Google Trends portfolio: selling Ripple

Another update on the Google Trends portfolio.

The most interesting change here is Ripple's "market cap over-valued factor" going above 1.00. I have therefore sold all of the Ripple. I initially bought the XRP for about $0.202 each, and I sold all of the remaining XRP for about $0.223 each, or slightly over 10% profit. I'm happy enough with that.

The only coin in the portfolio that's done better than Ripple is Litecoin, which is currently up 25%. The Litecoin "market cap over-valued factor" is still nice and low, so I've got no plans to sell it. The Dogecoin is up slightly, and the rest is all down.

In the last update I said I had put off buying Monero after first seeing its Google Trends score go up, just in case it went down again, but it didn't go down so I bought some. Well, now it's gone down again. I'm not selling it just yet but if the "market cap over-valued factor" goes much over 1.00 I will do. The Monero is currently down about 14% since buying it, which is not ideal. Ledger Labs have begun work on Monero integration for the Ledger range of hardware wallets. This is great news. I expect lots of people who would otherwise be interested in Monero have been putting off buying it due to the lack of hardware wallet support, which should mean increased demand for Monero after hardware wallet support becomes available. That's if anyone can actually get their hands on a Ledger by then.

IOTA has lost a bit more value, and I'm currently down over 30% on the IOTA. There were some cryptographic vulnerabilities discovered in IOTA recently, and announced earlier today. Although the latest version of IOTA supposedly fixes these vulnerabilities, it seems to confirm what many have been saying about IOTA all along: that it uses weird homemade cryptography for no good reason, and is likely to be insecure. Even if the discovered vulnerabilities have been fixed, there's a good chance there are plenty more undiscovered vulnerabilities.

Bitcoin Cash still has an inexplicably-high "market cap over-valued factor". Bitcoin Cash came into existence as a Bitcoin chain split, which means all of the Bitcoin that existed now exists as Bitcoin Cash as well. It's therefore likely that a large proportion of the Bitcoin Cash in existence belongs to people who wouldn't have bought it if it were a new coin, but haven't sold it (e.g. it's in cold storage, or it's being held hostage by Coinbase). If we assume the "market cap over-valued factor" is a reasonable predictor of anything, then we can get an idea of how much unwanted Bitcoin Cash exists but hasn't been sold: the factor is 3.87, which means there exists about 3.87x more Bitcoin Cash than is actually being traded. Maybe. That would place the "alternative" market cap at $2.8 B, and the "alternative" price at $170. I think it's likely to slowly head towards those values as more people get coins out of cold storage, and if Coinbase let everybody have their BCC.