Evening update

Today was supposed to be my self-designated RDO, or regular day off from work, something I’m experimenting right now as a way to reclaim some of my time so that I can work on personal projects. I did wind up doing a fair amount of reactive work for my day job, but got a surprising amount done still.

Of course I was focused on money: activities in the equities markets, crypto, and trying to make sense of what the hell is going on in DeFi right now, which is just a bit mind boggling.

I did finally say goodbye to my Basecamp account. As much as I like the product, the monthly fee of a hundred dollars is just too much for me when I don’t have any active projects going on. I think I can do most of what I need there in Notion, anyways.

Of course I rewarded myself by starting a TradingView trial. After god knows how many years I’ve been using that, and I’ll never have to see a stinking nag screen or ad again. Hallelujah.

I caught some nice profits off of Materialize ($MTLS) earlier this week after placing a trailing stop on them after they hit a nine on the TD sequential. It got pulled up with a spike on Wednesday I pocketed a nice one hundred percent gain. I’ve had a value averaging protocol in place on this one for more than three months now, and reset the position to start accumulating again while I watch and see if the TD generates a buy signal.

Materialize ($MTLS). Value average accumulation period in white box.

I’m not seeing any good entries in the crypto markets right now. Cardano (ADA) looks like it might be setting up for a buy zone. It seems to be at the support formed by the June buy setup. I would probably size my position here to stop just under the 200-day MA.

Cardano ($ADA) chart

Tezos ($XTZ) seems to be a bit of a mess, but might be worth a look. It looks like it takes 1000 XTZ to stake, which is a bit much for me to accumulate, so I’ll keep this one on the back burner at the moment.

Tezos ($XTZ chart)

The topics of staking came up in conversation with an associate today. My IDEX holdings are maintaining for right now, and I’m eagerly awaiting the release of IDEX 2.0 in the coming weeks. I don’t know whether that will be a “sell the news” type of event or not, but I’m hoping I’ll have enough of a stake to operate a Tier 2 node when the specs are released. Still no word on what that’s going to look like. In the meantime, it looks like I’ll be getting double the staking rewards every two weeks.

Perhaps the biggest decision right now is whether to accumulate more Ethereum in advance of the planned change to poof of stake. 32 ETH seems to be the magic number needed to create my own money-printing machine. That’s going to require a substantial investment, but will it be worth it? I’m guessing yes.

I was also exploring the possibility of running a ChainLink node. Interestingly, it doesn’t actually require staking LINK, although ETH is needed. The hardware requirements are pretty steep though, requiring 16GB of RAM. Running one in AWS isn’t going to be cheap, but if LINK continues to perform, it may be worth it also.

And speaking of LINK, half of my original ICO proceeds are now officially locked up in a Yearn Vault. I may have been overzealous, cause I still don’t understand fully how it works or is paid out. So far it has cost me a bit of gas to purchase Aave’s aLINK and deposit it in the Yearn vault, not to mention the cost I’ll incur to pull it out. For now I can just wait and see what happens, and watch to see if any more buying opportunities arise. The price has really pulled so far ahead of the moving average that I would expect it to consolidate or pull back for a while. Given how much ChainLink has been up to, though, there’s really no telling how far up this is going to go. I just can’t see selling any of this right now.

And I still won’t be buying anything yet, until I get my trade plan program up and running. I haven’t looked at it in a year, and who knows what I was doing last time I worked on it. I’m almost scared. I’ve got a few more things I want to do with my BEAM converter before I change gears to work on it, so hopefully we’ll have several more weeks of opportunity before things start to take off.