DAA Manager Insights: Michal Novák

Ragnar Lothbrok said, “Don’t waste your time looking back, you’re not going that way.” This quote could easily be the mantra of our DAA manager Michal Novák, as well as of the whole crypto space. In these insights he reveals the story of how he came up with his DAA name — Ragnarok Crypto Asset Array.

You told us that you started exploring the potential of blockchain technology in 2016 and have since been diving deep into this revolutionary new world. What were your main resources when learning about cryptocurrencies? What are the resources you would recommend to people just starting out?

I first stumbled upon cryptocurrencies when researching new investment opportunities. This soon led me to quite possibly hundreds of bitcointalk topics and back to back research and countless hours of financial modeling. One exceptional resource that helped me a lot in the beginning was the ICONOMI slack. Hands down one of the best communities I encountered so far, for that I’m very thankful. The amount of great information and ideas is priceless especially in an industry so overloaded with memeing, FOMO, FUD and the likes of such.

When people ask me how to get started I always advise to read a lot, and do a lot of due diligence before one gets familiar enough with the industry to differentiate credible source and people that try to scam you out of your money.

You named your DAA the Ragnarok Crypto Asset Array and in your description explained that the word “Ragnarok” comes from Norse mythology and represents the end and rebirth of the world as we know it. Could you tell us what the inspiration was for this name?

I wanted to avoid sounding too serious unlike most people in the industry, which is overcrowded with fancy terms. Finding the right name was quite hard in that context. Many people think that I was inspired by Thor:Ragnarok movie, which is currently quite popular. However, I’ve been a huge fan of viking mythology for a very long time, I listen to some metal bands covering this topic, so I thought I might pick something from it. The Ragnarok fulfils my ideas — it is an end and a beginning of something new, its little funny, but has a story behind it that can easily serve as an analogy to what is currently happening in our world.

Becoming a DAA manager is of course important decision. What does your average day as a DAA manager look like? How often do you check the crypto market?

It was quite a tough decision to come out of anonymity, which cryptocurrencies to some extent offer. However, the opportunity to do something that really fulfils me and I believe in, prevailed.My typical day consists of everlasting battle between crypto and everything else. I already gave up setting some timetable when to do crypto, or rather when not to do it, as that was quite pointless. I’m following variable resources to cover the important crypto topics, I also read a lot of information about new projects or updates of the existing ones. Throughout a typical day I have many chats and calls with both my team and also with investors, where I mostly have to guide them through the process of getting in as without direct fiat gateway it is still very complicated for some people.

You have briefly described the philosophy behind the name and starting RCAA, what users are you trying to address?

As I stated previously coming out of anonymity wasn’t an easy decision to make but the greater incentive was to allow friends and family to allocate financial resources into this exciting industry. Iconomi had a promising idea which turned into a great working product. The ambitions now a lot bigger as we soon ran out of friends and family that weren’t involved. With increasing AUM comes great responsibility and we are now trying to address also more seasoned clientele. We are certainly happy about the model we developed for structuring our portfolio and our results are very appealing to users. At the same time the better we perform as an array the more due diligence we do to be prepared for potential corrections.

Speaking of your model and RCAA structure, what is your strategy and how does it differentiate from others?

At the beginning I had two ideas in my head, first one was to make a very aggressive array without BTC and ETH as people can easily hold these themselves. However, the amount of interest from regular people led me to the second option, to structure a less aggressive portfolio. We always try to keep around 30 % in more mature assets. For the other allocations we have developed a system where we assess everything from market caps, token distribution, competency of the team and any track record of such, overall need for the proposed project, and other factors. Once we allocate an asset into our portfolio we then focus on the overall market performance, competition and technical analysis. Choosing an actively managed array was a no brainer for me as a manager as the crypto markets are very different from everything else that’s ever happened. The involvement of regular people makes the space also very immature and there is lot more of newbie psychology present than anywhere else. Generally speaking, people easily hype projects with no product and no practical use and let their fear of missing out or weak hands dictate their actions. In the longer run this may result in big corrections as the markets develop and we want to be prepared for the option to go into stable coins or fiat when we feel the market conditions are no longer safe for our investors.

Follow our official channels for more updates and news:

Facebook / Twitter / Reddit / Medium

or log into our platform to explore more DAA strategies.

DAA Manager Insights: Michal Novák was originally published in ICONOMI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.