Luke

Down the rabbit hole I fell, learning things they’ll never tell #bitcoin

[Joe Carlasare @JoeCarlasare]

https://t.co/zLrNeh88ta

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

The future has two Bitcoins.

One is bearer Bitcoin: cold storage, self-custody, personal sovereignty, exit from the fiat permission layer.

The other is institutional Bitcoin: ETFs, corporate treasuries, bank custody, collateral markets, structured products, lending desks, sovereign reserves, accounting frameworks, insurance wrappers, and capital-market machinery.

The first protects the soul.

The second drives scale.

Saylor is betting that the second layer brings trillions while the first layer keeps the whole thing honest.

That is probably correct.

Bitcoin will not reach full global monetary impact by staying a purist enclave. It reaches maximum force when the world’s existing balance sheets start treating it as superior collateral. Banks do not need to love Bitcoin’s ideology. Governments do not need to become libertarian. Pension funds do not need to understand cypherpunk culture. They only need to realize the asset is liquid, scarce, durable, politically harder to print, and increasingly unavoidable.

That is how Bitcoin eats the system.

Slowly, then through balance sheets.

The deepest signal in Saylor’s post: he is shifting Bitcoin from anti-system asset to open monetary network.

That language is designed to make Bitcoin acceptable to CFOs, boards, banks, regulators, sovereigns, and normal families. He is sanding down the revolutionary edge without abandoning the hard monetary core.

That will anger old-school maximalists.

It will also make Bitcoin much larger.

The forecast is clear: Bitcoin becomes more integrated, more regulated, more collateralized, more institutionally owned, more politically important, and more strategically protected. Self-custody remains the sacred base, but most economic activity around Bitcoin moves through institutions.

Price probably benefits.

Purity suffers.

Systemic importance rises.

State attention intensifies.

Bitcoin began as escape from the financial system.

It becomes world-historical when the financial system is forced to build around it.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

https://t.co/yeG4PgpjEq

[Matt Dines @LeveredUSTs]

Thread tracking the emergent “Hunter Biden x Bitcoin” social media influence operation:

[Santiago Capital @SantiagoAuFund]

doing a livestream with @MarioNawfal in 5 minutes.

You can find it at the link below.

https://t.co/43QAlY5X1h

[Jaymes R. @jaymesrosenthal]

https://t.co/F2ukJdy43B

[Aksel Kibar, CMT @TechCharts]

@EthanLeeEthanMe @forexstophunter @factor_members Clearly the most important 4 books for charting and risk management. Congrats

[Horse @TheFlowHorse]

I can tell you first hand, the amount of work going on behind the scenes is astonishing. This team is not settling for being just another dex.

[Plutus @RunPlutus]

https://t.co/gxmrNMUhpf

[Luke @LukeValue4Life]

@caprioleio Every time is more difficult to take you seriously. Not a fanboy of Saylor but comparing it w Terra is way retarded.

[Jamie Coutts CMT @Jamie1Coutts]

Thank you, @traderbrasil, for the conversation. Always love to speak to another CMT

@CMTAssociation

[The Factor Report @PeterLBrandt]

A harsh reality
Are you out to turn a little into a lot in a hurry?
Look folks, there has been tons of research done on the success rate of retail traders. By exchanges, regulatory agencies, brokerage houses, trading platforms, academic researchers and the like.
The numbers are in and you are a fool to begin with if you think your are an outlier -- although all retail traders think they are outliers (and they usually are on the left side of the bell curve distribution).
Expectations and eagerness to trade for the sake of money are inversely correlated with success. Sorry, but true (of course except for in your dream world).
You want to turn $50k into $5 million in five years? Well, go for it if you that is your dream. But know that professional career traders in zero-sum markets (like futures, day trading anything and crypto) plead with you to trade their asset class. Please, I beg you to trade futures (my asset class).
Fresh meat is always welcomed.
Maybe you are among the 2 in 1,000 that can with a few years of experience achieve back-to-back-to back-100% years. I do not want to do anything to prevent your effort. I wish you well. In 50 years I've witnessed many try.
Or, do you have realistic profit expectations and want to become excellent in some niche of market speculation?
Then you have a chance.
But your chance depends on your ability to protect your capital and avoid big losses.
Here is the reality folks -- the real world where 99% of us live.
Pick your asset class. Now have adequate capital (the amt is disputable but I use the figure of $50k). Next know that no matter what you do it will take three to five years to even pick up the scent of where your excellence might be hiding.
Your challenge will be to develop some scheme or system or approach that is repeatable. Every successful trader has a different method. No exceptions. You cannot copy anyone. There are reasons why I won't go into.
You might have to try a few different approaches to find what methods are suitable to you.
But here is the HUGE challenge you face.
You will have to keep your capital intact (relatively speaking) or have deep pockets to get through the three to five years of the steep learning curve.
You will also need to avoid the fast talkers who want you to believe they have your answers.
Following are appeals I received via email in just the past week from "reputable" trading services (these are verbatim):

-$10,000 into $30,417. 14 out of 20 trades doubled
-that's a 1,004% return in 6 days, turning a $605 bet into $6,684
-1004% on UMAC
- +100% on BBAI in a day
-See how stock flips could have made $92,000 in one year!
-Soured 1,025% in just six months
-convinced this could be this year's next 1,000%

You fall for these lines, you are done for. Another reality is that not everyone is made for crazy success in trading. Most people would be better off living frugally and putting as much money as they can into a 50% SPY, 30% fixed income, 10% energy and 10% precious metals portfolio and let it work over time. Then pursue a day job that excites you.

So, don't be conned by the circus acts that promise you the moon. Trading is hard work. Tedious. Boring often. Stressful.

My standard recommendation to most young people is to get an education in a field that you like and where jobs are available. Like welding. Or supply chain management. Or engineering.

98% of you young folks will thank me for this advice someday.

[The Factor Report @PeterLBrandt]

Taking a profit is often a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" dilemma.
While taking a profit is always better than taking a loss, there are times when taking a profit can create anxiety and outright regret.
Let's say you buy a stock at 50 with a mental target of 100 and maybe the possibility of 150.
Next let's say the stock goes to 100 but you do not take profits.
Next let's say that your trailing stop (if you use these) takes you out of the trade at 80.
Do you then regret not taking profits at 100? Of course you do if you are even part human being.
But what if you would have taken profits at 100 but then the stock kept running? Chances are you would have also regretted the decision to take profits at 100.
You see, taking profits is a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't business.
I hate regret. I decided many decades ago in my 50 year career that regret is something a trader needs to avoid. Living in a cycle of regret is not healthy for trading will sooner or later come back to bite you.
So I made a decision to create rules and stick by them. Rules created process for me so that my emotions were not led around by my last or current trade.
I take profits at targets when I have a light position on. If I take a heavier position I will then take profits at the initial target on a portion of my trade and hold out for a 2X profit on the other portion.
Do I miss the occasional rocket-ship market by taking profits? Of course. There is no perfect trading plan.
There is an alternative way that from time to time I will employ in a trade. That is using a simple moving average on a partial position so that I adopt a trend following approach on some of the risk I take.
In a trade following approach inevitably the top cannot be picked so some money is given back at the trend change or major correction. But again, there is no perfect model.
My recommendation to new traders is to commit yourself to the path of least regret, whatever that might be.

[Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. @hubermanlab]

Episode link here to all formats https://t.co/HlemKl8ifm

[Jaymes R. @jaymesrosenthal]

Next week I’ll be doing a livestream discussing value through the token flow at a basic level

Until then, here’s the main list to add to your Trading View

[Capital Flows @Globalflows]

READ THIS ON HYPERLIQUID

This is my thesis

[Jesús Fernández-Villaverde @JesusFerna7026]

How has the Spanish economy performed over the very long run?

To answer, I use Leandro Prados de la Escosura’s (@LdelaEscosura) data on real GDP per capita from 1277 to 2024. I express Spain’s figure as a ratio to Britain’s, since Britain was the first economy to achieve modern economic growth, from around 1660, and has been the leader, or close to it, ever since.

Spain, within its present borders, was prosperous in the Late Middle Ages, well ahead of Britain, then a peripheral corner of Europe. The Black Death and its aftermath hit Spain harder, and by 1360, the two economies had converged.

That parity held until 1600, when Spain began a long decline, in absolute terms (on the eve of the French Revolution, it was barely above its 1600 level, after a deep slump in between) and in relative terms (Britain pulled steadily away). The standard explanations, the Habsburg wars, and the serial bankruptcies run into one problem. They can account for the poor performance between 1550 and 1650, but not for the stagnation between 1650 and 1789. 140 years of stagnation is far more than wars and debt under the Habsburgs can explain.

The series also shows that Spain did not benefit from its empire. That is a problem for every theory tying colonies to modern growth. At most, one can argue that colonies were a necessary condition for takeoff (I do not believe even that, but leave it for another day). One cannot argue that they were sufficient.

The period from 1789 to 1936 was no kinder. The economy grew a little, and Spain built a modern but unfinished liberal state. Yet it never closed the distance to Britain. It is hard not to read the period from 1789 to 1936 as a national failure and the Civil War as its final consequence.

The recent efforts of some historians to paint those years in brighter colors strike me as unfounded. Spain did not fail at modernization as badly as China, but it did not succeed. A deeply corrupt dynasty, closed and incompetent elites in Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao, and an economic policy built on intervention and protection (by 1920, Spain was the most protectionist economy in the Western world, so much for the friends of protection) together made the country a basket case.

A cruel civil war left Spain at its historical low, with just 31% of the British GDP per capita. The foreign visitors who arrived in the early 1950s found a poor, backward country.

Policy in the first twenty years of the dictatorship was awful. Autarky was not so much imposed by the Allies as chosen. Spain’s rulers, using their quasi-fascist Weltanschauung, believed growth would come from state intervention, closed markets, and unorthodox fiscal and monetary policy.

Then, in 1959, policy changed. Spain adopted a more orthodox fiscal and monetary policy and opened to foreign investment and trade. The results were spectacular. For forty years, Spain grew briskly and became the modern country it is today. By 2001, it had reached 77% of British GDP per head.

But the internal contradictions of two things eventually became binding: the growth model launched in 1959, and the political regime created by the 1978 constitution. By 2024, Spain had slipped back to 74% of British GDP per head. This is worse than it looks. Britain itself has done poorly over the past twenty years, and losing ground to a weak performer is a bad sign.

Spain stands at a crossroads, economic and political. The country’s foundations no longer work, but its political and business elites have failed to understand this fundamental reality. A good grasp of its economic history helps make sense of its present predicament.

[The Factor Report @PeterLBrandt]

Random Ramblings of a Relic
A very long time ago I realized that my optimum trading performance would come from the following structure
1. I would avoid all world news - especially financial news (which I mostly do)
2. No screen time ever
3. I would daily be presented printed futures market charts with the price scale and name of the asset removed
4. I would mark up the charts with lines showing my trade (entry and exit)
5. Others would calculate price levels and sizing within a risk management model
But I live in the real world. Yet I try to remain as agnostic about the charts as possible
I have found that opinions about markets and charts are counter productive

[nicolas, 30 ans @nic_carter]

https://t.co/8eE6t2QmhW

[Jaymes R. @jaymesrosenthal]

There is INFINITE COMPLEXITY behind the S&P500.

So how should you approach it? Start with this Primer (takes 5 minutes max)