Day 536: $1k -> $1m Challenge
Portfolio value: $115,541.80 (+0.19%)
$CARDS position now up 25%. Also bought 50 more shares of $NBIS yesterday.
Stock positions now look as follows:
$NBIS - 250 @ $223.89
$CLSK - 2.5k @ $16.25
$HIVE - 6k @ $4.04
Day 536: $1k -> $1m Challenge
Portfolio value: $115,541.80 (+0.19%)
$CARDS position now up 25%. Also bought 50 more shares of $NBIS yesterday.
Stock positions now look as follows:
$NBIS - 250 @ $223.89
$CLSK - 2.5k @ $16.25
$HIVE - 6k @ $4.04
Day 535: $1k -> $1m Challenge
Portfolio value: $115,315.66 (+6.36%)
After capitalizing on last week's dip all stock positions are now in profit again. Previous highs are the obvious next objectives which would be another ~20-30% gain from here.
My $CARDS position is up ~10%. Also expecting more here. They recently announced on Discord that they are having troubles restocking the gacha machine at a sufficient pace. Growth is not a problem.
Not much to do until we take out previous highs across the board.
Day 535: $1k -> $1m Challenge
Portfolio value: $115,315.66 (+6.36%)
After capitalizing on last week's dip all stock positions are now in profit again. Previous highs are the obvious next objectives which would be another ~20-30% gain from here.
My $CARDS position is up ~10%. Also expecting more here. They recently announced on Discord that they are having troubles restocking the gacha machine at a sufficient pace. Growth is not a problem.
Not much to do until we take out previous highs across the board.
I doubt the barefoot hike. I'm no fan of the Christopher Columbus complex, and I happen to admire elites who develop a country rather than exploit one. So let me explain what is actually going on here.
I did, among others, property across Eastern Europe during my years at Babcock & Brown, and I spent the better part of a decade fighting a court case in Romania against people who tried to defraud my land title. I won. And here is the lesson I paid for: the one thing that separates an investable Eastern Europe from an uninvestable one is European Union membership. It is the guardian of the rule of law in an otherwise wild East, the easiest place in the world to lose your money.
That is the lens through which I read what is happening on Sazan Island.
You see, there was a time when Western elites saw themselves as custodians of institutions, rules and the places they touched. That instinct is fading. What remains too often is the Columbus reflex: arrive by yacht, "discover" land that people already know perfectly well, and treat the rules as obstacles reserved for everyone else. And then have the wisdom to go on camera and brag about it. Jesus. No wonder Albanians are now on the streets in their thousands.
"We were on a friend's boat and stopped for a swim. That's how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated."
What she "found" has been there for millions of years, in the Adriatic, not "the Mediterranean." It has a name. Sazan Island sits where the Adriatic meets the Ionian: a former military base, Italian and then Cold War, including a Soviet submarine base, inside a protected national marine park that has been open to the public since 2017 via boat tour from Vlorë. An island crawling with snakes, including the nose-horned viper, Europe's most venomous. So much for the barefoot hike.
Nothing was discovered, and nothing justifies any entitlement. Quite the contrary.
What actually happened is that Jared Kushner set out to cash in on his father-in-law's temporary power as President of the United States. That status means precisely nothing in Switzerland, with its seven centuries of direct democracy and institutions no outsider can buy. But it means everything to a weak man like Albania's prime minister, Edi Rama, cornered at home, courting Washington, and now under criminal investigation for how his government handed this deal away. Kushner understands that asymmetry perfectly. And he wants to exploit it. Period.
In Albania, he can. Albania is chronically bureaucratic, the long tail of its communist heritage, a home-grown Stalinism so absolute it broke even with Moscow and sealed the country off from the world. That legacy is the same one that ran, and still runs at times, from Sarajevo to Tirana, from Bucharest to Belgrade: decades of one-party rule that hollowed out the courts, the press and property itself, and left a vacuum filled by the personalised, strongman power of a connected few. It is the soil in which corruption flourishes, and Albania's greatest vulnerability.
And on that soil, in one of Europe's poorest countries, the island's protected status was suddenly changed in December 2024, in the weeks between Trump's election victory and his inauguration. Just like that. The public-tender rule was bypassed. "Strategic Investor" status went to a Kushner-linked SPV before the inauguration: no business plan, no feasibility study. Wonderful. Because Ivanka "discovered it". Right? Wrong.
A country vulnerability like that can be met in two ways. A responsible investor sticks to the rules and ties his fortunes to the country's long-term development, because that is what makes returns durable in the first place. And that will take a lot of time and upfront investment, with a highly uncertain reward. That's called risk-taking.
A powerful one, on the other hand, willing to bend the rules, as this deal suggests the Trump family is content to do, sees only something to exploit.
The subsequent damage runs far deeper and longer than a few harmless bungalows built without a proper concession. What is happening here is that Kushner is becoming part of the problem that corrodes Albania's path into the European Union. That is the real issue here. Just like the issue when JD Vance travelled to Europe and openly campaigned for illiberal politicians while lecturing Europeans about democracy. Who do these people think they are? Guardians of democracy?
Consider what the Albanian path actually looks like right now. The Balkans, like much of post-communist Europe, are chronically corrupt. But they are also full of people fighting to turn their countries toward something better, and EU accession is the single most powerful tool they have. It forces the one thing that actually develops a country: predictable rules, secure property, contracts that hold, and the credible belief that the same rules apply to everyone.
That belief is what brought the great wave of investment into Poland. Its absence is why Romania and Bulgaria remained under special monitoring for years after accession. The rule of law that eventually held in that Bucharest courtroom, and saved me, exists because membership forced it into being. Brussels learned the lesson. Today enlargement runs on a "fundamentals first" basis.
Which is exactly where Albania stands.
Last month it became only the second candidate after Montenegro to clear those rule-of-law benchmarks, with the EU's own enlargement commissioner describing SPAK, the very prosecutor now investigating this deal, as the country's "most trusted institution." The concession lands squarely on the chapters that decide membership: the judiciary, justice and public procurement. So this is not a side issue to Albania's European future. It is a direct test of it.
And that is why this does not help. It does the opposite. A single family connected to the presidency of the United States showing that the rules bend on demand corrodes the one asset a poor country cannot afford to lose: the belief, hard-won and easily lost, that the rules are real.
Then those same people have the chutzpah to complain about corruption in Eastern Europe and lecture the world about American exceptionalism. It is all so deeply wrong. And make no mistake, it erodes our democracies too, ever so slightly.
The thousands in the streets of Tirana understand all of this instinctively. They are not protesting a resort. They are defending the only thing that gives their country a future and hope: the rule of law applied equally to all.
And make no mistake about who the brave ones are. They are not on a yacht. They are on the street of Tirana and inside SPAK, because in Albania, stepping on the toes of the powerful is done in the knowledge that the danger is real. Confronting entrenched corruption in the Balkans has cost prosecutors, judges and journalists their their lives. That is the issue here, ladies and gentlemen!
I doubt Ivanka loses any sleep over any of this. Her concern is closing the deal while her father remains in office. And on a timeline that tight, a public tender, one they may well have won fairly, becomes an inconvenience rather than a safeguard.
That is the difference between a custodian of capitalism and democracy like Warren Buffett and the late Charlie Munger and a primitive land-grabber without any moral compass and integrity.
Day 533: $1k -> $1m Challenge
Portfolio value: $108,179.17 (-8.02%)
Big shopping day today. In the morning I bridged to Solana for the first time in forever and bought $CARDS for $10k at ~$0.16. I outlined my thesis in an earlier post today.
Afternoon was for loading up on stocks. Sized up all my positions and added a bunch of shares bringing the totals to:
$CLSK - 2.5k shares
$NBIS - 200 shares
$HIVE - 6k shares
Included the $CARDS position in the TradFi balance for now. The stock PnL is -$2,685 and based on closing data. Might actually be a bit off now. Will update everything in the coming days. All trades posted below as always.
Day 533: $1k -> $1m Challenge
Portfolio value: $108,179.17 (-8.02%)
Big shopping day today. In the morning I bridged to Solana for the first time in forever and bought $CARDS for $10k at ~$0.16. I outlined my thesis in an earlier post today.
Afternoon was for loading up on stocks. Sized up all my positions and added a bunch of shares bringing the totals to:
$CLSK - 2.5k shares
$NBIS - 200 shares
$HIVE - 6k shares
Included the $CARDS position in the TradFi balance for now. The stock PnL is -$2,685 and based on closing data. Might actually be a bit off now. Will update everything in the coming days. All trades posted below as always.
Day 532: $1k -> $1m Challenge
Portfolio value: $117,620.02 (-1.75%)
Went shopping these last 2 days and my AI exposure is now up to ~$76k notional. Will add more if we go lower. Don't mind dipping my toes into some leverage if necessary. Happy with my 3 stock picks for now. Might add option legs at some point as well. Either covered calls or some short puts.
In terms of crypto I have my eyes on $CARDS. An acquaintance told me about this project and it looks really good honestly. Will write about it more if I decide to buy.
Here's the full papifolio breakdown for now:
$CLSK - 1.5k shares
$NBIS - 150 shares
$HIVE - 4k shares
$PIP - ~1.4k tokens
$POINTS - ~680k tokens
Bought some $CARDS here at ~$0.16.
The protocol ranks no. 12 by 30d revenue out of all crypto protocols.
I solves an actual problem by making the TCG market more efficient. Grading systems like PSA make these cards a homogenous product which is great if you want to trade them. @Collector_Crypt removes additional friction by tokenizing these cards and putting them on-chain. No need to ship, import or physically handle these cards in any way.
The gacha is the revenue driver. No better business model than gambling.
Growth story also intact.
Day 532: $1k -> $1m Challenge
Portfolio value: $117,620.02 (-1.75%)
Went shopping these last 2 days and my AI exposure is now up to ~$76k notional. Will add more if we go lower. Don't mind dipping my toes into some leverage if necessary. Happy with my 3 stock picks for now. Might add option legs at some point as well. Either covered calls or some short puts.
In terms of crypto I have my eyes on $CARDS. An acquaintance told me about this project and it looks really good honestly. Will write about it more if I decide to buy.
Here's the full papifolio breakdown for now:
$CLSK - 1.5k shares
$NBIS - 150 shares
$HIVE - 4k shares
$PIP - ~1.4k tokens
$POINTS - ~680k tokens
Day 531: $1k -> $1m Challenge
Portfolio value: $117,620.02 (-1.75%)
Closed the $PURR short already for a tiny profit.
Moved $10k margin to the TradFi Balance and bought 1k shares of $CLSK at $17.67 last night. Leftcurve thesis is simple here: They haven't announced a customer for their HPC business yet and when they do it's gonna pop off.
TradFi longs:
$CLSK 1000@$17.67
$NBIS 150@$223.83
Bid some of these names after hours.
- Aschenbrenner stocks hot right now
- the AI circus is far from over imo
- $BTC down bad here. Any upside lends favorable to prices
- both leftcurve and rightcurve picks
- every announcement about new capacity or signed customer is a catalyst
Great 3 am read last night. What happened to Iran and its Shah is a tragedy.
Dude literally made Iran a top 5 nation and suffered from his own success. Educated his people to a degree that the job market couldn't absorb. Enabled too many young Iranians to study abroad who became westernized Leftists.
~10% of the Iranian population ultimately joined the revolution and plunged their country back into the dark ages.
The same ignorance can be seen today among the people who are so fiercly opposing the very things that created such immense wealth in the western world.
https://t.co/5JCn9mx7GU