What Alan Masters crypto analysis offered
Alan Masters published technical analysis of cryptocurrency pairs for paying subscribers. Adrian Campbell co-founded it with partners based in Hong Kong, one of Asia's main financial centres.
The service ran from 2016 to 2017. Campbell exited as the market matured, and it does not feature among his current businesses.
How subscription analysis services work
Paid market analysis is an old idea. Investment newsletters on shares and currencies have existed for decades, and the model moved into crypto as public interest in digital currencies grew.
A subscriber pays a regular fee and receives analysis in return, usually charts with written commentary. In crypto, services like this were commonly delivered through websites, email and chat channels, because the market moves at all hours.
What technical analysis of crypto pairs means
A cryptocurrency pair is the price of one asset quoted in another. BTC/USD shows bitcoin in US dollars, while ETH/BTC shows ether priced in bitcoin.
Technical analysis studies price charts and trading volume, rather than the project or company behind an asset. Common tools include:
- trend lines, and support and resistance levels
- moving averages, which smooth out short-term noise
- momentum indicators such as the relative strength index (RSI)
Analysts use these to judge whether a market is trending, moving sideways in a range, or turning. The note on trending, ranging and volatile market regimes explains those states in more detail.
The method has critics as well as followers. Some economists argue that past prices say little about future ones, while practitioners reply that charts capture how crowds of traders behave. Both views have long histories in finance.
Crypto markets trade around the clock, every day of the year, on many exchanges at once. They are also highly volatile, and no form of analysis removes that risk.
The crypto market in 2016 and 2017
Alan Masters ran through one of the most dramatic stretches in crypto history. Bitcoin began 2017 at around US$1,000 and came close to US$20,000 by December.
Hundreds of new tokens were launched through initial coin offerings (ICOs) in 2017, many of them built on Ethereum, which had gone live in 2015.
The market also began to change shape. In December 2017, Cboe and CME launched bitcoin futures in the United States, the first time major regulated exchanges there had listed them.
Why Adrian Campbell exited Alan Masters
Campbell exited in 2017, as the cryptocurrency market matured. He took something lasting from the experience.
Running the service turned his attention to a different approach: trading decisions made by software instead of by people.
The general case for that approach is well known. People tire, miss signals when they watch many markets at once, and can react to a loss with emotion. Software applies the same tested rules every time, although it brings risks of its own, and no system removes market risk.
From Alan Masters to iQuant Fund
That interest eventually led to iQuant Fund. Campbell was one of its co-founders in February 2021, together with Jason Noorman and other partners, and he served as its Chairman.
iQuant developed machine-learning models for systematic trading and research in equities, and it worked only with institutional clients. Speaking to Kanebridge News in 2024, he described its founders as traders who had spent long hours across several screens and away from their families, and who wanted a system to automate their own strategies.
Alan Masters and iQuant sit at opposite ends of that shift: one sold human analysis, the other built software to do the analysis. Read how they fit with his other businesses in all of Adrian Campbell's companies, or see his full profile.
This page describes a past business and is not financial advice.