Giskard's Journal - slingin code to reach FI

[giskard]

Yeah ... so great for speculation and borderline spoofing. Lesser fools eventually unloading to greater fools. People having inflated NWs based on holding stamps, NFTS, selling pixels, sneakers collections, sports cards, and collectibles that might be hard to turn into cash. People making money from other people who end up holding the bag and eventually losing money. From my old school investor perspective, these are crazy times.

I wonder how many are actually playing these meme/stonk games #liquidity. Is it but a dozen millions fanatics each throwing in a hundred or a thousand bucks, encouraging each other within a single bubble. That would be enough for a so-called market value of 1B USD based on the peak price... although it would be impossible to extract that amount in cash getting out of the position. I wonder how much paper-NW can be turned into actual cash within, say a year, w/o crashing that NW metric. This used to be a VC or (pretend-)billionaire on paper problem, but it seems like it's turning into an everymans' meme stonk gambler problem defaulting to a "sell it down the river"-solution.

I think, at least currently, the technical hurdles to even be able to trade these (the worst ones only exist on chain) mean many people are going into this with both eyes open and they think of it as gambling first and foremost.

RE: your 2nd point... this line of thinking is quite interesting because its a public ledger. You can easily see the breakdown of who owns what coin, what other coins they own, and how many wallets hold it in total etc. You can do analysis on this to try to figure out which ones have more momentum, etc. And, yes of course most of these asymptotically trend toward zero over time after attention is exhausted.

Some links to further illustrate this

Here is an example on ethereum:
https://etherscan.io/token/0x6982508145 ... 3#balances
(note, pepe is quite mature so all the main holders are centralized exchanges)

Here is one on solana, this is something called STAN - "Stanley Cup Coin" (lol). It's not listed on any exchanges yet, its under 50 million mk cap:
https://solscan.io/token/CQSzJzwW5H1oyW ... JC#holders

Last link - I will point you to dexscreener which is the site everyone uses to see trending dex trading pairs across different blockchains. The main ones are solana and ethereum as you can see:
https://dexscreener.com/solana


Imo even from an old school investor perspective betting heavily on the gas tokens (Ethereum & Solana - the layer 1 tokens) that you need to pay for transactions and buy the meme coins with makes sense. I am very convinced only a small number of traditional market participants actually understand what we are dealing with here.

It's a world casino and everyone is invited but the L1 tokens are the price of admission.

[giskard]

Update post April 2024

Ending NW: 1.99 million
Change m/m: -267K (oof new high score to the downside).

I'll post the last few m/m changes here bc its kind of hilarious:
- Sept 2023: -23k
- Oct 2023: +78k
- Nov 2023: +143k
- Dec 2023: +177k
- Jan 2024: -23k
- Feb 2024: +354k (best ever)
- March 2024: +298k
- April 2024: -267k
- May 2024: +70k (3 days in lmao)

All of this is unrealized of course. I just long into large positions and hold them and then scale out slowly after a long time to get into other big positions, that's like 95% how I trade.

This is especially funny to me since I take home only 8k a month from my paycheck.

[Scott 2]

Is there a point where you de-risk the portfolio and declare victory? 2 million looks like enough money.

[giskard]

Is there a point where you de-risk the portfolio and declare victory? 2 million looks like enough money.

imo its not all that risky it's just high vol. I'm not leveraged at all. I believe government bonds are quite risky and the geopolitical situation is a tinderbox so I don't even really know what I would de-risk into.

[Scott 2]

Maybe I'm naive in seeing that volatility as a proxy for risk. I certainly haven't found returns like that, ever.

Any assets that reduce the volatility would appeal to me. Gold. Land. Bonds. Whatever might be less correlated to the movement of crypto. Not to say any of those are superior assets, only that it could be time to diversify, trading returns for stability.

[giskard]

Maybe I'm naive in seeing that volatility as a proxy for risk. I certainly haven't found returns like that, ever.

Any assets that reduce the volatility would appeal to me. Gold. Land. Bonds. Whatever might be less correlated to the movement of crypto. Not to say any of those are superior assets, only that it could be time to diversify, trading returns for stability.

That's kind of what I'm doing. I have a fair amount of allocation to: natural resources, health care and gold.

Ultimately yeah I have a majority of assets in either software companies, general tech companies or crypto. But it's what I do for a living and it's what I know. It's what I believe I have some edge in. When I was trying to invest in dividend stocks and "undervalued" stocks when I first started out all I did was lose money & underperform. I don't think diversifying into stuff you don't know well is a good way to build wealth.

Now that I have been doing this for 15 years I have come to this conclusion: I would like to get back the hours of my life I spent reading Benjamin Graham & almost every other book about investing. I would like to get back all the money I threw down rat holes of "value".

If I could go back I would expose my younger self to Rene Girard and George Soros and the concepts of reflexivity and memetic desire.

[giskard]

Thoughts May 22, 2024

I was watching doomers bearpost on Twitter today about how Nvidia is a scam and "the bubble will pop" literally hours before they release earnings, absolutely crush it and the stock rise above $1000 while announcing a 10:1 split.

Arthur Hayes wrote a piece this week theorizing that the US will likely open massive swap lines with BOJ to prevent them from having to dump US treasuries onto the market in order to support the Yen from going weaker. This would result in a flood of USD liquidity and push the dollar down forcing all assets up.

Another thing that happened this week was some kind of apparent reverse course on the Ethereum ETF. Maybe dems are realizing that people with a lot of their NW tied up in crypto are effectively single issue voters & many are typically default democrat voters & all they have to do is take their boot off the neck of crypto to get all those votes. Otherwise they are all going to swing Trump.

Then we have this situation where all commodities are somehow hitting all time highs. Is this China buying gold mostly? Not sure but somehow copper is at all time highs also.

So we have:
- AI infrastructure build out continuing in full force.
- Political reverse course on crypto
- Commodity bull market
- The dollar at range highs and so many reasons for it go lower
- It's an election year.

I continue to be MAX LONG. If I get wrecked I get wrecked but Im long: tech, crypto, and commodities still. The dollar mean reversion is a huge tailwind to all of this.

I guess I ask, how can you not be max long? Why are people bearish? Do they not get that so many outcomes lead to QE, printing, falling dollar, etc etc etc?

[giskard]

Study 5 figure anime girl jpegs on the blockchain.

[bostonimproper]

After the political reversal, especially after FIT21 got bipartisan support in the House, it just seems so obvious. But at the same time, who can you tell? Everyone who believes in the trade is in the trade and all your friends and family you want to convince have already told you to shove off about that crypto stuff already. At least, in my personal experience.