Yeah, Tether certainly was the thing in Argentina when I was there last October/November. I forgot to bring US dollars, so I ended up selling tethers to my taxi driver (lol) who wanted to get rid of his Argentine Pesos and offered an exchange rate that was twice as good as what I got if I used a debit/credit card. Blue dollar, they called it – before Milei, anyway. They had (physical) crypto shops here and there too, but you can find those in other South American countries as well.
LUNA was not a stablecoin it was an unbacked algo spec Ponzi 😂
It’s true all ETFs have microscopic credit risk and some weird hedging convexity leakage /basis
Bitcoin has idiosyncratic regulatory, quantum hacking, custody and other risks. Odds of losing a cold wallet or losing a password probably 10,000x the odds of TQQQ default. Nothing is perfectly safe. Certainly not BTC
Jakob: "LUNA actually had a stable coin that unpegged from the USD, started by the fact that it was undercollateralized. How do you know other stable coins are not undercollateralized? Tether (biggest stablecoin by marketcap) actually had to go to court over this:
Odds of losing your wallet depend on you best practice, with multisig you can mitigate most risks of losing your bitcoin. Whilst it is true that nothing is perfectly safe, Bitcoin is certainly safer than any other asset that comes with counterparty risk. Therefore literally one of the first sentences of the Bitcoin whitepaper: "the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending", as is the case with any tradfi product, starting with the USD. And additionally in a 2022 paper published by BlackRock titled "Asset Allocation with Crypto," the investment management corporation suggests that the optimal Bitcoin allocation for a well-diversified portfolio is 84.9%:"
I just read the paper it says 3 percent not 80plus
“… an investor needs only to believe the bliss regime will occur with probabilities around 0.0005 to hold optimal BTC allocations of approximately 3%.”
Other parts of the paper say 1.7 to 3 percent allocation.
Yep Tether almost certainly undercollateralized. All assets have various risks. I’ll read the paper next week but allocating 80 plus percent to bitcoin based on past performance and historical data defies common sense to me. Bitcoin’s skew and volatility will go lower and lower now I think as we have crossed to a new regime as it becomes another Wall Street asset class and is no longer in the novel price discovery phase.
But anyway everyone should invest based on their own preferences there is no correct one size fits all answer.
Much of the white paper is obsolete at this point as BTC not at all a peer to peer currency. It’s just a store of value and NGU vehicle for most people. See El Salvador etc BTC doesn’t work as a currency only as a spec asset and that is not at all how the white paper frames it. The white paper was the dream and blackrock and Coinbase centralizarion is the primary reality for most people tradimg BTC In 2024
A few would be agricultural commodities due to massive, ongoing efficiency gains. Commodity futures in general due to negative carry. Options due to decay of course. And any asset where the future demand is incredibly uncertain. Art, collectibles, etc. will hedge you if people still want them in the future but if you buy a piece of art that goes out of favor, no bueno. Basically anything with positive cashflows is best because the value of the cashflows goes up during periods of debasement. But generally the rising tide lifts all boats.
Thanks! On commodity futures I would expect that holding & rolling the front would, all else equal, profit faster debasement / higher inflation? Of course the negative carry could more than offset that but that’s a different kind of risk factor
Commodities are funny ... they go up in big waves but then languish for very long periods. By defintion they are correlated to inflation, but they have a ton of issues with basis and roll and bad hedging costs. USO, the oil ETF is down from 600 to 72 since 2006 even though oil is basically flat in that time. Whenever the curve inverts, these ETFs get killed. Same problem in futures if front end is bid .. and commodity producers have been horrible investments too. Commodities just tend to trend cheaper in real terms over time so I'm only a fan of riding waves up ... commodities generally aren't great hedges for fiat debasemnet imo because they have negative carry most of the time and high prices lead to subsitution and greater supply. Always better to own things that are positive carry in the long run. Sometimes commodities are, but often they are not.
I read a lot of macro content, and can confidently say your work is one of the absolute best! Thank you Brent.
Thank you !
Excellent Brent...
Yeah, Tether certainly was the thing in Argentina when I was there last October/November. I forgot to bring US dollars, so I ended up selling tethers to my taxi driver (lol) who wanted to get rid of his Argentine Pesos and offered an exchange rate that was twice as good as what I got if I used a debit/credit card. Blue dollar, they called it – before Milei, anyway. They had (physical) crypto shops here and there too, but you can find those in other South American countries as well.
Always an informative fun read. Thx.
Thank you, Brian !
Interesting thanks man
This was particularly good (esp. your comments about the importance of carry, and the 3X Nasdaq & BTC correlation.
Stablecoin Terra Luna crashed and TQQQ has issuer risk, according to Jakob Debus
LUNA was not a stablecoin it was an unbacked algo spec Ponzi 😂
It’s true all ETFs have microscopic credit risk and some weird hedging convexity leakage /basis
Bitcoin has idiosyncratic regulatory, quantum hacking, custody and other risks. Odds of losing a cold wallet or losing a password probably 10,000x the odds of TQQQ default. Nothing is perfectly safe. Certainly not BTC
Jakob: "LUNA actually had a stable coin that unpegged from the USD, started by the fact that it was undercollateralized. How do you know other stable coins are not undercollateralized? Tether (biggest stablecoin by marketcap) actually had to go to court over this:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-mystery-where-s-the-69-billion-backing-the-stablecoin-tether
Regarding regulatory risks:
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/bitcoin-cannot-be-banned/
https://dergigi.com/2021/08/02/implications-of-outlawing-bitcoin/
Regarding quantum hacking:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerhuang/2020/12/21/heres-why-quantum-computing-will-not-break-cryptocurrencies/?sh=24a95b3c167b
Odds of losing your wallet depend on you best practice, with multisig you can mitigate most risks of losing your bitcoin. Whilst it is true that nothing is perfectly safe, Bitcoin is certainly safer than any other asset that comes with counterparty risk. Therefore literally one of the first sentences of the Bitcoin whitepaper: "the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending", as is the case with any tradfi product, starting with the USD. And additionally in a 2022 paper published by BlackRock titled "Asset Allocation with Crypto," the investment management corporation suggests that the optimal Bitcoin allocation for a well-diversified portfolio is 84.9%:"
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4042239
I just read the paper it says 3 percent not 80plus
“… an investor needs only to believe the bliss regime will occur with probabilities around 0.0005 to hold optimal BTC allocations of approximately 3%.”
Other parts of the paper say 1.7 to 3 percent allocation.
Where do you see 80 percent or whatever ?
Yep Tether almost certainly undercollateralized. All assets have various risks. I’ll read the paper next week but allocating 80 plus percent to bitcoin based on past performance and historical data defies common sense to me. Bitcoin’s skew and volatility will go lower and lower now I think as we have crossed to a new regime as it becomes another Wall Street asset class and is no longer in the novel price discovery phase.
But anyway everyone should invest based on their own preferences there is no correct one size fits all answer.
Much of the white paper is obsolete at this point as BTC not at all a peer to peer currency. It’s just a store of value and NGU vehicle for most people. See El Salvador etc BTC doesn’t work as a currency only as a spec asset and that is not at all how the white paper frames it. The white paper was the dream and blackrock and Coinbase centralizarion is the primary reality for most people tradimg BTC In 2024
Thanks Brent. I had a bad month January, so have decided to re-read AlphaTrader two years after the first time, best trading book I’ve read.
Thank you I appreciate this ! ... I definitely find going back and reading my favorite trading books is an excellent way to reset after a nasty slump.
“But USD fiat debases very, very slowly and almost any asset you buy is going to hedge you against fiat debasement anyway”
Q: do you have examples of assets that don’t hedge you against fiat debasement?
A few would be agricultural commodities due to massive, ongoing efficiency gains. Commodity futures in general due to negative carry. Options due to decay of course. And any asset where the future demand is incredibly uncertain. Art, collectibles, etc. will hedge you if people still want them in the future but if you buy a piece of art that goes out of favor, no bueno. Basically anything with positive cashflows is best because the value of the cashflows goes up during periods of debasement. But generally the rising tide lifts all boats.
Thanks! On commodity futures I would expect that holding & rolling the front would, all else equal, profit faster debasement / higher inflation? Of course the negative carry could more than offset that but that’s a different kind of risk factor
Commodities are funny ... they go up in big waves but then languish for very long periods. By defintion they are correlated to inflation, but they have a ton of issues with basis and roll and bad hedging costs. USO, the oil ETF is down from 600 to 72 since 2006 even though oil is basically flat in that time. Whenever the curve inverts, these ETFs get killed. Same problem in futures if front end is bid .. and commodity producers have been horrible investments too. Commodities just tend to trend cheaper in real terms over time so I'm only a fan of riding waves up ... commodities generally aren't great hedges for fiat debasemnet imo because they have negative carry most of the time and high prices lead to subsitution and greater supply. Always better to own things that are positive carry in the long run. Sometimes commodities are, but often they are not.
Thanks for that, super helpful