of their promises.  ADA is Cardano’s network coin and many view Cardano as a far more solid project than other platforms that already do what Cardano promises to do.  Perhaps the accolades are because the market cap of the ADA token is far greater than Cardano’s competitors?  Or maybe they know something we don’t because the truth is that I don’t have the time to sit in on their community meetings to learn for myself and I already purchased my ADA back in 2020.  I’m not looking to get more, only to position my existing ADA in the proper vehicles to increase my portfolio value.

This bizarre financial milestone (potential over value) has been explained away as a time lapse to allow for Cardano to focus on building things correctly from the start.  The idea is that when they come out with something, it will be as near bulletproof as possible, because they took their time developing and testing it.

As a former CTO of software companies, I guided development teams through many product build outs.  Our core focus was on building strong foundations, so I understand that mentality and identify with the challenges.  Cardano has all the money and all the time to do their best work.

But, knowing that we all are human, I kind of think there may be another explanation here.  Perhaps one more obvious one that we all aren’t seeing.  As the saying goes, the simplest explanation is almost always the correct one and perhaps ADA’s price hovering around a dollar for so long has brought it a lot of attention?

What I think is that the pricing of ADA in combination with the market cap, flashy marketing, and a really good community expanding with ease via the socials, has led to a lot of exposure for Cardano.  I think the world-wide dollarization has brought focus to ADA as it’s price hovers around a dollar now.  I think this is a place where people think putting a buck into it will have a better chance of being worth more than a buck when they go to take it out. Screw interest because you can stake! 😉

ADA has hit as high as $3, yet the promise is it should increase maybe to $4 or $5 I guess… Not sure when (if ever) this is meant to happen and it doesn’t matter much to me as I’ll still own my original ADA through that.

ADA DEFI

Just food for thought: no matter what you think about price or the future of the Cardano project, I had an experience with Cardano this week that I thought I’d share.  It shows me that there is perhaps more to this story.

I’ve been trying to get my core network coins into the proper defi networks for some time now.  ADA is no exception.  Cardano has come out with a few projects and active services within their defi ecosystem as well as wallets and such.  I really can’t complain anymore that all ADA is good for is bots and staking….  So it’s time to expand into ADA DEFI.

As I interact with a new chain I tend to go on these wild goose chases pre-searching (the safe google) for answers on how to actually accomplish my goals.  Sometimes I’m met with ease and, for example, on-boarding my first time into TERRA was super simple. Onboarding into COSMOS was also effortless.  But transferring ADA to a wallet and using that wallet inside anything productive within the Cardano DEFI space proved to be nearly impossible for me in my first try this past week.

Now, take this as a grain of salt, because MANY other thousands of people are in the ADA DEFI network and I have not given up on it yet.  I just have this idea that my experiences within each chain that I wish to keep invested in MUST be easy to understand and repeatable without pre-searching the same questions in the future.

Perhaps I’m using the wrong wallet, or the wrong services, or something silly – I honestly don’t know.  What I do know is that I scheduled my usual 4 hour focus slot in my calendar to roll into ADA DEFI.  My goals during that time were to on-board ADA into Cardano, then purchase some ADA specific assets and set up liquidity staking inside ADA DEFI.  I was not able to complete all the steps and I thought that I got farther than I really did.  This was disappointing particularly because of the looooong wait and the implied promise to be perfect when released.

I tried to buy another asset with my ADA and wasn’t met with the other end of the purchase. I think the liquidity isn’t inside their network yet, which makes sense since I have these troubles in some other DEFI networks as well.  Though there are NFTs in Cardano, so I know that lots of folks are using this platform.

Cardano appears to have a bright future as the projects I saw within their ecosystem seemed to promise a lot – but as with general Cardano development, the question is how long will we have to wait for that network to catch up with itself and when it catches up with it’s promises, will the users have moved on?

I have such a small amount of ADA left because I was in ADA since it was a nickel each – so to me, it doesn’t really matter how Cardano does as my bag is de-risked already.  I just want to get those coins into their ecosystem so I can ride it all the way up, or watch it crash first hand.  All the ADA I have now have a negative cost basis, so to me, no matter the value of my ADA now, it’s all gravy.

Trader JOE is on the move

Here is something that might be kind of amusing to those who aren’t in the Avalanche ecosystem and haven’t heard about one of their hottest coins, JOE.  JOE is the utility coin for Trader Joe.  No, not the store, LOL.  Trader Joe is one of the first decentralized exchanges (DEX) inside the Avalanche ecosystem.

I bought and staked JOE early on. I have put JOE into liquidity mining contracts and am even mining the staked coin as staked assets are sometimes able to be traded.  I’m way underwater on this asset though as I believe my average price is in the 3 USDT range and I think JOE is around a single USDST now. That 3 USDT price was what I paid for the JOE I purchased.  The JOE I have received as rewards from staking or liquidity mining have a zero dollar cost.  Truly I don’t care because I don’t intend on selling my JOE ever as I believe it’s a core utility coin.

I made a bit of a move this week though: I pulled some JOE out of it’s liquidity mining and combined it with my wallet balance then pushed it into an exchange and got a bot rolling.  Just like my QI from Avalanche, it’s time for JOE to start stacking me some real crypto 😉

Who knows if it will be a good asset to bot with, but I’m about to find out I guess.

Quick QI update

My quoteless Kucoin QI/USDT BOT has gained 25 new USDT for me and it’s still going strong at about a 400% grid APY – yay!

What is grid APY?

There are two measures of a BOTs’ success. The first is “grid-based” gains and the second is “market-based” gains.  If I start a bot and the asset appreciates 1 USDT then the market-based gain is 1 USDT * the quantity of BASE.  In this case perhaps several full circle grid trades were able to be completed and the “grid-based” gain is measured by the NEW crypto created during those trade cycles.

In general, I ignore market-based measures as with my strategy I’m not looking for organic growth, more of an up and down, then out the bottom of my bot range.  I’m waiting for the Market-Based gains to go back to zero to cash out of the bot with all my BASE intact.  BUT the grid based profits is the new crypto created by the grid trading happening inside the bot.

Quick LUNA update

Ironically the LUNA bot I am experimenting with has generated 23 new USDT for me at a return rate of 40% grid APY. This doesn’t sound all that great until you realize that the QI bot needed 22 days to generate the 25 USDT, whereas the LUNA bot only needed 11 days to generate nearly the same return.  Granted the amount of investment into LUNA is larger, as that asset is more stable IMHO then QI.  It’s my hope that LUNA starts moving quickly and that should result in a massive influx of capital changing hands. This should hopefully give Kucoin the volume to reward my bots well.

Exchange Transfers

I did something that made me chuckle this week.  I definitely restarted many bots and I always chuckle a little when I do. What I did made me chuckle even more and, if it works, I think I have figured a way to better disperse my desperate bags across my accounts.

I needed a new, fresh account with no history for some experiments so I went about creating a new account on Kucoin here.

I am using this new account to run my new LUNA bot.  I am also using this account for a really interesting idea I came up with on how to transfer assets from one exchange to another without paying through the nose.

First, a traditional way to transfer 10 assets from one exchange to another is to do 10 transfers.  One for each asset.  This takes a long time and no matter how you do it, it will cost you at least 10 times as much as it would cost to do a single transfer, right?  And really, to do this correctly, one must send a small amount first to verify that it works, then the rest.  So this means potentially 20 transfers… yucko…  And these are all really small amounts, so fees may be larger than the transferred amount value.

I got to thinking, why wouldn’t I just sell in place and re-buy on the new exchange?

That’s impractical since the time it would take to sell is arbitrary: there is no real usable way to consolidate unless you sell all at (or near) the market rate.  Certainly this is a quick way to liquidate the 10 assets into one stable coin bag and move that stable coin bag over the TRON network.  It should only cost 1 or 2 TRX at the most and those things are like 6 cents each.

So, you can potentially move millions of dollars within a few minutes while spending less than a quarter of a single dollar….  Crazy.

Anyhow, on the new exchange you could place orders to re-buy those assets, even potentially setting lower orders to buy back in lower and make a gain!

To me, this is far too many moving things to consolidate and too much risk that an asset would moon before I could buy back in, thus making it a risky move.

So, I tried something that was somewhat of a hybrid approach.  I’m trying it with bags that I want to grow and that are small now.  My thinking is that I can grow bots in this new kucoin account to increase my army but they need my BASE assets to start.

What I did was jot down the assets I wanted to move and made a note of their precise value at the time I wanted to move them.   I added this all together and deployed an unused bag of stable coins to the new Kucoin account that could purchase the bags at this current market price (or better).

I then set up trades across the exchanges whereby my older Kucoin account would sell (higher), and my newer Kucoin account would buy (lower) thus completing the trade for a gain.  Now all I have to do is wait and over time these assets should “move.”  I have the original numbers to refer back to and will be absolutely certain I’m getting a bargain as I move these assets over.  To me, a bargain is getting more assets for the same price so I can build the bag quantity up.

My ZEN node, I forgot about you

I totally forgot that I had a ZEN node running!  Horizen is a network that supports private transactions of ZEN.  This means that theoretically no one can know how much you hold and no one can know who sends how much to whom.

I started this ZEN node more than a year ago with ZEN that I purchased for 5 USDT each.  When I look at the ZEN chart now, I see it’s trading at 43 USDT and its high was 165 USDT.  I see this as a project with (at the very least) the ability to fund many bots for me long term and a potential way I can keep some of my wealth protected against prying eyes.

There were technical updates needing to be applied to the node several months ago that reminded me.  I had my team plow through the security upgrades, but I haven’t checked into the wallet that holds my rewards in at least a half year.

So, I decided to have a look.  I opened the wallet and refreshed – bamn, there’s another full ZEN for me to keep as a reward for using my electricity to settle transactions on the ZEN network.  That’s well worth the 5 cents a day cost for the electricity to run the node. 🙂