Uncategorized

04
Jun

As long as we can pay the interest

Joe Biden released details of his first budget on Friday with $6 trillion to be spent in the next year against $4.2 trillion in revenues. Of all the things that stand out in the budget, “only” $300 billion is new spending. The rest of the $1.5 trillion shortfall is consumed in pre-committed programs such as Medicare,

28
May

The Earth is flat

Peak bad news? Having navigated Elon Musk, I had thought there was nobody more prominent that could have an opinion on Bitcoin. I was wrong. This tweet from the Pope was taken as a dig at the protocol and its power consumption. Reading it, it could equally be about aircraft, space travel or formula one cars

21
May

Did someone say Elon?

The wrong chart Quite the week. No need for another reminder of how frequently we have these steep pull backs, since we’ve just had one. The situation is adequately described below. For those that don’t know. The term HODL originated in 2013 after bitcoin’s price had crashed 40% to $450. A highly medicated trader typed HODL

23
Apr

Agent Lagarde returns

Protocol Henceforth, references to Bitcoin (B) mean the network, the software, the entire protocol. References to bitcoin (b), mean the currency embedded in that protocol. I’m glad this convention has emerged, it has bothered me for a while. Obviously, when starting a sentence, you’ll still have an issue and will simply have to do your best. A

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

19
Mar

Nothing to see here.

International Women’s Day Did you enjoy it? I certainly did. In particular, the ‘heartfelt’ emails from male CEOs warbling on about all the great things they are going to do for women before immediately defaulting to their normal behaviours once the day is over. Not to be left out, President Kamala joined the platitude party with this incredible

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

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

05
Feb

Adios Davos

I went to Davos (on Zoom) A small town in Switzerland rejoices as world leaders don’t visit. Remember Davos? The big pow wow for the rich and famous in the Swiss Alps. Well you haven’t heard about it because this year it happened on Zoom. That’s right, Davos is now called Zoom. Without the private jets, the