Can I beat Bitcoin?

In 2020 I created an investing experiment to see if I can create an “all weather portfolio” that would beat S&P 500 index and Warrent Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

It ended quite well after 7 months:

As you can see from results - I was able to outperform S&P 500 index and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway ($BRK.B) mainly because of my decision to invest 40% in Bitcoin.

Investing in Bitcoin

Did I get lucky? Maybe, but if you check what returns can be produced by using a DCA strategy and investing in Bitcoin, there are not many things that can beat it.

For example, if someone had started investing in Bitcoin at one of worst possible times: 16.12.2017 when cost of 1 Bitcoin was $19 500 (and it was less than $1 000 at beginning of 2017), and used DCA approach - and invested $1000 in BTC each month up to today, results would be following:

It almost looks too good to be true:

In short - while in the first investing experiment I tried to beat S&P 500 and $BRK.B, the real challenge could be to outperform Bitcoin. Is it possible at all in longer term?

Can I beat Bitcoin?

I decided to create a new experiment and try to outperform Bitcoin. I am probably setting myself up for a failure, but still interested to try a new challenge and learn more about altcoin space.

So I've decided to invest $1 000 per week in following way:

• $350 in Bitcoin

• $150 in Ethereum

• $500 in some other crypto currency

So after a while 50% of portfolio will consist of BTC and ETH - so called Blue Chip cryptocurrencies, and 50% of portfolio will consist of many so called “shitcoins”. If I don't run out of money and continue this experiment till end of year, I should have a portfolio of 50 different altcoins.

The goal is to find out over longer time period:

1. Can ETH outperform BTC? I am skeptical, but there are lot of ETH fans talking about possible flippening and people are paying lot of money to use ETH network, so it must be valuable.

2. Can I somehow pick 50 altcoins from ~10 000 in the market that outperform Bitcoin?

3. Even if I pick few high-performing altcoins, how does that translate to overall results of a larger crypto portfolio? Does diversification make any sense?

What about risks?

The biggest risk is picking up lot of altcoins that end up like this:

My hope is that even if most of altcoins perform very bad, then BTC and ETH should work as a hedge overall.

Of course, there is also a risk - that investing in crypto ends up as a bad idea in general, and for some reason (heavy regulation, stablecoins like Tether going to 0, etc.) all portfolio value underperforms S&P 500, $BRK.B or just holding cash, but I am not too worried about this and think that the longer I continue the experiment, the less likely that this risk will materialize.

At least in case of cash, it seems like even the most developed countries will do everything possible to print it like there is no tomorrow, and you can expect your USD or EUR to lose purchasing power over time just like most of crypto altcoins:

pierrepoilievre @PierrePoilievre

What is money?

Portfolio: Week 1

I've made my first $1 000 investment today, and the altcoin of the week is $KP3R, you can read more about it here.

To track results of this experiment, I started using Coingecko portfolio function:

You can also use this link coingecko.com/en/portfolios/public/kristapsmors to view the same info, but without PNL or holding amounts.

Key takeaways

1. It is very difficult to beat the average market return, but beating Bitcoin - almost impossible

2. The reasonable way to invest in Bitcoin: use DCA, but remember about volatility: it can drop in price -50% per day, or even -80% in a year.

3. Most altcoins just like fiat currencies tend to become worthless over time.

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P.S. Join “High-risk investments“ Telegram group for an informal discussion.