Stats given cover closed trades for the 24th September - 30th September
My total realized profit from the past week is 1.44% Overall the portfolio is up 1.80%
Profitable trades closed: 32
Unprofitable trades closed: 2
Most traded instrument: $AMD (8 Trades)
Never a dull week in trading; this week saw some big drama around Elon Musk & the SEC, some interesting movements around chip stocks, Stellar launching their long-awaited DEX and more block producer collusion rumours for EOS. The end result in terms of performance, was a good 1.8% increase to the portfolio alongside 1.44% of realised profit, undoing some of the damage from last week’s XRP trades.
Tesla have had yet another rollercoaster week after news broke that Elon walked away from a deal with the SEC over the securities fraud allegations. The market opened almost 13% down on friday, closing at around -15% as investors feared Elon potentially being removed as CEO. Over the weekend further news broke that a deal had in fact been reached after all. Elon lost his position at the head of the board, was required to pay a $20M fine to the SEC, and Tesla had to instate a shadow board to vet major decisions taken by the company moving forward. This resulted in the price jumping back up to it’s previous level in pre-market trading
As we entered 2018 I said in a post that if 2017 was the year of ICO’s 2018 would be the year of DEX’s (Decentralised Exchange). The movement has been underway for several years with projects such as Shapeshift and ETHFinex innovating early. This week we saw a tease of EOSFinex, a decentralised exchange for $EOS built by Bitfinex. However the most impressive DEX I’ve seen to date was launched this week on $XLM - StellarX offers over 2500 trading pairs, fully decentralised (and I mean really, every order on the ledger, no middlemen at all), and most importantly they are offering zero-fee trading. To my knowledge this is the first exchange to offer it on such a vast scale. It is genuinely something I am very excited to play around with, and in my opinion could well do for Stellar, what Binance did for crypto trading overall We’ve also had some interesting developments from China this week as Bitmain released some 400+ pages of information ahead of their IPO. If you didn’t know who Bitmain are, allow me to enlighten you. Bitmain is the biggest crypto mining company in the world right now, with the majority of hashing power on many top cryptocurrencies. They produce their own mining hardware, both to use themselves, and to sell directly to the public, currently they control around 85% of the market. Controversially they have built hidden “boosts” into their hardware to use for their own agendas before. One thing Bitmain are very well known for is their affinity to $BCH. They famously sided with Roger Ver in the Segwit 2x debate last year, and were a major player in the decision to fork Bitcoin and create Bitcoin Cash. So what’s in the documents? Everything you’d expect, and some numbers which I believe are quite interesting & revealing. Bitmain’s revenue for 2018 is up some 800%+ from last year as of June. There are still some big concerns though. Recently Samsung announced their plans to enter the mining hardware market. Over the past year both $AMD and $NVDA have also paid more attention and could offer additional competition to Bitmain. Interestingly Bitmain also listed their holdings, audited by KPMG, approximately 30% of their assets currently sit in cryptocurrency, primarily BCH. Should the company begin to struggle they would be forced to liquidate some of these holdings, pushing the price lower and starting a self-fulfilling downward spiral. Currently there is no suggested price or market cap for the IPO Also out of China there has been a lot of discussion about collusion and vote-buying among Chinese Block Producers for EOS. As soon as it launched, EOS faced strong criticism for the potential formation of oligarchies within their governance structure. Over the past few months some of what publically appear to be the most popular Block Producers such as Cypherglass, EOS42, EOSCanada, EOSRio and Scatter have been pushed lower and lower in the rankings as Chinese BP’s have increased their share of the vote. Chinese block producers now make up over 50% of the 21 BP’s who control the network. At 66% these BP’s would be capable of conducting the EOS equivalent of a 51% attack. Several key figures from the community have given statements suggesting that they are committed to finding a solution and increasing transparency for governance in EOS
Cryptos
$EOS - A small green trade for 3.5% profit
$XLM - Another small trade for 1.8% profit
Stocks $TSLA - I feel I traded the news well with 3 short positions closed at 1.7%, 4.3%, and 3.6% profit. Unfortunately I did not have the guts to open a long ahead of the rebound, but I’m content with these day trades regardless
$ATVI - 3 trades, 0.8%, 1.7%, and 2.1% profit. Some reasonable trades over a relatively short time-frame, I remain unsure about holding on to positions here long term. Although I believe the latest Call of Duty title will do well, I am not convinced it will dramatically affect the share price. The Overwatch league remains the big bullish signal for the stock for me, but again I’m not sure how far it can move the price, especially in the short term
$AMD - 8 trades, (4 short, 4 long). 6 of these trades were profitable for between 1.6% and 2.7%. The two losing trades were however much worse at -8% and -24% approximately, resulting in an overall loss on AMD trades this week
$SQ - 5 trades, 44.2%, 32.8%, 6.6%, 5.3%, and 2.0% profit each. Very happy with the results here, taking a little profit ahead of a potential drop back down to the moving average or 95 support level before we push through 100. I’m holding most of my positions open here though as I expect another great earnings
$AMZN - 3 trades, 3.3%, 3.4%, and 2.0%. I was patiently taking up positions below the 2000 price point waiting for this stock to rally again. It’s had a phenomenal year, but I am again very bullish on the stock for the long term and expect to increase my trading activity and exposure
$NFLX - Netflix has been rather sluggish over the past few months, struggling to rebuild it’s price after it’s worst earnings for some time. At last it has began moving up again, freeing me up to take some profits at 4% and 7.3% and trade it more actively again
$SHOP - A really nice day-trade towards the end of the week for 4.6% profit on 2x leverage
$NVDA - A similar trade to Shopify, 3.9% over a few days with 2x leverage
$WIX - Hit my target of 120 this week so I closed a couple of positions at 9.2% and 2.6% each. I expect a move back to 116 support where I’ll try to rebuild the position. I plan on going back and listening to their Q2 earnings call again, along with some deeper research to reassess my price target
$ETSY - 2 more trades at 8.0% and 13.0% profit
$SNAP - A short closed at 0.5% profit after hitting the trailing stop-loss a little earlier than I had hoped
$DIS - 1% profit on 1 position
Looking Forward
Swell by Ripple starts today. Last year it provided some interesting drama and price action with a big pump and dump once the event began. It appears at first glance that this year is a little more reserved. There is also no live stream from what I can see The start of October means Q3 earnings season is coming with the first reports (for the stocks I trade) due in a few weeks
Comments and questions are welcome!