Warren Buffett's most repeated argument against gold is that it "doesn't pay you anything."
He's wrong, and the gold market has been proving him wrong since 1989.
Gold has paid interest for decades through the lease market.
Central banks lend their gold to bullion banks, refiners, jewelers, and mining companies. The borrowers pay interest for the privilege.
The rate even had a name. GOFO.
The LBMA published it every day from 1989 until 2015.
So why have you never heard of it?
Because retail never touches it.
Gold leasing is a wholesale market. It runs between central banks and the firms that need physical metal as working inventory.
If you hold gold in an ETF or a coin in your safe, you're missing the yield entirely.
Theo doesn't.
@iggyioppe broke down how it works.
They buy physical gold and keep the legal title to it the whole time.
That gold gets leased out to institutional borrowers.
The lease income more than covers what it costs to store and secure the bullion.
But gold leasing alone has a problem.
It's still a price-exposed position. If gold drops 12% in a month, your lease income gets buried by the loss on the metal.
So @Theo_Network shorts gold futures on CME against every ounce in reserves.
The short cancels the gold price exposure.
The lease yield comes through in dollar terms.
That's how $THUSD pays 5.5% on USD deposits.
Institutions have been running this trade for forty years.
Theo packaged it into a token anyone can hold.
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In 2018, a company tokenized a $30 million Manhattan apartment building.
The pitch sounded great. Fractional ownership, global investors, 24/7 liquidity. Real estate was finally going to trade like a stock.
Three years later, the token had a handful of holders and barely traded.
It wasn't a tech problem. The smart contracts, the custody, the legal wrapper, all of it worked.
Nobody wanted to buy the token.
Putting something onchain doesn't create demand for it. It never has.
@iggyioppe has a railroad analogy for this.
Rails on their own don't do anything. You need a train, fuel, an operator, and cargo somebody wants to ship. Take any of that away and the whole thing is dead weight.
Tokenization works the same way. The blockchain is the railroad and your asset is the cargo. If nobody wanted to trade it before, the rails don't change anything.
So the order has to be right.
Start with assets that already have real liquidity and a track record of being traded. Low-risk first.
The onchain version then inherits demand that's already there, rather than building it from scratch.
Look at what's working.
The most successful tokenized real-world asset is the dollar.
Stablecoins are now a $322 billion market. That's bigger than the FX reserves of 95 countries, settling trillions in transfer volume every year.
The dollar got there because it was already the most liquid asset on earth. Tokenizing it was plugging existing demand into better rails.
Everything else has to earn that demand the hard way.
March was the worst month for gold since 2008.
Down 12% in 30 days. Steepest drop in 17 years.
If you held a gold-backed token, your dollar value dropped with it.
But what about a stablecoin backed by gold and pegged to the dollar?
Gold dumps 12%. Does the thing break?
$THUSD didn't.
Held a dollar the entire month while gold was getting hit.
The trick is the hedge.
For every dollar of thGOLD sitting in reserves, @Theo_Network runs a matching short on CME gold futures. Gold drops, the spot leg loses value, the short prints the same amount on the other side. The two legs cancel.
What you're left with is a position that doesn't care which way gold moves. Net exposure in dollar terms, flat. THUSD stays at a dollar.
Sounds clean on paper.
The mess is in the execution.
Physical gold prices in London through the LBMA auction. Two fixes a day, set by a panel of banks. Futures price continuously on CME in a different time zone, on a different rhythm.
So there's always a basis between what London says gold is worth and what CME says gold is worth. Usually small. Sometimes not. Either way, it moves.
Most firms running this trade wear that slippage and call it a cost of doing business.
Theo doesn't.
They fire the CME hedge at the exact second the London auction prints.
Both legs anchored to the same price discovery window. The basis has nowhere to drift to.
The founders came from Optiver and IMC, two of the most disciplined market making firms in the world.
That discipline is what's holding the peg.
🟩 The biggest winners of the AI era might be humans.
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📅 23rd June
⏰ 2:00 PM UTC / 10:00 PM HKT
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One of the strangest business stories right now is that weight-loss drugs might be giving Victoria’s Secret a huge boost.
As drugs like Ozempic and other GLP-1 treatments become more popular, millions of people are losing a noticeable amount of weight.
And when you suddenly drop 10–20% of your body weight, there's a good chance your old clothes don't fit the same anymore.
That's creating a surprisingly big ripple effect for fashion and apparel brands, with Victoria’s Secret reportedly seeing a major jump in sales as people refresh their wardrobes.
It's kind of funny when you think about it.
A pharmaceutical breakthrough ends up benefiting a lingerie company.
But it makes sense. Physical changes often lead to new shopping habits, whether that's clothes, fitness gear, beauty products, or pretty much anything tied to appearance and confidence.
The trend is still much bigger in the US than in most Asian markets right now.
But if these medications keep getting cheaper and more widely available, the impact probably won't stop at healthcare.
A lot of retail brands are about to discover that weight-loss drugs can be surprisingly good for business too.
Is AI really solving everything?
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📅 16th June
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One of the biggest AI mistakes right now is assuming confidence equals competence.
A Chinese office worker found that out the hard way after asking Doubao for business advice.
The AI pitched what sounded like a great opportunity: build an AI aggregator, scale it through Douyin, and ride the AI wave.
The guy bought in completely.
He reportedly spent around 50,000 yuan (around $10,000) on servers and hundreds of premium AI accounts to get the business running.
There was just one problem.
The whole strategy depended on Douyin... which doesn't allow that kind of setup in the first place.
His accounts got banned almost immediately.
And honestly, this is becoming a bigger issue than most people realize.
AI can sound incredibly convincing, especially when it lays everything out in neat bullet points and business jargon.
But sounding smart and understanding real-world rules are two very different things.
That's why we're seeing cases where AI gives questionable financial advice, bad tax guidance, or suggests things that would never work in practice.
The lesson here is pretty simple:
AI can help you think, and...
It probably shouldn't be the only thing doing the thinking.
New Money Cast is LIVE:
Topics:
- Justin Bieber is in the tech industry
- Dead internet theory
- EVs are taking people’s jobs
- Startup built AI that learn and do your work for you
- Diet water
- This country turned every receipt into a lottery ticket
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🟩 AI needs people more than people think.
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📅 9th June
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