TwoCitiesCapital

And yet has kept up with the S&P 500 for the last ~40 years in terms of returns. I understand we're all Buffet-types here and Buffett never liked gold, but there were obviously times and places for it and was a great portfolio diversifier from a more "modern portfolio theory" framework. I think Bitcoin will play this role in the future. All of the naysayers have to consider that they naysayed: when it was just a hobbyist collectible naysayed when it first made wide headlines in 2017/2018 for rallying to 20k naysayed as the financial community started to point out its risk adjusted returns/risk profile naysayed while companies (and COUNTRIES) started acquiring it for their balance sheets naysayed when the largest asset manager in the world launched its ETF and advocated for a portfolio position and are now naysaying while the US government is announcing an official reserve for it That isn't to say there won't be set-backs, but the direction is CLEAR and becoming more CLEAR every day. There are only 21 million of these things. The ONLY way this can happen is if the market rises enormously to accommodate the demand/flows.

RC Capital Not a ticker I follow regularly, but is a REIT of sorts that just reduced its dividend and announced a $150 million stock buybacks program. $150 million is 15-20% of the plunge-adjusted market cap. Supposedly book value of portfolio is ~$10 per share while shares now trade near $5 - so should be accretive. And they seem serious about it to. Repurchased $40 million in the quarter preceding the dividend/reduction and plunge Buyback plus plunge in price were enough to interest me. Will take a deeper dive once I find the time - but struck me as the situation we all hope for: a management willing to cut the divvy for buybacks, when it makes sense, a falling stock price to supercharge that accretion.

It is a step - it is not a step that pleases the moon boyz. It is more measured than you'd expect from Trump - and perhaps James is right he'll still full-Trump it tomorrow. I myself am happy to continue holding and accumulating and this doesn't do much to change anything for me other than to act as one of many confirmations that mainstream adoption is happening right before our eyes.

+1 Would love to see them move from 3-4 year treasuries to IG corporates and other higher yielding opportunities if/when spreads blow out. We could easily get 50% more income locked in on a scenario like that.

No. Myself, and I think most Bitcoin proponents, would argue for BTC only if this is being done. That being said, I mostly indifferent to it. There is no way the US government will be able to acquire enough to matter relative to its deficits OR debt - so I don't want them to try (as a taxpayer). As a cryptoholder with ~20% of my net worth in BTC, I'll benefit enormously of the US govt tried to acquire a meaningful amount of BTC to build a reserve. I think the best of both worlds - balancing my views on BTC with my views as a taxpayer - the US government is better off focusing on debt/deficits/budget and not wasting time on this - but SHOULD probably have a policy of holding any BTC they acquire via law enforcement means and/or converting other cryptos acquired in a similar manner to BTC.

The argument would probably be that there are rarely times when there are two monetary standards. Even in the age of gold & silver - most preferred gold, gold has traded at an increasing multiple to silver over time, and the countries who initially chose silver mostly ended up switching to gold at unfavorable exchange rates (who do governments sell to when no one else is buying government sized lots?). It's a winner take most/winner take all market. Either you're the best long-term money to hold in reserve or you aren't. And everyone wants the best. I expect at some point Gold would be demonetized in favor of Bitcoin and gold's relative price to BTC will suffer even more than it already has as a result. So the primary issue with gold reserves is the threat of them not being of much useful value in 20-30 years and that COULD be an argument for establishing a BTC reserve as a hedge. That being said, I don't really think any of it matters. Fiat currency is toast regardless IMO and there will be pain as that is worked through.

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.