The Pomp Podcast - How Global Conflict Is Moving Bitcoin & AI | Matthew Sigel

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

Matthew Sigel is the Head of Digital Asset Research at VanEck and portfolio manager of the NODE ETF. In this conversation, we discuss why he’s turning more bullish on bitcoin, how AI and energy are driving new investment opportunities, and why bitcoin miners are emerging as key players in the AI boom. We also explore risks around AI Capex, geopolitics, and how he’s positioning across crypto and equities.======================Award-winning Fountain Life - Energy supercharged. Memory sharper. Life extended. Ready for the best investment you’ll ever make? Schedule a life-changing call at FountainLife.com/Pomp Get $1,000 off the cost of a life-changing membership with Fountain Life when you schedule a call at FountainLife.com/pomp======================Need liquidity without selling your crypto? Take out a Figure Crypto-Backed Loan (https://figuremarkets.co/pomp), allowing you to borrow against your BTC, ETH, or SOL with 12-month terms, 8.91% interest rates, and no prepayment penalties. Or check out Democratized Prime (https://figuremarkets.co/pomp) and earn ~8.5% APY on real world assets, paid hourly. Unlock your crypto’s potential today at Figure! https://figuremarkets.co/pomp ======================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates the buying and selling of your preferred crypto strategies. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com and start your automated trading strategy for free. No catch. No hidden fees. Just smarter trading.======================0:00 - Intro1:02 - AI stocks, Capex & market debate4:47 - Bitcoin miners & AI pivot8:35 - Energy & AI investment plays11:10 - War & global markets17:03 - AI, crypto & defense tech19:53 - Bitcoin treasury companies 24:02 - Bitcoin outlook & altcoins30:30 - Real-world assets & Figure32:46 - Crypto equities & competition36:23 - Biggest risks in 2026

hear that it's your money calling it wants a promotion elevate your savings with the scotia high interest savings account always earn high regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest conditions apply visit scotiabank.com slash hisa to learn more scotia bank you're richer than you think what's happened in the derivatives market for bitcoin leaves me much more bullish. Another thing that's happened is the OG selling. Some of that selling has eased up. We're still bullish, but we haven't added maybe as much as you might expect, given that kind of respect the cycle, respect the four-year cycle. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great conversation with Matthew Siegel. He is the head of digital asset research at VanEck,

and he's also the portfolio manager of Node, an ETF that's focused on beating Bitcoin with lower volatility. In this conversation, we do a little around the world. What's going on in terms of all of the AI, ROIC on CapEx, what's going on with the Strait of Hormuz and the war in Iran. And then how's he thinking about investing? And we go name by name by name of all the things he's excited about,

maybe some of the things that he's not excited about. And my guess is that we're going to talk about multiple things that are in your portfolio or things that you've considered putting in your portfolio. And so here you go. Here is one of Wall Street's smartest guys who's going to explain his current views

on all these different names. And he did it all for you. Here's my latest conversation with Matthew Siegel. All right, Matt, I thought I'd give a place to start the conversation. Artificial intelligence stocks and market in general are very, very heavily debated right now. You were telling me an interesting anecdote that inside of VanEck, you guys basically were like at the buffet. You were using every single model. You were trying to automate a bunch of stuff.

Now you're consolidating, and it sounds like maybe you're bullish on stocks but maybe bearish on some of the private companies. Is that fair? The internal debate among VanEck PMs is very fierce right now, both on the war and the return on capital from AI CapEx. I think those are the two biggest things that are facing the market right now. Is Hormuz going to open and what does that mean for the energy complex versus everything else? And then Mag7 underperforming most of those stocks below their 200 days now and the market's demanding a return on this CapEx. Is that return going to come through cutting heads or are there profit dollars that can materialize? Where do you stand on the AI CapEx?

I mean, I lean bullish just because of my own internal productivity, where I'd say we've been able to not hire folks because of the work that my new analyst, Claude, is doing, especially when I integrate him into Excel. That's been a very powerful unlock. So at the firm level, Jan Van Eck really embraced AI from the moment ChatGPT was released and we started licensing all of the models. In the last few weeks, we've consolidated our budget around Anthropic and we are beginning to aggressively build agents to automate some of the back office work. I think our agents are going to get a 401k match at some point. So, you know, given that my fund being crypto oriented and the Bitcoin miners are a big part of my benchmark, those companies are really the tip

of the sphere in terms of this AI CapEx trend, because they're levered, they have to sell Bitcoin to fund their repurposing of the data centers. And there's one data set that I've been looking at, which is what is the dollars per megawatts of these leases that are being signed by Cypher, by Iron, by TerraWolf. And each time we see a new lease, that number is going up.

And if you look at the rental costs for NVIDIA chips on the spot market, those numbers are also going up. So I think the stocks are down 40% from the peaks. It doesn't feel like a time to be selling. I'm definitely managing position sizes, but I come out bullish because I can feel the productivity in my own work. What are you doing by hooking Clod up to Excel?

Just walk through maybe what you were doing manually before that now it's saving you time. Yeah. I mean, even just on my position sheets, instead of using formulas to calc how many shares I might need to buy or sell. I just input the instructions into Claude. I have Claude make a new sheet each day to analyze the attribution, what's helping my performance, what's hurting my performance. Issues around, I care a lot about taxes. So I want to avoid fund shareholders being stuck with gains at the end of the year that I would have to pay out. So managing tax loss selling against gains, having Claude, you know, suggest some of those by taking a big spreadsheet and

just simplifying like which lots have losses that I can sell easily. It's just cutting down on time. Yeah. That's very interesting. Let's talk Mara Marathon. You guys, I think were bearish. Now you're bullish. They're going through a huge transition. They recently sold a bunch of Bitcoin. Just maybe level set everyone like what was the business? What does it appear that they're moving towards now? Why did you guys change your mind? Yeah. So within Node, our universe is any company that has a strategy to make money or save money from the adoption of Bitcoin blockchain digital assets. And we've been fortunate that since inception, we're up 27%. Bitcoin is down 33%. So we've done a good job at capturing where the gains have been. That has been in the AI

miners. We've been very underweight on digital asset treasury companies and exchanges. So MicroStrategy, Coinbase, very small positions, worried about the leverage. And Mara turned itself into a debt after the election. They caught the FOMO that public equity investors might pay a premium for the Bitcoin that a company holds on its balance sheet. They levered up the balance sheet. They did a bunch of converts and then the market turned and that premium to NAV that MicroStrategy was trading at 1.7 times collapsed to one and Mara caught that same derating. Meanwhile, the economics around Bitcoin mining were also worsening and the CEO was very stubborn around the AI opportunity. In the last quarter, they've made a pivot on that.

And the headline which everyone caught on to this week was, oh, they sold like a third of their Bitcoin and retired a convertible bond, two convertible bonds at a discount. So it was a very accretive transaction. But I think even more importantly, they've changed the executive comp So that management now is not so much paid on how many Bitcoins are produced, but they've added a new annual recurring revenue line that management needs to hit in order to get their restricted stock. And they made an acquisition in France of a data center company that might be able to capture some of this sovereign AI outside of the US. So we started adding to that position a couple of months ago, and then the convert retiring yesterday was a validation of that thesis. I think that they've got religion that the market does not need to pay a premium for Bitcoin that it can buy itself. And so they were sellers to willing buyers at the fair market price, which I think was the right thing to do. And the stock looks really cheap if they can continue to attack that arbitrage. So the miners that have been most aggressive on AI, HPC, like Cypher and TerraWolf, they're trading at like $15 million of market cap for each megawatt that they control. Mara is like less than $2 million per megawatt.

So there is a huge valuation arbitrage if they can find a client. And now they have a JV with Starwood, which is a large private equity firm with big data center platform. It's going to help them market some of these data centers. They'll still be a CapEx burden. But I think when they sign that first lease, I don't know if it's in one quarter or three quarters, that'll really open a lot of people's eyes. Is there still a lot of demand for this stuff?

Like it shouldn't be that hard for somebody like them to find a client? uh there's a lot of new competition there's also a lot of demand so it's it's not a riskless venture but i think with the size of their footprint they'll be able to do something got it now if we continue down this kind of like energy ai space uh you guys have a company acre a-k-e-r uh that i think you're really excited about what do they do and why are you so excited yeah this is one of the few uh stocks that has really been a contributor to performance this year. So we're down about through March 26, we were down about 5%. Node was down about 5% year to date. S&P is down 6%. Bitcoin is down 19%. A handful of stocks have contributed most of the

performance this year, as is often the case. And one of them is this fascinating Norwegian company called Aker. It's run by one of Norway's handful of billionaires. And they're an energy North Sea oil and gas company. And five years ago in 2020, the CEO wrote a shareholder letter about Bitcoin. And they announced that they were going to start mining Bitcoin with some of their spare energy. And he wrote very eloquently about how Bitcoin can act as this economic battery to capture stranded energy and then monetize it through Bitcoin. They went quiet on that venture For many years, I wrote to IR, asked them, can we have a chat? I want to learn about this. Crickets, right? In 2023, that expertise that they gained in mining Bitcoin led them to fund a company called Nscale. Nscale is like Europe's Corweave, Europe's Nebius. and Ocker funded this company early.

They set up a JV where the oil and gas company will provide energy infrastructure to that new hyperscaler, I guess you could say, Neocloud. And they continue to participate in funding that company. It's been a home run. So Nscale just got, did a, I think a series E at a $15 billion evaluation. They're talking about an IPO.

Acre has participated in every raise. They're going to own 24% of this company when they IPO, and that investment is now worth like a third of Acre's market cap. Meanwhile, you're paid a 5% dividend yield from the core business. So it's done very well. It's a beneficiary from the war because of their energy assets. And meanwhile, you've got this hidden gem that's about to be monetized probably with an IPO here in Q2. So we love to look for those kind of under the radar stories that US investors

can't always get exposure to. And that's been one of our biggest winners this year. You mentioned that there's two fierce debates internally. One is the AI stuff, the other is the war and how long it's going to take for the strait to reopen. When you talk about an energy company like this one in Norway, all of a sudden it becomes, well, actually maybe the straits more important than the AI stuff, right? And how does that impact an energy company like that? Well, it's been going up even during the war. So these things won't last forever. And probably when N-scale goes public, that might be a good time to take some profits in the name. But for now, they seem to be benefiting either way. When the market's focusing on energy, they hold up

better. And then when AI is working, they have the N-scale tailwind. What is your take on when the straight will reopen? Well, it's kind of open already if you're willing to pay $2 million of RMB, Chinese currency, which I thought was really interesting. There have been 10 ships, 10 vessels that have transited in the last few days. Two of them paid RMB. So I really wish that had been Bitcoin. It's not what we want to see is China being a winner in this war. Um, but, uh, you know, my, everyone has their biases on this. My bias is that, uh, Trump's most consistent campaign promises were that he's going to keep us out of foreign entanglements. Um, Passover starts next week. Uh, that's a big deal in Israel. Those soldiers have been deployed for quite a long time. There's a lot of pressure to get them home for the holidays. Uh, so, you know, you don't see it in the markets on a day like today, uh, with S and P's down a couple percent,

But I think the market might be underestimating the chance for a ceasefire next week, March 30, April 1, around the Passover time. Now, many people disagree, including at VanEck. It's interesting. It's like geographically divided. The folks who sit in Europe tend to be more bearish on the U.S. going it alone, abandoning its allies and then asking for help. I just think that, you know, you got to listen to what Trump says. He tends to repeat himself a lot and generally follow his own core beliefs. And one of them is no forever war. So I think there's a good chance it's going to be over soon. So the people in Europe are thinking that the United States could get locked in the forever war and go it alone. Yeah.

Now, you know, it's funny about that, right? It's like the European countries, they're not helping at all. They're not doing anything. And so the question becomes if the United States calls on their allies to participate at certain times and those allies do not participate, then I think immediately definitely the like hardcore America first, you know, groups is, well, why are we supporting them? in times of peace? Why are we supporting them with security? Why are we doing these other things? The whole point of having an ally is they're there for you when you need them. I don't know. It's kind of interesting because if that becomes a bigger conversation at the national level, you get the redirecting of government spending. Maybe there's some

companies in Europe that actually start to suffer because they don't have kind of the persistent bid of revenue and capital coming in to the continent. I don't know. There's like some ramifications there. Yeah. I mean, if we, if we declare victory and leave and Hormuz remains semi-closed, you know, there, there's going to be a disconnect where a lot of folks are, how can you declare victory? Uh, Hormuz is closed. And I think the answer to that from America's point of view is like, we don't use that straight anyway, right? It's the Chinese, it's the Indians, it's France, who's importing diesel and distillates from the Gulf coast. So, you know, we don't have as big skin in the game. We're relatively self-sufficient in our own energy markets. It kind of be a middle

finger to Europe, but as you, as you pointed out, it's not like they're helping. So if they want to open it, go right ahead. Today's episode is brought to you by Fountain Life. Are you ready to seize the day that will change your life? Guaranteed. You invest in wealth creation every single day but what's the point of it without an optimal health span award-winning fountain life is the world's most advanced longevity destination and in just one day they can map an exact and complete picture of your health profile no guesswork and no blind spots from there they create a personalized plan that prevents disease and may even reverse aging using precision medicine and restorative therapeutics it's available nowhere else in other words your energy supercharged

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Real cash flows, not speculative token emission. In a market where capital efficiency matters more than ever, Figure gives you real options. Check them out using the link in the description or go to figuremarkets.co.pump. Again, that's figuremarkets.co.pump. Yeah, it is pretty interesting. Now, what about – do you guys do anything in like the autonomous defense space or anything like that where there's like AI type stuff where you're pretty much just focused on things that touch digital assets? And the reason I ask is it does feel like AI and crypto are kind of coming together. Maybe they touch a little bit and then they go back apart depending on where you look in the stack of companies.

I used to invest in some of these drone companies when I worked with Kathy and in previous jobs. And they tend to be really volatile. Like many defense contractors, just earnings are really lumpy and it's hard to get good visibility for national security reasons. And so the multiple that investors pay for that kind of lumpiness is pretty low, right? So the way that I've been playing it, another stock which has contributed a large amount to our returns this year, it's through Hynix. So the DRAM market. Drones right now are about 30 basis points of DRAM demand. So really small. But when you look at the growth, not only in drone volumes, but also in how much memory is going into these drones to make this autonomous, it's like a 10x increase in the amount of memory per drone. plus you get the volume boost on top of it. If you can get DRAM to, if you can get drones to three or 4% of DRAM demand, that is enough to really change the calculus because so much of

that DRAM is locked up in long-term contracts. There's not that much available in the spot market. So I've been, you know, long and strong on the Hynek story and, you know, a little bit of wobbles here the last week or so, but that's one element, which is keeping my conviction relatively high makes sense um when you think about uh the bitcoin treasuries or the altcoin treasuries um what is your take currently on the market because i think what we saw was there was a huge push everyone got into the public market and now it's like a complete scatter right it's like the lights got turned on everyone's going in different directions in terms of strategy uh performance all these different stuff which kind of your read as an investor yeah uh i've

I've been really underweight these names because I just don't see the need to add leverage to what is already a very volatile asset. You know, it works really well on the upside and then the drawdowns just can crush your performance and volatility. And that conviction that we had really as a shop, VanEck, we did not really participate in the debt capital formation. And part of that conviction comes from investing in Asian conglomerates over the years. There's a lot of listed companies that trade on their net asset value, which usually consists of a bunch of real estate and businesses that are kind of quasi-liquid. And those stocks trade at like 0.3, 0.4 times NAV, even when the NAV is growing. So why is that? It's a handful of

reasons. One is if the investors aren't seeing a cash return in the form of dividends, then they don't really believe why they should pay a premium to NAV. Another reason is related party transactions. Those companies tend to do some self-dealing between themselves, which investors hate. And then a third reason is that they're often kind of founder-led with no succession plan for management. And the minority shareholders feel like if things go wrong, they have no recourse to get the management out, maybe contribute to the board, things like that. And I see a lot of parallels between the DATs and that model. And yeah, that's one reason that i've stayed away and and like you can see that i i do think it's encouraging that some of these

companies are giving up basically selling their coins buying back stock uh you know mara is is kind of one quasi example but there are other smaller cap names that are you're you're buying back a stock right i think it's with cash really smart with cash yes with cash with cash had to get the cash um uh but no but i think this is important actually yeah uh we have never bought a bitcoin and then sold it now uh does that mean that us or others will not sell the bitcoin to fund share buybacks like from a pure mathematical standpoint if you sell bitcoin at a dollar and you buy back at 60 70 80 cents it is accretive to your investors right um the one thing that I think over time I have learned in the Bitcoin world is you never know what will happen in the

future. When you think it's going up, it may not. When you think it's going down, it may not, right? And so for us in particular at ProCap, when we got the convert funding at close, we did not take that and buy Bitcoin. So we sat on a bunch of cash. Now it happens to be that that was a pretty good decision. It could have been a bad decision if Bitcoin had ripped higher and the whole thing. And so I do think that what you're seeing is across the industry, not just our company, but others, is like this maturation of, do you always want to be 100% max risk taking, full allocation, etc.? And look at the individual level. How many people do you and I know over the last decade? That's how they lived their life. every dollar to their name. I've got a friend who always jokes, he's like, it's like they didn't have

any furniture in their house. They slept in their car. It was just like, I have to own as much Bitcoin as possible. Great when it was going up. But now as we've gotten this volatility and these big swings and stuff, they're getting older.

Maybe they have a family now. They've got some responsibilities. You're seeing, it's not so much taking risk off. It is just a reluctance to be 100% max risk-taking with their allocation. And so that's normal though.

Yeah. Like, don't get me wrong. There's, I think, a handful of companies that have done smart things around risk management. And like, Saylor now has a couple of years worth of dividends, right? Right. Strive now has 18 months worth of dividends and their preferred is back at ninety nine cents. So, you know, and I have some some some small positions in that area. But then there's other names like, oh, we're going to give up our ETH strategy and pivot to jet turbines. Right. There's a company that's doing that. Oh, we're going to abandon our ETH strategy and or our world coin strategy and pivot to writing a check to open AI and getting shares. It's just not consistent and it's not great corporate governance. So still a lot of weirdness in this space.

Now let's go to the actual liquid like underlying. So what are current views for you and internally at VanEck in terms of Bitcoin? And then what about all of the alts? Yeah. On Bitcoin, the four-year cycle is keeping us from getting max bullish. So we did, like in Node, we added some the first time when Bitcoin was in the low 60s. Now we're kind of getting close again. So maybe, you know, might be time, although I'd like to wait for maybe a lower level to turn up the dial a little bit more.

And the looming midterm elections, which have the potential to freak people out around data center capex, I think, because of this Bernie Sanders idiocy around banning data centers and whatnot. But as it becomes clear that the Republicans will lose both houses of Congress, good chance the market's going to freak out about what that means for growth and for the pro-growth energy capex that's been put into place. Uh, on the other hand, what's happened in the derivatives market for Bitcoin leaves me much more bullish. Uh, so, you know, if you look at what you have to pay for puts versus calls, it's like we're in the 99th percentile here of folks paying up for protection. That's a contrarian long signal. Um, another thing that's happened is the, the OG selling the, uh, the coins that are kind of three to five years old that haven't moved in three to five years, we started to see those move a lot in Q4 and into Q1 of this year. So, it's folks who looks like

they bought the cycle well and, you know, they're taking profits. Some of that selling has eased up in recent weeks. Now, Mara is a counterexample to that. And I think Mara will still be a seller And the Bitcoin miners will still be a seller. But a lot of that OG selling seems to have washed through. So I'm like, I'm still, you know, we're still bullish, but we haven't added maybe as much as you might expect, given that kind of respect the cycle, respect the four year cycle. What about alts? Alts as a house, we have very little. And part of that was after the election when alts doubled, but app usage did not. In the hedge fund, my colleague Pranav took down almost all of his alts exposure and moved into equities. In Node, we're less than 5% alts, right?

That's how we've outperformed Bitcoin so much, focusing on the Bitcoin miners. And we haven't really released many new ETFs either, right? So we have Avalanche that we launched, and we have BNB, which is in the pipeline, and hopefully that'll be by the end of the year. But this is the year of corp chains. And I know a lot of people want to hate on that because we went through a couple cycles where people tried with these corporate chains and didn't fail. But I think the third time is the charm on here.

What is a corporate chain? Corporate chain is when a company like Circle, who manages the USDC stablecoin, they also have an internal blockchain called ARK. And so they're trying to capture some of the payment flow that might otherwise go over the ACH or the banking wires. Stripe has a corp chain that they're working on. You've got Tempo. So it's basically these – Canton, another one, these quasi-public blockchains where the administrator can control part of the validator set and capture some of the profits. But if you – like the fees are more predictable for the end user. They are integrated into the regulatory rules and requirements.

Yeah. The biggest tailwind for the corp chains is that eight different crypto companies have gotten banking charters this year. Why is that a tailwind? Because they can on-ramp and off-ramp with much less friction than working on Ethereum. I think that's really the unlock is that when you have a banking charter, You can access a Fedmaster account. You don't need to rely on a correspondent bank in order to get your clients on and off between fiat and crypto. You're really integrated into the financial system in a way that we've never had before. And I mentioned that there's eight companies that have received these special purpose banking charters. There's another

half dozen or so that are pending, Coinbase among them, that we think is really going to put some of these stable coins on a more equal footing with traditional bank rails. And it's the companies that administer those corp chains, they're in it for their own profits. And like, yeah, they need to provide a better product to the market so that their customers can move money cheaper, faster on weekends, move back and forth between tokenized cash and tokenized T-bills, right? If you can do that on the weekend, that's a big unlock. And if you can do that without going through a corresponding bank, that's a big unlock. And Ethereum doesn't have a banking charter, right? So, yeah, we're still underweight alts. I think if Clarity Act can pass, there's a possibility for

a big mean reversion trade there. And we'll capture a little bit of that because I don't have zero. But I want to see user growth and apps going viral and institutions actually buying and operating on permissionless chains in order to get excited about the fundamentals. Because the market caps are still really high for kind of these L1s. And they've got new competition now from from corp chains um you also have figure uh technologies i've been an investor for a long time it seems like you guys are somewhat excited about that what's going on there yeah uh i think figure is the best example of a company that is bringing um blockchain benefits to uh a traditional securitization market uh so what they what they've figured out is how can how can you originate a

home equity line of credit faster and cheaper than the competition. And it turns out that when you use an open source ledger, like the provenance blockchain, and you get the buy-in from all the banks who are used to transacting in these securitized loans, and you get the buy-in from the auditor. And in the case of figure, the auditor says, wow, this is so transparent that the information that you have to input to register your loan on the blockchain, we actually need less of it because it's all super transparent. And so their cost to originate a loan is just much lower than the competition. And that creates a really interesting flywheel. So they started out with HELOCs. They're now moving into auto loans. They have a yield bearing stablecoin, YLDS, which is a security. So it doesn't have this regulatory risk that, you know, USDC kind of has via its partnership with Coinbase. And can you or can you not pass the yield on? In the case of YLDS, you can pass the yield on, but it's security. So, you know, all of those regulations apply.

And that creates a really interesting ecosystem for the banks to keep their balances on chain. So figure, you know, I guess there was some controversy because they reported, you know, I guess a weak quarter last quarter when we dug into the numbers. We thought it was actually really strong. So we doubled down on that stock, you know, at the lows or hopefully they were the lows. And it's now a top five position in the fund. So that's a big change over the last couple of months. What about companies like eToro or Securitize is now going, Abra, right? There's a bunch of these companies that are equities that maybe they've been around a

long time or maybe they're kind of the newer cohort that are going public. What's your evaluation as to the ones that get excited? Obviously, you can't buy everyone, right? So how do you start to think about that? Is it pure equity analysis that you would do for a normal company or is there some other heuristic that you use? Yeah, it's pretty standard equity analysis trying to make sense if the price of the stock is justified by the fundamentals and is it pricing in the growth that we think is possible and then how much can crypto and blockchain add to that growth and is the market paying for it? And so I think Robinhood would be the best example of a company, and they are also going

to have a corp chain. It's not released on main net yet, but you should be able to trade tokenized securities on their blockchain over the next couple quarters. So I've had a position in the stock, but it's smaller than it's ever been. And I think part of the reason is just the competition is so fierce. And if you believe that blockchain is going to bring down costs and create less friction for moving balances around, then the customer loyalty may actually maybe not be as high as people think.

And the economics may get compressed through competitions. I saw there's news today that Interactive Brokers, which is another name that we own, you can now send crypto to your interactive broker's account. That's a first for them. And then their fees are 12 bps on trades. Pretty attractive. Coinbase takes more than a percent on each way on retail, naive retail buys and sells. So it tells me that there's pricing pressure here. Um, there was, uh, uh, crypto wallets like phantom, which got a no action letter from the sec last week to be able to offer, uh, derivatives straight from the wallet without registering as a broker.

That could be a headwind for brokers like Robin hood, um, because it's a lower regulatory burden for phantom to enter this market at low fees. So I've been trimming some brokers and buying other stuff. What about hype? That seems to be getting a lot of hype, no pun intended, online. What are your thoughts there? We like hype. Clearly have proved that there is demand for 365, 24-7 derivatives on crypto rails.

They've done a great job of onboarding real-world assets. The oil and precious metals volumes are considerable. It's the best way to express macro multi-asset views on the weekend. They have a buyback, which is considerable. And the valuation based on that buyback math looks pretty reasonable. So, there's one example where there is no hype ETF. So, I had to buy a DAT in the fund. Very small position given the volatility, but I think that's one that's worth looking at. Got it. Is there anything that you're worried about in 2026? Yeah, I mean, I'm worried about Mag7 not earning a return on their enormous CapEx.

And when you look at companies that go through enormous investment cycles, tends to be a tough time for the stock because you only learn later what the return on capital is. And with the concentration of these companies in the S&P, if they're not earning a return, That's going to be a real headwind for the market. We were debating this the other day. Microsoft has been a total dog year to date. It's now as cheap as it's ever been on PE. And why is that? Part of it is because the Office franchise, like, do we really need PowerPoint if Claude can make me a deck, right? So the Office franchise might be threatened. But also, they haven't done big layoffs.

And actually, Elizabeth Warren wrote them a strongly worded letter, like, warning them not to do layoffs. So there's political pressure when your multi-trillion dollar companies have. There's political pressure for them to maybe not be as aggressive on headcount as they otherwise would be. You can also see this in the way that the hyperscalers are approaching the electricity market. They want to be obfuscated from the CO2 emissions.

And so that's one reason why the Bitcoin miners are actually really handy is because they can serve as that punching bag to absorb the negative entropy from the climate folks. And I think it's this similar dynamic when it comes to headcount reductions where they have these political considerations. And I think changing minds on the return on capital around AI, that would change the whole market. Where can people go find the research you guys put out? I know you guys are coming out with this corporate chain research piece. Where else can they go?

Yeah. Follow me on X, Matthew underscore Siegel or vanak.com forward slash node. All of our research is out there. Got it. And when you think of node, like what's like the one sentence, Hey, this is, you know, the, the strategy I'm a shareholder, by the way, I think I told you this. Yes. Um, what, uh, what, what's kind of the general, whether you, uh, you explain it.

Uh, well, we're, we're trying to beat Bitcoin, uh, without taking too much risk. So, you know, we're up 27% versus Bitcoin down 33% since inception. We've done that with a lower volatility than Bitcoin. So we want to be super diversified, relatively small position sizes across all sectors that capture the growth in the space with a focus on profits. Well, that's – some businesses, that's a blasphemous take is profits. All right. Thank you very much for taking time to do this. We'll do it again.

Thanks.