Cryptocurrency - after Bitcoin’s price surge in mid- to late-2016, everyone and their grandmothers know about crypto (seriously, there are memes about it). Since then, however, the crypto market has cooled down a bit.
With the right know-how and some historical price data, you can make quite a bit of money investing in crypto. But how can you obtain the data that you need to make sound investments in this volatile market? And how does a crypto newbie know when the right time to invest is?
I’ll show you how to scrape historical pricing data from CoinMarketCap using ParseHub, as well as show you an easily recognizable pattern that can you use to get started with crypto investing.
Project Set Up
From the main CoinMarketCap page, I am going to Select each coin’s name, and then add a Click command to go into each coin’s page in order to extract historical price data. I then added Select/Click commands to paginate so that I can extract data for every coin listed on this website.
Next, I used some Select/Click commands to navigate to the historical data tab, and then show the last 3 months of data using the dropdown menu.
Now that we have the prices pulled up for the last 3 months, we are going to extract dates, and their open, high, low and close prices from the table so that we can chart them in Excel.
Analysis
Now that we have our data, we can start analyzing it. It is much easier to analyze this data in graphic form, so we are going to use the Open, High, Low, Close graph template that Excel has under the “Waterfall” category. For this example, we are going to graph the pricing data for Noah Coin.
Most price rises in cryptocurrency are unsustainable because people tend to sell off their coins when there is a large jump in price, which lowers the price of the coin. So, when the price of a coin goes up, it just as quickly falls back down to a price that is more stable. A coin that has had one rise in price is bound to have another (unless it fails), so the ideal time to invest in a coin is during a period of steady prices that follows a sharp rise and fall.
You can see one of these patterns in the graphs above. On August 29th, there was a large jump in the price of Noah Coin. The price cooled off during the month of September before shooting up again at the beginning of October. This period of stability in mid-September would have been the ideal time to invest in Noah Coin. You can see another period of stability forming at the tail end of the graph.
Of course, there is so much more to cryptocurrency than prices and when to buy/sell. Most cryptocurrencies are built with a specific function in mind that uses the blockchain as a framework. For example, Noah Coin is an alt-coin being used to support global, social, and economic development. Not all of these functions are going to be useful or are novel, so some cryptocurrencies are bound to crash. You should read up on the currencies that you plan on investing on to see if they can actually succeed in the marketplace.
This post was written using this strategy guide from Trading Heroes as a guideline. I would highly suggest this guide for anyone wanting to get into the cryptocurrency market. You should also check out our Help Center for more helpful tutorials that can help you scrape almost any website!
Disclaimer: This article is not an endorsement of Noah Coin. If you decide to invest in cryptocurrencies, please do your own due diligence before doing so.
