If you are going to invest in anything, you should first understand how to gather data about your potential investment.

Gathering and understanding the various information about an investment is paramount to understanding when to buy, when to sell, what to buy, how to see the peaks of a coin, and a great deal of other things.

Cryptocurrency investing is no exception to this.

There are countless ways to begin datamining of a cryptocurrency.

Datamining with Crypto Compare

Today I will teach you about one of my first stops in datamining. That of Crypto Compare.

Crypto Compare offers a ton of data about cryptocoins and is a great place to start.

It has so many features I couldn't possibly explain them all in a post.

If you want to truly learn to use Crypto Compare youtube is a great place to begin.

I prefer Crypto Compare because its free, it houses the most amount of data, and it has my favorite source of information, HAL9000.

HAL9000 Timeline Bot

HAL9000 can be viewed in the screenshot below and is a very nice, easy to understand timeline view of whats been going on with a coin.

To get started with HAL9000 takes a little setup. First create an account at Crypto Compare and log in to your account.

After you are logged in go ahead and click the "timeline" link from the tab menu on the right hand side.

As you can see from the screenshot above we are going to be looking at the timeline for Private Instant Verification Transaction (PIVX).

To properly setup your timeline for a coin what you want to do is go through each of the filters, as displayed in the screenshot on the right with the 'high price' filter, and ensure all the filters are enabled (check boxes checked).

Doing this will populate the timeline with all the relevant information.

Within the next few days a feature is to be released so you can add your custom own coin triggers to the timeline to get customized information, however for now that is not ready.

Examining the data

There is a vast amount of important information you can find inside the HAL9000 timeline of a coin.

A simple example of things you can see with this data, is shown above. From these images you can see that the all time high for PIVX was back in April.

We can compare that to last months high (It is showing last month because not enough data exists for this month) and we can see that PIVX has dropped nearly 50%.

At first glance this information may seem a little alarming. Is the coin tanking? Is there any reason for its downs? Has the project been abandoned?

A little more research is needed.

Digging Deeper

The next logical thing to do is to look to the forums and twitter posts of the team.

A quick glance of what is being said can be found using the overview tab, or you can click to the forums to read every detail of whats being said.

For our study I am going to use the overview tab.

Strolling to the bottom of the page I can see a couple of great pieces of information.

This is in fact the greatest piece of news one could read.

This tells me that in fact, there is an active development team working on the coin, and not only are they active as recent as 9 days ago they added an android wallet.

Having an active development team is the single most important thing to investing.

No one is going to invest in a company that has no one running it, and the same is true of a cryptocurrency.

So what could be the cause of this drop? Is it trust being lost in the coin? Is there some development hiccup? Is it just the natural flow of cryptocurrency?

Continuing to look at the stream gives me this answer.

Cryptocurrent Growth Bubbles

We can see two weeks ago, someone saw the bubble coming, and warned about it.

Although at the time it was not a very liked opinion, we can in hind site see they were in fact correct.

What this tells us is, its nothing more than a typical cryptocurrency growth bubble that popped.

A growth bubble is what happens when investors buy into a coin early, wait for it to reach a certain level, and ten sell.

Investors only care about getting returns on money, so this is a logical step.

The long term investors, the ones who believe in the project, are steady going strong however, which means more investors will come on again and the coin will again go back up.

This is a GREAT time to buy a coin when you see these signs.

This is the entire "buy low / sell high" type of coin you want to find to invest in. It has great long term growth potential, active community, steady flow of investors, growth bubbles, and all the signs of a potentially successful coin.

Today I recommend checking out two coins, but I will allow you to do your own research as to why. Those coins are PIVX and NAV. Both of these coins should be long term investments expecting to leave your money for no less than 9 months as many as 18.