TwoCitiesCapital

This. I try to find the middle ground - deals are too lucrative to totally ignore, but I also don't want to spend hours planning flights (let alone hotels) to get the best redemptions available. I typically sign up for 1-2 stupidly lucrative cards a year. This year it was Capital One (spend $500 and get $200 back) which I did in a single purchase. Now will be used as an balance transfer card to roll a portion of my new car loan at 0% interest for 18 months. The other was the American Express Business Platinum. Already had the personal, but got a 150k sign-up bonus AND the 35% points return immediately increases the value of the sign up bonus and the 180k of accrued points I already had. So far, have used points to book for round trip tickets to Denver, Toronto, Florida, and Hawaii for my girlfriend and I and will still be ending the year with a higher point balance than I started with as a result. 8-free round trip tickets isn't anything to sneeze at.

Barely a new ATH set for Bitcoin today.

I thought it was his serve

Does this mean he's lost his focus again and we should be actively shorting/selling his investment vehicles?

That an interesting way to view inviting a mob to march on the capital and threatening the vice president's life...

It would certainly be a bold step for him to try for a 3rd time....and I'm not as certain as you that he won't try. Hasn't mattered for the last 15 years. I don't expect it'll matter much going forward. If anything, a change from the status quo is the risk. Nobody cares about this. Especially with no courts having the balls, (or now the power/resources) to really enforce the law. We've seen this even before Trump. It'll be worse after him. There is no scenario where owning 80% or the orgs is better than owning 100% of the profits and capital with none of the liabilities. Right now tax payers are sitting on ill gotten gains and it'll be tax payers that bear the cost of that rectification if it ever occurs.

Stablecoins are about the only use case that I see as valuable to the Ethereum eco-system at this point, but even that doesn't necessarily mean the benefits accrue to ETH. Take Tether for instance - more than 1/2 of Tether is now circulating on Tron over ETH. Have been waiting since 2021 for evolutions in DeFi and DAOs to actually come to fruition and it's just NOT happening. I'm basically a Bitcoin maxi now as a result of watching ETH with disappointment for 4-5 years.

A little confused by the story. Is the bolded part supposed to actually read that he IS loyal which is why he didn't sell?

Of course! Which is why I said sometimes. Intermediate US bonds sucked in 2022, but short term bonds were only down 3-4% while equities were down double digits. Gold was flat. Intermediate bonds did fine this year in the April drawdown. Gold did even better. You have 3-5 of these exposures that aren't positively correlated and there's typically something you can do without being forced to sell at a loss. But as with anything, price you pay matters. And paying such a high price to get 0% yield means your forward return is likely terrible regardless of the environment.

I think if you really envision a debt spiral for the U.S. - what you also have to envision is the government capping interest rates like they did in WW2 and restrictions on capital flows. So I don't necessarily think you get a secular tailwind of an upward rate trend. Will interest rates be higher in the 2020s then they were in the 2010s - sure. But will they be significantly higher than the 4.5 - 5.5%-ish we've seen this cycle? Probably not significantly so.

The net worth data was scraped off Google searches. Perhaps it was was exaggerated/debunked. Point was even if you believe the most egregious numbers about the Biden's over his 12 years in office, it pales in comparison by orders of magnitude to Trump's first 6 months of this term....

Am up ~14% YTD with a 45% slug to fixed income. Returns are primarily from Fairfax, Fairfax India, Alibaba, Prosus, and Bitcoin and selling covered calls and cash secured put spreads on IBIT.

There were problems with the Biden's - for sure. But ignoring what is happening under Trump because "what about the Bidens" ignores the dramatic difference in scale between the two If you believe everything coming out of the Trump administration (a big ask!), the total the Biden family received from foreign entities for "influence peddling" was ~$20-30 million over the 12 years he was VP and then President. DJT just accepted a $100-150 million plane directly from a foreign government. In his first 6-months in office.... Biden's net worth when taking presidential office was estimated to be $8 million. Leaving office was estimated to be ~$40 million. Assuming it was all ill-gotten, that is ~$32 million of corrupt gains. DJT family have raked in over $600 million from crypto based 'scams' in just his first 6 months.... There is NO comparison in the scale of grift that is going on. If you're point is to be 'objective' - it starts with admitting that these are in no way comparable in scale and one of these is WAY worse than the other

I asked chat GPT to give me year-edd BTC targets based on historical trading patterns. $40 -225k encapsulated the 95% confidence range with it's mean/median estimate at $130-150k. Then I told it to ignore all prior trading history and estimate the price based only on supply demand factors. It estimates demand at ~2k BTC per day (ETFs alone are doing more than this on a lot of days - no consideration for miners holding, corporations/countries buying, or non-brokerage activity) and the annual shortfall at ~530k BTC. Based on supply/demand mismatch, it acknowledged the potential for parabolic outcomes asymmetric to the upside. It's range is $180,000 -$280,000 to compel additional sales/supply if current demand trends persist.

I saw a stat the other day that more than 50% of tether issuance is now on Tron (another platform - an ETH competitor). Just because stablecoins "win" doesn't mean they'll be on ETH. You need stablecoins AND ETH to win for ETH to do well and I'm not certain that is going to happen.

If rates drop hard, there will likely be opportunities in equities and credit that make up the difference. That would be the lumpy outcome for returns instead of just consistently clipping 5% coupons whole their equity portfolio cruises. I kind of want the lumpy though - I don't expect that Fairfax will pull another 2022 and go up while markets go down when interest rates reverse. Would be nice to pick up more on the cheap whole they're picking up cheap assets and the fixed income is locked in for 2-3 years and the longer-term picture is still in tact.

I don't disagree with you in theory, but in practice the RATE of decline also matters. In this instance you have two forms of collateral: 1) Fiat - you can be near certain it will depreciate, but probably not by more than 1-5% in any given year and can be modeled easily without much of a macro view. 2) Bitcoin - an asset that can appreciate, sometimes significantly, but has also a demonstrated ability of falling 20-50% multiple times (even in bull markets) and by 80+% in bear markets. Much harder to model - particularly without a macro view that proves accurate. I DO thank Bitcoin will be used as collateral in the future. I DO believe it's volatility will continue to come down some and will be primarily in the upward direction. But I also believe this is new for the banking industry and mistakes will be made along the way. The question is how big and how widespread they'll be.

We can only say that definitively once it's closed. Any given quarter could contain a March 2020 where Fairfax goes down 40% in a month. And a single month of it doing that probably takes us back to prices below where you were asking for that That's my concern. I'm not terribly concerned about FFH's underlying value going down by 40%, but stock prices are fickle and it's based on the stock price and not the intrinsic value. And have pro-cyclical liquidity where you have to provide billions of liquidity in a down market instead of receiving it as the opposite of anti-fragile which is more of what I want from Fairfax.

Ledn has been offering Bitcoin backed mortgages for a bit now.

Sure. Everyday there are people selling. But then all that means is were exhausting the supply of people selling @ $105k - 110k to fulfilling that shortfall. I'm not selling at 105. I won't sell at 105 next week or the week after. Most people who haven't been selling for the last 1-2 months won't be selling at these same prices on the next 1-2 months. So over time, the people willing to sell at 105k -110k are doing so and that population/supply is shrinking. And those coins move to people who think 105k is a good price and plan to hold it beyond that. And then the price moves up to whatever the next wall of supply is and the process repeats. But the price trends up.

I think people, myself included, have underappreciated the extent to which the market is under supplied since the ETFa were launched. Since the 2024 halving, only 450 BTC are produced a day. And not even all of those are are part of the available supply. Miners like MARA and Cleanspark tend to hold every BTC they mine and are responsible for ~10% of the BTC mine in Q1. So less than 400 are available daily in supply. The Bitcoin ETFs sucked up 2,800 BTC on Friday. 795 BTC on Thursday. 1,500 BTC on Wednesday. 3,900 BTC on Tuesday. 3,600 BTC on Monday. Nearly every day of inflows to the ETFs is sucking up multiples of the daily available supply without including people buying BTC directly. The ONLY path forward is for the price to rise high enough to where $ inflows buy significantly less BTC or price goes high enough to compel a ton of selling. Either means significantly higher prices.

I highly doubt it. +1 BTC has been absorbing most of my incremental taxable savings for the last 2-3 years. Only once it got above $100k did I start slowing that down. Would only add that there are credible estimates that 3-6 million are permanently lost. So total eventual supply and current circulating supply are dramatically lower. +1 Anyone concerned about QC breaking Bitcoin shouldn't own banks, credit card companies, insurance companies that provide cyber security coverage, etc etc etc.

There is no asset that you buy that has "cash" backing it for the price you paid. Not treasuries. Not stocks. Not Bitcoin. When you give someone $105k to buy a Bitcoin - they aren't them holding that money in reserve to "back" the value or to give it back to you when you decide to cash out. The value is at $105k right now because that is the price that compels those with it to sell to those that are bidding for it and both have agreed that is the right price. Just like any other commodity (and basically and short- and intermediate- pricing of stocks).

Tarriffs are deflationary in the long term. Higher prices means lesser quantity sold AND/or consumers trading down. Either way, it's a net loss of revenue across the system from a combination of trading down and buying fewer units (some winners, more losers). And while those losers are losing revenue and unit sales, they just beefed up inventories which will then need to be liquidated. Further deflationary impulse. Prices go up temporarily in the short term and then get obliterated in the second order evolution. Not to mention all of the uncertainty is delaying purchases, investment, etc that slows the demand of base commodities, slows the velocity of money in the system, and typically will result in an appreciating currency which should also be a disinflationary/deflationary impulse.

+1 And you don't have to wait for the market as a whole to correct. Just individual names. I picked up plenty of names I already owned in April - Prosus, Fairfax, Ensign, Eurobank, etc. Many of these names were down 10, 20, or 30% while the S&P was only down ~15%. And I've rolled many of those purchases back to cash at 10-30% realized gains in 4-6 weeks time. I didn't deploy everything, but making double digit returns on tactical trades while earning 4-5% on the whole over time dissipates cash drag tremendously