I pulled the trigger yesterday and bought one of the worst cryptocurrencies of all time.
Everybody seems to hate this name. They hate the founder. They hate the whole thing. It’s down more than 90% from its peak in 2021.
And I bought a bunch of it anyway.
Why?
Because I think I can sell it at higher prices. Much higher.
This is the kind of environment where I want to be long Cardano, ADAUSD on most exchanges.
To be clear, this is not a Primary Trend portfolio type of position. That strategy is built to own the best assets. Leaders. Strength. Momentum.
This isn’t any of those things.
This is more of a Divergence portfolio trade. The type where everyone already gave up, positioning is offside, and you’re betting on a move in the opposite direction.
But there’s no clean TradFi (that’s short for “traditional finance”) vehicle to express that view, so I went straight to the source and bought it on-chain like everybody else.
No alert went out. This doesn’t fall into any official bucket.
But I had to tell someone.
Even Fidelity Said “No”
It’s been a while since I touched Cardano. For good reason.
This thing has been a disaster. One of the worst charts in crypto for years.
I had some cash sitting in a Fidelity account and figured maybe by now they would let me buy it directly. Save me the hassle.
Typed in the ticker. It showed up. I thought we were good.
Nope.
A message popped up saying, “Fidelity Digital Assets does not support trading for this cryptocurrency.”
Perfect.
Now I want to buy even more.
But Why Tho?
Even my closest friends think I’m nuts.
I asked the guy who I’ve always turned to for all things crypto Louis Sykes earlier this week, “ADA down here? YOLO?”
He said, “Absolutely not.
Then I told my buddy Steve I was thinking about buying some. He laughed. But he didn’t push back.
He said he wouldn’t do it, but he understood exactly why I would.
And that’s the key.
His point was this is the type of environment where these trades can work.
This is where you go digging through the junk drawer and pull out something everyone forgot about. Something broken. Something hated.
Not because it’s a great asset.
Because it’s not.
Because it’s so washed out that it doesn’t need much to move a lot.
Look at the chart:
The gray line marks where it stopped going down back in 2022 and 2023.
We’re right back there again. Same level. Same opportunity.
Either it bounces here around $0.23, or it doesn’t bounce at all.
That’s the trade.
When downside is defined and upside is open, I get interested, particularly in a market like this one.
The Bigger Picture
I’m not out here just buying garbage and hoping for the best. There’s a process behind this move.
Software stocks stopped going down. That matters. Some even made new lows and snapped right back above them. Failed breakdowns.
Semiconductors and hardware have already been leading. Small-cap tech, mid-cap tech, equal-weighted tech, all making new highs.
Now software is trying to catch up.
To me, crypto lives in that same world. It behaves like software. These are risk assets. Sentiment-driven and Momentum-driven.
If software is bottoming and turning, it makes sense that some of the most hated corners of crypto might start to participate.
That’s where Cardano lives.
The risk management is clean. If these lows fail, I’m out. No questions.
But if we’re above $0.23, I’m in. And I’m in with size.
Because the upside, if it works, is not 10% or 20%. It’s multiples.
And one more thing.
Just because it trades at twenty-something cents doesn’t make it a “penny stock.” That’s just how crypto prices things. It’s the culture.
This is still a roughly $10 billion asset. It would be considered a large-cap stock by most definitions.
It might be the punchline of a lot of jokes in many crypto circles.
But in the right environment, even the biggest jokes can go a lot higher.
And when they do, that is when I plan to sell it to them.
Stay sharp,
JC Parets, CMT
Founder, TrendLabs