I've been pondering how to participate in ICO's and is there a winning trading strategy that can be applied. So I decided to investigate this quantitatively ... lot's of noise either way from the winners and losers in ICO-land ... lot's of rumours, FUD, FOMO, YOLO and the likes ... What to believe... how best to spend my time - trading, HODL'ing or ICO'ing?

So here's what I found.....

Methodology:

1. Get the public ICO data for ICO's from 1 June 2017 to now.
2. Compare the public ICO price to the current price against USDT, BTC and ETH
3. Run some stats .... for the full data set versus USDT, BTC and ETH
4. Run some more stats .... for 2018 only versus USDT, BTC and ETH

Results

Notes

1. The page I sourced all the data from is www.tokenstats.io
2. Past performance may not be repeated - just because we got great results in the above data sets doesn't mean we'll get good or similar results in the next 9 months of ICO's

Conclusion, Observations and Possible Interpretations

1. My conclusion - for myself only ... I'd have to be a mug not to be punting on ICO's !
2. With an equal bet on each of the 298 ICO's ... your return is 1380x holding USD e.g $100 on each ICO you'd turn $29,800 risked into $138,000 ... or even more dramatically if you started with $3000 with 30 x $100 bets and came out ahead then you'd turn $3000 into $138,000

What's possible?

These return results are with no discernment (selecting the ICO or when to exit) ie these returns are simply based on HODL and today's price and the PUBLIC ICO price. I would expect the returns would be significantly increased by:
a. Gaining access to pre-sales bonuses
b. Careful selection of ICO's (filtering the dross)
c. Good exit strategy ... hopefully exiting during the peaks rather than a random day

2017 vs 2018

1. The full results - ICO's since June 2017 - shows significantly higher returns than ICO's since 1 January 2018 - with a 1380x vs a 182x ... This could be because
   a. The peak we had in December and the overall market being higher now
   b. The 2017 ICO's have had longer to develop since launch
   c. Something else?

USD vs BTC vs ETH

See the tables below. In both cases - 1 June 2017 onwards and 1 Jan 2018 onwards - participating in ICO's significantly out performed holding ETH or BTC - somewhere in the range of 38x to 117x ...

What's next

A friend asked - could we turn $20,000 into $1,000,000 in a year with good risk management .. this peaked my curiosity and I've decided to analyse that as well - this is the topic for my next post. Sneak peek - what I've done so far is looking very optimistic to achieve that ... I'll share a betting strategy and risk management strategy that, based on the above distribution of returns vs USD may well just achieve my friends goals.

In closing

I'm in the process of automating the the above statistics and more .. I'm keen to produce more stats especially focused on optimising exit strategies

I'd love to hear from people - what interpretations or observations from the above data do you have? What data about ICO's would you be interested in seeing?

Cheers

Mike

THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE

1. Information and educational purposes only
2. Do your own research
3. Make your own decisions
4. Educate yourself
5. Be self-responsible
6. Past performance may not be repeated
7. General information - it may not apply to your personal situation