Solrise’s 3rd Trading Competition | July 4th — September 25th

The world is a wasteland. Humans have severely over-leveraged themselves and a brutal liquidation cascade resulted in an extinction level event wiping out humanity.

But there is a glimmer of hope. A new Dawn is rising…

🦧🎉 Solrise is pleased to announce the 3rd iteration of the DAWN trading competition — DAWN of the Apes, which will take place between July 4th and September 25th 2022. 🦧🎉

DAWN of the Apes consists of a quarterly leaderboard, weekly leaderboard, a 4-week tournament (King of the Jungle) and a monthly reward program with a cumulative prize pool of 50,000 USDC, 300,000+ SLRS (up to 3 million SLRS), and a Degen Ape NFT. Eligibility for the competition is determined by locking $1,000 of your manager share and manually joining. Winners are decided by their % return on investment during the competition.

All prizes are distributed after a manual check, as quickly as possible, no later than 30 days after winning. There are no lock-ups or vesting periods. For a full rundown of the rules and eligibility details, please refer to the Solrise Gitbook or reach out in the Solrise Discord (admins will never DM you first).

Tune in this Friday at 1200 EDT / 1600 UTC to hear Solrise’s CEO and our resident Llama conduct an AMA about this upcoming competition. All you need to do is access it from Solrise’s page on Twitter’s mobile app.

4 Ways to Earn Prizes

1. Quarterly Leaderboard 🟠

Quarterly Leaderboards will continually offer managers incentives to earn high returns for their investors. The top 10 funds with the highest return on investment at the end of the 12-week period qualify for the USDC prizes.

2. Weekly Leaderboard 🟡

Managers that joined the Quarterly Leaderboard also participate in the Weekly Leaderboard which awards USDC to the top 3 funds with the highest return on investment in that week, every week.

3. King of the Jungle 🟢

16 funds qualify for the King of the Jungle tournament. Qualifiers are the top 10 funds from the Quarterly Leaderboard at the 8-week quarterly leaderboard mark (a snapshot will be taken at 8 weeks) and 6 wild cards chosen by Solrise and the community (trading volume, $ profit and an active blog will be important factors). USDC prizes are awarded to the top 3 managers, and a Degen Ape NFT for the King.

4. Monthly Rewards 🔵

Along with the leaderboards and King of the Jungle, Solrise is introducing monthly rewards for high quality managers who can now earn a premium on the profits from their fund. The more investors they have and the more profit they earn, the more SLRS they are rewarded with.

Managers who joined the competition and end a month with a minimum of a $100 fund profit will receive SLRS rewards. 1 SLRS reward per $1 fund profit (up to 2 SLRS per $1 fund profit with higher locked manager share). Read more information here.

High Quality Managers

Solrise Fund Managers are the foundation of Solrise. High quality managers attract more investors and more investors attract more high quality managers.

It’s not a chicken or the egg problem, it’s a flywheel.

Mango Perps & Jupiter Swaps

Solrise Fund Managers can profit in any market conditions trading on on-chain perp markets (with up to 20x leverage) via Mango Markets or swapping on-chain with the best prices, lowest fees and lowest slippage via Jupiter’s DEX Aggregator.

Checkout the Solrise Gitbook for guides on how to do both.

Overview

Savvy Investors

Managers have the power but investors have the optionality. Solrise provides qualitative and quantitative analysis tools for investors to make informed investment decisions as to which Solrise fund fits their risk profile.

These tools are powered by blockchain enabled transparency which prevents any manager from hiding their trading activity or their fund’s previous performance history. For a full list, check out the Analysis Tools page of the Solrise Gitbook.

Along with essentially zero transaction fees and the ability to self custody one’s own funds, Solrise combines the following 3 features to give Investors the greatest chances of success:

Solrise will continue integrating high quality protocols on Solana and providing Managers with the best tools to trade successfully. This won’t only improve the Manager experience while keeping Investors more informed but it will ultimately make the investment process more efficient.

Join DAWN of the Apes

Solrise will be regularly offering competitions going forward which will give Managers and Investors opportunities to build their on-chain reputations and fund sizes.

All of the rewards from DAWN of the Apes are for Fund Managers but there are future plans to incentivize investors in a similar fashion so keep those eyes peeled. We want to give a few managers a chance to prove themselves before opening the floodgates for investors.

If you want a piece of that $50,000 prize pool, a powerful Degen Ape (floor price ~60 SOL), and SLRS token rewards, go ahead and create a fund on Solrise, ape in and start trading. 😤🦧

🌅 DAWN of the Apes was originally published in Solrise Finance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Solrise and the Solflare Academy🎓 is proud to announce the publication of its inaugural crypto course Crypto Fundamentals. This is the first of many courses to be released through Solflare’s Knowledge Base and will serve as the cornerstone content for all those looking to start their journey in the crypto and blockchain world.

Click here to begin the course.

Crypto Fundamentals will be going far and wide but not too deep on any one topic. In this present age of infinite information, having the ability to ingest the minimum effective dose is a valuable skill and the information presented in this course is meant to be no more than that.

Problems with Crypto Education

Blockchains networks are as ambitious as they are misunderstood. They enable systems to exist as permission-less, decentralized, and more open entities than ever before. When Bitcoin went live in 2009, it was a watershed moment. It was the culmination of decades of research that inspired an entire industry to exist at the cutting edge of technology, cryptography, finance, gaming, art, publishing, self sovereignty, digital transparency, and more.

Outside of the crypto and blockchain industry, it’s easy to be misled about the issues that blockchains are addressing and causing. This is due to the fact that the underlying technology is still relatively nascent, exceptionally complex, brings together multiple professional fields, and is constantly changing.

There are, however, aspects of the industry that are fundamental to one’s understanding of how blockchains can shape the future. This course is an attempt in categorizing and elucidating these fundamentals in order to help readers understand the vast spectrum of what’s happening in crypto. The content is primarily written but the hyperlinks and embedded links are definitely worth your while.

Below is the syllabus:

• Chapter 1: Blockchain Foundations
• Chapter 2: Consensus Methods
• Chapter 3: Self-Custody Part 1
• Chapter 4: Self-Custody Part 2
• Chapter 5: Permissionless Systems
• Chapter 6: DeFi
• Chapter 7: NFTs & DAOs
• Conclusion & Further Reading

Don’t get it twisted

To avoid confusion, it’s best to read about what’s happening from both primary (white papers, Gitbooks, source code, interviews with founders) and secondary sources [this course, high quality newsletters from full time crypto aficionados who aren’t just pumping their own bags (Venture Capital Funds), journalism from reputable sources within the industry, etc.] before forming an opinion on the topic.

There are a number of books and thousands of articles on cryptocurrency that offer both varying perspectives and levels of validity. The topics involved are complicated and require thorough research. To research thoroughly, investments of time are required. As this time passes, more innovations are taking place which may effectively make what was being researched obsolete.

The internet is saturated with obsolete, misleading, or non-factual information about crypto so be wary.

The Rabbit Hole & Iceberg Analogy

Crypto is a rabbit hole and this course is the tip of the iceberg but it’s more than enough for you to understand the important aspects of what’s happening and how it all works.

This course is the first of many for the Knowledge Base. The Knowledge Base is not just a few dozen articles and guides but rather its a growing compendium of the information you need to understand how to utilize blockchain technology and succeed in this digital age.

Further integrations and partnerships are going to have a large impact on the Knowledge Base’s trajectory and it is definitely something to watch out for. 👀

Learning is Great, but…

To fully understand the context and functionality of crypto, you need to make transactions on-chain with a non-custodial wallet.

If you haven’t already, go ahead and set up a Solflare wallet and see what it’s like to perform permissionless swaps, on-chain perp trading, and liquid staking.

Crypto Fundamentals was originally published in Solrise Finance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Transacting on blockchains can open the doors to unprecedented opportunities. Unfortunately, the technology has lacked the same foundational infrastructure that most of us have become accustomed to with traditional internet companies — until now.

Solflare just launched a world class notification system on Solana🎉

This article dives into the significance and impact of Solflare’s notification protocol as its implementation has wide ranging benefits for Solana’s on-chain ecosystem. Is your on-chain leveraged yield farm about to get liquidated? Did someone just put a stink bid on your NFT? Are you eligible for an airdrop?

With Solflare notifications, you’ll find out instantly.

Today’s Agenda

• Blockchain Limitations
• Why Solana?
• Protocol Notifications
• Impact: Market Efficiency
• Conclusion

Blockchain Limitations

When someone sends you a text or a Venmo, you expect to receive a notification for that. Centralized systems can do this very easily because they are using other established 3rd party systems to do everything from settling transactions to obtaining marketing analytics, but applications built on blockchains don’t have this same luxury.

Blockchains only have a few jobs but each of them are critically important. Public blockchains need to be able to facilitate permissionless, censorship resistant, and secure transactions. If they do a good enough job at that, then applications can be built on top of them that can virtually do anything. Beyond that core functionality, individual protocols need to be implemented to satisfy even the most basic needs of an ever-changing financial and technological ecosystem.

One of these needs is notifications.

Why Solana?

Think of a blockchain as an operating system like Apple iOS or Android. Certain types of blockchains are better at hosting certain types of applications. In the same way that Android is more customizable than Apple, Solana is more efficient and scalable than its competitors.

So what is Solana so good at?

• Security ✅
• Speed ✅
• DeFi Infrastructure ✅
• NFT Infrastructure ✅
• (Extremely ) Low fees ✅
• Active User Base ✅

With the implementation of Solflare’s notification system, you can add customizable protocol notifications to that list ✅.

Protocol Notifications

Solflare’s notification system is built to accommodate individual wallets using DeFi, NFT, and DAO protocols across Solana. They’re customizable and can be toggled on and off directly within the mobile (iOS, Android), desktop and extension apps.

These are examples of what you can expect to get notifications from

• On-chain Trade confirmations.
• NFT
• Spot Assets (SOL/USD)
• Derivatives
• Perpetual Futures
• Synthetic Assets
• Options
• You’re Eligible for an airdrop.
• You’ve won an auction for an NFT.
• Your NFT was sold on a marketplace.
• Your borrow position is getting close to being liquidated meaning you might want to add some more collateral.

And much more.

Protocol Notifications are a logical next step in advancing blockchain infrastructure. There is a serious need for alert systems.

A few weeks ago, $540 million was stolen (by North Korea’s Lazarus Group) from the Ronin blockchain. No one noticed for five days. Even though these funds were promptly replaced (just like the $300 million stolen from the Wormhole hack a few months earlier), there is obviously a lack of critical infrastructure and alert systems.

Solflare’s protocol notification system is a giant step in the right direction.

Impact: Market Efficiency

The impact of blockchain notifications is that crypto markets will become more efficient. Asset prices will more accurately reflect their value because market participants will be acting on more up to date information.

Efficient Market Hypothesis

There is a concept in finance known as the efficient market hypothesis. The idea is that the market is a collective brain that judges asset prices based on a set of criteria such as all presently available facts being accounted for. While the validity of the entirety of the hypothesis stands in question, the idea behind it has merit. Different markets present different levels of efficiency and crypto is considered radically inefficient.

This is a result of the accessibility candle burning at both ends. Finance is largely inaccessible, opaque, and has high barriers to entry which results in people investing into standard mutual funds and ETFs because of a lack of investing confidence. Many blockchains and protocols, like Solrise, are built around removing these barriers to entry and democratizing access and ability within finance for all but as stated earlier, there is also a lack in critical infrastructure and safety nets.

On-Chain Efficiency

When operating on-chain, it’s easy to set and forget. Until now, when you listed an NFT asset for sale, you would have to manually check if it sold. Now, you can know immediately when it sold and you’ll then have cash to reinvest elsewhere. In that sense, protocol notifications also increase the velocity of money on-chain.

The same goes for the instances where you get a notification to deposit more collateral to backstop your on-chain borrowing position. If you weren’t manually observing your collateral ratio or receiving an immediate notification about it, you may get liquidated in a position that you could have easily backstopped with other tokens you own. That’s not a very efficient way to operate. To avoid this, just use Solflare.

Conclusion

Blockchain notifications lessen the time between on-chain market participants learning new information and reacting to it. This makes on-chain markets like DeFi and NFT economies more efficient, liquid, and ultimately more safe. Efficient, liquid markets are much more safe than inefficient, illiquid markets that can easily be taken advantage of.

Non-custodial wallets are not just permissionless bank accounts on blockchains but they are decentralized investment accounts as well. Solflare values investor protection greatly, as evidenced by what its secure decentralized fund management protocol — Solrise, can attest to.

Blockchain notifications are just the logical next step in this practice of investor protection. As more Solana protocols adopt these notifications as part of their infrastructure, the safer Solana’s on-chain markets will be.

The Importance of Solflare’s Protocol Notifications was originally published in Solrise Finance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today, Solflare is proud to announce that the long awaited launch of our Ledger X and Solflare Mobile integration has finally arrived. You can now log into your mobile Solflare wallet and connect it to any Ledger hardware device via bluetooth. If you want to sign transactions to interact with Solana DeFi, NFT, or DAO ecosystems, you can securely do so from your Ledger X device.

Blockchain Security

As a blockchain company, the security of our customers is paramount. Unfortunately, the industry is rampant with scams and malicious projects that continuously put investor’s funds at risk. With billions in infrastructural hacks and hundreds of millions in rug pulls and phishing scams, we believe the best way to combat these dark hat hackers is education and accessibility to high quality utilities.

Solflare x Ledger

Hardware wallets help bridge the gap between having assets at risk or being secured. Solflare knew this and enabled Ledger compatibility with our desktop wallet since the early days. Our mobile development team has been keen on integrating it with our mobile application and now that the software kinks have been ironed out, the ability to secure your Solana assets with a hardware wallet has never been easier.

Why should you use a hardware wallet?

Hardware wallets ensure that your private key is not connected to the internet. Your private key is what is accessed by your recovery phrase and if anyone knows it, your wallet would be compromised. Hardware wallets give you an extra layer of security and primarily serve two purposes.

1. Protect your private keys from being leaked to the internet.
2. They let you securely sign transactions from your hardware device.

Hardware wallets enable what’s called cold storage which is when you keep your private keys offline. Technically, your assets are always on the blockchain but they’re only accessible with your private key so keep those safe!

If you have more than $500 in a wallet, it’s worth $100–200 to secure it.

“When it comes to our two driving product principles — enhancing security and utility for our users — it’s hard to find a feature that ranks higher than mobile ledger support.” said Nate Strang, head of Solflare product, “ When we started working on Ledger back in November, we knew it would require a daunting amount of engineering. But because this is so important to our users and the entire Solana community, we prioritized it and put in some long days and nights to get it done. The whole team is so excited to finally bring you Solana’s first mobile wallet supporting Ledger.”

To begin taking advantage of this new integration, go ahead and download our mobile app (iOS, Android), and then get your Ledger device ready. If you haven’t set up your Ledger X device, you can learn how to do that with this guide. If you have already funded your Ledger X device and all you want to do is connect it to your Solflare wallet, there’s a guide for that.

Digital wallets are both savings accounts and investment accounts. If you want to secure them with a hardware wallet, visit Solflare and set it up today.

Your Ledger X devices are now compatible with Solflare mobile! was originally published in Solrise Finance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re proud to announce that Mango has successfully been integrated into Solrise Finance and is live on Solana mainnet! Fund managers are now able to go long and short on a growing list of assets using an intuitive trading interface.

Along with big feature updates like non-custodial leverage trading and advanced order types, this release includes improvements in the onboarding experience for both managers and investors as well as a completely new trading interface.

The impact that this integration can have on non-custodial fund management is explored in this article as we believe it’s a crucial step for us and is directly Solrise’s vision of permissionless, democratized finance.

Today’s Agenda

New Features

• New Trading Interface
• Leverage Trading
• New Order Types
• Trading History

What This Means

Solrise’s Vision

New Features

You can now create a Mango account within your fund and deposit USDC collateral from your fund’s spot account to take on up to two cross-margined positions. As long as there is ample liquidity, new assets will be added to Solrise when they are added to Mango. In order to ensure low slippage and safe trading, the Solrise x Mango asset offering will start off with SOL, ETH, BTC, LUNA, AVAX, and BNB perps.

New Trading Interface

To accommodate the powerful new features being implemented, we decided to rebuild our entire trading interface. You can take advantage of simplified account interactions, TradingView’s powerful charting tools, and more.

Leverage Trading & Estimated Liquidation Price

Mango’s on-chain leverage capability is seamlessly communicated through our new Leverage Slider that lets you easily and quickly adjust your leverage. We also go one step further and display a calculation for the estimated liquidation price before you complete your order.

Leverage trading not only allows managers to speculate with conviction, it also allows them to hedge their bets and perform more complex trades.

The amount of leverage differs per asset and is detailed below.

SOL, ETH, BTC

Up to 20x Leverage

LUNA, AVAX, BNB

Up to 10x Leverage

5 New Order Types

Previously, fund managers were confined to transacting with market orders on spot assets only through Raydium or Serum. Now, they have the ability to place market and limit orders as well as take-profit and stop-loss orders using Mango.

All the new orders are listed below:

1. Limit Orders
2. Stop-Loss Market Orders
3. Stop-Loss Limit Orders
4. Take-Profit Market Orders
5. Take-Profit Limit Orders

Having access to limit orders is important for managers because it allows them to reduce their slippage costs and avoid taker fees. There are 0 maker fees when setting limit orders.

Having access to these more advanced stop-loss and take-profit orders are even more important because it lets managers execute their strategies in granular detail.

For example, combining a take-profit and stop-loss order would build a safe bracket around a position and remove the need for a manager to keep their eyes glued to the screen 24/7 while still maintaining limited downside and a price target.

Trading History

When trading at a centralized exchange, you usually have access to an easy to understand trading history. When trading on a blockchain, most platforms don’t offer that luxury.

Solrise is following suit with its partner product, Solflare Wallet, by introducing a very clear and human readable trading history. You can now look back on your on-chain trading activity and immediately understand the details of each transaction.

What This Means

All of these features and enhancements open up a world of opportunities for Solrise fund managers. If the market goes up, down, or sideways, managers now have the ability to curate profitable strategies that capture value for their investors.

The fact that this is all taking place on-chain is another aspect to consider. Anybody, anywhere can now open what is essentially a borderless, transparent, and censorship resistant hedge fund. There is a global community of investors on Solrise who are looking for the best managers on the platform to invest with and now the managers have so much more to work with.

This all falls in line with Solrise’s Vision of lowering barriers to entry for financial services and democratizing access to financial freedom.

Solrise’s Vision

There is a reason Solrise is on Solana. The low fees, low latency, high throughput, and compounding scalability are just a start. Along with being the natural home for high frequency trading, there is a robust and growing ecosystem of DeFi products being built on Solana and Solrise is positioned to be right in the middle of it.

Solrise is the only protocol that has also built a non-custodial wallet and vice versa. The synergy between these two products is obvious. In the near future, Solrise funds will be directly exposed to Solflare’s huge user base and Solflare users will have the ability to invest into Solrise funds with one click directly from the app.

Earning performance fees from this growing audience is a natural incentive for managers to perform well — which ultimately benefits investors in this dynamic.

Conclusion

This Mango integration is just the start. Other features and updates to look out for are an integration with Jupiter — Solana’s best DEX Aggregator, incentives and rewards for high performing managers and ALL investors (with bonuses for stakers), a big security update and partnership, blockchain notifications 👀, a Solflare integration exposing funds to a huge pool of users who will be able to invest in them with one click, and many future protocol integrations.

That’s a lot to look forward to.

Mango x Solrise is here! was originally published in Solrise Finance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At the time of writing, exactly 1 Million $SLRS have been burned.

Why is this important and why burn?

Our team at Solrise is thrilled to be building an ecosystem of products with Solflare, Solrise Finance and Solrise Pulse. We believe that converging these products over time will exponentially accelerate their growth and create a powerful flywheel effect.

Solrise Finance funds will be exposed to millions of users in Solflare.

Solflare will build Solflare Institutional for Solrise Pulse users.

Solrise Pulse will create the foundation for Solrise Finance Pro.

At the core of all these products lies $SLRS — the ecosystem token of Solrise.

Currently, staking $SLRS provides decreased swap fees within Solflare and decreased platform fees on Solrise Finance. More token use cases like on-chain governance and access to advanced features will be added over time.

Fees that are generated from all Solrise products are being used to buy back $SLRS tokens from the market and subsequently burn them.

Building this ecosystem is a massive undertaking and will take time but we firmly believe in our vision of advancing Web3 benefits to all users, keeping them safe, and making them more successful in this new decentralized world.

So… how does the burn work?

Solrise Finance generates fees by collecting a percentage of managers performance fees and from investor exits (fees are collected in the same wallet as fund assets):

https://solscan.io/account/2F8sGJ6XwXJPk4cYxdju6bxUFaz9Sz5N4HwjgA4PaaRW

Solflare generates fees as users swap tokens in the mobile app, extension and on the web app:

https://solscan.io/account/2rbMgYvzAb3xDk6vXrzKkY3VwsmyDZsJTkvB3JJYsRzA

Solrise Pulse collects maker and taker fees: https://solscan.io/account/BybAEz1cqRRaqkNvjqYBvHMrP3C3NUkWf8AqgEW95cPm

All these fees are collected in various Solana tokens which are then swapped to $USDC.

That $USDC is transferred to a smart contract that automatically buys $SLRS on Raydium in small chunks several times per day, in random intervals:

https://solscan.io/account/93Mak1denpnsBowJjkoc9nyWUTk6gyg8RwiCkCarZ7rk

If there is a large amount of $SLRS on the buyback address, it is transferred to cold storage until the burn date:

https://solscan.io/account/D944Tdjh3cSh2T8LiosV9bHMcmTXwTFRkw7fY3AHFWTt

From now on, we will burn all $SLRS collected in the first week of every month and post the link to the burn transaction publicly on Twitter and other social channels.

We are here for the long term, and the $SLRS fire will burn for a long time.

The $SLRS Burn explained was originally published in Solrise Finance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to Solrise’s first monthly recap!

March has been busy. Below is a breakdown of some of the most notable updates from Solrise’s suite of products — Solrise Finance, Solflare Wallet, and Pulse Institutional DEX.

Solflare Web

• Scam NFTs have plagued wallet users for years due to the public nature of blockchains. The Solflare web team has created a way to burn scam NFTs and warn users not to send tokens directly to a staking account.
• Push notifications are now fully live and functional through Solflare web and the extension. Solflare users will instantly get notified if they received some SOL/SPL tokens or sold an NFT on a marketplace. This eliminates the need for users to manually check these things themselves.

Solflare Mobile

• Ledger integration is nearly ready to ship! We heard you!
• You’ll soon be able to use your Solflare Wallet to sign and verify transactions with a QR code for Solana Pay.
• NFT PFP support has been added to mobile, which was previously only available through web/ext.
• Minor Bug fixes and quality of life features such as a 60 frames per second refresh rate for the NFT page, a smoother user experience, and more were implemented.

Solflare General

• Transaction history has been implemented across all platforms for humanly readable transactions.
• We’ve migrated away from Discord for support and are now fully utilizing Intercom to answer any question, 24/7.
• We’ve integrated a protocol notification feature that lets you receive notifications from your favorite blockchain applications.

Solrise Finance

• The Mango x Solrise integration is nearly ready to launch. QA testing has started and we’re receiving constant feedback on all the stages of testing. We’re expecting a launch date in the very beginning of Q2.
• The Solrise dashboard interface has been updated with the list of new assets available from Serum and Raydium.
• A few low liquidity assets have been removed from Solrise but are still available to swap in Solflare, just watch out for slippage! A full list is below.

COPE, CWAR, IN, LIKE, SLND, SNY, SRM, STARS, SLRS, soLINK, soETH, HXRO, APT, AURY, GRAPE, LIQ, MER, MNGO, STEP, TULIP, GENE, ALEPH

The final asset offering list is the following.

• Serum: SOL, soBTC, FTT, RAY, weLUNA, weAVAX, weMATIC, weLINK, weBNB, weSUSHI.
• Raydium: weSUSHI, weETH, ATLAS, mSOL, POLIS, RAY, SOL.

One of the main concerns we’ve heard about Solrise is that fund managers could possibly pump outside bags on low liquidity coins. This is why we removed them altogether, even including our own $SLRS. This is a long term solution because our aim is to attract the right kind of managers who will instill certainty and trust in investors.

You also may notice that we have 2 versions of ETH. One is the Sollet wrapped ETH that is liquid on Serum and one is Wormhole wrapped ETH that is liquid on Raydium. ETH seemed important enough to offer on both markets considering it’s possible. We are also removing soSUSHI and soLINK (illiquid) and adding weSUSHI and weLINK.

Well, you made it to the end of this month’s recap. Our team works tirelessly each and every day to provide all of our users across each product with the best of the best.

More major updates will be posted via Medium on top of our monthly recaps. Until then!

Solrise Ecosystem Updates:  March 2022 was originally published in Solrise Finance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Placing trades out of FOMO (fear of missing out) results from our natural tendency to believe that what is happening will continue into the recent future, which is a common cognitive bias. In the financial trading world, every moment in the market is unique and anything can happen at any time.

Trading out of FOMO shows that our overriding trading emotions are greed and envy — we desire to gain the same profit those who are already in on the trade are gaining, without considering that the price movement may have run its course.

Unfortunately, the FOMO feeling becomes greater the more the market continues to move in that direction. However, the farther the price moves, the more likely it will actually reverse or make a pullback. From experience, most trades placed out of FOMO often end up as losers, which could have been avoided with a little bit of discipline.

Traders often have to think fast and make quick decisions, darting in and out of projects on short notice. To accomplish this, they need a certain presence of mind. They also need the discipline to stick with their own trading plans and know when to book profits and losses.

Emotions simply can’t get in the way.

When traders get bad news about a certain project or about the asset class in general, they naturally get scared. They may overreact and feel compelled to liquidate their holdings and sit on the cash, refraining from taking any more risks. If they do, they may avoid certain losses but may also miss out on some gains.

Acknowledging Your Risk

Traders need to understand what fear is: a natural reaction to a perceived threat. In this case, it’s a threat to their profit potential.

Being able to quantify fear might help, but it goes much deeper than that. Traders should consider just what they are afraid of, and why they are afraid of it. But that thinking should occur before the bad news, not in the middle of it.

By thinking it through ahead of time, traders will know how they perceive events instinctively and react to them and can move past the emotional response. Of course, this is not easy, but it’s necessary to the health of an investor’s portfolio, not to mention the investor.

Greed is not easy to overcome. It’s often based on the instinct to do better, to get just a little more. A trader should learn to recognize this instinct and develop a trading plan based on rational thinking, not whims or instincts

Although mastering your emotions in trading is a never-ending battle, the basic framework for tackling the problem is actually quite simple. Your emotions run wild when they are given the space to dominate your thinking, which is why professional traders always use a strict trading system that helps to contextualize their decisions and keep their emotions in check.

Your Judgment and Sanity

The fear of missing out usually occurs when an asset is making a big move and you missed it. This can lead to chasing an entry which is never a good trading decision because you will end up with a poor entry price and as you are caught up in the thought of missing out you forget to manage your trade and risk.

The fear of missing out is driven by a desire to be a part of a good thing, even when all signs suggest that it is not a wise investment. FOMO is so pernicious because we see other people succeeding, even if they are taking unjustifiable risks to do so, and we have a natural urge to join in. The more wildly successful other people are, which is usually directly correlated with the amount of risk they are taking on, the stronger the urge to join in.

FOMO is usually harder for new traders to grasp because they haven’t been burned as many times as someone who has been trading the markets for a while. The best way to deal with FOMO is to have rules in place and if you break them then you need to have some kind of punishment like no trading for the rest of the day.

Setting Rules and Guidelines

The actual process of opening and closing of positions is always the most difficult and stressful aspect of trading. Even the most well-researched trades can go poorly if the trader is overly emotional when executing trades. Having a set of strict rules for how and when to execute trades is essential to maximizing the profits from good ideas and minimizing the losses from trades gone wrong.

Whether you just met your weekly profit target in one trade or wiped out two days’ worth of work, it is always wise to have a system for cooling down after one trade before moving on to the next.

Every trade will color your emotional state, so the best traders know how to cleanse themselves of the lingering emotions of the last trade before moving on to the next one.

Conducting Research and Strategizing

As traders/investors, we need to become experts in the projects and industries that interest us.

Traders can rely on a tried and tested trading strategy to help them gauge and control their emotional state. A regimented trading system offers an anchor of proven reason that traders can rely upon when attempting to interpret market information and their own emotions. Any effective trading strategy is composed of various rules that help to frame all investment decisions.

Devote as much time as possible to the research process. That means studying charts, reading trade journals, and doing anything that will hinder cognitive bias. Being able to go back and understand why you made that particular decision can help you eliminate future risks.

Conclusion

Knowledge of the common pitfalls in trading psychology and a strict set of rules for trading are both essential to achieving lasting success in trading. Don't put yourself in a situation where you're risking both your mental health and financial well-being in the same trade. The market will be around for longer than you.

Dawn II — The Art of FOMO was originally published in Solrise Finance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Sharpe ratio, named after William F. Sharpe, is an analysis ratio that provides us insight into how much risk we are about to self inflict on an investment when compared to its potential reward.

What is the Sharpe Ratio?

The Sharpe ratio measures the reward-to-variability ratio of an investment by dividing the average risk-adjusted return by volatility. Investors can directly compare multiple investments and evaluate the amount of risk that each investment took on per percentage point of return. This ratio allows investors to better manage their risk exposure while maximizing potential returns. Relatively speaking, mo money mo problems.

Why the Sharpe Ratio?

When creating a fund, the first and most obvious problem that fund managers run into is “How do I properly allocate my money in order to maximize my potential returns, while being able to sleep at night knowing that my fund won’t crash and burn at any second?”

How Can I Calculate It?

It’s Easy! In order to calculate the Sharpe Ratio for your investment, you first begin by subtracting the risk-free rate of the return from the expected rate of return from the investment. You then divide that number by the standard deviation of that investment’s annual rate-which is a measurement of volatility.

Standard deviation: In statistics, the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of values. A low standard deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean of the set, while a high standard deviation indicates that the values are spread out over a wider range.

Volatility: The degree of variation of a trading price series over time, usually measured by the standard deviation of logarithmic returns. Historic volatility measures a time series of past market prices.

Why Does the Sharpe Ratio Work?

In order to fully understand why the Sharpe Ratio works, it is important to refresh our knowledge on risk-adjusted returns.

Risk-adjusted returns: is a risk-based profitability measurement framework for analyzing risk-adjusted financial performance and providing a consistent view of profitability across businesses. The concept was developed by Bankers Trust and principal designer Dan Borge in the late 1970s.

The easiest way to measure risk is by using the beta coefficient, which measures a fund’s volatility against a benchmark. This can be used as taking the volatility from your fund of all altcoins and using Bitcoin as your benchmark.

A fund’s beta is simply a measure of how volatile an investor can expect the fund to be compared to the overall market. A beta of more than one means that the fund is more volatile than the overall market, and a beta of less than one means that it is less volatile.

We can use this method to evaluate excess returns. It shows us whether these originated from a smart investment strategy, or there was too much risk involved. An asset can have a higher yield, but that’s only worth it if it doesn’t bring excessive amounts of additional risk.

An investment can have a negative ratio, showing the asset is underperforming against the benchmark. However, this gives us no real insights, as it means that either the risk-free rate is above the investment return, or the return is negative.

Using the Sharpe Ratio

An investor has a choice of three portfolios, all with expected returns of 10 percent over the next 10 years. The average returns in the table (below) indicate the stated expectation. The returns achieved for the investment horizon is indicated by annualized returns, which takes compounding into account. The standard deviation takes returns away from the expected return. If there is no risk — zero standard deviation — your returns will equal your expected returns.

Now let's think about this, what if Fund Manager A generates a return of 15%, and Fund Manager B generates a return of 12%. It appears that Fund Manager A is a better performer. However, if Fund Manager A took larger risks than Fund Manager B, it may be that Fund Manager B has a better risk-adjusted return.

In addition to this example, say that the risk-free rate is 5%, and Fund Manager A’s portfolio has a standard deviation of 8% while Fund Manager B’s portfolio has a standard deviation of 5%. The Sharpe ratio for Fund Manager A would be 1.25, while Fund Manager B’s ratio would be 1.4, which is better than that of Fund Manager A. Based on these calculations, Fund Manager B was able to generate a higher return on a risk-adjusted basis.

For some insight, a ratio of 1 or better is good, 2 or better is really good, and 3 or better is extremely good.

Limitations of the Sharpe Ratio

While the Sharpe ratio makes for an equitable comparison between similar investment products, you should keep in mind that investments with a higher Sharpe ratio can be more volatile than those with a lower ratio. The higher Sharpe ratio simply indicates that the investment’s risk-to-reward profile is more optimal or proportional than another. There could still be significant risks or volatility involved.

Conclusion

When we evaluate investment opportunities, we must consider both reward and risk at the same time. The Sharpe Ratio allows us to determine the asset with the best return, while also taking risk into account.

Now that you have a rough understanding of what the Sharpe Ratio is and why we use it, go out there and reinforce your knowledge by implementing it into your next fund.

Useful Links

Notes on Sharpe Ratio- https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/SharpeR/vignettes/SharpeRatio.pdf

Sharpe Ratio: Estimation, Confidence Intervals, and Hypothesis Testing- https://www.twosigma.com/wp-content/uploads/sharpe-tr-1.pdf

The Statistics of Sharpe Ratios- https://alo.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/The-Statistics-of-Sharpe-Ratios.pdf

Dawn II — Investing With the Sharpe Ratio was originally published in Solrise Finance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We have now entered the second phase of DAWN II!

This phase is all about allowing fund managers to show investors why they should invest into their funds!

First impressions mean everything. As fund managers, we have a subconscious goal of not only wanting to impress ourselves by setting and achieving personal goals of accountability. but also crushing the competition and finishing at the top of the leaderboard to impress our peers.

The beauty and the struggle of the second phase is that there are time restraints. Now that managers only have a small window of time to perform well, one must create an edge in order to come out on top.

What is an Edge?

An edge is when a trader can identify something in the market that gives them an advantage or insight into how well a trade will do. A trading edge defines your technical or strategic advantage in a highly competitive market environment. Traders can establish multiple edges by starting with popular strategies and customizing rules to lower the risk of getting trapped with the emotional crowd. This is where we introduce Time Series Analysis (TSA).

Alright, so what even is “Time Series Analysis”?

Time Series Analysis is a systematic way of analyzing previous time-series data and formulating meaningful outputs of data. It differs from Time Series Forecasting which uses TSA to predict future values based on old ones. In Time Series, time is denominated as the independent variable — with the end goal of forecasting the future.

Examples of where it’s used

• The daily weather forecast, Equity prices, Crypto prices, Sports betting, website traffic, Sales demand, and cost of production. (It’s literally used EVERYWHERE!)

A few concepts that we’re going to discuss below are Autocorrelation, Seasonality, Trend, and Stationary.

The Elements of Time Series:

Autocorrelation

Autocorrelation is the correlation of a signal with a delayed copy of itself as a function of delay. Informally, it is the similarity between observations as a function of the time lag between them. Autocorrelation occurs when the error term in one period is related to the error term in previous periods.

Positive Autocorrelation is when p > 0 or when positive errors tend to follow positive errors and negative errors tend to follow negative errors.

Negative Autocorrelation is when p < 0 or when positive errors tend to follow negative errors and negative errors tend to follow positive errors.

Autocorrelation plots provide enough data to hint at the idea of Seasonality if (AND ONLY IF) the plot is a sinusoidal function.

Seasonality

Seasonality is a characteristic of a time series in which the data experiences regular and predictable changes that recur every calendar year. Any predictable fluctuation or pattern that recurs or repeats over a one-year period is said to be seasonal.

For example: Google trends for keywords will appear lower/higher depending on the time of the year, Bitcoin consistently performing underwhelming results in certain months, you being surprised with how expensive your electrical bill is after lighting up your entire house with Christmas lights each year.

As stated above, “Autocorrelation plots provide enough data to hint at the idea of Seasonality if (AND ONLY IF) the plot is a sinusoidal function.” To put it plainly, observe the variable, and it will give you the duration of time in which the season occurs.

Trend

Trend is the overall direction in which a variable is developing or changing. A trend can be either upward (an uptrend) or downward (a downtrend).

• Uptrend: Describes the movement of a variable when the overall direction is going up.
• Downtrend: Describes the movement of a variable when the overall direction is going down.

Uptrends can be contrasted with downtrends and downtrends can be contrasted with uptrends.

Stationary

Stationary means that the statistical properties of a process generating a time series do not change over time. It does not mean that the series does not change over time, just that the way it changes does not itself change over time.

When using Time Series Forecasting, most time series models assume that each point is independent of one another. The best indication of this is when the dataset of past instances is stationary.

More often than not, stock/crypto prices are not stationary — due to volatility continuing to increase and social media introducing growing trends that shape the market every day.

It is important for us to have a stationary series of time for creating models. Of course, not all conditions will be stationary, but we can create alternate transformations to make them stationary.

Implementing Time Series Analysis into your Investments.

Here I am going to run through one simple concept (using seasonality) that the majority of crypto traders already subconsciously think about.

ETH/BTC has historically performed exceptionally well throughout Q1. One simple way you can use seasonality in your favor is to allocate yourself into ETH/USD (or ALTS/USD) over BTC/USD, during the final months of Q4 and entering Q1.

It's really all about hedging your bets at the right time.

Conclusion

Now that you have a basic understanding of Time Series Analysis and what some of its general characteristics are, fortify your knowledge by analyzing a time series dataset. At the end of the day, your longevity is based on the principle of always keeping the probability of success in your favor.

Useful Resources

http://www.ru.ac.bd/stat/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2019/03/504_05_Box_Time-Series-Analysis-Forecasting-and-Control-2015.pdf

https://web.stat.tamu.edu/~suhasini/teaching673/time_series.pdf

https://mybiostats.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/time-series-analysis-with-applications-in-r-cryer-and-chan.pdf

DAWN II Phase 2 — Creating an Edge Using Time Series Analysis was originally published in Solrise Finance on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.