So the next question I get a lot is around finding those hidden gems before everyone else and accumulating them before the whales and rest of the Crypto community get their grubby little paws on them.
There are plenty of different strategies out there but one thing they all have in common is they take a lot of time and hard work but are extremely rewarding when you do find that gem. Anyway, on to the method.
Initial Research
The first thing I do is open up CoinMarketcap.com and click View All then sort by BTC price. What you end up with is a list of all the coins sorted by price like the screen shot below. Now here comes the time consuming part.
What I look for are a few quick indicators that the coin may be worth looking into further:
- Market Cap
- Volume (24h)
- % Change
Each has been labeled in the below screenshot.
Now let's use Infinitecoin (IFC) as an example. When I am browsing down the list I see that there has been around 63BTC of volume in the past 24hrs which is a decent amount for a coin that is currently 2 sat. I can also see that IFC is down 12% in price compared to 7 days ago but up 0.40% in the past 24hrs. So I open that coin up in a new tab showing a detailed breakdown of Infinitecoin (IFC).
Now we can dig a little deeper into IFC and see if it is a hidden gem or something to not waste anymore time on. In the screenshot below I have highlighted a few things in red.
First thing I notice is there was a huge spike in price and volume on May 22nd. This could be due to people accumulating or a simple Pump & Dump which we always want to avoid.
Social Tab
Next I would open the Social tab to see what is going on with their social media efforts. Things to look for are how active are they, how many followers do they have and have they posted any interesting news that may have gone under everyone else's radar. As you can see they don't even have a social account listed with CoinMarketCap.com. (Not a good sign!)
Markets Tab
Next I would look to see what markets the coin is being traded on and if the exchanges are reputable and what the buy and sell books look like. With IFC I can instantly see that the majority of volume in the past 24hrs has been on the Chinese exchange Jubi. Interesting, do they know something we don't?
I then open up the exchange by clicking the IFC/CNY link which brings me to the exchange. Once on the exchange I want to have a quick look to see if I can gather anymore intel on the coin and it's future.
What I instantly see is that on the 16th and 27th of August there was quite some volume. Again, interesting!
ANN Thread
Now it's time to head back to CoinMarketcap.com and check out their website and ANN thread. Let's start with their ANN thread.
First thing I look for is when was the thread started along with the idea and specs behind the coin. I also look for how many pages are in the thread, the more the better usually as it means people are talking about it.
With IFC I noticed that there are not that many pages and the thread was started a long time ago, Dec 2013!
Let's skip the the latest posts and see what is going on! Skip to Page 36
Read through that page yourself and you should get a fairly good understanding of where this coin is at and where it is going.
- Seems dead but it does have a few people who want to see it resurrected. Is that enough, who knows.
- People in the thread have noticed that there has been volume increase on certain exchanges.
Website
Now let's move on to the IFC Website! Here is where I would look to find as much information as possible. I also look to see if they have social pages listed that were not on CoinMarketcap.com. What do you know, we found their Official Twitter. Taking a quick look at Twitter we can see they haven't updated it since 2015! (Another bad sign!)
Conclusion On IFC
I wanted to show you what the process looks like on a coin that in my opinion is not going anywhere. To me it looks like a possible accumulation for a Pump and Dump with no developers in sight to support the project. At this point I would not waste anymore time and move on to the next coin on the list.
Keep in mind that chances are you do this for 50 coins to find 1 or 2 possible gems, if that!
Biggest Gainers & Losers
The last thing I will leave you with on this brief introduction is the Biggest Gainers & Losers list on CoinMarketcap.com.
This list gives you a quick glance at what has moved the most and shows you the % changes compared to 1hr/24hrs/7days. It's a quick way to see what is moving and then try to get in on the action.
Final Words
Please understand that this is a brief look into how I and many others do our research. There are many other factors involved such as Technical Analysis and actually speaking to the community, if there is one, by joining their Slack or Telegram groups. Always try to find out if there are plans that have not been announced yet as that information is usually shared in these private groups first before announced to the public.
If you found this helpful please let me know below in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @SentineliAU and I will be happy to do more on topics you guys want to learn more about.
And please, only invest with what you can afford to lose and always do your own research. My posts are always just meant to be informative and never act as trading advice.