The public portfolio started on 1 December 2018. This was the height of the bear market and “Bitcoin is dead” was being chanted in all corners of the finance world. Gold bugs especially were having a field day laughing at the crypto industry and all the tokens that had fallen some 90%.

However, as you and I know, money is made in bear markets. Of course there were many worthless projects in the crypto space, but that only made the legitimate projects even more valuable, if you knew how to find them.

I wrote in April 2019 that the two highest probability coins to have in your portfolio were Bitcoin and Litecoin, which have both performed well.

I also wrote in March 2019 that Binance Coin was a dark horse and was going to surprise people. Today, BNB is the third largest coin by market cap and has rocketed from $30 NZD to $750 NZD per coin.

Finally, I talked about some passive income coins that looked promising, of which Stellar and Vechain were both added to the public portfolio. Both have also performed strongly and doubled in value several times over since we bought them.

Here’s a quick snapshot of the public portfolio as it stands today:

Overall we are up 552% after around 26 months.

Our best performer is Vechain, closely followed by BNB. Our largest value holding is Bitcoin, and we’re pretty well diversified across other major coins such as Ethereum, Litecoin, Stellar and EOS.

Probably the one thing that has surprised me is how much EOS is lagging the rest of the market. EOS made a huge amount of money during its ICO and should have ample resources to develop a world-class project. It could be a bust, or maybe they’re moving slowly, time will tell.

What’s the plan from here? As the portfolio is supposed to be a long term project, I don’t forsee us selling much or at all. I believe all these coins will provide us the opportunity to make passive income, through either interest deposits or staking (or both). For now it’s hodl, until the next bear market. We still have some cash to invest!

Let’s see where we are in a year.