The Pomp Podcast - #491 Jeremy Boynton on Digital Asset Active Management

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

Jeremy Boynton is the Founder of Laureate Wealth Management, a comprehensive wealth management firm for affluent investors generally ranging from $5 million to $25 million in total net worth. In this... conversation, we discuss value accrual, institutional adoption, active management, private market investing, and digital asset fund of funds.  ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.io/. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today.  ======================= Diginex is the first company with a cryptocurrency exchange to be listed in the US. Their ticker is Nasdaq: EQOS, and they are the first crypto company that you can buy stock in. They also have a crypto exchange called EQUOS, which has been built to institutional standards, but is available to everyone. You can trade Bitcoin and Ethereum spot, as well as Bitcoin perpetuals, and get a 5% discount on all fees, by signing up using http://www.equos.com/pomp ======================= Money On Chain brings Bitcoin to mass adoption with solutions to meet the needs of different types of users: a fully bitcoin-collateralized stablecoin (DoC), a bitcoin on steroids (BPro), and a dizzying bitcoiner option for lovers of leveraged trading (BTCx). All this, without requiring the delivery of private keys. Money On Chain - Bringing bitcoin into the mainstream. Visit moneyonchain.com/pomp to learn more

Transcript
Discussion (0)
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. Let's kick this thing off. Jeremy Boynton is the founder of Laureate Wealth Management, a comprehensive wealth management firm for affluent investors, generally ranging from $5 million to $25 million in total net worth. In this conversation, we discuss value accrual, institutional adoption, active management, private market investing, and digital asset fund funds. I really enjoyed this conversation with Jeremy, and I think you will as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.
Starting point is 00:00:37 First up is Exodus. Exodus.io is one of the most popular cryptocurrency wallets and has been around since 2015. It's supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. You can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies. Interactive charts let you view the price history of a specific asset or your portfolio's performance over time. And maybe the best part? Exodus is integrated with Treasure Hardware Wallet, making advanced security easy for everyone. You can visit exodus.io for your free download or search Exodus on the App Store or Play Store. Again, exodus, E-X-O-D-U-S.io for the free download. Or you can search E-X-O-D-U-S on the App Store
Starting point is 00:01:19 or the Play Store. Exodus, one of the most popular cryptocurrency wallets that's been around since 2015. Go check them out. Next up is Diginex. They're the first company with a cryptocurrency exchange to be listed in the United States. Their ticker on Nasdaq is EQOS, EQOS. And they're the first crypto company that you can buy stock in. They also have a crypto exchange called Equos, E-Q-U-O-S. E-Q-U-O-S is the name of the crypto exchange. And that has been built to institutional standards, but it's available to everyone. You can trade Bitcoin and Ethereum spot as well as Bitcoin perpetuals and get a 5% discount on all fees by signing up using Equos.com slash Pomp. Again, E-Q-U-O-S.com slash Pomp. Go check them out. Diginex, the first company with a crypto
Starting point is 00:02:06 exchange to be listed in the United States under the ticker symbol on NASDAQ, E-Q-O-S, E-Q-O-S. lastly money on chain money on chain is bringing bitcoin to mass adoption with solutions to meet the needs of different types of users a fully bitcoin collateralized stablecoin doc a bitcoin on steroids b pro and a dizzying bitcoiner option for lovers of leverage trading btcx all this without requiring the delivery of private keys money on chain bringing bitcoin into the mainstream you can visit moneyonchain.com slash Pomp. Again, moneyonchain.com slash Pomp. They've built an entire suite
Starting point is 00:02:45 of decentralized financial products that do not require the delivery of your private keys. Go check out moneyonchain.com slash Pomp. My voice just cracked, so you definitely have to go to moneyonchain.com slash Pomp. DeFi is definitely for Bitcoiners. Go to moneyonchain.com slash Pomp. All right, let's get in this episode with Jeremy.
Starting point is 00:03:06 I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got a very special guest for you today. I've got Jeremy here with me. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. Thank you. It's great to be back.
Starting point is 00:03:48 Absolutely. For those who didn't listen to the first episode, maybe just give us a quick two minutes on your background and kind of what you're doing today. Sure. So we launched, first of all, I'm an investment advisor. I run investments for really kind of the $5 to $25 million dollar net worth family office, who's not quite big enough to create their own family office, but big enough to play in that space. So you can think of me as an outsourced family office solution. I've got 19 families around the country that I do that for. And, you know, in middle of 2017, that led me down a rabbit trail to investigate crypto, completely became enamored with it launched a hedge fund of funds pure crypto in uh january 28th uh i'm sorry january
Starting point is 00:04:34 2018 which of course as we all know uh in hindsight was impeccable uh but yeah so i i've got a three year track record on that fund now we're launching pure crypto two or we just did january of of this year and uh so we're here uh discussing sort of what we've learned and and what we're excited about and what may have shifted and changed over the course of the three plus years. So let's just start with what's changed, which is a lot, but go back from 2018 to today. Forget everything in between, but just like the sentiment in January 2018 to sentiment in January of 2021, what are the biggest changes or differences that you see? Yeah, clearly from a sentiment standpoint, you know, the kind of maybe the obvious biggest
Starting point is 00:05:20 issue is just the institutional adoption the uh my my industry as a whole in uh fourth quarter 2017 and certainly even first quarter of 2018 kind of had that uh i told you so this is a fraud this is horrible it'll never work kind of uh you know vibe and and and all of those naysayers for the most part uh have actually reversed course and it's pretty interesting to see how that has matriculated that's one but i think the more interesting one and the one i love to sort of passionate about talking about is when you look under the hood and you you actually look at the inner workings of how crypto has matured as an asset class and by the way it's got a long way to go and and we're still we feel early in the game um you know in in the fourth quarter of 2017
Starting point is 00:06:06 uh venture capital investments in cryptocurrency were really you know three week to three month kinds of investments, right? These people, it was like the go-go days of the internet. You get an interesting team of individuals. They write a white paper or create a marketing deck, and they go out and they raise capital without having to create any technology at all. And of course, when the bubble popped, that went away immediately. And you couldn't go get money for free to come build an idea before you'd done anything with that idea. Today, it's more like traditional venture capital. You got to go, you got to go raise a seed round. You got to spend that money judiciously. You got to make some progress on your technology. You got to keep
Starting point is 00:06:49 feeding it, you know, A round, B round, C round. And it takes a while to get to your ICO, initial coin offering, probably three years in most cases. And that one shift alone dramatically shifts where value is created in the ecosystem for cryptocurrencies and digital assets as a whole. Got it. And so when you think through this, you've got a whole bunch of things that you could offer to clients, right? You could do fund to funds, you could do indexing, you could do active management, you could go start your own company, you could start your own project, whatever it is. Walk through kind of your evaluation as to where you play in the market and why. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll sort of do that even historically. You know, when I sort of stumbled in the middle of 2017, I thought, this is cool. I'm going to go raise a hedge fund and start picking coins. And then I realized, well, I've never programmed a line of open source code in my life. I don't know how to do that. Nor do I have an NSA level of cryptography. I don't understand that. Right. And so at that time, all of the projects that were interesting were really kind of you needed those sciences. You needed people on your team that really understood those in a very, very deep way. I didn't. So immediately I thought, well, if I'm going to have value add in this space, it's not going to be on that end of the spectrum.
Starting point is 00:08:06 So we naturally shifted to fund to funds in my role as an advisor to wealthy clients. I'm always looking at deals. My, you know, my ability to vet and source deals and ask questions and trying to find talent. that's kind of what i do for a living so we just took those skills and tried to apply them to this cryptocurrency world and my most passionate point in making that fund structure work was a belief that the asset class was so nascent that you did not want to pigeonhole yourself with really strong boxes you didn't want you know like in in traditional finance you've got morning star style you know morning star box style and you know small cap growth large cap value all that kind of stuff. This ecosystem doesn't have that yet. And you don't want that. I think it's way
Starting point is 00:08:49 too relieving. Still, you want to go find the smartest guys in the room and give them the widest mandate you possibly can. Because the landscape shifts so dramatically, so quickly, you can't box them in. And it'll be years before we get to a place in this industry where you want to actually start boxing people in. But that will come eventually. Yeah. Talk a little bit about active management and kind of why that's so important well uh i'm maybe the first threat on that is go back to the idea of the venture capital if you're in a if you're in an index uh in the in the early days uh you know most of the value creation in i'm going to say in the year 2017 might have been uh found in tickers that were already trading publicly not anymore right we have
Starting point is 00:09:32 a position in our portfolio through one of our managers called the graph the first trade post ico in the graph printed at 13 cents i believe it's trading somewhere around 55 cents today our cost basis is one tenth of a penny and we were only able to achieve that because we hired really smart people that were super excited about that project before it went ico and so as an active manager you've got to understand how the ecosystem works where value accrual is happening and be able to move funds uh towards uh towards the part of the market that is accruing value in the most compelling way yeah and it's really fascinating to me i guess that um as you think through uh kind of that active management um not only is it going and finding some of the
Starting point is 00:10:24 stuff in the private market but it's also then knowing when to get out of the positions as well Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. And again, because I don't program open source code, nor do I have any chops in cryptography, we actually don't make those calls. I mean, we are a traditional hedge fund of funds. We've got five managers in our portfolio. We're in constant communication with them. They don't ask us our opinion on when to sell. But our bet is that we're with the smartest herd and that there really is a small herd. And I think that's actually an important point. You know, in 2017, I believe there were less and don't not 100% sure of the exact number, but I'm pretty sure that there were less than five managers in crypto that ran liquid cryptocurrency books greater than $50 million in value. There was a really, really, there's hundreds of funds, but most of them had really, really small portfolios of capital under management. And I'm not including the venture capital guys. I'm just saying actual liquid crypto guys, right? Today, I bet you could count less than a dozen hedge funds managing liquid crypto books of greater than $100 million each. That's a really, really small universe. I mean, I can get on an airplane and go see those guys in three or four weeks, all of them, and be really close to the biggest, maybe the biggest aren't always the smartest, but their ability to attract capital probably has some sense of leaning or direction as to whether they've got chops in the space. And so I just think it's such a small space. There's so much misinformation. There's so much price discovery that isn't really accurate in the spreads in the market. And it's absolutely an active manager world. Yeah. Talk a little bit about how your clients are thinking about sizing this in their kind of larger portfolios. And that'll kind of help people understand, like, why that feeds into the fact that some of these funds, you know, only have $10 million, $50 million, $100 million to them. Yeah, for sure. So, you know, when we came out with the fund in 18, we said, you know, write a check that can go to zero, like, literally, I want you to write a check, you are not going to lose sleep, you're not going to, it's not going to change your life, it's not going to really impact your financial at all.
Starting point is 00:12:49 We think that's probably a 2% to 3% position. If we're wrong and crypto goes to zero, it shouldn't change the portfolio, shouldn't change your life. If we're right and it goes 10x over the next five or 10 years or whatever, 20x, it can turn into real money. That conversation has shifted. We think today the floor is much higher. We've survived yet another 80% drawdown in the short life of Bitcoin's history. And you can't kill it. and and the institutional adoption it's upon us and we think the technology is here to stay so
Starting point is 00:13:25 we think double that allocation is reasonable for most most investors although i have to say i you know if you listen to this podcast this is not investment advice i don't know you i don't know your portfolio situation really investment just in terms of general broad stroke understanding space, we think of it. So when you think through how the space is evolving, one of the things that you've talked about in the past is this like value accrual, right? So we talked a little bit about kind of asymmetry and some of these investments. If you're the average person sitting at home, how do you think about this? Like, can you and should you go look for the active managers? Is this something where people should spend a bunch of time to get educated and then go try to trade or kind of pick, you know, stocks would pick these like coins?
Starting point is 00:14:18 Like, how do you just think about that from a wealth management standpoint? Yeah, you know, I'm going to obviously you've teed me up really well. Thank you for that. I'm going to talk my own book here, but I'm going to talk my own book because it's really what I believe. It's how I believe this space should be attacked. But, you know, there are, in my opinion, and I think in most people's opinion, this is going to be a little bit of a long answer, but I hang with it as I explain this. There's probably seven hedge funds managing liquid crypto books that pretty much most people think those are the seven best in this country. I'm not talking about Europe or Asia, but I'm just saying U.S. domicile crypto, crypto asset management. uh we have we have uh allocations to five of those seven and the two that we didn't allocate
Starting point is 00:15:05 to it was by choice two of those managers in our book are closed cannot get cannot get any money into them the third manager has a really high minimum a million dollars they'll be closed a fourth manager has high minimums they'll they might be closed in like three to six months went to the range so there's actually arguably in my opinion only one manager in our deck that has some significant room for for uh taking on new capital and it's because that manager is really looking at a value sector of the market that's got way more runway uh to it but the all the traditional crypto guys are getting full of capital there's so much interest and so uh from a capacity standpoint your ability to get diversification and get access to the smartest
Starting point is 00:15:52 projects that are out there really, really difficult. Even if you spend the time and go do the work and learn how to understand the code or the cryptography and figure out how to get in the right doors, it's just a super high mountain to climb as an individual. Yeah. And so when you start to think through where's Bitcoin fit into all this, right? Is it still the king and people should have exposure to it? Are you of the belief that people shouldn't have Bitcoin? How do you just think about it given some of the asymmetry and value accrual you're talking about in other parts of the market? Yeah, I would say I don't think that way. I think absolutely people should have allocation of Bitcoin. I think it's a very good core holding. I think Ethereum is the same
Starting point is 00:16:38 way. And I think that those are exposures that don't need, frankly, a hedge fund with a carried interest. I just don't think the market, I think the market has matured to a point where we just don't need to pay somebody that much to gain those exposures. So I'm absolutely in favor of an allocation to Bitcoin and Ethereum direct alongside an actively managed portfolio. Yeah. And then when you think about some of the interesting things that you've seen, And are these decentralized protocols or they are specific like subsectors in crypto that you're saying, hey, look, this is really where I want to spend a lot of time? Well, for sure. Again, with the caveat that we don't make these calls, we just listen to all the smart guys in the room and we get excited when they get excited. But we don't we're not actually directing them. You know, so it's really they're they're explaining those narratives to us.
Starting point is 00:17:34 But absolutely, DeFi is the first killer app, if you will, in my mind. It is real world, has real cash flows. It's the first place in the ecosystem where you can take your financial accounting 101 and actually apply real business metrics to a token. Like, you know, like we can talk about Uniswap, right? Decentralized exchange, 30 basis points of transactional volume on a daily basis. a cruise to that token so hold on before we get into the token component of uniswap just explain uniswap at kind of a high level first for those that don't know it's decentralized exchange it's
Starting point is 00:18:15 nasdaq without the middleman okay and that basically means that there's uh a pool of tokens if you own some of those tokens then you essentially have uh ownership right a couple of that near quotes of the cash flow for that decentralized exchange that's correct you have OK, you have ownership is right in air quotes because the cash flow accrues to the token holders voting rights. Right. So token holders could vote them theoretically to their neighbor. But but but there is and the token holders get to vote where that where that cash flow goes. OK. And so walk through just like if you were to look at it as like a company valuation, kind of that that evaluation. Yeah, so 30 bps, 0.3% of the transactional volume on that exchange accrues as cash flow to the token, which on an average of roughly $700 million of transactional volume a day, which, by the way, has been growing like crazy.
Starting point is 00:19:22 I mean, I don't even know the number, but it was a fraction of that just a year ago, right? So that's a $2.1 million daily cash flow haul, which is about a $766 million annual number. And I think if I haven't looked at it this morning, I've been on calls all morning, but I'm pretty sure the valuation of Uniswap is somewhere around $4.5 billion, which puts this at maybe about a 5x that cash flow. I hesitate to call it earnings because that's like this capital thing, but you can kind of make that. And that's a value company. Whether you call it exactly earnings or not. Two years ago, we were sitting around a table saying, well, how do you value a digital asset? It's not real. I can't touch it. And it's just a series of numbers and codes and it doesn't really spit off any income. And what is it? And we're past that. there's a whole section of crypto that actually has real world cash flows another example in a different world would be spencer dinwiddie's nba contract probably half or more of your readership or listeners know this but there's an nba basketball player out there who created his own token to brilliantly so to pull forward his 15 million dollar or so nba contract in cash flows
Starting point is 00:20:36 you know he basically took his 15 million and sold it for 14 and a half or whatever to create an implied yield for the token holder and basically asset back to that token with real world rights to pro rata ownership, the cash flows of an NBA contract. There's more and more of that happening in crypto or what I would more appropriately say digital assets. And so when you think about like go back to the Uniswap example, is that just a thing where investors are undervaluing that? Like it sounds like at five times cash flow, that sounds pretty low of multiple, especially given what's going on in the public markets uh is that the right way to think about it is maybe that's actually the right valuation like how do you wrap your head around valuation versus uh kind
Starting point is 00:21:18 of the analysis of the actual cash flow yeah that's that's so great uh i i i mean this is where it's i'm i'm passionate about it but my opinion is just that it's very open-handed opinion uh but my opinion on that is it's just that people don't know i mean everybody you know 30 years ago uh Not very many people had money in the stock market today. It's ubiquitous, like a lot lower, lower, lower and lower levels of net worth, more and more percentage population of the country. They have money in the markets in one form or another through their foreign case or their IRAs or whatever. Crypto is is nascent. You know, just because it's true doesn't mean people know it yet. I think that's the entire reason why there can be that price dislocation, because because it's just a novelty. People people have people are still trying to get their head wrapped around how to own Bitcoin, much less this funky token called Uniswap they've never heard of.
Starting point is 00:22:12 Absolutely. And so when you think through kind of where the world's going, do we think that all of the capital is going to flow out of the stock market and into this kind of digital world? And there will be this digital decentralized financial system. Is there coexistence? Like just how does this evolve over time? Yeah, I love that. Like we, you know, it kind of goes back to, you know, we've been saying institutional capital is coming. It's coming. We've been saying that for three years. And it showed up, but it showed up first on the balance sheet of micro strategies, treasury management. Nobody thought that. It's like we thought that Warren Buffett would come out and say, oh, this is good stuff or, you know, Ray Dalio, a sort of institutional adoption. And it came in from a really strange corner. And I say that because I think I think whatever we think is going to happen, it's going to come out of a strange corner. So so I don't mean to make that a cop out, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit if out of defending their own territory. I mean, there's lots of entrenched players that have a lot of motivation to try to keep their turf, right? So it wouldn't surprise me one bit if ultimately the stock market morphed.
Starting point is 00:23:21 I mean, you know, I think we're seeing central banks do that, right? If you can't beat them, join them. Figure out how to – don't kill it, but figure out how to co-opt it, right? Power is important, and people love power, and people that have it aren't wanting to let it go. So I don't exactly know how that all collides, but I think there's a move towards this technology, no matter how it actually gets adopted, either by the winners or the losers. Yeah. Talk a little bit about the institutional adoption, right? So you talk about microstrategy, and we now see all kinds of players coming out of the woodwork, right?
Starting point is 00:23:54 Whether it's people who were in the venture capital, the kind of technology forward space, you got people who kind of are very well-known publicly, like Anthony Scaramucci, uh you've got big institutions like fidelity and others who who are starting to uh to participate uh or have been for a couple of years now um just what do you think about the institutional adoption and kind of the impact of the market yeah my favorite thing to talk about on this is actually i feel like we're in the second wave of institutional adoption now we're entering it the first one was you know those those uh those those kind of uh trailblazers the people that were willing to be the first to take career risk um and and and really sort of blaze a trail for
Starting point is 00:24:40 the others right and there's been a number of those those are well-documented players the second wave is starting to figure out how to change the narrative like i think one of the most perfect examples is guggenheim is fairly famous or maybe you could say infamous the cio guggenheim for coming out and calling a $400,000 price target on Bitcoin, right? That was December 16th. January 21st, he comes back and says, well, it's actually going to go to $20,000 before it goes to $400,000, right? I mean, if that's not the most blatant example of talking your book, right?
Starting point is 00:25:15 He kind of realized he couldn't talk it up until he gets his entire position in play, right? You know, BlackRock filed very, very quietly to have two of their funds be allowed to own Bitcoin. Never sent a press release out. Nothing was said anywhere. So you've got this stealth institutional movement now. And that's that's the real meaningful one. That's the one where if they believe it strongly enough to not talk about it, but do it. It's a compelling investment. For sure. Talk a little bit about kind of the, what's the best way to talk about this? As these institutions move into the space, you will get the Guggenheims, you will get the Black Rocks, you will get kind of all of these players, but they're starting out buying Bitcoin. They're not going and looking at Uniswap or kind of the long tail of things. And so is it just, there's an evolution and they start out with Bitcoin and then they go look in Ethereum and
Starting point is 00:26:13 they kind of move down the path or just how exactly do you think that plays out over time with the institutional adoption across the asset class? I love this question. I absolutely think it's that for a couple of reasons. I think it's that because it's career risk. The institutional world, they've got safe jobs. It's like, don't screw it up. Right. And so if all of my neighbors are buying Bitcoin, I can buy Bitcoin, right? But what that does is it creates a kind of a bifurcated market. I mean, the people that are buying Bitcoin and Ethereum and maybe a couple of other coins are really a different set of investors than everything else. And that allows this, quote unquote, everything else part of the market to be extremely inefficient. And if there's
Starting point is 00:27:03 one thing that's important in having alpha and active management, it's finding inefficient markets, which there are very few of today. Absolutely. What is the best thing you've heard in the last year? So you talked a lot of managers, like what's the thing that you're most excited about in the entire industry, whether it's kind of a corner of DeFi, it's something that maybe you've heard investors say, like, just like, what's the thing that sticks out? And you're like, man this is really really exciting and nobody knows about it well um so we've got a manager that and this is hot off the press as of yesterday uh you know we got a manager who's setting up an spv to specifically target um small cap defi and and pretty much as broadly as
Starting point is 00:27:55 possible across the defi spectrum and uh they they can't put it in their larger fund because they're so thinly traded. They're small cap and the liquidity profile or constraints doesn't really fit. But it's the most interesting space in terms of value accrual, in terms of growth of transactional volume. That's going to change. But for right now, we think that that is probably in my mind, that's the thing that comes to the top of mind fastest is this small cap DeFi, which there's you know there's pretty much no way i'm going to say that you could probably replicate what what we're investing in in that sleeve uh unless you're one of these smart guys in the room i mean this is not a do-it-yourselfer homemade portfolio yeah i love it um what is the thing
Starting point is 00:28:46 that you think is most overhyped in terms of people are talking about what you think actually uh is probably not going to be sustainable or valuable oh that's a good question i'm not really sure that there's much that's overhyped. You get a lot of disparate opinions on, you know, what Bitcoin's ultimate price target is. If there is something like that, it's got to be in the Bitcoin world. But I don't know. I don't think people know where it's going to go. I'm not sure I've got a good answer to that question. That's fine. You've got plenty of good answers. So So not having one for one question is perfectly fine. When you think through the allocation, before we kind of get into the rapid fire questions
Starting point is 00:29:33 to wrap up, you started out with the hedge or the front of funds. How do you think your clients are thinking about it today? Is it one allocation to one strategy? Is it multi-strategy? And will that also evolve over time? Like, will it start to look like that multi-strategy approach they deploy in the institutional world? Sure. Yeah, it will. It will morph over time. Right now, we've got really wide mandates and we know the DNA or we think we know the DNA of our managers. You know, one of them's kind of got a trading mentality, you know, coming out of Goldman and Susquehanna.
Starting point is 00:30:10 to you know a couple of the others really are uh just you know coding tech geeks like deep science guys trying to solve the big problems of the world that's a huge allocation chunk um and then we got this value guy and and so broadly speaking we're explaining that dna uh really 10 000 foot view um to our investor base and telling them we you know we don't want to we don't want to restrict we don't want to put handcuffs on them. But as the asset class matures, we will. There will be a time when enough capital is in that to differentiate and find alpha, it's going to get more crowded. It's just not crowded yet. Yeah. And it feels to me almost like that's the natural market cycle, right? It's just everyone doesn't think something's a thing.
Starting point is 00:30:58 There's a couple of people who are early adopters. They get a bunch of alpha. Over time, the returns get commoditized down. And then when kind of the, you know, mainstream or middle market of the investor base shows up, you kind of just get a little bit higher than you got in the traditional world. And then by the time the last folks get in, you get kind of heavily commoditized returns that look exactly like the last market did. I think that's the narrative for most asset classes in history, right? You can think about the quote unquote hedge fund, the market neutral strategies or the long short uh credit strategies or any any niche in in the hedge fund world that sort of was born in the late 90s had some really interesting return profiles with really good alpha
Starting point is 00:31:42 capture early on but by the time you got to the um the 08 recession it was ubiquitous there was so many people and so much capital trying to find that arbitrage it got arbitraged away and i and i and i think this asset class will do that too i i don't know where or how long but it feels a number of years away uh in my opinion but but it'll it'll it'll happen yeah it's pretty uh pretty crazy where do where can we send people to find you on the internet or uh or find out more about the uh the work you're doing uh yeah pure crypto.com uh would be the website that's uh uh discloses the, uh, the allowable, the regulatorily allowable information about the hedge fund. Um, and laureate-wealth.com L A U R E A T E dash wealth.com is my advisory practice.
Starting point is 00:32:36 I don't think I ever asked you, where did laureate wealth and pure crypto, where the names come from? That's funny. Laureate was just, uh, we were kicking around trying to, we, we formed the company in 2009 and, um, you know, we just kept looking around, looking around and, And it's a laureate is a Nobel laureate. Like it's a wreath. It's what the it's what the Greek Olympians were given when they won. And so it's a term of distinction. It's a place of honor. So pure crypto is is just simply, you know, we wanted something that smacked of hedge fund that had nothing but crypto currency allocations in it. So it's kind of simple, but that's a pretty self-explanatory name there. not very creative but it's what we got all right so i'm gonna ask you uh two questions i've already
Starting point is 00:33:28 asked you my normal questions uh but i'm gonna ask you two new questions uh before we go to wrap up and you get to ask me one question uh the first is a uh is a very fun one uh which is what is the craziest thing one of your clients has said to you about bitcoin or crypto in the last three years oh the craziest thing oh i it's probably fairly uh boring i i probably have had half of my clients at least uh become morally offended by my identification with uh you know silk road transaction basically that's a pretty strong mantra that's a false narrative uh i mean of Of course, you know, lots, lots of interesting tech starts in nefarious places. I mean, that's kind of a thing, but that doesn't mean that that doesn't mean they carry that DNA forward.
Starting point is 00:34:26 Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Second question is more personal. This comes from our friends at Eight Sleep. They've got this thermoregulated bed that basically makes it super cold. I use it every night. It's amazing. Absolutely love it. Are you a five or six hour sleeper? Are you a nine or 10 hour sleeper? What's kind of the sleep routine and how much sleep do you get? Well, I'm embarrassed to say, uh, I will say I try to hide this from my clients. So maybe they won't watch or listen, but I am a dude, I'm an old man. Like I'm, I'll be 50 in June. If I don't get eight and a half hours of sleep, I am just no good to anybody. My wife, my kids, my business. I'm just like, I gotta have, I gotta go, I gotta get my sleep and I gotta work out
Starting point is 00:35:07 and I got to eat right. Yeah, that's a good thing. I think it used to be that people were like, you know, I'll sleep when I'm dead, right? But now I think the tide's turned and people realize like, hey, sleep's pretty damn important. And we probably should make sure that we're doing that.
Starting point is 00:35:20 Yeah, I am. Yeah, I'm definitely an eight and a half, nine if I can get it guy. I love it. What one question you have for me to finish up? I'd just be curious, other than crypto, what's the most interesting investment
Starting point is 00:35:37 that you're super excited about right now? Early stage venture capital. I'm just a big believer that innovation drives returns and early stage venture capital is by far the best place to go find that. You're looking for the asymmetry. In some ways, some of the markets that you're talking about with venture are frankly, or in crypto are basically venture type investments, kind of zeros or heroes. It's just that they're not equity, they're this token based thing. And so I think that, um, that's probably it within that. Um, I don't know if I could pick like an individual sector that I'm like, Oh, this is going to be amazing, um, over everything else. Cause I just think that across the board, uh, early stage venture is just driven
Starting point is 00:36:21 on innovation and that's where you're going to get kind of outsized returns. And so that's what I'd pick. Yeah, no good word. And really, um, that's, that's the way we coach our investor base to think about crypto, even though it's liquid, it's venture capital, even post-ICO. There's nothing in the digital asset space that's not venture capital today. I couldn't agree with you more there, my friend. So listen, thank you so much for doing this again. We will have to continue to do it as we check in on basically what the sentiment among your wealthy clients are, but also kind of how the fund's doing and what you're seeing from all the different managers. Very cool. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

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