NFL Week 4 is in the books. Lots of action but thankfully somewhat of a breather from the near heart attacks of the past 3 weeks.
The first game of the week, MNF, started us off with PHI at CHI. The line was PHI -3 and -3.5 mostly. I bought through the 3 on my PPH (which lets me do that for too cheap as I've mentioned on here before) and also did a small screwball teaser where I pulled PHI from a heavy -3 to +3.5. I hedged and middled as usual but CHI blew them out. I hate starting the week out with a loss but no big deal.
The Thursday night game went much better. I did another very small screwball teaser and pulled PIT from a heavy -2.5 to +3.5. I middled that with CLE ML, -2.5, and some -3. The game ended perfectly with CLE winning by exactly 3. I didn't get much down on this at all though but of course I'll take it.
On to Sunday. My only teaser legs for the 1:00 slate were BUF -1.5 and NYG +7.5. There were a couple of legs that were close to being teasers but they were the -2.5 -117, +2.5 +105 kind of lines. Right in between 2.5 and 3. I didn't feel the need to force anything so I just rode with BUF and NYG. And both games were so close to landing perfect. With BUF, I mostly hedged with PATS ML but I had a little bit of +7 and +7.5. I basically got myself BUF ML at like -200 with a small middle chance, so all I really needed was BUF to win outright, which we know didn't happen as the PATS won a nail biter by 3.
The NYG game was much more of a bummer. Right when that line opened last week, I jumped on ARZ ML at -106 which was pretty off market at the time. I let that sit and then when the line went all the way to ARZ -2, I jumped on a bunch of NYG +7.5 teasers. With such a low total, I went for the big middle and hedged with everything from ARZ ML to ARZ -7.5. If ARZ won this game by 7 or less, it would have been massive. At the very, very end of the game, ARZ was down by 6 with 1st and goal on fucking GOAL LINE, and somehow turned that into negative 6 points (pick 6 to end it). I live bet NYG ML during the last ARZ drive so I managed to squeak out a little profit from it, but so close to the big middle of the day hitting.
The only afternoon leg that was semi wong-able was SEA -7 to -1.5. I hedged with mostly LAC ML and +3.5, but I did manage to get a little bit of +7 and +7.5. SEA won by exactly 7 so a decent result. The only teaser of the day to have any of my middles hit.
The only other real action I had was PHI +3.5 +105 which, again, Draft Kings left up as an arb to the market for most of the day. They were winning by 10 late in the game but somehow managed to lose by 4. I also had a huge middle on SF winning by exactly 3, which looked in play with a 3-3 score at halftime which ultimately didn't go my way.
A couple other small arbs but nothing note worthy, really. I lost about 5 units on the week but I had a couple big teasers sneak through with ATL +7.5 as the last leg tonight. The line movement has been great for me on this game as ATL has taken a bunch of money and the game is now about a pick em. So I'm able to hedge/middle with everything from NO -1.5 at plus odds, all the way to NO -8.5. So if ATL just covers +7.5, I'll make a few more units than I lost last week. If NO blows them out, I'll be just about break even with last week. But...if I can finally hit one of these big middles this year...if NO can win by 7 or less, I'll come out way ahead. So I'm essentially free rolling on the middle tonight.
A ho-hum kind of week. Got torched on the PPH again so my leash is long as hell there now.
Looking ahead, I don't see anything I feel like I need to jump on right now. I added some ATL +7.5 teasers, paired with IND and CLE. I don't love those legs right now though, that was just to get more down on ATL. We'll see how things develop. So far we're 4 weeks into NFL season and I'm up about 25 units. Pretty good pace but I feel like it could be better. We'll see!
Switching gears, I want to talk about Bitcoin a little bit.
A few months ago I mentioned that I had borrowed some money to invest in Bitcoin with; something that I had never done before. I bought a big chunk when BTC dipped its toes into the $50k range, basically as much as I possibly could. Then I borrowed that money, put on a big weekly DCA buy, and made a few massive limit buy orders all between $50 and $60k. I, like everyone else on the planet it seems, thought that there would for sure be one more leg down for Bitcoin. We all apparently watch Ben Cowen now and thought Bitcoin HAD to hit the 'realized price' at about $55k, and it just didn't. Mid August Bitcoin shot up from $65k to $77k and is now flirting with $90k. It seems like the bear market bottom is, indeed, in.
So I missed it somewhat, got a little too cute which is a bit of a recurring theme for me over the years. I did manage to get in about half the amount I borrowed/planned on investing and the big weekly buy I put on may end up being one of my best investment moves of my life in something like 10-15 years down the line. So, again, it kind of half worked. I doubled my Bitcoin stack this 'bear market', but it never quite feels like enough, does it? I've been sort of wanting BTC to crash one more leg down for like 4 months now, but at this point I'm fine either way. With a couple weeks worth of closes above the 50 week moving average, which is about $80-$83k right now, it feels like we go up from here.
Which brings me to my overall point with Bitcoin and crypto in general, which is that I don't really care to talk about it anymore. Honestly, I just don't give a shit if people I talk to buy it or not. I always think back to the Saylor quote 'everyone will buy Bitcoin at the price they deserve.'
One thing that I will say though is that it is funny to think that this last little drop in price was even called a 'bear market.' It is stunning to think how far BTC has come in a short amount of time. In every other bear market, you would have loads of people saying BTC was going to zero and it was all over for it. You don't hear that anymore. Bitcoin really is here to stay. That's an easy thing to take for granted now but it wasn't so easy back in 2019, and harder still even before that. (I didn't buy BTC until the the covid crash, but I followed it as far back as 2015. And every single bear market/75% drawdown, you would have every Tom Dick and Harry come out of the wood work to dance on its grave and declare that, this time, it really was dead. I didn't see a word of that this cycle. All you hear now is talk about when the price will recover, not if).
The only other thing I really wanted to mention about crypto is that I am all but done with alt-coins. I have my ETH, my Chainlink sidepiece, and tiny amounts of Litecoin and Solana, but I barely bought any more of those during this downturn, and I plan on selling a good chunk of my ETH and SOL when/if the price rebounds. (I never actually wanted ANY Solana. I had to accept it once for settling up purposes at it's all time high, and now I'm stuck with it, waiting for the price to rebound so I can sell it. Been waiting years now though). I just don't believe in the use cases for any alt coin anymore. They don't beat The King longterm and all you fake smart people who called Bitcoin a dead "boomer coin" during the 2020 alt-coin/NFT craze were DEAD fucking wrong.
That's all for me today. I have a longer form post working its way out of me so check back soon. Bye for now!
