Bitcoin

07
May

Coke Heads

It was the annual gathering of Buffett sycophants last week. Tell us more Warren about how you have underperformed the market for the last 15 years etc. etc. Year after year they are asked about bitcoin and still have not come up with a coherent critique. It’s difficult to let this year’s vitriol slide though, so

30
Apr

Everything is terrible

Bitcoin has died** You didn’t really think that some computer code was going to compete to be a global asset class, did you? I mean, that was pretty stupid of you if you did. A bunch of bearded cryptography enthusiasts versus all the intellect of the world’s bankers? It was hardly a fair fight and it

16
Apr

Isabel

Risk Free Here’s an interesting trade for you from Bloomberg. December bitcoin futures were trading at a $5,000 premium to the spot price last week. All you had to do to make the 8% annualised return was go long spot bitcoin and short the December future. Sit tight for a few months and collect. Indeed, there are

09
Apr

Professor Plum

Quarterly performance Fund Managers love quarterly performance, especially when it’s good. “Here are all the amazing things we did with our brilliant and insightful analysis that’s three miles deep and two inches wide” or whatever that Scottish sounding bloke says. Fo us, quarterly performance is really irrelevant. Time and again, I urge people to just

26
Mar

The Hunger Games

The dog ate my homework “The trouble with excuses is that they become inevitably difficult to believe after they’ve been used a couple of times.” The pressure on US regulators to sign off a Bitcoin ETF is growing. In Canada, Purpose Investment’s ETF raised $0.5 billion in two days. It crossed $1 billion in its

12
Mar

28 Trillion

$28 Trillion Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate and all round moron, often repeats “Debt is money we owe ourselves”. His argument is that it does not matter, because America can print money whenever it wishes to pay back whoever it wishes. Sadly, he is absolutely correct. Furthermore, he can point to Japan and Italy whose debts are

05
Mar

Coinbase

In what is one of the most anticipated public offerings of the last few years, Coinbase has filed for direct listing on the NASDAQ. Rather quietly it has become a very big company: 43 million customers worldwide $456 billion in transaction volume to date 1,200 employees (amazingly small) Interestingly, no headquarters. They all work from

26
Feb

Who would be a lender?

Square US financial services company Square reported their full year this week. Bitcoin revenue has gone from a bit of a sideshow to being the single biggest revenue item, by far. Sales grew 9x in 2020 and in their forward looking statement Square announced that in January 2021 CashApp had set a new record for monthly

19
Feb

Water

Water Taken from an address by David Foster Wallace in 2005, the idea is that the most obvious and important realities are often the hardest to see. Everyone has default settings, things they assume are just correct and they never question them. The idea is an excellent one and you can extend it to any corner

12
Feb

Worthless

Cash on Hand To great excitement this week, Tesla allocated $1.5 billion of their Corporate Treasury cash to bitcoin. The excitement did not necessarily extend everywhere though. Here is Nils Pratley, who to my surprise is the Financial Editor of the Guardian (yes, they have one). Irrespective of what you may think of Tesla or