Nickel The world’s largest Nickel trader is a gentleman called Xiang Guangda, known in the market as ‘Big Shot’. It turns out that in April, Big Shot went short Nickel at $25,000 to the tune of 150,000 tonnes. The price of Nickel then rocketed to $100,000 and he was sitting on an $11 billion loss.

Price controls This is how we control inflation now — by shouting. Evil oil companies are price gouging American consumers. Or, prices remain high because nobody can pick up a signal from the markets after the price mechanism was destroyed. The true cost of inflation is that it makes economic decisions much harder. Do we

Denied “the proposal did not meet standards designed to prevent fraudulent practices and protect investors”. Once again, the SEC has denied Grayscale’s application to convert their bitcoin fund to an ETF. There were over 11,000 letters from investors and academics in support of the application this time, which is far more than anything seen before

I told you so! Everyone who says I told you so. Didn’t. A quarter to forget (or remember) Quite something this last quarter. Massive collapses in DeFi, massive liquidations across the sector and the price movement proves it. Below are the five worst quarters in bitcoin’s history: Our fund has operated through four of these

New money, old habits Zero Celcius DeFi lender Celcius stopped customer withdrawals on Sunday. The email to customers was reminiscent of the Lehman Brothers collapse: The carefully chosen wording about honouring withdrawals “over time” caused the Celsius token to fall as low as 14 cents, down more than 95% in a year. It also caused

Little Apple The Big Apple is getting smaller. Once the place we all wanted to go and visit; not any longer. There has been huge net migration out of the state since 2000. One million people have left New York since, for a net loss of 250,000 residents. That ranks the state top in the

New branding! Our weekly newsletter is growing quickly. Previously referred to internally as ‘The Weekly’ we felt that name lacked panache, so now it’s MoneyBits. If you are reading that as MonkeyBits, I assure you that you’re the person with the problem, and not us. Otherwise it’s business as usual. Davos concludes Precocious teenager The

The Prophecy …and it did. It spread all over the globe and now everything you use every day is laced with cryptography. Your phone, messaging apps and email. Much to the frustration of governments around the world. Then it spread to money. Like everything else it touched, it won’t stop. No matter how much wishful

Terra update Many of us are struggling with the complexity of the collapse of the Terra stablecoin. A rather simple explanation was provided in the week clarifying matters: What else could go wrong? Actually, quite a lot. Here are three other things that would be viewed as existential threats to the sector, when in fact