It’s a Scam Rarely these days do we encounter the feedback “bitcoin is a scam”. It does happen though including this week. The argument was along the lines of, it’s only valuable as long as people say it is, otherwise it isn’t.  A bit like gold then. Nobody ever decreed gold as money, people just

WHERE TO INVEST? This used to be a reasonably easy question to answer for a financial adviser. Perhaps a mix of equity and bonds, perhaps some small leverage depending on your age. We’ll change the mix as you get older. Thanks, that will be $5,000 a year, oh and here’s some life insurance you didn’t

Goldman Sachs Remember when Goldman Sachs were the ‘Masters of the Universe’? Their cult carried so far that the Twitter account @goldmansachselevator had over a million followers. It purported to post overheard conversations in the elevators of the investment bank. It was all part of the mystique. It was great and it was funny: Most

How money dies Its tough being a global reserve currency. History tells us surviving more than 100 years is very hard. The Spanish hold the record with 110 years. That particular arrangement fell apart because of the collapse of the Iberian Union between Spain and Portugal. Portugal got tired of being told what to do

Buffets The talk is that self serving buffets are now a thing of the past, simply they don’t work in this new world order. I was prompted to find out why, here’s a possible explanation. Not only that, Buffett has managed to underperform the S&P 500 for the quite some time. Still, this is not

Storage costs matter The oil price went below zero on Wednesday at the closure of the May oil contract. There are may reasons why. The most relevant perhaps, is that storing oil is not free. If you buy oil with a futures contract it will be delivered to you unless you roll the futures contract

Benoit’s Anniversary Today is the anniversary of ECB Director, Benoit Coeure’s, comments on digital currency and bitcoin, he made quite a splash at the time, let’s see how things have moved on since. Central banks around the world are in a bind. They know two things are almost inevitable, one of them is digital currency,

Metrics Coinmetrics research issued their latest report this week which gives some insight into the fundamentals behind bitcoin. The full report is here and we provide a summary of the highlights below. Daily value transfer Currently $2.3 billion per day in value is transmitted across the bitcoin network. For context, in 2018, Visa processed an average of

Short Squeeze +40% When was the last time an asset with a market cap of over $180 billion experienced a 40% price spike in hours? The answer is hard to find, but the oil price in the 1970s is the best example. It happened again on Saturday morning with bitcoin registering a 40% upward move