Coinbase IPO

Woke this morning to news of an exciting debut on Wall St. Coinbase is a trading portal for cryptocurrency, mostly bitcoin and ethereum, which I am officially bullish on, how courageous of me. No, I mean, for 'our' portfolios, ones modeled from the trading ethics I'm exploring, I'm rating it a buy. I think that they are currently growing and will continue, with lower volatility than they've been at risk of in the past.

So, what have we learned about IPOs? Bet against the price estimate as the peak and if it does better, be ready to buy in again with whatever you had offered at too low a price. Unfortunately, I do not have solid opportunities from our reserved money, but I have have scraped together $2,900 from other positions and I've put half of it, $1,400 on a 20% discount from the $250 price estimate, and the rest...$225 just...felt...like giving away money. $210 is not significantly different from $200, statistically, so tells us a great deal in the extremely unlikely event that one is picked up and not the other, but otherwise will tell little. I ended by offering $220 prices on another seven shares, and I will be checking for the first price update from the NASDAQ trading floor.

Update 1: Heh. So, good thing I was checking. It did NOT go for $220, but if I'd found another opinion available at the time I first looked, I might have expected that. It was reestimated day-of, which I will have to remember. That is our second checklist item, yes? 'Bid under the estimate before its trading and at or slightly over once its publicly listed' was the first.

Anyhow, it was reestimated at $360, I caught a look at a $396 valuation just by searching the new listing symbol on my trading account page, then had to go figure all of the preceding out with a websearch. Turns out I should have used the 'price' keyword early this morning. I caught up to the price at $414, bid $415 on...seven shares, half as many as had populated my first bids. I had a moment's fear when the price hovered around $414 for about 60 seconds, but then it cruised on past up to $422.

Unfortunately, I just checked it, now, after spending ten minutes writing this up, and it is back down to $400. So we will have to pray and hope. Good Hemes, do shield our efforts and advance our profits.

And keep watching, obv...

Update 2: Heh heh. Good thing, that. I watched. And it turned out that $422 was the absolute peak on the day. It closed at $328.28, which would have been really painful, but I got out at $386 or so. I mean, you first see it at $396 and it falls back to $392 within 30 minutes of your buy, you're willing to give it another ten minutes to turn around. You see it go from $422 to $386 while you're watching it and you get the hell out, I don't care what the stock is.

So. It could have been painful and instead it was a pricey lesson. We can take it.

Cheers folks.