The Pomp Podcast - #1538 Jordi Visser | Will Institutions Drive the Next Bitcoin Surge?
Episode Date: April 26, 2025Jordi Visser is a macro investor with over 30 years of Wall Street experience. He also writes a Substack called “VisserLabs” and puts out investing YouTube videos. In this conversation we discuss ...what is happening with bitcoin, Wall Street participation, why the global monetary order is shifting, heading to the bitcoin standard, robots, tariffs, and how Jordi sees the future unfolding.========================Figure Markets is where crypto meets real-world finance. Trade 24/7 with speed and transparency, borrow against your crypto with no credit checks, and earn—all on-chain. Stocks and real estate trading are coming soon, giving you 24/7 access and instant settlement. It’s the best of TradFi and DeFi in one platform. Get started today at https://www.Figure.com/pomp!Disclosures: https://www.figuremarkets.com/disclosures/=======================Polkadot is a scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain technology aimed at creating Web3. Created by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, Polkadot empowers users to build decentralized applications with ease. Backed by industry leaders, making it a preferred choice for big names, Polkadot stands out as a leading choice for investors seeking a reliable, future-proof solution in the growing world of Web3 technology. Learn more at https://polkadot.com/.=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:https://dreamstartupjob.com/Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/
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What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening
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episode. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a very special episode. I'm traveling. I'm not in
a suit and tie. I know. Calm down. I'll be okay, and I will be back. I promise, next week. But
today, we've got a conversation with Jordy Visser. In this conversation, we are going to go through
what's happening with Bitcoin. Is it decoupling from stocks? How should you think about Bitcoin
and all of the brand new ways that Wall Street can participate through all of these public
companies? Jordy gets into why he thinks the global monetary order is actually shifting,
and we are headed towards the precipice of the Bitcoin standard. On top of that,
we talk about robots. We talk about emerging markets. We talk about the Bridgewater memo
that is out there that is very bearish, and Jordy shares what his thoughts are on it.
And then, of course, we talk about the economic policies, tariffs, and how he sees the future
unfolding. I always enjoy talking to Jordy because he has very unique views, and today is no
different. So here's my latest conversation with Jordy Visser. Anthony Pompliano runs
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and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments.
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All right, Jordy, I thought a great place to start the conversation would be
Bitcoin on the precipice of becoming the Bitcoin standard. We've obviously seen the US dollars,
the global reserve currency for many, many years now. I think people have been very excited about
gold going up in recent weeks. But I think you are seeing Bitcoin in this kind of transition
into a decentralized, resilient digital world as something to really pay attention to. Explain how
thinking about this right now yeah this is and i i did hear your interview and i definitely have a
a different view on this and i'm gonna i'm gonna spend normally i try to only answer your questions
for about two minutes but this one's gonna take a little bit longer because i'm gonna take people on
on a history lesson because there's something unique that i haven't heard people really talk
about so let's start with the global reserve currency i think everyone knows that for the
us it started after world war ii but there's really only been two global reserve currencies
So this has been an experiment. It's just that it was first the British pound,
then it became the US dollar. But the new experiment, which is completely new,
is to get off the gold standard. So this is an un-gold-backed global reserve currency.
So you and I have talked about whether the global reserve currency, it's lost its status. And I've
said, I believe it has. So this is where Bitcoin fits in. So 1971, un-backed global reserve
currency 1985 we have the plaza accord 1997 we have the asian financial crisis 2008 we have the
financial crisis then we have covid then we have the largest bank run in history in the fastest
amount of time in silicon valley bank so if you go back over history which all macro people do and
you look at what's happened to this concept of the global reserve currency or any kind of situation
where debt to gdp and the fiscal deficit gets these levels it ends in depression it ends in
deflation it ends in war it ends in revolution and this is why most macro people get bearish
something else happened in 1971 which feeds into the bitcoin standard that or 1976 this
is when the personal computer was born so this was the beginning of the digital economy and so
when people talk about the bitcoin standard and i hear an economist talk about it they're always
fixated on this history of currencies and things like that and when is bitcoin going to take over
there's a very different situation that's going on here which is right now china and the us are
two biggest economies in the world and everyone's talking about how the us dollar is so weak
the chinese yuan is unchanged this year versus the us dollar which means it is also weak the
us has a trade deficit of about 470 billion with china europe has a massive trade deficit of close
to 300 billion with china this is not just one story this is the two biggest economies in the
world having a peg currency and the yuan cannot be the global reserve currency because of trust
What has happened so far this year is people are starting to realize that I don't trust treasuries anymore.
When you start talking about a Mar-a-Lago Accord, a restructuring of debt, when you start talking about a super bond, you're starting to lose trust.
And it seems like the administration wants a weaker dollar and doesn't care as much as it did about the reserve currency because it's got other attachments to it that make it worse.
The reason Bitcoin fits into this is after the personal computer, there was the Internet.
after the internet. There was the mobile phone. There was cloud. We've had the digital economy
that has grown violently. And so right now, if you had euros in your pockets and we were sitting
across from each other in New York and I had gold in my pockets and we went out to Starbucks,
we'd have a hard time buying what we wanted to buy, trying to exchange those two things.
If we had PayPal, we could transfer dollars into stable coins, dollars into Bitcoin,
Bitcoin into stable coins and we could pay there with PayPal. What has happened is there's two
reasons why this is the beginning of Bitcoin. We will no longer have trust from the globe.
So there's one thing that Bitcoin was created with a lack of trust on banks, a lack of trust
on the governments. But now the governments of the world don't trust the reserve currency status
and there is no replacement. So the birth of Bitcoin has to come from the realization that
you cannot transact payments with gold. And all of the countries in the world are fighting to
make stablecoin a payment system. And I don't think most people realize you can transfer
Bitcoin to stablecoins and pay for stuff already around the globe.
Now, does that mean that they will simply buy Bitcoin and hold it and it becomes a global
reserve? Or do you see this as they're going to use Bitcoin for bilateral trade and the promise
of kind of electronic peer-to-peer cash actually comes to fruition and the nation states that drive
that because they're not doing the micro payment to buy coffee for five dollars they're doing very
large transactions where actually maybe bitcoin's uh security um and transaction volume and things
like that uh may lend itself to be much more uh kind of effective yeah and i think you just
described it perfectly and this is why when when bitcoin started everyone figured the governments
would never allow it to happen. Well, the governments didn't want to lose that control.
Well, they've lost it. It's happened. So stable coins are growing. Bitcoin is up to the fifth
largest asset we've talked on here repeatedly. It will be the second biggest asset by the end of the
end of the year behind gold. So I think the government's already lost that fight. Now,
the administration's because of both democracy in the U.S., which is going to force everyone to do
it. But also what you've seen is stable coins are now becoming a threat around the globe because
99% of the stable coin is backed by dollars. So at this point, exactly the way you described it,
transactions will happen this way. There'll still be dollars. There'll still be currencies that go
because the government need that. And at no time does technology completely take over. There's Uber,
but there's still taxis. So these are parallel systems to me that are just going to continue
to shift to the digital economy. It'll just take longer than what people expect.
Now, what does this shift look like? Because there's some nuance here, maybe, that the US
dollar is the global reserve currency. The United States benefits from having that. Foreign central
banks have been buying lots of gold. The U.S. has gold. If we revalued it, it'd be a lot of gold.
Do we sell existing assets and then start to convert that to Bitcoin? Do you hold the assets
that you already have on your reserves? And Bitcoin is kind of like an additive thing. It's
kind of like almost like an option to the upside. And then you begin using it for transactions.
You know, it's impossible to predict the future, but how do you see this maybe most likely playing
out. And I ask that not just from a sense of like, what's going to happen to Bitcoin? Is Bitcoin
going to go up in price, which I think people are getting excited about, but also what's going to
happen to, you know, treasuries and gold and these other assets that maybe are going to become less
popular in this worldview? Yeah, so that that's the point where I think we always have to put in
context the number that every person who believes in Bitcoin knows, which is there's more than 500
trillion assets in the world. And the value of Bitcoin is still $2 trillion. So you don't need
to really have anything considering money supply grows around the globe at, say, 3% to 5% a year.
And everyone thinks that it's only money supply which grows Bitcoin. Bitcoin has been driven a
lot by money supply in the past solely because when you look at a liquidity measure, the S&P 500
has done the exact same thing. This year now, we're sitting at a point where U.S. technology
stocks are still down significantly for the year and Bitcoin is now up for the year. This has been
the transition that needed to happen to get the wealthiest people because we know that it's very
concentrated in terms of the 500 trillion. So what I think is going to happen this entire year
is that gradually people will be transacting and reducing their holdings and other securities or
money or bonds, whatever it is. But I think they're all underperforming inflation at this
point. So the debasement story that's been there, I actually think is going to get worse from here.
I think there's been a loss of trust in what is happening for corporations on the public side,
because they are very dependent on the trade with China. I mean, the rare earth story is a real
story. Tesla just announced that they're going to have to slow, maybe stop production on humanoids.
You just did an interview with Chris Camillo on humanoids. It was a great interview.
no one talks about the fact that you can't have humanoids production production without rare earth
and china ban rare earth trade so the interconnectedness of and the need for
fighter jets for iphones everything that's dependent on rare earth has kind of slowed down
so i think we're at the point where people are going to not have trust that this won't happen
again and bitcoin is a technology and an innovation that has no need on the tariffs it is not impacted
by it so i think you're going to see bitcoin outperform and then all the momentum will start
to fit into it when technology stocks are not working because people want growth so you mentioned
that bitcoin is up on the year technology stocks are down i think one of the big questions that
i've been getting in private i've seen people talking on television uh and now it is even
seeping into like the online discourse is uh will bitcoin break out will it decouple from the stock
market from tech stocks etc uh i think in moments of uh illiquidity or kind of liquidity crisis
all correlations go towards one and so people start to say oh bitcoin's not this safe haven
gold was going up gold's the safe haven uh the bitcoiners are idiots they're wrong
now it seems like people are changing their tune and so how do you look at the relationship between
bitcoin and maybe stocks broadly but also these technology stocks and like you know is it breaking
out is it decoupling is it important that it decouples uh and kind of like what should people
we'll be paying attention to over the coming months? Yeah, I think that, well, clearly,
in some measurement, the decoupling has already happened just by the fact that it's up and tech
stocks are down. But here's what I think has happened this week, which was very important.
US retailers went to the White House. And the very next day, we saw an easing in, let's say,
the rhetoric towards China. And actually, the first time we heard the administration say,
they could see tariffs being lower and they don't envision them being up here for longer.
So the whole theme for this week for the market where stocks rallied has been,
oh, okay, so I guess there will be negotiation. I think the better way to think about it,
and this is where it fits in with the decoupling, if you ask me how the rest of the year is going
to play out, we're not going to settle the China-US trade thing in the next two weeks.
I think investors are getting comfortable with the thought that earnings are going to be weaker
for now. The economy is going to be weaker for now. By the end of the year, I think it'll be
OK. And so stocks can have a bid underneath it. That means a floor has been put in. We now know
that they're not trying to take it to a depression. The Main Street versus Wall Street thing
has turned. I will reiterate that the low was made the Monday after Howard Lutnick talked about
millions of people screwing screws into iPhones because that was a ridiculous statement. And I
think it's become something of the bottom in the market. And so for Bitcoin, everyone wants to make
money and they want to invest. Bitcoin is going to go higher solely on short covering basis.
But since it has a passionate base that doesn't sell in down moves, I bought more in the down
move. I don't know if you did, but I took advantage of the fact that it went down because
I thought this year it would double in price. Well, now my expectations are starting to get
higher because once it does break out, I think it's going to force people who are stuck not
worrying that the market's going to collapse. But I don't know how people are going to jump
back into equities. If the economy and the uncertainty is there, Bitcoin will do well
with the uncertainty. So we saw the, I think it was the Walmart executive team, a few others,
they all started talking about the shelves will be empty. And there's this great tweet that I sent
you where this guy, maybe we can even pull it up. He was talking about America having full shelves
is actually the promise of America. We don't have scarcity, right? We have abundance. And maybe that
has lend itself to the consumerism of america but um is this idea that the retailers are like
they're not threatening but they're kind of uh maybe fear-mongering a little bit with like the
shelves will be empty do you think that that's actually a potential path forward or is this just
a way to convince the administration like hey let's back down de-escalate and let's get back
into a regime that maybe they're more comfortable in so unfortunately the reality is when you become
dependent on one country for the majority of your manufacturing. If on the one side,
you're saying we need to rebuild the manufacturing base. Well, that means the manufacturing is
outside the country. And if China has most of it, unfortunately, the easiest way to to to let's say
verify what they're saying is you go look at what we talked about last week, the port data.
There's nothing coming in from China right now. The numbers are staggeringly slow in terms of
the ships. And as you look at the ports, they give you kind of the three week look forward
of what's going to be there. The drop-off is just dramatic. So there will be empty shelves.
There's no doubt about it. Now, will it be every shelf is empty? No, because there's plenty of
things we make in the US. There's plenty of things we get from other places. But if you
like a certain good, it's already started to show up even in Amazon and stuff where you can't get
things or there's a long lead time. So unfortunately, this does have a little bit of COVID
to it. It's not as bad as what they were saying. But unfortunately, and I didn't mention this last
week, but this is something I did on my video. Within the market, the inflation forecasts for
months, meaning three months ahead, you can bet on them. There's swap markets on them.
They have the annualized CPI for the next three months at over 5%. And this is one of the reasons
why the pressure is increasing on the administration. Because if the shelves are empty
and you've already seen auto parts, everybody has said they have to raise prices, snowboard prices,
everything. In the long run, it's deflationary. In the short run, how can an administration deal
with inflation being annualized and see the headlines of, hey, it was 50 basis points this
month. It was 40 last month. It was 30. That's where these estimates are. So I think the pressure
not only from the retailers, but also from the inflation stuff really started to become
knowledgeable to them. Do you agree that inflation would go that high? Like from my perspective,
the tariffs are deflationary, definitely long run. But even in the shorter run where you're seeing
uh consumer uh you know consumption pattern shift you're seeing pullback and that kind of economic
slowdown um you also are seeing certain prices of gas and other kind of major staple stuff
uh crashing as well how do you look at the inflation outlook and you know let's say that
we just froze in time right now no policy changes moving forward what would your expectation of
inflation be over the next you know six months well what i said is the next three months you
you will absolutely have higher inflation. Now, that'll make headline CPI year over year tick up.
So it's down around 2.4, 2.3 percent. It will go back above three under this scenario because of
the drop offs that are coming in the higher month numbers. After we get through the three months,
we'll have to see. But the problem is with inflation, someone needs to eat it.
If you're not bringing goods in or if there's tariffs, it is a consumption tax. So it goes
higher. So yes, consumption comes down, but the problem is the businesses either go out of
business because they still need to sell them. They can't take the loss and eat it themselves.
Someone has to take the loss. So consumption does go down and that in the long run ends up being
deflationary. But in the short run, businesses need to pass through. If they're small businesses,
they don't have a choice because they can't lose money. If we go and we take a look at maybe the
traditional economic environment, the outlook, it's pretty bearish. I think people are trying
figure out where do they go um they're hoping that there's change with the administration uh economic
policies but simultaneous it feels like uh if the traditional world is becoming bearish and
pessimistic the bitcoin world is becoming optimistic and enthusiastic and we see that with
um you know strategy continues to buy bitcoin metaplanet continues to buy bitcoin we have a
new entrant into the market in this uh 21 which is canter softbank uh and tether coming together
uh brandon letnick has been very instrumental i think kind of organizing this jack maul is going
to be the ceo how do you look at uh those two forces is this a world where like the pessimism
in the traditional world pushes people to bitcoin and at the same time bitcoin is giving the market
more abundant opportunities to invest and therefore that just like accelerates the capital
flow into the market uh with without a doubt i mean you you mentioned the the monetary side we
haven't talked a lot about all the stablecoin bills and all the things that are happening
the stablecoin issuance by banks the fact that banks are going to have a part of this like
you have to remember there were two parts of this the us was both trying to
get rid of some of the benefits of the global reserve currency but at the same time it was
trying to impact the crypto side and be the leader in crypto so you don't want to fade the government
on one side why would you fade it on the other side so i've said before and i'll keep saying it
bitcoin is the s p 500 of the future of a world of ai and crypto so ai disrupts all businesses
it gets very hard in the capital structure to make a long-term investment in any company,
in my opinion, five years out. I don't care what company you have today in software that is built
on code. If you can tell me with certainty that AI will not gobble up your business over the next
five years, I think they're lying. And so five years from now, how do you value something with
a PE the way it's been done in the past? The great thing about Bitcoin is the negative that
I heard from people. When I talk to baby boomers or wealthy people running RIAs or family offices
in their 70s, and I say, do you have Bitcoin? Their answer, and I'm sure you've heard this
before, I don't buy anything if I can't value it. Well, I don't think any company now that runs a
business can be valued in a world of AI accelerating going forward. So now you're dealing with equal
footing. Well, I have no value on one side, but I have an asset that's only $2 trillion in terms
of the S&P 500. I have one over here that's $50 trillion. I think Bitcoin and crypto,
because of the innovation side, the global payment side, the fact that the reserve currency is ending
and the payment systems are going to explode around the globe, Bitcoin is going to sop in
most of the capital in terms of people that are excited. And as the price of Bitcoin goes higher,
it will bring more capital in. Yeah, it's so fascinating that Bitcoin,
even though now between the $80,000 to $100,000 continues to get de-risked the higher the price
goes right usually it's the opposite the the higher nvidia goes the more risky it becomes
people get worried the p ratios historic valuation measurements all the things that
kind of wall street prides itself on but there is no doubt that as bitcoin's price goes up
the risk goes away or significantly decreases but also the largest pools of capital both from a risk
mitigation standpoint but now they start thinking to themselves well i can actually put billions of
dollars into this. It's not just a game of, Hey, let me buy a little bit, you know, half a percent,
1%. Um, I know some portfolios, uh, in the hedge fund world, they have, you know, double digit
percentage of gold. Do you expect to see whether it's hedge funds or, uh, kind of large, um, you
know, institutions, pension funds, uh, endowments, hospital systems, sovereign wealth funds,
are we going to see big allocations to Bitcoin or is this going to be kind of a risk mitigation
1% to 2%. I won't get fired. And that's going to be my strategy.
So here's the great thing about your question. And one of the things that we said on this
weekly thing that I've gotten brought back to me is this concept of hedge funds have a quarterly
cycle where they have to manage certain things, meaning retail can keep buying throughout the
down run and people can mock them as, oh, we're not going to have a bottom in the market until
retail is done. I'm like, well, retail doesn't have the same pressure as you do. If they believe
the market is going to be up a year from now, they can buy it and hold it. Hedge funds can't
do that. They care about the path they are. And so it makes it very difficult. The groups you're
mentioning, they all have one thing in common, whether it's an endowment, a pension fund,
or a sovereign wealth fund. They have liabilities on the other side that they have to meet.
So this is not a redemption. They're not doing this from a speculative basis. They are doing
this because they actually have payments they have to make. If you don't think bonds are a
investment because they're not going to beat inflation over the next five years why would
you hold bonds a lot of people were heavily weighted towards stocks and all those groups
you mentioned they were heavily weighted towards growth and technology stocks what will force them
into bitcoin is the fact that they need to have growth so as it works remember people have been
doing their homework i'm sure you've had more people in fact i walked in here one day and you
had someone from an institution that's more on the institutional side what ends up happening is
is they're asking questions. They actually need to be doing their homework. And the ETF only
started a year ago. So the access got easier. So I think to your point, if you listen to Matt
Hogan speak when he spoke at your conference, he's like, we are getting lots of interest from
institutions. We are getting the people you're mentioning. I just think people have underestimated
that now there's a decoupling. It means I can buy this and I should be buying it because I can
actually make money in this that I can't make in stocks. When we see the institutional interest
coming uh when we see um these public vehicles coming out one of the aspects i come back to
is uh right now um these public market vehicles i saw matt levine who generally i think is very
smart obviously he's very good writer um he's making the argument that uh you can sell one
dollar of bitcoin for two dollars in the public market and so everyone's going to go do that
now i don't know if he is just kind of being snarky in the way that he writes and you know
he's kind of mocking to a degree on what's happening or if he actually believes that's
why people are paying more than what the nav of the vehicle is but what i think becomes really
interesting is my understanding of these vehicles is that people are actually paying for the future
purchasing of bitcoin kind of the increase in the bitcoin per share they're saying to themselves if
i buy right now and let's say one share equals one bitcoin i am going to try to figure out well
what is the bitcoin per share going to be in the future and then i'm going to have some sort of
multiple or growth rate and there's some valuation that i'm willing to pay uh in order to kind of
capture that future upside it does not feel like that is very well understood or explained or
covered right now do you expect that to become kind of a core component of you know financial
education if you go to some sort of class in college 10 years from now this is something
that they're going to be talking about it's like bitcoin per share and kind of a new metric
or should we be cautious when people start to create new metrics and you know there's history
of when these new metrics get created like uh community adjusted ebita maybe that actually
ends up being a uh something to be uh worrisome about okay so this is a great question i i we've
never discussed this point so i i think i've mentioned on here um i own micro strategy
I consider myself a reasonably educated person who's been in the finance world for 30 plus years.
I very seldom meet a hedge fund person who owns MicroStrategy. In fact, most of them want to
short it and they say this is a scam and this makes no sense. So what's the difference between
my view and theirs? And to your point, what it is. So I'm going to bring up a couple of things.
I think I may have said these on here, but this will feed into the way the world's going to look
in the future in your point. So when I talk about people on the fact that jobless claims haven't
gone higher yet, and I try to say the jobs market is not the same as it was before 2006 or 2007.
And the great financial crisis happened then. So the debate usually goes towards that. But I always
say, you understand that 50% of people that work are contingent employees now, five zero.
And they have no idea. They've never heard the phrase. They've never done the work. And I'm like,
I'm a contingent employee. I kind of do a lot of different things. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm
pretty sure you're a contingent employee. Maybe you're not. You have a business. You have people
here. But to some degree, we're just entrepreneurs who are doing a bunch of different things,
have a bunch of different revenue streams. That's only going to increase with AI.
If you're a consultant that has domain expertise, you're a contingent employee. If you're
a DoorDash driver, an Uber driver, you're a contingent employee. So the market has changed
because of the iPhone. You couldn't do those jobs without people being able to speak 24 hours,
do videos, the whole thing. So everything changed at that point. The reason I bring that up as part
of this, you have to adapt to technology and the capital structure. What Michael Saylor has proved
to me is that the capital structure of the future will be different. It will be completely different.
So the biggest companies in the world, when people say US exceptionalism is dead, I go, well,
the the companies that won the last 10 years they happen to be in america at a silicon valley but
50 of the revenues around the globe and it's innovation that really is kind of borderless
meaning google search is 94 in germany how what other i mean there's no car companies there's no
anything that happens so everything has changed because those companies have no debt so when the
companies that got up the money, they have no debt. So the capital structure of the world has
changed dramatically. And that's why I think everyone is still fixated on this debt fiat
backed system. And capital structure is a big part of that. In the future, your comment about
Bitcoin per share, Michael Saylor sold me on the fact, and that's the reason why the premium for
his company relative to his holdings, if he's able to lend this out, if it becomes the collateral
that replaces treasury what is the value of that if he has a moat on it so that's where i kind of
think people are going to have to get to is they have to question their beliefs on the capital
structure of the future of the world in a world with no debt and with bitcoin as the global reserve
currency now stocks happen to be up uh look at the s&p uh it's up like uh a couple percent since
the close on liberation day um does that mean that actually all the policy has been positive for uh
for stocks, does that mean that everyone who is selling and panicking and fear mongering and
doomsday predicting, uh, they're dumb? Like, how do you look at, uh, stock performance compared to,
uh, the close of liberation day? Yeah, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna jump into that one. I,
I think it's going to take, I think it's, I think the policy decisions, uh, have been handled in a
way which made the market fall very sharply. And I don't think this can be unwound very quickly.
that being said, I think the lows are, you know, I did an interview this week and said, I'll put
85% chance that the lows are completely in. I think there's maybe another 5% we could go through
them again and bounce back. The economy is going to be weak. Earnings are going to be weak. We
don't know when some kind of settlement is going to happen. But as I mentioned last week, and it's
been my theme, I'm a second derivative person. Rate of change is what matters in anything
regarding markets. And since this was a policy induced crash, policy started changing the day
after the army of a million screws in iPhones. That was the day that Black Monday, it's going
to be Black Monday and the market didn't change. That was the day they threw out the, well, what
if we did a 90 day pause and the market rallied. So I think what we've done here is the economy is
going to be weak. Earnings are going to be weak. We don't know how bad it's going to be. But Google
said their CapEx is going to keep coming through. The AI trade, the AI resilience, the profit
margins are still going to come. So I'll keep saying what I've said every week. You've said
it here too. By the end of this year or the beginning of next year, I think we'll be at
all-time highs in stocks the path there will be very very back and forth it'll be very volatile
but positioning and sentiment is the liquidity that that could take us close to the all-time
highs sometime sooner than people realize just because of positioning so let's uh maybe zoom
in a little bit on the stock performance since the liberation day forget for a second uh all the
people who are screaming and yelling but the fact that stocks are up since that moment does that
tell you anything about the way the market looks at these economic policies? Or is that just
something where because there's so much volatility, we shouldn't read into it?
No, you have to read into it. And this is actually a great point. If you think about
how much selling happened after that, how much the sentiment dropped off in my weekly thing,
I've shown, I mean, the most bare, we're at levels of the great financial crisis and like
the worst times in history, depending on how far back you have data, sentiment and positioning is
still extremely low. So if everyone was a seller, how did the market hang in here? If nobody's
buying and we're hearing every foreigner selling and hedge funds are selling and CTAs are selling
and everyone's selling, when a market is higher than it was the day after that, there's obviously
buyers that are out there too. Now, retail has been buying and everyone views that as negative.
The thing people forget is buybacks continue to happen. What has happened is once people made
their sales, they just stop trading. So there's a lot of funds that are just sitting there waiting
and sitting on their hands. And you hear this across the country. I'm not doing anything until
I see what's going on. The problem with that is the buybacks keep going on. And that means if you
decide to change your mind, you're going to have to buy at higher prices. And that's why I said
you could get close to the all-time highs with nothing more than this verbal liquidity bazookas
that just keep coming out. Meaning, do you want to be short on Friday before a weekend when we
might have deals with india and vietnam and japan announced and then you come in monday and it's up
another two percent no one's shorting it and this is the thing that i think has become an issue i
hear a lot of sell the rally things but really it's been a buy the dip market since liberation
day and i think it's going to stay that way i just think now if you if i had to put a range on things
i think we've upped the lower end of the range to maybe 5300 i think the bottom end of the range or
the top end of the range is getting closer to 5900 in my mind and so we're just kind of shifting the
range. And as long as even though China is saying we're not coming to the table until he basically
kisses the ring, I think they both realize this has gone on long enough. And I think we'll continue
to see marginal improvements and a de-escalation over the course of the next two weeks.
I recently interviewed Chris Camillo. And Chris is pretty interesting because he's known for
social arbitrage was the investing strategy. Basically, just listens to what people are
talking around him and he goes and he buys it before things show up in the data, right?
And so you can imagine if you're on the internet and you see everyone posting photos of Saratoga
water, my guess is that all of a sudden sales a couple of weeks or months later show up in the
data. So that arbitrage of understanding what people are talking about. Now, what he is talking
about now is humanoid robots. And he is like all in. He told me it's the biggest investment he's
made as a sector. It's the biggest personal investment in a single company he's made.
He's spending all of his time doing this off camera. He told me a bunch of things that he's
been doing of understanding from talking to, you know, robotic PhDs, all the way to visiting
factories and everything in between. I walked away from that conversation with maybe two major
takeaways. One was, this is gonna be hyper deflationary. And two is the world is going
to look very different 1520 years from now than it does today. We spent a lot of time talking about
kind of financial assets and the monetary world order and kind of people's portfolio with the
assets that are available today. What did you take away from that conversation? And maybe like,
are there any things with these humanoid robots that people should be preparing for
in their portfolio as the rise of those robots becomes more prevalent?
Yeah. It was a great interview. I've heard him. I didn't even know who he was until say three
months ago. So in my podcast kind of travels, I search by themes and I listened to a two-hour
podcast with him your interview was better not to to give you kudos but the reason it was better is
you kind of gave him um more bigger picture themes where the last one was a little bit more
associated with with the excitement over humanoids and what i mean is you just said 15 to 20 years
he was very balanced in what he said he said it's not today's thing and he said he he gave
me something unique on china he said all these videos that you see on x they're real
but their battery doesn't last very long so they're not ready for this so they can do all
those things physically but the power situation's not there so what i took out of this and i you
know for 22v research i did a a 20 page report on embodiment and the fact that you need a lot
of materials and pieces to actually do the production side so before we can have the
deflationary side of humanoids, which again, 10 to 15, 20 years down the road is the one we'll have
millions to billions of them. Great. Well, you need a lot of parts to get there. So I've talked
about the need for memory. And he talked about, you need a lot of memory. You need actuators.
The reason actuators are the muscle part of humanoid. So it's not just rare earth that you
need. You actually need certain parts that again, I hate to say it, but the Chinese make,
if we're going to get into a military war with China and we can't make humanoids for the next
10 years we're at a really big disadvantage if they're producing a lot so that was one thing
that came out another thing in this i guess this is something that people just have to um
start to recognize and this is another deep dive piece i did we don't have enough power um i was
going to you know say to you you like to learn just like i do there was on april 9th which was
a week after liberation day eric schmidt was part of a hearing in washington on the power needs it
it was on AI and how do we become competitive against China in AI. A lot of that hearing was
on the need for power. We do not have enough energy to make the humanoids go. We do not have
enough to have a billion humanoids. So the investments that are going to be necessary
in physical hardware, remember, we just left a world where cloud investments and software were
big. Code was the greatest commodity over the last 15 years. We're getting back into old school
commodity stuff like copper. If you look what copper did, it fell down violently on liberation
day and it bounced all the way back up. And I'm sure the Chinese went in and bought as much as
they can because it's needed for the power build out and they're doing a lot. So that's what I took
out of Chris is it's down the road. It's very sexy. It's very interesting. It brings up the
trade situation because we need actuators and we need rare earth. So we got to solve this thing
with China to be actually to grow them or they're going to slow down. And at the same point, we need
a lot of power to fuel them. So that's the way I kind of think about markets is what's in the near
term, what's in the long term. I'd be buying energy and utilities at this point. Now, speaking of the
big picture, Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund, they came out and this, I don't know
if it was leaked or they published it, but there's this like letter that is now making its rounds
online. And they seemed very bearish and they seem to be calling attention to a very historic
change in the monetary order and a lot of folks who are paying attention to like our stocks up
or down which you know portfolio is doing well what do i do tactically these guys seem very
focused on hey wait a second there is like a once in a century you know kind of situation playing
out or once in a couple decades situation we know that uh ray dalio has written a number of books
he studied this at length what did you take away from uh this and maybe do you agree with them
that that's part of what we're going through so i the video i did i think two weeks ago um
had had a title on it it's the end of the world as we know it so i agree um but i'll i'll do the
humanoid side because a remember they manage money they're positioned a certain way uh they're
talking their book for sure here's what i'll say humanoids will replace labor there's no doubt
about it if i mean i think chris camillo called it infinite labor is coming and that's why it's
so deflationary 24 hours a day you can have these things doing the job okay great that moment in
time is not today that moment in time is going to take time so the part i would disagree with
what Bridgewater said is they're making the assumption, which again, is a very dangerous
assumption. I agree the monetary order has changed. And I think this changes capital flows for the
rest of time. But I thought this was going to happen anyway, because of the competition from
AI, the decentralizing nature of the advantage that the MAG-7 had was going to be disrupted.
So if you break it down that way, it's less alarming, and maybe it's not as immediate as
they're writing it, I think everyone is right to say that the US will not be 75% of global equities
three years from now. But if they're 60%, 50%, and there's an underweighting and the rest of
the world has done better and US stocks have underperformed, it's not as alarming. I do agree
with the concept. I just don't agree with the alarming nature of what it's going to look like
over the next two years. If the US goes from 75 to 60 or 50, what are the areas around the world
that you would pay the most attention to where you would tell people to go and spend time actually
investigating whether there's investment opportunities? So the commodity thing to me
is a really big deal. I really do believe emerging markets that have commodities are
going to benefit a lot from this. I was talking to the person who's the energy specialist at 22V
this week, and we're collaborating on this power situation. And I remember hearing that Argentina
had massive amounts of gas reserves. And he said, yeah, they just made the decision. I'm sure it was
part financial not to do it. If you believe in a tripolar world, which I do, where China's kind
of focused on Asia, Europe's focused on Europe, and the US is going to be focused more on the
Americas, I think Brazil and Argentina, which are incredibly undervalued assets at this point,
They benefit a lot from commodities. I don't believe this is a 1970s style. Commodities are just going to go higher. But what I see happening is anything that has a high multiple, so 30 plus PE, based on technology, which can be hurt by AI, those multiples should come down for the reason I said, which is long term, you just don't know.
The great thing about commodities are we have a shortage of them in most places.
We just don't have enough copper in the short term, and it takes a long time to get new
mines.
So we're kind of back in this old school physical world.
And this is where innovation, if it goes too fast and you need power for it, it's a problem.
People have to realize that post the great financial crisis, we didn't need, we were
getting off of physical things and off of power because of the switch from all of the
things that change.
You look at that iPhone and that app, and if you take all of those apps and you go back to what you had to buy cameras and GPS and everything that you needed, a calculator, and think about how many trucks needed to carry that stuff around, how much diesel needed to carry it around.
We're just not shipping as many things as we used to ship.
Now, I think we're going to be in a place where commodities and physical things are going to be needed to power the AI side.
And so I'd be looking at emerging markets, any commodity producing places, any of the stuff, and there'll be a reweighting towards health care, financials and energy and commodities.
You mentioned earlier that in the Bitcoin dip, you bought more Bitcoin.
Is there anything else over the last couple of weeks that you've been doing tactically with your portfolio?
And I use that as a way to maybe highlight things that you previously thought that you no longer believe or maybe things that you didn't believe that today you believe.
no see the funny thing about this is i i once i got interested in um bitcoin
everything changed for me um it's it's funny to be a macro person and and have had your money
saved in different ways but my focus really shifted to bitcoin and i hate to say this to
people because it's not diversified my diversification in my holdings for them for
for my savings, it's heavily skewed towards Bitcoin. And it's higher than it was before
the year started, even though the price is now unchanged. And the reason is because I did buy
more Bitcoin. I did buy MicroStrategy. I took advantage of the situation where I thought
the administration and going with the government would be a good thing. And I always believed
the first time we met or the first time we physically met in Miami, I gave a presentation
And I said, my trade for this year, and this was at all-time highs for stocks, I want to be long Bitcoin versus the MAG7.
That's over 20% this year.
It was over 20% last year.
It was over 20% the year before.
The reason I bring up all three years, Bitcoin outperformed the MAG7 during the bull market years for the MAG7, and it outperformed during the bear market years.
So I just believe that stocks as a whole are just not going to participate with Bitcoin.
And I have a lot of money in money markets.
So I view my portfolio as being this thing where traditionally I'm a believer in diversification.
But right now, for where things are, I don't have a lot of faith in the fiat assets.
And once we get out of this and things settle down, I would probably be buying energy companies and things like that out of the cash side because you can get dividends on that and the appreciation.
So the energy side is going to be much more attractive to me.
Financials, too, because I believe in the blockchain and the AI benefits that come.
And I'll just say it again. I've said it on here. Healthcare is a huge, huge benefit coming from AI because of the inefficiencies inside that space.
Jordy, where can we send people to find all the great information you're putting out online?
The YouTube channel, they can get my recap every week, but also this one in particular. I'll go through some of the things I said on here with some details.
The historic part is important for people to know.
They can find me on Substack.
And then if they go to 22vresearch.com, I'm putting out a lot of deep dive research.
I did an interview this week with a policy person.
I'm going to be spending a lot more time in DC because I want to be more engaged with
the digital asset community and the policy side down there.
And because I work with this group and they do a lot of stuff in DC, they've been interested
in kind of the angle on the macro side and the fact that this is a major turning point
in the global monetary system, as Bridgewater said, I wouldn't focus on the downside. They
have to keep that system kind of going because it's mutually assured destruction for everyone
if it doesn't work. And I think they should be focused on which new system is going to come out
of it. And that new system, as you know, is based on, it's based on Bitcoin. It's based on stable
coins. It's based on tokenization, which is going to be a major part of this. All of those things
are happening in Washington. So 22vresearch.com, they can find me there. Amazing. Thank you so
much for doing this. We'll do it again next week. Thanks, Anthony.
