August finally wrapped up with some pretty mixed results for my Cindicator predictions... There were some nice payouts from the invite-only challenges, and a couple of complete bomb-outs with negative scores getting absolutely no rewards.

Crypto Markets

August was shaping up to be a decent finish... with a positive result to bring in a CND reward. Markets were being more predictable (well, for crypto...) as Bitcoin stopped surging at the expense of all the rest of the crypto eco-system, which meant that the altcoin predictions were becoming much less gloomy and settling into a new period of stability.

However, I hadn't counted on the large mass of time bombs from up to a year ago... with predictions about the 3/6/12 month pricing of Bitcoin and Ethereum, Crypto Market Capitalisation and Bitcoin Dominance all dropping large negative bombs. This is my own fault, when I started doing these predictions, I hadn't read the text of these questions properly... and I had thought that they were asking for the predictions for 1 month ahead... and not 3/6/12 months ahead! So, needless to say, the predictions are completely terrible... and I collected the maximum negative point loss for every one of them.... even more disheartening is that they come at the end of the month... which can dump your score in a single evening!

So, no payout for the crypto market this month... I hope to be clear of all these past time bombs soon!

Traditional Markets

Navigating the traditional markets starts to feel like navigating the crypto markets... the volatility of these traditional markets is quite.. well, volatile. The China-US trade war and the uncertainty around Brexit and the EU all make their mark by have large swings from week to week... for nothing more than a Twitter post or badly timed news event.

For the range questions, I've tried to mitigate this by increasing the allowable range... however, this comes at the cost of losing points if it becomes a quiet week or day... also, it can be hard to see which way the volatility will swing a particular metric. Still, it is a bit of damage mitigation... as the most important thing is to retain my greater than 60% super-forecaster status to keep the invite-only challenges.

For the binary and trigger questions.. it is a much more difficult task. I have continued to use the Bollinger Bands to offer some insight in the future behaviour of the underlying stocks... but again, an unlucky event or tweet can really send the whole thing flying out of the range of rational prediction.

Despite these difficulties, I still managed to get a top 150 finish and collect a payout for my efforts in August.

Invite-Only

The Traditional Market invite only challenges remain a strong staple of my predictions now. This are a ranking of 5 different company stocks in a particular market sector with the aim of ranking them with respect to their performance over the coming week. It can be a bit of a tricky one to predict, but I'm using a bit of a hunching combined with the inverse Bollinger Band method to try and rank the various stocks.

In Season 4, this method gave me great success with the payout for finishing in the top 10 (I was even number 1 for quite some time!) being a nice bonus for the month when it arrived at the end of August! However, in Season 5 (with most of the predictions in August, stocks were being thrown around crazily due to Brexit and the America/China trade war... with one week having terrible news and other weeks have optimistic news.. and so the stocks were see-sawing all over the place with little rhyme or reason.... making it pretty difficult to predict. Add to the fact that I was on holiday and had pretty terrible internet access, making it difficult to find times to accurately check the trading graphs. Unfortunately, this all resulted in a negative score as prediction after prediction bombed and I was seeing steady results coming in red resulting in lost points. Thankfully, the invite-only challenges don't affect the two main prediction history and results and are completely self-contained.

For some reason, the EPS Season 4 is still active... I have a positive balance in points for this, but it almost two months since the predictions closed for this... I guess there are untriggered predictions still outstanding... which is pretty surprising given the volatility of the current global market! I forget when it will close, as there is a cut-off date when the season finishes regardless of any outstanding unmet predictions... but it would be nice to have it off the sheet (and perhaps collect a payout!).

Entertainment

There has been the introduction of an "entertainment" prediction for some upcoming movies/series.... and to see what sort of critical reception they will receive on critic boards. It's an interesting move which might be just for analyst entertainment... or may be the harbinger of extended prediction markets?! Either way, it is a good thing for Cindicator... more people are interested in predicting the outcome of movies and stuff like that rather than financial markets... and so it would open up a new and interesting use case for Cindicator!

For my first prediction on the Entertainment section... well, at least I got some points... I suck at this... but I did learn that IMDb rates out of 10... and not the 5 that I thought it did!

Going Forward for September

Crypto markets seem to be reaching some sort of stability period after a year of surging Bitcoin and falling alts. This has definitely made the predictions a little bit easier... I'm no longer seeing the swathes of red predictions coming in daily as alts get slaughtered... which means that I looking to recover my super-forecaster status... something that took a year and a half to huild up and was lost in a short few months! So, aiming on getting more green... points are less of a priority, but the percentage of correct predictions is what needs to grow. I'm at 58%, and I need to creep back to 60% to have access to the lucrative crypto invite only challenges.

On the whole, there is a whole heap of negative sentiment around the global economy (trade war and Brexit)... but for some reason the stock market seems to be blithely unaware about the whole thing and continues to recover from each shock and grow again. I'm not certain that this will continue... one of these days, the knock is going to be the last straw and I think that things will fall over... in preparation, I have tended to make more downside predictions, more likelihood of downside triggers and ranges tending to be weighted a bit more towards the lower end.

The invite only challenges continue to be an interesting side event... a chance for a large payout for decent performance, with no cost for bombing out. It is a nice way to reward the super-forecasters... I'm still well inside the threshold for the traditional markets, but I now need to fight tooth and nail to get my crypto badge back! Slowly... slowly....

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