Forex markets can be volatile and uncertain at the best of times, and inexperienced traders can easily end up chasing their losses. Yet it is precisely this volatility that gives you the potential for major profits. These 10 rules of forex trading may give you the best chance of landing on the winning side. Please remember, however, that trading carries a high level of risk to your capital, and profit is not guaranteed. Over 95% of all new individuals lose all their capital in the first month of trading forex

1. Avoid forex trading software that claims to guarantee returns

While you’re on the hunt for forex trading software, be sure that you’re not taken in by promises of guaranteed returns. There is no forex trading software that can assure you of winning trades. If there was, why would anyone sell it?

2. Always use a demo trading account

We’ve all heard that practice makes perfect, and it’s true. A demo trading account can help you improve your trading skills with virtual trades in real markets. Once you’re skilled at demo trading, you can switch over to real-money forex trading. And even once you’re using a live account, you may still want to use your demo account to try out new forex trading strategies. Of course, you should always remember that your performance on a demo account may not be replicated in a live trading account.

3. Forex trading can be highly stressful – avoid emotional trading

Whenever real money is changing hands, the risk of loss is ever-present. Therefore you should base your trades on considered tactics and strategies. To avoid being led by your emotions stay focused on technical and fundamental factors and market news at all times.

4. Invest in a solid forex education

Knowledge is power – we all know that. Ensure that your forex provider gives you access to tutorials, webinars, expert financial analysis and commentary, an economic calendar, graphs and charts, and even forex trading signals. All of these tools will work to improve your trading performance. The ultimate goal is to generate greater profits than losses over time, even if you have less winning trades than losing trades.

5. You can learn to trade forex successfully

No forex trading system guarantees success (see rule 1) but some may be used as reliable guides. If you learn from the experience of successful forex strategists, your likelihood of success is far greater. But remember, when judging the results of any system or any expert, that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.

6. Manage your forex capital wisely

The forex markets can change on a dime, as currency markets are often characterized by high volatility. If you have generated winning trades, be sure to manage your profits. Use stop-loss and limit orders, closeout positions, and hedge your exposure to the best of your ability. Be sure that you are in control of your capital at all times.

7. Manage your investment-per-trade wisely

This is one of the most crucial aspects of forex trading. Many traders fail to heed this important advice: Don't trade more than one currency at a time. Doing so puts you at a significant risk of loss. If you spread your investments over a wide number of trades, you limit your overall losses by not putting all your proverbial eggs into one basket!

8. Use common sense

If you know you’re trading a strong currency against a weak currency, chances are the strong currency will dominate. We are going through a period now where USD is a strong global currency. With a Fed rate hike looming, you may want to back USD against emerging-market currencies. Use your common sense when judging the effect of current and upcoming events.

9. Ensure you use risk protection strategies at all times

Risk protection varies from one trader to the next. However, you can limit your risk by managing your capital wisely, limiting the amount you trade per position, using forex trading signals, trading with greater knowledge, hedging your trades, and using specific technical strategies. Your key risk protection tool is always your stop-loss order. Remember, however, that stop-losses are not guaranteed and you can lose more than your initial deposit.

10. Be especially cautious about overextending yourself with leverage

The bottom line

By following these 10 golden rules to forex trading, you should find yourself in a much better position over the long term. Your focus should always be on trading currency pairs that you understand, in a way that does not expose you to too much risk. Read up about market conditions likely to impact upon the currencies you’re trading, limit your leverage to an affordable amount, and use a demo trading account to understand the market dynamics.

Rules for Trading Forex

Avoid forex trading software that claims to guarantee returns

Always use a demo trading account

Forex trading can be highly stressful – avoid emotional trading

Invest in a solid forex education

You can learn to trade forex successfully

Manage your forex capital wisely

Manage your investment-per-trade wisely

Use common sense

Ensure you use risk protection strategies at all times

Be especially cautious about overextending yourself with leverage

Leverage allows you to increase the size of trade you can control with your investment capital. It magnifies your profits but it can also magnify your losses. Be sure to limit the leverage you use so you don’t get into serious financial trouble.
The bottom line
By following these 10 golden rules to forex trading, you should find yourself in a much better position over the long term. Your focus should always be on trading currency pairs that you understand, in a way that does not expose you to too much risk. Read up about market conditions likely to impact upon the currencies you’re trading, limit your leverage to an affordable amount, and use a demo trading account to understand the market dynamics.

The current oil price war is a once in a generation event. In terms of the COVID caused demand shock and the Saudi-Russian supply shock, it's a once in a lifetime event.

The time to hedge is now. To guarantee low oil prices for India for the coming year (s) and heal our current account deficit.

What is hedging?
A 'hedge' is a financial contract whereby you agree to purchase oil at a pre-determined price. Hedges are used to reduce price risk and they are a popular strategy used by some large oil users (particularly airlines) to ensure that fuel price volatility doesn't affect their plans.
Typically, under the contract, a user will offer to purchase oil at a fixed price at a later date. (say for eg. Jan 2021). The supplier will purchase oil today and will store it for delivery at that later date.

If oil prices are so low, why should we hedge?
Neither Saudi or Russia can afford to engage in this oil price war for too long. Their economies and forex reserves are too intertwined to be able to afford to fight this war for too long. They are going to cave sooner or later.
Furthermore, the main target of the oil price war is the US Shale oil Industry. This industry is a 400 pound gorilla in the oil world which has transformed energy markets and made US a net oil exporter, a feat unimaginable a few years ago. Essentially, clever American entrepreneurs learnt to extract oil from shale rock using advanced technology and caused the largest net increase in production in the shortest span of time. Between 2005 and 2020, the US has MORE THAN TRIPLED it's oil production. However, shale oil requires prices of over 40-50$ a barrel to be economical.
https://in.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-shale-costs-analysis/few-u-s-shale-firms-can-withstand-prolonged-oil-price-war-idINKBN2130HL
Once the shale producers are destroyed we will once again be at the mercy of OPEC and the Arabs.
Have we seen such an oil price war before?
Yes. In the late 1980s, late 90s and between 2014-2016. Each time Saudi blinked and reduced oil production to shore up prices.
https://www.spglobal.com/en/research-insights/articles/why-saudi-arabia-s-oil-price-war-is-doomed-to-fail-fuel-for-thought
Do countries use hedges to hedge their oil supply?
Sort of. While typical consumers who hedge are usually airlines. Suppliers often hedge as well. Mexico (which is a large oil exporter) annually hedges almost all of it's production in what is called a 'Hacienda Hedge'. This year's hedge has saved the Mexican Economy
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Mexicos-Oil-Hedge-Just-Saved-Its-Economy.html

When is it a right time to hedge?
This one is tricky. The ideal time to hedge is when oil prices are near their bottom.
Just like there is talk of 'flattening the curve' with Covid, for traded commodities the best time to hedge is the 'bottom of the curve'
This chart shows the price of 1 barrel of Brent Crude oil up to 80 months into the future. That's almost 5 years!
https://www.erce.energy/graph/brent-futures-curve
The price of oil 5 years from now is shown to be currently at 54 dollars a barrel. That is much lower than what we were paying just last year in September when Saudi oil facilities were attacked.
What are the risks?
The risks are mainly three fold.

Hedges work essentially by storing cheap oil today and having it delivered at a later date. As India is a large oil importer, any attempt to hedge oil consumption will immediately cause oil prices to rise. Therefore, while it may not be possible to hedge all of India's oil consumption, it is certainly possible to hedge a significant part of it.
India will not be able to take advantage of lower oil prices if prices CONTINUE to stay low. However, past history shows this is unlikely.
Indian Oil PSUs also export large amounts of their products overseas due to surplus refining capacity. However, if oil prices continue to be low, the relative cost of their products increases and export become uneconomical.

I am putting together my investment portfolio for 2018 and made a complete summary of the current Top 100. Interestingly, I noticed that all coins can be categorized into 12 markets. Which markets do you think will play the biggest role in the coming year?
Here is a complete overview of all coins in an excel sheet including name, market, TPS, risk profile, time since launch (negative numbers mean that they are launching that many months in the future) and market cap. You can also sort by all of these fields of course. Coins written in bold are the strongest contenders within their market either due to having the best technology or having a small market cap and still excellent technology and potential. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s8PHcNvvjuy848q18py_CGcu8elRGQAUIf86EYh4QZo/edit#gid=0
The 12 markets are

Currency 13 coins
Platform 25 coins
Ecosystem 9 coins
Privacy 10 coins
Currency Exchange Tool 8 coins
Gaming & Gambling 5 coins
Misc 15 coins
Social Network 4 coins
Fee Token 3 coins
Decentralized Data Storage 4 coins
Cloud Computing 3 coins
Stable Coin 2 coins

Before we look at the individual markets, we need to take a look of the overall market and its biggest issue scalability first:
Cryptocurrencies aim to be a decentralized currency that can be used worldwide. Its goal is to replace dollar, Euro, Yen, all FIAT currencies worldwide. The coin that will achieve that will be worth several trillion dollars.
Bitcoin can only process 7 transactions per second (TPS). In order to replace all FIAT, it would need to perform at at least VISA levels, which usually processes around 3,000 TPS, up to 25,000 TPS during peak times and a maximum of 64,000 TPS. That means that this cryptocurrency would need to be able to perform at least several thousand TPS. However, a ground breaking technology should not look at current technology to set a goal for its use, i.e. estimating the number of emails sent in 1990 based on the number of faxes sent wasn’t a good estimate.
For that reason, 10,000 TPS is the absolute baseline for a cryptocurrency that wants to replace FIAT. This brings me to IOTA, which wants to connect all 80 billion IoT devices that are expected to exist by 2025, which constantly communicate with each other, creating 80 billion or more transactions per second. This is the benchmark that cryptocurrencies should be aiming for. Currently, 8 billion devices are connected to the Internet.
With its Lightning network recently launched, Bitcoin is realistically looking at 50,000 possible soon. Other notable cryptocurrencies besides IOTA and Bitcoin are Nano with 7,000 TPS already tested, Dash with several billion TPS possible with Masternodes, Neo, LISK and RHOC with 100,000 TPS by 2020, Ripple with 50,000 TPS, Ethereum with 10,000 with Sharding.
However, it needs to be said that scalability usually goes at the cost of decentralization and security. So, it needs to be seen, which of these technologies can prove itself resilient and performant.
Without further ado, here are the coins of the first market

Market 1 - Currency:

Bitcoin: 1st generation blockchain with currently bad scalability currently, though the implementation of the Lightning Network looks promising and could alleviate most scalability concerns, scalability and high energy use.
Ripple: Centralized currency that might become very successful due to tight involvement with banks and cross-border payments for financial institutions; banks and companies like Western Union and Moneygram (who they are currently working with) as customers customers. However, it seems they are aiming for more decentralization now.https://ripple.com/dev-blog/decentralization-strategy-update/. Has high TPS due to Proof of Correctness algorithm.
Bitcoin Cash: Bitcoin fork with the difference of having an 8 times bigger block size, making it 8 times more scalable than Bitcoin currently. Further block size increases are planned. Only significant difference is bigger block size while big blocks lead to further problems that don't seem to do well beyond a few thousand TPS. Opponents to a block size argue that increasing the block size limit is unimaginative, offers only temporary relief, and damages decentralization by increasing costs of participation. In order to preserve decentralization, system requirements to participate should be kept low. To understand this, consider an extreme example: very big blocks (1GB+) would require data center level resources to validate the blockchain. This would preclude all but the wealthiest individuals from participating.Community seems more open than Bitcoin's though.
Litecoin : Little brother of Bitcoin. Bitcoin fork with different mining algorithm but not much else.Copies everything that Bitcoin does pretty much. Lack of real innovation.
Dash: Dash (Digital Cash) is a fork of Bitcoin and focuses on user ease. It has very fast transactions within seconds, low fees and uses Proof of Service from Masternodes for consensus. They are currently building a system called Evolution which will allow users to send money using usernames and merchants will find it easy to integrate Dash using the API. You could say Dash is trying to be a PayPal of cryptocurrencies. Currently, cryptocurrencies must choose between decentralization, speed, scalability and can pick only 2. With Masternodes, Dash picked speed and scalability at some cost of decentralization, since with Masternodes the voting power is shifted towards Masternodes, which are run by Dash users who own the most Dash.
IOTA: 3rd generation blockchain called Tangle, which has a high scalability, no fees and instant transactions. IOTA aims to be the connective layer between all 80 billion IOT devices that are expected to be connected to the Internet in 2025, possibly creating 80 billion transactions per second or 800 billion TPS, who knows. However, it needs to be seen if the Tangle can keep up with this scalability and iron out its security issues that have not yet been completely resolved.
Nano: 3rd generation blockchain called Block Lattice with high scalability, no fees and instant transactions. Unlike IOTA, Nano only wants to be a payment processor and nothing else, for now at least. With Nano, every user has their own blockchain and has to perform a small amount of computing for each transaction, which makes Nano perform at 300 TPS with no problems and 7,000 TPS have also been tested successfully. Very promising 3rd gen technology and strong focus on only being the fastest currency without trying to be everything.
Decred: As mining operations have grown, Bitcoin’s decision-making process has become more centralized, with the largest mining companies holding large amounts of power over the Bitcoin improvement process. Decred focuses heavily on decentralization with their PoW Pos hybrid governance system to become what Bitcoin was set out to be. They will soon implement the Lightning Network to scale up. While there do not seem to be more differences to Bitcoin besides the novel hybrid consensus algorithm, which Ethereum, Aeternity and Bitcoin Atom are also implementing, the welcoming and positive Decred community and professoinal team add another level of potential to the coin.
Aeternity: We’ve seen recently, that it’s difficult to scale the execution of smart contracts on the blockchain. Crypto Kitties is a great example. Something as simple as creating and trading unique assets on Ethereum bogged the network down when transaction volume soared. Ethereum and Zilliqa address this problem with Sharding. Aeternity focuses on increasing the scalability of smart contracts and dapps by moving smart contracts off-chain. Instead of running on the blockchain, smart contracts on Aeternity run in private state channels between the parties involved in the contracts. State channels are lines of communication between parties in a smart contract. They don’t touch the blockchain unless they need to for adjudication or transfer of value. Because they’re off-chain, state channel contracts can operate much more efficiently. They don’t need to pay the network for every time they compute and can also operate with greater privacy. An important aspect of smart contract and dapp development is access to outside data sources. This could mean checking the weather in London, score of a football game, or price of gold. Oracles provide access to data hosted outside the blockchain. In many blockchain projects, oracles represent a security risk and potential point of failure, since they tend to be singular, centralized data streams. Aeternity proposes decentralizing oracles with their oracle machine. Doing so would make outside data immutable and unchangeable once it reaches Aeternity’s blockchain. Of course, the data source could still be hacked, so Aeternity implements a prediction market where users can bet on the accuracy and honesty of incoming data from various oracles.It also uses prediction markets for various voting and verification purposes within the platform. Aeternity’s network runs on on a hybrid of proof of work and proof of stake. Founded by a long-time crypto-enthusiast and early colleague of Vitalik Buterin, Yanislav Malahov. Promising concept though not product yet
Bitcoin Atom: Atomic Swaps and hybrid consenus. This looks like the only Bitcoin clone that actually is looking to innovate next to Bitcoin Cash.
Dogecoin: Litecoin fork, fantastic community, though lagging behind a bit in technology.
Bitcoin Gold: A bit better security than bitcoin through ASIC resistant algorithm, but that's it. Not that interesting.
Digibyte: Digibyte's PoS blockchain is spread over a 100,000+ servers, phones, computers, and nodes across the globe, aiming for the ultimate level of decentralization. DigiByte rebalances the load between the five mining algorithms by adjusting the difficulty of each so one algorithm doesn’t become dominant. The algorithm's asymmetric difficulty has gained notoriety and been deployed in many other blockchains.DigiByte’s adoption over the past four years has been slow. It’s still a relatively obscure currency compared its competitors. The DigiByte website offers a lot of great marketing copy and buzzwords. However, there’s not much technical information about what they have planned for the future. You could say Digibyte is like Bitcoin, but with shorter blocktimes and a multi-algorithm. However, that's not really a difference big enough to truly set themselves apart from Bitcoin, since these technologies could be implemented by any blockchain without much difficulty. Their decentralization is probably their strongest asset, however, this also change quickly if the currency takes off and big miners decide to go into Digibyte.
Bitcoin Diamond Asic resistant Bitcoin and Copycat

Market 2 - Platform

Most of the cryptos here have smart contracts and allow dapps (Decentralized apps) to be build on their platform and to use their token as an exchange of value between dapp services.

Ethereum: 2nd generation blockchain that allows the use of smart contracts. Bad scalability currently, though this concern could be alleviated by the soon to be implemented Lightning Network aka Plasma and its Sharding concept.
EOS: Promising technology that wants to be able do everything, from smart contracts like Ethereum, scalability similar to Nano with 1000 tx/second + near instant transactions and zero fees, to also wanting to be a platform for dapps. However, EOS doesn't have a product yet and everything is just promises still. Highly overvalued right now. However, there are lots of red flags, have dumped $500 million Ether over the last 2 months and possibly bought back EOS to increase the size of their ICO, which has been going on for over a year and has raised several billion dollars. All in all, their market cap is way too high for that and not even having a product.
Cardano: Similar to Ethereum/EOS, however, only promises made with no delivery yet, highly overrated right now. Interesting concept though. Market cap way too high for not even having a product. Somewhat promising technology.
VeChain: Singapore-based project that’s building a business enterprise platform and inventory tracking system. Examples are verifying genuine luxury goods and food supply chains. Has one of the strongest communities in the crypto world. Most hyped token of all, with merit though.
Neo: Neo is a platform, similar to Eth, but more extensive, allowing dapps and smart contracts, but with a different smart contract gas system, consensus mechanism (PoS vs. dBfT), governance model, fixed vs unfixed supply, expensive contracts vs nearly free contracts, different ideologies for real world adoption. There are currently only 9 nodes, each of which are being run by a company/entity hand selected by the NEO council (most of which are located in china) and are under contract. This means that although the locations of the nodes may differ, ultimately the neo council can bring them down due to their legal contracts. In fact this has been done in the past when the neo council was moving 50 million neo that had been locked up. Also dbft (or neo's implmentation of it) has failed underload causing network outages during major icos. The first step in decentralization is that the NEO Counsel will select trusted nodes (Universities, business partners, etc.) and slowly become less centralized that way. The final step in decentralization will be allowing NEO holders to vote for new nodes, similar to a DPoS system (ARK/EOS/LISK). NEO has a regulation/government friendly ideology. Finally they are trying to work undewith the Chinese government in regards to regulations. If for some reason they wanted it shut down, they could just shut it down.
Stellar: PoS system, similar goals as Ripple, but more of a platform than only a currency. 80% of Stellar are owned by Stellar.org still, making the currency centralized.
Ethereum classic: Original Ethereum that decided not to fork after a hack. The Ethereum that we know is its fork. Uninteresing, because it has a lot of less resources than Ethereum now and a lot less community support.
Ziliqa: Zilliqa is building a new way of sharding. 2400 tpx already tested, 10,000 tps soon possible by being linearly scalable with the number of nodes. That means, the more nodes, the faster the network gets. They are looking at implementing privacy as well.
QTUM: Enables Smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain. Useful.
Icon: Korean ethereum. Decentralized application platform that's building communities in partnership with banks, insurance providers, hospitals, and universities. Focused on ID verification and payments. No big differentiators to the other 20 Ethereums, except that is has a product. That is a plus. Maybe cheap alternative to Ethereum.
LISK: Lisk's difference to other BaaS is that side chains are independent to the main chain and have to have their own nodes. Similar to neo whole allows dapps to deploy their blockchain to. However, Lisk is currently somewhat centralized with a small group of members owning more than 50% of the delegated positions. Lisk plans to change the consensus algorithm for that reason in the near future.
Rchain: Similar to Ethereum with smart contract, though much more scalable at an expected 40,000 TPS and possible 100,000 TPS. Not launched yet. No product launched yet, though promising technology. Not overvalued, probably at the right price right now.
ARDR: Similar to Lisk. Ardor is a public blockchain platform that will allow people to utilize the blockchain technology of Nxt through the use of child chains. A child chain, which is a ‘light’ blockchain that can be customized to a certain extent, is designed to allow easy self-deploy for your own blockchain. Nxt claims that users will "not need to worry" about security, as that part is now handled by the main chain (Ardor). This is the chief innovation of Ardor. Ardor was evolved from NXT by the same company. NEM started as a NXT clone.
Ontology: Similar to Neo. Interesting coin
Bytom: Bytom is an interactive protocol of multiple byte assets. Heterogeneous byte-assets (indigenous digital currency, digital assets) that operate in different forms on the Bytom Blockchain and atomic assets (warrants, securities, dividends, bonds, intelligence information, forecasting information and other information that exist in the physical world) can be registered, exchanged, gambled and engaged in other more complicated and contract-based interoperations via Bytom.
Nxt: Similar to Lisk
Stratis: Different to LISK, Stratis will allow businesses and organizations to create their own blockchain according to their own needs, but secured on the parent Stratis chain. Stratis’s simple interface will allow organizations to quickly and easily deploy and/or test blockchain functionality of the Ethereum, BitShares, BitCoin, Lisk and Stratis environements.
Status: Status provides access to all of Ethereum’s decentralized applications (dapps) through an app on your smartphone. It opens the door to mass adoption of Ethereum dapps by targeting the fastest growing computer segment in the world – smartphone users.16. Ark: Fork of Lisk that focuses on a smaller feature set. Ark wallets can only vote for one delegate at a time which forces delegates to compete against each other and makes cartel formations incredibly hard, if not impossible.
Neblio: Similar to Neo, but 30x smaller market cap.
NEM: Is similar to Neo No marketing team, very high market cap for little clarilty what they do.
Bancor: Bancor is a Decentralized Liquidity Network that allows you to hold any Ethereum token and convert it to any other token in the network, with no counter party, at an automatically calculated price, using a simple web wallet.
Dragonchain: The Purpose of DragonChain is to help companies quickly and easily incorporate blockchain into their business applications. Many companies might be interested in making this transition because of the benefits associated with serving clients over a blockchain – increased efficiency and security for transactions, a reduction of costs from eliminating potential fraud and scams, etc.
Skycoin: Transactions with zero fees that take apparently two seconds, unlimited transaction rate, no need for miners and block rewards, low power usage, all of the usual cryptocurrency technical vulnerabilities fixed, a consensus mechanism superior to anything that exists, resistant to all conceivable threats (government censorship, community infighting, cybenucleaconventional warfare, etc). Skycoin has their own consensus algorithm known as Obelisk written and published academically by an early developer of Ethereum. Obelisk is a non-energy intensive consensus algorithm based on a concept called ‘web of trust dynamics’ which is completely different to PoW, PoS, and their derivatives. Skywire, the flagship application of Skycoin, has the ambitious goal of decentralizing the internet at the hardware level and is about to begin the testnet in April. However, this is just one of the many facets of the Skycoin ecosystem. Skywire will not only provide decentralized bandwidth but also storage and computation, completing the holy trinity of commodities essential for the new internet. Skycion a smear campaign launched against it, though they seem legit and reliable. Thus, they are probably undervalued.

Market 3 - Ecosystem

The 3rd market with 11 coins is comprised of ecosystem coins, which aim to strengthen the ease of use within the crypto space through decentralized exchanges, open standards for apps and more

Nebulas: Similar to how Google indexes webpages Nebulas will index blockchain projects, smart contracts & data using the Nebulas rank algorithm that sifts & sorts the data. Developers rewarded NAS to develop & deploy on NAS chain. Nebulas calls this developer incentive protocol – basically rewards are issued based on how often dapp/contract etc. is used, the more the better the rewards and Proof of devotion. Works like DPoS except the best, most economically incentivised developers (Bookkeeppers) get the forging spots. Ensuring brains stay with the project (Cross between PoI & PoS). 2,400 TPS+, DAG used to solve the inter-transaction dependencies in the PEE (Parallel Execution Environment) feature, first crypto Wallet that supports the Lightening Network.
Waves: Decentralized exchange and crowdfunding platform. Let’s companies and projects to issue and manage their own digital coin tokens to raise money.
Salt: Leveraging blockchain assets to secure cash loands. Plans to offer cash loans in traditional currencies, backed by your cryptocurrency assets. Allows lenders worldwide to skip credit checks for easier access to affordable loans.
CHAINLINK: ChainLink is a decentralized oracle service, the first of its kind. Oracles are defined as an ‘agent’ that finds and verifies real-world occurrences and submits this information to a blockchain to be used in smart contracts.With ChainLink, smart contract users can use the network’s oracles to retrieve data from off-chain application program interfaces (APIs), data pools, and other resources and integrate them into the blockchain and smart contracts. Basically, ChainLink takes information that is external to blockchain applications and puts it on-chain. The difference to Aeternity is that Chainlink deploys the smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain while Aeternity has its own chain.
WTC: Combines blockchain with IoT to create a management system for supply chains Interesting
Ethos unifyies all cryptos. Ethos is building a multi-cryptocurrency phone wallet. The team is also building an investment diversification tool and a social network
Aion: Aion is the token that pays for services on the Aeternity platform.
USDT: is no cryptocurrency really, but a replacement for dollar for trading After months of asking for proof of dollar backing, still no response from Tether.

Market 4 - Privacy

The 4th market are privacy coins. As you might know, Bitcoin is not anonymous. If the IRS or any other party asks an exchange who is the identity behind a specific Bitcoin address, they know who you are and can track back almost all of the Bitcoin transactions you have ever made and all your account balances. Privacy coins aim to prevent exactly that through address fungability, which changes addresses constantly, IP obfuscation and more. There are 2 types of privacy coins, one with completely privacy and one with optional privacy. Optional Privacy coins like Dash and Nav have the advantage of more user friendliness over completely privacy coins such as Monero and Enigma.

Monero: Currently most popular privacy coin, though with a very high market cap. Since their privacy is all on chain, all prior transactions would be deanonymized if their protocol is ever cracked. This requires a quantum computing attack though. PIVX is better in that regard.
Zcash: A decentralized and open-source cryptocurrency that hide the sender, recipient, and value of transactions. Offers users the option to make transactions public later for auditing. Decent privacy coin, though no default privacy
Verge: Calls itself privacy coin without providing private transactions, multiple problems over the last weeks has a toxic community, and way too much hype for what they have.
Bytecoin: First privacy-focused cryptocurrency with anonymous transactions. Bytecoin’s code was later adapted to create Monero, the more well-known anonymous cryptocurrency. Has several scam accusations, 80% pre-mine, bad devs, bad tech
Bitcoin Private: A merge fork of Bitcoin and Zclassic with Zclassic being a fork of Zcash with the difference of a lack of a founders fee required to mine a valid block. This promotes a fair distribution, preventing centralized coin ownership and control. Bitcoin private offers the optional ability to keep the sender, receiver, and amount private in a given transaction. However, this is already offered by several good privacy coins (Monero, PIVX) and Bitcoin private doesn't offer much more beyond this.
Komodo: The Komodo blockchain platform uses Komodo’s open-source cryptocurrency for doing transparent, anonymous, private, and fungible transactions. They are then made ultra-secure using Bitcoin’s blockchain via a Delayed Proof of Work (dPoW) protocol and decentralized crowdfunding (ICO) platform to remove middlemen from project funding. Offers services for startups to create and manage their own Blockchains.
PIVX: As a fork of Dash, PIVX uses an advanced implementation of the Zerocoin protocol to provide it’s privacy. This is a form of zeroknowledge proofs, which allow users to spend ‘Zerocoins’ that have no link back to them. Unlike Zcash u have denominations in PIVX, so they can’t track users by their payment amount being equal to the amount of ‘minted’ coins, because everyone uses the same denominations. PIVX is also implementing Bulletproofs, just like Monero, and this will take care of arguably the biggest weakness of zeroknowledge protocols: the trusted setup.
Zcoin: PoW cryptocurrency. Private financial transactions, enabled by the Zerocoin Protocol. Zcoin is the first full implementation of the Zerocoin Protocol, which allows users to have complete privacy via Zero-Knowledge cryptographic proofs.
Enigma: Monero is to Bitcoin what enigma is to Ethereum. Enigma is for making the data used in smart contracts private. More of a platform for dapps than a currency like Monero. Very promising.
Navcoin: Like bitcoin but with added privacy and pos and 1,170 tps, but only because of very short 30 second block times. Though, privacy is optional, but aims to be more user friendly than Monero. However, doesn't really decide if it wants to be a privacy coin or not. Same as Zcash.Strong technology, non-shady team.
Tenx: Raised 80 million, offers cryptocurrency-linked credit cards that let you spend virtual money in real life. Developing a series of payment platforms to make spending cryptocurrency easier. However, the question is if full privacy coins will be hindered in growth through government regulations and optional privacy coins will become more successful through ease of use and no regulatory hindrance.

Market 5 - Currency Exchange Tool

Due to the sheer number of different cryptocurrencies, exchanging one currency for the other it still cumbersome. Further, merchants don’t want to deal with overcluttered options of accepting cryptocurrencies. This is where exchange tool like Req come in, which allow easy and simple exchange of currencies.

Cryptonex: Fiat and currency exchange between various blockchain services, similar to REQ.
QASH: Qash is used to fuel its liquid platform which will be an exchange that will distribute their liquidity pool. Its product, the Worldbook is a multi-exchange order book that matches crypto to crypto, and crypto to fiat and the reverse across all currencies. E.g., someone is selling Bitcoin is USD on exchange1 not owned by Quoine and someone is buying Bitcoin in EURO on exchange 2 not owned by Quoine. If the forex conversions and crypto conversions match then the trade will go through and the Worldbook will match it, it'll make the sale and the purchase on either exchange and each user will get what they wanted, which means exchanges with lower liquidity if they join the Worldbook will be able to fill orders and take trade fees they otherwise would miss out on.They turned it on to test it a few months ago for an hour or so and their exchange was the top exchange in the world by 4x volume for the day because all Worldbook trades ran through it. Binance wants BNB to be used on their one exchange. Qash wants their QASH token embedded in all of their partners. More info here https://www.reddit.com/CryptoCurrency/comments/8a8lnwhich_are_your_top_5_favourite_coins_out_of_the/dwyjcbb/?context=3
Kyber: network Exchange between cryptocurrencies, similar to REQ. Features automatic coin conversions for payments. Also offers payment tools for developers and a cryptocurrency wallet.
Achain: Building a boundless blockchain world like Req .
Req: Exchange between cryptocurrencies.
Bitshares: Exchange between cryptocurrencies. Noteworthy are the 1.5 second average block times and throughput potential of 100,000 transactions per second with currently 2,400 TPS having been proven. However, bitshares had several Scam accusations in the past.
Loopring: A protocol that will enable higher liquidity between exchanges and personal wallets.
ZRX: Open standard for dapps. Open, permissionless protocol allowing for ERC20 tokens to be traded on the Ethereum blockchain. In 0x protocol, orders are transported off-chain, massively reducing gas costs and eliminating blockchain bloat. Relayers help broadcast orders and collect a fee each time they facilitate a trade. Anyone can build a relayer.

Market 6 - Gaming

With an industry size of $108B worldwide, Gaming is one of the largest markets in the world. For sure, cryptocurrencies will want to have a share of that pie.

Storm: Mobile game currency on a platform with 9 million players.
Fun: A platform for casino operators to host trustless, provably-fair gambling through the use of smart contracts, as well as creating their own implementation of state channels for scalability.
Electroneum: Mobile game currency They have lots of technical problems, such as several 51% attacks
Wax: Marketplace to trade in-game items

Market 7 - Misc

There are various markets being tapped right now. They are all summed up under misc.

OMG: Omise is designed to enable financial services for people without bank accounts. It works worldwide and with both traditional money and cryptocurrencies.
Power ledger: Australian blockchain-based cryptocurrency and energy trading platform that allows for decentralized selling and buying of renewable energy. Unique market and rather untapped market in the crypto space.
Populous: A platform that connects business owners and invoice buyers without middlemen. Invoice sellers get cash flow to fund their business and invoice buyers earn interest. Similar to OMG, small market.
Monacoin: The first Japanese cryptocurrency. Focused on micro-transactions and based on a popular internet meme of a type-written cat. This makes it similar to Dogecoin. Very niche, tiny market.
Revain: Legitimizing reviews via the blockchain. Interesting concept, though market not as big.
Augur: Platform to forecast and make wagers on the outcome of real-world events (AKA decentralized predictions). Uses predictions for a “wisdom of the crowd” search engine. Not launched yet.
Substratum: Revolutionzing hosting industry via per request billing as a decentralized internet hosting system. Uses a global network of private computers to create the free and open internet of the future. Participants earn cryptocurrency. Interesting concept.
Veritaseum: Is supposed to be a peer to peer gateway, though it looks like very much like a scam.
TRON: Tronix is looking to capitalize on ownership of internet data to content creators. However, they plagiarized their white paper, which is a no go. They apologized, so it needs to be seen how they will conduct themselves in the future. Extremely high market cap for not having a product, nor proof of concept.
Syscoin: A cryptocurrency with a decentralized marketplace that lets people buy and sell products directly without third parties. Trying to remove middlemen like eBay and Amazon.
Hshare: Most likely scam because of no code changes, most likely pump and dump scheme, dead community.
BAT: An Ethereum-based token that can be exchanged between content creators, users, and advertisers. Decentralized ad-network that pays based on engagement and attention.
Dent: Decentralizeed exchange of mobile data, enabling mobile data to be marketed, purchased or distributed, so that users can quickly buy or sell data from any user to another one.
Ncash: End to end encrypted Identification system for retailers to better serve their customers .
Factom Secure record-keeping system that allows companies to store their data directly on the Blockchain. The goal is to make records more transparent and trustworthy .

Market 8 - Social network

Web 2.0 is still going strong and Web 3.0 is not going to ignore it. There are several gaming tokens already out there and a few with decent traction already, such as Steem, which is Reddit with voting through money is a very interesting one.

Mithril: As users create content via social media, they will be rewarded for their contribution, the better the contribution, the more they will earn
Steem: Like Reddit, but voting with money. Already launched product and Alexa rank 1,000 Thumbs up.
Rdd: Reddcoin makes the process of sending and receiving money fun and rewarding for everyone. Reddcoin is dedicated to one thing – tipping on social networks as a way to bring cryptocurrency awareness and experience to the general public.
Kin: Token for the platform Kik. Kik has a massive user base of 400 million people. Replacing paying with FIAT with paying with KIN might get this token to mass adoption very quickly.

Market 9 - Fee token

Popular exchanges realized that they can make a few billion dollars more by launching their own token. Owning these tokens gives you a reduction of trading fees. Very handy and BNB (Binance Coin) has been one of the most resilient tokens, which have withstood most market drops over the last weeks and was among the very few coins that could show growth.

BNB: Fee token for Binance
Gas: Not a Fee token for an exchange, but it is a dividend paid out on Neo and a currency that can be used to purchase services for dapps.
Kucoin: Fee token for Kucoin

Market 10 - Decentralized Data Storage

Currently, data storage happens with large companies or data centers that are prone to failure or losing data. Decentralized data storage makes loss of data almost impossible by distributing your files to numerous clients that hold tiny pieces of your data. Remember Torrents? Torrents use a peer-to-peer network. It is similar to that. Many users maintain copies of the same file, when someone wants a copy of that file, they send a request to the peer-to-peer network., users who have the file, known as seeds, send fragments of the file to the requester., he requester receives many fragments from many different seeds, and the torrent software recompiles these fragments to form the original file.

Gbyte: Byteball data is stored and ordered using directed acyclic graph (DAG) rather than blockchain. This allows all users to secure each other's data by referencing earlier data units created by other users, and also removes scalability limits common for blockchains, such as blocksize issue.
Siacoin: Siacoin is decentralized storage platform. Distributes encrypted files to thousands of private users who get paid for renting out their disk space. Anybody with siacoins can rent storage from hosts on Sia. This is accomplish via "smart" storage contracts stored on the Sia blockchain. The smart contract provides a payment to the host only after the host has kept the file for a given amount of time. If the host loses the file, the host does not get paid.
Maidsafecoin: MaidSafe stands for Massive Array of Internet Disks, Secure Access for Everyone.Instead of working with data centers and servers that are common today and are vulnerable to data theft and monitoring, SAFE’s network uses advanced P2P technology to bring together the spare computing capacity of all SAFE users and create a global network. You can think of SAFE as a crowd-sourced internet. All data and applications reside in this network. It’s an autonomous network that automatically sets prices and distributes data and rents out hard drive disk space with a Blockchain-based storage solutions.When you upload a file to the network, such as a photo, it will be broken into pieces, hashed, and encrypted. The data is then randomly distributed across the network. Redundant copies of the data are created as well so that if someone storing your file turns off their computer, you will still have access to your data. And don’t worry, even with pieces of your data on other people’s computers, they won’t be able to read them. You can earn MadeSafeCoins by participating in storing data pieces from the network on your computer and thus earning a Proof of Resource.
Storj: Storj aims to become a cloud storage platform that can’t be censored or monitored, or have downtime. Your files are encrypted, shredded into little pieces called 'shards', and stored in a decentralized network of computers around the globe. No one but you has a complete copy of your file, not even in an encrypted form.

Market 11 - Cloud computing

Obviously, renting computing power, one of the biggest emerging markets as of recent years, e.g. AWS and Digital Ocean, is also a service, which can be bought and managed via the blockchain.

Golem: Allows easy use of Supercomputer in exchange for tokens. People worldwide can rent out their computers to the network and get paid for that service with Golem tokens.
Elf: Allows easy use of Cloud computing in exchange for tokens.

Market 12 - Stablecoin

Last but not least, there are 2 stablecoins that have established themselves within the market. A stable coin is a coin that wants to be independent of the volatility of the crypto markets. This has worked out pretty well for Maker and DGD, accomplished through a carefully diversified currency fund and backing each token by 1g or real gold respectively. DO NOT CONFUSE DGD AND MAKER with their STABLE COINS DGX and DAI. DGD and MAKER are volatile, because they are the companies of DGX and DAI. DGX and DAI are the stable coins.

DGD: Platform of the Stablecoin DGX. Every DGX coin is backed by 1g of gold and make use proof of asset consensus.
Maker: Platform of the Stablecoin DAI that doesn't vary much in price through widespread and smart diversification of assets.

EDIT: Added a risk factor from 0 to 10. The baseline is 2 for any crypto. Significant scandals, mishaps, shady practices, questionable technology, increase the risk factor. Not having a product yet automatically means a risk factor of 6. Strong adoption and thus strong scrutiny or positive community lower the risk factor.
EDIT2: Added a subjective potential factor from 0 to 10, where its overall potential and a small or big market cap is factored in. Bitcoin with lots of potential only gets a 9, because of its massive market cap, because if Bitcoin goes 10x, smaller coins go 100x, PIVX gets a 10 for being as good as Monero while carrying a 10x smaller market cap, which would make PIVX go 100x if Monero goes 10x.

I am not associated with Onada in any way, just thought these were interesting and didn't know about them until recently.
Volatility Graph: Zero in on which currency pairs show the most significant price fluctuations over various time periods.
https://www.oanda.com/forex-trading/analysis/currency-volatility

Currency Correlation: See how currency pairs have moved relative to each other https://www.oanda.com/forex-trading/analysis/currency-correlation

Candlestick Patterns: See candlestick patterns plotted over recent currency movements.
https://www.oanda.com/forex-trading/analysis/candlestick-patterns

Currency Strength Heatmap: See the percentage change and rank of each currency relative to other currencies traded against it.
https://www.oanda.com/forex-trading/analysis/currency-heatmap

Market Trading Hours: See global forex trading hours and statuses.
https://www.oanda.com/forex-trading/analysis/market-hours

Official Economic Figures: Access more than 150 economic figures from the world's major markets.
https://www.oanda.com/forex-trading/analysis/economic-indicators/

OANDA Forex Open Position Ratios: A summary of open positions held by OANDA clients
https://www1.oanda.com/forex-trading/analysis/open-position-ratios

OANDA Forex Order Book: A 24-hour summary of open orders and positions held by OANDA's clients.
https://www1.oanda.com/forex-trading/analysis/forex-order-book

edit: Article about: Using Oanda’s Orderbook To Trade Stop Hunts
https://www.forexmentoronline.com/using-oandas-orderbook-to-trade-stop-hunts/
Again, interesting but i'm just starting out, little to advanced for me right now.

Having a basic knowledge of candlestick charts is a great starting point for anyone who is really interested in making a profit, rather than just playing games or speculating with their hard earned money in the cryptospace. The same candlestick that many financial institutions use to build their positions on the forex market is that the same candlestick traders also have in cryptocurrency exchanges.
In the 18th century, candlestick charts were been invented and developed. The earliest reference to a candlestick chart being used in financial markets was found in Sakata, Japan, where a rice merchant named Munehisa and traders use the candlestick to trade ojima rice. So, particularly for newbies that don't know about these candlesticks, it's not a new thing. The candle may be red or green, white or black, some few exchanges may allow it to be defined at which they want to call them. Such candles reflect an activity that is bullish or bearish.
Candle sticks can help anyone identify the next price action movement of a crypto asset, hence there are different candle stick patterns that will be encountered in exchanges that will determine their decisions. These candles are formed due to pressure or force of movement of price which result to form a full candle with or without sticks/wicks. The sticks are formed in the candle because of continuous force pushing or pulling the price of the crypto asset. (here is an illustrative representation of these candles for easy understanding)
Why Is It A Must To Use Candlestick Patterns?

Crypto asset price movements are easier to understand to know where the trend actually moves into either bear or bullish area.
Recognizing the candle pattern and how they occur in that crypto asset's price history is easier.
Candlestick charts unveil a dynamic information in every areas of the price movement with respect to time. (Open, close, high and low) compare to other patterns such as the graph or line charts.

Is this Candlestick Patterns Used By Many?
Due to the volatility of crypto instrument, most traders do not tend to read the chart before trading for the following reasons.

Greed
FeaDoubt
Lack of discipline
Lack of patience

Bottom Line
Understanding candlestick patterns is a key factor to managing those portfolios in the crypto space for maximum returns of investment. Candlesticks helps traders to detect trend reversals and price action breakouts in the market which helps to build a strong and effective trading strategy.

You have a chart in front of you, a buy and sell button respectively, this basically gives you 50% of probability that if you open a buy or sell at any time your action will end up making money after sometime. "Sometime" adds new variables to the game and makes it more complicated: is knowing the direction for sometime, the market needs to move to increase profit or increase loss. You then go into the volatility reports for lets say EURUSD, and you see that during London session and New York session, it's the time where price statistically moves more, so there is where you want to be if you want to day trade (open and close trades in the same day), this can be also noticed if you zoom out for example M5 of almost any pairs, volume will be bigger in this two sessions.
Ok so you have statistics of at what times it may move big, you also know that it may not move or it may range the whole day, but definitely there is going to be big moves. If you analyse the past, with only for example a 30 MA, you will see the 50/50. What else do you need? To be in most of the times you are humanly able following the trend, if price is averaging over any average you want and see useful to add, why would you bet that is not going to average oveunder it for some more time? Add a 1000 MA, what if you waited for each cross and traded it trend following? Here then comes a "must": money management = risk = stay in the game for long = you can lose multiple times and long term it's hard that you even lose 10% of your account. Start with the minimum risk, demo in 0.01. Why? If you can consistently win with 0.01 it's just a matter of optimizing the statistics your demo trading over time has thrown, money will come, lots of it, the amount your confidence as a trader can bear and ultimately because trading is so big and involves almost all of the aspects of your life and personality, your confidence as a human being can bear. But this is skipping to psychology.
So, volatility, an average of some x periods to get the trend (not of the market but of the x periods in relation to the market and time, x is important, x can't be 2000 in M5), money management and time to play. What else? When will you close the trades? There are multiple ways each one with pros and cons, price crossing the average (too slow sometimes), price hitting fibos (gotta have a method for plotting fibos the same time each time, check the "Do it yourself" section, 61.8 a.k.a 0.618 and 61.8, god made numbers), being this last one the one I like. Price plays with these levels, nothing magical about it, is just "nature", a forgotten and violated term these days IMHO. There it is, when to open with probability, when to close methodically, how to play your money so you last as long as you don't fail too much repeatedly. This results after studying Ralph Elliot's, W Gann's, Wykcoff's, Pesavento's, Gartley's, Carney's and some others WAY TO LOOK AT THE MARKET. They all found structure in price actions over time, they all understood natural patterns that occur, they all sat in front of some charts, used or created tools for handling those charts, in the end everything is so simple and easy that our minds, past, maybe present, the t.v, Instagram won't lets us succeed. Why? Your mind is your biggest enemy of what you want to do in life. How? Your past in someway defines you, defines what you are looking for in life.

Psychology, establishment and relativity.

Mark Douglas introduced me (in his videos) to a new way of thinking towards trading. He speaks about beliefs, how they drives us in each decision we make each day from as simple as making coffee, having a bath,
dressing nice or dressing in the first place. Beliefs are what makes your past define you today and tomorrow if you keep believing them. A wrong belief of yourself, a wrong belief of the world outside your eyes,
a wrong belief of the market (you keep trusting other people about the market, in the end after loosing you trust no one), this leads to what lot's of gurus outside the financial world, will say: trust in
yourself. Forex gurus tell you to trust them, pay them so they'll unveil the secrets. No money can change your wrong mindset, that feeling in your chest each time you think about possibilities with Forex (euphoria, dangerous as f not only in forex), that belief that some magical indicator will come, some hidden code of some pro advanced indi if you are more realist, some guy with the answer. You are very alone in this world my friend, money will tear countries apart, cities apart, families apart. People will sell their face for some money, their name, in the end corrupt politicians that don't get caught will enjoy their feasts everyday, with their innocent childs, who see their daddy as their hero, this is not a fair world, what's fair in the first place? A human creation so we can live together in peace, but that's not reality we all know. We are evoluted chimps, we still feel what the cheetah feel's in front of his prey, we share 90% of DNA with most of mammals, as intelligent as we like to think we are, we can't delete our nature, our hunger, our fear, our needs, our instinct (the one rushes adrenaline when you know you are losing too much), because deep inside we all know whats right or wrong, the difference between people is whether you hear that voice, or you shut it with a nicer version. 90% of people in forex (not real statistics, the real number varies from broker hmmm brokers another shady topic), prefers the nice version long term, which results not profitable basically.
It's your version (you + all gurus you've seen) not the version the market shows and the deep-you tries to alert.
I headed far from an important topic: gurus telling to trust them, a killer market killing you, lots of misinformation around the WWW and you not believing in yourself. What else do you have to face the markets?
You are in a triangle: broker (not so hard to get a nice one), market and yourself. Everything else is a lie until the person who is in any way selling you stuff, shows you his profitable record of more than 6 months in any financial instrument, that you look at yourself in the mirror and you can say I trust him, not I want to trust him (even if it's some of each, but hey everything involves risk).
LOOK AT THE CHARTS.
Want to have "fast money" (intraday), look M1 to M30, even H1 for a bird's view, optimize your profitable and consistent demo results to that market; want to look charts once a day, trade D1, I'd say you don't even have to look at something bigger as it is big enough and you can go to H4 or H1 for finesse entries (can become a vicious circle, how much finesse is finesse?).
It's all about trust, confidence and a good plan.
Psychology of yourself is so vast, and so unique to each person that I would dare to say that if you are looking for the answer outside of you, you better befriend a trader who is today making money and pray that he literally gifts you his confidence (not his knowledge even if it can help, hi will be sharing his confidence). Your social mind will spawn the hype, the euphoria, you will succeed for a while, market will kill you sooner or later, you will help the market to kill your account. Why? Because your confidence wasn't real, it may be that that day, that week the market moved nicely, or you felt strong and super.
How many gurus go live and say "hey today, as a human being, I don't feel great, I would not trade today?" none. They say market is not right ATM, cherry picking, they totally exploit that you can't go inside their screens and really know them, here comes the version you want to believe, you will tell yourself anything, you will tell anyone anything.
Here to finish, I'll say that consistency in anything in life starts from yourself. If you can't be consistent everyday with yourself for a long period of time, you will find temporary jobs, temporary stuff, you will keep jumping from gurus, from strategies, you will create better versions on your head, just imagine what version a guru must have created to go and sell forex related stuff instead of searching for how to kill the markets, he may be doing both, in the end none of that will give you anything, you will end up being the stair to the gurus goals. Try to comprehend how human we are, how arrogant we are from a farmers perspective, how or evolution results in our minds plays us tricks, to think the government is real, to think there's order, justice, to think that we can achieve huge things with the help of YouTube videos or paying another human being, the market is flow, manipulation is real (why call it manipulation when you would be doing the same in their shoes(big boys)) is part of the nature of anything you plot with Y and X axis (look for a graph of population changes, harmonics, double bottoms, double tops, in a population changes graph? how can that be?), it may be a cliche but is aaaaaaall an illusion guys, the truth is not good business for the other side of the trades.
See you on the other side.
"I'll be a big noise with all the big boys"

^{(This post is mainly for beginners in Forex that are struggling in support and resistance levels, although you more experienced guys might also learn a thing or two, this also doesn't go over how to use them to enter trades, although I could make a post about it if it is requested})

How to correctly mark support & resistance in most markets

First thing to realise is that s&r levels are not really levels, they are zones, sometimes the price just misses the level and other times it goes just over, but it still reverses/breaks out off the general level. You will rarely find the exact level of where the price will reverse. There is no exact criteria on what makes a level significant levels, but you will eventually get better as you pipe in more experience into the market.

What even is a support/resistance zone?
Simply put a support or resistance zone is a price the market has had experience with before. In the book "Naked Forex" Alex Nekritin puts perfectly that s/r zones are just market scars. Market scars that the price has visited before and will try to stay away from as best as it can (but sometimes breakouts occur, more on that later).
Do zones expire?
This is very subjective, some say the older the level the less valid it may be, and others vice versa. I personally believe they don't expire and significant zones stay valid unless disapproved by appropriate price action. Your answer may be completely different, everyone's experience with the market is different
What are these "breakouts"?
Breakouts are when the price doesn't respect the level. Most of the time the price respects a level and reverses off it, however that can only happen for some time, (if this happens for a period of time where the price is bouncing off a support and resistance it is known as consolidation). Of course it can't keep trading in a range forever, breakouts have to happen. Breakouts mostly happen within high volatility, either from news or just the time the market is open, however the price can also just wonder through the zone, creating a less volatile breakout. You may also experience the price going over a zone and then returning into it;

On chart 1 below you can see a bland chart, just load up any trading software and you should see something like this. We can see the price recently has been on a decline on the last four candles.
EURUSD H1 (Chart 1)
To the untrained trader, this looks like guess work to place a good significant level. Wicks flying everywhere, this is where tip #1 comes in.

Tip #1: Change your candlestick chart into a line graph
EURUSD H1 (Chart 2)
This very simple tool removes all of the wick clutter and just gives a nice line of how the price has been moving (Keep in mind this only shows the close of the time frame and doesn't include wicks). Thus it makes marking s/r lines way way easier. Just off this you can place lines where the price has reversed, don't add too many as that could also be too bad for you (check tip #2)
Another thing to keep in mind is that if a price curves and reverses, this usually shows a stall on the zone and is an important level to manage. (Check Chart 3)
On Chart 3 you can see some levels I've added in that respond to the recent price on the line chart:
EURUSD H1 With S/R (Chart 3)
After you've added your s/r you can switch back to normal candle sticks to further evaluate your zones.
EURUSD H1 With S/R Candlesticks (Chart 4)

Tip #2: Don't over-add unnecessary levels
This mostly occurs if you don't have patience with the market and want to rush into a trade. Don't try and scavenge for any little s/r zone as they could easily end up failing if they haven't been tested and confirmed. It will also prevent you from finding any valuable trades.
You don't want your chart looking like this, where would you even start looking for an entry?
Jumble of messy lines
Tip #3: Draw major zones on higher time frames
Say you enter your trades mostly on H4, draw your major zones on the D1 chart. As well as this you can draw minor zones in time frames smaller than your usual one, like from H4 to H1.
Just a little tip you could keep in mind.

Those are just three tips that really help me out when drawing my s&r zones (they might not work out for you but it's worth giving them a shot) and I have tried making this post as beginner friendly as possible, so I really hope you all learned something from this post.

^{This post was heavily inspired by Naked Forex, you can find a PDF of it} ^here
Edit: Typos

As originally published via CoinLive
I am the Co-Founder at CoinLive. Prior to founding Coinlive.io, my area of expertise was inter-market analysis. I came across Datadash 50k BTC prediction this week, and I must take my hats off to what I believe is an excellent interpretation of the inter-connectivity of various markets.
At your own convenience, you can find a sample of Intermarket analysis I've written in the past before immersing myself into cryptos full-time.
Gold inter-market: 'Out of sync' with VIX, takes lead from USD/JPY
USD/JPY inter-market: Watch divergence US-Japan yield spread
EUUSD intermarket: US yields collapse amid supply environment
Inter-market analysis: Risk back in vogue, but for how long?
USD/JPY intermarket: Bulls need higher adj in 10-y US-JP spread
The purpose of this article is to dive deeper into the factors Datadash presents in his video and how they can help us draw certain conclusions about the potential flows of capital into crypto markets and the need that will exist for a BTC ETF.
Before I do so, as a brief explainer, let's touch on what exactly Intermarket analysis refers to:
Intermarket analysis is the global interconnectivity between equities, bonds, currencies, commodities, and any other asset class; Global markets are an ever-evolving discounting and constant valuation mechanism and by studying their interconnectivity, we are much better positioned to explain and elaborate on why certain moves occur, future directions and gain insights on potential misalignments that the market may not have picked up on yet or might be ignoring/manipulating.
While such interconnectivity has proven to be quite limiting when it comes to the value one can extract from analyzing traditional financial assets and the crypto market, Datadash has eloquently been able to build a hypothesis, which as an Intermarket analyst, I consider very valid, and that matches up my own views. Nicolas Merten constructs a scenario which leads him to believe that a Bitcoin ETF is coming. Let's explore this hypothesis.
I will attempt to summarize and provide further clarity on why the current events in traditional asset classes, as described by Datadash, will inevitably result in a Bitcoin ETF. Make no mistake, Datadash's call for Bitcoin at 50k by the end of 2018 will be well justified once a BTC ETF is approved. While the timing is the most challenging part t get right, the end result won't vary.
If one wishes to learn more about my personal views on why a BTC ETF is such a big deal, I encourage you to read my article from late March this year.
Don't Be Misled by Low Liquidity/Volume - Fundamentals Never Stronger
The first point Nicholas Merten makes is that despite depressed volume levels, the fundamentals are very sound. That, I must say, is a point I couldn't agree more. In fact, I recently wrote an article titled The Paradox: Bitcoin Keeps Selling as Intrinsic Value Set to Explode where I state "the latest developments in Bitcoin's technology makes it paradoxically an ever increasingly interesting investment proposition the cheaper it gets."
However, no article better defines where we stand in terms of fundamentals than the one I wrote back on May 15th titled Find Out Why Institutions Will Flood the Bitcoin Market, where I look at the ever-growing list of evidence that shows why a new type of investors, the institutional ones, looks set to enter the market in mass.
Nicholas believes that based on the supply of Bitcoin, the market capitalization can reach about $800b. He makes a case that with the fundamentals in bitcoin much stronger, it wouldn't be that hard to envision the market cap more than double from its most recent all-time high of more than $300b.
Interest Rates Set to Rise Further
First of all, one of the most immediate implications of higher rates is the increased difficulty to bear the costs by borrowers, which leads Nicholas to believe that banks the likes of Deutsche Bank will face a tough environment going forward. The CEO of the giant German lender has actually warned that second-quarter results would reflect a “revenue environment [that] remains challenging."
Nicholas refers to the historical chart of Eurodollar LIBOR rates as illustrated below to strengthen the case that interest rates are set to follow an upward trajectory in the years to come as Central Banks continue to normalize monetary policies after a decade since the global financial crisis. I'd say, that is a correct assumption, although one must take into account the Italian crisis to be aware that a delay in higher European rates is a real possibility now.
![](https://coinlive.io/ckeditor_assets/pictures/947/content_2018-05-30_1100.png)
Let's look at the following combinations: Fed Fund Rate Contract (green), German 2-year bond yields (black) and Italy's 10-year bond yield (blue) to help us clarify what's the outlook for interest rates both in Europe and the United States in the foreseeable future. The chart suggests that while the Federal Reserve remains on track to keep increasing interest rates at a gradual pace, there has been a sudden change in the outlook for European rates in the short-end of the curve.
While the European Central Bank is no longer endorsing proactive policies as part of its long-standing QE narrative, President Mario Draghi is still not ready to communicate an exit strategy to its unconventional stimulus program due to protectionism threats in the euro-area, with Italy the latest nightmare episode.
Until such major step is taken in the form of a formal QE conclusion, interest rates in the European Union will remain depressed; the latest drastic spike in Italy's benchmark bond yield to default levels is pre-emptive of lower rates for longer, an environment that on one hand may benefit the likes of Deutsche Bank on lower borrowing costs, but on the other hand, sets in motion a bigger headache as risk aversion is set to dominate financial markets, which leads to worse financial consequences such as loss of confidence and hence in equity valuations.
![](https://coinlive.io/ckeditor_assets/pictures/948/content_2018-05-30_1113.png)
Deutsche Bank - End of the Road?
Nicholas argues that as part of the re-restructuring process in Deutsche Bank, they will be facing a much more challenging environment as lending becomes more difficult on higher interest rates. At CoinLive, we still believe this to be a logical scenario to expect, even if a delay happens as the ECB tries to deal with the Italian political crisis which once again raises the question of whether or not Italy should be part of the EU. Reference to an article by Zerohedge is given, where it states:
"One day after the WSJ reported that the biggest German bank is set to "decimate" its workforce, firing 10,000 workers or one in ten, this morning Deutsche Bank confirmed plans to cut thousands of jobs as part of new CEO Christian Sewing's restructuring and cost-cutting effort. The German bank said its headcount would fall “well below” 90,000, from just over 97,000. But the biggest gut punch to employee morale is that the bank would reduce headcount in its equities sales and trading business by about 25%."
There is an undeniably ongoing phenomenon of a migration in job positions from traditional financial markets into blockchain, which as we have reported in the past, it appears to be a logical and rational step to be taken, especially in light of the new revenue streams the blockchain sector has to offer. Proof of that is the fact that Binance, a crypto exchange with around 200 employees and less than 1 year of operations has overcome Deutsche Bank, in total profits. What this communicates is that the opportunities to grow an institution’s revenue stream are formidable once they decide to integrate cryptocurrencies into their business models.
One can find an illustration of Deutsche Bank's free-fall in prices below:
![](https://coinlive.io/ckeditor_assets/pictures/946/content_2018-05-30_1052.png)
Nicholas takes notes of a chart in which one can clearly notice a worrying trend for Italian debt. "Just about every other major investor type has become a net seller (to the ECB) or a non-buyer of BTPs over the last couple of years. Said differently, for well over a year, the only marginal buyer of Italian bonds has been the ECB!", the team of Economists at Citi explained. One can find the article via ZeroHedge here.
![](https://coinlive.io/ckeditor_assets/pictures/953/content_2018-05-30_1451.png)
Equities & Housing to Suffer the Consequences
Nicholas notes that trillions of dollars need to exit these artificially-inflated equity markets. He even mentions a legendary investor such as George Soros, who has recently warned that the world could be on the brink of another devastating financial crisis, on lingering debt concerns in Europe and a strengthening US dollar, as a destabilizing factor for both the US's emerging- and developed-market rivals.
Ray Dalio, another legend in the investing world and Founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, "has ramped up its short positions in European equities in recent weeks, bringing their total value to an estimated $22 billion", MarketWatch reports.
Nicholas extracts a chart by John Del Vecchio at lmtr.com where it illustrates the ratio between stocks and commodities at the lowest in over 50 years.
As the author states:
"I like to look for extremes in the markets. Extremes often pinpoint areas where returns can be higher and risk lower than in other time periods. Take the relationship between commodities and stocks. The chart below shows that commodities haven not been cheaper than stocks in a generation. We often hear this time it is different” to justify what’s going on in the world. But, one thing that never changes is human nature. People push markets to extremes. Then they revert. "
![](https://coinlive.io/ckeditor_assets/pictures/954/content_2018-05-30_1459.png)
Bitcoin ETF the Holy Grail for a Cyclical Multi-Year Bull Run
It is precisely from this last chart above that leads Nicholas to believe we are on the verge of a resurgence in commodity prices. Not only that but amid the need of all this capital to exit stocks and to a certain extent risky bonds (Italian), a new commodity-based digital currency ETF based on Bitcoin will emerge in 2018.
The author of Datadash highlights the consideration to launching a Bitcoin ETF by the SEC. At CoinLive, our reporting of the subject can be found below:
"Back in April, it was reported that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has put back on the table two Bitcoin ETF proposals, according to public documents. The agency is under formal proceedings to approve a rule change that would allow NYSE Arca to list two exchange-traded funds (ETFs) proposed by fund provider ProShares. The introduction of an ETF would make Bitcoin available to a much wider share of market participants, with the ability to directly buy the asset at the click of a button, essentially simplifying the current complexity that involves having to deal with all the cumbersome steps currently in place."
Nicholas refers to the support the Bitcoin ETF has been receiving by the Cboe president Chris Concannon, which is a major positive development. CoinLive reported on the story back in late March, noting that "a Bitcoin ETF will without a doubt open the floodgates to an enormous tsunami of fresh capital entering the space, which based on the latest hints by Concannon, the willingness to keep pushing for it remains unabated as the evolution of digital assets keeps its course."
It has been for quite some time CoinLive's conviction, now supported by no other than Nicholas Merten from Datadash, that over the next 6 months, markets will start factoring in the event of the year, that is, the approval of a Bitcoin ETF that will serve as a alternative vehicle to accommodate the massive flows of capital leaving some of the traditional asset classes. As Nicholas suggests, the SEC will have little choice but to provide alternative investments.
Bitcoin as a Hedge to Lower Portfolios' Volatility
Last but not least, crypto assets such as Bitcoin and the likes have an almost non-existent correlation to other traditional assets such as stocks, bonds, and commodities, which makes for a very attractive and broadly-applicable diversification strategy for the professional money as it reduces one’s portfolio volatility. The moment a Bitcoin ETF is confirmed, expect the non-correlation element of Bitcoin as a major driving force to attract further capital.
Anyone Can Be Wrong Datadash, But You Won't be Wrong Alone
Having analyzed the hypothesis by Nicholas Merten, at CoinLive we believe that the conclusion reached, that is, the creation of a Bitcoin ETF that will provide shelter to a tsunami of capital motivated by the diversification and store of value appeal of Bitcoin, is the next logical step. As per the timing of it, we also anticipate, as Nicholas notes, that it will most likely be subject to the price action in traditional assets. Should equities and credit markets hold steady, it may result in a potential delay, whereas disruption in the capital market may see the need for a BTC ETF accelerate. Either scenario, we will conclude with a quote we wrote back in March.
"It appears as though an ETF on Bitcoin is moving from a state of "If" to "When."
Datadash is certainly not alone on his 50k call. BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes appears to think along the same line.
On behalf of the CoinLive Team, we want to thank Nicholas Merten at Datadash for such enlightening insights.

Talk The Trader Talk: A Journey Into The Realm Of Trader Slang

Slang is a natural evolution of a language under working conditions. Every industry has its own slang vocabulary, which may or may not be composed of morphologies of words directly related to the job. Sometimes situations related to the job may evolve or devolve into adjectives, verbs, nouns of even completely new words that reflect the object in question. To the uninitiated, such terms may sound like gibberish and could well resemble the talk of thugs that has been so vividly presented many times over in television series and movies.
Whether it is pidgin, slang, argot, or a dialect, industries have their own ways of expressing their ins and outs. For instance, the exhaust system of automobiles is often called the "puffer" among mechanics, a "fat finger" is a larger than intended trade among bankers, a "gat" is a weapon among street gangs, and "all day" is a life sentence among prisoners. The lists of slang terms are endless and are an extremely interesting read.
https://preview.redd.it/704sgly6nfz31.png?width=820&format=png&auto=webp&s=9d7fe3b1ef36869834dbf284ea0fcb4a7caee720

The Trader Lingo

To make sure that MoonTrader users get into the feel of what it is like to be part of the crypto market, we have compiled a comprehensive summary of some of the most widespread slang terms used by traders. Knowing these terms is an important part of working on an exchange, as understanding what traders are talking about is half the job of becoming one of them and being able to delve into the processes taking place. To talk the talk and walk the walk, traders must understand each other and, most importantly, shorten their speech into a mixture of phrases comprehensible only for the initiated and mystical to outsiders.
Babysitting: A slang term used by traders all over the world from Wall Street to the most obscure exchanges in Africa. The term means holding a trade that has been losing out for a while in hopes that it will gain in price, usually in vain. For example: “You’ve been babysitting that option for way too long, it’s a hopeless cause.”
Crunching: A situation in which a stock’s or asset’s price starts falling rapidly and has no support levels. For example: “The XXX stock is going down the drain. It’s crunching, leave it!”
Jig Out: This is a situation when the market makes a sudden turn for the worse and an investor or trader loses out as a result. For example: “The YYY stock jigged out on me today. Lost half a mil.”
Learning Curve: A fairy common expression meaning the amount of time and effort someone, such as a budding new trader, has to put into something to master the art and “learn the ropes”. For example: “The learning curve for Forex is pretty steep.”
Melt: Another fairly common expression that can be encountered in the world of finance, which signifies that a lot of money has been lost and an account has been depleted. For example: “My account melted through today after the market jigged me out on that nut.”
Nut: While nuts may be tasty as a snack or very useful for keeping things bound together with bolts, in trading a nut is the total amount of commissions that have to be paid for a certain trade. For example: “The nut on ZZZ is crazy these days.”
Permabull / Permabear: Since bullish markets are positive and bearish markets are sleepy, the traders working on such a market are called bulls or bears. There are some optimists who believe that such markets are always there. These traders are called permabulls. The opposite are permabears. For example: “Even if the market is dead and floating, he will still act like a permabull”.
https://preview.redd.it/rj90k43enfz31.jpg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=86c9c63f1484cc49f683ae12159d03429f465341
Printing on the “O”: If we consider that O is an extreme abbreviation of the term “Override”, then the phrase means that the price of an asset is below the bid price and there is an urgent need to sell it. “XYZ is printing on the Os all day!”
ScalpeScalping: The idea of scalping is opening hundreds and thousands of small trades in a short amount of time in hopes of generating a large amount of small profits. Scalpers are traders who engage in scalping. For example: “He’s a heck of a scalper.”
Slippage: A common situation for inexperienced traders who lose on assets that are insoluble and cause losses due to higher or lower prices. For example: “He’s been slipping on ZZZ for three weeks in a row.”
Squiggly Lines: Technical analysis consists of graphs and indicators that traders use to make sense of market dynamics. The lines on graphs are never straight, which would mean that the market is comatose, thus they are called squiggly, or uneven lines. For example: “I’ve been staring at the squiggly lines all day and my eyes are popping out.”
Tank: A tank is not only a military machine or a container, but also a verb, which could either mean to fill something up, like a container or a stomach, and also a drop. In this case, tanking means a market collapse. For example: “The market’s tanking! All is lost! All is lost!”
Unicorn, Vulture, Whale: The trading terminology bestiary is full of terms that have gained animalistic form. A unicorn is a situation reminiscent of the mythical beast, when a startup has reached a $1 billion valuation. A vulture is a trader who preys on falling assets and buys them up in hopes that they will rise in the future. A whale is a holder of a large amount of capital or an asset.
https://preview.redd.it/gj479zvhnfz31.png?width=700&format=png&auto=webp&s=e89c8bc881323f531661b2f7f355a470607765f1
Stick: The US dollar has a lot of synonyms from bucks and dough to aces and greenbacks. The stick is another synonym for the US currency used in trading. For example: “Made a K load of sticks today trading XYZ.”
Whack: A fairy straightforward term meaning that a trader has lost a fair amount of money. For example: “I got whacked trading ZZZ the other day.”
Bottom Fishing: There are traders and there are speculators. When a market has “tanked”, assets usually cost much lower and a certain breed of traders emerges who start buying up assets that have lost in value in hopes of selling them off at higher prices later. Such actions are called bottom fishing, or scooping up assets that have floated to the surface of a market like dead fish after a bomb goes off underwater. For example: “The market has sunk today and the sharks are bottom fishing.”
Choppiness: The market is never a calm place and its trials and tribulations are often compared to storms and waves. Since waves can be choppy, or rough in terms of the height of their crests, it is fair to compare market volatility to wavy seas. For example: “The choppiness of the market is not allowing institutional investors to enter with their capital.”
Dark Pools: There is always liquidity on the market that is hid away from average traders. Such liquidity is called a dark pool, which is usually in the hands of special groups. In essence, these are trading volumes created by orders placed by institutional investors. For example: “The dark pools are buying up Bitcoins real quick.”
Dead Cat Bounce or Rubber Band Effect: Since markets are unpredictable, it is often possible for markets to suddenly rebound after seeming dead for a long time. Such a situation is called a dead cat bounce, or a rubber band effect, which is quite figurative in itself. For example: “The market is preparing for a possible dead cat bounce after the recent wave of news.”
Hodl: A bastardization of the term Hold, misspelled by a drunk BitcoinTalk user, which simply means holding an asset in hopes that it will rise in price. For example: “Hodl Bitcoin! Hodl it!”
Short squeeze: There are situations when an asset suddenly rises in price and forces traders to close their positions. For example: “The holders were forced to short squeeze after the price of ZZZ suddenly spiked”.
Resistance Zone: In technical analysis, this is the area between the current support and resistance areas. Prices usually start resisting other prices in such areas and may start falling. For example: “The resistance area of $120 has been reached for ZZZ and we can expect a decline to areas of $100.”

Fallen Angel: Assets that may have reached price heaven are not guaranteed to stay there and it often happens that a highly valued asset has suddenly lost in price. Usually, this biblical analogy refers to high yielding bonds that once had investment grades. For example: “ZZZ has turned into a fallen angel after the US introduced sanctions against country YYY.”
Fat Tail: In statistics, such cases are called outliers and signify that a value has moved away from the mean and has gained a high degree of riskiness. For example: “ZZZ is showing fat tails and will soon reach non-investment levels.”
Flavor: Given the abundance of types of orders and assets on the market, traders often do not distinguish between them and simply call them different flavors. For example: “How about some ZZZ flavor?”
Hit The Bid: A rather straightforward expression meaning that someone has decided to sell an asset. For example: “The price just hit the low, so go and hit the bid”.
Odd Lot: A lot is usually considered to be a million dollars. An odd lot is anything under a million dollars. For example: “I sold that odd lot of ZZZ yesterday.”
Smoke And Mirrors: The poetic expression has made its way onto the market and means that a corporate entity is distorting the market image in hopes of attaining its own goals, usually to make an asset seem more attractive. For example: “The market is all smoke and mirrors after ZZZ flushed its stocks on.”
The list of trading slang terms is endless in its variety and the only way to fully immerse one’s self into it is trading actively and gaining experience. Years of work on any market in any industry will eventually saturate a participant’s mind with the necessary skills and terminology turn any greenhorn into a pro.
Check us out at https://moontrader.io
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MoonTraderPlatform
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MoonTrader_io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/19203733
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/Moontrader_official/
Telegram: https://t.me/moontrader_news_en

Originally posted on our blog.

A generation ago, Deng Xiaoping postulated to his great country – “To get rich is glorious”. No better quote can be used as a definitive description of what the modern world is all about – the modern world that revolves around technologies. Taking inspiration from Deng Xiaoping’s words, and deriving from their essence, it is possible to morph his postulate into the technological realm and derive something of the like: “To develop is glorious”. However, if taken one step further and adapted even further to what modern users have come to expect from technologies, the semantics gives us a more accurate phrase – “To develop something that generates profit is glorious”.
There has never been a time in human history when trade did not occupy the determining role in human interactions and political ventures. The facilitation of trading environments for native traders was the key goal of politics, military campaigns and diplomatic negotiations. Nothing has changed since then, the tools have merely evolved to facilitate trade.
Digitizing Trade
The digital asset industry is the latest iteration of trading that has stepped over the restrictive entry thresholds that bar Wall Street trading houses from the 99% of humanity. Merely 1% of the world’s population has access and the means to trading traditional assets, such as commodities, futures, stocks, bonds, currencies and other tradable assets. But that state of affairs has rather sickened the remaining 99% who have access to online instruments and do not have the exuberant monetary reserves needed to access traditional trading houses and platforms.
This is where cryptocurrencies came in around 2013 as an affordable, highly volatile accessible, transparently traded and most importantly profitable asset that has been placed in direct opposition to traditional tradable assets. Since 2013, over 40 million people around the world have confessed to having opened at least one cryptocurrency wallet. People are starting to understand that the cryptocurrency industry is developing fast, and it is the market that can be construed as the next generation of profit-generating platforms.
It’s All About The Benefits
A profitable market is not one that is stable, but one that is highly volatile, as it is the price changes that generate income for holders of assets slated for trading. However, to be able to generate any kind of profit, it is not enough to just hold a certain amount of tradable assets in a wallet, but to have access to a convenient, user-friendly, transparent, high speed and versatile platform that would facilitate trade of said tradable assets and open gateways between sellers and buyers.
Forex, TradingView and other platforms have existed as the mainstays of trading on conventional markets for years, but now the time has come for a new generation of digital asset trading platforms capable of catering to the needs of cryptocurrency traders.
MoonBot is the blockchain platform for cryptocurrency trading that has reached and even exceeded the expectations of traders with its product offering. MoonTrader is a unique combination of advanced tools, such as trading bots and traditional analytical instruments that allows for extremely fast order execution and offers a variety of charts that allow users to have a better understanding of the market. It is the comprehensive approach to trade automation and the market dynamics analysis that makes the MoonTrader terminal the most comprehensive, wholesome, and advanced cryptocurrency trading platform on the market.
Never Stopping
The heart of MoonTrader is its intuitive and advanced trading dashboard that grants users access to the instruments necessary for programming trading bots to suit any trading strategy and market behavior. By relying on the array of analysis instruments available and having a full view of market volatility and dynamics, users of MoonTrader can tailor their trading strategies with a variety of listed cryptocurrencies and have insight into market movements on the basis of chart indicators.
The MoonTrader development team is fully vested in the process of perfecting their product, as the project ICO has been successfully concluded and more than enough funds were raised to dedicate all of the team’s attention to the development of a new product. The logical next step for the advancement of MoonTrader is the launch of a strong marketing campaign that would prepare the project’s audience for the release of the product that is scheduled for Q1 of 2020.
Fancy words would be fine in an abstract world, but MoonTrader is all about deeds. The product the team is offering is real and operational, generating profits for thousands of traders relying on the platform. The Alpha version of the product is up and running. Full integration and interaction with a host of exchanges has been conducted and new tools are being developed and implemented by the team on a daily basis. All of the necessary functionality that would cover the needs of future customers has already been included in the dashboard of MoonTrader with more advanced tools based on cutting-edge technologies already in the works.
Among the newest introductions to the MoonTrader trading terminal are instruments that allow charting the price graph of a selected asset, other tools that allow charting the order book on the same screen with the trading viewport and others. Simultaneous displaying of the price history with the trading viewport grants users the possibility of comparing prices in real time and determining profitable entry and exit points for various cryptocurrencies listed on the platform.
The development team is also developing the code that would allow users to place buy and sell orders directly on the exchange, bypassing the need to wait extra milliseconds for transactions to pass, thus saving valuable time that often means the difference between gain and loss in trading.
It Is Time
When it comes to convenience and transaction speeds, cryptocurrencies beat any other asset by a mile. But when it comes to trading them, MoonTrader beats any other platform by a long shot with its transaction processing speeds, automation and arrays of analytical instruments. Don’t lag on profits, just join MoonTrader.
Make sure to visit us at https://moontrader.io

https://preview.redd.it/smj14nox23x31.jpg?width=700&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8b5e86f6ddbbe19993eca91269792ff8658a2ba5
Check us out on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MoonTraderPlatform
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MoonTrader_io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/19203733
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/Moontrader_official/
Telegram: https://t.me/moontrader_news_en

Originally posted on our blog.

Looking back in recent history, it seems as though big investors and financial organizations are changing their attitudes towards Bitcoin and altcoins. The media coverage worldwide illuminated the vast returns being had in the cryptocurrency markets, with many coins up over 100x since their conception. This certainly has garnered the attention from both legacy and newcomer investors. Currently, everyone is waiting to see if cryptocurrencies can continue on their path to new all time highs.
2017 turned out to be a whirlwind year, with most cryptocurrencies soaring to new all time highs at the end of 2017 and early 2018. The media coverage of cryptocurrencies was nonstop, with news reports on financial programs almost daily. In addition, many movies and tv shows mentioned cryptocurrency, including the technology oriented show “Silicon Valley.” So far, 2018 has seen a vast pullback in the cryptocurrency markets. Many of the smaller altcoins are down over 90% with Bitcoin, the crypto leader, still being down over 60% from all time highs.
Even with the overall market pullback, many investors are still very bullish on cryptocurrencies going into 2019. Many big name institutions are jumping head first into crypto, with NYSE announcing a new crypto exchange, BAAKT. Also Fidelity has announced a crypto support platform for their customers. Even legendary Ivy league university Yale has announced a new 400 million dollar investment fund geared towards cryptocurrency.
With so much bullish news adding up rapidly, almost everyone seems to expect a very profitable year for crypto leading into 2019. While Bitcoin is still currently the market leader there are also some big name altcoins that expect 2019 to be a huge year for them.
The Altcoin Hierarchy
Before investing in the crypto market, let us go through the basic classes of cryptocurrencies that exist in the market. While every class has the potential to have impressive returns, some coins have more impressive use cases and concepts, In addition to more qualified and funded development teams. Simply put, not all altcoins were created the same.
The Penny Stocks of Crypto
These are the bottom tier altcoins that could possibly become worthless in the near future. They operate much like penny stocks, advertising big promises of ‘guaranteed gains’. Eventually, many fail to offer a fraction of their promised returns. One of the ways to identify these is to look at their team members, their past experiences, objectives of the project, probability of mass adoption, actual use of the coins and many more.
The reasons for their failure is usually because of unwillingness to work for the vision they once promised in the first place, bad wealth management, inclusion of scammers in their team, unrealistic expectation from the project and also making money via pump and dump schemes.
Some of these coins are Trumpcoin, Russia Coin and Verge.
Average Coins
According to the ‘coinmarketcap’ website, there are currently more than 2000 cryptocurrencies listed on their website. Among those, there are around 500 of them that can be considered in this ‘average’ category.
These are the coins that do have a purpose/objective to work on but fail to maintain a good development team. They and their coins don’t really have any kind of purpose in the crypto market and fail to finalize any kind of legitimate deals and partnerships with good investors. This makes their performance very limited as compared to other altcoins in the market.
Some of these coins are Deep Brain Chain, Funfair, Decred, Navcoin, Populous, Cryptonex.
Good Coins
There are around 500 of such good coins in the market that do offer a good objective for the project, a solid team with good experience to execute such tasks, a good marketing strategy to reach out to masses to share their ideas and quality contacts to make some good partnerships in the market.
The only reason why they are only classified as ‘good coins’ is due to the lack of uniqueness that the other ‘very good coins’ offer. They don’t really have that ‘point of parity’ in their project/product that separates them from their counterparts.
Some of these coins are NEM, Stratis, Monero, and BAT.
Very Good Coins
There are around 100 such ‘very good coins’ in the market. Their objectives are well defined with a solid team to execute their tasks perfectly. Along with that, their marketing teams are also well-qualified to make their ideas reach to the masses. Because of such a wonderful blend, they are able to make better and strong partnerships with a number of good companies.
What separates them from the ‘Good Coins’ category is their USPs (Unique Selling Points). They are unique in what they do and that’s what makes the difference.
Such coins are NEO, Stellar, Cardano, Ripple
Top Tier Cryptocurrencies
These are the top tier coins that provide the best functionalities. They have real-world usage, objectives to solve a real-world problem, strong fundamental teams to execute the mission of the project, marketing teams to spread the ‘idea’ and collaboration with a number of media channels to gain early investors.
Also, due to a good PR team, they are able to make a very strong partnership with a lot of Fortune 500 companies that give them an extra edge over rest of the projects in the market.
Some of these coins are VeChain, Ethereum, Bitcoin, IOTA, Icon, EOS, Kinesis.
Promising Projects Going Into the New Year
With more than 2000 cryptocurrencies out there in the crypto market, only a couple 100 of them qualify to be a top tier investment. It can be quite the challenge to find a worthy project among the thousands of choices. These next projects are some that show a lot of promise heading into 2019.
Always remember the 3’S’ of the investment – Sane, Smart and Sensible. An investor who is sane, smart and sensible will always look into the facts before he invests in any business or project.
Kinesis
This is one of the most promising upcoming projects in crypto. The broad overview of the coin is to offer an alternate and better evolutionary step beyond the basic monetary and banking system available today.
In short, it is a cryptocurrency that is backed by precious metals like gold and silver. According to the CEO of the company, Thomas Coughlin, the Kinesis coin is basically divisible units of allocated gold and silver which you can use as a currency.
There will be two stable Kinesis coins in the market backed by Gold and Silver. The stable Kinesis coins backed by Gold will be tagged as KAU and the stable Kinesis coins backed by Silver will be tagged as KAG.
These stablecoins backed by the precious metals like Gold and Silver are real game changers as these 2 precious metals are definable stores of value for use in trade and investment in the real-world economies.
The Kinesis coin is based on the Bespoke Blockchain Technology, a blockchain network forked off from the Stellar Blockchain Technology in order to suit the requirements of the Kinesis coin.
The cryptocurrency project is headed by Thomas Coughlin who is also the CEO of the Kinesis company. He has 15 years experience in the investment, funds management and capital markets. Before being the CEO of the Kinesis company, he held similar positions for the Bullion Capital and TRAC Financial Group as well.
Apart from Thomas Coughlin, there are other great members in the team as well. Their team consists of people like:
Michael Coughlin, Chief Financial Officer, having 41 years experience as a CPA in the accountancy and financial services professions.
Eric Maine, Chief Strategy Officer, having more than 30 years experience in Senior Management in the exchange and financial markets.
Ryan Case, Head of Sales & Trading in Kinesis, having extensive experience as Head of sales trading & partnership and also valuable experience in commodity, cryptocurrency, forex and derivative markets.
Jai Bifulco, Chief Marketing Officer, having a full-fledged 12 years of experience in award-winning full-stack marketer in Finance. He previously held roles of directors in multiple brokerages, consulting and Fintech sectors.
There are more than 30 different team members in this project spanning their roles from The Executive Committee to the Advisory Board to the Operations and Development team.
The coins are very limited in number as compared to other cryptocurrencies where the softcap is limited to just 15,000 KVT coins and HardCap is limited to 300,000 KVT coins. Minimum token that one can buy is set to 1 KVT which is equal to $1000.
So far, more than 57,000 KVT tokens have been sold which roughly equals to a whopping sum of $57 Million. With such a huge investment already deployed for the development of the project, there are still 30 more days left for the ICO sale period to end.
Also, apart from the investments gained, the Kinesis cryptocurrency is also focusing much on the partnerships with the top companies in the industry. These include companies like ABX (Allocated Bullion Exchange), MLG (Blockchain Consulting), Sigma Prime, Etherlabs and Fine Metal Asia Limited.
This cryptocurrency is certainly the one to watch out for in 2019.
VeChain
Broad Overview – In simple layman terminology, Vechain is a supply chain protocol to track logistics inventory. It has successfully implemented blockchain technology in various sectors like agriculture and industries like luxury goods and liquor.
They basically strive to solve real-life problems by providing solutions in various industries like:
Logistics: In this sector, VeChain implements the blockchain technology to improve the flow of information from one department to another by breaking silos yet maintaining the data privacy of every department. Government: There are more than 111 VeChain nodes deployed worldwide. The municipal governments participate in the VeChain blockchain network as nodes. The VeChain blockchain network offers decentralization and immunity against the data hacking that allows room for transparent information exchange. This indeed improves the efficiency of the municipal governments. The technologies used to track the logistics are:
Assigning digital identities to physical stocks that can be stored on the VeChain blockchain network Usage of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) NFC (Near Field Communication) Proof Of Authority Consensus In-House Temperature Controlled Tracking Quick Response Codes (QR Codes) The future potential of the VeChain cryptocurrency looks quite promising as the coin is signing new partnerships every month or so. Some of its partners are PricewaterhouseCoopers, DNV GL, Renault Group, KUEHNE + NAGEL, D.I.G, China Unicom and the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration of China.
Every single company with whom VeChain partnered has millions of customers that will use the VeChain technology embedded in their system. This makes the coin solve real-life problems and have mass adoption.
VeChain indeed makes a big difference in the logistics business. However, given the kind of turmoil that the entire cryptomarket is facing where the total market capitalization has fallen from $800 Billion to just around $200 Billion, no one can give any kind of assurance on the returns in your investment in the crypto assets. However, stablecoins like Kinesis has a reward yield system that incentivizes its investors for holding, depositing and also referring new users. Hence, the investors always stay on the benefit side even if the market collapses for a short duration.
IOTA
In simple terms, IOTA is a cryptocurrency which is designed for the Internet of Things. The cryptocurrency was developed to root a new direction to IoT by establishing a standardization called, ‘Ledger of Everything’ which means that the data exchange between sensor-equipped machines would be enabled to populate IoT.
IOTA has the potential to make transactions easy. A basic use case of IOTA can be seen in IOTA enabled vending machines. These machines can dispense the items without involving the associated transaction costs. Some other use cases of IOTA are Reddit Chains etc.
Technology Behind IOTA Surprisingly, IOTA does not use the traditional Blockchain technology for its design and development. In fact, a new platform called ‘Tangle Technology’ is being used for IOTA to operate on. The Tangle Technology deploys a mathematical concept called Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) which resolves both the scalability and transaction fees issues which we face in blockchain based cryptocurrencies.
In IOTA, for a transaction to be valid, each node present in DAG Tangle must approve the previous two transactions occurring at the other node. And adding to a note, this process removes the chances of mining and makes the system fully decentralized.
Future Potential Keeping in mind the remarkable result of IOTA, there exists a promising scope for it in the near future in various applications and platforms. IOTA would be standing tall and different in the future world full of cryptocurrencies vulnerable to quantum computers. IOTA has a lot of companies that it is working with. Some of them include Bosch, Volkswagen,Fujitsu, Accenture, Poyry and many more.
When viewed from a macro perspective, so far IOTA looks to be fee-less, scalable and fast which makes it next to perfect. However, if you own IOTA, the chances of you liquidating it into fiat currency via a ‘debit card’ and buying something from a grocery store is quite low. In order to fill this gap of actually buying something from the street market and becoming the global currency, Kinesis has introduced its Kinesis Debit Cards that enables the Kinesis token holders to exchange their tokens against FIAT currency and simultaneously buy products from a grocery shop, something which IOTA fails to offer.
ICON ICX
Broad Overview: ICON is a South Korean based company that develops blockchain technology and accompanies the cryptocurrency called ‘ICX’. ICON is a network framework which has been designed to allow independent blockchains to interact with each other. It allows interconnected blockchain networks to participate in a decentralized system which converges at a central point.
Technology: ICX token is built on the Ethereum blockchain network. ICON has developed a loop-chain platform that connects different blockchain communities through the ICON Republic which serves as the governing head for the Federation of other independent blockchain bodies.
All the communities are linked to Republic through C-Reps (Community Representatives) which then connects to Nexus. C-Reps functions as the portals to the communities to establish a connection with Nexus. And this way the entire procedure is carried out.
Future Scope: It is believed that ICON has plans to provide platforms to financial, security, insurance, healthcare, educational industries which can help them to carry transactions on a single network. Thus, ICON (ICX) can be seen having a good time in the coming days.
Also, it has been successful in signing a partnership deal with the tech-giant Samsung where it will be using ICON’s own Chain ID for a new Samsung project called ‘Samsung Pass’. Apart from Samsung, ICON has also signed deals with PORTAL NETWORK & W Foundation.
However, it is notable that ICON is built on the Ethereum network and is an ERC20 token. Hence, the transaction speed greatly depends on the Ethereum network. Currently, Ethereum can execute 15 transactions per second which is quite low in terms of what ICON (ICX) is currently aiming for. However, to fill this gap, we have Kinesis Bespoke Technology that offers a whopping speed of 3000 transactions per second. This lightning fast speed keeps the Kinesis token way ahead than ICX token.
Enjin
Broad Overview The native cryptocurrency of the Enjin Network, the Enjin Coin (popularly known as only ENJ) follows the ERC20 token standard and is used with a smart contract-based blockchain platform. Its typical users include content creators, game developers, and other members of the gaming community, who need to use virtual tokens to manage and trade virtual goods in the gaming world.
Technology behind Enjin As an ERC20-compliant token, the ENJ functions in accordance with the rules an Ethereum contract has to implement. It is used on a dedicated platform that is designed to support open-source software development kits (SDKs), applications, plug-ins, and payment gateways. As for its users, they will be able to efficiently participate in developing, launching, managing, and trade content and game-related products on the Enjin Network, without having to deal with the technical complexities.
Summary of Potential The ENJ is expected to solve some performance issues in using similar cryptocurrencies on the market today, including payment frauds where goods are not actually delivered, slow transaction processes, lack of ownership of virtual goods, lack of transaction standards, and centralization problems.
According to its creators, the ENJ coin, which is based on a blockchain, will create a distributed, trustworthy, and secure framework where transactions can be executed smoothly and quickly with minimal transaction fees. Its autonomous and decentralized system will ensure that all offers and deals will be honored.
Conclusion Generally speaking, the Enjin Coin is good. It helps bring the benefits of blockchain to millions of people participating in the virtual goods market. Its creators are working hard to prevent fraud in the gaming world.
However, it is still a relatively new project. As such, it is still volatile. This means that you still have to take utmost care and be wise when using it.
EOS
Broad Overview EOS is considered by many people who are participating in the virtual goods market as one of the best cryptocurrencies to use, supported by a powerful infrastructure for decentralized applications. Basically, the EOS blockchain is used for the development, execution, and hosting of decentralized applications (dApps) that are traded virtually.
Technology behind EOS The EOS system is composed of two key components, which are the EOS.IO and the EOS token. As for the former, it functions like a computer’s operating system in managing and controlling the EOS blockchain, with the use of an architecture that enables horizontal and vertical dApps. As for the latter, it is held (instead of spent) by the users to be able to become eligible of building, running, and trading apps, as well as using EOS network resources.
While EOS still does not have an official full form, it supports all core functionalities to allow individuals and businesses to create and trade blockchain-based apps.
It also runs on a web toolkit for interface development, just like Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store.
Summary of Potential While there are already a lot of cryptocurrencies based on Ethereum similar to it, the EOS system focuses on the critical and problematic points of the blockchain. Specifically, it attempts to solve the problems of scalability, speed, and flexibility that often cause transaction processes to slow down, which is a common issue in blockchain-based systems.
According to its creators, EOS.IO could also address other problems that come with the ever-increasing size of the dApps ecosystem, such as limited availability of resources, constrained networks, spamming, false transactions, and limited computing power.
It is said to be able to support thousands of commercial-scale dApps without hitting performance bottlenecks by using asynchronous communication methodologies and parallel execution across its network.
Conclusion The EOS system is very advanced. It is designed to address common problems with standard blockchain-based networks. But like other new cryptocurrency platforms on the virtual market today, it still has some weak points to improve. Also, there is again the exposure to volatility, as users hold the tokens to be eligible to trade virtually.
Nebulas
Broad overview Nebulas (NAS) is a new generation blockchain and is open for public collaborations for decentralized application (dApp) development. Its adaptability and scalability are the two characteristics that could propel NAS to be one of the top cryptocurrencies, thus giving it enough leverage to compete in the market.
Technology behind Nebulas Nebulas is the first crypto running on a 3rd generation blockchain, thus making it the dominant player of the new platform. This makes Nebulas highly flexible and scalable, even giving a good leverage in future-proofing their code. That could help avoid hard forking whenever some issues come up during scaling processes.
Summary of potential Adaptability, scalability and search-ability are three of the biggest potential NAS has to offer. With the 3rd generation blockchain it uses, it can allow the adaption of other codes based from Nebulas. This means that other cryptos can adapt to its platform soon enough.
Moreover, it can also act as a blockchain search engine. This can let users search particular blockchains based on efficiency and community strength.
Finally, its goal to provide fair incentives to Decentralized Application (dApp) developers is something that collaborators could expect. This means that more developers are expected to come, thus strengthening NAS even further.
Conclusion Nebulas (NAS) is a promising crypto especially with its adaptability, scalability and search-ability potentials. It can help with the fluidity of crypto into this new generation platform. However, it still lacks the value stability that Kinesis or stablecoins hold. NAS is still unpredictable, unlike Kinesis that backs it value with real gold.
Sky
Broad overview SkyCoin is a full environment system of blockchain technology, and has the goal of endorsing the actual usage of cryptocurrency.
Technology behind Sky Sky has its own algorithm, the Obelisk, which uses the web of trust dynamics to spread influence all throughout the network to come up with a consensus decision. The consensus decision depends on each node, by valuing its influence score. The influence score of each node is determined by the number of network nodes connected to it. This depicts the importance of the node to the network.
Aside from the Obelisk, Sky also operates its own cryptocurrency which is SkyCoin, its own ICO platform Fiber, a decentralized social media platform called BBS, and a decentralized messenger called Sky-Messenger.
Summary of potential Sky focuses its potential on being a full ecosystem of blockchain technology that encourages actual usage of crypto. Through its unique algorithm which is the Obelisk and some other dApps associated with it, Sky is a promising crypto technology and could be considered as the most complete one as of today.
Conclusion Sky, SkyCoin and the Obelisk is definitely a massive platform that could be considered as a full ecosystem of crypto and its related technology. Nonetheless, the SkyCoin depends its value on node influence scores, which could change from time to time as well. This makes Kinesis and Stablecoins still a better choice, especially for investors who want clear investments without hassle.
Crypto Predictions for 2019
While 2017 had the masses captivated and investing large amounts of capital, 2018 has seen price drops and sagging hopes. While the returns in 2017 exceeded anyone’s expectations, a strong pullback was predicted by many. Whether or not this bear market continues from here is the real question many investors face today.
Bitcoin’s rapid rise and fall exposed many problems, and the developers of the top cryptocurrencies in 2019 took note. When considering your crypto investments for 2019, factor in the following trends we predict will influence investments:
More Pullbacks According to the CEO of Vellum Capital, Eric Kovalak, the price of cryptos will reach new lows before they will rebound to new heights. This includes the biggest cryptocurrencies in the market, including Bitcoin. Kovalak believes that it will be priced below $3,500 before it will find its way back up. However, there are many mixed opinions on the current price of BTC, with some arguing the bottom for the crypto markets have already been seen.
Due to Bitcoin-based remittances, uncertainty in global economies like Asia, Turkey and Venezuela, and mobile penetration, there will be a surge in interest and the price of the digital currency.
A Flood of Institutional Investors
Institutional investors have been waiting on the sideline for the ETF to rule in favor of Bitcoin. According to Mike Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy Capital, once the ETF arrives, “institutional fomo’ will start flooding the market.”
Another factor is Kinesis, the investment blockchain that provides investors with a safe and reliable alternative. Pegged against precious metals, it provides protection against volatility that may be caused by political instability.
The Kinesis Monetary System lets you own real gold or silver when you purchase the digital currency. Your ownership is then digitized and then made available for spending, trading, and transfer. What is even better, the monetary system can be used internationally, ensuring reliability of money around the world.
With the recent crisis around the Turkish Lira, the price of gold has significantly increased.
Mass adoption of crypto by consumers In January 2019, blockchain technology will be 10 years old. It remains a speculative investment to this day but 2019 could be the year of mass adoption for digital currencies.
For this to happen, however, there has to be some triggers.
Speculation should become a real utility. People must use blockchain projects in everyday life so they will gain widespread use. Decentralized applications (DApps) must gain mainstream status to promote widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies. Improved payment processing, addressing the issue on the current situation of slow transaction times and high transaction fees. Scalability of blockchain technology with little to no impact on its efficiency. To date, slow transaction times are due to the growing number of users and transaction sizes. This calls for blockchain to grow and have the ability to compete with Mastercard, PayPal, or Visa. Introduction of off-chain solutions that allow users to complete a transaction through peer-to-peer payment channel instead of within the blockchain. This will address slow transaction times. Security will be provided by the parent blockchain. Gold Is Still The Standard Despite the promises and unique functions of many cryptocurrencies, there is still uncertainty in these new markets.
Gold has remained the best form of investment throughout history, and the best store of value, especially through times of crisis in politics and economies.
Kinesis pegs its value to gold which has proven to be the safest investment in history. Therefore Kinesis stands to gain from the stability gold offers while simultaneously fusing it with the unique features of this cutting edge crypto technology.
With the Kinesis Monetary System, investing in gold is no longer the slow process that many older investors are used to. This cryptocurrency is backed by gold and silver and supports precious metals trade.
It has three essential assets.
Tokens that represent an investors ownership of gold and silver. The inherited system where performance is done. Complete blockchain security that supports investments and paves the way for the creation of new assets protected in a banking system. Most importantly, the Kinesis Monetary System allows thousands of transactions to be completed per second in a completely secure channel.
The Near Future
Even a decade later, cryptocurrencies are still very much in their infancy. At this time, no one is sure what shape this growing sector will take in the future. Many cryptocurrencies will come and go but the ones that show the most promise, that fulfill their use cases, will stick around for the long term. With any emerging technology, we have to watch how it evolves and how it merges with our everyday life, changing the way we interact with everything around us.

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.

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)"

Forex Volatility Graph - Kyrillow

Rules for Trading Forex

1. Avoid forex trading software that claims to guarantee returns

2. Always use a demo trading account

3. Forex trading can be highly stressful – avoid emotional trading

4. Invest in a solid forex education

5. You can learn to trade forex successfully

6. Manage your forex capital wisely

7. Manage your investment-per-trade wisely

8. Use common sense

9. Ensure you use risk protection strategies at all times

10. Be especially cautious about overextending yourself with leverage

The bottom line

Rules for Trading Forex

Rules for Trading Forex

India should take this opportunity to hedge it's oil supply

Which are your Top 5 favourite coins out of the Top 100? An analysis.

Market 1 - Currency:

Market 2 - Platform

Market 3 - Ecosystem

Market 4 - Privacy

Market 5 - Currency Exchange Tool

Market 6 - Gaming

Market 7 - Misc

Market 8 - Social network

Market 9 - Fee token

Market 10 - Decentralized Data Storage

Market 11 - Cloud computing

Market 12 - Stablecoin

Some tools free from Onada's site.

[R] Understanding The Price Movement Of Cryptocurrency Using Candlestick Charts

Just thoughts after 3 years of Forex

How to correctly draw support and resistance levels

How to correctly mark support & resistance in most markets

Elaborating on Datadash's 50k BTC Prediction: Why We Endorse the Call

Beginner's Guide to Trading Crypto. Part 5

Talk The Trader Talk: A Journey Into The Realm Of Trader Slang

The Trader Lingo

Trade It, Adopt It

Best Cryptos to Invest in the Year 2019

New rule! Also are cryptocurrencies an investment, will there be a crash? Everything answered here!

Are cryptocurrencies an investment?

Should I invest in cryptocurrencies?

Examples of investments:

Examples of speculation:

Reducing the risk of speculation

Should I buy coins right now?

Bitcoin 2013/2014 speculation, chart

Bitcoin 2015 consolidation, chart

RSI & MACD key for above charts and primer

Analyzing overbought signals

Nothing goes straight up forever

Notable comments on reddit:

Is Bitcoin going to crash?

Relevant websites/wikis

Relevant subreddits