The Pomp Podcast - #1031 Brent Donnelly On How Bitcoin Saves Us From Insane Monetary Policy

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

Brent Donnelly is the President of Spectra Markets and is the author of AM/FX and Alpha Trader. In this episode, I'm joined by Julia La Roche. We discuss with Brent if Bitcoin is an inflation hedge, ...or is it a hedge against loose monetary policy. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Go to https://www.eightsleep.com/Pomp to check out the Pod Pro Cover and save $150 at checkout. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, and the UK. ======================= Valour (formerly DeFi Technologies) represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. Currently listed on U.S. (OTC: DEFTF) and Canadian (NEO:DEFI) exchanges. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at valour.com =======================

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Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Brent Donnelly is the president of Spectrum Markets. He's also the author of AMFX and Alpha Trader. I'm joined in this conversation by Julia LaRoche as well. Julia and I talked to Brent and we really kind of press harder on trying to understand, is Bitcoin an inflation hedge or is Bitcoin simply a hedge against loose monetary policy? That ends up being a very nuanced conversation and one that I thought would be very valuable to this audience. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope that you guys enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode though,
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Starting point is 00:01:23 they're liquid, and they're trusted. Learn more at lmaxdigital.com slash pomp. Again, lmaxdigital.com slash pomp. This episode is brought to you by 8Sleep. 8Sleep is the single best product that I have purchased over the last three years. It completely changed my life. I'm not joking. Pay attention. The Pod Pro Cover, which goes over your mattress by 8Sleep, is the most advanced solution on the market for thermal regulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. You can go to 8sleep.com to check out the Pod Pro cover and you save $150 at checkout. They currently ship within the United States, Canada, and the UK. I told you, it changed my life. It helps me sleep deeper, helps me sleep longer. I feel much more refreshed
Starting point is 00:02:07 and I have better energy. You want to know how I have relentless energy every single day? Because that sleep on an 8sleep. Seriously, go check it out. 8sleep.com slash pomp today. This episode is brought to you by Valor. Valor represents what's next in the digital economy. They provide simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance, and Web3 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. They're currently listed on the OTC at DEFTF and on the Canadian NEO exchange at DEFI. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and
Starting point is 00:02:49 financial information, you can visit their website at valor.com. That's V-A-L-O-U-R.com. Valor.com. Go check them out today. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brent, how are you? Hey, I'm great. How are you? I'm doing fantastic. I'm very excited about this. let's just jump right into the difference between being a hedge against inflation versus a hedge
Starting point is 00:03:35 against loose monetary policy. Forget Bitcoin for a second. Like what's the difference in those two things? Cause it's somewhat nuanced, but important. Sure. So really the difference is that policy reacts to inflation. So if you're trying to find things that are hedging against inflation, you need things that aren't going to be crushed by policy. So risky assets generally get crushed when policy reacts to inflation, whereas certain other things like commodities and bonds tend or short, you have to be short bonds, of course, as an inflation hedge tend to work even when policy reacts. So what you get essentially is two waves. You get the loose policy, which is what we had, extremely loose policy, fiscal and monetary. And that drives the price of all assets up.
Starting point is 00:04:26 But the highest beta or the most volatile assets are the most risky assets. So, you know, Ethereum, Bitcoin. And then after that, you had like Nasdaq stocks, meme stocks, all that kind of stuff reacts the most to loose monetary policy. And there's a whole bunch of vectors for transmission. I mean, one of them is just sentiment. You kind of get this panic to the top side, essentially. But then what happens is eventually the policymakers have to react to the inflation and tighten monetary policy. So then that's when the rubber hits the road on whether something's an inflation hedge or not. So things like commodities or short bonds have continued to perform well as the Fed has tightened, whereas obviously Bitcoin and more speculative assets have performed poorly.
Starting point is 00:05:19 So what I'm talking about here is a cyclical thing. And then what a lot of people believe is a more structural thing, which is that loose monetary policy, which I would just say MMT is kind of like the basic framework, which is very loose fiscal and it's kind of aided and abetted by monetary. So that's kind of like the primary framework, like the old Keynesian thing where you stimulate when things are bad and then you pull back fiscal when things are good. That's kind of gone in the garbage and now it's a lot more about MMT. So that started with the TCGA, which was Trump's tax cut at the peak, which is extremely unusual, totally unheard of, and continued with the COVID response. So I think
Starting point is 00:06:12 there's also this structural element of these things like Bitcoin as a hedge will work in the long run because money is being debased. But then that's a structural thing. And then you got to watch out for the cycles, which obviously the cycles can be nasty. And I'm not saying this in hindsight. So like I was writing about this in November of 2021, that like the party's pretty much over as the inflation and like loose policy and raging inflation is like mana for risky assets and for things like Bitcoin. But then when eventually policy reacts with a lag, then you got to watch out. So I think that some, I mean, some people would, I know someone responded on Twitter. Yeah. Like, thanks for the update. Obviously this is like, I can see the prices
Starting point is 00:07:04 on the screen. And I mean, that's certainly fair to some extent, but I don't think it's totally fair because lots of people were making this observation, including me in November. So it's not, it's not all hindsight. And also I do think there's an importance or a usefulness to understanding the current cycle so that the next cycle you understand it better or go ahead julie no i was going to say like where where do you think we're headed from here because as you pointed out this is something you were writing about back in november where are we headed so i'm like very cautiously optimistic now like i'm a little bit more bullish crypto but definitely not raging bullish there's a few things so one is that the terminal rate which is like how high is the fed
Starting point is 00:07:48 going to go is pretty high now in terms of what the market expects. So the room for rates to go higher to me is pretty limited, unless you got like another full on subsequent inflation shock, which I don't think we'll get, which would mean like probably that would mean oil to 150 or something like that, which is not my base case. So I'm cautiously optimistic because I think we're kind of around peak Fed. But then, you know, just the way I was saying, you got to separate the cyclical from the structural, you also have to separate the endogenous from the exogenous. So crypto has been getting hit by exogenous, which is external forces, which is macro, higher real rates, tightening policy, essentially like the inverse of the fiat debasement trade.
Starting point is 00:08:35 So people correctly saw crypto and specifically Bitcoin as a fiat debasement hedge. And that was true. But then if the Fed hikes real rates from minus one to plus one, you know, fiat debasement isn't really a thing as much anymore, because fiat currency has positive, you know, positive value in theory. So the question now is, okay, if that exogenous shock is done, which I kind of think it is, like, I think the Fed's close to probably peak. Although I will just say one quick little caveat there is that the Fed tends to always fight the last war. So that's what you got with flexible average inflation targeting was they failed to get inflation up for so long that they finally like said, OK, screw it, we're all in. And of course, that was the worst possible
Starting point is 00:09:24 timing. So now they're going to be fighting the last war again, which is they're going to be scared of inflation. The politics of inflation are bad. It makes the Fed look bad. They're hurting credibility wise. So I don't think it's going to be like 2018, 2019, where they just went from like hiking to cutting. My feeling is probably they stay, just stay on hold for ages once they find their happy place. So that's the exogenous story, which is like getting better, but it's not amazing. But then you have this endogenous, which is like the internal factors of crypto, which I think is like maybe reaching a crescendo around now um and it comes down to liquidations right like 3ac and and all that stuff um so like i've been dabbling for example in gbtc because like
Starting point is 00:10:12 the biggest holder of gbtc is is 3ac and so i'm guessing there's going to be some forced liquidation there and that's part of probably why the the discount has widened so far um so I believe in the structural crypto story as I think MMT and completely insane fiscal and monetary policy in tandem is the base case for the next 20 years. But then I am more of a trader, so I tend to ride the cycles as well. I feel like if you're riding the cycle from the short side, like short Ethereum or whatever, that trade's over. Now, it's more like I don't think it's the raging bull scenario either. I think it's more like you dabble, you pick your spots. And, you know, if you're an investor or you're looking for like long-term debasement insurance
Starting point is 00:11:03 in your portfolio, you know, buying Bitcoin from here down to 10K makes a ton of sense to me. And honestly, like, I don't know if you want to go into it, but to me, most, almost every other like altcoin, and I would include Ethereum obviously not as an altcoin, but I would include Ethereum as, I feel like those are just a completely different category and they might not work as fiat debasement hedges. They might just all go to zero. All right. I'll take the next one then. You mentioned kind of going down to 10K, like, is that where you're kind of expecting a bottom? Like what's kind of your outlook for Bitcoin and maybe if you have like a time horizon on that? Sure. So I think this is a boring view,
Starting point is 00:11:46 but I mean, sometimes views are boring. And my view is that we just chop. And so chop into probably like into Q1 of next year. And then I think that's the point where you'll probably get more visibility on Fed policy being, you know, the Fed being done hiking. You're also going to eventually get into the better part of the halving cycle, which will be helpful. And then in terms of where we bought them. I mean, the tech levels were pretty good on the way up and they haven't been very good on the way down. And the reason I think for that is that techs are a lot of behavior. There's a lot of behavioral element to technical analysis. So when it's like a behavioral story on the way up, the levels kind of the levels like 69 K obviously being the ultimate meme level
Starting point is 00:12:33 work, but on the way down, there's a lot more for selling and liquidation and for selling and liquidation doesn't care about technicals so if you're looking for levels like 20 obviously was was that huge breakout um in whenever that was i guess late 2020 um and we briefly went below that on the weekend um down to 17.5 the other level so by basically buying between 20 and 10 i mean i know that's a super wide window but if you're buying for like longer term insurance i think that's the window to buy. The reason I'm looking at like down to 10 is 11.4 is 85% off the highs. And so in first crypto winter, we were 84% off the highs. And there's a weird commonness, I don't know if that's a word, but commonness to 85% drawdowns in super speculative assets.
Starting point is 00:13:29 If you go through the list of what are the big bubbles in the last 25 years, So, crypto in 2017, obviously, was one, NASDAQ 2000, housing in 2006, all of those things, Nikkei in 1990, all of those things went high to low 85%, so 85% is 11.4 in Bitcoin, so I feel like that's a reasonable place to think that, I mean, I don't think it goes that far down to be honest, but that would be worst case scenario. Right. You mentioned liquidation. I suppose that's probably a risk that you're paying attention to. How do you begin to, you know, assess that risk? How widespread do you think that might be? So I actually wrote a piece about this. So I have a lot of experience in TradFi
Starting point is 00:14:21 with liquidations going all the way back to like Bear Stearns liquidating through JP. JP was liquidating in this huge position in March 20, in 2008. And I remember that well, because I was trading. I actually worked at Lehman Brothers at that time. And so the thing about liquidations, there's two things. One, they don't care what the price is, right? They're just, they sell because they have to sell. And generally it's not like an optimization exercise. It's just like a risk reduction exercise. The other thing is that you tend to see it cluster around the turns of the months, the quarters and the half year end. So this is a particularly interesting little period right here that we're in because a lot of the gates so you see the same thing with inflows
Starting point is 00:15:04 actually like during the good times bitcoin and crypto tends to perform very well at the turn of the month and part of the reason is that that's when people get paid so retail puts money in but then the other reason is that that's when inflows happen so most hedge funds and institutions the gates and the entry points and the exit points tend to be around the turns of the round points on the calendar. So this is a really interesting time right now. I think that if you can kind of like survive this next, like, I don't know, let's say five days, I think actually that's like peak liquidation window for the next little while and we could stabilize. And at least then, so like, obviously there's the correlation to NASDAQ and all that,
Starting point is 00:15:50 which I kind of believe is a somewhat permanent feature of crypto, although not completely, like, you know, the correlations are not static, but they can still also be kind of structural and persistent over time. So I think that correlation will be somewhat structural and persistent. But at the same time, at least the endogenous aspect of like just liquidation, I think is actually probably going to draw to a close in the next week or so. and then um you know things might actually calm down so i'm a little bit more optimistic going into july specifically as more of like a tactical play to be long um into july but scaling in between now and like fourth of july because of liquidation risk and then also the holiday and
Starting point is 00:16:38 the weekend and all that so brent that was my question was around uh there's a couple of things that are going to happen over the next five days and you mentioned that bitcoin must survive over the next five days. And I think that you're talking less about Bitcoin going to zero as much as just kind of chopping sideways here. We have the end of the first half of the year, the end of the second quarter. There's all sorts of redemptions and things that go on with funds and may be some forced selling there. You have the liquidation risk throughout the industry. We've seen a big washout of a lot of liquidation, but it doesn't mean it's over. You've got the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust decision coming up from the SEC in July. There could be some movement around that. But
Starting point is 00:17:16 there's also kind of a positive story around the retail inflows because people get paid either at the end or beginning of a month. There's also people putting new capital into whether it's hedge funds or other types of funds that will go buy these assets. And then I think the one piece we've seen Arthur Hayes write a whole piece calling out the July 4th holiday having this kind of illiquidity where people can't take fiat from their bank account and put it into their crypto account to go and purchase assets if they do drop. We saw when Bitcoin went down to $17,500 dollars two or three weeks ago. It was over a three day weekend. There was a banking holiday that weekend. How do you kind of put together this confluence of events that's about to occur
Starting point is 00:17:54 between end of Q2, beginning of a new month? You've got the banking holiday, like just talk through how you kind of evaluate what you expect to happen over the next five days. Sure. I mean, I think you've covered it pretty much perfectly there. So essentially what you're describing is downside risk until 4th or 5th of July, and then probably it's safer to be bullish. So when I was saying if you survive, I was talking about trading from alongside people that are using stop losses. Certainly, Bitcoin will survive the next seven days, God willing. So the way that I handle this is to scale in. So I don't think you want to try to pin the tail on the donkey and pick like the perfect entry point. So I just want to separate two things. So I'm up to this point,
Starting point is 00:18:39 I've mostly been talking about structural, more like investor mentality. Now I'm talking more trader mentality, which is actually more what I do is much more, you know, like in for three weeks or three months kind of stuff. That's generally what I do both in crypto and in fiat or TradFi. So the way that I would handle it is that you think there's going to be downside pressure or risk of downside pressure over the next, say 10, seven days. So you split up your purchases over seven days. And then once you're in, you pick a stop loss, probably like my stop loss would be below the lows at like 16, nine or something like that. And then you try to ride the rebound, which I do think July, actually, I'm pretty optimistic. Like I said, for the month of
Starting point is 00:19:24 July, once we get through this window. Now, the one thing, like if you want to play the second derivative game or like the, the third derivative game, if Arthur Hayes is talking about it and I'm talking about it, obviously other people are talking about it too. And that's also part of why I want to scale in and not just wait for the end. Like you might think that the optimal strategy would just be like by at 4 PM on July 4th, once all this, you know, once the hurricane has passed, but the problem is everyone knows about this. So the risk is actually that, that it's wrong, that that analysis is wrong and you missed the whole thing. And we're at 23, eight on July 5th. And you're like, Oh shoot, I missed it. So in order to avoid missing it, that's what I'm doing.
Starting point is 00:20:06 It's just going like, you know, split it into five purchases of 20% each. And then once I have my average, I'll put my stop below the lows. Julia, what else you got? I would just love to hear more about maybe more of like your macro views as it relates to policy. Like, do you think like MMT, is that going to be here to stay? I would say 100%. So, I mean, to me, like I've studied, I've read Stephanie Kelton's stuff and all that. To me, it's like a completely insane policy that has no limiting factor. It basically has no breaks. So even if like Stephanie Kelton is the expert on this, and even when I hear her responses to like, what's the limiting factor? I just don't find it convincing, like to think that politicians are going to raise taxes
Starting point is 00:20:53 or that government's going to correctly target spending or withdraw spending, to me, it's just like there's no way that's ever going to work. So if you believe that, which I do, and you also believe, so the whole thing of how spending and government and Keynesian policy and economics basically worked for my entire lifetime and probably the 50 years before that was that there's a connection between revenue and spending. and the connection's loose and you can argue about it. And you can say like, how are we going to
Starting point is 00:21:25 spend, spend, how are we going to pay for it when new spending is announced? But there was always the question of like, how are we going to pay for it? Even if they were bullshitting and, and really they weren't paying for it. There was that connection between tax taxation and spending. Now that has been snipped. There's no anchor whatsoever for spending. They don't even ask the question anymore. They just spend and don't like, it doesn't even matter where the money's coming from um so that that ship having sailed as a politician it's just always easier to spend more and in the past the limiting factor was kind of like this taboo on on spending during good times there was kind of like this taboo with deficits tended to increase in bad times and then you you
Starting point is 00:22:08 know clinton had a surplus in the good times so that whole thing is gone and i just i don't see it coming back. And the only thing that would break it would be some kind of like extremely disorderly inflation that creates this sort of Volcker moment where the politics of spending completely change. And I just, even with this inflation, even with inflation at eight or 10%, I don't think we're even close to that moment. So if that moment's going to happen, probably not even next cycle, it's probably like the next cycle after that. So that, you know, if these cycles are, say, two to five years, nothing's going to change on this front for at least 10 years. It would be like, I mean, that's my guess. And that's a lot of runway for something
Starting point is 00:22:54 like Bitcoin to appreciate in the long run. So Brent, when you start to think about Bitcoin over, let's call it the next couple of years, is the macro kind of story just you're hedging against MMT, you're hedging against a continuation of the fiscal policies, almost more so than the monetary policies? Or how do you balance kind of monetary and fiscal policies in relationship to Bitcoin over the coming years? Well, I think you need both turned on in order for the trade to really work like that. Obviously, the empirical evidence suggests that but I think logically as well. You know, what it what you're looking for is deep a debasement of the currency. And that really is fiscal spending that's monetized or, you know, aided and abetted by monetary policy.
Starting point is 00:23:42 So if they're pushing in opposite directions, like that's not really, that's not really the prescription for extreme debasement. The debasement prescription is spending money and printing it to cover it. And like, there's a whole debate just so people don't at me, there's a whole debate about whether it's printing money or whatever, but increasing M2 or increasing the monetary base to me is essentially the denominator in the fraction. And if the denominator keeps on getting bigger, then there's going to be a reaction in assets. And to me, you can argue that there's definitely an argument to be made through my framework that something like NASDAQ or levered NASDAQ would be similar. And I agree somewhat, but there's a lot more stuff going on
Starting point is 00:24:36 with Nasdaq in terms of like, you got to worry about earnings and all that. To me, Bitcoin is just a lot simpler in terms of it has one thing that it's doing in my mind and it's good at that thing. And so I don't want to screw around and worry about whether Apple's buying back stock or not buying back stock and whether iPhones are going to get beaten up by some other competitor and all that. And whether the mega caps are overweighted in the index and all that. I just feel like even if you can argue that there are a lot of similarities in terms of the purpose of these, of some of the assets other than Bitcoin, I just feel like Bitcoin does the job better. What do you think? I mean, it's just like when you, when you, I just want to go back to MMT
Starting point is 00:25:19 for a sec, because like when you talk about that and what the consequences could be and like what it might mean for the appreciation of Bitcoin, like, I mean, nobody has like a crystal ball and could like imagine what the future looks like. But when you start to parse out that scenario or think about it, what do you think it means even for the younger generations who might be watching this program? What are the longer term consequences? I think everything that's going on right now is the petri dish or whatever you want to call it. We're seeing the result of the experiment in real time. The result is hard assets go up a lot and there's a lot of pain and there's a lot of income inequality. And I just don't see that changing. I feel like the framework that the
Starting point is 00:26:03 orthodox policymakers are using is the same everywhere. And like, if, you know, if I would say, like, I'd be hopeful, because I think this policy is bad, because of income inequality and inflation and all that. But so if, if I were to be hopeful, I would see at least some smaller economies, like say, New Zealand or Canada, or some of the smaller economies that have tended to be leaders in terms of monetary policy, like the intellectual leaders in monetary policy have tended to be the smaller countries like New Zealand. And they're not pivoting at all either. So I don't see a lot of evidence or hope that this stuff is going to change. And the ramifications are really, I mean, not to oversimplify it, but just look around, whatever's happening right now,
Starting point is 00:26:50 that's that's what's going to keep on happening and it's probably going to get worse and what it essentially means is that we continue with these cycles of you know explosive monetary growth that leads to a lot of inflation and then like oh shit moments where the central banks try to get the horse back in the barn for a while but they don't have the political will to to withstand unemployment once it starts going up so then you know the whole cycle begins again now obviously like covid was a crazy super turbo example of of this policy so i don't think the next recession is going to see anything like what we just saw um it'll be just this series of of mini um qes or mini mini mmt or mmt light compared to what we just saw which was like mmt on steroids because
Starting point is 00:27:43 of the crisis. So Brent, when you start to think about the Fed, obviously, they continue to remain committed to increasing interest rates, at least through the end of the year, they're talking about 50 75 basis point hikes. They're doing it though, with q1 GDP contracting, we don't know what will happen in q2 yet. What's your thought process in terms of when will they kind of wave the white flag and give up? Is there one or two milestones that you're looking at saying, you know, this is the moment that either something breaks or something gets to the point where they have to give up and they'll return back to loose monetary policy? So there's two things. So like there's one, when will they stop tightening? And then the next one is when do they go back to loosening?
Starting point is 00:28:22 When they stop tightening, I think first of all, they just need to get to neutral. So I think that has been the message is that they're so far behind the curve that they first just have to get to neutral. So wherever that is, let's say around 3% or something. And then they'll probably pause and then it will come down to the data. So part of the reason that I don't think long-term rates can go up much more from here is that I agree with you, they're hiking into weakness because one built-in flaw of monetary policy as it operates now is that it eases very quickly, like in a panic in any emergency, and then it tightens extremely slowly. So by the time they're they're tightening, they're tightening into weakness because they waited so long. I mean,
Starting point is 00:29:08 they were still buying assets in February when inflation was at 7%. So that just shows like how lagged their policy is. So I think that they, if they're, what they've kind of done now is like specifically said, we're watching CPI and CPI is a super lagged indicator. So, you know, you can look around and see commodity prices are down 20, 25%. Housing looks like it's peaked, trucking, autos. All prices of everything are falling, but the problem is CPI lags. So I think they're just going to keep tightening into economic weakness. And the thing is, it's not just the US, right? Like Europe and everywhere else is pretty weak as well. So I think they're going to keep tightening into weakness and then they'll get to neutral, they'll stop, and the economy will probably be
Starting point is 00:29:55 weak enough by that point, which would be like kind of Q1 2023. The economy would be weak enough at that point that they probably should be cutting, but I think they'll be scared to cut because they got scarred by, like I was saying, like the fighting the last war thing. So I think they'll be actually kind of slow to cut in 2023, but that's the path in 2023. So Brent, one of our sponsors is Eight Sleep. And I spent a lot of time thinking about just how do you optimize your life outside of just staring at screens all day long? And eight hours of sleep is a huge piece for me. How do you think about in these bear markets where, uh, people seem to, you can feel a sentiment on Twitter. People are much more worked up. They're much more stressed out. You,
Starting point is 00:30:39 you feel people just almost like attacking each other more. Um, and, uh, there's liquidations, there's kind of these sudden abrupt moves, some that also violate what people thought was going to happen previously. What do you do in your own life to kind of keep a clear head, uh, and just make sure that you can kind of get through this without going nuts or, you know, freaking out and having a rage quit on Twitter or something like that? Sure. So yeah, I've written quite a bit about this because I feel like part of my reason that I've survived so long in finance is like that I've looked at some of these issues and taken them seriously. So for example, I turn my phone off at 10 and I turn it on when I wake up. Whereas say like eight years ago, if I got up to go to the
Starting point is 00:31:20 bathroom, I'd check my phone. Oh, where's dollar yen? Where's the Euro? Where's S and P's? And that just like has absolutely no value. It doesn't have any financial value because if you make a trading decision or if I make a trading decision at that time, it's generally a bad one with incomplete information would land no edge. And then it kind of like makes your next day worse because you haven't slept as well. So that's one simple thing is like create friction around unwanted behaviors. So like my unwanted behavior was checking my phone at night. So now I turn it off and I put it downstairs. So like I'm not, there's no chance I'm stumbling downstairs in pitch black to check my phone to see where S&Ps are at 3.15 in the morning. And then sort of on
Starting point is 00:32:00 that same topic of either creating friction around unwanted behaviors or automating good behaviors, I always automate all my orders. So I always put stops and take profits on every single position that I have. And I feel like that kind of means that you don't need to be staring at the screen all day. There isn't a ton of value. I actually close my trading platform half the time. I mean, generally because of my job, I know where markets are roughly, but I would say all the trading that I do, I try to have my plan when I put it on. And then I just put my orders in and, you know, inshallah, I kind of wait for it to happen. And I don't think like the, some people will say, well, there's, there's value in watching the price action. I just don't really believe that.
Starting point is 00:32:44 I don't think price action contains a lot of information other than around major events, the way that things trade, like good news, bad price, and things like that, I think have value. But generally, I think you have to look at your behaviors and say, is this adding to my overall utility or no? And be thoughtful about it and say, okay, this is stupid. There's no reason to check my phone in the middle of the night, for example. So I'm going to X that activity. And I think you can go through a lot of things and do that. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or subscribe to while you're writing so spectra markets.com is where everything is so i write a daily global macro um which is like kind of my main thing and then i write a weekly crypto
Starting point is 00:33:28 piece as well um which is more through the lens of like macro behavioral technical um that kind of lens like i don't get into like l1 versus l2 solutions and stuff like that that's not my my thing i'm more of like a macro macro guy so yep spectra markets.com all right my actually i lied my last question says that you like table tennis are you good i'm pretty good yeah i would say like i'm not professional but if you just put me against like random person i think like 99 of normal people i could beat but not ever like not i mean not an olympic tennis table tennis there's three there's three there's three categories of table tennis players there's people who just volley. There's people who can put what I call amateur spin on the ball. And
Starting point is 00:34:15 then there's the pros. And it sounds like you're in that second bucket, which means that you would beat 99% of people listening or watching this. Yeah. I mean like top tier second bucket, but nowhere near the third bucket. Awesome, man. Well, listen, thank you so much for joining us. And we'll definitely have to do this again. Awesome. Thanks for having me. For sure. See ya. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to try to transition to get a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com. We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry.
Starting point is 00:34:52 It's a three-week intensive training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to pompscryptocourse.com to learn more, and I'll meet you guys for the next episode. Thank you.

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