Anil Agarwal: JPMorgan designs bond for Agarwal to amass ...

Hello, dummies
It's your old pal, Fuzzy.
As I'm sure you've all noticed, a lot of the stuff that gets posted here is - to put it delicately - fucking ridiculous. More backwards-ass shit gets posted to wallstreetbets than you'd see on a Westboro Baptist community message board. I mean, I had a look at the daily thread yesterday and..... yeesh. I know, I know. We all make like the divine Laura Dern circa 1992 on the daily and stick our hands deep into this steaming heap of shit to find the nuggets of valuable and/or hilarious information within (thanks for reading, BTW). I agree. I love it just the way it is too. That's what makes WSB great.
What I'm getting at is that a lot of the stuff that gets posted here - notwithstanding it being funny or interesting - is just... wrong. Like, fucking your cousin wrong. And to be clear, I mean the fucking your *first* cousin kinda wrong, before my Southerners in the back get all het up (simmer down, Billy Ray - I know Mabel's twice removed on your grand-sister's side). Truly, I try to let it slide. I do my bit to try and put you on the right path. Most of the time, I sleep easy no matter how badly I've seen someone explain what a bank liquidity crisis is. But out of all of those tens of thousands of misguided, autistic attempts at understanding the world of high finance, one thing gets so consistently - so *emphatically* - fucked up and misunderstood by you retards that last night I felt obligated at the end of a long work day to pull together this edition of Finance with Fuzzy just for you. It's so serious I'm not even going to make a u/pokimane gag. Have you guessed what it is yet? Here's a clue. It's in the title of the post.
That's right, friends. Today in the neighborhood we're going to talk all about hedging in financial markets - spots, swaps, collars, forwards, CDS, synthetic CDOs, all that fun shit. Don't worry; I'm going to explain what all the scary words mean and how they impact your OTM RH positions along the way.
We're going to break it down like this. (1) "What's a hedge, Fuzzy?" (2) Common Hedging Strategies and (3) All About ISDAs and Credit Default Swaps.
Before we begin. For the nerds and JV traders in the back (and anyone else who needs to hear this up front) - I am simplifying these descriptions for the purposes of this post. I am also obviously not going to try and cover every exotic form of hedge under the sun or give a detailed summation of what caused the financial crisis. If you are interested in something specific ask a question, but don't try and impress me with your Investopedia skills or technical points I didn't cover; I will just be forced to flex my years of IRL experience on you in the comments and you'll look like a big dummy.
TL;DR? Fuck you. There is no TL;DR. You've come this far already. What's a few more paragraphs? Put down the Cheetos and try to concentrate for the next 5-7 minutes. You'll learn something, and I promise I'll be gentle.
Ready? Let's get started.
1. The Tao of Risk: Hedging as a Way of Life
The simplest way to characterize what a hedge 'is' is to imagine every action having a binary outcome. One is bad, one is good. Red lines, green lines; uppie, downie. With me so far? Good. A 'hedge' is simply the employment of a strategy to mitigate the effect of your action having the wrong binary outcome. You wanted X, but you got Z! Frowny face. A hedge strategy introduces a third outcome. If you hedged against the possibility of Z happening, then you can wind up with Y instead. Not as good as X, but not as bad as Z. The technical definition I like to give my idiot juniors is as follows:
Utilization of a defensive strategy to mitigate risk, at a fraction of the cost to capital of the risk itself.
Congratulations. You just finished Hedging 101. "But Fuzzy, that's easy! I just sold a naked call against my 95% OTM put! I'm adequately hedged!". Spoiler alert: you're not (although good work on executing a collar, which I describe below). What I'm talking about here is what would be referred to as a 'perfect hedge'; a binary outcome where downside is totally mitigated by a risk management strategy. That's not how it works IRL. Pay attention; this is the tricky part.
You can't take a single position and conclude that you're adequately hedged because risks are fluid, not static. So you need to constantly adjust your position in order to maximize the value of the hedge and insure your position. You also need to consider exposure to more than one category of risk. There are micro (specific exposure) risks, and macro (trend exposure) risks, and both need to factor into the hedge calculus.
That's why, in the real world, the value of hedging depends entirely on the design of the hedging strategy itself. Here, when we say "value" of the hedge, we're not talking about cash money - we're talking about the intrinsic value of the hedge relative to the the risk profile of your underlying exposure. To achieve this, people hedge dynamically. In wallstreetbets terms, this means that as the value of your position changes, you need to change your hedges too. The idea is to efficiently and continuously distribute and rebalance risk across different states and periods, taking value from states in which the marginal cost of the hedge is low and putting it back into states where marginal cost of the hedge is high, until the shadow value of your underlying exposure is equalized across your positions. The punchline, I guess, is that one static position is a hedge in the same way that the finger paintings you make for your wife's boyfriend are art - it's technically correct, but you're only playing yourself by believing it.
Anyway. Obviously doing this as a small potatoes trader is hard but it's worth taking into account. Enough basic shit. So how does this work in markets?
2. A Hedging Taxonomy
The best place to start here is a practical question. What does a business need to hedge against? Think about the specific risk that an individual business faces. These are legion, so I'm just going to list a few of the key ones that apply to most corporates. (1) You have commodity risk for the shit you buy or the shit you use. (2) You have currency risk for the money you borrow. (3) You have rate risk on the debt you carry. (4) You have offtake risk for the shit you sell. Complicated, right? To help address the many and varied ways that shit can go wrong in a sophisticated market, smart operators like yours truly have devised a whole bundle of different instruments which can help you manage the risk. I might write about some of the more complicated ones in a later post if people are interested (CDO/CLOs, strip/stack hedges and bond swaps with option toggles come to mind) but let's stick to the basics for now.
(i) Swaps
A swap is one of the most common forms of hedge instrument, and they're used by pretty much everyone that can afford them. The language is complicated but the concept isn't, so pay attention and you'll be fine. This is the most important part of this section so it'll be the longest one.
Swaps are derivative contracts with two counterparties (before you ask, you can't trade 'em on an exchange - they're OTC instruments only). They're used to exchange one cash flow for another cash flow of equal expected value; doing this allows you to take speculative positions on certain financial prices or to alter the cash flows of existing assets or liabilities within a business. "Wait, Fuzz; slow down! What do you mean sets of cash flows?". Fear not, little autist. Ol' Fuzz has you covered.
The cash flows I'm talking about are referred to in swap-land as 'legs'. One leg is fixed - a set payment that's the same every time it gets paid - and the other is variable - it fluctuates (typically indexed off the price of the underlying risk that you are speculating on / protecting against). You set it up at the start so that they're notionally equal and the two legs net off; so at open, the swap is a zero NPV instrument. Here's where the fun starts. If the price that you based the variable leg of the swap on changes, the value of the swap will shift; the party on the wrong side of the move ponies up via the variable payment. It's a zero sum game.
I'll give you an example using the most vanilla swap around; an interest rate trade. Here's how it works. You borrow money from a bank, and they charge you a rate of interest. You lock the rate up front, because you're smart like that. But then - quelle surprise! - the rate gets better after you borrow. Now you're bagholding to the tune of, I don't know, 5 bps. Doesn't sound like much but on a billion dollar loan that's a lot of money (a classic example of the kind of 'small, deep hole' that's terrible for profits). Now, if you had a swap contract on the rate before you entered the trade, you're set; if the rate goes down, you get a payment under the swap. If it goes up, whatever payment you're making to the bank is netted off by the fact that you're borrowing at a sub-market rate. Win-win! Or, at least, Lose Less / Lose Less. That's the name of the game in hedging.
There are many different kinds of swaps, some of which are pretty exotic; but they're all different variations on the same theme. If your business has exposure to something which fluctuates in price, you trade swaps to hedge against the fluctuation. The valuation of swaps is also super interesting but I guarantee you that 99% of you won't understand it so I'm not going to try and explain it here although I encourage you to google it if you're interested.
Because they're OTC, none of them are filed publicly. Someeeeeetimes you see an ISDA (dsicussed below) but the confirms themselves (the individual swaps) are not filed. You can usually read about the hedging strategy in a 10-K, though. For what it's worth, most modern credit agreements ban speculative hedging. Top tip: This is occasionally something worth checking in credit agreements when you invest in businesses that are debt issuers - being able to do this increases the risk profile significantly and is particularly important in times of economic volatility (ctrl+f "non-speculative" in the credit agreement to be sure).
(ii) Forwards
A forward is a contract made today for the future delivery of an asset at a pre-agreed price. That's it. "But Fuzzy! That sounds just like a futures contract!". I know. Confusing, right? Just like a futures trade, forwards are generally used in commodity or forex land to protect against price fluctuations. The differences between forwards and futures are small but significant. I'm not going to go into super boring detail because I don't think many of you are commodities traders but it is still an important thing to understand even if you're just an RH jockey, so stick with me.
Just like swaps, forwards are OTC contracts - they're not publicly traded. This is distinct from futures, which are traded on exchanges (see The Ballad Of Big Dick Vick for some more color on this). In a forward, no money changes hands until the maturity date of the contract when delivery and receipt are carried out; price and quantity are locked in from day 1. As you now know having read about BDV, futures are marked to market daily, and normally people close them out with synthetic settlement using an inverse position. They're also liquid, and that makes them easier to unwind or close out in case shit goes sideways.
People use forwards when they absolutely have to get rid of the thing they made (or take delivery of the thing they need). If you're a miner, or a farmer, you use this shit to make sure that at the end of the production cycle, you can get rid of the shit you made (and you won't get fucked by someone taking cash settlement over delivery). If you're a buyer, you use them to guarantee that you'll get whatever the shit is that you'll need at a price agreed in advance. Because they're OTC, you can also exactly tailor them to the requirements of your particular circumstances.
These contracts are incredibly byzantine (and there are even crazier synthetic forwards you can see in money markets for the true degenerate fund managers). In my experience, only Texan oilfield magnates, commodities traders, and the weirdo forex crowd fuck with them. I (i) do not own a 10 gallon hat or a novelty size belt buckle (ii) do not wake up in the middle of the night freaking out about the price of pork fat and (iii) love greenbacks too much to care about other countries' monopoly money, so I don't fuck with them.
(iii) Collars
No, not the kind your wife is encouraging you to wear try out to 'spice things up' in the bedroom during quarantine. Collars are actually the hedging strategy most applicable to WSB. Collars deal with options! Hooray!
To execute a basic collar (also called a wrapper by tea-drinking Brits and people from the Antipodes), you buy an out of the money put while simultaneously writing a covered call on the same equity. The put protects your position against price drops and writing the call produces income that offsets the put premium. Doing this limits your tendies (you can only profit up to the strike price of the call) but also writes down your risk. If you screen large volume trades with a VOL/OI of more than 3 or 4x (and they're not bullshit biotech stocks), you can sometimes see these being constructed in real time as hedge funds protect themselves on their shorts.
(3) All About ISDAs, CDS and Synthetic CDOs
You may have heard about the mythical ISDA. Much like an indenture (discussed in my post on $F), it's a magic legal machine that lets you build swaps via trade confirms with a willing counterparty. They are very complicated legal documents and you need to be a true expert to fuck with them. Fortunately, I am, so I do. They're made of two parts; a Master (which is a form agreement that's always the same) and a Schedule (which amends the Master to include your specific terms). They are also the engine behind just about every major credit crunch of the last 10+ years.
First - a brief explainer. An ISDA is a not in and of itself a hedge - it's an umbrella contract that governs the terms of your swaps, which you use to construct your hedge position. You can trade commodities, forex, rates, whatever, all under the same ISDA.
Let me explain. Remember when we talked about swaps? Right. So. You can trade swaps on just about anything. In the late 90s and early 2000s, people had the smart idea of using other people's debt and or credit ratings as the variable leg of swap documentation. These are called credit default swaps. I was actually starting out at a bank during this time and, I gotta tell you, the only thing I can compare people's enthusiasm for this shit to was that moment in your early teens when you discover jerking off. Except, unlike your bathroom bound shame sessions to Mom's Sears catalogue, every single person you know felt that way too; and they're all doing it at once. It was a fiscal circlejerk of epic proportions, and the financial crisis was the inevitable bukkake finish. WSB autism is absolutely no comparison for the enthusiasm people had during this time for lighting each other's money on fire.
Here's how it works. You pick a company. Any company. Maybe even your own! And then you write a swap. In the swap, you define "Credit Event" with respect to that company's debt as the variable leg . And you write in... whatever you want. A ratings downgrade, default under the docs, failure to meet a leverage ratio or FCCR for a certain testing period... whatever. Now, this started out as a hedge position, just like we discussed above. The purest of intentions, of course. But then people realized - if bad shit happens, you make money. And banks... don't like calling in loans or forcing bankruptcies. Can you smell what the moral hazard is cooking?
Enter synthetic CDOs. CDOs are basically pools of asset backed securities that invest in debt (loans or bonds). They've been around for a minute but they got famous in the 2000s because a shitload of them containing subprime mortgage debt went belly up in 2008. This got a lot of publicity because a lot of sad looking rednecks got foreclosed on and were interviewed on CNBC. "OH!", the people cried. "Look at those big bad bankers buying up subprime loans! They caused this!". Wrong answer, America. The debt wasn't the problem. What a lot of people don't realize is that the real meat of the problem was not in regular way CDOs investing in bundles of shit mortgage debts in synthetic CDOs investing in CDS predicated on that debt. They're synthetic because they don't have a stake in the actual underlying debt; just the instruments riding on the coattails. The reason these are so popular (and remain so) is that smart structured attorneys and bankers like your faithful correspondent realized that an even more profitable and efficient way of building high yield products with limited downside was investing in instruments that profit from failure of debt and in instruments that rely on that debt and then hedging that exposure with other CDS instruments in paired trades, and on and on up the chain. The problem with doing this was that everyone wound up exposed to everybody else's books as a result, and when one went tits up, everybody did. Hence, recession, Basel III, etc. Thanks, Obama.
Heavy investment in CDS can also have a warping effect on the price of debt (something else that happened during the pre-financial crisis years and is starting to happen again now). This happens in three different ways. (1) Investors who previously were long on the debt hedge their position by selling CDS protection on the underlying, putting downward pressure on the debt price. (2) Investors who previously shorted the debt switch to buying CDS protection because the relatively illiquid debt (partic. when its a bond) trades at a discount below par compared to the CDS. The resulting reduction in short selling puts upward pressure on the bond price. (3) The delta in price and actual value of the debt tempts some investors to become NBTs (neg basis traders) who long the debt and purchase CDS protection. If traders can't take leverage, nothing happens to the price of the debt. If basis traders can take leverage (which is nearly always the case because they're holding a hedged position), they can push up or depress the debt price, goosing swap premiums etc. Anyway. Enough technical details.
I could keep going. This is a fascinating topic that is very poorly understood and explained, mainly because the people that caused it all still work on the street and use the same tactics today (it's also terribly taught at business schools because none of the teachers were actually around to see how this played out live). But it relates to the topic of today's lesson, so I thought I'd include it here.
Work depending, I'll be back next week with a covenant breakdown. Most upvoted ticker gets the post.
*EDIT 1\* In a total blowout, $PLAY won. So it's D&B time next week. Post will drop Monday at market open.

By MATT LEE Updated Mar 7, 2020
Investors can trade almost any currency in the world through foreign exchange (forex). In order to make money in forex, you should be aware that you are taking on a speculative risk. In essence, you are betting that the value of one currency will increase relative to another. The expected return of currency trading is similar to the money market and lower than stocks or bonds. However, it is possible to increase both returns and risk by using leverage. Currency trading is generally more profitable for active traders than passive investors.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• It is possible to make money trading money when the prices of foreign currencies rise and fall.
• Currencies are traded in pairs.
• Buying and selling currency can be very profitable for active traders because of low trading costs, diverse markets, and the availability of high leverage.
• Exchanging currency is not a good way for passive investors to make money.
• It is easy to get started trading money at many large brokerages and specialized forex brokers.

Buying and Selling Currency Explained

It is important to note that currencies are traded and priced in pairs. For example, you may have seen a currency quote for a EUUSD pair of 1.1256. In this example, the base currency is the euro. The U.S. dollar is the quote currency.
In all currency quote cases, the base currency is worth one unit. The quoted currency is the amount of currency that one unit of the base currency can buy. Based on our previous example, all that means is that one euro can buy 1.1256 U.S. dollars. An investor can make money in forex by appreciation in the value of the quoted currency or by a decrease in value of the base currency.
Another perspective on currency trading comes from considering the position an investor is taking on each currency pair. The base currency can be thought of as a short position because you are "selling" the base currency to purchase the quoted currency. In turn, the quoted currency can be seen as a long position on the currency pair.
In our example above, we see that one euro can purchase $1.1256 and vice versa. To buy the euros, the investor must first go short on the U.S. dollar to go long on the euro. To make money on this investment, the investor will have to sell back the euros when their value appreciates relative to the U.S. dollar.
For instance, let's assume the value of the euro appreciates to $1.1266. On a lot of 100,000 euros, the investor would gain $100 ($112,660 - $112,560) if they sold the euros at this exchange rate. Conversely, if the EUUSD exchange rate fell from $1.1256 to $1.1246, then the investor would lose $100 ($112,460 - $112,560).

So here is the core element of what I believe, drives US foreign policy (Wars/Conflicts/Sanctions) and also domestic policy. I tried to trim my draft down so it's not a TLDR, but not leave out any critical information or citations/sources. This is pulled directly from this brief article: Petrodollar
"KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Petrodollars are dollars paid to oil-producing countries for oil.
• The emergence of the petrodollar dates back to the early 1970s when the U.S. reached an agreement with Saudi Arabia to standardize the sale of oil based on the U.S. dollar.
• Petrodollar recycling creates demand for U.S. assets when dollars received for oil sales are used to buy investments in the United States.
• Recycling of petrodollars is beneficial to the greenback because it promotes non-inflationary growth.
• A move away from petrodollars could potentially increase borrowing costs for governments, companies, and consumers if sources of money become scarce."

This list of facts should make clear just how dependent US currency is on the global oil economy. Which brings us to something called The Triffin Dilemma .
"By "agreeing" to have its currency used as a reserve currency, a country pins its hands behind its back.
In order to keep the global economy chugging along, it may have to inject large amounts of currency into circulation, driving up inflation at home. The more popular the reserve currency is relative to other currencies, the higher its exchange rate and the less competitive domestic exporting industries become. This causes a trade deficit for the currency-issuing country, but makes the world happy. If the reserve currency country instead decides to focus on domestic monetary policy by not issuing more currency then the world is unhappy."
"Reserve Currency ParadoxBecoming a reserve currency presents countries with a paradox. They want the "interest-free" loan generated by selling currency to foreign governments, and the ability to raise capital quickly, because of high demand for reserve currency-denominated bonds. At the same time they want to be able to use capital and monetary policy to ensure that domestic industries are competitive in the world market, and to make sure that the domestic economy is healthy and not running large trade deficits.
Unfortunately, both of these ideas – cheap sources of capital and positive trade balances – can't really happen at the same time."
Obviously, the US and global economy is a complex system with many moving parts but I think, just this small amount of information begins to clarify the bigger picture. It seems as though most people have accepted the idea that we have engaged in bad faith wars in the name of stealing oil, which is true on some level, but we are not actually trying to seize the oil, we are trying to force the entire world to participate in OUR oil economy in a way that benefits us the most.
Which leads me to the final part of this post. The Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) is a collection of approximately 120 nations that have joined together, starting back during the cold war, in an effort to remain independent and not be pressured in to choosing sides between the US and Russia. Many of these countries, such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and most recently, Venezuela and Syria, have either dropped the petrodollar or made efforts to trade in other currencies. If this list looks familiar, it's because we have invaded, occupied and/or attempted regime change backed by MSM reporting of human rights violations or threat of nuclear proliferation. Obviously, we have pretty solid evidence that most of these claims were completely false.
One of the main focuses of NAM these days, has been to conduct trade and handle the oil on their land, any way they see fit and they have been mounting a pretty strong coalition in response to the insanely harsh sanctions that we have tried to levy. Article About NAM and US Sanctions . This is essentially economic terrorism and unfortunately, most people, including myself, are not quite able to grasp just how de-stabilizing these sanctions are but it is slowly becoming clear to the public that we have been carrying out this policy of global dominance for decades.
The Trump WH and John Bolton just happen to be much more open about their motives: In January, White House National Security Advisor John Bolton issued a veiled threat on Twitter: My advice to bankers, brokers, traders, facilitators, and other businesses: don’t deal in gold, oil, or other Venezuelan commodities being stolen from the Venezuelan people by the Maduro mafia. We stand ready to continue to take action.
On his Twitter account, Trump insisted, “We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever, both dependable and reliable. It is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the World, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”
I realize that this may not be the most exciting topic, considering the kind of news we have been peppered with recently, but I think it is important for people to consider. It seems pretty clear that almost all of our military operations around the world have everything to do with giant oil companies, defense contractors and the petrodollar and have nothing to do with spreading democracy or freeing civilians from oppressive regimes. Our allegiance with Saudi Arabia makes a lot more sense and our insane obsession on Russia also starts to take focus. Russia is also a member of NAM and is basically the biggest country that has chosen to defy the US. And since we can't push them around like a weaker country, we rely on a constant fear-mongering campaign by our media outlets.
Following the NAM summit, Venezuelan Economy Minister Tareck El Aissami announced his country’s establishment of a payment system to meet obligations to Russia that will be covered with rubles. The developments have sent the US establishment into a frenzy.
Still working on part 2, but hope some people will find this informative....

This is going to be the only crypto post for now and an announcement:
Rule 6: Bitcoins & cryptocurrenies should be discussed in CryptoCurrency. Posts regarding this topic will be automatically removed.
If there's a stock correlated with cryptocurrencies, like coinbase going IPO, then that's fine, you might have to message the mods after posting to have it approved, no big deal.
Also if you're questioning whether something is an investment or not, just search for it on personalfinance. For general currency trading strategies, see forex .
If you're wondering if bitcoins are an investment or if there will be a crash, read on.

Are cryptocurrencies an investment?

This post is going to deal with bitcoins & cryptocurrencies as an investment... they're more speculative. All currencies are speculative mostly due to how the forex market works, but more because of exchange rates between countries keep currencies balanced (including inflation, country debt, interest rates, political & economic stability, etc), so you can only profit in price fluctuations.
Sure you could buy the currency of a depressed country, like Mexico decades ago, and then hold in the hopes it'll go up (which it did for Mexico), but that's also speculation (no one knew Mexico would pay off so much debt).
Bitcoins are also affected by other countries' currency values, but more so by the future expectation of legitimacy, world wide adoption, limited gains from mining, and eventual limit in supply. But at any given moment the United States could pay off more debt, raise interest rates to reduce inflation (or cause deflation), grow GDP, or even reduce the supply of USD all of which would increase the value of USD (keep in mind bitcoins can't do any of these things).
Far too many people are treating cryptocoins as an investment because currently (June 5th 2017) a lot of crypto investors are worth a lot of money, god bless you people, so this post will also help you determine if we're headed for a crypto crash and maybe you can keep those profits.

Should I invest in cryptocurrencies?

Understand that an investment is something you hope will go up in the future or provide income, both of which for the long term vs speculation which profits on short term inefficiencies.
Speculative securities are typically commodities, options, bonds, and currencies, but also stocks that are volatile enough to give you extreme returns or extreme loses.

Examples of investments:

• Stocks: A company's stock is an investment because the company's purpose is to continually grow and profit which is reflected in the stock price.
• Real estate: Typically you're in real estate for the rental income, but there is also the opportunity that property value will go up in the future depending on the local property market.

Examples of speculation:

• Overvalued stocks: AMZN a few years ago was more speculative than an investment when P/Es were over 1000 because the stock price was so high compared to how much Amazon was earning at the time and the possibility of earning even more was speculative.
• Options: An option contract worth 10 cents to buy AAPL at $200 in 2018, if AAPL goes over $200 you'll make several 100s of percentage points, if not you'll lose everything.
• Bio pharmaceutical stocks - FDA approval can send these stocks soaring or a bad drug trial will make you lose everything
• Penny stocks - several factors contributing to extreme price movements up & down
• Gold - global turmoil can send gold to new highs
• Hoarding a ton of Flooz giftcards or Facebook credits in hopes they'll go up in value, if not they're worthless. Also works on beanie babies, tickle me elmos, and collector items.

Reducing the risk of speculation

Typically for speculation you reduce risk by reducing your trade size and timeframe, but since you're trying to invest into something that is speculative, you can try:
Asset allocation, a strategy that reduces risk.. If you're 80% stocks, 15% bonds, 4% gold, and 1% bitcoins, if something were to happen to bitcoins, you still have 99% of your money.
But even very aggressive long term portfolios leave speculation out completely and just go 100% stocks because stocks benefit from growth while speculative securities like gold benefit from global turmoil in the short term. Only mid risk & mid term portfolios can take advantage of gold's speculative returns.
I also mention asset allocation because many crypto investors have been using this strategy on a portfolio of 100% crypto coins, but that doesn't help you reduce the overall risk of crypto coins, you're just reducing the risk of 1 speculative asset with another speculative asset. 100% crypto portfolio would face the same risks such as being made illegal, IRS aggressively hunting down crypto profits, a drop in correlated coin markets, or just a loss of popularity would all cause a sell off. Even the USD or Chinese currencies becoming more valuable would reduce the value of crypto coins.

Should I buy coins right now?

Cryptocoins are a better investment after a period of consolidation when volatility has stabilized:

Bitcoin 2013/2014 speculation, chart

• High volatility, extremely overbought signals

Bitcoin 2015 consolidation, chart

• Becoming more of an investment opportunity after volatility went down

Source Bitstamp exchange, while the volume is #2 to GDAX, Bitstamp is better to look at for historical price/data, more charts here.

RSI & MACD key for above charts and primer

• RSI overbought => 70%, oversold =< 30%
• MACD crossover is generally used for buy/sell signals and the green histogram anticipates that crossover by growing/shrinking. Also when the lines rise or fall to extremes (which is relative) give overbought/oversold signals, so we're going to use it to confirm or reject RSI. (If you think MACD crossovers are magic, don't, it's always late (crossing after the point you should sell or buy), but the crossover usually signals even more buying/selling, yet MACD is best used for confirming other indicators which is why I'm using them in these charts)

Analyzing overbought signals

So the first chart above have RSI & MACD screaming that bitcoin is overbought and you shouldn't invest in 2013/2014.
The black squares in the 2nd chart show consolidation and reduced volatility, a "better" time to invest. If you were trading short term, it would be a whole different story, and there would be opportunities to buy & short, but since this is written for investing, the small overbought signals are ignored, so if you were to buy Bitcoin at $300 inside the first blacksquare (2nd chart) and then it suddenly drops to 25%, it's okay because the volatility is much lower compared to previous price movements (nothing compared to 80% loss in the 1st chart). Any investor would tell you a 25% drop is terrible, but bitcoins are speculative and that kind of drop is pretty damn good for this level of volatility.

Nothing goes straight up forever

and anything that comes near this vertical incline will eventually lose 80% to near 100%, always happens, it's usually preceded by emotions (price euphoria), attention, and increased volume, all classic signs that something is becoming riskier.
Other speculative securities gaining multiples and then losing 80% to near 100% of value:

• Gold - detailed, shows two big corrections *happened multiple times in gold's long history
• AMD - 475% gains, then slide down to 84% loss *this has happened several times to AMD (1983, 1997, 2001, 2006)
• MJNA - these patterns in penny stocks are easier to see, they're the epitome of speculation
• Crude oil - I only took the 2006 to 2010 period which saw 3x increase and then a 76% loss, but oil was actually in a 7.5x incline since 2002
• AAPL - YES APPLE NO EXCEPTIONS, however with stocks it's easier to justify price increases because of earnings growth, but in this case AAPL was very overbought and earnings couldn't grow fast enough (even though earnings was already extreme). After a few mini corrections, a big one came which was 50% loss from the top. Keep in mind when looking at this chart that the previous price before the 7-1 stock split was $705 making the top $100.71 (I wrote it on the chart). Here the missing signal is increased volume, but we have another signal being MACD divergence which came late, but could have saved you another 20ish % loss.

Notable comments on reddit:

*This is just to get you guys looking at different subs on this topic, and yeah it's mostly anti-crypto, but don't let that discourage you.

• "Everyone was so wrapped up in which beanie baby would be worth the most in 20 years but nobody stopped to ask if anyone would care about beanie babies in 20 years. "
• "All cryptocurrency is speculation... most of the new cryptocurrency that's popping up are all cash grabs. Like penny stocks, they will push them hard and get people to buy in, then sell to all the suckers and the price will plummet"

Is Bitcoin going to crash?

Maybe, the signals are getting louder, you tell me: The only chart you wanted to see this entire time.
So based on the above chart, is bitcoin overbought? MACD levels are the same as 2013's crash, but the increased in value is around 4.3x or 2.4x (depending on which you look at), so maybe we'll see another spike before a crash, I don't know, it's up to interpretation right now. There's the emotional price levels of 3000 and 4000 that we might have no problem getting to in an overbought environment before a correction. And how big will the correction be? I think 80%, but it very well could be around 50% down to $1200, the previous level of resistance which would become support.
I put everything above in its own wiki here.
Well I hope that helps everyone. Sorry to anyone that may feel butthurt on classifying cryptocoins as speculation, I hope you understand the facts. Feel free to argue or agree with this. If I made any mistakes and you point them out, I'll correct them and give you credit for it in an update to this post and the wiki.
Also the automod will is just going to blanket remove posts (not comments) with the following keywords {crypto, bitcoin, btc, etherium, altcoin} (see update 4 below) (this will eventually get relaxed if Coinbase ever IPOs) and then it'll send the user this message:
"Sorry your post[link] was removed in stocks because of rule 6: Bitcoins & cryptocurrenies should be discussed in CryptoCurrency. You can find more information in our are-cryptocurrencies-investments wiki. If you're trying to discuss a non-OTC stock related to cryptocoins like Coinbase IPO, or this was just a mistake, message the mods and they'll approve your post, thanks."
Update: Created wiki, added relevant websites and sub reddits. Also turned on automod reply.
Update2: those relavant websites and subreddits I put into the wiki, thanks u/dross99 for recommending ethereum

Relevant websites/wikis

• Coin Market Cap - Great overview of all cryptocoins, their marketcap, graphs, price
• Bitcoin Charts USD - Bitcoin charts for USD by exchange. Also available on the same site are bitcoins in every currency.
• I just wanted to stick my money somewhere

Relevant subreddits

• CryptoCurrency - main sub to learn about all bit & altcoins
• ethtrader - trading eth
• ethereum - for more eth information
• btc - the place to have bitcoin discussions or r/CryptoCurrency; while Bitcoin does have a lot of information on Bitcoins in general, you'll find many reddit subs completely opposed to Bitcoin for heavy censorship of discussions, especially those critical of bitcoins, so you're better off reading the sub's wikis and discussing bitcoins in btc & r/CryptoCurrency
• personalfinance

Update3: Shoutout to the mods on CryptoCurrency
Update4: Updated auto mod keywords, it's not a blanket catch all, a little completed to understand if you don't know regex but it looks like this

"crypto ?(trading|investing)","(should(| I)|could(| I)|can(| I)|how to|is it worth) (buy|sell|mine|min)(|ing) (btc|btcs|bitcoin|ether|etherium|eth|litecoin|ripple|altcoin)"