CryptoBreakers - Swing Trade Recs & Education

This is an example of the analysis they're doing:

“A team is something you belong to, something you feel, something you have to earn.” - Gordan Bombay, The Mighty Ducks

January 31st
In this episode of “Breaking Through the Haze,” we give another update on market health as it’s driving much of the price action in your portfolio. We have another buy & hold recommendation for you but we also describe how we analyze projects and ICO’s. And finally, we go over a potential breakout so you can add to your own watchlist. Let’s break this down!

What We’re Covering In This Episode of Breaking Through the Haze

Market Update
Possible Break-Out
What Does It Mean to Analyze a Coin/Token
Buy & Hold Analysis: ICON
Update on Previous Buy & Hold Recommendations

Market Update
The market correction appears to be over since we finally broke out of the downtrend resistance line. Now, it's important to be patient and wait for a final confirmation before buying back in. We'd also recommend scaling in slowly - buying coins in batches, such as breaking up your order into 3 buys of 33% - versus unloading your entire capital all at once to mitigate risk.

What we're looking for:
The overall crypto market cap to close the day (4pm PT) above the resistance line.
A trend down to the previous resistance line to "test" the bullish confirmation and prove that the resistance line is now serving as support. 
Bitcoin to close the day in, or above, a range of 11,800-12,000. 
Several large volume spikes in the top 20 coins.

A Possible Break Out to Watch
Occasionally CryptoBreakers will share a potential break out we’re watching as an opportunity to educate. In this case we’re watching BAT as it’s forming a clear trading pattern known as a Cup & Handle. You can add this to your own watch lists but of course we’ll signal when it’s time to jump in.

Basic Attention Token (BAT) Swing Trade Analysis:

Currently forming a picture-perfect Cup & Handle (C&H) pattern (this pattern is so clean it should be in a book!)
C&H patterns provide some of the biggest payouts with explosive breakouts
To measure the ROI potential, measure from the bottom of the cup to the top, the top being where the uptrend got rejected off a resistance line and formed the handle portion of the pattern.
In the case of BAT, this payout should be between 500-520%
The C&H pattern is confirmed with rising buyer volume on the uptrend and breakout
BAT is also fundamentally strong, with a working product and stable partnerships

What Does it Mean to Analyze an ICO or Project
The primary differences between a “buy & hold” and a swing trade is the time frame of the hold and the importance of the underlying project. While swing trading still requires you to understand the underlying asset, buy & holds raise the importance exponentially higher because of the longer hold and the larger gains. When we recommend buy & holds we see opportunities that exceed 100x returns but they also require the patience to hold much longer.

CryptoBreakers has a thorough process to analyze buy & holds; which typically requires over 30-hours of research and documentation. The reason for this time investment is because buy & holds are typically challenging existing paradigms. Our analysis isn’t complete without analyzing their partners, advisors, market opportunities, competitors, and the social sentiment.

The obvious start to any analysis are the project’s website and whitepaper. Almost all projects have professional looking websites, but what we’re looking for is the level of detail they’re willing to document publicly. Is the website filled with flashy graphics and buzzwords such as decentralized and paradigm while promising to be the next bitcoin or are they answering real questions about the problem they see and how a blockchain solves it. The whitepaper should take the themes of the website and go into greater detail. The primary question we want the whitepaper to answer is why a blockchain helps solve the problem, and secondly what utility will the coin/token have. At the end of the day, we’re buying into the project because we expect to be able to sell it at a profit in the future.

After fully digesting the whitepaper, we find all the official YouTube videos from the project team. Often times the nature of video helps describe the problem and solution better than the whitepaper but will often times include interviews with the team. While in YouTube we look for third-party videos that can include interviews and reviews of the project.

Most projects have a content channel in Reddit or Medium and there we’ll read all the updates from the team. These typically include roadmap updates to help us understand the current status of the project. We subscribe to these so we can quickly learn about changes to the project and any new risks that may arise. Finally most projects have an announcement thread in BitcoinTalk. Reading this gives us a social sentiment that helps us understand the interest in the project but also how engaged the team is with the community.

Finally after knowing the details of the project, we take all unanswered questions directly to the project team itself. We first take it to their Telegram/Discord channel (or LinkedIn, Twitter, etc) and if we’re unable to get our questions answered there we connect directly to the project team. Most of the time our questions are answered but even if they’re not that’s a data point that makes its way into the recommendation.

All this research can be duplicated by you and we encourage you to supplement our research with your own. We've created a network of contacts and resources to provide real time data and insights, which we synthesize with our own research and deliver to you. As you can see, researching a project requires extensive investment in time, energy, and resources. Understanding the fundamentals of a project builds the confidence we need to slowly invest and build a large stake… but we’re confident double and even triple digit returns will come for our work!

Buy & Hold Recommendation:

ICON:

Market Cap: $3.4B
Website: https://www.icon.foundation/en/
Telegram: 16,000 Members
Short Description: A decentralized network that allows independent blockchains with
different governances to transact with one another without intermediaries.

Full Description: The advent of the blockchain technology has introduced the world of decentralization and is challenging our preconceived perspectives of the current social, political, and economic systems, most notably, the central banking system. The rapid advancement of this technology has begun to blend the world borders and statute, providing glimpses of an improved, alternative future. Yet, the technology is still at its infancy and is plagued with shortcomings in terms of performance, ease of use, and service quality.

Generally, the majority of blockchain projects place emphasis on their decentralization methodology and lack evidence of adoption in the real world.

There are fascinating projects such as Steem that operates a crypto world, a virtual service on top of its own blockchain. However, other projects that attempt to connect to the real world are feeling performance limitations, and hence, realizing the need for more research and development. To overcome such limitation of connecting the real world to crypto world, ICON was started

Fundamental Analysis: We cannot go into ICON without talking about The Blockchain Interoperability Alliance (BIA.) As the quote mentioned above, belonging to a team is important when challenging the status quo. The BIA is made up of three crypto projects: AION, ICON, and Wanchain. We had several questions coming into this analysis but foremost was how ICON would compete with both AION and Wanchain since all three are working on connecting different blockchains together. This is the mission of the BIA; to increase the adoption of blockchains across enterprises, universities, hospitals, banks, insurance companies, and enterprises by a hundred or a thousand percent. It is said that less than 0.1% of the world’s population own a crypto asset.

When asked point blank if ICON is a competitor to AION, AION replied the three of them are competing for market growth not market share. This seems like an insignificant detail but in actuality is a major factor of our thesis. The early days of the internet was not about market share but rather educating the people on the benefits of email and web browsing. It was about converting non-consumption to consumption. Competition eventually came but only after exponential growth, and now just about everyone has access via a computer or mobile device.

The health of ICON, AION, and Wanchain come down to the health of the BIA team. Our view of the BIA team is strong; the team have known each other for several years and seem to respect each other’s skills and value. At one point in the same interview a question was asked to Matthew Spoke of AION about the value his project is delivering but instead of answering Matthew handed it over to Dustin Byington of Wanchain for him to answer. This is just one data point but highlights a highly functioning team who’s not afraid to show off the value of their peers.

As for ICON itself, they’re in a market leading position in Korea with the largest blockchain network with over 40 institutions across banks, insurance, universities, and hospitals. The parent company DAYLI has a long history in fin-tech and has also been working on AI solutions in the same space. In fact they’re currently working on integrating their AI solution into financial institutions including AXA Insurance Liquidity.

Real World Token Application: While AION is focusing on Enterprise solutions in manufacturing, shipping and others, ICON is focusing on healthcare, insurance, and financial markets:

You can imagine a hospital needing to transact data and value to an insurance company, which would need to transact with a bank and would eventually need to transact with securities and other financial institutions. The ICON team already has working relationships with these institutions so we’re confident they can break into and help grow adoption of blockchain.

The ICX token has real utility as it’d be the store of value for the transaction across all these institutions. It may eventually get transacted out of ICX such as into Bitcoin, Ether or even into fiat but the transaction would flow as ICX. And yes, ICX is working on a fiat to ICX decentralized exchange platform to make this all seamless for their users.

Project & Dev Team

Partnerships & Advisors: Rather than listing out ICON’s list of advisors we’re highlighting the way their organization has structured to execute on their roadmap. The parent company, DAYLI Financial Group, has broken down the teams into theloop, Heenam, Leevi, and several other specialized teams. This allows them to specialize into their core capabilities and execute where their expertise is.

Risks and What To Watch Out For:

Breakdown of BIA: The primary point of our thesis is the strength of the BIA team. Rather than spending time, energy, and resources competing against each other AION (Canada), ICON (Korea), and Wanchain (China) have partnered together to drive growth in the industry. If this team collapses it could be a sign that either adoption is stalling or the teams are shifting to competition rather than cooperation
Korean Regulation: ICON is based in Korea and most of their early adopters will come from the same region. The Korean government has shown both a willingness to embrace crypto but also a heavy hand to regulation. An overreach by the government could scare institutions away from adoption or even worse Korea could decide to ban all forms of crypto value transfers. We believe this is a low risk but it is something to watch if you’re going to wait this out.
ICON’s Market Cap: ICON was the first of the BIA team to ICO and release their ICX token and thus their market cap is already over $3-billion (compared to AION’s $400-million.) This is not a project to invest in if you want to see an intra-week 10x return but it is one to store value and watch steadily grow over time. It was just March of 2017 when Ethereum market cap was just over $3-billion.

Closing Thoughts:

We’re already in progress of our Wanchain write-up (which hasn’t released its tokens yet) but we’re incredibly bullish on these three inter-blockchain projects. The world of finance, healthcare, education, manufacturing, and others are required to work and interact with each other. A custom blockchain will also need to solve for very specific problems and the only way to communicate with each blockchain are the solutions the BIA are bringing to the table. The fact that each of these projects are willing to partner and grow the space is very positive as it frees up energy, money, and time for them to execute. We believe you can’t go wrong by slowly adding to AION, ICON, and Wanchain (when available) to your portfolio. Just leave room for the quicker swing trades!

What’s Coming in Future Updates:

Fundamental Analysis Wanchain
More lessons on how to manage emotions