Edmond Chan

Binance

Increasing the risk/reward in my crypto portfolio whilst trying to protect the downside

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In my last post, I detailed my crypto portfolio as at 31 December 2017.

I think it’s pretty solid and it’s made some good gains, and I think it’s set up for some good gains in 2018. But I’m not sure it’s going to 10x in 2018.

Let’s take a look at my portfolio again:

I still want to Protect The Downside

One of Warren Buffett’s maxims is Don’t Lose Money. He says to ‘protect the downside’. This is because losing money makes it mathematically harder to make your money back.

If the value of your portfolio goes down by 50%, to get back to where it was, it needs to increase by 100%.

That’s why not losing money is Buffett’s starting principle.

(Now he might laugh about the idea of protecting your downside within cryptocurrencies but that’s another question!)

I think that my portfolio above is pretty good at protecting the downside. I see steady gains for all the coins above with the exception of Verge. Verge is a highly speculative play for me. (See how and why I bought Verge here)

But I want to increase my risk and therefore my chance of reward

It’s so easy to get caught up in the frenzy that we’ve seen in late 2017 and even in the last two weeks. Three friends have suddenly started buying cryptocurrencies, using Coinbase and Binance to buy Ripple etc.

Some coins are seeing 200% to 1,000% rises.

That makes me question my asset allocation.

Is my split too conservative by crypto standards? Am I missing out on potentially life-changing amounts of gains by playing it too safe?

The portfolio above is solid and if you bought the same split today, I would think that you wouldn’t lose money in 2018 and you might make 10x. But are there more gains out there? Am I being too greedy? Are we definitely in bubble territory now? (A classic oft-quoted example of bubble territory is when your taxi driver asks you for stock tips. Translate that to crypto and the equivalent is when The Sun tabloid starts giving in-depth guides to cryptos like Verge (XVG) and Stellar (XLM))

I want to add some risk to my portfolio but not so much that I fail to protect the downside

What’s the spice and how much to allocate to it

I’m going to add 15% – 20% of my portfolio into riskier coins which have the chance to at least 10x from here and that could actually return even more.

On 3rd Jan 2018, I deposited some Bitcoin onto Binance and bought a nibble of Cardano (ADA), Ripple (XRP) and some Stellar Lumens (XLM).

Yes there was certainly some FOMO in those buys but the amounts I’ve put in aren’t big enough to risk my downside. Their prices have dropped off a bit since the 3rd and I might buy a bit more of each to dollar cost average my entry price and I’ll write up how and why I bought these in subsequent posts.

Coins that are on my imminent watchlist

  • Binance (BNB)
  • Dragonchain (DRGN)
  • Kucoin (KCS)

What’s on your watchlist for 2018? Let me know in the comments below!

How I bought my first Verge XVG using Binance exchange

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verge xvg buy verge

I’ve been watching Verge VXG on and off now for a few months. It’s been hovering around 80th position amongst cryptocurrencies by market capitalisation. It’s been like this ever since I’ve been looking at it……until a week or so ago when it went crazy.

It’s now around 20th position on coinmarketcap.com.

verge xvg

What’s the price rise of Verge XVG?

Okay, so looking at historical prices on coinmarketcap.com, on 13th Dec 2017, Verge XVG opened at 0.009203 USD (that’s just under one US cent).

On 25th Dec 2017, Verge XVG opened at 0.258386 USD (that’s about 26 cents).

So one cent to 26 cents is a price rise of about 2,500%. I’ll say that again….2,500% in about 2 weeks.

This is the reason that crypto is so exciting and why so many people are now getting involved. You’d never get this kind of move in traditional markets outside of penny stocks.

What’s made the Verge XVG price move so much?

John McAfee is a well known crypto-evangelist (he said famously in 2017 that Bitcoin would one day reach 500,000 USD). He has a large Twitter following of around 500k followers and on 13th December 2017, he tweeted this:

He followed this tweet up with this:


These tweets have been credited (justifiably) with the huge rise in Verge XVG’s price rise over the last two weeks.

What’s my investment rationale for buying Verge XVG?

  1. It’s a coin and not an ICO token. It’s a coin like Bitcoin, Monero, Dash etc.
  2. It has a limited supply of coins. Its current circulating supply is 14,396,406,388 XVG and the total maximum supply is 16,555,000,000 XVG.
  3. The recent price surge and the backing of a major figure in the crypto world, John McAfee (above)
  4. The current low price. Low in terms of being sub-one USD. If it just gets to one dollar from today, that’s a 400% price rise. If it gets to 10 USD, that’s a price rise of 4,000%. Who’s to say that that’s not possible? I see it at one dollar in the next few months and then once it breaches the psychologically significant one dollar threshold, it could rise meaningfully from there.

How I bought my first Verge XVG

I was hoping to buy this from Changelly. (I’ve used Changelly to buy Monero before.) It’s also listed on the Verge website as a place to buy Verge XVG.

It’s also listed as a supported currency on the Changelly website, but when I tried to actually exchange BTC for Verge XVG, I couldn’t find it as an available option.

I also had problems with the Verge wallet. I went on the Verge website to look for wallet options. The OSX Electrum wallet wouldn’t open on my computer and I tried the alternative Verge QT but that showed as ‘Not Syncing’. This gave me pause for thought as I’d had similar problems with the Ethereum node wallet previously. The problem was where the node never caught up with the blockchain and never synced. This rendered my wallet useless. I want to make sure that I get the setup correctly with the Verge wallet(s).

So I did two things that I’ve not done before:

Firstly, I used an actual exchange.

Previously, I’ve only used Bittylicious (which is a peer to peer service) and Changelly and ShapeShift (which are instant exchange services).

I used one of the listed exchanges on the Verge site. I plumped for Binance. I have no idea why. The name called out to me. (NB: since writing this, I’ve looked up ‘Bittrex vs Binance’ and found this subreddit: Bitfinex vs Bittrex vs Binance.)

Binance was really easy to setup with. You enter an email and a password and that’s it for basic access. I then transferred some Bitcoin to it to fund my account. (The transfer took less than 30 minutes to complete.)

I then went on the XVG/BTC currency pair page to buy some Verge XVG.

It’s pretty straightforward. Look at this screenshot of Binance’s XVG/BTC screen:

Buy Verge XVG
Binance – XVG/BTC on 27th Dec 2017

Simply go to the ‘Buy XVG’ area above and enter the amount of Verge XVG you want to buy. As soon as you start entering into the ‘amount’ field, it will show you the maximum amount of XVG that you can buy, given the amount of Bitcoin (BTC) that you have funded in your Binance account.

The process of buying was easy and it took just 5 minutes to complete my order.

Secondly, I broke one of my cardinal rules of crypto speculation…

…I left my Verge XVG on the exchange. I’ve advised many times before to not leave your crypto on exchanges, as exchanges can go bust or they can get hacked. But until I can find a solid, functioning Verge wallet, I will leave my Verge XVG on the exchange.

NB: This lack of an easy to use wallet is another attractive thing about speculating right now in Verge XVG: As soon as it becomes available, greater mass adoption will follow, which can only be good for the price.

Closing thoughts on Verge XVG

I’d recommend having a little nibble on Verge XVG. Don’t put huge amounts in yet. There are more highly regarded, and better established privacy coins out there such as Monero. I can see the price moving to 5 USD or even 10 USD in 2018, but it’s not a sure thing. Worth a punt though.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!