If you've been following my portfolio you may have noticed that I purchased a lot of NEOS coin recently.  It actually has been doing extremely well the past few months and has done well for me. Well, the thing is, I didn't really mean to buy NEOS, I meant to buy NEO.  The names are very similar but they are two totally different coins, totally unrelated to each other. Neo, the coin I meant to buy, is the re-branded name of the coin called ANTShares (ANS).  ANS has been on a tear lately.  ANS is a very big coin in China. They call it the Chinese version of Ethereum because just like Ethereum it is a publicly accessible open source blockchain.  Just like Ethereum you can deploy smart contracts on ANT and create your own coins.  I have high expectations for ANS, so I'm trying to load up on it, as is everyone else. What is really interesting about ANS is that if you own the ANS coin you get paid dividends in the form of ANT coins.  Note that one is...

Alt coins traditionally show most of their strength on Fridays and Saturdays.  Then they tend to give some of that back on Sunday and Monday.  They tend to operate independently all week long, and then repeat the process. We didn't see much strength yesterday (Friday) and they are looking pretty weak right now.  I've got a feeling we are going to re-test the lows of the recent correction.  Either that or they are going to strengthen and break out to the upside in the next 24 hours or so. So, we better either see some strength soon, or I think we'll be re-testing the lows.  The image is from Poloniex at 19:00 on Saturday 6/24/17.

I had been watching ANT coins because there was a lot of talk about them and a lot of upwards price movement.  I didn't realize until reading a Hacked.com article today that ANT coins are traded as NEOS on Poloniex. This coin has a LOT of potential.  Per the Hacked article, you can see they are calling it the "Ethereum of China".  It is rare for Alt coins to jump to dollars in value so quickly out of the gate. NEOS has already traded as high as $11 per coin. I've sold SOME of my NXT, Monero, and SIA just so I could take a sizable position in NEOs.  If it performs like ETH, it has a long way to go in price.  If you remember, I bought a bunch of ETH at about $6 per coin and then put it away and forgot about it only to pull it out a year later and find it trading at over $300 per coin.  I'm hoping NEOs does the same thing.  I just bought it at a little over $6 this morning.

So kind of slow times in the crypto space, isn't it?  For those of you relatively new to this space, we haven't see these kinds of down days nor these sideways days since the first of the year. I personally think it is good for the market to do this.  It shows it is a more "mature" market in that it is behaving in a more normal manner.  After a big run-up like we've had, we are/were due for a correction.  Hopefully we are done with it, but I won't be surprised if there is a little more to go. We are getting close to the point where Bitcoin may be dethroned as the "biggest" coin.  Ethereum (ETH) is now running a very close second and could pass BTC in the next few weeks.  A lot of people, including myself, thought that might happen at some point, but I think almost everyone saw that as 5 or 10 years off. I saw this chart today courtesy of HowMuch.net and thought I'd share it.  As much as I (and now you) focus on BTC each day, BTC is really a...

BitShares (BTS) has really been consolidating nicely since it's big thrust up June 6th-8th.   As of now, it looks like if it breaks above, and holds above 0.00013 then it is starting it's next move. We might see a retest of 0.00011 before that move up.  That could be a great opportunity to buy more should that happen.  I'd put in a buy around the 0.00011 level with a tight stop at 0.00010 or so.  If it were go break down you'd only be out a few points and if it were to take off as it appears it might, it could provide a good run. Here's an interesting little addition to what BTS is doing this summer to help run up the BTS price and make more people aware of how big BTS really is: https://dontpanicsell.com/2017/06/15/bts/

The easiest way to make money with Bitcoin (BTC) is to buy it and hold it.  All you need to do is go to one of the 3 main places to buy BTC (CoinBase.com, LocalBitcoins.com, or a BTC ATM), buy some coin and every 6 months to a year check back on the price. I've done other posts about how BTC has performed over the past few years.  I think this statement sums it up well: I f you invested $10,000 in Bitcoin and $10,000 in Gold in 2010, that the Gold would now be worth $9,900 and the Bitcoin would be worth over $200,000,000. There are a lot of people who don't buy and hold but rather day-trade BTC.  Just like any highly volitile asset, some of those traders will get rich and some will go broke.  Since BTC has always seemed to go up most traders I know are making a lot of money as long as they don't short BTC. But, my favorite place to make "big" money on crypto-currencies is on the alternate, or "Alt" coins.  Bitcoin is only one of hundreds of block-c...

If you've had to interact with Customer Service on Poloniex lately you've come to see that waiting for a response from them is like waiting for the seasons to change.  They both come about very slowly and with little fanfare. Poloniex has recently added a lot more customer service Reps and they closed down the Troll Box in order to allocate those resources to customer service issues.  So they know there is a problem and they are trying to fix it.  But, here's a couple things you can do to get your question answered as quickly as possible. First of all, after you open a ticket, make sure you come back and check it every day.  It's very possible for them to respond to your ticket but for you not to know about it.  It can be because their response email ended up in your spam folder, or it just never went out in the first place.  More than once I've been surprised to see a response on my ticket with no associated response via email. Secondly, and most imp...

The upcoming SONM ICO has a couple things that makes it more complicated than most ICOs.  First, US residents are not allowed.  Whether or not you follow that restriction is up to you, but that is what the website says.  Second, they are issuing ETH based Tokens for your payments.  Tokens are slightly different than coins. In a typical ICO, you sign up for an account, you send them some funds, and they put their coins in your account.  Once their coins become popular enough to be listed on exchanges such as Poloniex or Bitfinex, you can move the coins there and do whatever you want with them. The SONM ICO will exchange ETH coins for SNM Tokens.  You can pretty much think of those tokens as being just like coins.  I hold some Augur (REP Ticker) on Poloniex which is the same kind of tokens as these will be.  They are both tokens that are created on the ETH blockchain.  Whereas BTC is a coin on the Bitcoin blockchain, ETH is a coin on the ...

I don't normally "trade" in Crypto currencies.  My strategy has been, and continues to be, find a good coin to buy and hold.  Studies have shown over and over that is the best way to make money when purchasing equities. But, I've decided to take some part of my portfolio, somewhere around 10%, and to take a risk with that part.  I'm looking for coins that have had a lot of volatility lately and which appear to be ready to break out. With that in mind I've focused on 3 coins this past weekend.  On Friday I bought a million coins each of Sia (SC) and Burst (BURST).  I have no attachment to Si, I'm only buying it because it is one of those coins I always seem to see with double digit gains on any one day.  Burst on the other hand is a coin I know fairly well and in fact I mine Burst on a daily basis. So I bought a million Sia at 0.00000425 and a million Burst at 0.00000560.  I'm hoping they both break out around the 0.0000072...

If you watch my portfolio you know I hold more ETC than anything else right now. That's not because I like ETC for the long term, that's because I think ETH moved more than ETC and I think ETC is going to play catch-up shortly. I'd actually prefer buying and holding ETH for the long haul. I have the same feeling about Monero. It hasn't moved as much as other Alts and I think it will catch up shortly. I came across this analysis of ETC today by a professional trader I respect. I totally agree with his summary. We'll probably see another retest of $14, but then move up and break out. ETC chart courtesy of Hacked.com.

Monero is one of my favorite Alt coins.  Unlike most Alt coins where, as much as I hate to admit it, I tend to follow the crowd, I like Monero because of its fundamentals. Monero is used in place of BTC when the users want greater anonymity than what BTC provides.  Yes, this is often on the Dark web buying products of questionable nature, but also on normal Ecommerce sites by people who just don't like everything they do being tracked. I don't know this for a fact, but I think in terms of Alt coins, Monero is probably the coin most used for monetary value other than BTC. Ethereum is maybe used more often, but not for monetary reasons.  ETH is used to create other coins and for other uses of it's smart contract functionality.  When it comes to buying something online, your choices typically come down to BTC or Monero (and sometimes ZCash and/or Dash). I think the chart looks great.  It's been growing at a nice steady clip.  It is showing higher highs...