Haven't been online in few months and I come online today and see all altcoins are dead? Little to no movement in past few months, majority of that is downward movement. Scammers have run out of ideas? people stopped investing?
What is going on?
meanwhile BTC is heading back to $400
I knew it was going to happen, didn't expect it was going to happen this soon. lol
Well...here's a reasoning-by-analogy bit that I cling to.
When gold recovers from a bear market, the senior producers recover first. Sometimes they jump up before gold itself gains traction; sometimes not. But it's the seniors that benefit first. The other more under-the-radar gold stocks keep languishing.
As gold continues to go up, eventually enough punters figure that the gold recovery is "real" and begin to scout around for missed opportunities. As with all market movements dependent upon the actions of people, the shift process is so subtle that it's unpredictable. To be honest, the only feasible strategy to play it is to get in early and wait...a long time that seems
very long when "every" stock but yours is going up.
At this second stage, the ones that take off are the junior producers. They're ones who are making money, or could be making money if the gold market co-operated, but they typically are pulling gold out of the ground and selling it. Their lack of visibility tends to come from they being too small to rate being included in the major well-watched gold-stock indices.
During these two stages, the exploration companies - the mining sector's answer to vapourware companies - still languish. Exploration companies typically have no revenue and depend upon capital infusions to keep going. Unless an exploration company is extraordinarily lucky [or extraordinarily unlucky, but that's a different story] this new capital has to be new equity. It has to be a new share issue, typically through an off-market procedure called a "private placement." Any cash in the bank is expected to be spent on exploration work.
When the entire exploration subsector is languishing, typically in the later parts of a gold bear market but also in the early stages of a gold bull market, you see something that's really disheartening. An exploration company issues a good, great or huge success from one of their properties - usually, a result from their latest diamond-drilling rock-sample program - that would have made the stock explode upwards in better times. But in languish times, the market yawns. It doesn't frown, it
yawns. These are times when an exploration company releases drill results than make a punter like me go "wow!!" - but the stock itself doesn't move. It not only doesn't move in price, it doesn't move in volume. By price-and-volume charts, it looks like the company didn't release any news at all!
Until that same subtle, impossible-to-predict revival process hits the exploration market. Then, its stocks start to boogie too. In fact, this stage of a gold bull tends to produce those spectacular gainers that show up in the advertisements of certain market letters.
What makes them explosive at that time is essentially an overlap between a company releasing a spectacular drill result at the time when the exploration-market itself is waking up.
Again, the wake-up process is subtle and dependent upon what goes on in punters' minds: it's therefore unpredictable. Again, the only way to play it is to buy early, wait, hope and endure.
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To the extent that this analogy is valid, the big
BTC is a combo of gold and the senior gold stocks. The typical altcoin is a lot like those exploration companies.
So if my analogizing is good enough to go on - please note this thinly-disguised disclaimer - the alts are going to look dead for some time: they'll keep languishing while
BTC plows upwards. At this point, it's pretty clear that the long, grinding, post-bubble Bitcoin bear is over. Interesting that the XT flap has coincided with the end of the Bitcoin bear market. Either that, or it hobbled the start of the new Bitcoin bull market. [The charts suggest the latter.]
My call: the alts aren't dead, they're frustratingly dormant. And they'll stay that way for some time - a tough time, where the big
BTC continues to make them look dead by comparison. Until, that is, enough punters start looking downwards and putting their Bitcoin where there hopes are...
