This round was interesting from the psychological point of patience and endurance. I must have spent almost 3 hours “mining” just 100 or so e-mails, was asking myself where else I might look, and thinking that if I could just get another hundred and a half I could settle for a total of 1,250 when I happened on some “second tier” investment banks who are much more inclined to open their doors to the outside world, and, wham, just like that, in just a couple of hours time, I took my list to over 2,000! I had hit a main vein! A real nice batch of personalized contacts. In just a couple of hours! I’m the happy camper. Now it just so happens that I’ve run out of candidates to scour and I don't think I'll push my luck, and I think I’ll leave it at this with 2,000+ (2,178 to be exact) high quality e-mail addresses of principals, senior vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, managing directors, executive directors, heads of research, sector analysts, asset managers, corporate brokering, corporate finance, compliance and sales people in more than 50 companies with international scope.
Of course, the early data indicates the expected: that most, if not all, goes directly into Spam, but a good many of us take a peek and sometimes, and, well, if I saw an e-mail saying “Top 5 CryptoCurrency Investments 2015”
with no attachment, I might take a look-see. We’ll have to see if their IT departments continue to give me at least Spam access or if they outright block me. Time will tell.
While on the one hand I know a lot of these folks are “old guard”, and crypto antagonistic, I also know that of all the target markets I can think of, these are the folks, with their very livelihood centered on financial analysis, investments and risk management, that if anyone knows how to correctly value the real long term investment prospects of crypto, it’s these folks, and that if there’s only one who reacts and gets involved, not even on a company level, but on a personal level – think about it, only one person with the income and wealth of these 2000+ prospects is enough to move markets (and there will be more than one, rest assured, and with time it will become institutional, but remember, for the time being, this is just first contact: the opportunity to get in front of them).
Next on the docket? An article about how thinly traded the cryptocurrencies are at present and the need to be patient with opening positions.
. . . it would be nice to get a “newsletter” relationship going with as many of these people as possible . . .
. . . and in September I’m going to buy a DB or two.