The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Has A 120-Day Fed Countdown - Trump Just Signed The Order | Mike Alfred

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

Trump just signed his biggest crypto executive order yet, giving the Fed 120 days to evaluate opening payment rails to Coinbase, Kraken, Circle, Ripple, and Anchorage. The move could break the bank mo...nopoly on Fed plumbing right as Bitcoin sits at $76K after $1B in ETF outflows and $660M in liquidations. Add Warren's attack on OCC crypto charters, JPMorgan saying Bitcoin ETFs are recovering 2X faster than Ethereum, Goldman dumping XRP and Solana for Hyperliquid, and the SEC readying tokenized stocks, and you have one of the most pivotal weeks of the cycle. Is this the bottom, or the setup for Bitcoin's next leg higher? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Trump just signed an executive order demanding that the crypto industry and fintech get access to the Fed. And I have to clear my throat. Will this be the final catalyst that finally gets the market moving or just another story that's forgotten in a matter of days? We're going to unpack this and more importantly everything is happening with the market with Mike Alfred. Let's go. Morning, everybody had a serious frog in my throat getting started there. I mean, go ahead and bring on Mike. Good morning. How are you? Good morning, sir.
Starting point is 00:00:46 I'm good. I think you bought a few shares. Your shares are backed this week. Yes, I purchased 585,000 shares in the open market on Friday, 365 on Friday, 220 on Monday, and then put out a form for, obviously I'm a board member there. But that makes Alpine Fox LP, my affiliated entity, one of the largest shareholders in backed right above Vanguard. I think it's number five on the institutional share.
Starting point is 00:01:14 holder list. So I just think the company is turning around nicely and like you want to be in the stable coin payments, neobanking space, I think in the coming years. I think that whole space is going to heat up quite a bit and, you know, backs a turnaround. But once it gets turned around, it's going to be right in the fight, I think. Yeah, obviously that was a big story. Was it last year that you joined the board, 25? Yeah. September. Yeah. End of September, the stock went up from like basically 9, 10 before I was announced to 50, a little under 50. And so now back, I'm looking 968. Yeah, it's still sitting well below where it opened the day after I was announced,
Starting point is 00:01:54 but it's a far better company now, right? Like the capital structure has been changed up, right? The voting shares, right? The super voting shares are gone. the balance sheet has like $80 plus million of cash and no debt now. It's totally different than where it was before. And the board has completely changed out. There was a bunch of folks that were much more compliance oriented, like not growth
Starting point is 00:02:21 oriented. And a lot of those folks were gone. And then we brought in people like Lynn Alden. So everything's cleaned up. Maybe most importantly, we also brought in the stable coin payments capabilities in house by completing the DTR acquisition, which wasn't an easy process, but I directly, you know, helped to get that done. And I feel like, you know, at this, at this price, anywhere between $8 and $10, it was a really good buy. So I bought it for myself. If the market doesn't want,
Starting point is 00:02:51 it, I'll take it. Right. And actually, I needed, I needed these red days, right? Like, basically, we were cruising along in the last Thursday, and then the market was just dumping, especially for small cap equities and crypto Friday, Monday, and a little bit. yesterday and kind of decelerated. And then today, of course, we're going to get a green day just because this moved down since last Thursday night is sort of not really been based on very much. It's the same stuff as the last time I was on last March. And I told your viewers in March not to flip bearish. That was right near the bottom of sentiment, right near the bottom of pricing. What did the equity market do? It be bottomed right back to all-time highs, almost too
Starting point is 00:03:26 predictably, Scott. I've got to be honest. It's almost boring now because you could just fade any of these fear periods and get paid pretty quickly. It used to be you had to wait a while to be validated and vindicated. Now you seem to be vindicated quite quickly as long as you stay bullish. Yeah, you mentioned that your view is that you know, you want to, you want exposure to fintech to, you know, stable coin infrastructure. I mean, is that specifically, you know, as a board member, obviously, but is that specifically how you view back to what they're building?
Starting point is 00:03:58 That seems to be the story everywhere for everyone. right they're all trying to pivot into that space yeah I mean look all the all the regulatory environment has gotten far better for companies in this in the sector and globally stable-coin adoption is continuing unabated either way we think there's significant disruption coming to the traditional remittances businesses the traditional banking businesses and we think the kind of neo-banking players are going to have more relevance in the future and back just needed to do a little little bit of work to clean up the business. Like we got rid of the loyalty business, which was like a
Starting point is 00:04:36 money losing kind of heavy, you know, business that sat there on the balance sheet. And that was a lot of work to get rid of that as well. I mean, all this stuff happened in the eight months since I joined the board. Many of those things were were in progress or in flight, but they had to be completed. And so now that those things are done, it's it's funny to me how markets work, right? Like you can you can significantly improve a company. And because of the market doesn't really understand all the changes yet, the stock can trade at the same level or lower than where it was when it had a lot more issues. But that's turnarounds for you. And you can't predict when the market will decide that those turnarounds are working. You can only affect the
Starting point is 00:05:17 turnaround and then let the market price follow over time. So look, I didn't buy 585,000 shares for fun, right? You only go in the open market and buy shares as an insider if you really believe. in what's happening. Because it's not that easy to sell, right? So it's not a trade for me, right? I really think that we have a nice run coming. Do you imagine the stink if the next filing was that you sold it all? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:05:45 I would like to note for the record that I have never sold a share of iron. I've been on the board since 2021. And even though the stock went from 28 to 1 to 75 to 47 or wherever it is this morning, I haven't once sold a share. The only thing I did was add. And I continue to believe iron is asymmetric as well, where there's a lot more upside than downside from my perspective. And so I'm going to continue to do what I've been doing up until now.
Starting point is 00:06:13 Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Maybe there's a good time before we dive into, I guess, some of the news if we get there, talk about iron and generally what's happening in the quote unquote minor space. I say quote unquote now because I don't think we're going to be calling them Bitcoin miners anymore that we should. I would love your opinion on that. But obviously, Marathon, you know, close their convertible note. They had made that move to become a Bitcoin treasury company like Sailor. And then they ended up selling $1.5 billion to close those notes.
Starting point is 00:06:39 And, you know, I think they're trailing on the pivot to AI. Iron obviously did it very early. I mean, do you view these now as Bitcoin miners? They, AI, you know, infrastructure companies that mine Bitcoin, if they're going to even keep mining Bitcoin. I mean, it depends on which ones, right? So there are a number of companies I'd put iron. Cypher, Terowulf is probably the top three from an execution standpoint so far.
Starting point is 00:07:04 But like those companies have effectively become AI Data Center developers slash neoclouds already. And so the fact that they mine Bitcoin or even still mine some de minimis amount of Bitcoin going forward is sort of not really the story. The market is entirely focused on what they're building and where they're going to execute next. There are another group of companies that have said that they're going to come into this space. That includes Clean Spark, you know, the former BitFarms, then the others that have executed on small contracts like Riot that appear like they're going to get there eventually, but haven't really executed to the same degree. They don't have as many contracts. They don't have quite as much momentum in the AI-HPC space.
Starting point is 00:07:47 But look, like the data center space is going to be a big deal for decades, right? because it's going to take years if you start from a standing start right now to develop a new large-scale data center. So these things are just going up in value. There will be periods of time where macro fear causes the repricing to the downside for short periods of time. But as I said in another live stream podcast type of thing recently, like pretty much every time they dip, not just these names, but kind of anything in the sector, anytime they dip a significant amount, it's probably going to be a buying opportunity looking forward to. or three years. So like on a cyclical basis, like for the next 20 or 30 years, every two to three years when you get a significant dip, it's probably going to be viable for a while. Because this whole
Starting point is 00:08:33 process is still in the first or second inning in terms of the buildout that's required here. And Jensen Wong and folks like that are all reiterating this. I don't know if you saw the picture of Dan Roberts, the CEO of Ireland. He was hanging out with Michael Dell, CEO of Dell and Jensen Wong, CEO of Mnvidia, founders, billionaires, all founders, all billionaires, all three of them. now. And, you know, that's just a sign of things to come, I think. Yeah, I just wonder what's going to happen with hash rate if we're going to see a reshuffling as, you know, kind of the dominant American players become more focused on AI. Not that it wouldn't matter. I mean, it's the nature of the Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin hash rate stayed pretty solid even during this drawdown.
Starting point is 00:09:16 You would have thought with a move from 126 to 60 that the hash rate would have been cut at least 20 or 30 percent, and it's basically flat. And that shows you the anti-fragility of the network. The incentives allow when some players come off, other players go on. Effectively, if those really big mega players start to redirect their power towards another form of compute, let's say, an AI, smaller players will fill in because they still want to mine Bitcoin. And I would argue, even if it's not profitable right now, it might still be rational
Starting point is 00:09:47 because if you're right about the scarcity of Bitcoin, then if you mine Bitcoin today at a loss, but it eventually is worth a million dollars a coin. And you can't mind more, let's say, in 100 plus years from now, maybe that's a good decision. You could argue that a lot of money was burned up chasing that this cycle. But the reality is, like the biggest money went into data centers. And those data centers, as long as they were repositioned to AI, have actually made substantial returns for shareholders. So it all worked out in the end analysis. Basically, Bitcoin mining incentivized the build out of large scale power and infrastructure,
Starting point is 00:10:21 that ended up being necessary, even though it hasn't been particularly profitable for Bitcoin in this cycle. And that's the magic of Bitcoin, right? It's unclear some of the times what specifically is going to happen, but the incentives are there for the network to continue to operate. Yeah. I find it just fascinating, and you've been on top of it the entire time. I mean, I'll never forget you coming on here when Iron was one, two bucks, and just pounding
Starting point is 00:10:46 it. And I know a lot of people I can see them in the comments are saying, that was a really good call. You know, and I've told the story of my friend who did exceptionally well as a result of the dinner where you made that call in in Vegas one time. So that was a good time for him. I hear he has a nice plane. I haven't been invited to fly on it yet. He's got three of them now, I think. So, yeah, not going too poorly. But, you know, moving on, obviously, the big story of the day, I just love the quick take on it is Trump orders government fed to review crypto firms access to payment rails.
Starting point is 00:11:19 So this, I would love to have Caitlin Long on with us to talk about this because it's kind of vindication for everything she pushed for all these years for Custodia. But basically there's two parts to this, which is that it's called the integrating financial technology innovation into regulatory framework. It directs the six federal financial regulators to overhaul fintech rules on a 90-day clock and then telling the Fed to evaluate granting crypto firms direct access to reserve bank payment rails on 120-day clock. So those who don't remember what happened with Custodian and Caitlin is that she's a fully reserved bank and asked for a Fed master account and was rejected, then sued the Fed and was still rejected. And now Trump is literally telling the Fed or asking the Fed since they're an independent agency to grant this access. But that would put the Krakins, Coinbase, Robin Hoods in the same conversation as the JP Morgan's and such who have direct access to the Fed. Yeah, Caitlin was right, our mutual friend. Caitlin has been right this whole time.
Starting point is 00:12:20 And sometimes you've got to fight these battles for long periods of time. And maybe it's sort of like past time, right? Because like she would have benefited greatly from having this done a few years ago when she had a lead and a lot of momentum. And now a lot of other folks will be able to catch up. But maybe that's not the point. She'll be fine either way. But, you know, kudos to her on pushing on this. Over long periods of time, like it's pretty clear that crypto is going to be fully.
Starting point is 00:12:48 integrated into the traditional system. There's actually no reason for it not to be. People are going to use it whether the U.S. government gets behind it or not, whether the Fed gets behind it or not. And some of this is just a seasoning process. Like if you think back throughout the history of financial markets in the U.S., like even the equities were considered to be the rambunctious stepchildren, like the wild children, right, like a hundred years ago. You know, a gentleman only own bonds, right? And equities now are viewed as safe compared to crypto. I think at 50 years, it'll be very clear that crypto is just another asset class. There's no reason to systematically exclude it. There's no reason not to build it into the system. Anything that's better in some way
Starting point is 00:13:30 will eventually be adopted. And so to me, this is a natural evolution. I don't know specifically what this means in the very short term, but I think it's a good environment for companies like backed. Again, another reason why I, you know, We made a large investment this week. Yeah, I mean, the next point I was going to make is imagine what this does for supercharging stable coins, which we know is a major priority for the White House and for the Treasury, right? For various reasons, I mean, it's a weapon of hyper-dollarization in a world where, you know, people are trying to reduce exposure to the dollars or at least sovereign nations are.
Starting point is 00:14:06 So, I mean, if you give full-fed access to every fintech and crypto-based companies, stablecoins are just going to continue to explore. explode even further. Yeah, look, Trump has not had the best relationship with the banks. I mean, I think he's pretty annoyed to the banks for not getting clarity figured out with Brian Armstrong faster. You could see the influence that staple coins have in the U.S. government. Like when I was at Mara Lago, whenever that was a month, month and a half ago, I was standing right next to Palo from Tether, and he was standing right next to Bo Hines, one of the, one of the crypto guys that was sort of in the administration there for a little bit. Now he's sort of a lobby.
Starting point is 00:14:44 And right after Trump got off stage, he took Palo behind the rope to have like a private one-on-one conversation with Trump in front of the rest of the room, right? As Trump was leaving to get on the plane to go up to the press dinner where they had the attacker try to break in, same day earlier in that afternoon. We were all with Trump. And you could see like he's the only guy in the room that was allowed that audience. And it speaks to the influence that Tether and other stablecoin manufacturers have with the government right now. because they're viewed as like one of the primary buyers of treasuries in a world where a lot of
Starting point is 00:15:19 people have said we're not going to buy treasuries anymore a lot of a lot of governments are sort of have become adversarial with the u.s and so these stablecoin companies are helping to proliferate the dollar globally they're a natural demand for the dollar and by the way just a like a few days later i saw paolo again with boehinds and they were standing right next to steve munich the former treasury secretary under trump in fact steve minucian couldn't even get into the club that I'm a member of. So we went and talked to, my buddy and I went and talked to the membership director and said, hey, that's the former Treasury Secretary. You should probably give them a tour while you're waiting for the canter people to get here to open
Starting point is 00:15:56 the party. Sailor got turned away at the door, too. Sailor and Manusian are standing outside this club, and my buddy and I were able to get someone to bring them in. And so like it's, but it's wild that you see these guys and it was like, we're up on the balcony and it's like Sailor, Mnuchin, bohines, Palo, and like you can see the connectivity that stablecoins are having now, not just with the biggest Bitcoin holders, but also with the U.S. government directly. And I think that's just a sign of things to come. What's so interesting about that is Tether doesn't have all of the clarity that they are necessarily seeking in the Genius Act, or at least that's the perception.
Starting point is 00:16:35 So it's interesting that he's the guy in the room who's getting that audience when people who read the Genius Act, you know, for the first time, think it's more favorable to a circle, for example, or, you know, a United States native stable coin company. Tether hasn't even announced their official plans, I don't think, for what they're going to do in the states, and still a lot of platforms don't use Tether here. Look, I personally have not been super positive on Tether historically. I mean, I think you can objectively say that they weren't the most transparent company for many years. They could not pass an audit. They were certainly short on reserves for long periods of time. They did a lot of
Starting point is 00:17:12 business with firms like Celsius historically, right? So like that is what it is. It's funny. I say that and people jump all over. Mike hates tether. He's a tether truth or he thinks tether's going to go down. I never once said that. I just, I like to be as objective as possible. And and so even if I, whether I like or don't like something, I try to be aware of what's going on with it. And look, tether's probably in a much better place than it was five years ago. And it was never really a huge risk of sort of collapsing because there's really no easy way to redeem. Like nobody's trying to go to a window somewhere in Italy and redeem tethers, right, like for dollars. So like it wasn't going to be easy even if there was a demand to do that,
Starting point is 00:17:52 to do that, whereas some of these other platforms, like all it took was a run on the bank effectively for people to say, hey, I want my money back for people to realize, oh, these firms didn't have, it didn't have the money. So you want to be really big and you didn't want to have a redemption mechanism. And Tether survived some of those moments and now is trying to sort of legitimize itself. And I think Powell is doing exactly what you should do. You should cozy up with the U.S. government and try to convince them that you've always been legitimate whether you have or not.
Starting point is 00:18:18 And that's why they hired Bo Hines to run the U.S. side in the first place. Right. Straight out of the White House. Bo Hines probably makes real money now being a lobbyist. That's why everybody wants to work. You wonder why someone wants to work in the government for two and 200,000 a year. It's because the moment you leave, you make two, you make two million a year, or 20 million a year, the moment you leave because you've got influence. It's influence pedaling.
Starting point is 00:18:40 It's a story as old as time. It was unbelievable how fast he made that transition now. It was the like most meteoric rise I've ever seen. Nobody's ever heard of the guy before, but he's a good looking American guy and you throw a suit on him and say he's a crypto guy, right? Like nobody knew who he was, but once he was that guy, every crypto company had to talk to him. It's magic how that happens. Yeah, it was incredible. What do you think of Bitcoin here? I don't think anything's changed.
Starting point is 00:19:08 I mean, it's what is it, 774 or something? Like it was, it was 60 on February, it was 598 at the lows on like February 4th during that whoosh down. That basically predicted the Iran conflict. We're coming up on three months or more than three months now into that, February, March, April. Yeah, like four or five months. months into it. And Bitcoin's still sitting above those lows pretty substantially. It went as high as 82, 83. I suspect at some point later this year, like, it'll go higher. I think the four-year cycle
Starting point is 00:19:43 people are sort of in shambles at this point, because if you haven't seen more downward momentum by now, it's more likely this is an early mid-cycle than it is at the end of the cycle. But we'll see. either way like you know i've been long strive i got long strive like october last year and people are yelling at me they're so angry and i'm i'm up 30% or something on my stride position i also bought um the SATa uh the the the preferred equity from strivenants daily dividends starting mid next month 13% um my original average was under 94 like once you start receiving the yield, right? Like the cost basis actually drops organically because it's a return of capital. So it's falling. But I think it's going to be hard to say no to an income product
Starting point is 00:20:34 where retirees can see new cash coming into their bank account or their brokerage account every single day. One of the big challenges retirees have is you go from like a biweekly paycheck, right, to a sometimes quarterly paycheck. Let's say a lot of your monies and dividend paying equities, MLPs, energy stocks, whatever, tobacco stocks. Those stocks are great, but you only get the dividend once every quarter. And so what happens is over time is your income becomes very lumpy. So you might have an average of $10,000 a month of income, but some months it's 12 and some months it's four.
Starting point is 00:21:07 And of course, retirees get better at balancing that over time. But a product like SATA from Strive allows you to kind of balance that out. Very high income paid every business day. First security and history that I know of that pays out the, holders every, every business day. And so my suspicion is the demand's going to go up. It's going to trade above par and strive is going to be one of the biggest Bitcoin holders in the world when Bitcoin's at much higher prices. So I remind you, Scott, that I was, just like you, I was a little bit skeptical last spring, right? I was very bearish on Nakamoto and a bunch of these other treasury companies.
Starting point is 00:21:42 I thought they could go a lot lower. But once that process had played out, I switch sides, right? Because that's what a good investor does. Like, you wait till all of the sentiment has been squeezed out of the balloon, and then you pile in then. So I came in then, and we had a little bit more volatility coming into this year, but now Strive looks like it's on solid ground. It looks like a clear number two, in my opinion, to MS. It's the only other company that has a momentum momentum around their preferred equity right now. It's hard to issue a new one right now. The demand may not be there. You need a billion dollar plus market cap. I suspect that they'll just keep moving up the list. They're going to pass riot. They're going to pass a number of other firms on there.
Starting point is 00:22:19 And at one point, I think they'll be number two behind MSDR. I met Matt Cole two weeks ago in Miami. He's such an incredibly impressive guy, the CEO of Strive. Because I did like five minutes of due diligence before I sat down with him. And I think he had like 11 consecutive years beating the benchmark as a bond investor. Like really, you know, with massive, massive capital behind him. You know, he's a really impressive guy. How do you view SETA versus STRC at this point?
Starting point is 00:22:49 I think last we talked, you held both. Is that correct? No, no. I've never held STRC. I think they're both going to work, right? STRC is much less risky because the balance sheet of MSTR is so large. So probably SETA should trade, you know, a slightly larger gap. like it should be it should be higher relative to STRC but I think what's going to happen is
Starting point is 00:23:18 SDRC is probably going to need to raise the yield a little bit more and or go go to a faster payment cadence like clearly going from monthly yeah I mean I don't know they probably going to end up daily as well if they can I don't I don't know what constraints there would be around that but if they can do that they probably end up daily as well to match the the same cadence and then they may in the short term have to raise the yield a little bit but look if you can keep your, if you can keep these instruments near par for most of the month, then then you win. And so I think STRC proved that you could do that before SADA did. And now, now Sata looks like it's, it's holding that near par level much earlier in the month like after the X dividend
Starting point is 00:24:00 date than it had previously. So I think the behavior is showing that people want these things. There's a tremendous amount of demand. And then all you need is Bitcoin over time to go up, you know, 15 or 20 percent. Yeah, I mean, then you crush it. But I mean, Saylor said, 2% I think is, you know, then they're fine. Yeah. If you, if you, if you, if you're willing to cannibalize yourself, then, then, you know, you can tolerate lower returns for some period of time. But for this to really be a truly an accretive flywheel, you want Bitcoin to go up 20 or 30%
Starting point is 00:24:30 a year, but I think it will. Yeah. Like over 10 years, I think that's a pretty reasonable bet. In the meantime, if you bought it as I did months ago now, every month that you get the return of capital, it sort of de-risk the investment, as long as the, the instrument it trades back to par. Think about it. Like if you're at 100 and you keep getting a dollar a month and it keeps going back to 100, every time you put that dollar in your pocket, that's basically downside protection against the risk that at some point these things don't trade at 100.
Starting point is 00:24:55 But I think they will. I think they're going to trade it 100, especially SATA because it's daily. It's going to trade 100 like all the time. And then you're still, you're going to be getting your yield return of capital all the time like every single day. So like the process of derisking and getting that track record of payment is going to happen at an accelerated It's sort of like, think about how Bitcoin trades 24-7-365. So it's actually traded way more than a lot of equities, right? Because over the same period of time, 16, 17 years, it's traded way more hours and way more minutes than a lot of other asset classes.
Starting point is 00:25:26 Well, state is going to develop a track record of payments that's going to rival, you know, dividend aristocrats that have paid for decades because it's actually going to make more dividend payments, more return of capital payments in a short period of months than a lot of those stocks have made in many years, right? because they're effectively doing, say, 22 or 23 or 24 or 25 a month, not 12 a year or for a year, like a quarterly payer, right? So they're going to do more in a month than some of these other ones do in a couple of years, three, four years, right?
Starting point is 00:25:59 So I think that accelerates this sense of inevitability that the market will have. And look, if you're embarrassed on Bitcoin here, it better be for like a week, right? or like a short period of time. And again, I don't even understand what the point of that would be because nobody can break the next week or next two weeks. I think if you look out two, three, four years, though, Bitcoin's higher. There will be another cycle that actually gets people excited.
Starting point is 00:26:25 And the fact that almost nobody's excited right now is perversely quite bullish. Yeah, I think that you made the best point, which is that, well, I think Saylor found that STRC, through all of his iterations of attempts at finding products that he could put out there to buy Bitcoin. has been the best one. And I think that Strive was just the fastest to innovate on that. And anyone who's not doing that specific product, even Sailor said to me when I was in Vegas, he said, I wish I'd done this first. Right. It's like, it took me all these other things to get to doing this. But this is the way. And this is what we're going to. And that's the benefit of all their
Starting point is 00:27:00 debt and is just doing this. Yeah. And that's the benefit of being a fast follower. Like, if you think about a long endurance race, like you don't want to be out in front the whole time. You actually want to draft off the leader for some period of time. so you can quietly decide what your strategy is going to be to try to pass 75 or 80 or 90% through the race and you just let the leader carry you. And so because Strive came later and some of the strategy was already laid down, they were able to draft, draft, draft, and now they're actually accelerating because they see a window to really differentiate.
Starting point is 00:27:32 And so, look, somebody asked me, another hedge fund manager when I was in Palm Beach recently said, how of all of these, all the noise in the treasury space last year, how did you pick out strive? And I said it was the same process I used to pick out iron and cipher out of a pool of 30 or 40 so-called Bitcoin miners three or four years ago. Like if you actually talk to all these teams and you ask yourself, forget about the fervor around the price, but just focus on, does the team have the capabilities to execute on the business model that they're saying?
Starting point is 00:27:59 It was very clear to me over a year ago now last spring that like almost nobody was going to be able to do this well. You can't just take an event planner, a party planner, a social media influence, or give them $200 million to buy Bitcoin in the open market and expect that real shareholder value would be created. You actually needed a team that was capable of really innovating in this securities issuance space, where you have to issue securities with certain characteristics
Starting point is 00:28:22 that meet the markets need, but also allow the company itself to be sustainable so the equity value can go up. And so my assessment of that after looking at the market last spring was that, like, Strive is probably the only company other than MSTR, which had the right capability. to be successful in this market, but you still needed to wait until the air kind of went out of the bubble. Once that happened, I went to work last spring and bought Strive, and I got a lot of hate
Starting point is 00:28:49 for that at the time, and now the haters are largely gone. And this is what happens over the market markets. If you're right, I got the same shit with iron, right? People are like, Mike, you're an idiot. Iron's $2, you've been wrong. And then when I went to $75, they're here a little bit right now because we're at 47 or 48, not 75, but when it's when it's higher again, they'll be quiet. And so I just learned to, you tune it out, right? You just focus on executing on your strategy. Love it, man. Well, thank you. I appreciate, as always, all the insight. Now I feel like, just like I bought iron, I'm going to need to go buy back. Yeah, look, I have no recommendation for anybody to buy back. I'm only telling you what I did.
Starting point is 00:29:32 I was a buyer on Friday and Monday between 820 and 834, a share of my average is. I think my average on the whole purchase was like 829, which coincidentally is my average on the whole position now, 625,000 shares in the fund. So that's what I did. We'll see if I'm right. I have a decent track record, but like time will tell. I mean, you don't have to ask anybody's advice when they can actually show you what they did. That's the beauty of, that's the beauty of following someone who can show you that they actually
Starting point is 00:30:03 have skin in the game, as opposed to most of us are just, you know, say maybe this. that at any given time. Love it, man. Well, thank you, Mike. Always a pleasure. Love what you're doing. And look forward to having another chat soon. Sounds good. Thanks, Scott. All right, man. We had a issue with getting live today. So I'm going to have to try to get us off here. All right, ma'am. Have a good one.

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