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Quite a bit has happened in crypto land since the last post just before the holidays. Ripple - Ripple stole the spotlight - due to its 10x gain in less than one month, making it the biggest crypto coin after bitcoin (previously Ethereum was #2). Ripple facilitates bank transfer of money over borders. The rise up has to do with a combination of banks adopting usage of Ripple's XRP token (which is the least used part of its protocol offering) - as well as speculation that more banks will adopt it. Rumors of it being listed on coinbase - which coinbase has since denied - also led to the run up. Now, Ripple cofounders (Ripple's current and former CEOs Chris Larsen and Brad Garlinghouse) are richer than Sergey and Larry from Google as well as the founder of Oracle - talk about madness. Jed McCaleb - another co-founder who left the company to start Stellar - is also a billionaire. Ripple launched in 2012 to facilitate global financial transactions. It differentiates itself from other digital currency platforms by its connections to legitimate banks. Companies that use the Ripple platform include Santander (SANPRA), Bank of America (BAC) and UBS (UBS). Cross-border payments that can take hours with bitcoin or days with traditional financial transactions can go through in a matter of seconds with ripple, the company says. CoinMarket Cap Rankings If You Invested $100 If an investor had placed $100 in each of the top 10 cryptocurrencies in 2017, the total yearly profit would have been $64,707 (on an initial investment of $1K). Ripple has surpassed Ethereum in market cap to become the #2 coin in terms of market cap. My apologies for not alerting on this one, I put in a speculative position at $.25, added at $.50, added at $.70, added at $1.3 - and it's near $3 now. Amazing from $.25 to $3+ - basically a 10x'er in 1 month. And this is not some micro-cap crypto - it's now the second largest. We'll have charts of the major cryptos below. During that Crash, we recommend buys at Litecoin 247, Bitcoin 13,000, and Ethereum at 620. Bitcoin is now over 16,000; ethereum over 900; and the only one stuck is Liteocoin which is still at 247. In fact with Ethereum - we reiterated a buy at 790 (see on the right) - and within one hour of alerting members, Ethereum shot up to 875. Now it's at 950. On the S&P side, we picked the correct direction as the markets opened for the New Year, but exited our SPY call way early. We entered bullish calls at 2690 and exited at 2702. Now it's 2742 -- completely ridiculous. Really can't make sense of the size of the move up, but it is what it is. Bitcoin Bitcoin pulled back from almost 20,000 to around 10,400. We alerted to members in chat a buy at 13,000. Today it finally started showing some bullish signs and is at around 16800, Litecoin Litecoin has been a lot weaker than I expected. It also doesn't help that the founder Charlie Lee sold all of his coins right at the top - that could be suppressing litecoin for a while and explain why litecoin has been underperforming most other coins. If Litecoin can clear 260 in the next day or so, then it should have momentum to be the 285 region a test. Ethereum Our buy at alert for ethereum at 650 is now looking pretty good with Ethereum at 865. For those who missed it at 650, we alerted it once again at 790 -- now looks like it's giving 1000 a test. After selling at 820, we rebought at 650. Last time, we put the below chart on ETH - citing a traditional Elliott Wave pattern where the crash of cryptos was the giant -wave down from 850 down to 480. Our buy was at 650 - since it only spent very little time in the 500 range. The strength and resilience of Ethereum (relatively to other coins during the crash) - was a hint that Ethereum would later jump to where it is now - well over 900. Ripple (XRP) Ripplehas been the one stealing the show lately. After reaching 3.3 yesterday,