Coin News

Bitcoin bull Tom Lee, co-founder of Fundstrat Global Advisors, is sticking to his forecast of a bitcoin price in the $20,000 range by year’s end, he told CNBC’s “Fast Money” on Friday. Lee said he is “trying to change the calendar year” with respect to his prediction, but remains bullish about it. Hedge Funds Play

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Bitcoin price today consolidated sideways within a strict range, never indicating a breakout optimism. At the beginning of the Asian trading session, the BTC/USD has slumped by 3.5 percent only to settle the mid-session inside an oversold area. The pair attempted a weak bullish recovery as the day matured, and rose as much as 2.8

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Anthony Pompliano, founder and partner, Morgan Creek Digital Assets has predicted that bitcoin could fall as low as $3,000 in a complete turnaround from one of the market’s most bullish positions. In a post, Pompliano stated that his January prediction of a $50,000 year-end bitcoin price was wide of the mark by as much as … Continued

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Over the past two days, the narrative on bitcoin exchange traded funds in the United States has felt like a rollercoaster.

•  If it seems like there are a lot of companies built on or around Salesforce, it's with good reason.
• The $106 billion cloud software company has made 275 investments around the world in companies that support its wider ecosystem.
• But Salesforce Ventures isn't like traditional venture capital firms, which want to make their investors money.
• The team has one priority: to make strategic investments that grow the number of ways customers can use Salesforce.

If it seems like there are a lot of applications and tools that integrate with or live on Salesforce, it's no accident. The company's secret weapon is Salesforce Ventures, a corporate investment arm with $1.02 billion in equity in other companies — but only ones that work with the Salesforce platform.

Salesforce Ventures is one of the most active firms in corporate venture capital, third behind GV (Google) and Intel Capital in 2017, according to CB Insights.

The firm makes an average of one deal a week between new and return investments, and while its investments are by all accounts a success financially, making bank isn't actually one of its goals. 

"Our financial returns have been excellent but that's not the priority for the program," John Somorjai, executive vice president of corporate development, told Business Insider. 

"The goal for the program is being this strategic investor that's helping to deliver these great solutions for our customers. The good news though is because we can help these companies along the way, they tend to do quite well," he said. 

Unlike its peers in venture capital, Salesforce Ventures doesn't take board seats and rarely leads a financing round. This keeps the team in good graces with big name investors, particularly Bessemer Venture Partners and Accel, so they frequently gets deals on the recommendation of other firms. 

Last quarter, the company saw gains of $211 million on its strategic investments, which is equal to 7% of its over all revenues for the quarter, according to a company filing.

In total, Salesforce Ventures has made 275 investments. Twelve of its portfolio companies have gone public and more than 50 of them have been acquired. 

In fact, 11 have been acquired by Salesforce itself — the most recent being CloudCraze, a business-to-business commerce platform built on top of Salesforce, which got acquired in March. 

Salesforce Ventures grows the greater ecosystem

Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff came up with the idea in 2009, when the Great Recession made it difficult for small cloud startups to get off the ground.

"He kept hearing those stories of our partners having trouble raising money," said Somorjai, who joined the company in 2005 to start its corporate development team. "It was so critically important for us to build this ecosystem around Salesforce, so he told me to start this program up and I was thrilled to do it."

Since then, Salesforce Ventures has grown to 12 dedicated people across offices in San Francisco, Chicago, London and Tokyo. It has six active funds, including a $100 million fund dedicated to Canadian startups, and a $100 million fund for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

[Read about Salesforce's biggest public investments]

While global in nature, Salesforce Ventures is strict about where its money goes. Somorjai said his team sticks to variations on a theme: those that integrate with Salesforce; those that build on top of Salesforce; and those that implement Salesforce solutions. 

"It's really important that as we grow, we have these capabilities that are built all around Salesforce on a global basis," Somorjai said.

Many of its best deals come on the recommendation of customers, and from sales and product executives who witness the interesting ways that people use the Salesforce platform. 

One of Salesforce Venture's most recent investments is in a consulting firm called Virsys12, which was founded by CEO Tammy Hawes in 2011 to help healthcare providers use Salesforce.  The startup sell its own apps and helps companies use Salesforce more efficiently. 

Ahead of its investment, Salesforce gave Virsys12 an award for its work with 180 Health Partners, an organization the helps pregnant women with opiod dependency, using — you guessed it — the Salesforce platform. 

Investments are a family affair

Salesforce Ventures' investment thesis isn't the only thing that makes it unique. 

It's common at venture capital firms for the entire team to watch a pitch and decide together which startups get offers. At Salesforce Ventures, the whole company pitches in. 

"We will have people involved from product, from sales, from finance as well as my team," Somorjai said, "We all will evaluate the investment together."

While the dedicated Salesforce Ventures team is responsible for evaluating the terms of a deal, investments also require an executive sponsor from inside who will say that they like a startup and think the investment is important, Somorjai said. 

This is vital, he said, because Salesforce's selling point as an investor is that it has all of the wisdom and resources of a $106 billion software success story. 

"We help companies by giving them access to our customer base, access to our leadership and also a lot of critical advice," Somorjai said.

The average check is $2 million, Somorjai said, though it's been known to do much larger deals, such as its $100 million investment in Dropbox on the eve of its IPO.

And while turning a profit is secondary to Salesforce Ventures's goal of building out its community, Somorjai thinks he'll be seeing both happen for some time.

"I don't think we'll stop seeing good returns," he said. "Because we're quite disciplined in the types of companies we invest in, and we're picking the companies where we can help and where we can add value."

SEE ALSO: IBM's CMO commands a team of 5,500 marketing experts — here’s why she made them behave like computer programmers

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NOW WATCH: An early bitcoin investor explains what most people get wrong about the cryptocurrency

Tokens have recorded massive 20 to 40 percent gains on August 26 while major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum maintained their low price range. Bitcoin has remained relatively stable in the $6,700 region in the past 24 hours as Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple, EOS, and Stellar all recorded slight losses in the range of 0.5

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Tokens have recorded massive 20 to 40 percent gains on August 26 while major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum maintained their low price range. Bitcoin has remained relatively stable in the $6,700 region in the past 24 hours as Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Ripple, EOS, and Stellar all recorded slight losses in the range of 0.5

The post ICON, and WanChain Record Massive Gains Despite Low Bitcoin Volumes appeared first on CCN

• Government officials have argued for a strong dollar for decades.
• President Donald Trump has gone against that precedent repeatedly.
• Some analysts think he could use exchange rates instead of tariffs to push US trade competitiveness. 

For decades in the US, government officials on both sides of the aisle have generally made a point to back a strong dollar in public — especially those in the Oval Office. 

President Donald Trump, on the other hand, has said the dollar is "getting too strong" and repeatedly lashed out at other countries for using monetary accommodation to weaken their currencies. 

Twice this past week, he criticized the Federal Reserve, which is meant to be independent from political influence, for raising interest rates. (Higher interest rates are attractive to foreign investors, so they generally lead to a stronger currency.) 

The Fed has raised interest rates five times since Trump took office, with two of those hikes coming under the leadership of Jerome Powell — his Fed chairman pick. It is expected to hike rates two more times this year, according to Bloomberg's World Interest Rate Probability data.

"As we have seen in recent weeks, the President has ramped up verbal jawboning over a strong dollar and higher US rates as the currency has strengthened," ING strategists Viraj Patel and Chris Turner wrote in a note this week, adding that the strength of the greenback appears to be "at the upper bound of the White House's tolerance level." The dollar has jumped more than 8% since April, right around when the Trump administration announced plans to hit other countries with tariffs.

Trump is far from the first politician to favor lower interest rates. Easy money is politically popular for a number of reasons. But for a president in a trade war months before midterms, analysts say it appears to be increasingly about defending trade competitiveness.

If the administration shifted from tariffs to the use of exchange rates, Nomura chief economist Richard Koo pointed out that it would essentially allow simultaneous price adjustments for "all imported products." A weaker dollar can stimulate exports because it makes US products cheaper abroad. 

That could be an attractive means of boosting exports, analysts say, as a trade war triggers political backlash in key constituencies for the president and his party. Tariffs have raised prices for American companies and lowered access to foreign markets, potentially setting the stage for dampened economic growth. 

A trade war can also present logistical issues, especially for an administration plagued by disorganization and legal chaos. A recent Associated Press analysis found the Trump White House has had record turnover. 

"A protectionist policy that must be individually tailored to each product category requires large numbers of administrative staff, and a period must be established during which companies can apply for exemptions," Koo said. "Exchange rate-based adjustments, on the other hand, entail no such costs.

"In that sense, the more problematic administrative delays become and the more industry opposition mounts, the greater the likelihood that President Trump will replace tariffs with exchange rates as his main tool for addressing US trade imbalances."

SEE ALSO: The chances of a Trump impeachment are climbing — here's how JPMorgan says you can protect your investments

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NOW WATCH: An early bitcoin investor explains what most people get wrong about the cryptocurrency

• The unemployment picture on Main Street looks downright rosy right now, but that could be signaling future market instability and a possible stock-market meltdown.
• Jim Paulsen, the chief investment officer at Leuthold Group, notes that sharp stock-market sell-offs are usually met with widespread Wall Street layoffs.
• In an ironic twist of fate, signs of strength on Main Street could be foreshadowing a reckoning on Wall Street.

When the housing bubble burst back in the mid-2000s, plunging the US into a deep recession, many affected workers on Main Street looked scornfully upon their Wall Street counterparts.

While the normal folk lost their jobs and their houses, Wall Streeters got off relatively easy. Sure, maybe some of them lost their jobs as well — but the general feeling was that the big banks set the middle class up to fail, then were let off the hook with mass bailouts.

Well, the middle class may soon have its revenge, albeit in indirect fashion, according to recent commentary from Minneapolis-based Leuthold Group.

That's because as Main Street workers enjoy their lowest unemployment rate in 18 years, the fact that it's so low could be portending a very dangerous period ahead for markets, according to Leuthold's chief investment strategist, Jim Paulsen.

And when the market melts down, Wall Street trims the fat.

At first glance, it may seem counterintuitive that a strong Main Street labor market is a signal of future market wreckage. But, as Paulsen points out, it's when positive conditions get stretched too far that markets are most vulnerable to a shock — largely because everyone is overly confident and complacent.

He also notes that low unemployment is generally characteristic of upward pressure on resource costs, high business confidence, higher inflation, rising yields, and restrictive policies. None of those things are particularly conducive to prolonged market strength.

"Low unemployment highlights an economic character which simply has not historically been hospitable for financial markets," Paulsen wrote in a recent note. "Investors should appreciate the 'rare air' they are currently breathing."

If you still don't believe Paulsen, consider the chart below, which plots the S&P 500 alongside the US unemployment rate. As you can see, periods when unemployment has been below 4% (signified by the red dots) have usually preceded stock market declines throughout history.

You'll note that the last time unemployment slid below 4% was in 2000 — the height of the tech bubble, and perhaps the most glaring example of both investor and consumer overexuberance in US history.

This dynamic also played out to a degree around the financial crisis of 2008. While unemployment didn't break the 4% threshold, it came mighty close, and we all know what happened next.

"During the post-war era, the stock market has never done well when the unemployment rate is at or below 4%," Paulsen said. "Yes, 'never' is a strong word, and while some of the red dots in this chart do go up, they have never risen in a persistently successful fashion."

And as the mid-2000s financial crisis showed, the health of markets has a direct effect on Wall Street employment. By the end of 2008, in the meltdown's immediate aftermath, banks had cut more than 200,000 jobs.

Wall Street has always been more directly intertwined with financial markets than Main Street. That's because deals — and fees — immediately grind to a halt when everyone gets nervous. Financing becomes nearly impossible to obtain, and capital markets grind to a standstill.

Not to mention the huge hits traders usually take during times of turmoil. In addition to the outright losses associated with big declines, the type of overconfidence that usually precipitates a major market event usually keeps traders from adequately hedging.

It's during times like these that Wall Street firms look to streamline operations by cutting costs — which inevitably means laying off employees.

"While admiring how great the underlying stock market fundamentals are today, Wall Street employees may also want to locate the closest government unemployment office," Paulsen said.

SEE ALSO: The legendary investor who predicted the past 2 bubbles breaks down how the 9-year bull market will end

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NOW WATCH: An early bitcoin investor explains what most people get wrong about the cryptocurrency

Alessandro Santos, a Brazilian architect, engineer, and self-described bitcoin aficionado, has recently inaugurated a cryptocurrency-themed hostel in Paraty, a city located about 260 kilometers (161.5 miles) away from São Paulo, Brazil. The hostel, appropriately named Hostel Bitcoin, launched on August 16, and was immediately booked for its inauguration day. According to local news outlet Portal

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• First-party Nintendo titles give the Japanese video-game maker a key advantage over its global competitors such as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
• Switch demand is going to be heavily skewed towards the October to December holiday season.
• Morgan Stanley argued that Switch sales will lift Nintendo's share price from a longer cycle.
• Watch Nintendo trade in real-time here.

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NOW WATCH: An early bitcoin investor explains what most people get wrong about the cryptocurrency

Last week, I was able to interview Zillaqa CEO, Xinshu Dong. As of the writing of this article, Zilliqa (ZIL) is sitting at #32 on CoinMarketCap with a market capitalization of just over $270 million. The currency peaked at over $1.6 billion in May of 2017. The coin’s meteoric rise occurred as bitcoin was hovering around the

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Randy Brito is the head of Bitcoin Venezuela, a non-profit organization dedicated to educate and promote Bitcoin in Venezuela. He is also spearheading the Locha project, which he describes as “an effort to push the needed developments and research for achieving the hyperbitcoinization in Venezuela.”  Brito also sees a use case for bitcoin in countries

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