Our Performance.
I’m sure you heard about the latest 40-year record-high CPI figures, fears of World War III, and exorbitant gas prices. But, today I want to discuss something else: our performance.
That’s because we’ve been getting feedback from some of our subscribers about Picks. This feedback is not surprising to me. People perceive losses twice as acutely as gains.
One thing that we haven’t been doing the best is tracking performance. That’s because it takes time to develop a reasonable model, code it, and implement it in a clean user interface. We’re getting there, and soon you will see the results.
In the meantime, let’s look at calculations for Picks and Radar that I’ve been doing on my scratchpad.
Starting with Picks, I intentionally left out Thorchain because I know how people look at it. Yet, personally, I don’t think we should shy away from it just because it’s an outlier.
Without Thorchain, we have 43 Picks, which in my model equates to a $43,000 total investment. Below is the chart computed with price data from CoinGecko for our portfolio. It accounts for new additions and take-profits at respective times.
Currently, the value of the portfolio is slightly above $50,000. That’s unrealized profit and loss (PnL). After calculating take-profits, you get realized PnL of around $30,000. In total, that’s over $80,000—almost 2x on the total initial investment.
I know, 2x sounds boring in the crypto context. But size matters. If your risk tolerance is incredibly high and you can put all of your funds in some crypto asset to never sell it, you will most likely outperform SIMETRI by a large margin. However, not many can stomach crypto volatility with an all-in bet.
I was buying BTC in 2018-2019 and held it all the way up to $50,000 and beyond. Then, when flash crashes started to occur in winter 2021, I pulled most of my money out. I’m sure many, especially less experienced people, were chopped out way before that.
When you have one position failing, it’s not worrisome if you have a diversified portfolio of fundamentally strong projects. However, if you’re all-in, even on something like BTC, you likely won’t be able to capitalize on its entire growth phase. You will either sell too early or too late.
I will always remember what my former employer, the founder of ICODrops, said about the Gate.io ICO. He said that it’s rare when you have a chance to make 50% on your entire portfolio. And that’s from a person who made 100x returns multiple times.
Now, let’s look at Radar performance. Radar is for short-term plays, and practice shows that holding each of Radar picks for about a month is the most optimal strategy.
If you’re not already a member of Radar, I recommend upgrading your subscription to SIMETRI Sapphire and trying it out. If the benefit isn’t obvious in the first 30 days, you can get a refund on the upgrade by reverting your subscription.
If you held each of the Radar picks for a week, you could have a total ~20% return. If you held each for two weeks, the return would grow to ~30%. Over a month, this number would go up to ~80%.
Surely, we have an outlier, Polkabridge, that skews the one-month performance. However, I want to draw your attention to how consistent Radar is in terms of positive returns. Out of 52 picks, only nine went underwater.
On top of that, mind that my tracking model maximizes gains and losses. So, if you didn’t hold Polkabridge until the very top, you also likely didn’t hold some of the underperforming projects until -80%. This makes the model’s results closer to real ones.
On top of that, note that if you had been selling Radar picks as soon as you got enough profit, you could reuse capital for next plays. This reduces the sum of your initial investment, but the model doesn’t account for that, which reduces the total return percentage it outputs.
Radar one week returns
Radar two-week returns
Radar one-month returns
Before I sum it all up, I want to remind you that we don’t predict how the market will perform in the future. We have Nathan, who plays this game of probabilities very well, but that’s not what we think about here in research.
The recent Pick of the Month entry points were when the overall market was elevated. Now, when the entire market is sliding down, it’s natural that Picks are being dragged down too. It doesn’t make Picks worse. They just need time.
We started SIMETRI in summer 2019, not long before the almost two-year-long bear market ended. Had we started it in 2018, the drawdowns would have been severe. Yet, our Picks would still most likely end up in good profit.
That’s because the 2017 market top now looks like a blip on the BTC chart. The market has expanded rapidly from the start of 2021, and projects that we picked up in 2019 and 2020 are now in the green despite the market’s retracement.
I expect the same to happen with the current Picks. It sounds awfully obvious, but it’s paramount to buy low to profit.
That “low” will look small in a few years, much like 2017’s blip. If we believe that crypto will be a multi-trillion dollar industry, today’s prices will look low in retrospect. Or, there’s no point in investing in this market anyway, be it with or without us.
Deploying capital at low prices is something that everybody knows is right, but very few do. The main reason is the fear that prices will go down even further. And they probably will.
If the market significantly slows down, we will adjust to a slower pace and will look for projects that will likely survive. You can do this too by dollar-cost averaging in Picks instead of making one-time transactions.
There are many reasons why prices may go down: lack of liquidity, lack of demand from speculators, external shocks. They have little to do with fundamentals. We will let you know if we see that a good project gets dumped for no good reason.
To conclude, this is the time to be in the market. The portfolio’s performance may not look great now, but I firmly believe those who stick around will see a replay of our 2019-2020 performance.
SIMETRI Portfolio – Sideways
As the market moves sideways near the $40,000 level, the portfolio follows. Its further performance will depend on the direction to which the price will eventually break out.
However, BTC sideways may end up in a short-term surge of alt-coin performance. That may be a good point to de-risk if you feel intimidated by the market’s conditions.
