How a single-strategy crypto algorithm turned $100 into $36,205 in 10 months

October 23, 2021 Coin Telegraph

How a single-strategy crypto algorithm turned 0 into ,205 in 10 months

Warren Buffett said that "What we learn from history, is that people don’t learn from history." Crypto traders can change that.

Before we get into the nitty gritty of how one simple rule created the kind of insane return on investment noted in the headline, let’s be clear on one thing.

You can't copy this.

Actually, no human can. Even a trading bot couldn’t replicate this particular strategy in real life, because it’s a thought experiment, a proof of concept, rather than an actual way to make money in crypto trading. The exchange fees alone would kill this particular strategy for most traders.

But that doesn’t mean it’s useless — in fact, it’s the perfect way to illustrate how a simple strategy can work for real traders in real life.

So let’s dig in. What could you do, right now, today, with this algorithm?

What does Buy 80, Sell 12 hours mean?

Here’s the basic premise. In partnership with data firm The TIE, Cointelegraph Markets Pro has developed the VORTECS™ Score, an algorithmic determination of how bullish or bearish current trading conditions are for a given crypto asset.

The score is based on historical data, and it essentially sifts through the whole history of a coin or token looking for conditions that are similar to those it observes right now.

It’s looking for a variety of similarities and outliers — for instance, trading volume, recent price action, social sentiment, and even the volume of tweets about that asset.

If it finds similarities, it looks at what happened next. Did the asset go up or down? How consistent was that movement? How significant was the rise or fall?

Combining all of these data points, it creates the VORTECS™ Score, a dynamic and constantly evolving evaluation of the current trading conditions for each supported asset. The higher the score, the more bullish the outlook — and the more confident the algorithm is. Conversely, a very low score is bearish (and equally confident). A neutral score of 50 means the algorithm sees no significant correlation between current conditions and past price performance.

The Markets Pro team started testing a whole range of strategies on the day the algo went live.

A Buy 80, Sell 12 hours strategy means that the test ‘buys’ every asset that crosses the 80 score, which is considered strongly bullish. And then it ‘sells’ the asset again after precisely 12 hours.

Of course, this is not happening on an exchange — it’s happening on a spreadsheet. And since the test wants to maintain equal holdings of all assets that are within its range, it rebalances every hour.

For instance — if SOL crossed 80, and was the sole asset with that high score, the test would place 100% of its current portfolio into SOL. But if BNB then crossed 80 as well, the test would allocate half of its position to BNB in the next hourly rebalance.

Why you couldn’t do this

First, let’s assume that you’re human if you’re reading this. If you’re human, you need sleep. The test is working 24 hours a day, every day, and has been for over ten months. Even new parents get a break from the baby once in a while.

Second, the algo is not taking account of liquidity or order depth on any particular asset on any given exchange. It ‘buys’ at the current price, and ‘sells’ at the current price, which we all know isn’t necessarily realistic.

And third, exchange fees for a rebalance every hour would be prohibitive, no matter how much BNB or FTT you’re hoarding.

So why is this a valuable test at all?

The point here is to evaluate whether the VORTECS™ algorithm is good at its job.

When it sees bullish conditions, is it *right* more often than not? When the score goes up, do prices generally increase? Obviously with this test, the answer is yes.

And while the Buy 80, Sell 12 is an outlier, there are other strategies that have created massive hypothetical ROI.

For instance, Buy 80, Sell 24 hours. That one is sitting on “gains” of 13,099%. Other strong strategies include:

Buy 90, Sell 168 hours | +4,544%

Buy 80, Sell 80 | + 14,862%

In fact, with Bitcoin returning 49.5% since the tests started running on Jan 5th 2021, every single strategy has beaten the ROI from simply holding BTC.

And that signals that VORTECS™ is working correctly. It is — in general, over time — proving that historical trading conditions for digital assets can be a useful gauge for the current health of that asset.

In other words, a high VORTECS™ Score has a proven correlation to price appreciation. Not in every instance, not for every asset… but in general this ten-month trial has made a compelling case.

Warren Buffett (perhaps paraphrasing Hegel) once said that “What we learn from history, is that people don’t learn from history.”

(As a crypto skeptic, he might want to revisit his stance.)

That’s what the VORTECS™ Score is all about. Learning from history. And that’s why a hypothetical return of 36,205% is important.

It tells us we’re looking at the right history.

Cointelegraph Markets Pro is available exclusively to members on a monthly basis at $99 per month, or annually with two free months included. It carries a 14-day money-back policy, to ensure that it fits the crypto trading and investing research needs of subscribers, and members can cancel anytime.

Cointelegraph is a publisher of financial information, not an investment adviser. We do not provide personalized or individualized investment advice. Cryptocurrencies are volatile investments and carry significant risk including the risk of permanent and total loss. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Figures and charts are correct at the time of writing or as otherwise specified. Live-tested strategies are not recommendations. Consult your financial advisor before making financial decisions.

All ROI quoted is accurate at 12pm ET on 10/23/2021

Why HODL for 48 hours? Because your altcoin wallet will thank you

October 16, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Altcoins

Even in the fast-paced cryptocurrency market, favorable conditions that fuel massive rallies often take days to materialize.

It might seem that the volatility of digital assets’ prices and the lightning speed with which crypto markets move would mean that those who act fastest secure the heftiest rewards.

And in certain cases this holds true – for example, when an announcement of a token’s listing on Coinbase or Binance first goes public, and the asset’s price line becomes all but vertical.

But in many cases, the tortoise beats the hare.

This principle is clearly at work when it comes to traders using quant-style tools to enhance their decision-making. One example is the VORTECS™ Score, an algorithmic comparison between historic and present patterns of market and social activity around a coin.

While the VORTECS™ algorithm is trained to detect historically bullish conditions around crypto assets, high scores are rarely followed by price surges immediately. In fact, the highest returns consistently arrive over the next few days after peak scores show up. What does it reveal about the nature of the crypto market?

The early bird gets the worm (but waits to eat it)

Exclusively available to the subscribers of Cointelegraph Markets Pro, the VORTECS™ Score is an artificial intelligence-powered indicator that looks for historic similarities across a multi-dimensional set of variables. These include changes in the price of a crypto asset, trading volume, social sentiment, and tweet volume, among others.

The higher the VORTECS™ Score, the more confident the model is that the observed combination of the key metrics around the token resembles past conditions that foreshadowed significant price hikes. Scores above 80 are considered confidently bullish, while a rarer sight of a 90+ Score suggests that the asset’s outlook is tremendously favorable, judging by its historic record of price action.

The timing, however, is intentionally fuzzy as the model is designed to detect conditions that had previously preceded rallies by 12 to 72 hours. In fact, although the algorithm is designed to flag bullish conditions as early as possible, it consistently delivers best results to crypto traders within days, rather than hours.

Historical data show that, on average, assets that score high on the VORTECS™ Score deliver consistent if small returns as soon as six hours after reaching the Scores of 80, 85, and 90.

Thus, crypto investors who rely on Markets Pro data to refine their trading strategies are often tempted to lock in profits early. The same data, however, suggest that it often makes sense to hold steady rather than grab the initial gains.

HODL, if only for a day or two?

The table below presents average returns after a crypto asset cleared a score of 80, 85, or 90 over a week. Each asset could only yield one observation per day, i.e. if a coin went from 79 to 81, then back to 79 and then to 80 once again in a few hours, only its first entry to 80+ would count.

As visible in the table, the more time passes after assets clear the threshold of 80, 85, or 90 VORTECS™ Score, the more likely they are to deliver larger returns. While these stats only reflect price movement from a single week, the pattern is actually observed very consistently throughout Markets Pro history dating back to early 2021.

In fact, 48 hours is not the limit. When it comes to ultra-high scores above 90, some Markets Pro subscribers report generating consistently large gains from holding such coins for a full week, or 168 hours.

These observations suggest that the crypto market could be not as chaotic and whimsical as many believe. Although many moves are clearly driven by waves of FUD and hype, the wider marketplace of digital assets exhibits identifiable regularities and recurring patterns of trading and social activities that can take days and weeks to build up before they move asset prices.

Cointelegraph Markets Pro’s VORTECS™ Score is simply one way to identify the conditions that lead to these moves — as early as possible. It’s up to the individual trader to decide when to take the profits.

Double-digit crypto gains and trading volume — what’s the connection?

July 1, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Altcoin

Unusually high trading volume can be an indication that a crypto asset's price is on the rise.

While the crypto markets are clearly led by the swings of Bitcoin and Ethereum, outliers are frequent — and identifying them is often what separates the average traders from the great ones.

Compared to the gains-fest of the first few months of 2021, June has been a rather bleak time for crypto investors. Digital asset prices were mostly stagnant and massive rallies were rare, leaving traders to do the hard guesswork: Which asset will do better than most others that are either going down or moving sideways?

Of many market and social metrics tracked by Cointelegraph Markets Pro platform, one proved to be especially useful this month: Average daily trading volume.

Five of the assets that recorded the greatest increase in daily volume compared with the previous month were among the biggest winners, securing double-digit dominance over both Bitcoin and the dollar.

And the correlation may not be an outlier — we saw the same pattern last month.

Trading volume is one of the components of the VORTECS™ score, Markets Pro’s algorithmic tool that relies on years of historical data to assess how healthy each coin’s current market outlook is.

As well as the score, raw numbers on unusually high and unusually low volume (relative to last month’s average) are available on Markets Pro dashboard. The Unusual Trading Volume Indicator is one tool that traders may find useful in identifying potential profit opportunities.

*Unusual Trading Volume 7.1.21 at 10:30am ET / Cointelegraph Markets Pro*

Here are the five coins that have seen the largest increases in average daily trading volume this month... and their monthly price dynamics.

AMP (AMP): +2,255%

30-day price change: +61.02% vs. USD, +59.32% vs. BTC

AMP embarked on a massive price hike that saw it shoot from $0.059 to $0.108 on June 14, and the trading volume followed the price closely.

Halfway through the rally, the coin popped up on the Unusual Trading Volume section of Markets Pro dashboard, alerting users that the ongoing price pump had been supported by a corresponding boost in liquidity.

The jaw-dropping increase in trading volume of more than two thousand percent was registered around the same time when the price peaked at almost 11 cents (red circle in the graph).

KEEP NETWORK (KEEP): 737.46%

30-day price change: +13.35% vs. USD, +11.28% vs. BTC

Keep Network (KEEP) hugely benefited from a series of high-profile listings this month: First came Coinbase, then Binance. The market absorbed the news before KEEP pairs began trading on these platforms, leading to the price peaking before trading volume. The highest volume of $215 million (red circle in the graph) came some 18 hours after the price touched $0.71 on June 17.

In the case of KEEP, a spike in trading volume was not a harbinger of a price increase, but at least partially a result of it.

THETA FUEL (TFUEL): 661.56%

30-day price change: +51.27% vs. USD, +48.51% vs. BTC

Theta Fuel’s strong showing this month in terms of both price and liquidity was powered by users’ anticipation of the upcoming Mainnet 3.0 launch.

Trading volume has definitely been one of the factors driving price action, as the two were moving hand-in-hand. In fact, between June 7 and 9, the growth of volume outpaced price movement, culminating minutes before the price hit the local high at $0.66 (red circle in the graph).

By that time, the Markets Pro Unusual Trading Volume indicator had been flashing for TFUEL for several hours.

PERLIN (PERL): 454.2%

30-day price change: +24.32% vs. USD, +21.92% vs. BTC

Perlin’s superior trading volume dynamics powered more than just the price movement this month. Combined with other metrics, it contributed to a series of strong VORTECS™ scores that preceded two price peaks on June 17 and 19.

The highest trading volume (red circle in the chart) came on June 17 as the asset’s value was at $0.112, bound for the high of $0.119 some two days later.

QUANT (QNT): 281.22%

30-day price change: +92.03% vs. USD, +88.56% vs. BTC

Quant (QNT) followed a price/trading volume pattern similar to that of KEEP. The coin’s price received a major boost from the news of an upcoming Coinbase listing before the actual spike in volume came along.

As visible in the graph, the high watermark of QNT’s liquidity came after the price hit the ceiling on June 16.

Important Disclaimer

Beating Bitcoin: Why some traders don’t care about USD prices

June 26, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Altcoin

It's all about the BTC for Hodlers who don't intend to cash out anytime soon.

There are always two components to each altcoin’s price. One is the coin’s own characteristics: Fundamentals, investor sentiment toward the asset, liquidity and trading volume, among many others. Another powerful factor — the one that often renders any altcoin-specific dynamics irrelevant — is Bitcoin’s performance.

Like it or not, when the king of cryptocurrencies soars, there is room for the shabbiest shitcoins to punch way above their weight. When BTC tumbles, even the sturdiest alts can take a proportional hit. It's a question of knowing which is which.

Many traders within the crypto markets are relatively unfazed by decreases in the U.S. dollar value of their holdings, because they trade almost exclusively against Bitcoin on key exchanges where the liquidity of the altcoin / BTC pair may be more attractive than the same alt / stablecoin pair.

And of course, there are plenty of trading diehards who don’t intend to cash out their position into fiat in the near future at all: The cohort who believe that increasing their Bitcoin portfolio is more important than transferring into the inflationary U.S. dollar, or some other fiat currency.

But it’s all correlated, right?

While it may seem that coins’ own conditions are irrelevant given Bitcoin’s outsize influence, they do, in fact, make a difference. Assets with a healthy outlook of their own are often among the top gainers when things are bullish, and when there is a market-wide correction, they can recover faster and harder than the rest of the altcoin bunch — and even Bitcoin itself.

So how do you tell which coins’ market situation is healthier than others’ when everything is gory red? The VORTECS™ score, an algorithmic tool comparing historic market conditions around each coin to the present situation, can offer some clues. Exclusively available to subscribers of Cointelegraph Markets Pro, each asset’s VORTECS™ score indicates whether the present combination of the coin’s market and social metrics is historically bullish, bearish, or neutral.

Here are some very recent examples. When Bitcoin plunged below $30K on Tuesday following the bearish news coming out of China, stablecoins remained the only class of digital assets not to go deep into the red territory.

However, over the next 24 hours, BTC recovered many of the losses, bouncing back to above $33K. Not all altcoins were quick to replicate this relief rally, but many of those that did were aided by historically favorable individual conditions that the VORTECS™ indicator captured hours before the negative trend turned around.

PARSIQ (PRQ) Analysis

24-hour price change: +18.83% vs. USD, +2.21% vs. BTC

PRQ saw a rough week as its price declined from $0.88 on June 17 to $0.56 just before the Bitcoin- induced market-wide slump on June 22. It then slipped further down to $0.35.

While the coin’s VORTECS™ score line has been yellow (neutral) for much of the week, it began picking up as the price was sliding down, suggesting that the patterns of market and social conditions around the coin were looking increasingly similar to those in the past that were consistently followed by significant price increases within 12 to 72 hours. The coin was ripe for a breakout — if and when Bitcoin-driven macro forces allowed.

BTC’s about-face that came late on June 22 meant that the way was open for fundamentally strong altcoins to rebound. PRQ’s VORTECS™ score peaked at 86 (red circle in the graph) shortly after the negative trend reversed, halfway through the coin’s leap from $0.35 to $0.55, although the score’s trend had been upwards for several hours.

Solana (SOL) Analysis

24-hour price change: +26.36% vs. USD +12.96% vs. BTC

Although SOL’s VORTECS™ score did not cross the psychologically important threshold of 80 this week, it has been in the high 70s consistently, indicating the model’s reasonably high confidence in the coin’s favorable outlook.

When its price began to sink along with the rest of the market, VORTECS™ dynamics remained positive: In fact, the low price point ($21.41, first red box) coincided with the highest score (77, red circle). Judging by the historical precedent, the coin was poised for an energetic recovery.

When the tide turned, SOL was among the biggest winners of the day, regaining 26% against USD and almost 13% against Bitcoin.

Enjin Coin (ENJ) Analysis

24-hour price change: +18.73% vs. USD, +7.30% vs. BTC

Much like PARSIQ’s case, Enjin’s VORTECS™ score shot up as the crypto market followed Bitcoin into a tailspin. It reached a high of 79 early on June 22 (red circle) and remained in the green zone throughout the entire flash crash.

As the correction was over, the price of ENJ shot up from the low of 79 cents to the high of $1.04.

Important Disclaimer

A RUNE with a view: How smart crypto traders caught a 48% price pump

June 19, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

THORChain and Kyber provide the perfect examples of how quant analysis and breaking news can help cryptocurrency investors to capitalize on volatile markets.

Disparities in information access and data analytics tech are what give institutional players an edge over regular retail investors in the digital asset space.

The core idea behind Markets Pro, Cointelegraph’s crypto intelligence platform powered by data analytics firm The TIE, is to equalize the information asymmetries that permeate cryptocurrency markets.

Markets Pro bridges the gap with two world-class functionalities: the quant-style VORTECS™ score, and breaking NewsQuake™ alerts.

The former is an algorithmic comparison of several key market metrics around each coin to years of historical data, which assesses whether at any moment the outlook for this asset is bullish, bearish, or neutral given the historical record of price action.

NewsQuakes™ are automated notifications driven by an AI routine that monitors thousands of information sources to deliver potentially market-moving news to members, often within seconds.

Neither of these is a predictive tool. What both the VORTECS™ score and NewsQuakes™ are designed to do is to notify traders that something has just happened that, in the past, reliably moved asset prices. That’s why a good Markets Pro chart is the one that shows events happening in the right order and in the right time: First comes the indicator, and then price action follows.

In the last couple of days, we have observed a number of exemplary scenarios illustrating classic Markets Pro reads on the market.

RUNE: VORTECS™ shoots up, price follows shortly

June 13 did not start off as a particularly great day for those who were invested in THORChain (RUNE) and looking to make some gains. The coin has been on its way down, falling from above $9.00 a couple of days ago to just above $7.00.

However, the coin’s VORTECS™ score has been steady in the green (bullish) zone, sometimes even venturing into dark green (confidently bullish).

While most traders only saw what was on the surface — a coin’s weak performance — Markets Pro members have had access to a wider view. Even if the price trend did not look promising at all, the market conditions remained historically favorable for RUNE, suggesting a dip potentially worth buying.

Shortly before noon, RUNE’s VORTECS™ line tipped over 80, foreshadowing a rally that began to unfold six hours later. When the price went up, it went up sharply: from $7.00 to the peak of $10.34 twenty-six hours later.

It might also seem from the chart that fuel for the rally came from a NewsQuake™ detected a couple of hours before the pump. While the announcement of a RUNE giveaway by an investment company Qi Capital has definitely added to the momentum, it is unlikely that it had actually triggered the massive pump: As a sequence of strong VORTECS™ scores pointed out, RUNE’s breakout was propped up by an overall healthy outlook in the first place.

KNC: Polygon partnership news shakes up the market

Big announcements that promise more liquidity for the DeFi sector are usually a boon for the coins involved. When Kyber protocol’s team announced the deployment of their first liquidity mining program on Polygon and Ethereum, worth $30M in rewards, the market rewarded the KNC token with a pump from $1.78 to $2.06 (a 16% increase) within 8 hours.

However, the effect of the news began to recede almost as quickly as it kicked in, so only those quick to react were allowed to feast at the profit table. A safe way to secure a spot was through receiving a NewsQuake™ (red circle in the graph) notifying users of the collaboration. Alerts were sent to Markets Pro several minutes after the deal was publicly unveiled, but before the price of KNC had begun ascending.

These classic patterns are replicated day in, day out on Cointelegraph Markets Pro, where the top-performing strategy the team has been monitoring since Jan 3 2021 (Buy at 80, Sell after 24 hours) has now delivered a staggering 3,694% return in live-testing. Full details of the methodology used are available here.

VORTECS Report: When this indicator lights up, LUNA, MATIC and EGLD usually gain 10%

June 12, 2021 Coin Telegraph

AVAX

Compounding modest gains is a key strategy for successful crypto traders — LUNA doesn't have to go to the moon to help profits rocket.

Consistency is not generally a hallmark of crypto asset price movements. In a market characterized by volatility, outliers often become the norm — while even macro analysis of large cap assets such as Bitcoin and Ether is often wide of the mark.

For cryptocurrencies with smaller market capitalizations, finding trading patterns can be even harder. But as the VORTECS Score™ from Cointelegraph Markets Pro continues to absorb the history of almost 200 digital assets, careful analysis of some crypto tokens demonstrates that patterns do exist: Even if they may be invisible to the human eye, the data doesn’t lie.

The data science team at Markets Pro and The TIE examined a number of cryptocurrencies that have regularly reached a VORTECS™ Score of over 80 since the quant algorithm was launched on January 3 2021.

A score of 80 generally indicates that the algorithm has reasonably high confidence that the combination of positive sentiment, price action, trading volume, and tweet volume that it currently sees in the market has historically led to increased prices for that particular asset over the next few days.

In the chart below, we can see assets that have hit that score on at least 20 days since launch, including AVAX, EGLD, VGX, MATIC, FTM, LUNA, AXS, AAVE, SAND and COTI.

The blue bar illustrates the number of days on which the asset hit at least 80 — if the coin rose above 80 and then retreated below, before achieving the score again, only one per day was recorded; all subsequent hits in the next 24 hours were ignored.

Orange bars represent the number of occasions on which the asset then gained 3% in value over the subsequent 72 hours, while grey bars show a gain of 5% and yellow denotes a 10% gain.

LUNA boasts the most consistent gains of at least 3% following a VORTECS™ Score of 80, achieving that milestone 92% of the time:

Gained 3% in value 92% of the time
Gained 5% in value 84% of the time
Gained 10% in value 68% of the time

Elrond (EGLD) also has a strong set of scores following an 80 score:

Gained 3% in value 65% of the time
Gained 5% in value 61% of the time
Gained 10% in value 55% of the time

The Sandbox (SAND) stands out for highly consistent minor gains that didn’t translate into the same sort of 10% plus returns:

Gained 3% in value 86% of the time
Gained 5% in value 82% of the time
Gained 10% in value 41% of the time

What is VORTECS?™

The VORTECS™ Score is an algorithmic metric derived from historical analysis of crypto markets.

For each one of the ~200 crypto assets supported by Cointelegraph Markets Pro, the algorithm is hunting for moments in time that resemble the current marketscape — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Specifically, it’s looking for patterns that have consistently led to significant changes in price in the past.

Those patterns include a variety of factors: Volume, Outlook, RealPrice, Tweet Volume, Elevation, Confidence, and Sentiment... or VORTECS™ for short.

The algorithm combines all of this raw data into a VORTECS™ Score, which is designed to identify the general health of the market for a particular crypto asset. A high score suggests that in the past, conditions similar to those we see right now have often led to increases in the price of that asset. The higher the score, the more confident the algorithm is that these scenarios have been consistent.

All-time VORTECS™ Score performance

Markets Pro has been tracking the return on investment (ROI) of Bitcoin, an evenly-weighted basket of the top 100 altcoins, and various automated VORTECS™-based strategies since launching the algorithm on January 3 2021. A full methodology is available here.

While Bitcoin was trading just 8% higher than its price on January 3 at the time of writing, the altcoin basket had delivered 348% in returns. The top-performing VORTECS™ strategies have delivered outsized gains including several in excess of 1,000%, although the recent market pullback has meant that one strategy (buy at a score of 85, sell at 75) now trails Bitcoin’s returns.

Time-based strategy performance

Score-based strategy performance

Important Disclaimer

Beyond Dogecoin: The 5 hottest cryptos on Twitter this month

June 1, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Elon Musk doesn't have a monopoly on Twitter chatter, as these five cryptocurrency flavors-of-the-month proved in May.

In the realm of digital assets, Crypto Twitter is a major seat of power. Memecoins and serious large-cap assets alike can see their value rise or fall depending on whether the whimsical Twitter crowd decides to pay attention.

Huge rallies and dramatic declines often trigger waves of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) or Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) on the platform, capable of massively amplifying the unfolding price dynamics.

Granted, it would be convenient if increases in Twitter volume always spelled price hikes — yet, as the facts demonstrate, this relationship is way, way more complicated than that.

Tweet volume is one of the ingredients of a proprietary formula powering the VORTECS™ Score, a machine learning algorithm that compares historic and current market conditions around digital assets to aid crypto traders’ decision making. The model considers a host of other indicators – market outlook, price movement, social sentiment, trading activity – to arrive at a score that assesses whether the present conditions are historically bullish, neutral, or bearish for a given coin.

This week, we follow five digital assets who made the biggest strides in terms of Twitter activity this month. All five added hundreds of percent of tweets compared to the previous month’s average – but how actionable were these dynamics for traders?

Here’s how the VORTECS™ Score could give investors a few hints.

Telcoin (TEL): +300% Twitter volume

Between May 2 and 5, as Telcoin (TEL) was bracing for a massive price leap that would take it from below $0.01 to above $0.05 within ten days, two considerable spikes in tweets tagging TEL occurred. While the coin would normally get several hundred mentions a day, these two peaks each saw more than 3,000.

Combined with other factors, this pattern was recognized as historically favorable by the VORTECS™ model, which dished out a very high score of 91 (red circle in the graph). A tremendous price run followed less than a day later. Further tweet volume spikes this month followed price surges rather than preceded them.

Overall, in the last 30 days, Telcoin delivered 189% vs. USD and 345% vs. Bitcoin.

Polygon (MATIC): +240% Twitter volume

Twitter activity around MATIC and its price action entered a virtuous circle in May, with each leg of the price rally triggering a surge in chatter which, in turn, preceded a further round of the token’s appreciation.

Of course, there was much more to Polygon’s remarkable month, with a slew of positive real-world developments and trading activity spikes, but tweet volume appeared to be an essential feature of each VORTECS™ score peak (red circles in the chart).

MATIC’s monthly gains: 125% vs. USD and 248% vs. BTC.

iExec (RLC): +711% Twitter volume

iExec (RLC) emerged as the biggest winner in terms of added tweet volume this month, yet its price increase has been more modest: 60% against USD and 148% against Bitcoin.

In RLC’s case, as the charts illustrate, spikes in tweet volume were largely reactive and merely followed price action. The coin’s VORTECS™ score has been largely neutral ahead of the rally that started around May 9, suggesting that the combination of market conditions preceding it has not been frequently observed before.

Solana (SOL): +525% Twitter volume

Solana (SOL) saw its average tweet volume increase more than four times compared to the previous month, yet almost all corresponding price gains got wiped out by the end of May: -31.48% against USD and +6.06% against Bitcoin.

Tweet volume largely lagged behind the price movement, with one notable exception: An outsized jump from 5,000 to 20,000 tweets on May 17 that contributed to an 80+ VORTECS™ score and came some 36 hours before the coin reached its all-time high near $58 (red circles in both charts).

Ethereum Classic (ETC): +321% Twitter volume

While the reasons behind Ethereum Classic suddenly surging from $40 to $160 in the first week of May remain a mystery, we can be fairly certain that an explosion in the volume of Twitter conversation was not one of them: All the added tweets came in response to the price rally.

The VORTECS™ algorithm hadn’t sensed a historically favorable outlook, either, as the score mostly remained in the neutral zone.

ETC ended the month with +67.36% vs. USD +158.85% vs. Bitcoin.

An uptick in Twitter activity around a digital asset can mean a variety of things, depending on the configuration of other important market and social indicators. The VORTECS™ Score, exclusively available to Cointelegraph Markets Pro members, can contextualize tweet volume within a constellation of other market-moving metrics.

For those who prefer to leverage raw data, the absolute number of tweets and current vs. average tweet volume are readily available as separate metrics on the market intelligence platform.

VORTECS Report: How volatility drove one crypto trading strategy to 280x Bitcoin’s gains

May 29, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Altcoin

While Bitcoin hodlers are seeing 2021's gains slowly diminish, one consistent crypto trading strategy has delivered over 3,000% since Jan 3 — and BTC isn't in the portfolio.

What does a highly volatile asset class offer traders, beyond palpitations and the occasional heart attack? Opportunity.

Nicole Wirick of Prosperity Wealth Strategies in Michigan summed it up for Forbes: “Market volatility is a normal part of investing and is to be expected in a portfolio. If markets went straight up, then investing would be easy and we’d all be rich.”

And during the decade-long bull market on Wall Street, some participants who should know better appear to have forgotten this, as they’ve become used to steadily-increasing stock prices over a period of years.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who infamously referred to Bitcoin as a “fraud” in 2017, told the U.S. House Financial Services Committee this week that “My own personal advice to people is: stay away from it.” And yet at his own shareholder meeting on May 18, he said that “A lot of our clients are asking, ‘can we help them buy or sell cryptocurrency? And we're investing in that as we speak.”

So why is the CEO of the largest bank in the U.S. investing in something that he advises the rest of us not to touch?

Volatility is at the heart of that argument: It’s a classic case of “Do as I say, not as I do.” And Dimon, and many like him in traditional financial markets, make oodles of money when markets are choppy.

Of course, no markets are choppier than crypto.

Over the past few weeks, volatility has returned to the crypto markets, pushing Bitcoin as low as $30,000 before the king of digital assets swung back to exceed $40,000 again. And altcoins have swung even more dramatically — a phenomenon which has helped Cointelegraph Markets Pro’s quantitative algorithm, the VORTECS™ Score, to post extraordinary results in automated live testing.

This chart, produced on May 28 illustrates the results of the VORTECS™ Score’s performance since Jan 3 this year, when the algorithm went live. At the time of publication, one day later, the ROI on the top strategy is now over 3,000%.

In a score-based testing scenario, the algorithm “buys” a digital asset when the VORTECS™ Score crosses a certain threshold (e.g. 80), and “sells” it when it crosses a second threshold (e.g. 75).

Without employing fancy rebalancing techniques, but simply dividing the portfolio between all assets that currently require an investment, the algorithm has delivered a return of 3,037% for its highest-performing testing strategy — buying at 80, and selling when the asset crosses 80 again on the way back down.

For comparison, Bitcoin has generated returns of just 11.2% since Jan 3, and an evenly-weighted basket of the top 100 altcoins has returned 247%.

The only reason the VORTECS™ Score can deliver outsized returns like this is because crypto markets are volatile — which presents multiple entry and exit opportunities in a shorter timeframe than enjoyed by traders in traditional markets.

That may be partly a function of the 24/7 nature of crypto trading, but it’s also partly because the risk tolerance of cryptocurrency investors is generally agreed to be significantly higher than that of Wall Street CEOs… at least for short-term investing.

So while volatility has obvious downsides, including the risk of total and permanent loss, it also has major potential upside for traders who have strong research skills.

And strong research tools.

Important Disclaimer

Heads-up: How Livepeer traders got a sneak preview of an impending 300% price boom

May 28, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

From two bucks to forty dollars, and back down to eleven before soaring to thirty-eight greenbacks... The stomach-churning ride of Livepeer (LPT) illustrates the benign volatility of crypto markets.

Crypto traders will take any edge they can get. From fundamental research on long-term prospects to short-term price pumps created by new exchange listings, the 24/7 digital asset market provides opportunities for investors and traders of all stripes.

But this week, those traders who incorporate the Cointelegraph Markets Pro VORTECS™ Score into their research had a special reason to celebrate the inherent volatility that makes risk-averse traders cringe… and seasoned crypto pros pop champagne corks.

LPT, the Ethereum-based native token of decentralized video streaming network Livepeer, has seen some extraordinary ups and downs over the last three months. Valued at less than $2.00 in mid-January, it soared on the news that Grayscale Investments, one of the blue chips of digital asset investment, had been poised to launch an LPT trust.

Another pump came on March 17, with the official validation of the news that saw the token to its then-ATH around $30. By early April, it was nearing $40 on the news of an OKEX listing.

The rest of April and early May were largely uneventful for Livepeer, before a series of bullish news items once more saw the token reach its current all-time high above $44 on May 11.

As the graph below rom Cointelegraph Markets Pro illustrates, that rally was strongly driven by two announcements, delivered to the platform’s users as instantaneous NewsQuake™ notifications: Listing on Bithumb exchange and start of SGD trading on Gemini (red circle in the graph).

*Livepeer monthly chart on Cointelegraph Markets Pro*

And then, Bitcoin and the entire crypto market tumbled… with Livepeer a major casualty.

The outlook became bleak for the asset as LPT embarked on an almost uninterrupted downward run that took it from its all-time high around $44 to the low of $11, registered on May 24.

Finally, this week brought good news that spelled a reversal of the negative trend. The VORTECS™ Score, an algorithmic comparison of historic and current market conditions exclusive to Cointelegraph Markets Pro, identified conditions that have historically been favorable for LPT — giving members a heads-up that bullish conditions had been identified several hours before the tide’s actual reversal.

The score before the storm

*Livepeer weekly chart on Cointelegraph Markets Pro*

in the chart above the coin’s VORTECS™ score line went dark green at 81 (first red circle) whil the price was still searching for the bottom at around $11. VORTECS™ Scores above 80 generally indicate patterns of market and social activity that in the past consistently preceded significant increases in the asset’s price over the next 12-72 hours.

This spike coincided with Livepeer’s tweet of a new weekly record high in terms of the length of unique video transcoded — a real-world development that could convince investors that the asset had been undervalued.

Several hours later, the price began climbing (first red box), eventually reaching $24 on May 26. While still on the way to this local peak, the VORTECS™ algorithmic score went over 80 again (second red box), suggesting that previous runs like this one usually had second legs. Indeed, a small aftershock did come several hours later, taking the price from $32 to almost $36.

The outlook remains quite bullish for LPT, as May 28 saw another two high-profile listing announcements: one from Binance, and another from Kraken.

Sure enough, Markets Pro members have been seated in the front row for both, thanks to lightning-fast NewsQuakes™ delivered via mobile notifications and in-browser alerts. Even before these two announcements hit, Livepeer was 144% up this week, and clearly the coin’s gloomy streak is over for now.

Pumped up by volume? 5 crypto assets that traders loved this month (and their prices)

May 27, 2021 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Trading volume in crypto markets can be a key indicator of price volatility — but is there a direct correlation that traders can use to help inform their investment decisions?

Trading volume — the amount of an asset that changed hands over a given period — is one of the key metrics that investors use to track price trends and assess the market outlook for a specific coin in terms of liquidity and trader activity.

The ranking below zooms in on the fortunes of five coins that have had the greatest increase in average daily trade volume this month compared to the month before. Most of them — although not all — emerged as massive winners in terms of their monthly returns, but the relationship between the price and trading was not always what you’d expect.

The data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro platform sheds further light how these two indicators can influence each other.

Along with multiple other quantitative metrics, trading volume is at the heart of the VORTECS™ Score — an algorithmic comparison of historic and current market conditions derived from billions of data points gathered and analyzed by a proprietary machine learning model.

Polygon (MATIC ): +643.79%

Capitalizing on the sprawling activity in the DeFi sector and the expansion of the number of projects springing up on its platform, Polygon has had a fantastic month, conquering one all-time high (ATH) after another. The coin delivered 329% vs. USD and 456% vs. BTC alongside a 643% increase in average daily trading volume.

The trading volume dynamics faithfully followed each price uptick, reaching an impressive $11 billion on May 19. On that day, MATIC was responsible for as much as 4.5% of the crypto market’s overall trading volume.

From the look at the VORTECS™ score chart, it becomes apparent that trading volume spikes have been an essential component of each ultra high-score stretch that MATIC sported this month (red circles in the graph). These dark-green sequences, in turn, foreshadowed each new leg of the coin’s powerful rally.

Ethereum Classic (ETC): +229.23%

A legacy chain of the original Ethereum that has been abandoned by much of the community in the wake of the 2016 the DAO heist, ETC has a small but enthusiastic fanbase and a reputation of a network lacking security.

Observers are divided on what exactly triggered ETC’s 300% price run, closely followed by surging trading volume, in the first week of May. Opinions range from users suddenly seeking cheaper alternatives to the main Ethereum network to new investors mistaking the coin for its better-known cousin.

At any rate, at the height of its May 6 rally, ETC commanded a shocking 15.9% of the crypto market’s overall trading volume — not too bad for a coin that has risen from years of oblivion.

Going by the VORTECS™ chart, not only ETC’s showing was unexpected - it was historically unparalleled. The combination of market and social conditions that preceded the coin’s blast-off was not similar to those that systematically came before ETC’s price leaps in the past, as evidenced by largely neutral VORTECS™ Scores.

Telcoin (TEL): +507.8%

Telcoin, a global remittance platform whose token appreciated by 437% against USD and 600% vs. Bitcoin over the past month, owes at least some of its success to Polygon’s fiery run. The likely reason behind TEL’s surge in early May has been a layer-2 migration to the lower-fee Polygon network and the token’s subsequent listing on QuickSwap that opened attractive terms for liquidity providers.

As visible in the graph, it was the QuickSwap moment that produced the greatest increase in TEL’s trading volume rather than the even bigger price hike that followed a few days after.

It was the same surge in trading activity between May 2 and 8 that the VORTECS™ algorithm picked up and, in conjunction with other constituent metrics, deemed worthy of a series of high VORTECS™ Scores that began flashing around three days before the final leg of the price hike.

iExec RLC (RLC): +1,153.62%

RLC, the native token of cloud computing platform iExec, demonstrated the greatest month-to-month growth in average daily trading volume, adding an astounding 1,153% compared to the previous 30-day period. The coin’s price began picking up following the May 4 announcement of a Coinbase Pro listing and was boosted even more by a cascade of further exchange listings, big-name partnerships and collaborations, as well as the announcement of a developer rewards program. Over the month, RLC delivered 200% gains against USD and almost 300% against Bitcoin.

As the chart supplied by data analytics firm The TIE suggests, on May 8 and early May 9 the trading volume indicator mirrored the steeply upward price movement with a few hours’ lag. The two lines then effectively merged, indicating that further increase in trading volume was no longer driven solely by price action, but began responding to the news and heightening sentiment around the coin independently.

As visible in the graph, RLC’s VORTECS™ score had been neutral (yellow) in the days preceding the coin price’s spike, and briefly turned moderately bullish (light green) as the rally unfolded. However, when both the price and trading volume peaked, the VORTECS™ Score went from bullish back to neutral (red boxes in the graph), meaning that in the past such concerted upticks in both price and trading volume were not followed by price consistently going up or down.

In summary, RLC’s run this month did not have clear historical precedents in terms of market and social activity regularities that VORTECS™ score could capture. Rather, it has been driven by a series of bullish news announcements. This is where another element of Markets Pro functionality, NewsQuakes™, comes into play: In the same graph, it is plain to see how two listing announcements, on Coinbase Pro and Bithumb (red circle in the chart), came shortly before the rally.

OKB Token: +253.28%

The average daily trading volume of the OKEx exchange token, OKB, grew by more than 250% this month. However, this fact did not translate to a corresponding increase in the utility token’s price: Over the same 30 days, OKB lost 18.76% against USD and gained a mere 4.89% against the beleaguered Bitcoin.

A look at the token’s price vs. trading volume chart offers some explanation of this discrepancy. While trading volume largely mirrored price movement in the first half of the month, the two starkly diverged around May 19 and 20, around the time of the market-wide slump. As the price declined, the trading volume shot up.

This key to this seemingly paradoxical dynamic lies in the nature of the asset. In a bid to keep the value of the token high, every three months OKEx reduces OKB supply by buying back burning a few million coins. As the current burning period is set to expire at the end of May, some traders likely wagered on OKB staying afloat thanks to the guaranteed buyback liquidity when other digital assets were in a tailspin. Indeed, a surge in trading volume did support a brief rebound, yet it could only be sustained for a couple of days before the asset began sliding down again.

Note how the VORTECS™ algorithm remained unfazed by the May 20 increase in trading volume as the score remained neutral. A constantly learning model, it has surely seen such token burn-inspired spikes before — and apparently, in the past these spikes didn’t always spell significant price increases.

Any single metric describing an asset’s market outlook can be uninformative or even misleading on its own, yet it becomes exponentially more useful when contextualized within the recurring patterns of the VORTECS™ algorithm's other metrics (which include price action, sentiment, and tweet volume).

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