Long time no speak again and lots to discuss so lets dive right in.
First off: Sports Betting.
It has been somewhat of a strange (couple of) years of betting for me, personally. Ever since I officially threw in the towel with props, I thought my days of betting were practically over. Props were like a good 75% or so of my total action. However, that really hasn't been the case. My volume is obviously a lot lower than it was when I was doing this full time, but very often in the world of advantage gambling and PPH accounts, when one door closes, another one opens. For me, it has been Wong teasers, off-market/alt lines, and team totals this year. I've always done these but not quite to the extent I am this season. It seems that I am FINALLY getting on the positive side of variance this year and have been doing quite well with Wong's and their hedges. I'm not sure how Wong teasers have 'officially' been doing this year, but I know that from my own sample I'm doing quite good. Lots of close games this year too it seems which is almost always a good thing for me. I've also really fine-tuned my approach where I'm doing a lot of three team Wong's which have slightly better odds than two teamers. (+170 on 3 teamers is better than -110 two teamers by a small amount. At +170, it's like having 3 bets at -255 odds. At -110, you have two bets at -262 odds.) I almost always include three teams that are playing in different time slots, so it's very easy to hedge/middle them. My main PPH guy stopped moving lines after I crushed him in the first few weeks of the season, but I'm still finding plenty of good spots.
I also opened up a Draftkings account for the first time this season. I used to use the brick and mortar kiosks to bet at DK when I was doing props, and ever since I stopped with props I haven't really felt the need to use DK. Their lines are pretty much on-market and heavily juiced and their two-teamer teasers are -120, three teamers +160, and four teamers +260. So that makes them completely unusable for teasers. However, I have found some stuff on there that is worth playing. For one, they offer a SHITLOAD of stuff. The amount of offerings they have for every game really is quite impressive. So there are some little nuggets to be found. They let you buy and sell as many points as you want and their alt-lines are sometimes off enough to be +EV. Plus, they offer a really impressive amount of rewards/promos. All kinds of small little free bets and odds boosters, plus a nice little deposit bonus. They are definitely a rec book and I imagine the freebies will dry up for me soon enough, but I highly recommend Draftkings for any sports bettor. (I mentioned it before, but I also own some DK stock and I think that's a good buy too. Maybe not right now as they've been pumping pretty good the past month or so, but something to keep an eye on at least.)
Actually, on the subject on Draftkings and sports betting in general, I do think that there could be some regulation coming for it down the line. I've started to see things on X a little bit. They're really pushing it with the non-stop commercials and the amount of e-mails and promotions I get are a lot. One ad I saw on TV was supposed to be 'the voice in your head telling you it's parlay time.' I can see in the future something like a guy loses his life savings betting, kills himself or worse, and a lawyer looks into it and sees all the deposits and the direct-to-him promotions, basically non-stop. I'm sure it's something that DK lawyers have thought of, but who knows. I was watching an interview on the Circles Off podcast with a young kid who became a tennis betting pro. He was talking about his start and depositing big sums onto a legal book for the first time, and subsequently losing it. He said he was instantly contacted by someone from the book and offered a big bonus on another big deposit. He said he never once heard from the book about being a possible 'problem gambler' and he was going through big sums at the start. I could totally see some politician glomming onto to some cause like that. It'll probably be a lot of talk and no real action though, so it could be a possible good time to buy DK stock.
Up next: Crypto.
Man oh man, huh. Bitcoin just casually sitting at $92k $93k 99k right now! It really is insane how much BTC has pumped in the last year or so. And I have to say, it is nice to be proven right so utterly convincingly. It is seared in my mind the stuff I heard about BTC when it went sub $20k at the end of 2022. Everyone thought it was dead, people panic sold and everything about it was so negative. From my own friends to the entire crypto-space online, no one called the bottom and it was nothing but doom and gloom. It really was a great lesson to live through. THAT is when you buy, and buy a lot. Looking back at some of my crypto posts around that time, one thing I said that I heard from my favorite you tube crypto guy, Ben Cowen, was that "it always comes back and we're all going to wish we bought more." How accurate was that? I have to say, as happy I am about it, I will always, probably for the rest of my life, regret not absolutely backing up the truck and getting to at least one full bitcoin during the bear market. That really was probably the single best investment opportunity that we'll ever see and I was all over it. Everything pretty much happened as I thought it would but I just didn't quite pounce hard enough. That's another good lesson. Have conviction, goddamnit! It's all so easy in hindsight and my total stocks and crypto ROI is over 100% currently, so I certainly can't complain. But I feel like everything I have right now should have one more zero at the end of it.
Speaking of Bitcoin, even though it feels over-heated right now, it really actually isn't. I don't have the link but google searches for 'bitcoin' aren't spiking at all. Ben Cowen's logarithmic regression model, which I did a post about a while ago, still has BTC somewhat calmly in the bottom half of the regression band. It's approaching the very top green band which has a fair value of $103k. Every single cycle has seen BTC touch the top of the regression band (the red lines if you can see it) before coming back down. Right now, the bottom red band is $218k, and if you push it out into February, it's at $240k. The top band, which it has hit in cycles 2 and 3, is $350k in February. So believe it or not, but 200 and even $300k is in reach this cycle. Isn't that unreal? BTC was at $15k less than two years ago. That is a plus 600% return, right now. It's insane to think where it could be 5 or 10 years from now. Every single person reading this should have at least SOME exposure to it. I've been beating this drum for years now and I won't go into it again, but buying and owning BTC is not nearly as complicated as you might think. The best time to buy BTC was during the bear market, but the second best time is right now.
An interesting part of this cycle is the absolute dominance of Bitcoin compared to alt-coins. Bitcoin is about $20k $30k higher from it's previous all time high and yet Ethereum isn't anywhere close. Same with pretty much every other alt-coin. They all bleed against The King. That will probably change in the coming months, as alt-season typically occurs in the second half of bull markets. But either way, it is quite the statement and a really big feather in the cap of the Bitcoin Maxi's. I heard quite a lot of snickering and shit talking about Bitcoin being 'Boomer Coin' a couple years ago. Lots of Really Smart Guys all thought Bitcoin was too old, too slow and they all found their little shit coin to invest in. Look at Matic right now. It's at less than HALF of its all time high! Same with Chainlink. With alt-coins, you take on more risk and get less than half the reward of Bitcoin. I really do think a big motivator of a lot of these guys is that they just want to be the smartest guy in the room. I don't know how anyone could possibly justify having exposure to crypto yet having very little or no BTC. It's The King, always has been and probably always will be. Why fight it?
Now, having said that, I actually do think that BTC dominance has likely bottomed out. So I have started buying/DCA'ing into ETH and LINK, the only other coins I really dabble in. (I do have small amounts of Litecoin and Matic. Matic I got stuck with and am just waiting to dump whenever the price rebounds this cycle. Litecoin I take tiny nibbles when it crashes and sell tops aggressively. I own less than $1k of it). ETH/BTC is at about .035 which I think will bounce from. We're already seeing some big moves from ETH and LINK the last couple days. Normally I would trade some BTC for ETH but I'm just buying ETH instead. I'm not planning on selling much BTC until things start to feel really over-heated and it doesn't feel anywhere close right now.
It's actually surprising how quiet this cycle feels. Bitcoin is just casually about to cross $100k. Its market cap is $1.9 TRILLION. Banks are falling over themselves to get ETF's going, including possible ETH ETF's. Michael Saylor has become the de-factor BTC spokesman. This is as bullish a feeling as I can remember, yet according to Ben Cowen's "social risk" indicators, it still looks like a bear market! He tracks new subscribers to big crypto youtube channels, new follows to Twitter accounts, including exchanges and analysts, among other things. It's a good sneaky little indicator and follows tops and bottoms pretty closely. And while it is definitely starting to trend up, it's still relatively low. It's at .4 with 1 being the top which it hit during the 2021 peak. Last time it went from .4 to .5, aside from a quick spike during the FTX saga, was late 2020 when it rallied from $10k to $65k.
I have somewhat altered my stance on investing in BTC/crypto this cycle. I've always considered myself more of a trader than an investor and that is how I approached crypto. I made tons of sells, always looking to come back in at a lower price. And that did work out fine, especially starting out, but now I have moved more towards 'investing' in my journey. I'm not looking to sell much of anything anymore, just keep adding. I've also spent a lot less time and energy analyzing charts and trying to predict price moves. Because the bottom line is that the number just goes up. It's swingy and volatile but all you ever have to do is zoom out. Bitcoin was at $10k at the end of 2020, it's the end of 2024 and we're looking straight down the barrel of $100k. I think we'll see a million dollar BTC in our lifetime. So why sell at all? It has more than proven itself and it's done the hard work. We have ETF's, it is discussed on all the mainstream news shows like it's been there all along. We're a couple months out from the halving, we have a new President who is very business friendly and it has officially settled into mainstream consciousness. Bud, get on board!
BTC price: $98k
BTC market cap: $1.93 T
BTC dominance: 58%
Total cryptos on coinmarketcap: 2.4+ Million (when I started this blog I remember it was 8k)
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