changegonnacome

The average American or the below average one for sure is noticing inflation......check out Dollar Generals result & commentary their customers are trading down............trading down to FOOD BANKS! For sure everybody's setups is different.......levered / unlevered.....fixed/adjusting.........37% of homes in the US have no mortgage at all. Under the hood lots of winners and losers...........big picture US housing dropped about ~7% real in the last year.......I bring it up as an illustration of small nominal falls being worse when inflation adjusted. its also important as per my source of fund framework for Joe Sixpack........you can't do ANOTHER cash out refi against an asset thats currently depreciating......hence one of Joe Sixpack's avenues by which he can expand is purchasing power has been shut down. True 3% mortgage holder are just #winnning whatever way you slice it..........but I know dudes who paid cash money would you believe in 2021/2022.......the Cash-Shiller Housing Index is very meaningful to them (in a sad way ) However you forget the 66 year old I dunno Phoenix home owner with no mortgage....intent on reitring soon in Flrodau.......who's purchasing power contained in that house peaked out it seems in Q4 2021......and has been failing in nominal and inflation terms ever since. Like I said 37% of homes in the US have no mortgage......and home prices rightly or wrongly play a part in the oft mentioned 'wealth effect'........modest nominal falls in house prices can have outsized effects on the marginal propensity to consume for lots of folks. It'll be interesting to watch housing......part of the affordability conundrum for those without a mortgage/home yet and embarking on household formation......is a few more years of the Case-Shiller inflation adjusted falls playing out as per above..........and affordability could get restored quite quickly (minus mortgage rate falls).....you know 5-7% YoY wage increases, 5% inflation & flat to 1-2% nominal reduction in house prices.....it wouldn't feel like a housing correction to anyone given the tiny changes on quoted prices on Zillow........but it would take a whole cohort of people who currently fail to hit DTI ratios.......and bring them into approval territory. Notwithstanding the structural shortages in housing etc.

Here's an example of nominal & real in action. Exam question - How does the housing market correct significantly (-20%) - without anybody noticing. It's the magic trick that inflation can pull on folks. This is how.....the just released April 2023 S&P Housing index modestly down on a 1yr basis: But we're a little smarter than the average bear.....how many tins of beans can your house buy you if sold it tomorrow.....quite a few less tins of beans than it could in April 2022 actually: If this 2022 to 2023 period replicated in housing for another 3 or 4 years.....i.e flat to slightly down nominal national prices while we continued to have 4-5% inflation......you could have a 2021 to 2024 period where US Housing corrects by about 20%+ in real terms.......while the Zestimate on Zillow budges hardly at all. Inflation is an insidious beast......cause people can mistakenly sit there as their actual purchasing power (all that matters) is getting destroyed MoM & YoY and they never even realize it. The only person laughing to the bank is Uncle Sam.

Yeah I still recognise the possibility, however slim, of a soft landing....they can happen......but like I said before I'm like 80% invested which is a bearish posture vs. a usual 115% for me.....like I'm not in a bunker somewhere with beans & toilet paper with a laptop typing this......I'm not underperforming SPY by 20% this year either......ya know what mean....I'm matching SPY actually....I'm a beta pig right now Arrogant would be a 0% stock allocation...I'm nowhere near that.....I'd argue 120% long is conversely also an arrogant position right now given the opportunity set & complexity.....that would scream I know EXACTLY what's gonna happen and its all good.....I don't know, it's a curious puzzle....dependent on what JP does, his courage or not, Ukraine etc......but the balance of risks & scenarios I see, to me, still point to the downside more than the upside & so my portfolio positioning/exposure is conservative.....on the expectation that some fat pitches are to come and I want liquidity to participate...but aint zero...my 80% allocation in some respects screams I'm not sure what the hell is gonna happen.

That is beyond a crazy statement for somebody who holds a tonne of long duration assets to make...its like praying for chaos.......your inviting a one time and instantaneous 30% mark down in your portfolio wishing that out loud. Inflation expectations are STILL anchored around 2%......such that the 10yr bond still has a 3-handle in front of it. In Greg world of new 4% accepted & stabilized inflation......the 10yr has to violently adjust upwards to something with a 5 or even 6-handle......and stocks do a one time violent swan dive to reflect the new paradigm & reset permanently at lower multiples. Let me know if/when @Gregmal you become Fed Chair ......cause I'll go to cash, buy some puts & chill out down the caribean for a year or two while you do your thang in D.C. Then come back to survey the wreckage & hopefully buy a few bargains Either way - it's going to be very interesting to observe the second half of this year......the Fed has some tough choices to make......they either step tentatively into Greg world and back away from the 2% inflation target (not a good day for stocks broadly)......or they double down on their fight against supercore (also not a good day for some economically sensitive stocks & defo interest rate sensitive stocks (autos/housing etc.)) Let's see - its just beyond interesting how this plays out & as @Intelligent_Investor says you've got the fiscal authority that cleverly loaded its fiscal gun with bullets back in 2021/22 fighting the Fed......I mean everybody says Joe Biden has dementia or Alzheimer's........dont underestimate his bumbling folksy ramblings........he sure hasn't forgotten how to create the foundations required to WIN Presidential elections..........Build, Back, Better bill ramping up spend & projects with endless red, white and blue ribbons to cut in every state heading into 2024 (genius Joe, high five ).........the IRA bill & CHIPS act creating a manufacturing boom with even MORE red, white and blue ribbons to cut in 2024 outside massive battery factories in the heartland & brand new shiny EV plants from overseas & domestic auto manufacturers.....yep Uncle Joe doesn't move as fast as he used too.....I'd be afraid he did......we'd have 10% inflation......but the old dog, knows some really old tricks....and those tricks work pretty great in elections.....not so much if you care about price stability.

And the problem with the bull thesis is that it believes in a kind fairytale.....that a bout of monetary domestic inflation goes away minus economic pain.....possible but HIGHLY unlikely. The problem with the bull thesis....that October 2022 marks the beginning of a new bull market expansion.......is that you have to believe that Joe Sixpack's purchasing power is increasing in the next 12 months..........yet his sources of spending/funds (credit & wages) are under pressure......inverted yield curve feeding into a credit contraction.......cash out refi ATM closed due to rates & stagnant home prices.......wage increases high enough to unfortunately sustain & perpetuate inflation but actually not high enough to expand his purchasing power in REAL terms.....the foundation for a new multi-year bull market such that I want to get constructive aggressive just isn't in place. Those conditions are simple: -Inflation printing mid-2's - Fed cutting rates -Yield curve un-inverted -BLS non-farm payrolls exceeding MoM inflation such REAL purchasing power is expanding Well i already explained that its much worse than mid-single digits......you're still living in a simplistic nominal world & pretending we weren't also printing high inflation while SPY EPS was falling. Its like my pal in Phoenix who was telling me the price of his house hasnt gone since he bought in 2021.....that its stayd flat....the problem out there for many right now.......is if X whatever you have hasnt gone up since 2021 that its flat......well it's actually gone down......and if its gone down a little in nominal terms.....well its gone down quite alot in real terms. As I explained the Fed put the first downpayment on an earnings decline...and it was low single digits nominal....double digits real.......and STILL underlying supercore inflation hasn't gone away or moved.......and the scary thing is its not clear to me that the Fed can take any credit for taking us from 8% to 5%....or the big one time headline CPI drop we are about to see in the next few weeks........its all external stuff rolling off.......transitory inflation just 18 months late rolling off. Disinflation Part Two: SuperCore........the sequel........where the Fed actually makes progress on underlying supercore will be accompanied by part two of the earnings decline.......as I said in the Bottom thread......margin compression and earnings declines require a disinflationary backdrop....you can't push price on weakening consumer.....a consumer who's source of funds are contracting credit & wages (unemployment/reduced hours)......and what you @Gregmal perceive as some kind of invalidation of the end of cycle template.....is really just the same problem that J-P has talked about & resolved to address.....which is to say 18 months into this hiking cycle......525bps of rate rises has been insufficient to make any progress on made in america inflation.....& correspondingly and one shouldn't be surprised by this as you think about it....the expected margin/profit decline has been more modest than expected (but still DOUBLE digits real). Why? Because the inflation progress or lack thereof has been way more modest than anyone expected......this US economy......locked into ZIRP rates......has shown itself to be quite immune to Fed funds at 525bps......which should as an observer be concerned on two fronts: (1) How high will Fed funds need to go then in this ZIRP fixed rate US economy to achieve progress on supercore? Fed Funds at 7%? Mortgages at 9%...... (2) If the Fed fails to make progress on supercore inflation such that we are printing 3.5% inflation as far as the eye can see.....what does the 10yr/30yr do......well they sure as hell move up into 4's or 5's....which is not a good day in the office for that other long duration asset equites. Your original Q was - And my answer is kinda yeah.......as Elvis would say........."we're caught in a trap" of 4% inflation....."we can't walk out"......without either bringing down or inflicting pain on the US economy to fix it......or if you cant bring yourself to envisage 5% unemployment & negative GDP & J-P chickens out.......I can then show you door two where that doesn't happen.........BUT and a big but.....you need to accept that the long bond (10yr/30yr) the DCF magic number is going to adjust upwards to incorporate the new inflationary reality & stock prices go down....again we had a little down payment on that in the 2022 with multiple compression........but if you whisper in Pimco's ear that the Fed is giving up on 2% and is now happy at 3.5%.....oh lord not a good day for long duration assets.

Indeed - basic thinking applies...stocks broadly measured aren't cheap......the Fed is determined to disimprove the economy as a means by which to tackle inflation.....which remains too high and displaying a worrying stickiness........we are about to see them undertake another round of hikes starting in a few weeks........I think you can read into the slowness by which the economy is disimproving as some kind sign of new bull market that the bears (like me) were utterly incorrect.....I think that is wrong.....the surprising slowness is a symptom of ZIRP (so much of the economy locked in low rates).........but you should in fact be a little worried by the slowness of the disimprovement we are seeing as all things being equal it might be quite surprising how high Fed rates may need to go to bring down a rate insensitive economy like the USA. Likewise if the US economy fails to slow down....it effectively means that the Fed is implicitly accepting higher longer run inflation......and in that scenario the long end of the curve moves up aggressively and permanently to a higher plateau.......not a good day in the office for that other long duration asset called stocks. Anyway: - I'd much rather be taking BIG shots on goal with a yield curve that is steepening such that the backdrop for credit expansion exists - When the Fed would prefer stocks to go UP.....vs. down or not maybe just not caring - when Joe Sixpack's cashflow statement is modestly improving MoM/YoY vs. modestly disimproving Short version a little like @Parsad is saying I think better opportunities lay ahead....its the future so its a guess.....and I'll keep my big swings till then......lest I be accused of being a permabear missing all the 2023 rally fun I remain ~14% up YTD & so happily matching the beta but with a portfolio that looks nothing like SPY. They would say E not falling that much is part of the problem of inflation not falling by that much.....it's not really to be celebrated as a victory its really a failure of the central bank to return price stability......in an inflationary economy seeking to impose disinflationary pressure you WANT your corporate sector to get taken to the woodshed on margins, on earnings.......its part of what real sustained and on target disinflation looks like. We haven't had sustained disinflation...only transitory inflationary falls......remember supercore hasnt moved down in like 15 months, its been flat.....and so the fall in E has been more modest. But they would also say actually take a closer look at E**.......look at the nominal falls of mid-single digits.......now do the intellectually honest thing......and add inflation to the nominal percentage falls...your getting into double digits....it's not pretty....but I'll admit better not as bad as I expected........but I mean do people buy stocks at 20 times earnings for the EPS to fall YoY mid-single digits or low double digits in real terms? That's not my game. I'm a simple man - I like EPS to go UP and to go up inflation adjusted....i.e. real purchasing power increasing. And back to my opening point on the failure of supercore to actually move down........well corporate earnings & inflation are twinned........an inflationary environment allows for price increases.....a true disinflationary environment destroys corporates ability to push price against a weakening consumer....corporates ability to push price hasn't been destroyed because we actually havent deep disinflationary pressure as evidenced by YoY AND MoM supercore numbers.....so E holding up slightly better than expected but still failing significantly is a function of not having truly solved domestic inflation...........true disinflation (which we haven't seen on supercore, remember it hasn't moved at all basically and is why the Fed is getting concerned & gonna jack rates up at least two more times) happens kind of contemporaneously with earnings and profit margins shrinking. They are part of and integral to the process of TRUE disinflation. We haven't had that yet - so why would we expect earnings and margins to have their dramatic moment either? Where I was totally wrong was on the rate insensitivity of this new post-zirp US economy & timing......I really thought that 525bps done as quickly as the Fed did would have moved the needle on inflation and began the negative spending growth cycle needed (credit creation failing/spending slipping & then unemployment rising) ...........which shrinks spending & therefore compresses the delta with productivity growth and returns us to 2% inflation....I'm as shocked as they are that they've made no progress on supercore....I always said 5 to 2 would be a bitch but I meant that in the sense that it would involve pain not that it would be this slow or non-existant in the move down........but like look at the supercore it hasn't moved and correspondingly we've had limited sectoral pain & by extension limited but still significant falls in earnings.....the issue for the Fed in some ways is EXACTLY the same issue with E having 'only' fallen nominal mid-single digits......in an 8% inflation economy that characterised all of 2022 and slipping into 2023.......there remained inside that 8% then 7%, then 6% inflation economy..........a persistent & sticky underlying ~4% inflation economy (supercore) that persists right up until today that has proved immune to 525bps of hikes........transitory overseas inflation went away on its own but made in america inflation remained......and so one part of the inflationary backdrop which allows companies to push price remained in place and so too did their margins & their earnings only slipped mid-single digits.........this is part of the problem for the Fed.......they are all connected.......supercore failing will be accompanied by further leg down in earnings/margins than we've seen. So this aint over till Jay-Pow sings rate cuts. There is another leg to this......and its when supercore ACTUALLY starts to MOVE down. The Fed has supercore in its sights.....its all they talk about.....and its not stopping until it begins to move down that number......betting on an EPS rebound IMO is folly....the SPY rally right now is a bet on EPS troughing basically right now and growing out from there.......but really supercore failing if/when it does & another leg of EPS failing (again) will happen together.........your effectively saying by SPY here that the Fed is going to abandon the 2% target or can't somehow engineer a recession when they control the price of money......but after reading Edward Chancellors excellent book 'The Price of Time'.....I need to stop calling it the price of money.....price of time is more appropriate......the Fed via Fed Funds really induces everybody to shorten their TIME horizons..........credit officers defer making multi-year loans to collect overnight Fed funds instead.......companies don't invest in long term P&E projects.....preferring to dividend cash to shareholders or do buybacks NOW rather than down the road.......VC firms demand FCF now, not later......you raise the price of time enough.....and an economy no longer invests in itself to expand and it stops growing. ** Factset Key Metrics: Earnings Decline: For Q2 2023, the estimated earnings decline for the S&P 500 is -6.5%. If -6.5% is the actual decline for the quarter, it will mark the largest earnings decline reported by the index since Q2 2020 (-31.6%). https://advantage.factset.com/hubfs/Website/Resources Section/Research Desk/Earnings Insight/EarningsInsight_062323A.pdf

Nope I keep harping on about onshore market structure too but your choosing to ignore that......like I said previously and to remove the offshore piece your stuck on.......in a theoretical world where Coinbase is doing 100% of the BTC volume.........the BTC ETF still DOESNT get approved by the SEC......Why? Cause the SEC would never approve a spot ETF in anything with a market structure like we have today in crypto land - where an exchange, broker, custodian and in some cases an asset manager in the market are the EXACT same entity..........it just so happens that right now you can add to the mix that the LARGEST exchange, broker, custodian by btc volume (Binance) is both offshore and a criminal enterprise that owns ~60%+ of the volume & has just been accused by the SEC of fraud & non-existent controls.. You can't make it up in the context of believing the exact same SEC who wrote the compliant against Coinbase & Binance is gonna turn around and approve a spot btc ETF People who think that have lost their mind IMO....but that's what happens in cult-like delusions....or in a scenario where you get all your news filtered by crypto promoters/shills on twitter/youtube/telegram/discord/ Listen BlackRock/iShares almost has a fiduciary duty to it shareholders to attempt to be the first ETF in this space...they would be shot if they didn't try........that's why they've done it....even if the probability of approval is like 0.1%.....gaining approval for a novel ETF the first of its kind in any new space/sector......is like creating a perpetual money machine it's a worth a shot even if the odds are terrible....the upside is just so juicy you can't NOT do it.........an ETF is a classic example of scaled economies shared or network effects business......nobody can compete with the scale of SPX or VOO......grabbing AUM in the ETF biz & pulling away in terms of scale basically creates as perfect a moat as you can design......BlackRock/iShares had to take a shot at it......the fact it came out after the Coinbase/Binance ruling.....is more a function of odds & timing. Odds and timing? What do ya mean? This space is in the process of getting taken to the woodshed......it's only getting worse from here...see I was thinking more about why BlackRock and Fidelity submitted these ETF applications now and it dawned on me the simple explanation.....they HAD to submit now...........the nature of discovery in these SEC cases moving forward against Coinbase & Binance means WORSE information is gonna come out about the deep deep deep fundamental flaws in the spot BTC market soon......you see......as I said in my earlier posts BlackRock has been working on this ETF application for at least 24-36 months.......so think about this in terms of a bet with odds by BlackRock.........the approval odds, post Coinbase/Binance compliant, just went down by ALOT.....ok but why submit the application right after the SEC complaint.......guess if your a conspiracy theorist you say they are working with the government to 'take back' BTC, that TradFi is trying to kill crypto players like CZ and steal all the profits for itself ........NONSENSE......it's simply because the odds of a BTC ETF approval aren't going to get BETTER with time, they are getting WORSE alot worse...Why worse? Cause the odds are going to keep dropping as the Coinbase & BInance cases move forward on the discovery front.....BlackRock & Fidelity are being rational here......they are dealing with sunk ETF application R&D investment costs.......the odds of a BTC ETF approval are slipping by the minute, by the second.....the curtain is going to get pulled back further on BTC land as the SEC cases move forward.....it is not pretty. BlackRock and Fidelity are rational actors.......the best time for a US spot BTC ETF application was 18 months ago.....the next best time is today........and next year it will be worse. That's why they pumped these application out the door so quickly....they did the math......the approval odds are terrible......but they are getting worse with every moment.....so they hit SEND. I mean I can't make it more simple than that....and we just had a wonderful demonstration around our ill fated bet between two people who dont know each other..... which is very much a market/counterparty problem......imagine if my response to your wager counterparty risk conundrum was the following......hey @alxcii dont worry bro on the wager, trust ME.....I'll custody ALL our proposed wager money just send it all to me.......I'll also provide trust services and decide who won the bet when the time comes.....such that I'll also do all the settlement & clearing of the bet to make sure the winner gets the money the right amount of money......you'd rightly tell me to go JUMP.......well what I just described there is Coinbase, Binance and the whole BTC market structure......and its why the SEC will tell BlackRock to go JUMP on this ETF. Anyway I'm defo done here now solving & explaining the mysterious case of the BlackRock/Fidelity BTC ETF applications. I suspect I'm spot on....but I would say that . Catch ya when the news breaks on the ETF approval/rejection.....and I'm a man of my word.......one hundred big ones for you if either of them get approved. Best - Change

Time horizon sure but really it's a market structure thing........tell me when the BTC market structure gets 'fixed' and I'll tell you the time horizon for SEC approval. To go mainstream you really do need CZ, tether & his offshore cabal to blow themselves up.......if I was a BTC maxi.....its really this that's required for your dreams to come true on it becoming digital gold or currency that competes with the dollar....without a blow-up its a very slow roll such that the US or EU players become dominant players in terms of volume twinned with discreet BTC exchanges, custodians & brokers. Right now the BTC market remains a frontier market.....straight out of the pages of a 1920's financial markets history book....it's almost laughable how this space broadly defined as crypto is running through every foible of financial markets seen a 100 yrs ago...."history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce"....this is most definitely farce happening right now.....a 100 yrs ago people could have been forgiven for the problems that arose once you create a security from a common enterprise and sell it to strangers.......1929 collapse was a tragedy.....but we got blue sky securities laws, the separation of exchanges, custodians, brokers, clearing houses, disclosures requirements etc. ....this time is most definitely a farce..............the only thing that's different is the distribution of the scams being digital as opposed to analog & the dissemination of the narrative or story being done via social media. There will be no punting here - the SEC in the Coinbase & Binance complaint has turned its crypto cards over for everyone to see....that is why I keep saying that to approve the BTC-ETF would be completely inconsistent with their recent findings against those two entities........I'm not sure if crypto fans ever go to source documents.....I suspect they never do and information/news gets to them filtered/distorted by their YouTube algo & twitter follows.......if your interested in this space you've got to go to the horse's mouth & trust me the horse is screaming....."this BTC SHIT is never getting into the heart of our capital markets without a serious market structure overhaul" Anyway I've enjoyed chatting with folks here, I'll come back fro debrief after the Blackrock BTC-ETF rejection - lets see how it plays out.......I'm very tempted to take some kind of short position here against Coinbase......its clear a lot of delusion exists in this space re: recent regulatory action....which explains the COIN share price resilience.....my only reservation is the wise rule never to short cults.....but it certainly feels like a moment where its been revealed that the emperor has no clothes....but the court jesters are yet to turn around and see him naked.

Nice lesson in counterparty risk & trust services for you @alxcii....think your starting to get to understand how the financial services regulatory structure we have today evolved for very good reasons..........and its good you know about the power of trusted third parties....who can provide custody & settlement services.......between people who don't know each other....its very very appropriate for our regulatory discussion and good lesson why the BTC ETF approval is a crypto pipe dream ..........& that the SEC could never approve a spot ETF in BTC where an exchange that does 60%+ of the volume of BTC is simultaneously & under the SAME roof an exchange, a broker, providing trust services and a clearing house functions all while being a custodian of the same assets. For anyone who works markets - the structure is preposterous & to the SEC looking at it its laughable.....so the BlackRock ETF will join the what 20 or 30 other BTC ETF applications in the rejection bin. Anyway the complexity & you attempting to pull people into our little bet has already made me infinitely less interesting. How about this for a simple wager - I'll send you a $100 if the BlackRock BTC ETF gets approved! Simples. I don't want a single penny/satoshi from you......you now have no counterparty risk as you are not putting up any money.....you are wagering nothing......you stand to lose nothing.....it's all upside and no downside for you......and all downside and no upside for me. What a great deal. It achieves the same point....which is I'm beyond confident that I will never need to send you the $100 so i consider it a riskless bet for me too.......and I just solved your trust and counterparty problem to boot....without a blockchain being involved! I look forward to waiting for the BlackRock ETF SEC rejection.

Most plausible explanation to me so far that I’ve seen - this was a coup “fire drill” - Putin wanted to flush out any real potential insurrectionists…with a fake insurrection…..the FSB had eyes and ears out to see whom made any moves against the regime in the last 24hrs….very useless info gathered.

Absolutely I'll take that deal all day long - how much will you let me get into this wager? It is indeed free money. Im interested in as much as possible.

Moving forward when people reference a counter-offensive please specify whether it is the Ukrainian or Russian counteroffensive you are talking about…..this could get confusing

I'll take the other side of that. I would say its hard to see how it happens. Look forward to seeing what happens & returning here to get the post-mortem when this and Fidelity etf is rejected

The best source of this stuff of course is the BlackRock BTC-ETF S1 where they are ultimately forced to admit all this stuff in the risks section in the application....and the risks section is ultimately a list of reasons why the SEC will reject the application for the reason that the spot market in BTC is deeply deeply flawed & poses a serious risk to US retail investors whom couldn't be expected to know that the price on the screen they are seeing could be fake and ultimately a function of at least two frauds hiding in plain site (1) Wash Trading on the largest exchange Binance (2) Tether/stablecoin Fraud Here are some of fav risks taken directly from the S1: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1980994/000143774923017574/bit20230608_s1.htm#riskfact Wash Trading & Market Manipulation: Tether Stablecoin Ponzi Fraud Risk :

My grandma wouldn’t know to ignore Binance. This is who this ETF is opening the door too. That’s the problem….as I’ve explained. But frankly your point lacks evidence..…the price movements on Binance are mirrored with almost a 100% correlation on other exchanges….excepting your recent outrageous spike glitch that you somehow think proves your case but doesn’t..…..so the 60%+ volume player that the SEC has accused of fake trades and you say is ignored…..is actually perfectly correlated in terms price movements on Coinbase…..it’s clear that Binance walks the BTC market up and it walks it down at will.

I explained to you about signal - people DONT ignore the price on Binance….a crazy spike up like the one your hanging your theory on gets ignored everywhere and in every market…it happens occasionally in normal markets, you get a glitch…that spike wasn’t a washtrade it was a fat finger, it was glitch…..washtrading is never done in spikes as I explained already….it so close to real looking you’d barely notice but a market gets walked up by it….then as I just told you the average crypto market participant is a retail lamb, they have no idea about wash trading..…no idea how the price they see might on a screen how it could possibly not be real…how do I know I’ve talked to a lot of them and their eyes glaze over. Now but I just gave you another really really great reason why a spot ETF is not happening in my last post……cause even if Coinbase had 99% of the BTC volume….the SEC is shocked & repulsed by the basic market structure itself….where exchanges are simultaneously brokers, custodians, and asset managers. That alone @wachtwoord is a red card….then just sprinkle the Binance fake volume mkt share on top…..you’ve got two red cards.

Thats a very silly straw man argument. Let me help. The gold market is a mature market with predominately sophisticated counterparties dominating the market itself with robust regulatory players & a market structure designed to reduce the possibility of manipulation (it still happens, nothing is perfect)....but you've people running the exchanges & separate brokers running KYC & then separate custodians....all regulated top to bottom with the vast majority of volume occurring in robust jurisdictions.......now lets take your straw man argument........if a gold exchange got established in Azerbaijan & with brokers and custodians that nobody ever heard off and they collectively began printing high volume & high price trades from their little gold exchange.......those trades would have ZERO credibility & would not move spot markets cause like I said you've got sophisticated participants in market and they can spot bullshit a mile away and your imaginary gold trading platform would be like a fart in outer space........or to use my language above there would be no SIGNAL in the wash-trading & the market for gold would remain fair & transparent and an accurate representation of bilateral transactions between unrelated third parties. BTC is an immature market predominately populated with unsophisticated retail investors. Then to confound this problem is that institutional counterparties in the market are in some sense unsophisticated and not up to snuff either- which is to say they have no ability to self-police or create a robust market....because they are setup wrong.....there is no separation between exchanges, brokers, prop trading groups & custodians...Binance is all these things at once , Coinbase is all these thing at the same time........in fact the SEC compliant against Binance & Coinbase expressly points out how this market structure alone is atypical and is effectively a barrier to a market that could be considered fair, transparent & robust because the opportunity for fraud when you have those functions under the same roof (the equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange, Schwab, BlackRock, Bridgewater, DTCC & BNY Mellon) the opportunity for financial fraud is almost limitless........so you know the market structure with all these function nested inside a few entities makes the market a toxic mess.....but now as seen in the SEC compliant against Binance + the FTX debacle is that the SEC has moved from a suspicion of fraud (due to the unsophisticated market participants and poor market structure) to a realization and a confirmation that it is indeed rife with fraud & that fraud is being carried out by the No.1 player. The most boring thing in the world really as a financial service regulator must be explaining to crypto people how the world got to the current construction of exchanges, brokers, clearing houses/custodians & asset managers all beautfully separated and regulated. Dont you crypto peeps get it - the world played this movie before in the 1920's in black & white and now you guys are doing it in color. & 4K.....the tech might be shiny new with crypto......but the financial frauds underpinning it are the same....front running your clients, stealing the assets of your clients, co-mingling client assets, prop trading against your clients, wash trading to manipulate the market, painting the tape, promising outrageous things in security offerings, not disclosing related parties, insider trading, high yield fraud, ponzi economics obscured, pyramid schemes, chain letters & MLM schemes .......and there's nothing inherent in the technology of security tokens or commodity tokens like BTC that changes whats as old as the sun and thats the various ways financial fraudsters defraud the public. The BTC market is so far away from being robust its not even funny.....its literally a fraud Disney world the way its currently constructed and the SEC knows it and they are not letting a BTC-ETF within 3000 miles of a US listed spot ETF. Like your literally living in never never land if you believe that & I'm afraid your social media filter needs to be tweaked cause you've let too many crypto promoters into your news feed.

Tribalism nationalism - but your putting words in my mouth.....i never spoke about coordination......I think we can agree that the news or lets call it 'big' news can have a tilt.......when 'we' are at war with 'them'......the news gets tilted to favor the 'we' at the end of the day we are social animals & this comes out in our news.....as Pink Floyd put it there is 'Us and Them'.....the news inevitably follows an Us & them tilt......I'm not claiming a consirpacy here....i hate that bullshit........just a simple commonly known psychological quirk of people......which finds its way into reporting....no matter how objective the attempt....when you layer on the commercial imperative....to 'please' an audience......audiences are most 'pleased' in war reporting by us and them narratives. So please dont put me in a consipracy bucket....nobody is having secret editorial calls at midnight across Japan, germany, france etc. of course not.

My analysis is really concerned with what the SEC is concerned with - look at the market in its totality......and ask what proportion of the volume in that market can be attributed to entities where one can have faith in the volume/price displayed having occurred between unrelated parties trading on an arms length basis on the exchange. The BTC market because of Binance + others large participation in it completely fails this test and so the SEC will never allow access to the most inner sanctum of the US capital markets which is lets call them grandma & grandpa ETF's.

Come on now your being a bit pendantic - 'our' news of course is the big boys with nice big budgets & audiences.... MSNC,CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox, BBC and list mainly TV news as this is the news that people consume reallly in the main....lets call it video news. Of course the internet has changed the game so to speak - for those who want to dive deeper on things.......but like 98% of people dont.......I'm sure your in the 2% @Viking as are lots of people in this thread/board........we are a little cult of news junkies, that are curious, that are engaged. The 2% vote in elections....but so do the other 98% and they shape elections/public policy......I should have been clearer in my post.....I was thinking about how the average person vaguely engaged on the subject is presented information & indeed what their impression might be of how things are going & that is shaped. Folks on here go further and deeper than that......I would put you + the common posters here in perhaps the top 0.1% of folks engaged on things......and I'm guessing nobody starts & stops with the 6 minute segment on Ukraine on CBS in the evening.....but let me tell you 99% of people do.........CBS/ABC is the NEWS for lots and lots of people. That was point.

The absense of news is a clue to how things are going. Omission is how our media filters information. Its certainly less horrible than the outright nonsense seen in other countries like Russia - we are lucky in that 'our' press is indeed the most free but its not immune to shaping the news around narratives/audiences/advertisers......Ukraine struggling to make headway with the offensive, after all our support and rhetoric, is counter to the narrative, fails to sell papers/clicks which loses you advertisers. Our media aren't scumbags - but if/when things start going badly for the Ukrainians I would expect that we wouldn't hear about contemporaneously & in 'real-time' but rather a little after the fact and only when its hard to ignore. I would expect a little exaggeration too on Ukrainian successes. I think when you put that filter on things we are lucky to have a press/media as good as we do.

It’s artillery, economy & the number of male bodies you can put through the meat grinder here that matters most. Population - Russia has Ukraine beat what 5 to 1 on the population piece and I don’t see a commitment where ‘we’ would be sending any of our young men to die. Artillery - Russia is the master of its own destiny here….Ukraine not so much….id rather be Russia here. Economy - like it or not Russia has a self-sustaining economy with petro dollars….Ukraine is on life support & completely reliant on the kindness of strangers. I hate what Russia has done - but you ask me what position I’d like to be in across the above criteria - you would ask for the Russian set of cards every day of the week.

Again back to my concept of layers in the US capital markets.....its not one markets, its many markets.......where grandma is sitting in the most protected layer at the centre To buy these ETF futures - Again the problem with your BTC-ETF approval dream - is that you need to believe that the SEC is going to allow a deeply deeply deeply flawed spot market, riddled with wash trading and a lack of controls, a direct line into the most sacrosanct part of the US capital markets.....which is a standard ETF wrapper that would trade in the same permission pool as say SPY, QQQ, SPX, VTI, VOO......not happening and not a chance thats gonna happen. I'm sorry - not until the market structure for BTC completely changes perhaps that happens if/when Binance et al go the way of FTX & 90%+ of volume starts trading on-shore (EU/USA)...until then park the BTC ETF dream.

I'm afriad it is........outrageous spikes on exchanges of course are ignored......this is not how you run a washtrade scam........a washtrade market manipulation scam is done by 'walking' the price up. Moron's doing washtrade scams - spike the price......you walk it up.....you make it believable....small trades......with the price edged up by 0.25% a time......this type of signal gets incorporated into Coinbase volume/pricing in BTC etc. This is HOW Binance but more correctly the market manipulators on Binance (operating with their blessing) play football with the price & perpetuate fraud. This is why the SEC will never approve a BTC-ETF - it would be like opening up my grandma's wallet for CZ & friends to take what they want.

Doesnt matter - like i said - markets are about signal.......and the BTC-ETF approval is dependent on the SEC coming to the conclusion that the underlying spot market for BTC has fidelity that the 'tape' can be believed. That it is an accurate representation of the price and volume of BTC being transacted by unrelated third parties happening in trading venues with adequate/robust kyc controls. The price/volume on the screen for BTC....is being written by wash-traders on Binance/Heibu/KuCoin....lets even pretend that they were only 20% of the market.....even that is too much in a free & fair market....and does not reach the level required, as I said, to open the door to the wallets of Joe Sixpack on NYSE/Nasdaq This is why the Binance SEC compliant is completely inconsistent with your dream for a BTC ETF approval.