May 2020 Newsletter

Hi Ember Crew,

We hope everyone is safe and sound given the circumstances in the US. These are unprecedented, challenging times. Our aim is that what we are building brings much-needed changes in centralized institutions. See below for updates:

📱 Company & Product Updates:

    We’re currently in the final testing phase for our smart contract technology which will enable a new set of powerful features (auto-rebalancing & lower mining fees).
    We’re testing out a way to earn interest on the Quant fund when the allocation is in a stablecoin. Stay tuned!
    We’re hiring - Are you an Operations wizard who loves to make customers happy or a Full-stack Engineer interested in building technology that will power the future of finance?

🔥Milestones:

    May 2020 was our biggest month in company history in terms of transaction volume.

📊 Fund Performance

https://i.imgur.com/OPWNDYj.png

    Market - Bitcoin broke its upward trend established in April on May 11th with a sudden reversal. For the latter part of the month, bitcoin was mostly range-bound struggling to establish a meaningful trend. -Eric

    S-Tier - The S-tier fund continues to focus heavily on altcoins with calculated hedged positions in USDT. Despite market sentiments on altcoins varying with volatility, the S-tier fund rivaled Bitcoin’s performance. Currently, Bitcoin is trapped between the massive resistance levels of $11,000 and $7,000, while altcoins have shown promising growth towards the end of May. We are concerned with Bitcoin's scalability barrier as it proves to be an impediment to the ecosystem’s expansion. As such we’re taking a defensive position for now. Detailed Fact Sheet linked: https://emberfund.s3.amazonaws.com/Marius+Fund+Deck.pdf. -Marius

    Quant - The strategy picked up a buy signal on April 23rd, at $7,163 BTC/USD and stayed invested until May 11th where the strategy exited BTC at $8,728. The trade PNL (profit and loss) on this hold was +21.85% while the holding period was slightly longer than normal at 18 days. The next trade for the algorithm resulted in a 1.8% loss. Buy signal received on 5/14 at $9,297 with an exit signal on 5/21 at $9,130. The holding period for that trade was close to 8 days. The algorithm then entered the market again on May 29th at $9,493. Performance for the calendar month of May was -1.5% vs BTC Buy and Hold +9.5%. While the performance for the strategy underperformed BTC in May, this performance is consistent with historical norms. The model continues to perform as expected. This model was designed to act as a more defensive allocation than a buy and hold strategy. It will almost always disappoint in range-bound markets as it tries to differentiate bullish trends from bearish trends from “no trends”. I think most investors are already naturally bullish on crypto, it is best to think of this strategy as a complement to their “long-only" exposures. Detailed Fact Sheet linked: https://emberfund.s3.amazonaws.com/Fact+Card+-+Strategic+Beta+BTC.pdf. -Eric

    Indexes - Our indexes continue to track the performance of the general market. Ethereum, with roughly an 18-25% allocation in all of our indexes rallied toward the end of the month. We continue to be bullish on ETH given the highly anticipated ETH 2.0 and the increased adoption and use of dozens of products in the DeFi space. As of this writing, we are fast approaching the $1 billion mark for the total value locked in DeFi networks. -Alex