There is a never ending list of strategies that are employed by crypto investors. One of the more common strategies is taking profits while the market is up. Funds are then available for injection back into the portfolio when the market is down. Essentially, the result is selling high and buying low.

Up until this point, the Shrimpy application has not had any method of taking profits or accumulating assets. The strategies have been limited to long-term rebalancing strategies which require no interference from users. Although long-term strategies are the main focus of the Shrimpy application, blacklisting has opened up the ability to implement more complex strategies. Advanced users, who are looking for more options, can now apply these techniques to their portfolios.

You can learn more about rebalancing in our previous article:

In order to keep the Shrimpy application as simple as possible, we generally try not to implement features that are specific to a single strategy. Ideally, we would like to provide the tools necessary to construct more advanced strategies, without specifically implementing these strategies. While the features may appear to be separate, they can be combined in clever ways to allow for these complex strategies. The first of these strategies we will discuss is a way to utilize blacklisting for asset accumulation.

What is Blacklisting?

Blacklisting is a simple way of selecting the amount of an asset that should be ignored when performing trades. Whether it’s only a portion of the entire asset balance or the total asset balance, the amount that is blacklisted will be ignored when rebalancing or allocating a portfolio. In the Shrimpy application, this amount will still be visible on the dashboard, so you can still see the full overview of your portfolio.

Complete Blacklist

There are times where you may want the entire asset to be blacklisted. No matter how much of the asset you own, you don’t want any of it to be considered for trades.

In this case, Shrimpy users can simply specify a large amount for a specific asset. Entering an amount that is more than you own will essentially blacklist the entire asset.

Example: You don’t want to ever sell LTC.

Solution: Blacklist 100,000,000 LTC.

You now have a complete blacklist of LTC since it’s impossible to have 100,000,000 LTC. The number you chose doesn’t need to be as large as 100,000,000 LTC, just larger than the amount you own.

One caveat with completely blacklisting an asset is that you will continue to buy that asset if you also specify an allocation amount for that asset in your portfolio. The reason is because Shrimpy pretends you have 0% of that asset, due to it being blacklisted. If you allocate 50%, Shrimpy will buy an amount equal to 50% of the remaining portfolio to attempt to reach the target allocation. Then, during the next rebalance, it will see that you have 0% of that asset again, repeating the buy. Continuing this process every rebalance.

Example: You have 100 BTC and 100 LTC in your portfolio. You completely blacklist LTC and specify 50% BTC and 50% LTC as your allocations.

Result: Every rebalance, half of your BTC will be sold to LTC until you don’t have any BTC left and only have LTC.

If you don’t want this accumulation to happen, don’t allocate a percent for the assets which are completely blacklisted.

Partial Blacklist

There are also times when you may not want an entire asset to be blacklisted, but only part. Partial blacklisting is also possible.

By specifying only some of an asset to be blacklisted, this will remove only that amount from being rebalanced.

Example: You have 1 BTC. However, you want .5 BTC to be ignored.

Solution: Type in a blacklist for .5 BTC.

Partial blacklisting will ignore the amount specified, the rest will be traded normally. Both amounts will show up on the Shrimpy dashboard.

Similar to the complete blacklist, the allocation amount matters when dealing with blacklisting. In the case of partial blacklisting, Shrimpy will trade in order to reach the allocation percentage with the rest of the asset.

Example: You have a total portfolio value of 1 BTC, an allocation of 50% BTC / 50% LTC, and a blacklist for .5 BTC.

Result: Shrimpy will trade so you have .25 BTC worth of LTC and .75 BTC.

In this example, you can see how since there is a .5 BTC blacklist, the remaining assets were divided evenly between LTC and BTC. This is because Shrimpy trades as if you only have .5 BTC worth of assets.

Exclude Offline from Rebalancing

Previously with the Shrimpy application, when inputting balances into the “wallets” tab for assets that were not on the exchange, users had the option to either select “Active” or “Inactive”. This determined whether or not the amounts that were input would be included or excluded from the calculations during rebalances.

This functionality has been changed so all amounts that are input into the wallets tab are included for rebalancing. Excluding an amount requires the addition of a blacklist.

The rules for partial blacklisting also apply for the balances that are input into the wallets tab. Either part of the amount or the entire amount can be blacklisted. Shrimpy will ignore the assets that were entered into the wallets tab first, and then if there is an additional amount in the blacklist, it will ignore the remaining amount from on the exchange.

Example: You blacklist .5 BTC. You currently have .25 BTC entered into the wallets tab and .5 BTC on the exchange. (So, a total of .75 BTC)

Result: Shrimpy will first blacklist the .25 BTC which is not on the exchange. Since there is still .25 BTC left over in the blacklist, Shrimpy will blacklist .25 BTC from the exchange. The result is .25 BTC that is liquid on the exchange.

This allows the blacklisting of both assets held on the exchange as well as those entered into the wallets tab in Shrimpy.

Asset Accumulation

The Shrimpy application doesn’t specifically allow this feature, but there is a trick we could use in order to accumulate assets on Shrimpy by taking advantage of the blacklisting feature!

Whether you are a BTC maximalist or simply want to take profits whenever the market moves upwards, Shrimpy now has a new feature that can work for you.

We all know that blacklisting allows you to specify which assets Shrimpy should ignore during trades. This can also be set so that only part of an asset is not traded. If you wanted to blacklist .5BTC of 1BTC, it will only trade as if it has .5BTC available for rebalancing.

Accumulation

Blacklisting can also be used for another function; accumulation. This is done by inputting a blacklist while still maintaining an allocation percentage.

Example: Set an amount you would like to accumulate in USDT. We can use 100 USDT for this example. Next, set a small percent allocation of USDT. We can use 1% in this example.

Result: Every rebalance will buy USDT until you own 100 USDT + 1% of your total portfolio in USDT. Then, raising the USDT blacklist to 200 USDT, will accumulate more USDT.

The steps to accumulate an asset are then reduced to these 4 simple steps.

Step 1: Blacklist an asset you wish to accumulate.

Step 2: Allow assets to deviate.

Step 3: Rebalance in order to accumulate more of the blacklisted asset.

Step 4: Increase the blacklisted amount.

We can visualize these steps by illustrating how blacklisting would look in an active portfolio on Shrimpy.