← The Wolf Of All Streets
Loading summary
Transcript163 lines
- [00:01]
A
Good morning everybody. Welcome to crypto town hall every weekday here at 10:15am and we've got markets up pretty much across the board. We had pretty loud calls for the top to be in in gold, but it is once again pushing towards an all time high after let me count them one down day in the last week. But people love nothing more than to try to call every single top of a parabolic run to the upside. One of the big narratives being that when gold tops bitcoin, historically bottoms, we've seen quite a few charts around. It does look like bitcoin is likely to at least be exploring or has found a bottom. Obviously we had the drop all the way down to about 103,000 last Friday. Nothing but up since then. So bitcoin back trading around 110,697 markets seemingly bouncing across the board. We can discuss where the market is at, why everything continues to go up. A lot of people pointing to a comment by Hassett, the economic adviser to the President, saying that we will likely or could possibly get an end to the government shutdown this week. But in my opinion, things are just going up. So I'm not assuming they're going to keep going up. Dave, I don't know if you heard any of that. Welcome. Obviously we unpacked a lot of these topics on macro Monday earlier, but basically just discussing how everything seemingly just continuing to rise. Can everybody hear me?
- [01:47]
B
We hear you, Scott, but Dave just dropped down.
- [01:50]
A
Yeah, Dave dropped. Anyone who would like to jump in, talk about where the market is at? Obviously, you know, we had the huge liquidation event just over a week ago on the previous Friday, and then this Friday made even lower lows, even on Coinbase. Bitcoin dropped to about 103,460. So pretty nice to see it trading back above a 110 year. Go ahead, William. William?
- [02:15]
C
Yeah. Hi everybody. Yeah, so it seems that just about anything that's not related to crypto is moving crypto prices. One day it's interest rates, the other day it's the banking crisis, tariffs, geopolitical events, the government shut down, you name it. The only time where crypto moves because of crypto, it's when crypto makes mistakes, like The Oracle's snafu. October 10, for example. When there's bad news, yeah, it's going to go down. This means that crypto is still a risk on asset. That's how it's seen. It means that the speculative forces are much stronger than any sense of fundamentals. And that's the Unfortunate thing right now still. So I'm going to repeat myself because I would love us to be more dominant in the narrative about talking about crypto in terms of usage, in terms of case studies, in terms of fundamental metrics, in terms of real traction. When are we going to.
- [03:27]
A
I lost you there for a second, William. Can you speak?
- [03:31]
C
Yeah, yeah, when you put everybody on mute. So what was I saying? What I was saying is that I'd love for crypto to start to take control of their own narrative. I mean, when is this going to happen? We are still at the mercy of external events, we're still perceived as a risk on. And the only way it's going to happen is that we have to be more vocal about the fundamental metrics that matter, the real traction, the case studies, the usages, whether it's defi and beyond. What are people doing with these real world assets, this tokenization. We need to talk more about the usage of crypto, not just the trading of crypto. That's the only way that we're going to start to control our own narrative.
- [04:21]
D
Unfortunately, I mean, I. Hey, Scott, can you hear me?
- [04:24]
A
Yeah, we hear you.
- [04:25]
D
Okay, good. Can I respond to that? Because I find it amusing. Sorry, William, I'm about to body slam you. But with Bitcoin, I'd say that I agree with you. With Ethereum and everything else, I'd say the old Chinese proverb, be careful what you ask for, for if you are not, you shall receive. It is in play because to look at tech platforms that may or may not have value and looking at the price, any basic financial, you know, metric, most of crypto is overvalued based on just standard ones. And yeah, you could say, well, there's new metrics and there's this total addressable market that's large and that's all true. But history is replete with the broken bodies of people who, you know, broken portfolios, at least of people who thought, this is different. There's new paradox. I think that you have to be very careful what you ask for. I mean, and all you have to do is look at the variant, at what happened to the Ethereum network a week ago Friday, right? You know.
- [05:36]
C
Nothing happened to it, it's just rumors.
- [05:39]
A
Dave, you're breaking up. Dave, I can't hear you.
- [05:42]
C
Nothing happened to the ethereum network on October 10th. It's rumors. Whatever you think was anecdotal, it kept humming very, very well.
- [05:55]
A
I can't hear Dave. I don't know if you guys can, but he.
- [05:58]
B
No. And I really want to hear what he's saying too.
- [06:00]
A
Me too. I'm dying to hear it. Yeah, it's a little better.
- [06:07]
B
A little better.
- [06:07]
A
We're clearly had your cell service with going out.
- [06:11]
D
Yeah. Okay, Go ahead, Dave.
- [06:16]
B
Running. He's speaking on his phone.
- [06:18]
A
Unfortunately, I would say that.
- [06:20]
D
No, I was speaking on myself.
- [06:23]
A
I was laughing so hard. Dave, go ahead.
- [06:27]
D
How about. Oh, reconnecting. Recon.
- [06:30]
A
Yeah. You sound spectacular.
- [06:32]
D
Okay. It's, it's. I now have WI fi because I.
- [06:41]
B
Well, this could be related to the Amazon outage that's going on right now.
- [06:46]
A
Either that or we're all just boomers at heart. Go ahead, Craig, jump in. You had your hand up.
- [06:52]
E
I appreciate it. No Amazon outage over here. Can you hear me clearly?
- [06:56]
B
Yeah, perfect.
- [06:57]
E
Perfect. I was actually sent a tweet the other day, call it tweet still on the, the art piece, the digital asset NFT that was purchased for $69 million. Can you guess today what it's worth? $10,000. It kind of puts into perspective on a board Ape, I guess now is worth 25, 000.
- [07:16]
D
It was purchased for 3 million.
- [07:17]
E
We're still so incredibly early. And I feel like it's sort of this, this test and measure. You mess around and you find out. But I think we have to vary on the level of patience. And you know, like again, I think you guys are better equipped from a technical standpoint to talk about what happened last Friday. But there was definitely. It spooked the market. And if you were a memer, you were all about, oh my God, my bags are down, I'm either getting in or I'm getting out. You stay put. And if you're over, if you're over leveraged and you're putting in more as a retail, you know, someone who's just, I don't say a normie, then you know you're asking for trouble. And you said, Scott, I think on a space before this you had on your live stream, you know about content creators putting out something and then erasing a tweet or a video promoting something. Don't get behind what you don't believe in. So if you believe in Bitcoin or Ethereum long term, then focus on those and keep accumulating DCA because again, we're still so incredibly early.
- [08:15]
A
Yeah. Give all credit to Dave. I think he was saying that this morning on macro Monday. It wasn't me.
- [08:20]
D
Yeah, can you hear. Is this working better now?
- [08:22]
A
You sound amazing.
- [08:24]
D
Yeah, I rebooted everything, so whatever. Okay. Yeah, there's a couple things to unpack. First is the destruction that was caused in the market takes time to get through, right? The bid didn't go anywhere in bitcoin. We can see that. We've seen it in the price. So all the hysterical numb nuts on the kols on, on Twitter or X or whatever we call it that were all yelling, sell, sell, sell. And now they're yelling, buy, buy, buy. I mean, you understand that there was a lot of leverage that was wiped out. That said, the smarter firms and the smarter people did really well and the dumber ones did poorly. It's very Darwinistic. But when you have that amount of wealth destroyed, you're going to have time. It's going to take time for markets to, you know, get back to where. Where they're going to be. And so I think we're still in a range for a little while. People are starting to get excited now because it looks like we found a tradable bottom. And that's cool. You know, you can, you can talk about narratives until you're blue in the face. The gold narrative is very important. And gold will continue to do what it's doing until the hot money stops piling into gold. And that won't happen until it meets real sellers. And we don't know when that's going to be. Now, given the fact that I think today's the first day of Diwali, anybody up here who celebrates, who understands it, that generally means a physical gold buying in India and not small amounts. So it's it gold seasonality, this is pretty strong for it, which is why those who thought it was stalling out probably, you know, well are empirically wrong. So you have to look at all these assets and understand where the money is being created. The fact is there's more liquidity sloshing around the system. And as long as liquidity sloshing around the system, some assets are going to do extremely well. And that's what you're seeing. I mean, you really don't have to look any farther than that. As far as early or not early. Look, until bitcoin starts doing something about eating into gold's monetary premium, it's still trading. Like everything else, it will at some point. And certainly its network is indicating that that will happen. When that happens, it could be explosive. But that could be a year from now, two years from now, five years from now, or it could be next week. It could start. I mean, we really just don't know anyone who claims to know that. Well, good luck. You Know, then, then your crystal ball is working, mine's in the shop, you know, so it really, it really is that you, if you are out of the market when bitcoin does its thing, as it were, then you're going to be sad because we know that most of its gains are 10 days a year. I just don't know what those 10 days are going to be. Right?
- [11:04]
A
Absolutely. Anybody raise your hand? Thoughts? Yeah. Mauricio.
- [11:09]
F
Hey guys. So I generally agree with Dave. I think once for one, I think the gold, it's hard to predict when the run in gold is going to stop. But usually when an asset starts going parabolic like that and you start seeing lines of people in different places of the world sort of rushing to buy the asset. It's late stages, but it doesn't mean that it's over right away. And the other point that I'll make is it's relatively hard to get leverage or go leverage long on gold outside of an etf, right. It's very, very difficult for people.
- [11:43]
D
Not true. Not totally not in fact. So not true. That, that's why you need to understand this. So I said it last week and I said it on Macromundi again, I'll say it one more time. There is an enormous market called contract for differences. It doesn't exist in the United States, it does exist in Europe and it's certainly in Eastern Europe, in Asia and the Middle East. It's a massive market where people are offered enormous lever buy or sell FX and gold and silver. And so, and a large part of that is driving the market. And I heard that directly from like very senior, very important, like as in largest in the world market makers. So this narrative, I used to think this too, Mauricio. I used to think, well, gold can't, doesn't have all leverage. So we're not seeing it. Actually the reason it makes what's happening in the price much more explainable. If you know that there's a hot ball of money that is the same people who buy bitcoin perpetuals aren't. They're buying gold and silver. You know, gold and silver contract for differences. Sorry to interrupt you, but you just need to know about that because I didn't know about that until last week. This just shows, you know, we all get to learn stuff.
- [12:49]
F
So that, that's, that's super interesting. Where is there a place where we can track how much leverage is going into this market? Because I think in, in bitcoin we can look at the perps and we can look at the funding rates we can look at the, the futures open interest. But how do you do that for gold?
- [13:04]
G
Well, so it's really difficult because they're by a lot of them are bilateral and they do what these FX brokers are doing, what's called B booking. So for a lot of traders, they might not even hedge until they realize that they're on the wrong side of it and then they go out and buy in large size. So it's very much like the crypto OTC market which we kind of have to guesstimate based on a lot of other factors.
- [13:22]
F
Well, that's a.
- [13:23]
B
It may be good to try to get Lawrence Leopard on here because he's, he's got a lot of knowledge in both bitcoin and the precious metals space. He's written a book and he's happy to come on. Probably.
- [13:35]
D
Yeah, we have a macaroni but Ian, in Dubai, evidently last week or the week before there was a conference there and I think it may have overlapped with where you were in Asia but evidently there was a massive conference in Dubai. FX conference that was dominated by the gold leveraging and people talking about all that.
- [13:54]
G
Yeah, I mean anecdotally I went to the gold souk last week and I tried to fix the price and put a deposit down. He's like, okay, you have to send me the money now because it's going up. And all the gold deals, dealers are very, very heavily long gold. Even now they're still buying and they're holding an inventory. So I think it has a lot more room to run just based on how busy the gold souk was and what the gold dealers were saying. But I mean, who knows?
- [14:14]
D
Yeah, that's good. That's the Peter lynch method. For those old enough to remember that count the people in the gold souk if you want to know who's buying gold.
- [14:25]
A
Craig.
- [14:29]
E
Yep. So two years ago I bought a bunch of us paper, silver, silver on paper. And it was interesting I think around that time I think it was around maybe 25, $26. It wasn't near where it is now. And I think it reminds us that we have all this. And again in this short space on X we have this short term hopium. Right. Tomorrow it's going to go up. You're, you're not thinking long term. And I'm so grateful that I actually grabbed that a few years ago and now to watch what silver's doing. It was talked about but we didn't know when and good point to, to Dave's point about, you know, there's 10 days in the market where bitcoin's going up. That's interesting. I'd love for him to elaborate a little bit more on that.
- [15:11]
A
I don't know if you heard that.
- [15:12]
D
Yep. Yeah. I don't understand the question.
- [15:15]
B
I just don't think he's familiar with the 10 days. Yeah, there's 10 big days in bitcoin.
- [15:19]
A
Oh, on average. On average. Basically, if you're out of the market, you'll probably miss the biggest moves because they happen on a very small percent of the days of the year. Historically, it's roughly, you know, 10 to 15 days of the year bitcoin makes.
- [15:33]
B
I think the statistic is something like, yeah, if you miss. If you miss the top 10 days, you actually have negative returns. That's basically the.
- [15:41]
A
Which makes sense. Which makes sense.
- [15:42]
D
Thank you.
- [15:43]
E
Y.
- [15:45]
A
Saw someone's hand go up, and then now there's no hands, of course. So there you go, Mauricio.
- [15:52]
F
Well, I'll try this one again. And. And I actually love the. Love being able to understand this golden, you know, dynamic. I. I would also love to understand if this. This is also true for people hedging trades short gold on a pairs trade, because those guys are probably all getting blown up. But I'll let. I'll let someone else speak about leverage around gold. The other piece that I saw that I think it's interesting is from a week ago till today, you've seen, at least on Poly Market, the odds of a 25 bip Fed cut in December also creep up higher by another 8%. I think right now it's. It's at 83%. The probabilities of another cut in December, and I think that that's related to. I read a tweet, I think, over the weekend that even though the government has shut down and they're not releasing a lot of the data, they've decided to release this Friday's CPI data. And apparently they're primarily priming the market for. I don't know what people are assuming might be a bullish CPI read that might basically lead to even cementing this idea of more cuts in December. But the other piece of that is I think financials have started reporting in this cycle of earnings season. And so far, I think they've all beat somebody. Correct me if they're following closer than I have, but it seems like they've all been beating. And the sentiment market, it's actually not terrible, even considering we're in the middle of a shutdown.
- [17:18]
A
Anyone? Thoughts?
- [17:19]
D
Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm trying to research. Grok is giving me a bunch of sites which, you know, things like FX Empire and Broker Chooser and Dailyforex.com and all these other ones. Trying to see if we can get a handle on the size of the CFD market. But I think they basically are just showing leverage and just, just to put it in perspective, FP Markets, Pepperstone, AVA Trade, although you're talking 1 to 401 to 501 to 501 to 1000 leverage. And then there's, there's others that go up to 2000 times leverage. So if you think I'm joking, you know, we, it almost makes crypto at 100x, you know, quaint. So there is an enormous amount of leverage available. I just don't know what the total numbers are. I don't know if there's anything like you know, Coin Glass or whatever in, in the FX market or in the, in the gold market.
- [18:08]
A
But you need, you need the leverage in the FX market to even be able to trade it because the moves are so slow.
- [18:14]
D
Small that, but that, but not in gold.
- [18:16]
A
Massive leverage to. Yeah, not, not in gold at all of course, but you, it's just for, for the clarity for people listening. You know, when you are trading on 0.1% moves, you really can't do that without the massive size and spot, of course.
- [18:32]
D
But when gold is, is moving 2 or 3% a day and you have 100 to one leverage, you're, you're either wiped out or making money in an instant. And we all know what that means. Right. You know, so it's there, there's market and it's, it's important to understand. I just think that understanding that there's a huge leverage market that retail and high net worth people can play in, in the market does change the market dynamics. And what we're seeing and actually is extremely explanatory. Right, right. It just, it explains how a market can go from being, you know, 1/10 the ball of, of the S P to being larger, you know, almost seemingly overnight. And it's like well okay, that's what it is. Gold is the new meme stock. It just happens to be almost a 30 trillion dollar memes, you know, mean asset meme asset. When you think of the size, it's enormous.
- [19:27]
A
Yeah. I'm not sure if you saw the story bit mine. Tom Lee, obviously we talked about last week the fact that he was saying treasury companies are in a bubble or worry bubble or RA bubble in the meantime bought $1.5 billion worth of ETH over the past week through the dip. So clearly showing some conviction and size.
- [19:50]
D
Well, you know, he has capital, right. You know, he's no reason to let it get dust on the capital. The real question is, you know, other than Tom Lee, will people follow through with ether? I think with bitcoin, it's pretty clear that it's a much more diversified bid. I mean, yes, MicroStrategy is buying, but MicroStrategy's amounts, relatively speaking, are small and will stay that way until bitcoin enters a new range and starts moving. It's, it's just kind of the, the dynamic of micro strategy and the way that it's all set up is until bitcoin volatility gets significantly larger at higher price levels, it becomes a, you know, it's a, it's a, a magnet. Sort of like if you think about fire, it's an accelerant. Tom Lee is kind of hold, is, is kind of holding the line here. Now, I'm not saying this necessarily bad, but, but he doesn't have the people to join him. Whereas there's plenty of talked about how.
- [20:40]
A
Volatility is obviously the lifeblood of treasury companies or certainly of a strategy where obviously he needs the volatility to be able to, you know, take advantage of it to buy more bitcoin. Does that include when, you know, we go from 126 to 102 in a matter of weeks, or is it on the upside price?
- [20:59]
D
No, volatility in general is good. I mean, you know, if you're, if, but it's a question of what does he want to do? Does he want to sell, you know, convertible it? Does he? And it really is the MicroStrategy stock, you know, volatility is the one that helps him the most. Right, but bitcoin volatility and microstrategy volatility are highly correlated. So yeah, I mean, look, he's trying to build and is building a capital stack. That's what it's all about. And his most important one is that bitcoin will outperform treasuries and if he's right, it will accelerate to the upside. If he's wrong, well then he's going to languish for a while. And that's why I keep telling people it's path dependent. Microstrategy could be, could stay range bound for longer than you think and then explode. If bitcoin really does, you know, go out of its range, but that's why when bitcoin first makes a new high or first does something, it reacts so violently to the upside. But when it stays there or, or falls, you know, it races all those gains. I mean it's, it's, I mean it's just the math of, of how, you know, he set up his capital stack. So it really is a question of do you want the longer term leverage bet that you know, because he's effectively by giving 10% interest and Mauricio, you obviously care about. You still there. Yeah, you're still there. By paying 10% on STRC, he's making a bet that bitcoin's going to outperform that and that's fine. But understand that if it doesn't, it's going to lack. Right now, this isn't over days, this isn't over weeks, we're talking months or years. But, but still.
- [22:31]
B
Yeah, yeah. I think the patience that's required right now with MicroStrategy. Keep calling it that because the word strategy is confusing Twitter.
- [22:39]
A
Twitter is Twitter and strategy is microstrategy.
- [22:42]
B
Exactly, exactly. X is Twitter. But yes, like he's, I don't want to say struggling but like the, the market demand for at the market preferreds isn't as exciting as people might have expected or as he might have expected. And my sense is it's a matter of waiting the next run up that bitcoin gets. Probably STRC will see enough of a rise in value that he's able to sell a lot of it at the market. But I saw this morning's press release. They sold no STRC at the market in the last week and so didn't. Weren't able to use it to buy any bitcoin. It may turn out that this is not the hot, the iPhone moment that they thought it was. It may turn out that they have to wait a couple more months. But you know, they, they've ratcheted up the interest rate on it now that even at par it pays ten and a quarter percent. That's pretty attractive. That's pretty attractive. And they've got the capital to, to back it up. So I, I don't know exactly what the dynamics in the market are that are shaping around this, but it should, should. We should see ignition again at strategy at some point in terms of their ability to accumulate bitcoin without issuing common, common equity. But I guess the market is trying to sort out, well, what does the preferred instrument actually look like in the capital structure and what are we putting a multiple against? Is it is it the total value of the bitcoin? Is it the total of the value of the bitcoin? Less treating the preferreds as a liability? I, I guess the market is still trying to figure that out, which is why that instrument is trading just below $99, which is at the point at which strategy it's permitted to sell, sell new shares at the market.
- [24:37]
A
It's interesting. Go ahead, Mauricio.
- [24:40]
F
Yeah, I've been following the SDRC offering quite a bit because I think it's actually a great cost of capital or a proxy of per cost of capital for bitcoin financing. And I think there's a few things to point out. I think since SDRC launch, which I think was July, July 21, Bitcoin's price performance has been pretty lackluster, I would argue, since it launched. So SDRC is this idea that, you know, ten and a quarter is a reasonable amount if Bitcoin continues to appreciate by multiples of that, you know, over time. But I think as long as you're seeing SCRC price at ten and a quarter and bitcoin performance sort of breaking even or staying flat, it's just, you know, the market might just look at that as just, you know, you know, a relatively high cost of capital relative to a levered ETF if they're going to be, you know, borrowing money, assuming at the overnight rate. So I think once you have these massive sort of breakouts in bitcoin price, it validates MicroStrategy's model and the SDRC concept and the idea that it's paying ten and a quarter and that is a reasonable price. But I think there's a few things that are challenging that view. Most of it being the fact that it's not outperforming the ten and a quarter. So I think it's also an idea of perception and going back to this idea of the 10 days, we haven't had one of those 10 days in a while in the market where bitcoin gets, the model gets validated and all these long term plays make sense again and everybody rushes back to them. So I think until we see that, it's going to be hard for not just SDRC but a lot of the treasury companies. If you look at a lot of the treasury companies, the price performance hasn't been that great. And I think it's this idea that MicroStrategy created this concept or this perception that treasury companies could raise cash at very, very attractive rates and 0% coupons to go buy this asset that was appreciating by, you know, 50% on average, year over year. But now if you actually do, you know, if you look at that today and you say, okay, well, these companies are borrowing at 10% plus and the assets flat, it's not nearly as exciting.
- [26:56]
A
Anyone comments?
- [26:58]
B
I mean, it's almost a bit of an understatement to say that the treasury companies have been underperforming, particularly the non strategy. Like the. Some of them are. Nakamoto's down. I haven't checked in the last day, but. Oh, I guess they're down to 74 cents. So they're down like 98. You know, they're down like 100%.
- [27:16]
D
Right?
- [27:17]
A
Yeah, but that. You know, we should talk about that, though, Tomer, because that's. Listen, I know that the bitcoin value was depressed certainly last week when we were talking about it. But at $111,000, Bitcoin, I have to imagine that NACA is trading at a pretty significant discount right now. Just.
- [27:33]
B
Yeah.
- [27:33]
A
Even to their bitcoin. Obviously. It was at about. I think, when it was at 110 or so, David. And I'm talking about Nakamoto at a dollar ten. Excuse me, not Bitcoin. 110,000. That they were trading roughly at nav with debt and bitcoin, they've got to be trading at a significant discount now.
- [27:52]
B
Well, those private jets are a bit of overhead over any. Over an etf. But I think, like the market's lack of enthusiasm for these other bitcoin treasury companies that don't seem to have access to cheap capital so that they can create, you know, accretive acquisitions is the market's really down on these things right now. And, you know, they may bounce back.
- [28:16]
A
But where I think they will.
- [28:18]
B
Where they were before, at these high multiples of the value of the bitcoin that they have. I think the market sobered up to that, to the notion that Tomer.
- [28:28]
A
Yeah, I think that they were trading at a massive multiple to bitcoin. They didn't even have. By the time they actually bought bitcoin, they were back to almost to par. Right. So we actually had a hype bubble where things were trading on the idea of how much bitcoin they may buy before the shares had even registered and pipe investors were in the market. So we actually had a bubble in an asset that was impossible to price on underlying value because of the mechanics, which we've seen before. Right. So, I mean, by the time. I mean, Nakamoto didn't buy bitcoin until mid August. Right. And they were already probably down still at a huge premium. I think, you know, they were trading maybe between four and eight dollars if I remember correctly. But far from the 28 that it hit, you know, on the announcement, their.
- [29:11]
H
Average price is 118 plus.
- [29:13]
A
That's the average price for Bitcoin.
- [29:17]
H
Correct.
- [29:18]
D
So I mean, so they've got to.
- [29:19]
A
Be trading at a significant discount and.
- [29:22]
H
They own 5,765 bitcoin reportedly worth $634 million, but their market cap is 397.
- [29:30]
A
Right. So even with 200 million debt or whatever, they're trading a discount.
- [29:34]
D
So the question is at what point will their reporting be good enough that people can actually make that math work? Right. So you know, what I'm saying is when their balance sheet, because they are a public company, one would think that they will have to report on what their actual debt is, what the actual enterprise value is, what their discount or premium to nav of assets is, how much enterprise value they're attributing to their ability to monetize goodwill, et cetera. But until we know that, I think that that's why it's trading the way it is. I think people think of it as broken until that. And the joke about private jets notwithstanding, that's non trivial, right? I mean not private jets necessarily, but you know, how much overhead, like what are they paying themselves, what are they, you know, what are they spending money on? Is it all accretive behaviors, etc. Etc. Really, really hard to, to value a company unless you have some notion of is it actually trading at a discount? And nobody can answer it other than we kind of say we stick our finger in the air and Gary and you and I say think it's a discount. I think it's the kind of thing that you might want to own if you think bitcoin's going higher. But you know, is it the grayscale trade when grayscale was trading at 45%, you know, between 40 and 50% discount for the better part of a year and you know that you're buying cheap Bitcoin or is it something else entirely?
- [30:55]
A
And until not only did you know you're answering. Yeah, go ahead.
- [30:58]
D
No, I was saying not until you can answer that question. The valuation is going to languish, right? Yeah.
- [31:04]
A
With gbtc, not only did you know that you were literally buying Bitcoin at a tremendous discount, you also had the odds of an ETF approval that would send it right back to zero immediately.
- [31:13]
D
Yeah, absolutely.
- [31:15]
A
And, you know, obviously, it wasn't even a speculative bet on what will this thing do if Bitcoin goes up or. Which is kind of where we're at.
- [31:23]
D
I mean, if Nakamoto is trading at a significant discount and the guys there need to get something out. You think that Jack Mullers and others or, you know, might not be able to. To make an acquisition and just say, okay, people don't like your management team, but, hey, we'll take your assets and we'll buy it this way. Boom, done. I mean, that's what. That's what happens in M and A cycles.
- [31:45]
B
I think you're right, Dave. I think one of the analogies. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's like if you roll back the clock a couple of years and you look at the Bitcoin mining companies, there were. There were many of them that were, you know, raising substantial capital, making substantial investments, but some were much more prudent with their expenses and management compensation and more had a further outlook with respect to the integration of mining with. With AI data centers. And those ones have. Have done better than. Than the ones that didn't have that professionalism, if you. For lack of a better word. And I think that that's probably what's going on. It's like, which. Which of these companies are. Are going to be run as well as. Or close to as well as strategy versus which ones are. They thought this would be easy, and it turns out it's not easy. And they're not prepared for. To do whatever it's going to take to win the confidence of investors, because investors have. Investors have strategy as the alternative. So these things. These other competitors need to have some value proposition. Other than that, we're still small and we can get big. They need to have, like, we're professional and we're smart and we're hard working. Not. We're, you know, the announcements around buying themselves private jets take it as the common. It just. It like it's the wrong.
- [33:10]
A
Can you tell us what that announcement was? I totally.
- [33:12]
B
Oh, this is months ago. Months ago. In the. In the prospectus, I think they talked. They talked about Nakamoto buying a private jet or making private jets available to their officers. So it was like, what's the priority here? The convenience and luxury of the lifestyle of the executives or the actual accretion? And you'd think that a company that's holding, that all it's doing is holding as an asset, would be the most parsimonious. Right? It's like you need to operate like Southwest Airlines or you need to operate like Walmart. You just need to have every expense. You can be as parsimonious as you possibly can because you're trying to save as much money as you as you can.
- [33:48]
A
So you need to operate like a bitcoiner.
- [33:51]
B
Yes.
- [33:51]
A
The guys who have a billion dollars in bitcoin and drive a Toyota Camry because they will never sell a single penny of their bitcoin.
- [33:57]
B
That would have been.
- [33:58]
A
Yeah, that's how you want your company that you're investing in to behave. It doesn't mean how you have to behave, but that's what you want to.
- [34:04]
B
See from if in their perspective, they had said, we are buying a used Toyota 1999 Toyota Camry for executive travel, it would have been the right signal to send and it would have been funny, and it would have been well done, received and aligned with the goals. But they instead said, I think the.
- [34:20]
A
Other thing tomer is that there's. From what I've seen. So for most of these treasury companies, you let me put it this way, strategy. He buys basically every week. Right. Come hell or high water, he finds a while.
- [34:33]
B
Except for weeks where he has other, like, other releases that prevent him. Yeah, absolutely.
- [34:39]
A
But the. So you know that come hell or high water, Michael Sailor is going to find a way to keep buying bitcoin. He's shown he's committed to it to five straight years, basically. I haven't really seen many plans for a lot of these others to buy bitcoins or huge bitcoin or huge announcements that they are. It seems like you get kind of like a big raise and a lot of kind of, you know, hype and then one purchase and then you don't hear much about it. So I think investors not specific to Nakamoto, to Treasury companies in general, want to see consistent buying, even if it's small one week, big one week. You just want to see them dollar cost averaging into the asset conviction. Amazing. If today. Yeah. If Nakamoto was making an announcement, they bought a bunch of Bitcoin at 105,000. Right?
- [35:26]
D
Yeah.
- [35:26]
B
But I think that's it. I think the reality for them is a lot of these companies are where strategy was very early on, before that, you know, and they're trying to accelerate that experience by doing exact, so far, exactly what Michael Saylor did. But it turns out he squeezed the rock dry on convertible debentures. And he's squeezing the rock dry.
- [35:50]
A
And he suffered trading way below his price of acquisition when Bitcoin was at the depths of the bear market. And there were the questions as to survival that people were posing. You can't replicate what he did. And if they're trying to accelerate what he did, they need to be buying Bitcoin immediately, not start a company and buy Bitcoin two years later. Yeah, it's just not. I don't think you can copy that model. I mean, we started this by saying.
- [36:13]
H
They don't have any more money.
- [36:15]
A
Exactly.
- [36:15]
H
But we don't have any more money. They got to go raise new money. I mean, I'm in this thing. I'm thinking about dumping it, Scott, because like, if you really think it through, they're done. They have, they've deployed their cash.
- [36:27]
A
Yeah, that's my point.
- [36:28]
H
Magazine is a fucking option worth $12.
- [36:30]
A
And there's no path 12.
- [36:32]
H
$12 divided by all the shares, by the way, not $12 per share. So what do you. I mean, I don't know how you. Look, what needs to happen is that Sailor wants to own access to the Japanese market and he buys Meta Planet and NACA for discount to what he could buy Bitcoin. That to me, makes sense. Makes total sense. If he could pick up Bitcoin at a hundred thousand dollars right now from Naca Meta, which I think he could probably do.
- [37:02]
A
What'd you say the market cap of NACA was?
- [37:06]
H
400.
- [37:07]
A
I mean, that, that, that's a week of buying on a good week for sailor.
- [37:12]
H
Yep. And NACA's average cost is 117 and 7. So call it 118. I don't think they have any more cash. I think they've deployed the capital, so they have to now what, issue new shares at $0.70? They've already gone through one debt holder that like the first debt holder, they realized they didn't have a good relationship. It's just a circuit, man. It's just not. It's amateur hour.
- [37:39]
A
And I, I think that that's why we started.
- [37:42]
H
I mean, I'm just having these conversations with you and I because we're like no financial advice to anybody else. But you and I are in this deal. We kind of went in at about the same time. I got a sizable position here. Not going to kill me, but it was a mistake, man.
- [37:57]
A
Yeah, but, but you got my worms, though. You came on here at 95 cents and said, Every part of me wants to buy more because of averaging down, but I'm not doing that. And here we are at 74.
- [38:06]
H
Yeah, well, that's an ego. That's an ego move, dude. Like, I bet I'm better off buying iron, you know, below $60.
- [38:14]
A
But, you know, as. As I don't know the answer. By the way, they can raise more cash. The inability to buy more is problematic, as I.
- [38:22]
H
Exactly, dude. It's a huge problem. They have to issue more shares. I mean, right. Or they surrender their salaries, which is maybe a million dollars a year max. So I don't know how this gets fixed. Actually, I reached out to what's his name three weeks ago. Two weeks later, Luca says, hey, David asked me to call you. I'm like, seriously, dude? My email was literally, hey, how much liquidity do you need to stop the bleeding? And I didn't get a phone call back. And that's the guy I gave 12.8 Bitcoin to through the bitcoin community. I mean it's. Who does that, dude?
- [39:03]
A
Yeah, it's challenging and I think, you know, to the greater conversation, we started this by saying Tom Lee bought $1.5 billion of ETH through the dip. That's what people are going to want to see. I don't know if you guys.
- [39:15]
D
That's a pro.
- [39:16]
H
He's executing, dude. He said he was going to do something. He's going to own 5% of the Ethereum supply, like it or not. Like we know what his strategy is. To me, that's a better trade than what David's doing.
- [39:26]
A
Yeah, I mean that's even current valuation, you need to see them buying through the dips and to have dry powder, you need to see them behaving like responsible investors or like you would if you were trying to acquire any of these assets. It's really that simple. They just. There was an announcement today, actually. Interestingly, you know, Tom, we had said that the bubble had somewhat popped on these. I was kind of looking back. We have not seen many treasury company announcements in the past few weeks of them forming. But we did get an announcement today that the co founder of Huobi is doing a billion dollar eth treasury company. That was actually kind of the first announcement we've seen in a while of anything sizable. A while only being a couple of weeks, but yeah, it's hard to imagine that anyone who didn't have capital on the sidelines to buy the largest liquidation event in history is going to have raised much confidence or show that there's a clear path here. I'm just thinking this through in real time with you, Gary, but you. Any one of these companies, you would have wanted to see, hey, we bought Bitcoin at 105, hey, we bought efit, you know, 37, hey, we bought Solana at, you know, 180 or whatever the kind of general lows were. Anybody else thoughts here generally on this trend? And, and you know what it pays.
- [40:39]
B
To have adults in the room like that? That's, that's the fundamental comment here, right? Like Saylor has a lot of experience and Tom Lee is a very mature person. And right now maturity is being rewarded rather than immaturity.
- [40:57]
D
I mean, yeah, look, the entire thing is important to look at. It was less than a week ago when various people were on X talking about treasury companies imploding and forced selling, which we all kind of looked at and said, well that's dumb. I mean, just literally dumb. And of course you have, you know, people with hundreds of thousands of followers saying this is going to happen and this is the reason why you're going to get shorts, etc. I mean, we all understand that the capital markets won't allow things that are dumb to happen. You know, that much. I mean, yeah, obviously markets get crazy in various directions, but you know, it, it becomes a buy. Meanwhile, you know, in the alt markets, you know, we've seen other things and you know, and there's other stuff that could be talked about. But you know, if we're talking about Bitcoin specifically, if the major driver of it falling from these levels and losing, you know, 100, losing the 50, you know, the 200 day ma or any of the other things that everyone looks at is going to be forced selling? Well, no, the for selling hasn't happened. And then you have to ask yourself the question, well, what happens if that forced selling, if all the people who shorted it and a lot did, did it on the back of for selling in the future and the for selling doesn't happen, what do you think is going to happen to the price?
- [42:16]
A
Short squeeze? Yeah, I mean you should go up, but yeah, it makes a lot. I, I guess the question is though, at what point do these just. Either they're spending too much money or they can't buy more bitcoin, how do they phase out? I mean, obviously we talked about the merger and acquisition, but what's the end game here? If you're frozen and buy bitcoin once and that's your treasury strategy?
- [42:41]
D
Well, I mean, think about it. You know, that's just, I hate to say it, that's silly, but it's silly, right? Because either one of two things is possible if all the investors in. Let's just, we're picking on David Bailey today. So let's pick on David Bailey. So of all the investors in Nakamoto set out, crap, I want to dump my shares and it gets to a super discount, someone's just going to go and make an M A offer to buy it. Because you're right, I mean, it's easy enough to raise money to buy things at a discount. What's hard to do is to raise money to buy Bitcoin at 111,200. But if someone says you can effectively buy Bitcoin today at 90,000, you're it's going to be that there's going to be an E that's an easy sell. You can find a lot of money who's willing to buy bitcoin at a 20 some odd percent discount to the market, if that's what it is. And especially because the people who buy it can fire the executives, sell the private plane and effectively turn it into a pure Bitcoin strategy. So to think that that will happen is silly. It's also silly that a company, if that a company who has is trading at a discount, can't find people willing to buy in at a discount. Right. You know, because yes, there's dilution. But the trick is, is you can't. I'll tell you, here's what you can't do. You can't find people willing to give you cash that you're going to sit on for some indeterminate amount of time to buy Bitcoin and then buy it. You can find people who will give you money in order to deploy Bitcoin. So it's much more likely they'll get a revolving credit line from people who will convert that credit into equity if and when they actually make the asset purchase. You can structure deals in, in a variety of ways to do that. Now, I don't know if the management team at Naco or any of these other treasury companies understands capital markets enough to know that you can do that. You can do it with derivative contracts. There's lots of different ways you can play this, but you actually have to understand the market to do so. So, you know, someone made a joke on on X the other day that, you know, maybe they should look for new board members or new people who actually understand financial market markets. But it's not really a joke if they don't really understand it. Now presumably they do and I don't know what the hell they're doing about it. But Gary, that's the conversation you should have with them to Be blunt. It's if they don't really understand the financial markets and know that they have other options, then I don't know what to tell them.
- [45:04]
A
But for speaking specifically about Nakamoto, they're not strictly a buy. Bitcoin play even like strategy is now, right? They invest in Meta Planet, they've invested in multiple other companies. They're sort of like a fund of fund for Bitcoin treasury companies. I'm not sure the market understands that or knows it, but I imagine they have some dry powder on the sidelines to actually, you know, follow through with that strategy.
- [45:29]
B
Well, yeah, they had a thesis going back. This wasn't what I was going to say and if you're running out of time, by all means, just stop.
- [45:35]
A
No, go ahead.
- [45:36]
B
They had a thesis that what strategy was able to. To do in the American markets they could do in a number of other markets and that Meta Planet in Japan was the. The example and that they would then start doing this all over the world where there were. It's not the size of the American market obviously, but there where there's capital that couldn't buy Bitcoin directly but wanted to buy Bitcoin and they could set up treasury companies in all these different countries and make it easier and, and justify a premium for doing so. Unfortunately, the premium on Meta Planet itself has come down and it may be that it's taking much longer or not or not becoming valid that they can do this elsewhere. What I was going to say was more on like I think we're now in a state where I. It's not necessarily the case that they're all panicking, but they're looking for something to do because plan A people will just keep on giving you money at a high multiple and you'll keep buying and the multiple will stay high. That plan didn't work out so you're getting some kind of M A activity like I think. I think it's strive that acquired or is planning to acquire Semler Scientific where we're in a share in a share exchange deal. So they're issuing shares but I'm not sure if that deal is going to close because their share value is so damaged that the timber would be selling itself at half its nav. And why would. Why would they do that? So you know, these deals can get announced but they don't always close if something volatile happens in the markets and, and they're looking for solutions here. There aren't that many that are big, but the big ones are all on the move. Doing something other than strategy, which is doing. Sorry, doing something new other than strategy. Whose strategy is clear. Sorry if that was long winded.
- [47:25]
A
No, it wasn't. And I think it makes sense. I think it keeps going back to the same point, Tomer. Everybody just wants to see you buying the asset and have a plan to do so.
- [47:34]
B
Right. And if you can't do it, then. Then you're not. Then you're not what they expected.
- [47:40]
A
If you can't get in when price drops 20%, then the market's going to see that. And we just had that. And so anyone who bought really interesting. Anyone who didn't, maybe they don't have a strategy. The Meta Planet thing is really interesting, Tomer, and I think their thesis is actually correct. Right. I mean, Meta Planet had a lot of things going for it. You can't really buy spot Bitcoin as an institution. There was no ETF in Japan, so Meta Planet became somewhat like a proxy, much like MicroStrategy did before we had ETFs. And also there was tax arbitrage in the way that spot assets are viewed versus companies. So you pay much less taxes on trading MetaPlanet than you would Bitcoin. That makes a ton of sense. You should go into other markets around the world that do not have access to any sort of ETF or institutional vehicle to buy Bitcoin. But to your point, maybe it's just taking a really long time and maybe it was actually a bit of hubris to think that they understood the regulatory or financial environment in each of these countries in the world and would just be able to do this overnight. But if they do actually pull that off, I think that's a very bullish narrative.
- [48:49]
B
To add a little concrete example to what you. The last couple of days was the Canadian Bitcoin conference in Montreal, Canada, and there were a lot of panels on treasury companies and, and some Canadian companies trying to be treasury companies. And what you, what you sense when you see the people who are the representatives of those companies are. It's like, this is not Michael Saylor, right? Like this, this is someone with less experience. And, and so you really feel the execution risk that they have in doing it, it's not just, well, you put up a value proposition like you're running a money market fund and you just got to keep it clean and easy. There's. You have to know how to raise capital. You have to navigate through all of the regulatory hurdles of a particular market. And for people who are not like, let's not forget Michael Saylor was the longest serving CEO of, of a public company in America. He's, and he'd been through like scandalous blowups. So he, he, he learned through experience how to navigate these markets and he's still experimenting in them, but in a very mature way. And I think you, when you, when you look, you know, David Bailey himself, you know, admitted a couple of weeks ago he doesn't really have that much experience in capital markets. Not that that was a big secret, but you know, the lack of expertise, maturity and experience really shows. And when you're trying to execute all over the world where, where the strategy is, well, every, every country in the world has its own unique set of regulations. In some cases that's going to be really hard to wrap your head around. It's going to be easy to make a mistake to say, oh, this was true in Switzerland, it must be true in Germany, it turns out it's the exact opposite or something. So it's hard to, to, it's hard to help everyone in the world overcome complex regulatory hurdles when they're, when their complexity is different in every country.
- [50:36]
A
Ian? Yeah.
- [50:40]
G
I'm sorry to break up the bitcoin party. I get this is bitcoin, but I just wanted to make one point about the new treasury companies that are coming online. So I think it's interesting the hyper liquid treasury company that, that hasn't closed it, I think they raised 500 million. They, they have like $500 million in hype. But what's interesting about the non bitcoin treasury companies on some of these coins that actually have big revenues is that they can actually do more useful stuff with the underlying asset. It's kind of hard to get native yield on bitcoin. There, there is some, but it's very low. But if you have an asset that's actually a productive asset that has cash flows, where there's a robust borrow market that, that isn't kind of oversaturated, I think there's more ways for these companies to actually generate return on the assets that they own instead of just having to take on perpetually more and more debt. And it just seems clear that MicroStrategy 1 and that these other companies aren't going to make it. So I don't really think there's more room for other bitcoin treasury companies to exist. But there's this whole new class of treasury companies that are coming out for different L1s and I think those companies, there are going to be clear winners that are going to come out over the next year and those companies will actually be able to have real cash flow. So and so it's less going to be like this volatility wrapper where they're taking on more and more debt and they have to buy at a price, but they're actually going to be able to have an asset and generate cash off that asset. And to me, being in crypto this long for eight, for whatever 10 years and having everyone say well there's no cash flow, there's no cash flow, there's no cash flow. Now there actually are cash flows. The hyper liquid network is making over $1 billion a year and 90% plus of that is going to token buybacks. There's huge amounts of cash flow. There's, it's trading at a 13 times price to earnings which is not crazy even in normal tech stocks. So I think you're going to see these protocols coming out. Some of them may already exist, some of them will be new that are actually generating real cash flows. And there's opportunities for publicly traded companies to own that asset and generate significant cash flow that can be passed back to the shareholder.
- [52:30]
A
Interesting. Anyone thoughts? We got a couple of minutes left. About three minutes. Dave, any final thoughts here from you?
- [52:38]
D
Well actually that Ian makes a good point and you know, it's the same. The real question is if you know the winners. If you, if buying a company that's going to intelligently leverage an ecosystem is a way of picking winners. If you can pick the winners then great. I mean one would imagine, I know this is going to drive people crazy, but I'm actually surprised or maybe there it already exists that there isn't a pump dot fun treasury company for exactly the same reason. And, or you know, what you're going to see are companies that try to marry cash flows to assets. And I think that that's right. I think that that's a trend that makes an enormous amount of sense. As far as bitcoin treasury companies, Bitcoin's big enough. There probably are is room for more than just strategy. I'd say that 21 has a shot because they have a pretty good management team and there's some businesses associated with it. But the point is well taken, right? Trying to do something because you run a bitcoin conference and you think you're going to get seen the best deals. I mean the whole point of people buying in an Okamoto was they believed that they would see deals that nobody else would see. And maybe that's still true. But you know, there has to Be I've said this before. You've heard it to me, you've heard it from me many times. I inserted for me probably thousands of times that if you're going to put money behind something you should have an edge and there aren't going to you if you don't have an edge then why are you going there? And, and that really is the most important thing. And that's true with investing writ large. It's not just treasury companies, it's everything. I saw Richard at his hand up.
- [54:10]
F
One question Dave, just coin. Does it get a Treasury company?
- [54:14]
D
God, I hope not. I mean I keep one look all these memes that are, that have nothing behind them other than a joke. You know, if you can't figure out a way to create value it's they should die. But the truth is is that people will. It's self perpetuating. I mean FTT still exists and it's still worth more than companies in the Russell 2000 which is crazy. So you have, you know, we have things that have no apparent path to any value whatsoever in the crypto ecosystem worth more than companies with dozens or 50 or hundreds of employees. It's really, that's the world we live in now. Until that is gone and it happened in the Internet bubble. It took a long time for that to happen. Until that's gone. Then you know, that's good. That's holding the crypto world back in my opinion from actually achieving, you know, what it needs to achieve. That was sort of Williams Lament before, right? In the beginning. Yep.
- [55:13]
F
For the record I agree that was, that was said in gist.
- [55:16]
D
No, no, I understand that but it actually is I watch fart coin as a, as a price and the fart coin bitcoin ratio to me matters. Right. The, the worse it gets, the better the healthier the overall crypto market is. I But that said, if bitcoin goes from 111 and ramps 150 is there anybody who believes that far coin at 38 cents or whatever it is, is it going to jump back up over 50 or 60? I mean I hope it doesn't, but it probably will. Right Craig?
- [55:46]
E
No great points concerning fart coin. I didn't know that would be part of this morning's conversation, but I, I think there will be a handful of memes that long term will thrive so long as they can deliver on some utility will be considered on institutional memes. Maybe I'm against throwing it out there like a pepe, but it'd be time will tell. Time Will tell the tale on that one for sure.
- [56:06]
D
But, but is that really a meme at that point? I mean, if you're Pepe or a pudgy penguin and you have a brand that gets used in marketing from hundreds of in there, and there are firms who want to rent the brand, is it any different than celebrities, you know, creating tokens for themselves? Right. You know, is it. Seriously, I mean, there, there is a path to value there. I mean, I'm not against the notion of a meme. I'm against the notion of an asset that has no value to the underlying to the asset owner. I just want to be really clear about that. I am not anti meme in general because what's the difference in a meme and a celebrity? I mean, in fact, you know, most of the celebrities out there, quite a few of them are. I would stack up the IQ of Pepe the Frog over Mark Ruffalo any day. Right. You know, there's a lot of these people are complete morons. So. And you know, they have, their brand has value. So yeah, you can create value. It's just a question of. There are those that don't have any. That's all that makes sense, Craig.
- [57:05]
E
Very much so, yeah.
- [57:07]
D
I just, I just want to be clear because I, I'm happy with getting hate mail. I don't want to get hate mail for something I don't really believe.
- [57:17]
B
There's a lot of what you just said, Dave, in the last five minutes that someone could clip out of context.
- [57:22]
A
We do that. That's what we do.
- [57:23]
D
It happens all the time. If Scott does it to me, then I have to defend the myself. That's fine, whatever. Yeah, it's fun.
- [57:28]
A
It's not me, it's my producers. I don't see the clips just for the record. They do it to me also, if it makes you feel any better.
- [57:32]
D
Oh, no, I know, it's, it's just amusing.
- [57:35]
A
Anyway, I, I, I wish I could, but it's definitely not my responsibility. All right, guys, we're at, we're at Time I got another call I gotta take. Thanks for another great crypto town hall. Amazing panel today. Be interesting to see what we're talking about tomorrow if the world gives us a lot more news to discuss. Otherwise, we'll just debate the viability of treasury companies until we're blue in the face and I'll die of old age. That's all we got for you guys today. See you tomorrow. Thanks.