Fin Tech Project 1

A price performance analysis for various crypto alt coins.

Data - Pulled from Coinbase Pro's API using the CBPRO library https://pypi.org/project/cbpro/

Motivation

Shared interest in Crypto assets and their performance over time.
We sought to understand how closely alternative crypto assets (Alt Coins) performed compared to Bitcoin.
We also wanted to understand which alt coins performed as well, better or worse than Bitcoin historically.
Finally, we wanted to analyze a crypto portfolio to a comparable portfolio made up of the S&P500 stocks.

Questions we wanted to answer:

Where can we find reliable historical data on crypto assets dating back at least two years?
Which alt coins performed best on a daily and cumulative basis?
Which alt coin prices are most closely correlated to Bitcoin price?
Which portfolio performed the best over the past 2 years? (slightly less due to data cleaning)
- Portfolio 1 - 50% BTC, 50% even distribution of the altcoins mentioned above.
- Portfolio 2 – 50% BTC, 25% ETH, 25% even distribution of remaining alt coins.
- Portfolio 3 – Totally even distribution of alt coins and BTC. 1/13th per coin.
- Portfolio 4 – Weighted Distribution based on the market cap percentage (of the total market cap of crypto) of each alt as of
  09-18-2019. – This data was taken from https://www.coingecko.com/en
- Portfolio 5 – No BTC or ETH – Just an even distribution of other alt coins.
- Portfolio 6 – S&P 500 Only, no crypto. Data extracted from https://finance.yahoo.com/

Where can we find reliable historical data on crypto assets dating back at least two years?

We chose Coinbase due to the name recognition and probably the oldest data set in the United States.
We also wanted to use a platform that has a readily available and quick to learn API. While this API may not be ideal, the documentation was clear enough, and got the job done.

Which alt coins performed best on a daily and cumulative basis?

As seen from the plot below, Chainlink (LINK) outperformed all crypto alt coins we analyzed. A close second was Ether (ETH). Warning!! You may need to Alter your GitHub Appearance Settings to Default light to see the text for these images.
As it is not super clear which line was which alt coin on the above line plot, we decided to make a visualization that made it more clear which one was the leader.This pie chart shows the overall performance in % gains over the past 2 years:

Which alt coin prices are most closely correlated to Bitcoin price?

Unsurprisingly, all of the Alt Coins were fairly correlated to Bitcoin. As you can see here, most alt coins had a fairly strong .50-.80 positive correlation, with the exception of REPUSD, which only had a .40 positive correlation.
Here is a different way to look at the correlation values:

Which portfolio performed the best over the past 2 years?

In order to determine this we took the .cumprod() of daily returns.
As you can see Portfolio 2 performed the best at about a 529% gain, over 2 Years! This is likely due the higher weighting of ETH as that was #2 in the overall cumulative gains.
Portfolio 6 clearly was the laggard of the pack, at about 46% gains, which was the S&P 500.