| Hi, I'm the author. > He doesn't have an investment strategy, and probably never heard of portfolio re-balancing. This is perhaps a reasonable inference to draw based only on the information in the article, but it is incorrect. Without going into too much detail, the missing context is that I have effective long exposure to certain markets through my ownership of founder stock in a startup that operates in those markets. And while I place a high expectation value on that stock, it's also illiquid and can't be easily hedged. For reasons I didn't go into in the piece, I believed Bitcoin would also serve as a partial hedge for that market exposure, which justified a higher allocation than one might naively expect. (I'll also observe that portfolio rebalancing isn't the right decision in all situations. Startup founders rationally concentrate their net worths into their companies, which is justified by their overwhelming informational advantage.) > He got in lucky and made some good returns. Now he thinks he is a genius because of that, and as a result can predict the next market move. I agree with the first sentence. I would strongly dispute the second. It's precisely because I don't think I can predict what will happen next that I've zeroed my exposure to this entire ecosystem. > He didn't do good market research. For example, most of the volume in USDT is faked by the exchanges. Coinbase, GBTC, and CME each one of these is are probably bigger than USDT in size and volume. Unregulated derivatives are an alternative to USDT for more sophisticated traders and they are also huge. I'm aware of these claims — there are rumors of wash trading by the big unbanked exchanges that I consider quite credible. I didn't include those in the piece because I wasn't able to find confirmatory evidence in the time I'd allocated to research it. I would be extremely interested if you could share any evidence you may have collected about these claims. |
I’ve lately decided I need to be more moderate in my investing to avoid quagmires of conflicted indecision.