TwoCitiesCapital

The crazy thing is, this should be illustrative of why it's NOT overvalued. The other two companies - you could argue surging commoditt prices may normalize and shares/earnings will follow. For an insurance co? A huge chunk of those earnings are guaranteed for the next 4-years. It's not like Fairfax's balance sheet is dependent on gold prices.... You see this chart and it's immediately clear one of these things isn't like the others with just one follow up question of "what is driving these rallies?"

+1 Russian oil/gas was still finding it's way to market, so I don't expect that will meaningfully impact global prices. Will just make it more expensive for India/China who won't be able to buy hated oil at a discount and less expensive for Europe who now has more choices - but average prices globally will remain largely unimpacted. Agreed it's not bullish for net investment and new production at this time.

If only this was somehow foreseeable... /Sarcasm +1 Just more smoke and mirrors. Elon and DJT know this isn't the bombshell they're making it out to be. They want us focused on this instead of other things like DJTs administration falsifying the documents for the $400 million in Tesla cybertrucks to make it appear as if that was Biden's administration...

Maybe Eric Trump bought the dip and needed a pick me-up

I have similar concerns, but this is exactly how our nuclear launch codes work. We don't seem to be demanding changes there.

Is a good question. There are multisig wallets that would allow for transactions with "2 of 3" signing parties present (or other variations). So you could have 3 employees trusted with different "passcodes" requiring collusion between at least two of them to do anything and protecting against a single rogue actor. I'm not in support of any crypto strategic reserve that comes before we eliminate the deficit or includes anything other than Bitcoin. That's because there is no realistic scenario where the government could hope to acquire any amount that is meaningful relative to our deficits/debts/unfunded liabilities and it's a waste of energy looking to Bitcoin to save us from the bad decisions of our politicians.

No more of a religion than the belief in the "full faith and credit" of the US government. Or the religious-right imposing their white-washed view of Christianity on the rest of the club.

Did they? We did direct payments and then got inflation. We stopped the direct payments and inflation started to moderate. Did I miss something? Some of it was supply chain related, absolutely! Buts it's not like prices reverted afterwards. No, they kept going up - just at a slower rate. That's demonstration of a persistent loss of purchasing power and not a one time supply shock that was later fixed. #DirectMonetaryDebasement I dunno - have you seen the costs of homes? Or gold? Or Bitcoin? Or stocks relative to earnings that were nominally higher in 2021 ?!?! Or what bonds are yielding despite the "expected" forward inflation? Seems like we've definitely had inflation and plenty of people are expecting more based on the prices I see in these traditional 'hedges'. It seems pretty clear to me that the current administration is trying to manufacture a recession now so they can be credited with a recovery when we have elections in 4-years after they spend trillions more than project to bring the economy back out of it. Trump will cut $2 trillion from the budget just like Trump got Mexico to pay for the wall or China to pay for his tarriffs. It's $2T+ per year more than is advisable...and you're kidding yourself if you don't think we're gonna blow that out of the water. Which is why you'd expect inflation to continue.

Yea - I'm not crazy about the idea. I'm fine with banks allowed some lattitude to hold it, with an appropriate capital charge for the volatility, but exposures and they shouldn't be release crypto oriented products without a way to bring in crypto based revenue. As for the US government? Sure. If they want to create a policy of holding BTC that is seized, or other crypto, or converted all seized crypto into BTC, I'm fine with it. While I would personally benefit from the policy of printing money to buy BTC, that is not a sound policy I would generally support as it is going to hurt the 80-90% of the population that doesn't hold it (or the others). +1 As mentioned before, without the details, it could be a big nothing-burger. Yup. It's Trump. This is how he operates. His base is still waiting for tipped wages and overtime to be tax-free (and believe it is still coming!).

Surely those won't have more weight than $TRUMP?

I would like more details on list that tokens included, how inclusion is determined, and how inclusion/exclusion will be determined in the future...along with proposed weightings. I am surprised it happened so quickly - but the details on the size of the reserve, the weightings within it, and the timeframe to get there - so it may still be a nothing-burger or yet another way to funnel US taxpayer money into TRUMP coin which may be included next As a US tax payer, I'd be concerned if the weighting of the non-Bitcoin tokens was significant. At the very least we should start off with a rough market-cap approximation which would put ~65% in BTC, or more, into BTC.

Yes, but it has to be in size as the gas fees/latency/slippage impact earnings. Gas fee are basically the same for a 1k transaction as a 10k transaction for instance so the more size you have the more fees become meaningless. FTX was doing this and is one of the reasons they were so massively profitable - nobody else was really gaming price differentials across exchanges. Had they had some risk controls and actual segregation of client funds from prop trading then they'd have probably been fine. I started with ~20k in the space in 2021 and probably added $20-30k more over the course of 18 months as I was learning. The fees ate me alive. You'd probably need at least 5x that amount as a starter to dip your toes into the pool and have a reasonable amount to work with and diversify across 3-4 different activities. The traditional process: Transfer money to Coinbase and buy ETH (commission). Send that to your private wallet (gas fees). Take the ETH to Uniswap and buy the token you want (gas fees to permission the app/gas fees to trade the token/slippage). Take those tokens and stake them (gas fees to permission the app/gas fees to stake the token). You still haven't earned a return yet, but have paid 5 sets of fees so far. Today, there is another set of fees to move your ETH/token from base-chain to level 2 chains to lessen the ongoing gas-fees. I don't' know what this costs today, but in 2021 it was going to be over $500 of ETH for me to move my balances to L2 on Optimism and was going to leave me in an inactive limbo of 7-10 days waiting for that to process. But that isn't where the fees ended. The Yearn pools I staked to earn yield on various projects? Ended up closing due to developers moving onto new projects requiring me to withdraw the money (gas fees) and stake new pools (more gas fees) that then later closed too (more gas fees). Returns were minimal and the transaction was forced - you didn't really have a choice. The Curv stablecoin exchange I provided liquidity to? The returns in mid-2021 were not really more than low-single digits which was a far cry from what the historical revenues had been so there were more fees for me to unstake and move elsewhere. The token lending I did on Aave? Proved to be the same. Rates were high at first and then immediately came down to levels less than what I could earn in a money market. Eventually, all interest rates moved to zero because I didn't unstake (gas fees), move to L2 (more fees), and restake on the L2 networks (gas fees) so I had to unstake everything and move to elsewhere. The derivative exchange I staked? Paid weekly rewards that vested in a year...i.e. weekly fees to claim (that often approached or even exceeded the reward value) and fees again in a year to claim the vested tokens. Not to mention, I had to maintain a specific ratio of capital so there were constant additional deposits/staking (more fees) to keep myself eligible to earn the rewards as the token was diving in price 90+%. I looked into providing liquidity for token pairs on Uniswap and others, but was seeing that the returns there paled in comparison to simply buying and holding the tokens. All of this pushed me away from the decentralized stuff into the more centralized carriers like BlockFi and Celsius where the scale made the fees more reasonably. And then they went under.... Much of the yield doesn't actually occur, when it does occur it is paid in tokens that are likely to depreciate massively, you are forced into transactions you didn't necessarily want to make (like when protocols go unsupported or returns suddenly go from 10-15% to 2%), and every disposal of a token is taxable INCLUDING the gas paid for every transaction which makes tax time an absolute pain in the ass. I spent 3-years in the space. Its not clear to me that real improvements have been made for the longevity of the product, the returns are ephemeral, fees are enormous and regular, and the economy is circular. There's money to be made here, but its from the zero-sum game of taking it from others less lucky than you and not because the pie is growing overall.

Same. You can tell exactly when dry January stopped based on my heart rate variability changing. Not sure what do with the data to the extent that I don't know how much of a health difference having a heart rate variability in the upper 30s/lower 40s is vs having it in the lower 30s, but you can definitely see the physiological impact it has.

Yea - Im playing it the boring way. Probably ~25% of my portfolio is in bond funds like RGVGX at this time. Sold out of my TLT/ZROZ last month and replaced with calls - so still have some duration kicker, but not as much as I did a few months back. I'll just have to be content with modest gains on 25% of my portfolio that can be used to buy more of the remaining 75% when it drops.

This is where you'd want to buy CDX on IG and HY. Anyone know if Ackman is doing that?!?!

The revisions in Atlanta Fed GDPNOw estimates agree with you. We seem to be headed for a contraction fairly quickly. About to line up another Republican led recession and Trump will be 2 for 2 in "being good for business" while wrecking the economy.

It may create a recession in the short term and will limit choice/competition and increase inflation intermediate/long term.

Plenty of people believe it - in both parties. Otherwise we'd have never have gotten here. Trump himself ran the largest peacetime deficits ever during his last presidency and Musk's current cost cuts pale in comparison to Republican proposed tax cuts that will further increase the debt. We're past the point of no return IMO. How quickly it unravels depends on how quickly others come to the same conclusion.

I think it's possible. But people said the same with the launch of futures and futures ETFs and it played out the same. I know it WILL break. But until it does, I use it to guide me.

Oh, trust me. I'm watching MSTR too. Trading at a 3-4x premium to NAV was worrisome. The recent correction has me feeling better about the path forward though. Last cycle was similar. MSTR traded higher/faster than BTC appreciated, topped earlier, and then the ratio of MSTR/BTC faded into BTCs top. Then alt coins rallies. Then everything died. So far, only MSTR has topped so there are more steps left if we follow the same pattern. I dunno when the 4-year cycle will break. Maybe it's this year. But if it continues, it implied a high sometime in the fall with highs significantly higher than we're at now. And if it is broken? All bets are off, but that also means the traditional 80+% decline is probably off the table too.

Or full self driving. Yet here we are.

We don't need to worry about inflation again until Trump tries to spend his way out of the next recession. On a secular basis, I expect inflation to be higher than last decade. But not in the next year or two.

the hottest new meme coin is....Bitcoin? https://www.dlnews.com/research/btc-bull-token-soars-past-25m-in-presale-as-expert-tips-100x-gains-best-meme-coin-to-buy/ Not sure of the mechanics of how you can airdrop BTC on Ethereum - I have to guess that "$BTC" is some other bullshit token or is a reference to some version of wrapped BTC. But should then be referred to as wrapped BTC or wBTC instead. I will believe that the bull market is over when people start getting rich on this type of stuff. That will be the heigh of euphoria - people buying something that isn't BTC, but is tied to BTCs price/success, in hopes of getting rich buying something other than BTC. Would be nice of the crypto industry outside of BTC existed for something other than degenerate gambling on shitcoins, but here we are. All roads will eventually lead back to Bitcoin. In the meantime, capital will be eviscerated in alts space.

Doomed? Probably not. Elon has always found creative ways to save it - institutional investors buying minority interests, publicly lying about its finances while being days away from running out of cash, promises that build hype but then are never delivered on (or delivered years later), etc. He'll find a way. But it will be a no-growth company selling a fraction of the cars of other OEMs with no immediate pathway to revenue growth trading for $1 trillion.... who is going to want to own it? Maybe everyone can sell to Kathy Woods and the price will remain unchanged.