On August 31, I released an interview with representatives of the MEREXP company, in which I tried to figure out how to make money trading cryptocurrencies using metrics based not only on mathematical wizardry, but also on economic theory. Even after the interview, I was left with a feeling of some misunderstanding as to how theory translates into practice, so we decided to continue studying the proposed product.
To start, I registered on the website merexp.com. Here, I must say, the process seemed quite insecure to me: the password was simply sent by email, and afterwards, I couldn’t find any way to change it in the personal account. However, as long as the service only provides paid subscriptions to certain indicators rather than taking money under management, it’s not that critical.
In the future, the company representatives promise a large set of analytical tools, but so far only Swallow is on sale. This is an AI that swallows news related to Bitcoin (and separately to other crypto) and spits out an assessment: how many positive and how many negative mentions accumulated during the day. Then the information is displayed as a simple needle indicator, which shows what the news background is right now, in the moment.
For those who want to understand the dynamics of the news background, graphs are provided, which look roughly like this:
A monthly subscription for access to the indicator is 17 dollars. They provided it to me for free for the first month so that I could play around with it and write this review. For those who register via my referral link https://merexp.com/?ref=ankap_tyan, the subscription price will be 12 dollars per month (this is for monthly payments; there is an additional bulk discount for quarterly or annual payments). Payment is made through a third-party service, cryptocloud.plus, in USDT or USDC, depending on your choice.
A natural question arises: how meaningful is it to buy access to a single indicator. Even the service authors are sure that it’s not very meaningful, which is why weekly reviews are included as a bonus, in which analysis is performed using an additional set of metrics (they are not ready to sell these metrics yet).
So, I have the ability for instant monitoring of the news background and detailed reviews, which, however, are released only once a week. I set a task for myself: to find out if this is enough to feel confident while trading. From the sale of DOGS tokens received in an airdrop, I had 0.00123149 BTC (about 65 dollars) lying in my exchange account; these were used for trial trading using the proposed analytical toolkit, as these were definitely funds I wouldn’t mind losing.
On September 4, MEREXP released another review: “Bitcoin: A Time of Uncertainty and Hidden Opportunities.” The content of the review boiled down to the following theses: seller pressure is growing in the market, while buyer activity remains stably low. The news background is consistently positive, so any drawdowns that occur are shallow, and after some time the exchange rate returns to its level. But as soon as the news background becomes negative, that’s it, expect a crash. Thus, an ideal situation was created for testing the news indicator specifically, since the price was supposed to depend primarily on it.
At that time, on September 4, I opened a position—a long with 5x leverage—at a price of 58071, using a quarter of my deposit. The rate almost immediately began to crawl down. Daily monitoring of the news background showed that it remained positive, sometimes shifting toward the yellow zone. Taking what was written in the review on faith, I interpreted this as a signal that “the drawdown is temporary, I can average down, we will go up soon”. And I averaged down. This is roughly what my trading looks like on a chart with daily candles:
The position was closed on September 10 with a slight profit. On September 11, it was opened again at a lower rate and closed finally on September 13 at a price of 58454, as I had to start drafting this report. Taking into account all the averaging, leverage, and trading commissions, the net profit was 0.00009351 BTC (about 5 dollars), which in relative terms means 7.6% over 9 days. Considering that I deliberately chose an unfavorable moment to enter, I consider the experiment successful. Of course, if I had honestly bought the indicator via my own referral link for 12 dollars, the purchase would not have paid off in such a short time. However, if a real deposit of at least a thousand had been involved instead of a toy deposit, the indicator would have paid for itself handsomely, with enough left over for some wine.
It is clear that a single success does not guarantee further profits. However, you know, sitting in a serious drawdown is quite an ordeal for the nerves, when you have to guess: is the rate ready to collapse, and I must urgently close at a loss to avoid liquidation—or is it ready to bounce back, and I should buy more at the bottom. The news background indicator is exactly what answers this question. Without access to it, I would not risk trading with leverage, and you can’t make a serious profit with spot trading.
One last piece of advice for the MEREXP company. Try to set up a test deposit as well and illustrate your weekly reviews by demonstrating how you trade in light of your own analytics. Then, firstly, potential buyers of Swallow or other future indicators will gradually develop a clearer idea of how to use such tools. And secondly, by the time you resolve the legal issues and are ready to accept money for trust management, you will have a proven success story. You don’t need to show trading in real-time so that people don’t copy trades for free, but reporting on a weekly basis looks like a quite viable marketing move.
On 17.05.2024, I posted a review of the telegram channel MEREXP analytics. Unlike many other channels analyzing the cryptocurrency market, here, first of all, crypto was viewed simply as another type of currency, and the analysis focused primarily on the impact of global liquidity on it—and secondly, homemade metrics based on economic theory were used, which, paradoxically, is not that easy to implement within the framework of exchange analysis. In short, I liked the channel. Therefore, when the company running this channel approached me with an offer for an interview, I didn’t need to think long, especially since I still had questions from my review that hadn’t been answered. And here is what we came up with:
Ancap-chan: During the review of the Merexp channel, it remained unclear to me what your business consists of. You call yourselves an investment fund, but from the published materials, it is completely unclear how and in what you invest. The reader sees only analytics but cannot understand how skillfully you use them yourselves, and therefore cannot determine whether they should entrust their money to you. Perhaps you are still in the process of formation, and the business model will become obvious later. So, exactly how does Merexp plan to make money?
MEREXP Analytics: Yes, we spoke earlier about the fund’s investment product, but at this stage, we are not ready to accept assets for management from mass clients. This is absolutely unrelated to our trading strategies and analytics. The strategies and analytics have proven themselves well; this is easily verified by analyzing our early analytics on historical data. Moreover, we are constantly improving and supplementing our analytics and trading strategies with new proprietary developments, such as the Swallow AI. Our current refusal of the fund’s investment product is more related to the legal side; we fully understand the weight of responsibility for client funds, and we are not ready to manage assets without the certainty that client funds are safe and everything is legally properly formatted. But we are resolving this issue, and as soon as we settle the legal points, our clients will see investment products in the fund’s tariffs. As for earnings, the plan to sell investment products hasn’t gone anywhere, but in addition, we also plan to sell analytics and other products, such as Swallow AI, because the fund’s capabilities do not end with investments alone. And we would also like to demonstrate the quality of our models and our approach before offering investment products.
Ancap-chan: So, you are working in several directions at once: achieving the ability to accept investments, preparing your analytics for sale, and continuing to improve them. I would like to discuss where this analytics comes from. Typical analytics look like this: here is a price chart, and here is our guesswork based on the chart about where it will go next. Or: such-and-such an event is expected, it should affect the exchange rate in such-and-such a way. Your metrics, however, look completely different: here is the balance of supply and demand, here is the ratio of bulls to bears, and so on. Where do you obtain the primary data? Is it available in the public domain? Even if it is available somewhere, you aren’t looking at all exchanges, only some of them. Doesn’t this introduce distortions?
MEREXP Analytics: Correct observation; our metrics indeed differ, and there are strong reasons for this. But first, let’s analyze conventional analytics, where a price chart is built and, as you rightly noted, a kind of “guesswork” occurs regarding where the price will go. This is indeed guesswork, because such analytics are based on historical data—on what has already happened. Everything else is just assumptions and attempts to match the current situation with similar ones in the past. But even this is incorrect, because there are never absolutely identical situations; there is always a factor that can change the outcome, even if conditions seem identical at first glance. We approach the market from a different side. We analyze fundamental supply and demand data with a deep dive. It is precisely this data that forms the current market state. Of course, we also use classic metrics such as the order book, the tape, and the chart, but we need them more to understand how the market reacted to an event we already knew about in advance. We obtain this data thanks to the calculations of our analytical model. As for the primary data sources, of course, some of them are public sources. However, another part consists of our complex calculations, the result of the work of our AI and analysts. Yes, we indeed do not cover all exchanges yet, but this is sufficient, as it is well known where the main volumes of the cryptocurrency market are concentrated. Therefore, saying that a limited number of sources distorts the data would be incorrect. It would be more correct to say that it creates some margin of error, but it is so small that it does not affect the quality of our analysis.
Ancap-chan: And separately, I want to know the details regarding the use of AI. It is known that AI is used for trading robots. For example, charts are fed into it, and it invents incomprehensible heuristics on how it could have made money in the past, assuming that the same heuristic will work in the future. In other words, it’s advanced technical analysis. You don’t use technical analysis. So what application have you found for AI in cryptocurrency market analytics?
MEREXP Analytics: In fact, we have many directions for the application of AI in cryptocurrency market analytics, and many of them are at the development stage. For example, take our supply and demand indices. After forming a suitable mathematical model, we can use neural networks for forecasting based on these indices, creating a new AI-based product. It is important to note that not all AI models rely on training on historical data with the assumption that the future will repeat the past. We consider such approaches too primitive, especially for our tasks. Our goal is to develop analytical models that will work not only yesterday and today, but also tomorrow, regardless of market conditions and external factors. First, we create correct analytical models, then we train AI based on them, and only then do we get the final product. A good example of such a product is our Swallow AI, which regularly analyzes news and evaluates the current news sentiment in the cryptocurrency market. We decided to offer this product to our clients so they could better understand how the news background affects the market. Today, news is one of the most important factors shaping market movements, but far from everyone can extract, process, and correctly interpret the necessary data for their trading strategy from a huge flow of information. That is why we offer Swallow AI as an ideal solution for instant news analysis, which saves a lot of time and minimizes errors.
Ancap-chan: Do you use only trusted news sources for analysis, or can the AI also draw data from one-off third-party sources? Your analytics have so far paid a lot of attention to fiat macroeconomic data. Will the AI also analyze fiat macroeconomic news, drawing conclusions about how it will reflect on the world of cryptocurrencies, or should this analysis be done for you by cryptocurrency news agencies?
MEREXP Analytics: Yes, we use a huge number of carefully selected sources that cannot provide false information, thereby reducing the inaccuracy of our AI’s readings. As for AI analysis of other markets (fiat, stock, commodity, etc.), it is important to understand here that all markets are closely interconnected. As an example of such a connection, we clearly see the link between the price of Bitcoin and global liquidity, and this is very easy to track in our analytical reports. Therefore, we will certainly track these interconnections. Moreover, work in this direction is already underway. However, it should be noted that this is a very complex and comprehensive system consisting of many AI-based models. Each of its parts must be developed separately and integrated into a larger general model. For comparison, you can take our Swallow AI, which analyzes news. Such a model is just a small gear in a complex system. This process is not fast, but in our opinion, this approach is the most correct, since for analytical tools, quality is the most important thing, as we are talking about risks.
Ancap-chan: Out of all cryptocurrencies, your reviews only concern the Bitcoin to Dollar exchange rate. However, many trade in other currency pairs, and therefore could expect analytics for them as well, especially when it comes to “altcoin/bitcoin” pairs. Do your analytical methods work in this area? Do you plan to expand your analytics in this direction?
MEREXP Analytics: As of today, we can say with confidence that a significant share of the cryptocurrency market is concentrated precisely in Bitcoin, and this in itself is an indicator that Bitcoin data has a huge influence on the market as a whole. That is why we started with the analysis of Bitcoin and its most liquid pairs, such as BTC/USD and BTC/USDT. Certainly, we plan to expand our analytics and track other markets, including pairs with altcoins. Our software infrastructure is already ready to work with this data. First and foremost, we plan to add analytics for “altcoin/stablecoin” pairs. Regarding the effectiveness of our methods, we analyze fundamental market laws, such as supply and demand. These are analytical models that will work in any market, since any movement is a consequence of changes in supply and demand. Thus, our model is applicable not only to Bitcoin but also to other cryptocurrencies, as well as to various financial markets in general, since the law of supply and demand works everywhere.
Ancap-chan: This turns out to be interesting. First, the exchange analyst Carl Menger in the 19th century derived the subjective theory of value, understanding that the theories prevailing before that were completely inapplicable to exchange trading. From this grew the entire Austrian school of economics. Then humanity, to explain economic phenomena, became fascinated by mathematical models that had less and less connection to the real world. And now, at a new level of mathematical capabilities, you are once again bringing the very law of supply and demand into exchange analysis, which was originally formulated based on exchange analysis. Typical spiral development.
So, you stand on a strong theoretical foundation, but you are crafting practical tools literally on the fly. A good discount for early buyers suggests itself, since they are effectively destined for the role of testers of a new product that will continue to be seriously refined. What is the overall intended pricing policy for your service? Will you sell each tool separately or the whole set as one package?
MEREXP Analytics: To an outside observer, it may seem that we are “crafting tools on the fly,” but in reality, before offering a product to clients, we conduct long and painstaking work. Each tool undergoes thorough verification and testing in various market conditions. For example, Swallow was developed as early as autumn 2023, and the supply and demand indices in the spring of that same year. We pay huge attention to the quality of our products and adhere to strict, multi-level verification criteria before market release. It is important to emphasize that our clients by no means act as testers. On the contrary, we discard many tools at different stages of development if they do not meet our high standards. This is part of a normal workflow that allows us to be confident that our products actually work and meet the stated quality. Regarding pricing policy, we understand the needs of the market and know that users want to try a product first before deciding to buy. Therefore, we are ready to offer promotions, free trial periods, demo versions, and we are also preparing training materials for our products. Our tariff plans will include both separate products and package offers so that each client can choose the optimal set of tools and not overpay for those they do not plan to use.
Ancap-chan: Well, I think we’ve discussed enough for an introductory acquaintance. I’ll allow myself to briefly summarize:
In perspective, Merexp should become an investment fund, meaning taking money from clients and multiplying it. However, before that, you have a number of legal difficulties to resolve.
In order to make successful investments, you have created and continue to refine your own analytical toolkit. At the current stage, you intend to earn by providing these tools to clients, with which they can successfully invest themselves.
At the core of these tools lie those basic tenets of economic theory that have not yet been fully applied to exchange analysis, which makes the product unique, at least for the moment. This is primarily the analysis of supply and demand, as well as the automatic analysis of the news background using AI.
You plan to offer clients a flexible grid of tariffs depending on which tools they actually plan to use.
I think it’s also worth giving readers key links: to your website and other platforms through which you plan to publish your materials. Are there any other important points that we missed in the previous conversation and that should be mentioned?
MEREXP Analytics: Perhaps it’s worth adding that we have literally just launched our website. And Swallow AI, which we mentioned repeatedly today, will be launched by us on September 1st. And those who manage to purchase a subscription to Swallow by September 15th will pay 5 dollars for the first month of subscription instead of 15.
Ancap-chan: It’s a kind tradition to offer gifts for those who read until the end. Thank you for the detailed answers. I will definitely find time to browse your website and try this very AI—and then I will certainly report back.
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