The Wolf Of All Streets - Why This Bitcoin Dip Is Actually Bullish | Mike Alfred

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

Bond markets are spiraling again, with U.S. 10-year yields back above 4.8%, UK yields at their highest since 2008, and oil near $95 reigniting inflation and Fed hike fears. Bitcoin is getting crushed alongside risk assets as markets now price roughly a 70% chance of a September rate hike. Meanwhile, major banks are teaming up on a new stablecoin, Hyperliquid Strategies expands its equity facility to $2.5 billion, and China’s collapsing credit impulse adds another warning sign for global liquidity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bitcoin made it almost $82,000 last week, but now it is down around $76,500. But I'm going to tell you why this Bitcoin dip is actually bullish. And more specifically, I'm going to leave that job to my amazing guest today, Mike Alfred, because I have a feeling he also believes that this is a dip worth buying. We're going to dive into that and everything else happening in the news right now. Let's go. Good morning, everybody. And welcome to the show.

it is day 793 of me drinking liqueuroy publicly until they sponsor me. Somebody call them, please. I'm going to go ahead and bring on Mike right now. Good morning, sir. Good morning. How are you? Do you drink liqueurie ever? No, no.

Yeah, you shouldn't. You're an aquapana guy. You don't do flavors. I know this already. Yeah, I mean, you literally memed aquapana into success. If they're not sponsoring you for some reason, I don't know how this even works. I have no chance. So first, the most important question, how does it?

your golf game. Rough. It's the worst. You know, I played for my high school golf team and I just got worse over time to the point where I got so frustrated with it that it was no longer worth my time. Maybe one day.

It's beautiful out there though. That's what matters, right? Yeah, turn the phone off and go out there and hack away. All right. So we got this title, right? Why this Bitcoin dip is actually bullish. We have a kind of endless narratives as to why this dip is happening.

which I find funny because it was the bond market that was the catalyst for us to go up. But now apparently it's the bond market that's the catalyst for us to go down. Ten-year U.S. Treasury yield hits highest level since November 2023. Many pointing out, obviously, that Bessent didn't really manage to manipulate the market for long, right? Rates came down very temporarily on the news that they were going to intervene and went back up. Of course, we have, you know, oil yield curves in England and Japan and every, you know, bond market is apparently bad, across the board plus, you know, more and oil going up. So those are the excuses, apparently, for the Bitcoin drop. Well, Bitcoin's up, though. So Bitcoin's up quite a bit over the last

couple weeks. It was 60K, when as low as 57, 58. It never really violated the February lows. So the four-year cycle Dumers who predicted that Bitcoin would fall all the way into October, it looks like they've already been wrong. And the fact that Bitcoin is 76K right now with yields as high as they are, with oil, with the election cycle and everything that's going on. I would call that a win. I think it's pretty clear now, Scott, that there was no four-year cycle bear market. So we did not get a 85% decline. We got a little over a 50%. So mid-mid-bill market decline rather than a period. I consider it a mid, and I've been, you probably heard me or seen me say this. I've considered this a mid-cycle correction the entire

time all the way back before February even. You know, I have the same track record as everyone else in calling Bitcoin short-term moves, which is to say not great. But my track record and calling directionally the long-term has been pretty good. And what I saw this cycle basically since the liquidity bottom in December of 2022 is an incomplete crypto cycle. I don't even think we had really a crypto cycle at all since 2021. So I think the last five years has basically been in the desert. There have obviously been moments where certain assets have run temporarily, but we haven't seen the sort of all-inclusive crypto rally where risk goes out on the curve and everybody in crypto makes money. And in fact, a big chunk of people have left crypto for good

and moved to AI or move to do something else because there hasn't been much money to make. So I would consider the strength the last two to three weeks to be very, very telling. And the fact that we haven't violated the sort of lows from way back in early February, as a reminder to people that calling Bitcoin a four-year cycle and saying it acts the same way every time is probably incorrect. Well, I always considered, to your point, all of crypto as the same four-year cycle if you considered it, right? Or more specifically, I didn't think we had the four-year cycle this time because the rest of crypto did not act the same as it did in previous cycles. And I thought that violated it. So like it was a, you know, the one data point for the four-year cycle is when we topped, right?

But nothing else rhymed to me. Yeah. Of all the heuristics I use, I'd say outside of the timing of the day we topped it. Look, the timing of the top could be partially because of all the manipulation on Binance, right? You had, you had that was in October. Yeah, October 10th. And you had a bunch of market makers get blown up, a stable coin BD, DPEG. I mean, Binance has always been a hotbed for.

criminal activity. And so for that to happen on that day and for finance to lead, that activity is not surprising. And to some degree, these things are self-fulfilling prophecies. So the broader market may not have wanted to see a top then, and there may not have been a top outside of that very specific activity. But that's crypto for you. It's a brittle, like, you know, small market globally relative to the rest of Tradfi. And so people started to believe this delusion that, like, it had to top on that day. and then it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, even though the broader market is fine. And look, we haven't had a business cycle.

We haven't had a traditional business cycle since 2021. So it makes sense that we haven't seen, you know, a broader risk rally outside of AI, which is a very idiosyncratic investment theme, right? So anything in that AI thematic in the S&P 500 has done well, anything outside of it has largely done nothing. And anything outside of Bitcoin in crypto is largely done nothing. and to some degree suffered during that period.

So I think with the benefit of hindsight, and again, I was saying this for most of the last year, this was a mid-cycle type of environment. It reminds me a lot of COVID where basically the Strait of Formoos is the virus this time. And it caused a compression in Bitcoin where otherwise there wouldn't have been much going on. And just like in 2020, we had a 70% decline from the high in 2019. to 2020, but nobody ever calls that a bare market. So, like, it's totally disingenuous, but people don't talk about that period as a bare market. They're like, oh, that was just COVID. So we're just going to like wave that, hand wave that away. It didn't happen. But no,

mid cycle just before Bitcoin ripped from the 4,000 or 5,000 area where it bought them, right, it actually worked into the high three on March, whatever, 17th, 18, 19, somewhere in that range. And then it popped, or maybe earlier in the month. And then it popped back up. And by 2021, it was in the 60s, right? People forget that that happened very quickly. So I think we're in a similar environment. The challenge just is there may be a consolidation period here because of all the cross currents. And so we may not see significant moves higher in the very near term.

But my suspicion is at 2027, we should be back at all-time highs again. Yeah, my view on this move is that we leveled up ranges. You know, like it's amazing to not be in the 60s. now maybe we trade for a while in the 70s, you know, and pop up into the 80s, and then we slowly climb the wall of worry till we're talking about all-time highs again, you know, a year down the road, as you sort of alluded to. I didn't see us going to 81 or 82 as the catalyst to next week to 100. In fact, when we got there, you see leverage longs piling up.

You see sentiment completely changing, and you know that those people can't immediately win. So Bitcoin's going back to the mid-70s or low-70s or even high 60s. It doesn't matter to me, right? Those are bullish retests if you do care about charts, right? You expect to go back, flush out the new leverage and, you know, get people perish again and then send it. So I think maybe we'll chop now, 70s, 80s for a while. Yeah. And as I said, nobody's nobody is absolutely nobody has been correct about the short-term direction of Bitcoin in the long run, right?

Meaning like you can be right once. You can call 84,000 and it goes to 84,000. wrong about everything else, right? And that's kind of the way Bitcoin works. But we have a game of chicken right now between the central bankers and bond yields. And I think it's early stages for that. I think Bitcoin sniffed out that there's going to be significant intervention. The question is just how significant is that intervention? I don't think Besant is going to back down very easily. I think he's a very proud guy. I think he wants to prove that he has domination over the bond market. I think that's a tough game.

But ultimately, I think the bond market wins in the sense that Trump has to back off on the geopolitical stuff in order to stop the inflation in order to stop the fear around what's happening in the Middle East, et cetera. And then separately, Besant may have to intervene more substantially than the market believes today. I think the combination of those two things could lead to a release of significant compression in the market, triggering the completion over a year or two of a real business. And in that environment, I could see Bitcoin at 300,000. I can see Ethereum at 10,000 or more.

I could see the S&P 500 continue higher, but with leadership outside of AI, et cetera. And I think that would be a very, very good environment for a lot of investors. And Scott, I've been buying, right? So I've been buying the last few days pretty heavily. I've been adding to things that are deeply out of favor. The whole AI data center thematic went out of favor. The real estate sector in the U.S. is way out of favor. with the number of names in that area that I like.

And I'm actually using a little bit of margin because when prices get to where they are now, you probability say you're going to at least get a significant bounce in the coming months, if not the beginning of a much larger rally. So I continue to be constructive. Again, I don't know when we may go down for another week or two, right, on risk assets.

We may have another few weeks to a couple months of compression. But when it releases like in April of last year, if you own the right stuff, you go up so much in those up moves that it doesn't matter how much you retrace in the compression periods. Like you remember last year in March and April, like everyone was worried that the whole world was going to collapse. Right. And then we bottomed off of the low in early April 5th, 6, 7th, time frame 2025. And then a lot of the stuff that I own, small cap equities levered AI, they went up like 10x. So I was down 30% or something at the lows. you know, for the year in 2025 at the absolute lows, but then by the end of the year,

I was up, you know, 200, 300 percent. So again, no prediction specifically about what happens here. I just don't lose a lot of sleep about these compression periods if I believe that we're not in a larger like barricle. And I don't think we are. I think we're actually entering a better environment. Yeah. When you're talking specifically to Bitcoin, even if you believe we're in that environment,

Bitcoin just went up 24% in a week. So, yeah, like, you can, you can. I guess you can like not believe the move. You can say it's a bear market rally. But like if you're being intellectually honest, you have to say the regime changed, right? You can't say you can have your belief that it's going to go back down. But that level of volume, that, you know, size of expansion out of a range, all those things. Like it's meaningful and something changed.

And so the people who are just saying, ah, it's nothing. That's just emotion or like their, you know, bearish bias or something. And that should be with any asset. I mean, that's a massive move. having trouble hearing? You're muted now, so I can't hear you. Once again. I can't unmute you. Can you hear me? Can you hear me now, Scott? The mic wasn't connected there for a second. I don't know. Something glitched. Yeah, I couldn't hear the, I couldn't hear the end of what you said. It's my browser, lost connection with the mic. No problem. I was just saying like, you know, it's an emotional,

bearish bias if you can't at least say, hey, that was a big, meaningful move out of a range that I should be paying attention to. Right. Yeah. So I, you, you, you, you, brought up the AI Data Center theme, obviously, which I think you were very publicly, the loudest voice about when things like Iron were two or three bucks. Right now, you've got the bearishness again, right? Iron, 19 million of EBITA against 30 billion of CAPEX and people saying it's a strong cell and all these things. It's 50% off the highs. I mean, maybe update just your thinking on the space, the Bitcoin miner that we can no longer call Bitcoin Miners space for now. Well, I'm not going to comment specifically on iron or iron earnings, but what I'd say is the business across the sector is good, right?

You listen to any of the earnings reports, like Nebius, for example. Every day. Yeah, I mean, it's the demand far exceeds the supply. That's as far as the I can see. In the short term, there are concerns around data center development in general. and obviously those political concerns are being ceded by foreign governments who want to stop the United States from building computing power. I think Jason Lowry was effectively correct with his book, Software, in the sense that it isn't Bitcoin really directly. It's the computing power that built up around Bitcoin.

Because with the benefit of hindsight, you could see that people building data centers for Bitcoin actually ceded the beginning of this computing power revolution. in the U.S. It's like the fracking industry. It's gone completely parabolic. And a lot of that was developed and was allowed to develop organically because it made power, especially renewables in the middle of the country where there was no people. It made it economical. And now that computing power is being redirected to AI, and AI is sort of the future of warfare. You think about drone swarms. You think about, you know, targeted missiles and missile defense. You think about pretty much everything. It's going to be driven off of computing power. Computing power is going to be a proxy for military strength. And so I think it makes sense

for these governments who first were trying to influence our elections. Now they're trying to influence public thinking around data centers because if they can stop enough data centers from being built, they can actually effectively hamstrick the U.S. from defending our borders long term. So I actually remain very long-term bullish to the extent at which some of this non-concincts. Some of this consensical argumentation coming from the political stuff in the U.S. stops some data centers from being built. It makes the remaining data centers more valuable. But ultimately, I think Americans are too smart to fall for this stuff, especially if it's being seated by like the Chinese or the Russians. You should be smart enough to understand that like data centers are the

future. Large AI data centers are going to proliferate. And that actually makes the U.S. safer in the long run. And if we don't do it, our enemies definitely will. So I'm viewing it more as an imperative and less of just as a business opportunity now. And I'm still long-term bullish, 20, 30-year bullish on the buildout. I'm sure you have a lot more insight on this than me. Obviously, the miners were uniquely well positioned to, no matter how long it took to switch over, right? And just become AI data centers. How long does it take from scratch to build an AI data center that can compete?

I mean, if you're Cipher pretty fast, Cipher just delivered a portion of their Black Pearl Data Center for Amazon like two months early. It's very rare to hear anyone deliver anything on time even in this sector, whether you started in Bitcoin mining or not. It's just construction, large-scale construction where you have thousands of people on site is hard no matter how skilled you are. I think Elon Musk, part of the excitement around SpaceX is Elon Musk has proven that he could do these large engineering projects himself. He operates from first principles.

He's not just a CEO. He's also like a very good engineer, maybe one of the world's best, all-purpose engineers. And so, yeah, it takes a while and it's expensive. And the good news, though, is the financing environment has gotten better. You're able to finance a lot of pieces of the value chain. One of the more interesting parts is the GPU financing, because the GPUs are the majority of the CAPEX for some of these large data centers. And the market that's evolving around the financing of the GPUs is getting more robust.

And you're hearing that repeatedly from some of the biggest players in the cloud space. So yeah, I think it's going to be a good time to be in the space for 20 or 30 years. It'll be a lot like the Internet, though. We've talked about this where there are periods of time where because of macro or external factors, you get drawdowns. And if you're a very short-term in orientation, it may be enough to sort of scare you out of these names. But when you look back 20 years later, it's going to be so obvious that, of course, you just wanted to own Apple, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, et cetera, right?

And I think it'll be very similar here. Like when we look back 10 years or 15 years from now, any of these dips, any of the sort of macro-led dips in the sector will probably be viable with the benefit of hindsight. There's been this notion, Jordi Visser has spoken quite a bit about it. But effectively, the amount of Cappex spend in infrastructure is sort of the new stimulus, right? That trillions of dollars being spent on AI infrastructure and therefore, you know, that's kind of the money printing and stimulus that we need. What do you make of that notion? I mean, I assume you think we're going to keep spending. I don't like, you can characterize something as whatever you want.

It doesn't change the nature of it. It is a large-scale CAP-X project that is sort of inevitable. It's like the next major revolution, industrial revolution, but related to technology, there's a physical component to it now. You're going to have self-driving car networks, swarms of robots, swarms of drones. Everything's going to be powered by centralized brains. like intelligence will become ubiquitous.

You can call it whatever you, whatever you want. It's just the economy allocating resources. It's a free market. We still, contrary to popular opinion, we still have some capitalism left in the United States. The left hasn't been able to take that entirely away yet. So those of us are still able to wield our capital to build stuff, want to build stuff that's going to be useful and profitable in the future.

So to me it's an organic process. It's not stimulus. It's just the economy doing its thing. It's allocating resources. And yes, I do believe it will continue indefinitely. And again, there'll be fits and starts. The fits and starts will be types of things like we're seeing in Texas right now, where for political reasons, there may in the short term be some curtailment in the evolution

of the space where, like, there's some compression, right? There's some guardrails. There's some slowdown, right? There's some friction that you have to work through. But then that period releases and you just continue. you back into growth mode again. And I think that's a 20 or 30 year thing. Like none of the, none of the hypers have blinked. Every single one is increasing their CAPEX budget like every quarter, every year for years now. And I don't see how that stops. I think anybody who thinks they're

smarter than those hypers because they know better what those guys should be doing with their balance sheets or with their cash flow. Like I tell them maybe to study a little bit more. Like they're not dumb. This is an existential battle. Whoever wields the most intelligence, we'll be able to build the most value in society, be able to generate the most profitability, build the most sustainability into their business. And so if you don't do it,

there's a risk that eventually you become sort of obsolete. And nobody wants to be Blockbuster Video. Right? Like, you don't want to be written up as a Harvard business case study because you were on the board of a company that failed to invest in the future, right? So you sat on your hands and just milked your cash flow because that's what your shareholders told you.

They wanted you to do. They wanted you to pay a dividend or whatever. and then other companies end-arounded your entire business and caused you to become obsolete. And this has happened many time in human history, whether it's Blockbuster or Kodak or many other examples, historically where people failed to recognize change. So to me, this is a natural organic process.

It's not stimulus. I mean, it's a cute thing to say, but I don't think it's true. Are you looking broadly at crypto beyond Bitcoin at this point? Are you still, when you're looking at the crypto space, primarily focused on Bitcoin? Obviously, there's been a few runners, and I think that there's a few things that people are starting to look at where they can value it based on the economics and the utility and buybacks and all these, the hyper liquids and the pumps and all of these others. Are you still primarily focused on Bitcoin in that space? I'm focused on things that have become institutional grade.

So if I can access them directly or indirectly via a traditional broker, non-crypto broker, then I'm more interested. Right. So right now, that's basically Bitcoin and Ethereum. Ethereum's actually started to outperform Bitcoin a little bit around the edges, which is good. And then I own, I'm also expressing this view via the Treasury companies. You probably remember I came out in Support of Strive last fall, September, October, November timeframe. Last couple weeks, right? Yeah, it's up 100% or so, like over the last month or so.

And, you know, I was the 10th largest institutional shareholder last quarter, right? So if you looked at the list on like Yahoo Finance, you know, Alpine Fox was 10 on there. And, you know, for a long time, like for most of this year, I was getting a lot of hate. This is a very common theme, by the way, Scott. Like I buy something. I say I'm going to buy it for maybe a year or two. I sometimes DCA for a year, two years, whatever. Everybody hates.

Everybody hates it. And then it goes up and they're like, oh, Mike, like how did you know, you know, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, well, I didn't know. I just, my view is that if you have a clean balance sheet as a Bitcoin Treasury company, and you're smart about your securities issue and says that eventually, when Bitcoin goes higher again, you will get some sort of return over and above the return of Bitcoin. And the return of Bitcoin should be quite good, especially from levels like 60K over time, probably 20 to 40% kegers, which means for something like Strive over 10 years,

you might get a 50 or 80% keger, depending on how well they execute. So, yeah, like Strive is a big part of my positioning, and then BitMind immersion also, which is also recovered nicely off of the lows. It was in the low teens and went all the way up to 25, 26, I think, at the high. I think eventually both of those stocks will make new all-time highs. It may take a while for Bitmine immersion and strive because they've got a long way to go, but I've got a long time to wait, right? I've got young kids, right?

So I'm going to be in this business for a while. I'm not Warren Buffett, right? I'm not in my 90s yet. Yeah, it's interesting because my view now is that, strive sort of took the strategy model and perfected it to some degree, right? They kind of eliminated the, well, that maybe it is not fair. I think that strategy was in a position where they had to try a lot more things. And when they got to the finish line, Strive was able to say, okay, we're going to do what

you did at the end and not have to learn all the hard lessons that you did, right? But so it seems that it's wildly outperformed. SETA obviously has returned to PAR. STRC is still, I haven't looked today, but I'm imagining 96, 97. in that ballpark. So, you know, it seems like that was the savvier play at the moment. And then BitMine, I look, and no matter what, you know, people, whether right or wrong, kind of said it's the, you know, strategy of Ethereum. And Tom Lee was never forced to sell and always continued buying.

Like, there was always a way every single week that Tom Lee seemed to show up, even at the lows when strategy was sort of being forced to re, you know, know, redo their entire balance sheet. So it seemed like good picks. Yeah, so far, right? I'm, I'm up substantially on strive and I'm a little bit down on bid mine because I started to average in too early. And if we go in a bit, the bull market now, it's going to be a rounding area. Yeah, and there will, and there will be, right, because they're not going to, we're running two trillion dollar deficits in the U.S., right? And we're going to need to monetize more debt. We're going to need to issue more debt, we're going to refinance more debt, the fiat system is going to require more stimulus over time in order to operate, period. And so the question is less of,

if there's going to be able to market and just when. And so I've always said this, like to the extent of which you can stay positioned in good assets, you're almost guaranteed to become extremely wealthy. I am wealthy, and I'm going to continue to compound over time. And the key is to not stop that process of compounding. I was talking about this the other day, like the things that cause a cessation and compounding are things like divorce, right? So if you get divorced and you lose 50% of your assets, if you develop a drug addiction, if you over trade, if you pay too much in taxes, and ultimately if you die, right, like dying is one of the quickest ways to stop compounding. Your account may continue to

compound, but you're not there to participate. And so your job as an investor is just a state position. If you use leverage like Leopold in situational awareness, then you're you're stopping that process of compounding, right? Because at some point, you'll be liquidated, and then you're compounding stops. And so your job as an investor is to stay positioned in these quality assets and wait. You remember back in 2023, there was a long period of time where, like, Cipher and some of these other data center stocks look like crap. Like the chartists were like Mike's an idiot, like Mike only buys garbage stocks, like Cipher's $2, whatever. And I said, hold on. Like nothing's really happened yet. Let's wait and see what happens when

they actually start to develop some of the stuff. And Seifer went from 39 cents at the low in 2022 at the end of 2022 to $30 in June. Like June 22nd, I think it was just over $30 for a second, right? And 100 X. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, off the lows. Off the very, very lows, almost 100x. But of course, nobody got the low and nobody got the high because there's no trading at those levels. But I was come, a lot of my buys were concentrated in the $1 to $3 level. And I'm still holding, you know, a relatively large position because I don't think, I mean, if you barely deliver any of your large-scale data centers and you have a bunch of big sites that you're still going to monetize in the coming years, like, that's not an environment I want to sell when I

think we're in a 30-year AI bull market. So anyway, a long way of saying that, like, it really depends on your personal time focus. And mine is two to three years, right, at any given moment. like I'm always looking two to three years forward. And I continue to be extremely bullish on crypto. A lot of people have given up on it, but I think over two to three years you could do quite well. And you tend to do quite well in assets that have recently not done well.

Right. So people, the momentum guys, the technical traders, they want to buy a chart that looks really nice, right? Because it's already run up a lot and it's following all the rules, all the lines that they drew. Guys like me, I don't really care about that. I tend to want to buy the asset for fundamental reasons. And the messier the chart looks to the chart people, the more interested I am. Yeah. If you know the fundamentals are good and the chart looks bad.

And also because I'm not a small ball penny flipper trader. So like if you're on X and you're attacking me for buying a stock that's temporarily in a downtrend and you're trading 5,000 shares at a time, we're not the same. Like when I'm trying to buy 5 billion shares and you're trying to buy 5,000, you could trade in and out in the next five minutes. I can't trade it out in the next five days, right? Because if I trade too much, I'm going to move the stock because my position is too big. Right.

So it's a very, I actually want stocks in downtrends. I want stocks that are negative. I want really interesting companies when they're trading deeply out of favor because that's the environment where people are dumb enough to sell the stock at the lows. And that's where, that's the only way you can get big positions at low cost basis is you need other people to sort of misbehave and behave badly. So just different, right? And so because my timeframe is two to three years and most of the people on X time frame is the next two minutes,

then there's a fundamental clash there happening. And it's more philosophical than anything. Ultimately, everybody can make money. But the people who stay positioned in large size over longer periods of time tend to make a lot more. Yeah. So obviously you've taken a look at the treasury companies. I think there's a story today actually that crypto treasury companies hit, I don't know, 340 billion market cap and they were up 10%, which I just laughed because I'm like,

that's obviously just because the crypto they're holding went up a little bit. Right, but this space is still a disaster. Outside of the few that you've sort of chosen and I guess arguably strategy, there's very few potential winners here. I will say there's one other and this is kind of why I wanted to lead you if you were interested in crypto at all. Hyperliquid strategies expands equity facility to 2.5 billion from one billion. This is the stock per and, you know, this has never

really been on my radar. I've kind of been, I think, wrongfully dismissive maybe of hyperliquid and everything was happened. But I did see that Drucken Miller bought a whole bunch of this before Donald Trump mentioned it at the White House. So I just wonder, you know, when you're valuing things, take you a look at what to gain exposure to, at what point does something a little further down like a hyperliquid start to at least, you know, hit your watch list? I mean, I'm aware I was watching Hyperi and D-FI since it transitioned from

Inovia because I got pitched on it by an investor who was in that in the private round. So I'm aware of Hyperliquid. There are a number of people on X that are very bullish on Hyperliquid. The Treasury companies in that space have not performed that well. Like if you look at HyPD,

the stock is basically still flat-ish for the last six months and down a little bit year to date and really hasn't done anything over the last it's down 50% over the last year at one point just after it converted into a hyper liquid kind of holding vehicle it shot up from like two three bucks to 15 and then now it's back at three um so i look i'm watching those names but i just don't feel like i have any edge because i'm not a tactile like crypto native type of investor like i'm not using hyperliquid uh myself i'm not using uniswap right i'm not trading crypto every day

and so i'm not going to have any edge. and recognizing that. I can smell when there's momentum, right? And I can see when people are building up positions, but that's not really my style of investing. So there might be a time, right? I have gone a little bit outside of Ethereum, right? I briefly owned the Suey G, which was like a suey holding vehicle last year. Again, thinking that the crypto turnaround would happen earlier and it didn't, right? So I was too early on that. I was too early. I own Sharplink gaming. And then I converted a bit mine when I realized it was getting more. mine share. I just wanted to have some

intelligent Ethereum exposure. And I know Tom Lee personally, so I probably should have just owned that from the beginning. But Sharplink looked cheaper, right? As a multiple of the Ethereum, I'm like, okay, as a value investor, I want to have exposure to Ethereum, Sharp link looks cheaper, but I think BitMind is actually the right vehicle

longer term. They're able to attract the mine share and the capital necessary to continue to grow. As you said, they kept buying all the way through the dip. And Strive is the same thing. And Bitcoin Treasury. They've been buying, they're still growing their stack when a lot of other people are completely stalled out or even selling and liquidating, right? And that's how you knew we were near a bottom, by the way, in Bitcoin, because a lot of the weakest Bitcoin Treasury companies

were liquidating right around the lows, including MSTR. And you would think MSTR being the biggest wouldn't have to do that. But in order for the Treasury model to work, the market needs to believe that there's enough liquidity to pay yields on preferred securities. And if you have too many preferred and you have too many obligations, the market needs to see more cash. And if you made the mistake of using cash to try to take out your convertible notes too quickly, the market will punish your preferred. And so in a sense, MSDR triggered that fear period in June on its own. If it hadn't rushed to pay down convertibles and waited for Bitcoin to do what it did, this month, they could have done that now. They could have started to chisel away at the convertibles, and the market would have

look more kindly on it now because Bitcoin is moving back higher. If Bitcoin's falling and sentiment is negative and you take your cash and try to attack the capital structure to remove the securities you don't want on it to make it more like strive, then the market will smell that sort of fear. It was like, why do you so aggressively need to take out notes that aren't due for a couple years? That was the man. Yeah. If he hadn't have done that, he would have never probably sold Bitcoin. SDRC would be at par. Maybe. Yeah. I mean, that they could. I mean, that they could have necessarily seen that happening. I think they viewed it as, you know, like I said, I think Strive, you know, closed out all their debt, had no more converts, said, you know,

Matt Cole was on my show and he said, listen, we've realized that, you know, Seda is the way to go. That's how we're going to buy Bitcoin. We're not going to do all this other stuff. They don't have a stack of five, you know, subpar prefs. And so I think that Saylor thought he was actually, or strategy, thought they were actually doing what those guys we're doing, which is let's close out a bunch of the old stuff, simplify this stack, and they ended up with a much more complicated stack, two U.S.D. reserves, selling Bitcoin, STRC is still subpar. And listen, I think strategy will be fine. But, like, you can't make the argument that they're not diluting strategy shareholders, where they printed 6% of the, you know,

total outstanding of strategy in the last three weeks, something like that. I mean, they're, they're working through the flywheel here. Yeah, I mean, I think the way I, I think the way I, think about it is that MSTARE will probably almost certainly be the largest Bitcoin Treasury company indefinitely, but because they started with a bunch of different securities, some of which are going to be hard to extinguish, their balance sheet is less clean and less easy to understand. And so going back and trying to be strive now is harder versus having started with the clean balance sheet sort of from the beginning and building up from there. And look, I think Strive is a real company with real governance.

Like I think they probably actually listen to their board directors. I think they actually have a robust discussion about strategy. My concern, and I actually genuinely like Michael Saylor a lot, but my concern is that like when you have one billionaire. For the first time, at his house. So I know, yeah. Yeah, I met you though. Yeah. But when when you have one billionaire who's been a billionaire for a long time, like how do you check somebody like that if they have a view?

on something. So if he comes to the boardroom and says, okay, we're going to just go after the converts and you raise your hand and say, well, Mr. Saylor, I'm not so sure we could, we should do that because that might cause STRC to sell off the 70. He's just going to ignore you, right? And so, like, I think having that balance of power in the boardroom is really important in the long run. Now, strive learned from Sailor. So the way I think of it is like the Tour de France mountain stage where you have a peloton, you have a whole bunch of treasury companies, pomp and, And David Bailey fell off the back of the Peloton and Strive and MSR still at the front. At some point, Strive was drafting off of Sailor for too long and they realized, okay, we can actually pull out in front.

And they went to a daily dividend structure, right, which obviously has tightened up the liquidity and the spreads even more. Yeah. Higher daily and a better balance sheet of the issuer. And some people who don't understand this while I go, well, MSJR definitely has a better balance sheet because they could sell all the Bitcoin. and extinguish all the preferreds and all the converts and still have a net balance. I'm like, yeah, that's true. But that means it's very hard to model the Bitcoin per share at the equity level. And it's also hard to just understand the flow of funds and what would happen in a downside scenario, whereas in Strive, it's like super simple, right? You have Bitcoin, you have cash,

you have STRC, right? And you have ASST. There's just four things. In MSDR, there's at least two or three times as many variables at play. and the debt is a real debt. It needs to be paid. And so the cash requirements for people to feel comfortable that STRC is going to get paid or probably higher. So I'm not bearish. I'm actually not bearish on either of those. I think they'll both be fine.

And I do own a small amount of MSTR still. I just think that if Bitcoin goes to 150, and I think it will at some point, right, like either over the next year or longer, then ASST should outperform MSTR because the rate of change and the balance sheet, Bitcoin will will be much more substantial. It's just going to take a lot for MSTR to double their balance sheet. And I think ASST can do it quite easily between here and 150. You mentioned the Peloton, obviously. You said Bailey and Pomp have sort of fallen behind the Peloton.

Nakamoto, I kind of don't know what they're doing. Pomp pivoted to effectively, you know, buying his CFO Sylvia, the AI, you know, financial assistant, and seems to have gone all in on that. I mean, what do you think A happens to non-even-specific to them kind of the laggards in the treasury space and do you think they should be basically pivoting to other things at this point like he is? I don't know.

I mean, the good news I don't have to know because I'm not on their boards and I haven't committed to their models. But, you know, I think scale mattered. It's really hard to issue an STRC or SATA style preferred now. Because if your market cap is low, there's no reason why anyone would buy it here. And so if you can't get your market gap up over a billion, the banks aren't going to do a large scale preferred offering for you. So there's this huge divide.

It's like the K-shaped economy for individuals that's happened in the treasury market where if you didn't make that cut where you didn't get up to Strive or MSTR, you're way behind now. So I don't know what the answer is. There may be other Bitcoin Treasury companies in the future that manage to catch up. But I don't see anyone right now who can compete with Strive. So I personally would do exactly what they're doing. I would try to find other ways to build momentum.

I just don't know how many of those things will work. I think it's very hard to run a startup in a public company. So if you want to run an AI application company, I would go private and try to see if I can actually make the business work and then take it public again. I probably wouldn't try to run it out in the open in public like that because then everyone's going to see all the errors and mistakes and all the stops and starts.

Being a public company is hard. I think it's better to be public once their business is actually working. But look, anybody who wants to take a shot at it, it's a free market. If somebody is willing to give you capital and give you a public structure, then by all means, you know, you only get one life. You should try. Yeah, I had never even taken a look at the per chart, by the way. Hyperliquid strategies is pretty good.

I didn't realize that we actually had treasury companies that have performed well since inception. Yeah, what's the, so what's the price at now? It looks like $1.24 and, you know, down here, talking about $3. So, you know, $4.5x, but most of these things are down 90, 90, 100%. They obviously started a bit later, but pretty good. I mean, considering a December 25 start. I don't own this, by the way, guys.

Like literally the first time I've looked at the chart, it just kind of had brought up that news about hyperliquid strategies increasing their facility. So, I'm saying. I literally was not aware that there were treasury companies in the hyperliquid that were massively up. If you're bullish on hyperliquid, though, you should definitely look at HYPD because it's a very similar type of platform, right? They're just accumulating hyperliquid. So it's worth checking out. So I think we just open.

I do think the data center space has gotten a bit compressed. So, you know, every time I come on your show, I remind people to take a look at the sector way back in 2023, again in 2024, and obviously we're much higher now. But I don't think the sector is like played out. I think there's still quite a ways to go in the coming years. And you're getting a significant discount off of the prices we were at just in June, as I discussed. We were much higher in June, and now we've retraced a lot of that move. And historically, as long as the trend is still alive, historically, that's represented a good opportunity to add or initiate position.

So I'm still bullish through the end of the year, especially at these prices. Like, basically, I like stuff that I know as fundamental quality, and I like it when, for whatever reason, the world is turned against it in the short term. Those are the best situations. That's where I've made a lot of my money. and investing. And so I think we're right back there. Again, these things are cyclical, right? We go from deeply in favor. Everybody loves them at one point, and that's when everybody wants to talk about them, and then deeply out of favor, and nobody wants to talk about them. And my job, as you've seen,

repeatedly, Scott, is to come here and talk about things when they're out of favor, which is hard to do, because it's much more popular to talk about the thing that's working than talk about the thing that's not working. But the question is just, will it work again? Right. And if the fundamentals are there and it has real tailwinds, it almost invariably will. Bitcoin's a good example. example that, like, you can't turn Bitcoin off and they keep printing money every five years or so. If I came on your show, no matter what price Bitcoin is that, it'll probably be higher again. I think AI is going to be similar for the next 20 or 30 years, where, like, if I just wait until everybody hates the sector and come here, like, my hit rate will be 100%.

Because you don't have to predict the news flow or the narrative that's going to cause the prices to expand again. You just have to know when the sentiment is negative enough that the prices reflect value. And I think we're right back there again. Whereas if I'd come on in June, like if I'd come on on June 18th, there was a little fair bit of exuberance in the very short term, and of course we retraced almost 50% on a lot of those names from June till now. And seasonality kicks back in. We've had a slow August and September in this sector for four years. Even though we finished higher every year, August and September were tough, and then October through December in aggregate were pretty good. So if it mirrors these previous

years, then some point over the next, if not right now, over the next few weeks, like if you take a position, you'll probably be up by the end of the year, right? Just statistically, that's what's happened. Yeah, there was, I don't know if you have comment on it, but there was one last thing worth discussing just generally in the news today, which is this pretty massive stable coin story. I don't know if you saw Citigold and other global banks and asset managers team up on stable coin venture. This was announced last year as a kind of pilot an idea with 10 banks. Now it's 21 banks. And they've committed to early 2027 to launch the pilot of their stable coin venture. So there will be basically a Citibank and Goldman Stablecoin coming.

And they said that by the end of next year, we'll have a Eurobacked stable coin from the same platform. This seems like the most hotly competitive space in crypto, if you even view it as crypto anymore. Yeah, but look, it's super bullish on the broader crypto because it shows that the banking system is aware that crypto is better. right? It's like the most stunning admission that we've seen in a while that they're like, look, this is better. Our customers are using it. Our customers are going to want to use it. We can't just sit here and let circle, right? Or tether or a stablecoin payments company end around our entire business. And that's what's happening. Like the neobanking players are able to use stablecoins to offer a service that's better for payments, for remittances. I mean, this is one of the reasons why I got involved in

backed. Backed has all the rails. They've got the money transmitter. licenses. Now we've integrated the stable coin payments component. And BACs focused on new verticals, like verticals where maybe they're not crypto-oriented. They're not firms that would naturally be interested in crypto, but there's some utility of stablecoins that can lower cost in some component of their business, more of like an enterprise grade where there are certain parts of the economy where there's a lot of friction. And stable coins can remove that friction. So I think there's going to be a lot of opportunity for everyone. I think this is actually a positive signal if you're in crypto because it means that the crypto still has a significant

runway to change and affect society. And so I'm like I've expressed that via circle where I was sort of pounding the table on circle when it was like 60 a few weeks ago. And then I went from 60 to 90 really quickly. It's always nice, right, when you when you buy something and it goes up 50% in a month. And then also via backed where I purchased more shares. in the open market. I'm now the third largest outside, institutional outside. I'm obviously an insider personally, but my vehicle,

my affiliate is outside. And so it's like BlackRock, vanguard, and then Alpine Fox in backed. And so I've obviously hadn't backed down on that. I think turnarounds take a long time. People want success tomorrow next week,

whatever, but if you have a little bit of patience in a turnaround and the turnaround works, you can make a lot of money. And so what I do is I don't try to take the position all at one time. I get involved. I make sure the balance sheet is where it needs to be. I make sure I like the strategy. The team is jelling.

And then I start to increase the position. And you've seen me do this relentlessly. I did the same thing back in 2023 when I was buying Cipher and Iron. I bought them repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, a month after month after month. With Strive, same thing. I started buying it. And I bought it repeatedly for six to nine months. and now with back, same thing.

I got involved. We fixed a lot of stuff, and then I started buying it repeatedly in the open market. And people, the whole time on all of these things, you get criticism from the chart squigglers and the kid analyst, but they're not really playing the same game.

I'm trying to buy stuff that I can hold for five or ten years, and they're trying to buy stuff that's going up next week. And again, not that interesting to me. But I'm bullish on stable coins. Scott, I'm bullish on crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum, stable coins, everything. I'm still bullish on AI and I'm bullish on residential real estate in the

US and residential real estate platforms in the US. I think like real estate has a long term runway, but right now it's highly compressed by interest rates and prices. But I think over five or 10 years, especially like look at Warren Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway, they're buying home builders. You know, like you want to buy this stuff when it's out of favor so that when it's back in favor again, you got to buy it at low prices. It's not rocket science. It's harder to do, though. Very hard. Because it means you have to do the thing that's unpopular in the moment. And I'm fine being unpopular. Like, it doesn't bother me. That's why I started that subscriber group, because on the public internet, you'd think everybody hates me. But in the

subscriber group, I get hundreds of DMs from people saying how much money they've made. Right. So it's like a different signal to noise ratio when someone pays $219 a month. Magically, all of a sudden, you get a different quality of feedback. Because it turns up people who actually can afford 219 a month have generally been more successful investors than people who just lob tomatoes from the public internet. So it's been a wild experience becoming a more significant content creator over the last month. Well, I mean, I don't remember now the exact, you know because you have a photographic memory, but the exact price of iron when you first came on this show and screaming about it. Two bucks, 180? Or was it like 380? I can't

remember if it was up four. I think it was in the two two dollar two 80 range somewhere between two 80 and three. It was when I remember talking about it first. Yeah. So I mean happened. Yeah. Scoreboard. Yeah. But so like yeah and I've seen it constantly in the comments how many people including myself and my friends bought it. You know when would you kind of convinced us. So you know, wins a win. Well, it's never financial advice, Scott. I talk about the things that I do, but nothing I say is financial advice. Unfortunately, a lot of people are going to trail you and copy trade you no matter what you say. So again, that's part of why I created the subscriber group to have a more intimate conversation with people that have proven that they're successful.

It turns out there's like a lot more value created on both ends. Like I'm enjoying using X again and the people who really value what I have to say get like direct access to me, right, in a way that I can't do with 345,000 people. And I'm hosting my first dinner in New York coming up for the subscribers. And we had 80 requests for 24 seats. And it's, you know, I'm bringing the wine, right? Like we're going to do steak in Midtown Manhattan. And so I'm trying to like make myself more accessible to folks because I enjoy it.

It's fun. Like we had a poker tournament this weekend. We raised $43,000 for charity. And like seven or eight guys flew in from around the country just to drink expensive wine with me and play poker. And it's totally different vibe than on the internet where, Scott, you know this, like, you'd think half the internet hates you at all times. Because there's so many angry basement dwellers that, you know, are heroes from behind a screen ready to attack you for any reason or no reason at all. But in real life, those people don't exist.

Like, they do exist, but they just don't leave their house. So you're never going to see them. The people who actually show up in person are always wonderful people. And so this whole thing of like interacting more with a group of people. that follow me on the internet, like in a more intimate way, has been really valuable for me. You as well, right. Yeah, that's the main reason why I did it for sustainability. I don't even really care about the money.

I plan on taking a big chunk of the earnings and reinvesting it in these dinners, right? Like the wine and the steak and everything, among other things. And it's reinvigorated my desire to interact with people. So I'm enjoying using X again. Awesome, man. Well, I know we kept you for long enough. probably have a golf round to play right now golf course golf course is closed for reseeding so i'll just be running and and working all right well yeah i guess you got to work sometimes my

man it's always a pleasure to have you on uh deeply appreciate you i know that everybody here loves listening to you and a lot of them made a lot of money uh on you coming on the show maybe that's the most important part so thank you man i hope to see you scott and talk to you later