The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin RIPS 24% as $2.6 BILLION Floods Back Into Crypto

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Bitcoin is coming off one of its strongest weeks in years, with ETF inflows surging, yields falling, and the weaker dollar bringing the debasement trade back into focus. Attention now shifts to PCE, Nvidia earnings, and Jackson Hole, while strong moves in ETH, Zcash, and other crypto assets suggest risk appetite is broadening beyond Bitcoin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Bitcoin rips 24%. Its second best week since early 2021 has $2.6 billion flood back into crypto investment products. This was a big week, a big pivot. So inevitably, we will now discuss whether this is one of those face melting bear market rallies or the entrance, the beginning of yet a new cycle. We've got Dave, Mike, and special guests, Alex Thorne from Galaxy here. And I'm definitely about to get another copyright infringement, but I don't care. I have to play this. Let's go. Get the fuck out of bed, bitch, go. Wake up, bitch, get up.

Yeah, new intro music. I guys like it. All right, we've got... We've got Mike's... I know, I got a copyright infringement last time, and I did it anyways, which means we can't monetize, but hopefully I don't get a strike. But, you know, I wanted to start with Mike, as we always do, you know, with the morning meeting.

But, Mike, I figured I would play that especially from you because I know that you are a huge fan of sailors hubris. I am, but I can't. The derogatory reference to females doesn't work for me, particularly in my corporate environments. I have to be careful being associated with that. Honestly. Was that an official strategy post?

Because I saw it this week ago, I was quite a lot. Okay, well, we'll all comment on that one. Let's start with the morning meeting, Mike. Yeah, so our economist, Andrew Sacher, pointed out to, it's all about warses, this wars at Jackson Hole. That's Wednesday. He thinks he's going to commit to the 2% target, and the key questions will that satisfy the bottom market. PC is coming out this week, 3.4% year over year, which is well above the target.

He points out a lot of this leasing is due to portfolio management fees, which means stock market. He expects the Fed to stay in hold in September, expects claims to stay low, and expects a strong case of the Fed to stay and hold inflation above target. Ira Jersey, our rate strategist, pointed out about the buybacks. It's basically a form of operation twist. Morris wants on the short end, buy back the long end. When is the, his key question is when's the end game? Will enhance liquidity, you think so? Short trading on the fundamentals, he disagrees, he thinks markets trading in phenomenal.

So he decrees with Scott's Besson's comment for last week. We have nominal growth running around 6% right now, which is usual long end yields go. That was Ira's comment. US is now competing with long ends yields in other countries. Hedging back, the currency is kind of getting higher than the U.S. He pointed out they expect the economy to do fine with 30 year above 5%. Chris Kane, our equity side's point in strategies point out these obviously things are still bullish, but he did point out the commitment of traders report for the NASDAQ is showing the most short

rating since 2020. It's a lead me dating a little bit. His quote was he thinks that's going to be fuel for the fire. And he pointed out how good earnings 100% of the rally this year is due to earnings. Forward P's are actually coming down. 32.5% year-over-year growth in S&P earnings. He thinks that's the strongest in U.S. history. Energy was up 145 percent.

Just, you know, all that bull of stuff in stocks. We get that. Sergei Vogelov came on, pointed out the ECB is expected to hike soon. He thinks the bullish trend thinks that's going to bring the euro to dollar rate back towards 120. And then I get on and quoted a comment about commodities just pointed out that my main bias in crude oil remains downward. What's the go of Mr. Trump? And I pointed out, U.S. January natural gas has already collapsed. Now, it's at a good support.

There's a level you should buy it, but that's the number one measure of heat, electricity, and fertilizer. The wed led the way lower before. And I point out of similar issues between gold and Bitcoin. Now, we can use that for later, but they both face-fed tightening. Bitcoin more of a bare market bounce and gold, more of, I think, a consolidation long-term bounce. Key thing that's happening this week, and you might not care so much, but I'll mention yields and U.S. grains. Corn have been collapsing the estimate so that market's popped up, which means higher food. Hedge funds are on board of that.

And that's so I'll end with this. The key thing that I pointed out in with, I just updated my commitment traders. Hedge funds are basically countering Mr. Trump into the midterms. They're long crude in petroleum and long food, the grains. And Mr. Trump needs both of those to go down. Back to you. We got a lot going on this week. We can pull any of those threads.

I just want to kind of put it up there to follow up. you know, consumer confidence, whatever, July new home sales could be interesting. PCE, I guess is meaningful. I think Nvidia earnings is probably the biggest story of the week. And then, of course, which isn't even here, I don't think we have Jackson Hole. Right. So, Alex, I know where Mike and Dave stand on Warsh and inflation. Could I assume that you're in the, he ain't raising rates camp alongside the rest of us? I think it's unlikely. I think I still, you know, I don't want to jump the gun too much. He's only been in there a little bit, and he's got a materially different style than J. Pao did.

So, but, but, yeah, I think, I think hikes are unlikely in the near term. Yeah. Yeah. Dave, we're still agreeing with that, I assume. I mean, I just posted a thread that, that says what I think, which is that Warsh will accommodate what the scent is doing, that they are talking probably daily. They are part, they are on the same team, wearing the same jersey. I made the point last week that, you know, there's lots of, and I always use the analogy, you know, they talk about this crap, which is, you know, our twin mandates of low inflation and, and, you know, high employment.

But what they actually care about is making the government able to fund their deficit without a killing and creating a debt spiral. That's what they really care about. And so if you don't understand that, then you are just a, you are just a Keynesian, slavish, you know, economist who read your textbooks in college and have absolutely no clue how economics really works in the real world. And yes, I have a lot of disdain for most modern economics professors. Most of them are morons. And they've ignored the entire everything Milton Friedman's ever said, despite the fact that pretty much every time he said it, he's been right. And, you know, they ignore Hayek, they ignore Mises, they ignore everybody who understands monetarism. And what is actually happening,

And the apotheosis, I think I speak, pronounce it right, of that is modern monetary theory, which is what we get if we end up with a president of AOC. We will get spending as far as the eye can see. We will get them saying, look, China has long rates that are 3% below us, 60 some odd percent lower, with a deficit that is a debt burden that is, I mean, within a puncher's distance of hours. And they'll say, oh, well, that's because they buy their own debt. and so that's all cool and you can do it. Now, of course, China also has assets that our government doesn't have, but that's a different

story. Of course, these people believe they could just seize assets and therefore have them. But why am I talking about this in terms of policy terms? Because last week was really important, okay? And the story of last week is call it Operation Twist. You know, I'll channel my James Lavish and say, I don't care what the hell you call it. What what what what percent basically said was he admitted he said the quiet part out loud, which is they're going to control yields. They're they want to bring down the long rates.

That's what they want to do. And you know, James talked about this for a long time. And we and he and I both agreed that when that happens, the reaction of the markets will be interesting. The fact that the market reacted by Bitcoin exploding by gold outperforming stocks and Bitcoin five Xing or four X in gold's performance. I think is extremely telling. It's telling you a lot about who are the current composition of Bitcoin holders or Bitcoin hoddlers and what do they actually believe. And that matters, right? So, you know, the reaction last week was not surprising to me. The reaction is Bitcoin, all the shorts got flushed. We saw the largest short liquidation, maybe ever. Certainly, I couldn't find it. Alex, I'm curious

if I'm wrong, but I think it was the longest, the largest short liquidation we've ever seen in absolute terms. And that's not surprising. We can talk about volatility and why that's there. But the important point is Bitcoin outperformance in direct response to a trend change matters, because that's it performing exactly as you would expect it to perform. And I think that's the thread that I want to pull on because, you know, gold at 4,700, look, I've been more bullish on gold than Mike for 700 points now, right? You know, for, for this reason. No, seriously. I mean, because I see monetary debasement. And, you know, that to me is what matters. I think that one way or another, Warsh and Bacent are working together. They need to monetize the debt. Because if they don't,

we can't pay it. And not paying it has far worse implications. So to me, last week was very important. And it wasn't any of those stories, but I think that's the why here. Now, the fact that it happened in a low liquidity summer, I mean, if you were just from a technical trader's point of view, you would say, eh, I'd fade it, right? But I think that there's something fundamental underneath it. And that's why I'm much more bullish than I would be if it were just a dead cat bounce. Yeah, Alex, I want to get your take on the move last week. So, like, I think consensus is Bessence sort of lit the spark, leverage was the gasoline.

Trump came over the top and let it continue, but we've been stubbornly high since then, right? And I think that you can't just call it a short squeeze when you have data like this, which you posted, right? Bitcoin ETFC, biggest weekly net flow since October 25 all time. Net flow this week, 1.6 billion in the week is not over yet. When you add in ETH, obviously, it's much higher. So these products did over $2.3 billion in a week.

It's a real, you know, somebody's really buying. Yeah, it was $1.9 billion. for Bitcoin spot ETFs. That was the largest since October, since all time highs, inflows into the ETFs. I mean, yeah, I think not,

I've not been able to figure this out. Who was short in that size at like 63K? Zero volatility. How did we have such high open interest with so many shorts? I agree with that. It hasn't quite made sense yet because, and Dave's right,

I mean, we look to, liquidation data is, you know, a little noisy and hard to gather with confidence, but I mean, it was the largest liquidation we could find basically of shorts. I mean, I think it eventually was well over $2 billion, maybe towards $3 billion in short liquidations, effectively at the 52-week low, right? So maybe that's the type of hubris that, you know, helps mark a bottom is the shorts way too short at the bottom. This usually does happen if you go and look through various cycle bottoms for Bitcoin.

Just the way like, you know, longs get carried out on stretchers on October 10th when the market it stretched. We were stretched to the downside. So I think it was susceptible. There was the dry kindling in the fire susceptible to a spark. Obviously, you know, the operation here at the Treasury is not that big in absolute terms, but it's the signal that matters. I'm still thinking about this announcement, I guess, today that they could use the TGA to fund these buybacks, which you're right, that's the Treasury General account, which makes it technically not like Operation twist, though, I think, you know, moderately, I mean, still similar, right? But I agree with Dave's overall point here that, like, they need to fund the government without the government collapsing.

And sort of everything flows through that. They're not, you know, these are, they're relatively pragmatic here in the scheme of things. They don't have a rabbit up their hat like they did possibly with the, you know, all the cuts they were doing with Elon. What was that called again? That happened for like two or three months? Doge with Doge. with that was a real like that was a real long-term idea right like that was a real rabbit hat rabbit out of the hat idea that might have actually reversed the if it had been successful the trajectory here but otherwise it looks like you know the train isn't stopping and this really shouldn't be surprising but i guess it's an admission by treasury that you know something's got to give and you know all the

all the risk assets outside of you know crypto basically are stretched already and So I think there's also an aspect of like once the spark is lit, you've got people saying, well, you know, where is my next 2x coming from? Is it coming from incredibly stretched like AI stocks? You know, sure, you want to stay long, you know, the invidias and the, you know, in the big Meg 7 and whatnot. Like I'm not saying those are going, but you know, prime for rotation, I think here as well. If you look, if you, if you went around the start of the year and asked portfolio managers whether they felt they, they wanted to be, what weren't they long enough? The answer was not going to be Bitcoin. at the start of the year, right? Most people were going to say, crap, if they weren't already mega long AI-related theme stocks, then they wish they had, right? If you said, weren't you long enough, I think most people would have said,

I'm not long enough, Nvidia, et cetera. I don't think that's really the story today. Most people are long, the AI and big tech complex, and they're looking at something in Bitcoin that, you know, was down, right now is only down about 37% from all-time high, but it'd been down, you know, 50-plus percent with a proven track record that it could go. go to 125.

Like, we know that is possible. And, you know, I think the combo, I mean, Bloomberg right here as the, I was reading Markets Live here from your colleague, Mike, Andre, it says Bitcoin to extend gains on dollar debasement. You know, it's digital gold right now, at least for the last few days, it's digital gold. How long, like, how, for how long we've said, like, the only thing Bitcoin needs for all the narratives to kick back in is price to go up, like one, one green candle and all a sudden our narratives are back.

Well, Mike, I would love for you. Narrative follows price. You got to love it. It's a better than good. It becomes more attractive to people, the more expensive it gets. I don't know why it does. I think it's a perfect sedgeway. It's the problem with people hoping to go back to the glory days of Bitcoin

when some of us were really liked it when it was cheap and the government hated it and the ETS weren't launched. Now we got all that now. And I want to just tilt over if I can show a screen a little bit with the index that we created with Galaxy with Alex's team, which originally came from my idea. And this is a Bloomberg Galaxy Index divided by SMB 500. total return. It's the same level as 2017. Okay, it's almost 10 years of poor performance, yet it trades about four times of volatility. Okay, just a quick thing on the index, it's 12

cryptos. They're capped at 35%. Part of that was me creating indices initially. You don't want to have too much of a weight. Okay, so let's look at Bitcoin. Bitcoin versus the S&P 500. It's same level as 2021, yet it trades about three times of volatility. Let's look at Bitcoin versus gold. It's the same level is gold since 2021. Yet, oh, by the way, the volatility, this is annual volatility, has dropped to its lowest level ever. So I put on my FRM and CFA hat, you know, just stuff that I thought I had to get to keep a job. And I look at this is a horribly poor performing asset, high volatility, high correlation, and underperforms beta, particularly on a volatility weighting base.

So let's look at back down to a normal thing that people are forgetting. Bitcoin has never done well when the Fed hikes rates, virtually never. So it's starting to roll over. Okay, obviously it held its 100-week moving average in this very significant solidating area. Great call for people who bought it. Certainly for you, Dave, you nailed it, stuck in the range. But what do bear markets do? They screw everybody, make you lose your hair, and then they roll over.

So this is what we do. This is the key thing I want to point out right now is it's still hovering right below. Now, it's heading towards its 50 week moving average around 81. Great, get it. But Fed's price for high stakes. Last time that happened, Bitcoin peaked around 69, and it didn't bought them until, what, 20? good luck i mean i just want to point it's august price for hi as a bear market bounce just quickly mike do you think they're actually going to

hike no no i don't think they're going to hike but the stock market might double dog dare them and the bottom line for me is missed is what the difference between mr worse what he says and what i hear obviously said the bond market started to hike for him the key thing the bottom line is simplest most significant thing to hike for him is a stock market just going down a little bit now i can see some divergent strength in Bitcoin versus a stock market going down 10%. Yeah, that might be a good sign. But the problem is there's still massive purging that's still going on in that space. I mean, like, you know, I mentioned some of these. We all know that a lot of this stuff still needs to be perched. So to me, that's a key thing. It's August.

And bottom line is what I really want to point out is what I think just happened is Bitcoin just signaled the beginning of volatility season. It's still August. This is going to be a great trading year. And so far, some of the best trades in Bitcoin has been to sell rallies. we've had a good rally. So there's a couple things that need responding there. I mean, look, in a vacuum, if there was no reason, if there were no stories, if we weren't seeing a sea change and the words being spoken by the Secretary of Treasury, then maybe I could sort of agree with you, kind of if I squint really hard and kind of look at volatility, whatever.

But when you cherry pick numbers going back to 2021, you're committing, you know, you're committing, you know, statistical malpractice, right? You know, you have to use rolling averages. You can't, you know, just look at at from the previous peak, you know, obviously Bitcoin peaked in the 60s in 20. We know what happened in 22. There was, you know, a series of events, you know, starting with Luna and ending in serial, force selling, fraud, you know, collapse events that basically crushed. We then saw what happened in 2025, Trump with the meme coins and dividing the country, et cetera, et cetera. There's all sorts of things that that have occurred. But, you know, we're cherry picking a period of time. And what we saw last week

was a narrative, very strong narrative change. Narratives are what drive prices. I mean, when you ignore narratives, you get crushed. The people who ignore narratives are the ones who sold NVIDIA 5% into its move. People, they're the ones who sold Amazon, you know, at, a split-adjusted $20, thinking they had a 20x and they did great, ignoring the next 10x, right? You know, or more. I mean, the narratives of Bitcoin being a monetary asset is extraordinarily important because if you do the math, Bitcoin, the market is pricing Bitcoin at 120th of gold's monetary asset value.

And that matters. And so, you know, whether it's 1-20th or 110th, 1-15th, whatever, you know, you know, you have a huge kicker. So if you believe that we are in a long-term fiat debt spiral, and a lot of people do? And even if you're just looking for a hedge, do you pick the one that is undervalued by a 10th or a 20th for your long-term holding of your hedge? Or do you pick the other one? Well, the answer is you're going to pick both, and that's exactly what we saw. We saw gold up 6%. We bought Bitcoin up 23% last week. The reason it's extending now is because who's going to short it, right? And so this narrative shift matters. Because the two things that got said, and I'm going to take a

victory lap and James isn't here, but we'll give him the victory lap as well. James and I were beating the drum at the beginning part of this year. We said that the policy of the, once there's a new Fed chair, that a policy of the Treasury and the Fed is going to be what? We said there, you know, James talked about yield care control and what did I say every week, Scott? The only way out is to grow our way out. What did Besant say last week? The only way out, is to grow our way out. You're also like mocked the 40 trillion number and said, no big deal. But that, ignoring, ignoring that policy for the next two years is going to be to goose investment

growth, goose asset prices, and basically push in the direction that we, that I've been talking about, is just people are going to align their portfolios based off of that. And Bitcoin, as Paul Tudor Jones said, in that situation, it proved it last week as the fastest horse. It matters. Now, I do want to get one thing back to Alex because Alex made a really good point in terms of who the hell was shorting it. Here's the thing that Mike and I both know. When volatility compresses, it doesn't fricking matter. When you go long periods of time with really low volatility relative to what you would expect,

it gets realized into the market. People start doing things like selling calls and they sell and they sell or leaning on positions. They say, well, every time they look at their charts and you have all these crypto influencers

and every time it goes past 65, it reverses. And you see it five, six times in a row. You're like, okay, great. There's an expression and is what I was taught

by my O'Connor trained mentor in options, which is, don't sell gamma. Don't leave that volatility of volatility on the table where you could get hurt. And that lesson does not get learned by most newbies in the market. And most of the traders in the crypto world are relatively new. For every one, I don't want to start naming names, but we all know who they are there. For every one really seasoned professional option trader, there's legions of people who say,

oh, okay, well, it's worked five or six times in the past, so I'm going to keep doing it. And so that's what happens. It's the madness of crowds. It's literally the same thing at the top and the bottom. It doesn't matter. People tend to lean on volatility when it compresses. And come on, we've been talking about Bitcoin was 64,000 for how many weeks in a row, Scott? It's like the Titanic lady.

It's been 84 years. It was forever. Yeah, it felt like it. That's where it comes from. So that definitely magnified the move. But this narrative ship does matter. And, you know, does it have legs? Could it go for years as in a start of a new cycle-ish, you know, however you want to call it?

Or is it, as Mike says, going to get flushed out as soon as the Fed decides, oh, no, we're going to, we're going to, you know, cut liquidity and we're going to tank markets and we're going to see a volatile fall? I mean, that's the question. I want to gently go to Alex. I just want to highlight the fact that today percent is speaking at 2 o'clock and that he's billed it as economic deed day for Iran. So we're coming back to that with some probably heavy sanctions. And then to just confirm what Alex was saying that these buybacks will come from, you know, the general account. So I think it is semantics. You can't call it QE because they're not printing money to do it, right?

And you can't call it yield curve control because they haven't said 5.2% is our line and we're going to do whatever we need to do to defend 5.2%. But maybe it's just semantics, right? Because you can see exactly what they're doing. And he's kind of alluded to the fact that if it's not. double, it'll be triple. If it's not triple, it'll be whatever we need to do. Kind of reminds me of, you know, when the Fed came in on Silicon Valley Bank and quietly said, well, we'll do what we need to do. But if we need to do more, we're unlimited. And that's how the percent felt to me. And so I find it very interesting that Bitcoin can actually move on that.

In fact, I look back at Silicon Valley Bank, and I was saying this to somebody recently, but that was the unexpected catalyst in my mind for the last bull market, right? Bitcoin was kind languishing around 20, whatever, and it jumped from 19 to 24 or 25 in a matter of days when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and people had questions. I sold my USDC because I didn't know and I bought Bitcoin with it. You know, like I just did that as a knee-jerk reaction because I didn't know about the liquidity. This feels like the kind of unexpected catalyst where Bitcoin's narrative actually, whether you believe it or not, people can attach to it, right a bank fails get bitcoin you know they're gonna have bond buybacks get bitcoin those things make

sense and then i think the fomo and price do the rest yeah i think you're right by the way 23 was a fun year scott you remember we started the year at 157 post ftx collapse we ended the year like near the 40k range marching towards the launch of the bitcoin etf so quite quite a year and i remember that SVB in march right they closed it on a friday i think by sunday night bitcoin had rip like 20, 30 percent. Look, I mean, if you can't, I guess if you can't solve the long-term creditworthiness problem by actually saving money and running a fiscally prudent government, then the next best thing you can do is just buy your own debt back, you know, and try to protect the long end.

And that's the signal that's being, you know, said here by the government. They said, look, we tried Doge. It didn't work. Well, we'll at least say that generally we've got a credit card to, you know, protect the long end here. And I don't know how far, I mean, the bond markets have already called that bluff a little bit, but now they're, you know, Treasury is still coming out with more chatter about it, with TGA. And he said Besson is speaking. So like, you know, they're fighting, they're fighting a war in the market here a little bit. It's not like dire for the dollar yet. But I mean, this shouldn't be

surprising. You know, I guess the goal is to keep it at a low simmer for the next, you know, 50 years while the dollar slowly debases over time. Like that, that would be a win, I think, for the here absent actually reforming the way government works, which, you know, I think we gave it the, they gave it the best shot I've seen in the last, you know, in my time following politics, and it didn't quite go anywhere. I'll just add to from a technical standpoint to both Mike and Dave's points. Bitcoin, I think just from looking empirically at the charts, like really does need to recapture the 50 week moving average here, which is like Mike said it's at 81, around 81. My says it's around 82, but either way, it's not that far from here.

something like 11 out of 13 times that Bitcoin crossed the 50 week moving average to the upside in a bear market, it signaled the bottom and that the bottom was in, right? So only twice that did it not. And both of those, by the way, were during the, in between the two peaks of 21. So not even quite a real like crypto Bitcoin cyclical drawdown. Technically, certainly a bare market because it went down like 50% plus then. And yeah, that's right there. If you were to zoom out, you would find that every time we came out of a bear market, crossing that 50 week to the upside, it did not ultimately go lower. So just from a pure empirical technical standpoint. Yeah.

Yeah, crossing that. And look, and you see the, I guess it would be like a goal, I don't know what kind, which kind of cross it'll be when the, I think you got what the 200 week and the 50 week there. The red is a death cross if the 50 is going down. But when you're on these larger time frame, the death crosses are usually the, you know, know, they're lagging. Right. So you get the, you get the death cross after the bottom and you get the golden cross after the top.

I mean, it happens all. Yeah. So, so I think, I think, you know, you're somewhat close to a clear decision point here, though, I think from a technical standpoint when it comes to these moving averages, the magic lines that I like to call them. So, I mean, I think, go ahead. Sorry. I mean, that's what I'm, from a pure technical standpoint, you can look at a whole bunch of

other stuff that, you know, technical chartists better than me like to look at. But this is my, what I'm just following here is like, can we get a good close above that 50 week? I mean, I would. Then you really do change the regime. Right. But I mean, this was only the fourth time we've ever been oversold on the weekly, which is this one, right? We were oversold here. You got bullish divergence there.

You held the 200. These are the things that have happened at the bottom of every cycle. 50 MA on the monthly. Exactly right there. And now you take a look at the daily and you spread from the 50 to the 200 in a single day, given we're historically overbought now on the daily. And then breaking the 200. And Mike, you've been pointing at the 200 a lot, right?

So we're well above, I think we come back and test it. But technically, there's a lot of reasons here to believe that A bottom could be in. I had a line there before. But right here, you know, 828, that's where you would break the structure of lower lows and lower highs. That's where, like, it becomes very hard for bears to defend bear structure technically, right? But we're not there yet. So I would say that, you know, like we're 8 to 10. I think Van Eck said it last week, right before this moon.

eight of 12 of their bottom indicators were in, and all 12 had flashed at some time in the past two or three months, right? So, I mean, there were a lot of things here. But Mike, I'm assuming, and then I want to come back and talk about the outperformance of alt coins, Alex, but I want to just get Mike's take on this really quickly. Mike, I mean, I'm assuming your view,

and you've said it many times, and it generally is correct in all markets. The biggest rallies come in bare markets, so I'm assuming you think this is a sellable rally, as you mentioned before. But is there anything here? What happened with percent? What you're seeing on the chart?

White House comments. anything that at least gets the spidey senses tingling that we could be seeing a reversal? Oh, sure. I think this is, let me show a few screens. To me, this is a classic case of a short-covering-running opportunity to sell. And it's certainly part of because of the responses I'm getting from people. The motions should never show motions in investing. And that's why I want to show you the Fed is tightening and Bitcoin's rolled over, 50-week moving average, and it's up against resistance. I just look at that. It's August. That's a sell. right now, Dave, the price is $78,000.

I'll consider myself short to you. By the end of the year, whoever wins gets bragging rights. So could I ask the question? Because you often use this. I mean, when we were at 63, you said you would set your stop at 75. Okay. So now, okay, so let's rebase. So here we are.

We're at 78, whatever. Where's your stop? At what point do you say set a stop? Did I say set a stop? So here's a thing, remember now. We could go back to the R&B. The closing basis stop and how many days did it close about 75? Six.

So maybe my closing base stop was a couple days. Maybe it was a couple weeks. I don't trade anymore. No, it's not. It depends when you trade options, which you mentioned, which you and I both came from. I started in a business trading options. So you put up a put one by two spread or something at those levels, but it's also, as you know, markets are designed to hit stops.

So right now I'm pointing out the facts of it's rolled over, Fed's placed for tightening. But I want to point out when you point out and say, I'm cherry pig and I'm not sure. I'm just pointing out since when is Bitcoin unchanged versus beta? Remember, this was an asset all of us loved before the mainstream got on it. It traded pretty well. But virtually everything you said means nothing compared to the stock market. Now, one to 10 scale. The next 10% move, I just wrote on Friday, the next 5% S&B 500, it's all the matter. So 10% I want to show that in metals. The reason I want to show that, because let's use macro, not just keep talking about one silly little asset that's a number on the screen. Let's talk about the broad metal sector. The reason I want

point that out is the metal sectors I show you here. This is another index I asked our index team to create in 2010 years ago. It's been the best before him, but it's a complete sock puppet to the S&B 500. I just show our metals index on the same scale as S&B 500. And the 100-day coordination right now is the highest in history. We go back only 30 years on that. It's August. The stuff I'm seeing right now is this is a warning. You're probably not supposed to be more. And the number one thing to make commodities go down, metals go down, of which gold is beta. It's a stock market. I'm just saying facts. So it's point out also another thing. I just have a question. Because you talk about it as the stock market. Isn't it possible that there are causal events that impact the stock market and different metals differently, like the ones that are used industrial or obviously used by the same companies? Gold is obviously reacting to dollars. But isn't it possible that there are causal events that move them as opposed to the stock market is the event? You know, you talk about a stock puppet all the time.

I'm pointing out facts of a typical value at risk model. If I'm sitting with a position and I'm long gold, silver, platinum, most notably copper or cryptos, I'm sitting in that position. I look at the whole market as a massive value at risk model and I look at it and if the stock market drops 10%, everything goes down. Now, what makes it happen? You can dig in the details. I'm just pointing out the facts of P&L and performance.

And anybody who's been selling rallies in short cryptos this year has been doing well. Just as the fact, they're still funked to test. I want to point out the key things that really is going to matter as we dig into the first. So a lot of the things that you hear and say about debasement, you got that in a chat GPT maybe five years ago when some of us are really bullish gold and very bullish Bitcoin. I want to point out some facts of where we are now. If you look at the number one people say to buy gold in Bitcoin, it's that U.S. debt. Oh, it's unstoppable. Well, U.S. debt right now is minusco.

Right now, the stock market is the highest versus U.S. debt in 20 years, since 2007. It's also the highest bond yield since then. And the same time, we have priced for tightening. To me, this is part of the endgame. It's just getting started. And Bitcoin just gave you a great chance to sell. So I consider myself short to you at $78,000. Let's see how we do it by the end of the year.

Okay. Well, I would like to make one point because to me, it's the key one. And that is the causal factor of what's going on. So you've mentioned a few things. So first of all, you talk about stock market to GDP being at stretch levels, yet valuation metrics are, I mean, they're slightly high. Hang on, I said debt, not GDP. Okay, fine.

But why is that? You know, why is that? Corporate profits are going crazy. We're in the middle of a second industrial revolution, which is impacting corporations' ability to make money. At the same time, we have more dollars in circulation. You can look at, I don't love M2, but it's the best we got. but the correlations are very, very high there.

And you want to know why metals have been correlated? Well, metals, it depends on which ones. I mean, gold is reacting to money supply, and it's that simple. And Ray Dalio said it better than me. You can go back and read his print. You know, he hit a nice long thread, and he talked about all this stuff, and he said you need to own gold in Bitcoin. His reasoning is exactly the same.

He obviously is more bullish on gold than I am and less bullish on Bitcoin. but still directionally similar. When you have a situation where you're constantly creating new money, new credit, and remember, everyone who says that when the federal government deficit crowds out private investment, they are literally ignoring the modern financial system. I mean, this is Keynesian clap trap. I mean, I had an argument with Grok this morning and he ended up, yeah, okay, yeah, that is true. The fact is, is we know that the Kaman.

islands or where all the owners of U.S. Treasuries are, but you know what that is? hedge funds. And when you do treasury, when the Treasury issues new debt, the people who are buying it are buying it on leverage. And that leverage is a transmission mechanism into the economy and why monetary aggregates are increasing. And it's important to understand all that. Now, why am I mentioning all these obscure economic facts? Well, because at the end of the day, when you have a government that's trying to grow its way out and doing everything it can and spending in, well, it's not really peacetime anymore, as Scott was trying to say, but effectively spending, you know, government deficits of $2 trillion as far as the eye can see, you, you are in a different regime. And that regime is going to matter. And so that's what's causing things to be higher because, you know, why is the price of stake higher? Why is the price of anything? Why is the house price higher? Well, it's because we've created more money. money. More dollars chasing the same stuff means prices have to go higher. And honestly, if when you ignore that, you have a problem. And, and the problem is, is you're misreading it.

Now, why do we have metals correlated to the stock market? Well, because you have this other causal factor, which is more money being pumped into, you know, more liquidity, you know, globally. And that's what it is. I mean, that's what's causing it. Now, can that reverse? Yes, sure. You could have a massive catastrophe. March 2020, we saw it, right? We saw this, this absolute catastrophe. And what did the Fed do? Well, you know, it did what it did. It pumped liquidity back in to rescue the markets. What was the biggest outperformer? Well, we know what the biggest outperformer was, you know, the most speculative one of those. But, you know, we've seen a lot since then. And, you know, and basically what I'm saying is if you use March 2020 as your starting point,

as opposed to 2021, you get very different answers. Should that be the right starting point? No, that's a cherry pick also. But you have to look at global liquidity. That, to me, is the single most important thing to look at. And I just really wonder if there's even a scenario where, I mean, a 10% correction, we've had multiple. We've had 20% corrections on Liberation Day and all the other stuff.

But is there any real scenario where a sustained stock market correction and malaise can set in without the government doing something because they're depending on the wealth effect. That's the question, right? And you keep saying 10%, but how many 10% corrections have we had over the last three years? Maybe we can tilt over to Alex Red than you tell us the past. Let's focus on the future. My whole everything you said is we get that. Everybody knows it.

It's move on the future. The deficit spending right now, the key theme is it's unstoppable. The point is assets and liabilities. You know accounting 101. It's assets for a liability. liability. That liability is minuscule. So as folks gets on the asset, that asset has to keep going up. Point out is probably Bitcoin might be warning us on a one, two, a year basis, a two year basis, a two year basis. Bitcoin performance just sucks versus a stock market. I hope it does better for you. But my point is

the rational smart investors see this performance. They see that that performance stopped in 2021 in the back of the biggest money pump in history. And they see that why am I going to add something that has a high correlation to my assets and poor performance and trades it many times of volatility. That's what we see right now. That hasn't changed, and it just gave you a balance. It's August. So I stick with my tactical view on that. And let's look forward.

Let's stop wasting our time with all the past. I get that. We all get that about metals. The key theme to remember is we're at such a point in time. We've reached such an extreme level that you mentioned money supply. I wrote just a few weeks ago that gold reached its highest versus U.S. money supply since 1980. and the stock market is right at its high versus money supply since that peak in 2000. So money supply matters, yes.

But the money supply is figure out what's driving everything. What's driving everything is a U.S. stock market. Why being these silly cryptos that trade poorly and they go up once in a while when you can trade stocks and make record highs? Alex, let's talk about silly cryptos. Of them are making all-time highs, right? So what I find interesting on this rally in particular, something that we rarely see these days is that we talk about beta. Well, the beta to Bitcoin has been outperforming Bitcoin to some degree, right?

I mean, we've got ETH, BTC, has actually been outperforming now for months quietly, but got a much bigger move than Bitcoin. I think ETH to Dollar was up 30% this week when Bitcoin closed about 21%. Obviously, the next one to mention is Zcash, right? I mean, making highs for multiple year highs or getting an ETF, but absolutely pumping after, you know, it was down as low as 250 on the stories that they could have had, you know, unlimited supply, as Mike loves to say, but eight year high, near 850. So I guess what I'm getting at here is that this rally might look a little different

because it looks like rallies of old where there's actually money coming into things beyond Bitcoin. Well, yeah, but they were a lot more beaten down than Bitcoin. Like if you look at Seoul, it was down, you know, year over year, it's down 52%. ETH is down 48% again, one year, and Bitcoin is only down 30%. So I will say like there's a, there's a cost basis effect here, you know, like a, you know, I mean, ETH has just been one of the worst performers. I mean, keep in mind, it, it's rallying off of like, you know, the high, you know,

one handle here in the high one thousands. That thing made an all time high for about five seconds in the entire last bull market, right? So, like, it has not ultimately delivered the way it didn't even, I mean, Bitcoin, I think a lot of Bitcoiners complain that the 125 just simply wasn't a high enough top for the cycle anyway. Eve didn't even get a multiple on its prior all-time high. Obviously, if you ingest for inflation, it's even worse than that. So I think that explains a lot of the outperformance on this move is simply like, you know, lower, lower, you know, like cost effect, basis effect, basically. there's some aspect of that. There is no doubt, though, that like, you know, the privacy angle, AI-related themes in crypto are driving some, you know, the perps and the Dex narrative that,

of course, hyperliquid and others, you know, benefit from are pretty, like, profound and durable narratives in the crypto trading ecosystem right now. You know, you had the president, I'll just say, say the word hyperliquid. That was enough, I think, last week, to energize the hyper-liquid bulls. You know, while I have questions about how exactly the CFTC is going to bring hyperliquid into the U.S. in a legal and compliant way, quote and quote, like, which was, you know, some paraphrasing the president's quote, nonetheless, like, you know, the trade everything app, the, whether it's through prediction markets or perps or whatever, very durable. So like not surprising, I don't think to see some of those do well. Also, Solana has been, you know, quietly doing well as a chain. It's got a lot of volume on there. That coin is going to be hard, in my view, to really ever see a new all-time high in absolute dollar terms. Just if you think about what took it to 300, literally the president and his wife announced meme coins on it during the inauguration. It just from a pure narrative standpoint, it finds, I find it very difficult to see like how it can, you know, over a long enough time if the chain is very successful. Probably it does.

But I don't know how you can get a confluence of events like Solana had to start 2025. But that's sort of what I see it, Scott, is mostly basis effect. I mean, you know, ETH outperforming, like, just still go look at the ETH BTC chart. It still doesn't look that good. Yeah. So I'm not 81 million more bit mine, I guess. So it was their biggest buy since early July, if that's exciting. And I will say, like, in terms of ETH and Sol as examples, beta on BTC, like, you know, the stuff happening in Washington, I think is uniquely more supportive for Ether and Solana than Bitcoin.

even if we don't get clarity, you know, and I'm pretty pessimistic on clarity at this point, becoming law, but, you know, the stuff out of the agencies, the SEC, the CFTC, tokenization, stable coins, that stuff's not going to happen on Bitcoin. So to the extent that there is a, you know, durable fundamental catalyst on the policy side, it probably also does benefit ETH and Seoul, you know, to Bitcoin's detriment. I mean, reg crypto last week, I think people aren't realizing, assuming that goes through how big that is on the degenerate side. And actually, it only can exist and be as degenerate as it is without clarity.

Well, I mean, clarity would have more defined guardrail and you can raise $5 million from the guy on the street and launch whatever you want. And you got four years to print it on the paper. I don't know if that's if that framing. I agree with that, Scott. But I will say, reg crypto does effectively go right at Title I of clarity, which is like the primary issuance and regulatory jurisdictions of various tokens. That's Title I of clarity.

So I would say it's a good replacement in lieu of clarity becoming law. It's a little more nuanced, I think, the overlap between the two. But I actually think the reg crypto regime is the risk to it is the opposite, that it's not lenient enough. And teams end up opting to continue with reg D and offshore issuances that eventually after seasoning trickle back into the U.S. Not that you get an explosion of, you know, onshore degenerate issuances. is that still has to be played out.

But I do think there's a decent chance if they figure that out that, you know, Red Crypto does spark like an ICO 2.0 era. And of course, that does not accrue specifically to Bitcoin. It's much more additive to Ethan Sol. Yeah, Scott, I think that this topic is worth a serious deep dive because what you just said was maybe in all the years that we've been working together, maybe the most wrong that you've ever said, because essentially what you need to understand, and people always miss this, is when Congress passes a law, the law instructs agencies to write rules. What Atkins did is said,

if clarity passes, this is the rule I would write, but fuck, I'm going to write it anyway, right? You know, it's like, he's just basically assuming the jurisdiction is there. And how are they doing that? It's because the CFTC and the SEC got together earlier this year and created a taxonomy. I mean, I was on a couple panels with the guy who wrote it. Actually, Alex, you were on a panel at, it was at consensus with the guy from, you know, from that wrote it. I talked to you afterwards. I mean, they basically, the CFDC and the SEC, essentially before Clarity said, here's how we think it should be broken down. Now, clarity makes it more specific. The issue is, is there going to be state attorney generals or other people to challenge the CFDC and SEC and claim that they don't have congressional intent,

to actually split up the world between the two of them. That's going to be a really hard case to win, right? You know, the real issue without clarity is that a future SEC and CFTC take it back. Of course. Which is not as easy as you think when it's a jurisdictional thing and they've done, you know, because they've been doing,

you know, Commissioner Purse, you know, has been leading this effort for some time. This taxonomy is not a small problem. And the more it gets into the zeitgeist and the more there are precedent-A-Able kind of red crumbs that say that this is more or less close. The fact that a large percentage of Congress voted for the First Clarity Act in the House, and the Senate doesn't have enough votes to pass it, but it certainly isn't, they're not arguing against it. I don't think that's true.

The thing about Red Crypto is it will allow for builders. It has nothing to do with any of the tokens that already exist, except for those tokens that have utility and don't pass on the economic value to the holders. That's going to have to be negotiated. That's going to have to be safe harbor. That's going to probably require no action relief. But there's nothing stopping the people behind, I'll name them, the two that are the most obvious. Chain link and Ando both have, you know, supposedly real revenue, and neither one of them have a mechanism to define.

what gets passed on to holders, they could go work with the SEC now and say, we would like to do this and get no action relief in all likelihood. And for all I know they are, I have no notion of it one way or another. But that's what the sort of thing that has to happen. I mean, Alex, you deal with this all the time, right? You know, you have investors, right, you know, who want to know if I own this thing, what does it work? I wasn't saying no clarity is good. I was just saying being able to do $5 million launches without accreditation and four years to prove yourself. leaves the door open. As I said, it might be better for the D-Gen side for people to just start. But did you read the fine print there? You can do that, but you have to make disclosures. And if you violate those disclosures, no, not just a... On the $75 million one, you had to make constant disclosures. On the $5 million side, it was basically submit with a white paper and see you in four years. Sort of. But within that white paper, you have to specify token economics. You have to specify supply. things that created the worst rug pulls, you have to basically say will not happen or maybe

you say it will happen and say, oh, I told you it was going to happen, right? You know, but effectively, you do have to make those disclosures. Let's be careful. It's not a carte blanche. These people aren't dumb. Yeah. Yeah, the low threshold one does have fewer disclosure and I don't know what we call. It's not really registration or licensing, but, you know, discussions with the SEA.

requirements than the bigger one. The bigger one, you can't self-certify. You actually need SEC approval to use under the proposal. So that's much stricter. I mean, I think you're going to see a deluge of comments from market participants, not just, I guess, potential token issuers, but probably, you know, galaxies and coinbases and whomever is the trades, asking a whole bunch of range of these questions, whether that 5-mill setup ends up holding through rulemaking, like we don't know whether all of this could get tweaked before it even is put forth for a vote on a rule. And then not just state's attorneys general, but probably like traditional finance trades will challenge this and end the innovation exemption if and when it comes. Right.

Like this, the thing with the SEC here, like they probably waited on both red crypto and innovation exemption partially due to not wanting to interfere with the Senate's work on clarity, not wanting to. not wanting to, you know, throw this regulatory hand grenade into the center of the otherwise tenuous negotiations. And so part of me thinks that reg crypto coming out now is a little bit of an admission that by the commission that, you know, clarity kind of is probably dead. I mean, the White House is still saying there's going to be a big vote, you know, to be clear, there doesn't act. We're not certain there actually will be that vote. They could pull the vote. that is possible too. But I think like the commission acting here is trying to fulfill what they promised, which is that there's going to be market clarity on crypto, whether it's primary

issuance or secondary trading, regardless of what Congress does. I think the, the red crypto is probably more legally defensible, given that like you're talking about issuing securities effectively, and they do clearly have the sense of Congress under the Securities Act to regulate that. Innovation exemption also decent. I think the one that's really tricky for the agencies in terms of like how whether their rulemaking can be durable and have fidelity, for example, against lawsuits, especially under Lopper Bright, is the prediction markets question for the CFDC where, you know, Chair Selegg has been very bullish on defending his agency's jurisdiction over prediction market event trading because they're swaps. I think it's harder to make the case that Congress, when they, you know,

past the CEA, like meant that sports gambling could be done on Cal sheet. Like that, that doesn't seem it nearly as durable to me as the SEC saying, well, there's a new class of securities, here's a new way to do the issuance of them. Like that is relatively in their remit. But I think, you know, obviously it can be rolled back. I mean, look at the pivot that Chair Atkins has done following Chair Gensler. I mean, the custody rule languished and was let go, right? Like all of these.

It should be noted, by the way. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. It is harder. Dave's right. Like, you know, fully formalized and acted rulemaking isn't like a stroke of a pen under the APA to actually undo. But it's a lot easier than federal statute.

So. I was just going to say to CFDC last week for people who missed it. At the end of the week, C-Lig also sort of furthered what Atkins is doing and said, if clarity doesn't pass, we need to start making rules basically and told his agency, which is just him. and to do other commissioners. But he told them to start, you know, looking at making rules of clarity doesn't pass. So I would just say that's another piece of evidence that directionally it's probably unlikely in rulemaking is going to be the path forward.

And I brought this up just to point out, too, as part of your initial question, Scott, about other crypto's beta. Like, I think given the events last week at the White House, the CFTC's investor advisory committee, the comments from, you know, the release of red crypto, the comments from Seelig, like some of the bounce and outperformance and alts could be related to optimism around regulatory clarity. Mike, I can see your screens in the back and you're flipping through stuff. Do you got something for it there? Yeah, you know, I was just looking at Bitcoin versus Money Supply. It's the same as 2017. So yeah, Dave's right. I get that. That's completely true. But I have to ask you our audience,

what part of clarity is going to make people want to speculate more in highly volatile digital assets and underperform beta in an environment where the only game in town now is a stock market? I just don't get that. What I think it's going to do is continue doing what I've been expecting all along is enhanced the value of tokenization. This technology is awesome. Number one, stable coins, crypto dollars, and what's going to be next? Stuff that's going to come on chain to next to Dogecoin that'll earn stuff and that doesn't. This is just classic chance to sell in August, I think, and that's why I look at it.

So I look at my spidey senses, ex-trader tactical senses. Yeah, you just got a chance of short an asset that's been depreciating and melting for a while. a while and you probably should do that and make the market prove you wrong and let's see if it does. Like I look at, here's another thing, what's called macro a little more, to talk to energy. We've had, we have a president who needs lower energy prices and natural gas is collapsing. I look at the January natural gas contract below four. Probably should buy that. I think it's going to go down, but we should have some spikes.

And what does he need for then for midterms? He needs crude oil lower. But a key thing I want to point about running it hot is that's what's changed. The macro has changed. If you don't want to get elected and you want the next president guaranteed to be a Democrat, run it hot. Create that inflation high. The tilt is happening. It's already changed.

The game is over. They've got to fix it out. One key way for that to happen is get crude oil to collapse. That would help. And, you know, the bottom line, the number one force for all inflation in the whole world right now, which is not, it's deflation in China. Is that U.S. stock market? So one thing I really do want to make clear because I don't disagree with everything, Mike says, by any means. I mean, value and value adherence in crypto is not uniform.

There are a lot of coins that there are assets where you can look at them and say, okay, I understand what I'm buying. I understand what this will be. Then there are others where you say, I want to buy it because somebody else is going to buy it for more and I'm going to sell it to them. Right. And when I look at memes, that's what I think of when I see memes, right? That doesn't mean that it has to be a short-term sell it to them. it could be a long-term sell it to them.

So there is a, when you look at what's been going on, yes, there are certain, you know, there are certain things. I mean, Dogecoin has performed quite well over the last week. Cool, right? You know, kind of in line with everything else. The, but the truth is that you see Zcash, what's its narrative? Zcash is capped, limited supply, private Bitcoin. That's what, that's what their narrative is.

Is it going to be right or wrong? I don't know. I mean, I nibbled. I have a small position in it. that's fine, you know, and it may go to zero or it may become something big. I don't know. You know, you see XRP, you know, going, the volatility in XRP has been insane. I mean, XRP last month, you know, fell below one. It's at 150 now, right? You know, these are big moves. Now, why am I pointing out these moves? Well, because there's, what we've seen in the stock market is it's

not a monolith. You know, we saw this huge, huge outperformance being driven by the AI, trade AI infrastructure and the hypers, et cetera, and the Mag 7, leading the stock market higher. We saw that. Well, the stock market's still pretty damn high, but those stocks have all come off because you get rotation, and people are always looking for the next thing where they can make their money. So is it remotely surprising that during a period of time, you see a period of time where

people go, look, oh my God, these cryptos are down so much. I should put my money in because they're going to recover. Now, that could very well be a bare market rally, that's shortable. I just don't think Bitcoin has that profile, right? And I don't think that, and I think there are some other cryptos that don't, like I don't think Hyper Liquid has that profile given the amount of earnings that are backing what it is. And I do think him mentioning Hyper Liquid is a big deal. Why?

Because it's a really interesting market model. And there are lots of people in the U.S. who would like the CFTC to be able to work with Hyper Liquid to regulate it in a, in a sense on manipulation and use that market model. It really is interesting and should probably exist. It shouldn't be legislatively or regulatorily like squeezed out of the U.S. like it is today, you know, from a whatever perspective, because it is a good model in lots of respect.

So you have to look at these things. This could be, crypto could be having its dogs of the Dow moment, Mike, to go back to things that you have to be a boomer to understand, you know, where people are just buying the crap that's been the hell beaten out of on the hopes that it recovers. And but that doesn't end in a day. I mean, the other thing I would say is, is anybody who expects a straight line up to get to the 50-week moving average isn't paying attention. The odds are very high that you get a little bit of a pullback here, a base, and then it'll make it to salt. And it'll probably be the second or third time it gets to the 50-week moving average before it breaks through.

That's much more typical than just a blast group. with. And so people who are, oh, I should buy today on huge leverage, they're going to get washed out. If we start seeing a lot of leverage buying at 78, yeah, you know, they're going to get washed out, but are they going to get washed out down to below 60? That I doubt. So you just have to look at it both ways. Well, can I tilt over a little more than the macro and stop focusing on this one asset that's only a couple trillion dollars? Let's focus on the macro. The government just announced her buying bonds. This is not the government. This is Mr. Besson. He's one of the best traders on. the planet and by the way they're selling crude i'm going with that trade not a big deal

i like L tl tl tl t oh i've been liking it forever but it looks better at 5% than 4% and been eaten been eating that one but that's a key theme for this year is also working you sell risk assets on reality so we just got that in in bitcoin again now from a lower level we got that it's silver got silly above 100 can go go back to 5 000 i don't know the final big one is copper the number one i've been wrong and it's 6% or so 10% above my first initial level, but the stock market's pulling it up. That's the whole idea. It's got to be pulled up by stock market. And I look at that as a sock puppet. Copper is going to drop 20% and the stock market drops 10%. Almost guaranteed, we'll see what happens. See, maybe I'll be proven wrong.

But in the meantime, as a trader, it's August. You just got a chance to maybe jump on that theme I've been having for all. This year that hasn't kicked in yet that volatility will increase in the stock market, it might go down, and just got a chance to sell that top risk assets been melting in the whole space and a decent bounce in August. Give it a shot. To me, that's as a trader, that's my thought. So Mike, can I think about Nicole on both copper and oil? I just ask two questions. You know, oil is way above its cost.

I don't want to. Yeah, no, selling oil above its cost of production, if things normalized, makes sense. Isn't copper reacting to worldwide construction? Isn't it really about construction? Yeah. So what's focus on, again. But the construction sector.

Again, I just assume all that stuff you can get in chat GPT is all soon by our audience. I get it. everything is bullish about copper. You go in the room, everything's electrification, decarbonization. Then you focus on the number one user of copper in a planet's China. They're 10, you know, the deals at 1.6,8%. And you look at copper versus S&P 500, which is the way I've been looking at and used to trade it for 10 years. It's a complete dog. It trades two times of volatility. It's been lagging. It's performance sucks. And by the way, hedge funds are about 25% open interest long. That's us, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a cell stops just waiting for, waiting for to get, to get triggered. And that's why I look at where's that trade. Do you want to join that bull market or do you want to wait until it get flushed and maybe buy it, buy it?

Now, obviously, it's been good to wait for Bitcoin to get flush and buy it. That's worked out for a lot of long-term people, but I think that's more of an enduring bear market. Copper hasn't confirmed it's nothing but a bull market yet. It's just so streamed, it's so expensive. But the key theme is all the fundamental stuff that you can get a normal thing. We're already past that end of the commodity strategy. It's smooth past, look on the forward. Like manage money, net positions, and see me also, it's completely distorted by one human being, Mr. Trump.

All right, well, we're towards the end here. Alex, I want to give you final words, if you have any for us. I mean, I think Mike is spot on. He's got, he's, you know, got a lot of experience watching these lines on the screens. And I've got my Bloomberg terminal here as well, and I read Mike's stuff. So, I've been have for a long time. I think just on Bitcoin specifically, that small asset that Mike's not focused on, even though he's been writing about it for like nine years or eight years now. I think you were the first mainstream analyst in traditional finance, really, to cover Bitcoin, Mike. So I always appreciate your thoughts. I just go back historically. Like, I think Mike will be proven right or wrong here over the next couple weeks on Bitcoin.

If it's not the, if we don't retake this 50 week and sort of establish higher, then it's very likely to revert down into the 60s and test those again. I mean, that's how Bitcoin has always traded. So, you know, I think still, though, there is a renewed optimism. I think, you know, from the narrative standpoint, you look at something like the cold card vulnerability and exploit. It's different, but it's kind of same, same, but different to like an FTX bottom, right? You've got sort of all the things. You've got, you know, total oversold, no real seller left in the 60s. You've got a short squeeze that moves you higher up towards the 50 week moving average.

You've got a catastrophic exploit that demoralizes the community. All of these are just very common. bare market bottom signals. I don't think we're going to retest 58 and actually make a lower bottom personally, but can we revert all the way back? We're basically definitively in this 200 week to 50 week moving average range now. And I think you'd see the 200 week, you know, be support and the 50 week is going to be, you know, it's going to be hard to break on the upside. So until something happens, I think it's totally, it's totally reasonable. to sell Bitcoin here and hope to buy it in the 60s again and trade that range if you're

trading it. I think at this point, most of the long-term believers have just been adding their position in the historically low volatility. I mean, implied vol in the options market was basically at an all-time low and realized vol was not far behind it. So, you know, I think who was left to short and sell? I mean, you know, people did do income generation, created a lot of short gamma that probably amplified the move along with the short liquidations. But, yeah, until we get above the 50 week, I don't consider it really a true new market regime from a technical standpoint. So it could always trade lower.

Yeah, I think we stepped up ranges. You know, I think we stepped up ranges, well, you know, like which is a step in the right direction. And I think we need a lot more to be convinced. So I think, yeah. I'm not going to comment on top or I'm going to leave that to Mike. Yeah, once again, you know, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, know nothing about copper.

Is that that brown metal? I got to act like I know something about something. Well, I appreciate all of you guys. Alex, thank you so much for joining the circus today. We always appreciate having a new guest to step into the fray. It was great to have you. And we'll definitely do this again soon. Dave, Mike, thank you as always.

And, you know, once again, we just get to do it next Monday and see where the price is at. So, you know, we put it out there and then we see where it land. So thank you guys for always doing that. See you guys tomorrow. Bye.