Fitbit is trading at all-time new lows after reporting their second quarter earnings earlier this week. Their earnings (really their losses were higher than expected) fell short of expectations and they cut back on their full year revenue guidance. It appears Fitbit a lot of their hope into the Versa Lite smartwatch.
CFO Ron Kisling quantified how badly the Versa Lite underperformed, saying, “What we’re seeing generally across the course of the year in our guidance was Versa Lite over $150 million below what our initial expectations were.”
While the Versa Lite didn’t sell well, the original Versa exceeded expectations, Park said. The company is reevaluating its pricing and promotion strategy for future hardware launches, and it’s accelerating hardware product development.
Fitbit was the pioneer in fitness trackers and was doing well, that until the smartwatches were also able to track fitness activities. But just like Snapchat has to contend with Facebook and just like Blue Apron has to contend with Amazon, Fitbit has to contend with the Apple Watch.
Five months ago, I talked about how the chart was suggestion price was heading lower to the weekly demand at $4.50
Needless to say the stock has now breached the weekly demand zone after earnings.
Unless, Fitbit finds another niche for its products, just like Garmin International moved away from just a GPS screen in your car, the chart suggests Fitbit is headed to $1, with a final stop of getting delisted from Nasdaq.
This post is my personal opinion. I’m not a financial advisor, this isn’t financial advise. Do your own research before making investment decisions.
Sometimes Trump has perfect timing. The DOW rose nearly 300 points yesterday, only to close down nearly 300 points. Speaking of down, trump’s twit said it’s time to short the Retail Sector.
On the news many of the major retailers, from Kohl’s to Nordstrom to Macy’s fell right after his twit. When Trump said the U.S. would impose 10% tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese goods beginning Sept. 1st, it automatically signaled an additional tax on the Retail Sector. That because the proposed list of goods includes consumer and technology goods, like the iPhone, toys, footwear and clothing.
The SPDR® S&P® Retail ETF, XRT seeks to provide exposure the retail segment of the S&P TMI, which comprises the following sub-industries: Apparel Retail, Automotive Retail, Computer & Electronic Retail, Department Stores, Drug Retail, Food Retailers, General Merchandise Stores, Hypermarkets & Super Centers, Internet & Direct Marketing Retail, and Specialty Stores.
XRT was showing a double top – bearish technical reversal pattern, a up trendline break, and a head and shoulder pattern – market trend is in the process of reversing, in this case bearish trend.
The chart suggest price has further downside. I’m personally looking for price to break the $37.50 level and eventually making its way to the weekly demand at $33.
This post is my personal opinion. I’m not a financial advisor, this isn’t financial advise. Do your own research before making investment decisions.
What started out as a slow week, has been made up in the last two days thanks to all the volatility. Volatility is a necessary evil, if one is to make money. I say a necessary evil because when prices move, it provides an opportunity to make money and make money quickly. However, because trading is a zero sum game, that money that was made quickly was due to someone losing money quickly.
Fed Powell cut central bank cut rates on yesterday for the first time in ten years, due to continued uncertainty and a slowdown in the global markets. Fed Powell told the Markets not to necessary expect more cuts in the future. The DOW fell a little over 500 points.
Fed Powell tried to clear things up at the press conference,
“Let me be clear: What I said was it’s not the beginning of a long series of rate cuts,” Powell said. “I didn’t say it’s just one or anything like that. When you think about rate-cutting cycles, they go on for a long time and the committee’s not seeing that. Not seeing us in that place. You would do that if you saw real economic weakness and you thought that the federal funds rate needed to be cut a lot. That’s not what we’re seeing.”
but the damage was already done. I trade the futures market and missed the opportunity to ride on the backs of the Smart Money when price pulled back into a daily demand zone.
The Markets took off at the opening bell, the next thing I know the DOW was up almost 300 points. Then Trump did, what Trump does,
And the DOW reversed ending the day down almost 300 points, a 500 point reversal and busting through the daily demand zone in the process.
So what’s the lesson of this post…win, lose or draw, trade your plan, plan your trade.
This post is my personal opinion. I’m not a financial advisor, this isn’t financial advise. Do your own research before making investment decisions.
In Elliott Wave terms, BHPCoin began a wave one advance on March 2. The red wave one (blue sub-waves i-ii-iii-iv-v) finished on June 27, and the red wave two (blue sub-waves a-b-c) correction ended on July 24. If this wave count is correct, BHPCoin should be heading next towards the June 27 peak in the red wave three.
BHP（Blockchain of Hash Power）is a public chain which is a decentralized digital asset interaction network based on bitcoin hash power credit. You can read their latest bi-weekly update below.
During a question-and-answer session on Oct. 3rd, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said the central bank was a long way from adopting a neutral rate of growth. At the time the Markets were grinding higher from a very volatile 1st quarter where the US Equity Markets had not one, but two 10% declines. The Markets didn’t like what Powell said and showed him by tanking.
Then in December of 2018, Powell said the Fed’s program to reduce the bond holdings on its balance sheet was on “autopilot.” Powell later went on and raised short-term rates another one-quarter percent. The Markets didn’t like what Powell said and showed him by tanking again.
At this point, the Markets had Fed Powell right where it wanted him. The Markets become the puppeteer and Fed Powell became the puppet.
In early January, during a round table with Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke, Powell said, there is no preset path for raising rates or adjusting the balance sheet. The Markets like what he had to say, eventually climbing 10%, aiding in one of the greatest V-reversals in US equity market history.
Yesterday, Fed Powell cut rates. However, the Markets had the rate cut priced in. But Fed Powell tried to cut the strings off from the puppeteer (the Markets) saying to the Markets not to expect more cuts, just because I cut rates this time. Well, the Markets pulled on the string by dropping almost 2%.
So what’s the lesson of this post, the relationship between the puppeteer is a special two way relationship in which the puppeteer gives life to the puppet by being man-handled when necessary.
This post is my personal opinion. I’m not a financial advisor, this isn’t financial advise. Do your own research before making investment decisions.
Fed Powell cut central bank cut rates on yesterday for the first time in ten years, due to continued uncertainty and a slowdown in the global markets. However, this wasn’t anything surprising as everyone and my Grandma expected the cut. However, it was his language that did surprise the Markets. He pretty much said, I’m throwing the markets a bone, but don’t necessary expect more bones.
This was a dovish tone in terms of more rate cuts and so the US dollar moved higher on the news as worldwide investors moved money into the currency (the US dollar) offering the greatest return. Although the US Feds cut rates, everyone around the world is cutting as well, but a faster pace.
So where is the US dollar heading next, lets go to the charts?
Bigger picture, the US dollar is moving towards the weekly demand at $99. This is key as there is room for the US dollar another $1 higher before potentially reversing. Which means Gold, Oil, Wheat, Soybeans, the Euro dollar, etc. should move lower as these assets are inversely correlated to the US dollar.
Based on the daily chart, potential turning points are between $99.40 and $100.40 as highlighted by the daily supply zones marked in white.
This post is my personal opinion. I’m not a financial advisor, this isn’t financial advise. Do your own research before making investment decisions.
An emerging market is a country that doesn’t have all the characters of a developed market. Examples of developed markets would be the US, Australia, England, Canada, etc. Years ago, when it came to emerging markets, it was all about the big four, BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
Since then, India, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand and several other countries are now considered emerging markets. Countries wanting to join the club, known as frontier markets include include Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, Philippines, Vietnam, among others. As these frontier markets develop, they could perhaps offer investors with handsome returns.
The VanEck Vectors® Vietnam ETF (VNM®) seeks to replicate the performance of the MVIS® Vietnam Index (MVVNMTR®), which includes securities of publicly traded companies that are incorporated in Vietnam or that are incorporated outside of Vietnam but have at least 50% of their revenues/related assets in Vietnam.
“Recently, Vietnam has attracted global investor interest as a potential beneficiary of the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China, but investors have also taken notice of the country’s attractive long-term fundamental characteristics,” said VanEck in a recent note.
The equity market there is small as highlighted by VNM’s roster of just 27 stocks. However, the nation is growing rapidly and its demographics are more favorable than larger Asian economies such as China and Japan.
“Vietnam is taking gradual steps to liberalize its markets, while seeking to avoid the negative impacts of capital flight,” according to VanEck. “Hot money is a real issue for frontier and emerging market economies, and the negative repercussions, including volatility, may have long lasting effects on the local economy.
Now I see why they call it frontier markets, as these markets are still underdeveloped like the chart below. At some point, VNM will breakout…maybe by this time Vietnam joins the emerging market club.
This post is my personal opinion. I’m not a financial advisor, this isn’t financial advise. Do your own research before making investment decisions.
I wrote about the new KuCoin staking plan on Tuesday. This post explained it: “Don’t miss this one!”
True to my word:
I fully intend to lock up my KCS for this period, and I will do so as soon as I can.
I was waiting on KuCoin, ready to lock my KCS as soon as the clock hit 1 August (UTC +8), which was at 16:00 (UTC) on 31 July.
Of course, there were problems…
The problems:
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t surprised. Secretly, I had been expecting some sort of issue, even though I have great faith in the KuCoin team. Blockchain tech is just still all so new; because of this, platforms often forget to take something into account and fail under heavy loads or unusual conditions. This is exactly what happened to KuCoin.
The second that the staking contract opened, it failed. I hopped onto the various social media channels and watched the ensuing chaos for the first few minutes. To their credit, KuCoin were quick to respond. I saw multiple KuCoin admins respond on the telegram channel within minutes.
It turns out that a large block of simultaneous API calls (to lock KCS tokens) had triggered a safety system in KuCoin’s software. From a geek point of view, this is interesting: I have been wondering what safety systems KuCoin has in place – for obvious reasons these are not openly published. I guess we just found one! The safety system shut off the locking contract and had to be reset and disabled for these particular KCS withdrawals. The delay took about 20 minutes to rectify, after which KuCoin announced that they would retry launching the staking procedure 20 minutes later.
KuCoin did a good job of keeping us informed, even replying to my personal thread on Twitter where I and another investor were discussing the issue:
At 00:40 (UTC +8) the contract was reopened – and it worked.
To make up for the problem, KuCoin made the decision to double the maximum total amount of tokens that could be locked on Day 1. The daily cutoff for locking is 500 000 KCS, with a limit of 10 000 KCS per person. KuCoin raised the total to 1 000 000 KCS for Day 1 – which is about the best that they could do at short notice without unfairly disadvantaging those who had been waiting. TAKE NOTE: the 1 000 000 KCS limit was reached well before the 10 minute mark! In fact it took only 6 minutes and 6 seconds before the limit was reached – despite it having been doubled.
What to do and what to expect:
There were not a lot of explanatory posts about the KCS lockup process before it happened. I know of only two that KuCoin released themselves. Because of this, I had a few unanswered questions at lockup time – things I was unsure of. I decided to write this post to try to help you with any questions that you may have about the process, and to guide you through those bits of it which are not immediately obvious.
Firstly – the address to use for the lockup is exactly what they say in their blog post: LOCKKCS. “LOCKKCS” is what you type into the “Wallet Address” field (as seen in the image below).
Note: If you type this in before the contract is open, you will see an error message “Contain invalid or sensitive information”. Don’t worry, this is normal. Just wait for the contract to activate at 16:00 UTC. If you try to lockup once the contract is already full (500 000 tokens have already been staked for the day) then you will see the same error message.
Trying to transact when the contract is closed will look something like this:
From www.kucoin.com ; modified by Bit Brain
Once the contract is open, refresh the page and the error message should be gone. Remember that you must lock a minimum of 200 KCS at a time. Also remember that KuCoin has a lot of checks and balances when you withdraw (depending on your account security settings). For me this meant the usual ritual of keying in my KuCoin trading code, my 2FA code and a code which is emailed to me. Don’t forget about all that, it adds at least 30 seconds onto your precious time, so be prepared before the contract goes live: have your apps and webpages open and get ready to type/click fast and accurately. In reality, you probably have at least 5 minutes in which to to this – a time which should grow longer each day.
If you manage to beat the rush and lock successfully, then you will see that you have an “in progress” transaction in the “Withdrawal history” section at the bottom of the page.
Additional Information:
The “Remark” section caught me a little off guard. With less than a minute to go before unlocking, somebody on Telegram asked about using referral codes for the lockup (as was briefly mentioned in a KuCoin blog post). With literally seconds before the lockup went live, an admin replied that you put the referral codes in the remarks field. Having no other referral code at hand, and not knowing whether it was mandatory or not, and with the admin already swamped with questions, I hurriedly put my own code in the field, just to ensure that all fields were complete and that my transaction wouldn’t get automatically declined and miss the lockup.
No, I’m pretty sure that you can’t self-refer and that I won’t score anything extra by doing this!
I honestly do not know for sure if a referral code is mandatory, I highly doubt that it is. If you want to be a nice person, please use my referral code for locking. I will get extra lockup rewards if you do (which I could really use!). You type it into the “Remark” block. My referral code is E39MoQ
After the problems of the first round, APIs will no longer be able to conduct lockups. Aside from causing problems with the contract, according to https://twitter.com/KuCoinUpdates:
To ensure a fair and equitable KCS lockup program for all of our users, KuCoin will prohibit the use of API to withdraw KCS to the LOCKKCS lockup address. This has taken effect immediately and will continue through the end of the lockup period.
It’s a good decision – it’s fair and it was suggested by a large number of users on Telegram when the first lockup stalled.
Be aware that after you have locked your tokens, you will no longer see them in your KuCoin account. Don’t panic, they will be back (automatically) in three months time – with interest! Also, there is no Lockup Dashboard yet, the only indication of your lockup at this stage is your withdrawal history. Similarly, do not panic if you click on the Etherscan link to your lockup transaction and you see something funny. After lockup your withdrawal page should look something like this:
From www.kucoin.com ; modified by Bit Brain
If you click “view transaction” (as highlighted above) you will see a message such as this one:
From https://etherscan.io
That is perfectly normal. The LOCKKCS address is not a regular Ethereum address, it is an internal KuCoin construct. The transaction does not go onto the Ethereum blockchain and will not appear there, so Etherscan is supposed to return an error message. This was confirmed by KuCoin technical staff and the Etherscan screenshot above is from my own lockup transaction.
Note that despite the double allowance, only 286 people managed to lock in round one, I therefore consider myself to be extremely lucky! However, if you missed out, then don’t worry! The rate you can get by locking today is only very slightly less, you’ll still score about a 10% ROI within only three months by locking your tokens! The average amount of KCS locked per person yesterday was 3521 – which I consider to be quite a lot (certainly way more than I own!) With amounts like that being deposited, don’t expect the contract to stay open for long for at least the first few days of locking. I tell you again: be ready and waiting on the dot of 16:00 UTC!
Conclusion:
Despite the teething issues, I want to say well done to KuCoin. I think they did a damn good job of handling the API issue in a rapid, fair and responsible manner – about the best they could have done under the circumstances. I don’t blame them for the issue either, it would have been nice if it had been picked up before the time and prevented, but that’s very easy for me to say after the fact, and hindsight is always 20/20. Just as I think Binance handled their hack very well, it’s good to see the intelligent and levelled-headed folk at KuCoin able to do the same under pressure. Such incidents are potential PR disasters if not handled correctly. I don’t see how KuCoin could have handled it any better, their Tweet on my own Twitter wall being a prime example of the lengths they went to to inform and to ease tensions.
Well done (again) KuCoin!
In other news: I have recently heard that KuCoin are busy with a “dust” feature such as Binance has (great idea in the first place – well done Binance!) whereby small balances of other tokens held on KuCoin will be able to get “dusted” into KuCoin Shares. It should be released with their next platform update, I look forward to this!
Also, for those of you amateur videographers out there, KuCoin is running a video creation competition with 50 KCS up for grabs. Check their Twitter feed for the link.
Out of interest: I decided to shift my small Tron holdings from Binance to KuCoin two days ago. I’m pleased to report that the fully automatic staking contract is working and that I have already earned my first daily “soft staking” rewards.
Now if KuCoin could kindly please stop releasing awesome features all the time, then perhaps I could go a week without blogging about them! That would make a nice change!
Yours in crypto Bit Brain
Featured image from https://twitter.com/KuCoinUpdates
“The secret to success: find out where people are going and get there first”
~ Mark Twain
“Crypto does not require institutional investment to succeed; institutions require crypto investments to remain successful”
Advanced Micro Devices reported their second quarter earnings yesterday, but they couldn’t live up to the expectations. Revenue was down 13% year over year, net income fell over 40% and AMD said that it expects its full-year results won’t be as good as the previous forecast. On the news the stock fell double digits.
I remember writing a post about AMD almost one year ago and I remember that $33 level being a monthly supply zone which eventually push price to the sub $20 level. It’s still so vivid because I remember I was wrong on the call and thought price was going higher.
NOTE: I should of known better, as very few things trump a monthly zone, but at the time, all I saw was AMD’s price continuing to higher after years of hibernation.
The CEO, Lisa Su said the weaker than expected forecast was due to weakness in gaming consoles as both Microsoft Corporation and Sony Corp announced they were coming out with new game consoles. Needless to say the stock fell double digits yesterday. However, I’m not surprised because the way that monthly supply got me almost a year ago, got many traders/investors who went long yesterday or didn’t take some profits off the table.
On the daily chart, price formed a “M” pattern which is a reversal pattern. So the potential price action over the coming days/weeks might be to the downside.
This post is my personal opinion. I’m not a financial advisor, this isn’t financial advise. Do your own research before making investment decisions.
In Elliott Wave terms, PlayChip began a wave one advance on January 30. The red wave one (blue sub-waves i-ii-iii-iv-v) finished on January 30, and the red wave two (blue sub-waves a-b-c) correction ended on July 10. If this wave count is correct, PlayChip should be heading next towards the January 30 peak in the red wave three.
