"One lesson, please!"

There is no better teacher in the world than experience. You can tell a kid hundreds of times for years "don't touch the hot stove", but all those warnings and all those years pale in comparison to the millisecond of him actually doing it, searing his hand and searing the lesson in his mind forever. He won't touch another bright red oven burner for the rest of his life. And you can hear "not your keys, not your coins" until the cows come home, but nothing drives home the point more than waking up and finding out that your funds are "frozen" on an exchange.

I am, of course, talking about the FTX collapse and subsequent fall out. I didn't have anything on FTX, but I had a nice chunk on BlockFi. "Had" being the operative word there. Embarrassingly, I didn't even realize BlockFi was tied into FTX until it was too late. BlockFi "paused" withdrawals literally a couple hours after I made my last blog post and only told people with one email late Friday night. Waking up that Saturday was like a fever dream. 

Luckily I didn't have everything on BlockFi. Not even half of everything. I guess I intuitively knew not to put all my eggs into one basket, but I certainly had a good chunk on there and now it's all gone. Just an unmitigated disaster of epic proportions. 

(One side note and possible saving grace: based on their court appearance and from what they've said recently, I think there's at least somewhat of a chance that BlockFi customers will get back the crypto that was in their Wallets as opposed to what was in the Interest bearing accounts. If you don't know, BlockFi sort of advertised themselves as a crypto savings account and offered 7+% interest on crypto and stablecoins. Then they were taken to court in New Jersey and the ruling was that they could no longer offer interest bearing accounts in the U.S., but anyone who had one could keep theirs and keep earning but couldn't deposit anymore into it. So I, like many others I assume, just figured I'd keep my interest account going there forever and anything else I bought on there just went into my Wallet. So if I do end up getting the Wallet balance back I would consider that a MAJOR win. But I'm absolutely not counting on it).

First off, this will 100% never happen to me again. I bought my own cold wallet and transferred everything I had on other exchanges onto it. New Rule number 1: NO CRYPTO ON EXCHANGES, EVER. Anything I buy now I move to my cold wallet immediately, save for a couple hundred in each crypto to sell/trade. Absolutely no exchange is safe, period. They never were. And while this is unquestionably horrible and embarrassing beyond belief, it doesn't make me "mad" at bitcoin whatsoever. If anything it strengthens the case for (self-custodial) BTC. This kind of thing can happen anytime and on any exchange, and not just to crypto. Wealth has been confiscated by the State in every country since the dawn of wealth. Even in America less than 100 years ago, the government made it illegal to own gold under the penalty of jail time. So if you own crypto, you simply MUST purchase a cold wallet. They're not as hard to set up and use as you might think. {Pro tip: I recommend the Nano Ledger type S that DOESN'T have bluetooth. And when you buy one, buy it directly from Ledger, not on Amazon or any other third party site. There are thousands of youtube videos showing how to set it up and use it. I recommend "the crypto dad" on youtube for his Ledger unboxing/walkthrough video.}

And while this doesn't deter me or my outlook on crypto in the future, I can't lie and pretend this isn't embarrassing and borderline devastating. I mean, I fully knew and understood the "not your keys" mantra and why keeping BTC on an exchange literally nearly defeats the entire purpose of crypto. It's not like I'm some guys uncle who just plopped down 5k on an exchange and left it there. I am fully in this space and fully cognizant of the risks. And I still got burned. I just truly could not envision a scenario where BlockFi would simply default on 100% of its customer funds overnight. Like, what?? But here we are.

The second worst thing about all this is that the warning signs were there. I still remember the day I got the email from them offering 7.5% on stablecoins. It didn't seem right to me and I should have pulled out that day. Even worse, BlockFi actually paused withdrawals a few months ago! That was why they were even in bed with FTX in the first place. FTX bailed them out (or not, apparently). The fact that I didn't get out after that happened is kind of mind blowing, even to me. And while BlockFi and FTX are absolute criminal scumbags who I sincerely hope rot in prison (yea like that'll happen), the cold, hard truth is that I deserved this. I can't plead ignorance and the warning signs were all there. It's been tough to really sort of digest this and admit it, but it is the truth. The world is a big place filled with all kinds of people, and it's on you to protect yourself. No one else is going to do it for you, even the people who are paid to. And it's not enough to just "know" this, you have to live by it too. 

Now, THE worst thing about all of this is where my money actually went. If they gambled recklessly with customer funds and the money was just lost, that's one thing. It's a horrible and illegal thing, of course, but it's a lot less horrible than where the money actually went in this case. MY money, like my own literal money that I earned, went to some of the absolute worst, scummy cretins on this planet and towards some of the worst causes imaginable. Top Democrat politicians and mega donors. Corrupt regulators and Bankers. Money printers. Fucking "UKRAINE". It'll probably go towards anti-crypto regulation. Picturing my money being spent on some corrupt Ukrainian arms dealers' hotel stay for the week, or in the pockets of Maxine Waters or Katie Hobbs. Like, some of the worst people who exist with power, all working towards some of the worst policies this country has ever seen. Things I'm diametrically opposed to and which got me into crypto in the first place. They have some of my money and are using it to advance some of the most damaging ideas we've ever seen. It's so absurd it's practically vulgar. It's so ironic that it's borderline funny to be honest. 

It really does make me sad though, not just for myself personally, but for bitcoin in general. This kind of stuff, the money printing, the buying of elections, the corruption, the bail outs, the ongoing war in Europe that we're sponsoring for some reason. It's all the kind of stuff that helped create the hard and sound money rules of BTC, with its capped supply and heavy duty security. And BILLIONS of dollars in crypto just got stolen to fund all of it. This is indeed a very dark time for the crypto space. Something we'll probably remember forever.

A couple more things on FTX before we move on. The details about this SBF guy and his whole operation are astounding. And I don't mean that lightly. I mean literally read about this whole thing and you will be astounded. He bragged about playing video games while being on huge business calls moving millions of dollars. His little weirdo girlfriend who he put in charge of their trading arm DIDN'T KNOW WHAT A STOP LOSS WAS. She bragged publicly about doing amphetamines. There was a group of about a dozen or so of them and they all lived together and were openly fucking each other in their little "polycule" or whatever the fuck they called it in the Bahamas. FTX didn't have a compliance board! Oh and ready for this? Their chief regulatory officer, Dan Friedberg (sorry but of course that's his last name) was one of the major players in the Ultimate Bet 20 million dollar scandal! You couldn't make that up if you tried. Was ANYONE looking at these guys, at all? (If you don't know, Ultimate Bet was an online poker site back in the day that very famously stole customer funds. One of the owners of the site and some of his minions hacked into the site and were playing while being able to see their opponents cards. They made off with at least 20 million. At least they were all caught though, and had to pay it back plus went to jail. Just kidding! They didn't even GET CHARGED never mind make restitution, and this Friedberg guy wasn't even disbarred from being a lawyer. It's almost enough to make you want to do something drastic, isn't it?)

Before I really lose my mind, one silver lining here is that this could have happened 5 years from now and it would have been much, much worse. Clearly this was going to happen at some point and imagine if this all went down years down the line when these exchanges built up even more trust and people had even more money on them. Imagine if bitcoin was worth 80k. If it had to happen, which it did, it's better that it happened now during a bear market. It's painful but I can rebuild from here.

So what can we learn from this? Besides the obvious "not your keys, not your coins", I think one lesson is that as a society and as investors, we need to stop giving these little weirdo "wunderkind" children so much respect. New isn't always better. Not being able to look people in the eyes is not an admirable trait. Wearing pajamas and playing league of legends in business meetings does not make one a genius. In the age of billion dollar IPO's and the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, I think it's clear that everyone got a little too loose. Well, not a little too loose, actually. This is 'sleeve of wizard' loose. It's a bad look for not only the crypto industry, but just our society in general. We're easily bamboozled. And this guy SBF's veneer of "effective altruism" was like the icing on the cake. "How can he be bad, his hair is weird and he's committed to giving other people's money to Democrats!" Beware the addy-d out wolf in sheep's pajamas, I suppose.

I'm a little all over the place here and I'll probably have more to say about this as it all unfolds. If you're out there and you got burned like me, don't let it chase you from the space. That's whey they want. I know in my little circle, people are capitulating. People are just done with it all and I can't say I blame them. But this is the worst time to give in. Like the saying goes, 'be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.' If you have your principles, stick with them. Don't let SBF and his little alien looking fuck buddy win. Take a break if you need to, sure, but don't give up. Bitcoin is the future. The road will be rocky and there will be more set backs, but stick with it.

Personally, I am taking a little breather. I've probably been a little bit too into it all, making too many trades, buying every single dip. I sold off a chunk of my ETH as I think the btc/eth valuation is going to come way down. My plan from here on out is to just keep slowly buying BTC, keep it in my wallet, and when the btc/eth valuation comes back to earth, buy up more ETH with BTC. I'll update my new positions next post. I have the BlockFi mess just labeled as a huge sell with a nice fat zero for dollars received. So now I'm way upside down with all my buys being higher than my sells. My poor sheet is hard to look at now. My avg BTC price went from 22k to something like 40k now and ETH is even worse. But like I said, I'm not going anywhere, and maybe someday we'll all laugh about that time that little weirdo who almost brought it all down.

Check back soon, see ya!

EMERGENCY PRESS CONFERENCE!

Well all hell broke loose pretty much as soon as I pressed 'send' on my last post. I had that post done Monday night but I was planning on adding a little bit to the end on Tuesday morning. Then the market just fell off a cliff so I put it out there before I'd have to delete the whole thing. The theme of my last post and the big question on everyone's mind right now is 'is the bottom in?' Was 19k the bottom and we go sideways then up from here? And the answer to that question was a resounding NO. Bitcoin dropped from 21k all the way down to about 15.5k is just three days. It has since rebounded a little bit and is now hovering around 17k. So my sells all look pretty good and I was able to get back in at 17 and 18k. I didn't quite hit the exact bottom but close. Matic actually dropped all the way to exactly .83, my exact target buy, and then shot back up to a dollar and change. But I freaking missed it. It played out almost exactly as I predicted but I was buying the bitcoin and LINK dip so hard, I didn't have any powder at the moment to scoop up anymore Matic. Very, very mad at myself. I'm very slowly trying to have a little bit more trust and confidence in my convictions but this was just a flat out miss. I think now is an absolute terrific time to at least start buying bitcoin, but to be fair I thought that at 30k too so who knows.

I did say two posts ago that I expected one more leg down for BTC. Was this it? To be honest, I don't think so. I think there's still some room to go but I think we're close. All the metrics I've seen suggest we usually drop about 83% in ROI from the latest peak and I think we're at right about 80%. I think 14k might be the bottom but I wouldn't be shocked if it went as low as 10k. If it goes under 8k I'll still be buying but that would be quite uncomfortable.

I think ethereum is going to crash even harder. It's been way north if its regression band for a while (Ben Cowen on youtube) and I think we're going to see some really cheap prices on ETH in the next 6 months or so. I'll for sure be looking to scoop up lots of it if it goes to something like $500, which wouldn't shock me.

A big driver of this latest dump has been the FTX disaster. If you haven't heard, FTX is an exchange with a native token that just went bankrupt. There's lots of wordy, confusing reasons and explanations and excuses you can read about if you want, but the bottom line is that yet another DEFI exchange/token went broke. And this isn't poopypeecoin either. Tom Brady and Steph Curry had FTX endorsement deals. It was all over the Super Bowl last year. It's really not a good look at all for the crypto space, de-fi in particular. Like I said before, the more I see, the more of a BTC-maxi I become. Live by this mantra: "Never marry an alt-coin".

I got my average BTC price down to 22.1k. So obviously I'm still under water but not too bad. I'm steadily marching towards owning a full one, too. My ETH price is still 1309. I didn't go as crazy buying ETH because like I said, I think it's coming down further. 

I did a real good job waiting it out with Chainlink. I started selling its latest pump at 7.3 and was selling all the way to 9 where it topped out. It hovered in the 8s for a while and I started seeing some bullish LINK things around the internet, which I haven't in a long time. I got a little nervous it was going to keep running but I was patient and scooped it back up in the mid 6's during the this latest crash. My average LINK price is now 10.6.

I got back in on Litecoin and a tiny bit on Matic but small amounts so not much news there. My average prices are 32.6 and .2 on LTC and Matic respectively, but with tiny amounts. I'm mad I missed the dump on Matic, but I think it'll come down like I do with ETH. If you look at the MATIC/BTC pair, it looks way over valued. I like the idea of sticking with mostly BTC here and if/when the Ethereums and Matics of the world come down, I can buy them with BTC.

In other news, the midterm elections came and kind of went (they're still counting. Guess where?) and unless the ones still counting all break for the right, which is highly unlikely, it'll be disappointing for republicans. Everyone on the planet saw a red wave coming and we barely got a trickle. Although even with it going not as good as it was "supposed" to for the right, it looks like republicans will take the House and the Senate is very much up for grabs. 538 has the right winning the House 84% of the time and the Senate 59%.

First off, as bad of a night for the right as this was, and it was bad, it certainly was not a "good" showing for the left. The party in power is supposed to win midterm elections. It seems so bad for the right because people were really expecting a blowout. The same states that did it in 2020 are taking forever to count their votes, again. This really, really needs to stop. Even if everything is perfectly on the up and up, which it isn't, but either way, it's a terrible look. Right or wrong, a lot of people are very concerned about security and integrity in our elections right now, and having the SAME counties have the SAME long, ridiculous delays is not going to restore anyone's faith. 

I think the right needs to really think about its abortion stance. Regardless of what I think, I know that  that's a big issue that people on the left just can't get behind. I've always felt that the GOP has such a perfect opportunity to use it as a bargaining chip on just about anything else. Voter ID, gun laws, taxes, anything. Budge a tiny bit on abortion and get rid of absentee/mail in voting. Boom.

Another problem on the right is WTF is with some of these candidates?? Hershel Walker?? DOCTOR OZ?! We can laugh at all of the absurdity from the left, and there is plenty, but Doctor OZ?? We've got to do better than that.

Of course, this all leads back to the one, big, massive problem the right has, lurking in the shadows. We've seen rumblings lately. It's the Trump/Desantis fight. Anyone who wanted to move on from Trump faced a lingering issue; who can replace him? Who on the right could even come close? Ted Cruz? Wrecked. Rubio? Bent the knee. Mitt Romney? Bent the knee like no one has ever bent a knee before. There really hasn't been anyone on the right that could compete with the raw ID of Trump. But now there might be. Desantis seems like the real deal and he just absolutely mowed down his opponent in Florida, flipping lots of typically blue counties in the process. (This happened early Tuesday night and people were REALLY sensing a red wave coming which only added to the disappointment). I don't think any reasonable person can argue with how he handled the pandemic. To me, he seems like Trump minus the bafoon-ery, which is exactly what I've wanted for the right since Trump came to power.

On paper, I think Trump was a good, borderline great president. I like his policies. But you don't run a country on paper and even the biggest MAGA guy has to admit, some of the Trump stuff is just flat out  embarrassing. He's an insecure guy with a massive ego. I've always thought of him as more of a murder weapon. He was the perfect guy for the moment. He called out the media and the useless in the GOP. But he's not a long term solution. He's too fragile of a guy. He needs too much. Either way, the next two years will be quite interesting to watch the top of the GOP ticket.

As if there wasn't enough going on this week, we had a CPI report yesterday (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf) that came in quite a bit better than expected. Actually, I should say, not as pants-shittingly bad as most expected. The stock market got a nice bump from it and has carried over into today. Fun fact; over the history of the S&P, the biggest pumps have come in bear markets. Everything is still way down from their recent peaks, but we're starting to see maybe some recovery? Is the bottom in for stocks? Again, who knows. I really don't think so. I think we're going to be looking at about a year of more pain and then sideways then up in 2024. Depends a lot on what the Fed does. The next BTC halving will come in 2024 which is something to keep in mind. I think we'll be looking back in two years saying "I cannot believe I could have got BTC at 16k or Tesla under $200", etc. But again, who knows.

Just remember, be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy. "Buy when there's blood in the streets." Right now people are afraid of their shadows. The market can always go lower, so if you sit around and wait you can miss the whole thing. This isn't advice, I'm still very much a noob, but I don't think anyone will regret starting out slow with crypto or stocks right now.

That's it, expect another post soon. Bye!

Crypto Update

One thing that has amused me in the crypto world is all the hoopla about "The CME Gap" or "The Gap". If you follow crypto social medias you've definitely heard some version of this. There's even a group calling themselves the "gap boys" (lol...honestly, how embarrassing is crypto sometimes). What CME refers to is the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. On the CME, you can bet on the price of bitcoin without having to actually buy any bitcoin. It's for people who want to get in on it but are afraid of the technical or legal aspects, I would imagine. Now, the CME operates like any other American exchange and is closed on the weekends. But of course, crypto is 24/7. So whenever bitcoin makes a big move over the weekend, the price on the CME opens Monday higher or lower than where it closed on Friday. This creates a "gap", or, (ready?), a "CME gap". Up until somewhat recently, these "gaps" have always been filled. I think there's still one open at 9400ish and the gap boys will lead you to believe that the bottom isn't in until we "close the gap" or hit 9400.

This is, of course, nonsense. A gap on some random exchange that appears due to a technicality in its operating hours doesn't have predictive ability. I mean really, there's not much more to it than that. The "gaps" have been filled before because bitcoin is insanely volatile and moves around a bunch.

The only reason I'm mentioning this, I suppose, besides the fact that it's kind of funny, is that I feel like I see and hear about it a lot, and it really is a ridiculous notion. There is no predictave power in it! Just because it happened before doesn't mean it has to happen again, or is even likely to happen again. And I guess it's one of those weird kind of trend things that people are always, always looking for. I saw it in sports betting all time too. ("They're 6-0 against the spread coming off a home loss facing a non-divisional opponent with a winning record"). And I don't know what exactly it is about it that appeals to people but it's interesting.

It's largely been pain across all the markets for the past year now. It's close to exactly a year since bitcoin topped out at around 69k. I've been in buy-mode for a while now, but I just recently sold a little bit of everything in this latest little bear market pump. I think there's still much pain ahead and I'm looking to buy back in and average down. My avg BTC price now is 23,270, Ether is 1308, and Link is 14.4 (looking back on my posts I'm slowly getting these numbers down which is good). Litecoin and Matic I'm actually free loading on now as I took more profits than I ever spent. But I own tiny pieces of those two now. LTC, Matic and Link really pumped the past week or so, so I took some profits and I'll be looking to get back in pretty much as soon as possible (as soon as the price goes below my worst most recent buy, I'll start buying back in). I've been using some of the money from the alt coins to buy more bitcoin. Mostly though, lately, I've been doing the opposite, selling bitcoin for alt coins. Trading coins back and forth for each other might honestly be my most favorite thing to do in this space. I'm only up a couple hundred bucks doing it but it's 100% free money. And it really scratches that trading itch I'll always have. (Matic pumped recently because Instagram announced they've be using Matic for some kind of NFT thing they have going, by the way. Whatever. Take profits, sell the news and I'll see you again at .8.)

I started buying Matic at .835 and took quick profits at .886. Bought back in at .845 then took profits at .899 and then .925. Then bought up the dip nicely at .85, .83, .75 and even .73. Sold a little bit at .837. Back in at .807. Profits at .86, buy back in at .818, sell some .88 and .93. Buy a little bit at .86 and then sold about 80% in this latest push at .92, .99, and finally 1.22. And that is how you get your average price to be below zero. Now, if it just keeps ripping I'll look foolish and will have cost myself dearly. But if it goes back down it's a really good move. Only time will tell, but I'm betting that with the macro environment right now, this isn't the start of some massive 200% bull run for Matic or ChainkLink or Litecoin. When they come back down into my range, I'll start buying again. I wish I got into these alt-coins earlier, I do have to say. I don't really care or believe in the use cases for most of them, but I'm starting to think that I can probably make at least a little bit of money with anything that just moves a lot. I do have on rule with them though, and that is to never sell all of anything. I might go as low as under 100 bucks, but never to zero. I should probably come up with a solid number though. Let's say I never go under 200 bucks worth, from now on.

I think my biggest weakness so far trading crypto and to a lesser extent stocks, has probably been over trading. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is nothing. I always want to sell if I think I can buy back in lower later, and I'm always buying dips. I think this is pretty clearly the best strategy overall, but I often find myself selling too much too soon, or buying back in as soon as I'm in the money instead of letting it ride out more. I really felt this way when it was all bull run all the time last year. Now that I'm going through my first real bear market. though, it does look quite a bit better in hindsight. If I never sold any bitcoin, I'd be buried with an average price of 34k. It would be a while before I was in the green again. But with selling, my average price is 23.2k. The cost is that I own a lot less than I would have, but if you buy already planning to sell, you can end up with close to the amount of exposure you want.

That's it for today, Ill have an update soon with some election stuff.

Crypto, Stonks And Life

 Been a little while so lets jump right in with some quick updates:

As predicted by pretty much everyone except for the Federal Reserve, all that money printing during covid has come back around to kick us in the ass. Hard. Inflation is of course WAY up and stocks are way down. Turns out printing trillions of dollars and handing it out like you're a rich family in the suburbs on Halloween has consequences. Who knew!? The Fed has been hiking the federal funds rate and is promising to keep raising it until inflation cools off. Once again, the Federal Reserve lurches us from one catastrophe to another. Rates really should never have been as low as they were in the first place, but here we are. By the way, on the topic of the Fed, I have a rare book recommendation for anyone reading this. I seriously cannot recommend this book any harder. "The Creature From Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve" by G. Edward Griffin. Stop what you're doing right now and just order it on Amazon. I promise, it's not nearly as dry as it sounds. It's one of those books that makes you stop every couple pages and think about what you just read. The American people have been getting raw dogged by the Federal Reserve and bankers since its inception (and even before that) and it's truly mind blowing how they're able to get away with it. And people not only don't really understand what's going on, they support it! Every time I see a "support Ukraine!" thing I want to vomit. Might as well tag yourself "free use" (look it up, sicko). If you have any interest in money, investing, history, the creation of money and wealth, etc., then this book is for you. Seriously. Read it. I know you probably haven't read a book in a while so it'll be good for you.

Now let's talk a little crypto. Currently bitcoin is trading right around 20k and ethereum is around 1325. We're officially in bear market/accumulation phase and I have been accumulating. I've done a good job of selling tops and buying dips so even though my first buys were around 40k, my average bitcoin price is 23k. So I'm still in the red with BTC but not too bad and certainly not nearly as bad as it would be if I never sold anything. My average buy price is 35k and average sell price is 44.3k. I'm working my way to owning a full bitcoin which I will absolutely have by the next bull run.

I've actually done an even better job trading ETH. My overall average price on ETH is 1350 so I'm just about even. My average buy price is 1922 and my sell price is 2400. I have just shy of 4 "ethers". My general strategy is pretty simple: buy some on red days, sell some on green days. It's amazing how the general public seems to get this backwards. People pile in when an asset starts ripping, then lose their nerve and sell when it drops. Which, of course, is the exact opposite of what you want to do. If you're in crypto or you've been on sidelines watching, I think the time to buy is now. It could still go lower and I actually do think it will, but forget about trying to time the bottom. Just buy a little bit every week or so and hold on to it. And whatever you do, don't sell it at a loss.

While I consider myself a borderline BTC maxi, I have ventured into investing in a few alt coins (besides ETH which I don't even really consider an alt-coin anymore). My third biggest holding is Chainlink (LINK). Chainlink is a layer two, smart contract platform that runs on the ethereum network. Its major use case is translating real world data onto the blockchain. I love the functionality and use cases for Link, but it's "tokennomics" are concerning. There's no max supply (my favorite thing about BTC) and I keep reading things about the developers creating and selling Link coins. I started buying Link when it was in the 30's but with selling tops I've managed to get my average price to 17. It's currently trading at around 7.5 right now so I'm in the red pretty bad with it. I think Link is a good sleeper coin though so I'm not too concerned. It also tends to do pretty good in bear markets compared to other alt-coins.

The other two alt coins I have are Litecoin and Polygon (aka Matic). Neither of these two coins interest me really, except for the fact that their prices move a ton so it's pretty easy to trade. I aggressively take profits with alt-coins, so any rally's I sell a ton and then it's pretty easy to buy it back a lower price. Look at the price action with Chainlink over the past few months. It goes up then down then back up to pretty predictable levels. I've been buying Link at 7 and selling at 7.5 and up for months now. Same thing with Matic. I don't care at all about the future of Matic or litecoin, so taking profits with them is easy. My average price for litecoin is 49 and Matic is .8. 

Another thing I like doing and wish I had thought of earlier is trading crypto's for each other. Take a look at charts that show btc/eth, or btc/link, or eth/link, etc, and you can see some pretty clear channels of support and resistance. For instance, my average price for buying BTC and selling ETH is .0731 (in bitcoin), and my average price for buying ETH and selling BTC is .067. As long as the first number is bigger than the second one, it's free money. I'm only up a small amount with 'inter-cryto' trading but I made a few mistakes at the start. It's not something that came to me right away though and I suspect the same thing for other people. So if you are in this space it's definitely something to consider.

I think predicting future price moves is largely a fools errand, but for what it's worth, I do think there is one more leg down to go for crypto. I think the bottom is not quite yet in, but of course I could be wrong. I think BTC will bottom somewhere around 13-15k, hover around 20k for another year or so, then start ripping. The bear market will probably last until the Fed starts to pivot which I don't think we'll see anytime soon. I wouldn't wait around for that though and I'm sticking to my plan to keep DCA'ing in. 

My venture into the stock market was ill timed but I've been slowly buying at these depressed prices. I also expect the stock market to keep dipping, so I'm DCA'ing in there too. My general stock "thesis" is Tesla, mushroom stocks, Amazon and a few other small ones. I have some European power supply companies on my watchlist that I'm just waiting for a big red day to jump into. They've been going up lately though so I hope I didn't miss it.  I'm way more invested and interested in crypto over stocks, but stocks are fun too. Stonks. 

Personally, I recently got married which is nice. We also sold our house in late August which literally felt like getting out at the perfect time. We didn't have to buy a house immediately either, so if the real estate market goes through a 25% or so correction in the next year or so, we'll have really timed this out perfect. By the way, our house sold in less than a week and we got almost 10% OVER asking. Want to know how many offers we got? One. One offer, way over asking. Talk about top of the market.

And since I know many of you got here from my sports betting days, I have to admit somewhat somberly, I think my sports betting days are largely behind me. I still have active accounts and I still put in some action and stay involved with getting other people accounts, but that particular fire in me has been put out. I know what it takes to win at sports betting and I just don't have it in me anymore. My models are still profitable so if anyone out there is reading this and is interested in my offer to sell them and walk through how to use them, now would be the time to do it. I'll still have some updates regarding sports and who knows, maybe I will get back in seriously. But with work and now crypto and stocks, my mind and my heart are just not fully in it when it comes to sports. I remember getting that fuzzy, warm feeling when props would get released for the day, or getting a new juicy account. And sorry to say, it just ain't there for me anymore. I will definitely get back in on political betting though. 2020 political betting was probably the most fun I've ever had betting. This time around though I'll definitely get a PredictIt account and really do it right.

Like everyone else I suppose, I'm mostly just watching America crumble into a pile of ashes right before our eyes. It's weird. We're all just like watching TV and eating lunch like "yea, empires don't last forever." I really do wonder what life will be like 50 years from now. I think it's either we're on Mars or fighting a civil war with 3D printed guns. Maybe I'll get more into that for my next post. I think I'll stop here. Thanks for reading, talk soon!

(P.S. If anyone wants to get in touch with me, leave a comment with a joke in it so I know you're not a bot and I'll find you.)

We Are In Trouble

 I've had this post rolling around in my head for quite some time now. It's more of a feeling than anything else, but I think that we are officially in Trouble with a capital T. And by "we" I mean everyone on the planet. I've never wanted to be wrong about a prediction so bad, but I think something really big and really bad is coming. And it isn't the case that there is just one thing badly out of whack that everyone can point to, like in 2008 with the housing crisis. It's more like every single thing, every institution, the very fabric of society, the way people interact with each other, is rotten to the core, past the point of being fixable. 

First, let's look at some numbers. Did you know that nearly 80% of all US dollars in existence were printed in the last two years? It's easy to read a sentence like that and just kinda keep it moving. But think about it for a minute. Without a degree in economics or any special knowledge, does that seem like a good thing to you? And this isn't some whacky conspiracy theory, this is according to the Federal Reserve itself. Look at some of these graphs:

Does that look sustainable to you? There's this new idea out there that since we're off the gold standard anyway, governments can simply print as much money as they want. This idea, of course coming out of the insipid and awful world of 'academia', is loosely called "Modern Monetary Theory", obviously abbreviated to MMT. [Here's a real good rule of thumb I've learned over the years; whenever you see lots of acronyms, you're in trouble. The more acronyms, the more trouble.] Basically, a bunch of literal pencil pushers and other cretins who live in dark, stuffy rooms on college campuses and dreary government buildings all got together and created lots of fancy graphs and equations and definitions of things with words like "heterodox" and "vertical vs horizontal transactions." The conclusion was, 'hey we're creating money out of thin air anyways, why not create a shitload of it!' The former chair of The Fed, Alan Greenspan, actually said this: "The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default." Zero possibility. Right.

Anyone with a basic understanding of the world can probably grasp the fact that you can't just print as much money as you want. Only someone with a graduate degree could be stupid enough to think something like that is feasible. And the reason is simple. Wealth is how much money you own in relation to how much money is in circulation. Your wealth is the percentage of the total that you own. If you have 10 apples, but only 100 apples exist, you own 10% of all apples. Most people don't own any apples, some have one or maybe two. You would be "apple rich". Now let's say a million apples fall from the sky. Now everyone has at least 10, some even have thousands. Suddenly, you're apple poor. What happened?! The amount of apples you own didn't change! Well obviously, the apples falling from the sky is what happened. The value of every single apple dropped enormously and instantly.  A 10 year old can grasp this concept. 

When I made my first Bitcoin post here, one of my major reasons for investing in BTC was the amount of dollar printing the Fed was doing. I said it way back in 2020 that it would have catastrophic results and that inflation would skyrocket. All while the Fed kept saying that inflation was only "transitory". Now here we are, 2 years later, and of course inflation is WAY up and the Fed has had to admit they were wrong about the "transitory" nature of this inflation. How did a nobody fucking sports betting blogger know more about future inflation than the Chairman of the Federal Fucking Reserve?? It's either one of two possibilities: they were being sincere and really didn't think all this money printing would cause inflation, or they did know and they just lied and did it anyway. They're either lying or incompetent, and honestly, I don't know which one is worse. 

I just saw in the news the other day, a few states are considering MORE STIMULUS money to go out to citizens to pay for the higher gas prices. That is a take your breath away kind of stupid. It's like starting a fire and trying to put it out with gasoline because gas is wet and fires don't like wet things. It's one reason I think we are in capital T Trouble. 

Inflation is such an insidious problem because I don't think many people really understand it. It affects absolutely everything. It's why the cost of every single thing is way up. Besides greatly diminishing your purchasing power, it also diminishes the value of your past labor. Every dollar you earned in the past, every hour of work, is now worth a lot less than it was at the time. Inflation is like a tax that no one votes for and no one gets anything out of. It's a real sneaky way to move wealth from the lower and middle class to the upper class. If you don't have investments that at the very least keep up with the current rate of inflation (which, by the way, is probably around 20%. Not the 8% CPI the government likes to use) then you're going backwards. And even if you somehow can keep up with inflation, all the money you made in the past just became worth a lot less.

If this were our only problem, I'd still think we'd be fucked. Just maybe not "learn to farm, fast" fucked. But our monetary foibles are only a piece of this shit pie. 

Have you noticed that rule of law seems to be eroding? People walk into a CVS, take what they want, and walk out. While being videotaped. No one stops them, and even more damaging, no one seems to be even arresting them. Smash and grabs are a regular thing now. Do you know how detrimental this is to a society? If we can't freely trade with each other anymore, you can pretty much kiss the world as we know it goodbye.

Violent crime is way up in most major cities. Free speech is under attack. The basic law of self defense is suddenly up for grabs. Elementary school kids are having their minds absolutely poisoned. Racial tensions are as high as I can ever remember. Men are breaking womens fucking skulls in legally sanctioned MMA fights, and we can't even agree on what a man or woman IS. The mainstream media is so utterly compromised that it's a joke. "Hate crimes" get exposed for being hoaxes with virtually no repercussions. Actually, they get praised!! Here you have someone talking about Jussie Smollet saying "even if it was a hoax, it's low key noble" (to an eruption of applause from the audience). It's jaw dropping. The very fabric of society seems to be tearing at the seams. 

And I keep thinking, what if Covid was only like 5% worse? It had a survivial rate of roughly 98%. What if it was only 90%? Or 80%? In the middle of the panic, my fiancee had to take a covid test for work. The at home tests were all sold out, so she was waiting in a long line at a public testing place. She got there before they even opened and was still in an hours long line. 9 AM came and went, and they didn't open. There were workers inside but they remained closed. People started getting mad, some were even banging on the glass. Eventually a cop showed up and went inside to see what was going on. Apparently, not enough workers showed up so they couldn't perform the tests and they were afraid to open and tell people. So they announced to everyone that this testing site was now closed and they weren't testing anybody. People were understandably pissed off. My fiancee overheard a woman on the phone say she was going to another test site nearby. Others heard her too and a bunch of them RAN to their cars to get to the other test site before they shut down. 

Does that seem just a little bit concerning to you? It's like the first half of a zombie movie. We've seen how we react to a virus with a 2% death rate (and even that stat is probably way over exaggerated since there seems to be no distinction made between people who died because of covid vs those who died WITH covid. If someone dies in a car accident and happened to have covid, would you consider that a covid death? The CDC does). Imagine if the death rate were 5%? Or 20%?? Imagine if everything we saw during the pandemic was 10 times worse. It's hard to even fathom.

And the sad part is I don't even think the worst is behind us. We have no idea how badly we damaged an entire generation of children with our hysterical, over the top reaction to covid. A weird thing I've been seeing out and about is families walking around outside with ONLY their little kids wearing masks. Lots of schools still have mask mandates!

Oh and by the way, the data is starting to leak out about the affects of social media on children, and boy is it bad. I would bet a good chunk of change that if we're still all here in 30 years, we're going to look back on children using social media the same way we look back on doctors prescribing cigarettes to pregnant women. Maybe even worse. 

There's a phycologist named Jonathan Haidt who I've been following for a while. He's all over the affects of social media on children, and the conclusions he draws are absolutely terrifying. Depression and anxiety are through the roof for little kids, mainly young girls. This guy is no nut job either, far from it. He thinks we're about 10 years away from our democracy failing. I highly recommend you check him out, but here's a quick quote: 

'In 2019, Haidt postulated that American democracy may fail in the next 30 years, but he now says with his understanding of social media, it could be more like five to 10 years if Donald Trump is re-elected in 2024.

"I think the ability of a deliberative democracy to have a deliberation is declining and the ability of people to believe crazy, ridiculous stuff is ever growing. So I think these are all threats to open societies.

"By fail, I don't necessarily mean civil war, but I think becoming a dysfunctional nation like some of the least functional Latin American nations with sporadic violence ... I don't know what's going to happen, and probably I'm wrong in my pessimism but catastrophic outcomes that seemed like one in a hundred 10 years ago, now seem like one in two or one in three."'

Professional, public thinkers like him don't say stuff like that lightly. A 50% chance of the United States becoming Nicaragua, or worse. Awesome

There's plenty more problems, too. The declining birth rate of industrialized nations is a ticking time bomb that no one seems to notice. The explosion of illegal immigration into the U.S. and the catastrophic effects on our demographics. The sudden and bizarre sexualization of children. The FBI is compromised. The ACLU is now literally fighting against free speech. I honestly can't think of a single American institution that hasn't been thoroughly captured by evil, partisan politics and power hungry people with their own agendas. Not even Disney is safe anymore!

It's easy to dismiss all of this as some conspiracy theory, Alex Jones type whacko shit. Three years ago I would have too. And I'm not saying that there's some shadowy group out there, deliberately trying to stoke racial tension and general unrest and upend America as we know it. What I am saying though, is if someone were trying to do that, it'd look a whole lot like what's going on right now.

Personally, I'm officially starting to prepare. I need to learn how to grow and maintain a garden. I need to learn how to collect and process rainwater. I'm going to start buying some seeds. Weapons, ammo, first aid stuff. Lots of other things. I can't believe I'm saying this shit either but I honestly think that's where we're at.

I'm still obviously very much into crytpo and am still actively trading. My next post will be some updates on where I'm at with that and how the future of crypto might look. But I had to get this off my chest. I hope to god I'm wrong, but the time for bravery was about 3 years ago. I think now it's time for preparation. 

How To Bet On The NFL, Specifically With Teasers

I want to do a fairly basic primer for NFL betting and take a dive into teasers, specifically NFL 6 point teasers, AKA Wong Teasers.  I meant to post this when the playoffs started but unfortunately didn't get around to it. This will be helpful to anyone who bets for fun to hopefully make you at least lose less if not actually turn a profit.

First off, it is amazing how bad the average bettor is. I was a bookie for a while in a past life, and you really can't believe how bad the vast majority of bettors are. Getting the worst possible number, buying points for no reason, teasing NBA totals, action reverses, parlays, teasers at -120 (or worse) odds...the list goes on. It's the equivalent of someone playing blackjack who has a loose understanding of the rules. Even if you play perfect blackjack, you're expected to lose something like 2% of every dollar you risk. But if you're hitting 18s and staying put on 9's because 9 is your favorite number or something, you're obviously going to lose a lot quicker. That's what most people are doing when they bet. If the market says a team is +3 +103, and you bet it at +3 -110, you're already behind. Now let's say you buy 2 points because buying points is fun. Those points should cost something like 35 cents, but you pay 50 cents! Now you're REALLY behind. So hopefully this post can help you or someone avoid things like that.

If you're going to bet on anything, you must first learn the importance of line shopping. Getting the best possible number/odds is the most important aspect of betting straight bets (unless you're at the very top of the pyramid, in which case you generally want to get the most amount down on everything. For this discussion we're leaving the syndicate guys out). If you're betting at -110 lines (which you shouldn't be but most everyone is), you need to win 52.4% of the time to break even. If you can hit 55% you can make retirement money. Think about what that means, winning 52.5 out of 100 games versus winning 55 out of 100. You have to turn 1.5 games out of 100 from losses into winners. Or a couple pushes into winners. And think about all the 1 or two point or half point losses you'll have out of 100 games. Getting that extra half point or paying -105 instead of -110 is really the name of the game. 

So that brings us to a natural question; how do I know the "true line"? Where is this market? There really is no set answer to this, but the best answer is simple; check pinnacle. Ive talked about it before, but Pinnacle Sports if an offshore book that is basically considered the best. They're the market maker. They take the highest bets, have the lowest juice, and generally don't kick people out. Some people may quibble over this, some books are right up there and it does depend on the market, but for anything with high liquidity, such as any NFL game, you should consider the Pinnacle line the line to beat. Oh and you have to beat the juice too. So what you do is take the vig out of Pinnacles line, and that is basically considered the true line. You beat this line, in the long run you will make money. If you don't, you will lose. (Again, we're talking about high liquidity, aka big games. This doesn't apply to small stuff like props). 

You really should be betting with this as the goal. However, I realize this isn't feasible for most people, so you should try to get as close to this line as possible. Always check pinnacle before making a bet and have at least two different sports books. I like to have at least 10 accounts going at once but you have to have at least two if you're going to betting any kind of money at all. 

One good little nugget if you're just betting for fun; look for what I like to call the 'pinny stopper'. Sometimes pinnacle will make a game -111 when the rest of the market is at -110. This is them basically saying we don't want anymore action on this. That can be a good bet if you have to make a bet.

Remember, you're betting numbers, not teams.

OK so let's look at teasers. There is actually a very specific teaser you can make that has historically been +EV. If I were forced to bet on the NFL with one account and couldn't find off market bets, the only bets I would make would be this teaser. And I don't mind talking about it and 'giving away the secret' because the secret has been out for a long time.

A while back, this math professor named Stanford Wong wrote a book and he talked about an exploit he found betting on the NFL. Specifically, 6 point teasers where you 'capture' both the 3 and the 7. They're called Wong Teasers and you can read all about them for the math of it, but the simple explanation is this. Football is unique in that points are not scored 1 or 2 at a time, but generally 3 or 7 points at a time. A teaser is a bet where you're essentially doing a parlay and buying points. But since not all points are created equal in football, you can actually tilt the odds in your favor if you tease the right games.

So what games are we looking for. You want underdogs at +1.5 to +2.5, and favorites at -7.5 to -8.5. If a team is an -8.5 favorite, you tease them 6 points down to -2.5. You go through, or 'capture' both the 3 and the 7. Since so many games land on exactly 3 and 7, you capture enough win probability to win long term AT -110 OR BETTER ODDS. This is hugely important and cannot be overstated. When Wongs book came out and before these were well known, you could find 6 point teasers for as good as +110! I remember hammering a book around 2012 that had them at +105. Books did adjust and nowadays you really have to look to find anything better than -110. If you find a place that does -105 or even odds, you're in great shape. I actually had a book this year that had them at even odds for a while but changed to -110 mid season. (However, one lesser known thing; 3 teamers at +180 is really good too and you can still find these some places. Most have gone to +160 which isn't great, but any time you get a new sports book, always check out their odds for 2 and 3 team 6 point teasers.)

Now here's the catch, apparently. People always get greedy and include teams that are close to, but are not true Wongs. You have to capture the ENTIRE 7 or 3. You can't tease a team from +3 to +9, or -9 to -3. You must get the entire point. 

Personally, and especially since the XP point moved back, I like to play these only if they're perfect. For example, if the whole market has a team at +1, I'll hunt for a +1.5 to tease it to +7.5. Or same thing, if the market is -9, -9.5, I'll hunt for a -8.5 to tease to -2.5. Also, check your books rules for pushes. Some count them as losses, some count as pushes.

If you play these perfectly, you'll almost certainly make money. It's as close to a robotic, plug and play sports betting system that actually works. Yet people consistently cannot stay disciplined with these. They include totals (which is HORRIFIC by the way), they tease NBA games, they tease only TO the 3 or 7 and not through it. If you can stay the course, you can have fun betting and make money!

So that's about it for today. I'll be posting more often again so be on the lookout.

Ether: Not Just For Huffing Anymore

Bitcoin, huh? It has been a nice little 6 weeks or so in the crypto market. Bitcoin has continued its steady but bouncy ride upwards, going from a local low of 48k on Feb 28th to its current price of just under 60k. It's up 15% the past month and 82% the past 3 months. It broke through 60k and hit an all time high of 61.2kish on March 13th before bottoming back out at 51k on March 23, and then groggily making its way from there to 58.3k at the time of this post. 

The total crypto market capitalization right now is $1.94 trillion, and the BTC market cap alone is sitting at a nice and comfy $1.11 trillion. The BTC market cap settling in over 1 trillion is a real good sign. Ethereum's market cap is $237 billion. After that is Binance Coin at $51.6 billion, Tether (which is a stablecoin always pegged at 1 USD) at $42 billion, then Polkadot at $40.5 billion to round out the top 5 coins right now. Just under that is Cardano, and Chainlink is 10th with a $12.8 billion market cap. (A point I'd like to make here, by the way, is that too much emphasis is put on a coins' price. The real metric you want to measure is market cap. What a coins current price is is irrelevant when comparing to other coins or the market as a whole.)

The 'BTC market cap dominance' is something I like to keep an eye on. It's currently just under 60% and has been slowly trending down since mid 2019 when it 69%. ETH market dominance is at 12.4% which is about average, albeit slowly climbing since end of 2018. I think market cap dominance is obviously a good metric to look at to see how BTC and any other coin is doing compared to the whole of the crypto market. Last post I was worried about an alt-coin surpassing BTC and becoming the go-to crypto currency. I'm a little less worried about that now since BTC has such a huge lead over anything else. The closest competitor in market cap is ETH but ETH and BTC can co-exist. I have been and will be buying ETH anyway so that doesn't really scare me. And the BTC dominance falling doesn't necessarily scare me either. There are currently 9108 crypto currencies listed on coinmarketcap.com and that number is constantly growing. So BTC can slowly lose its market cap dominance yet still be in first place by a mile. I suppose that is the real question though, isn't it? Where will the BTC market cap dominance sort of 'settle in'? 50-40% feels about right. If it fell through 40% I might start to get worried. 

With the markets being open 24/7 and the crazy volatility and maybe even the futuristic feel of it all, it seems like time speeds up in the crypto markets. A week feels like a month and a month feels like 6 months. And for a while it seemed every night at around 2-4 AM the price would fall off a cliff before slowly rebounding during the day. Everyday waking up and checking the price can be a wild ride. When you look back at charts it all seems so obvious and easy but being in it every day is a different story. I learned my lesson pretty early on trying to 'time' the market and sell tops and buy dips. I actually made a really nice little excel sheet that tracks everything I do with crypto. I'm up about 10% on my total investment on BTC and 15% on ETH (ethereum) but I own about 10x more BTC than ETH. My average entry on BTC is 51.6k and for ETH it's 1750. I've 'lost' money by selling BTC but have done better with ETH trading-wise and am up just on trading. I also have tiny bits of Chainlink and Cardano.

I think I got all of the n00b mistakes out of my system early on and feel great about how things are going. I got a little crazy when BTC and ETH were really pumping in the beginning and made every mistake possible. I made a couple BTC and ETH buys at literal tippy tops and made some BTC sells that look absolutely horrible in hindsight. I also FOMO'd my way into Cardano at its all time high and managed to pay a bunch of fees for the privilege. It was for a tiny amount though and I just look at it as the price of an education. The alt-coin market is crazy and honestly probably best to just avoid. I waited on a nice little dip on Chainlink and got in at 25.23 but I don't think I'll do much more alt-coin dabbling in the future. A little piece of advice I heard was that you should own at least one full bitcoin before you get into alt-coins and I think that'll largely be my strategy from here on out, except for adding in around 20-30% ETH. 

Speaking of Ethereum, what in gods name is Ethereum? Well if you thought Bitcoin was hard to understand, take a dive into ethereum. I'm not going to go deep into ETH and what it is and what it does. I'm far from an expert and you can learn plenty for free online. But the broad strokes are that ETH is a smart contract platform and its network is 'proof of stake' instead of the btc-used 'proof of work' (or at least ETH is turning into a proof of stake network.) Proof of stake uses up less energy than proof of work, and the energy consumption problem is becoming one of bitcoin's biggest issues. There is no real 'coin' though with ethereum and what you own when you buy ethereum is honestly a little murky. You're basically buying a piece of the ETH network. There are 115 million "eth's" in circulation right now, but there isn't a max supply. That was one of my biggest pluses with bitcoin and that worries me about ETH. Another cool thing about ethereum is that it is actually able to host other crypto currencies. This has been the most common use of its platform so far (Link is on the ETH network).

However, the big thing right now with ETH is the fact that all the NFT (non-fungible tokens (fungible means tradable)) stuff is going on the ETH network. You can't talk about ethereum without talking about NFT's. NFT's are a huge thing going right now. If you don't know, it's basically like baseball cards but online. And instead of just baseball cards it's all kinds of stuff. Meme's, tweets, art, music...they all can be NFT's. Some of the stuff going on right now in the NFT market though is absolutely insane and honestly makes me a little nervous that we're at a top. A meme of a defeated Donald Trump sold for almost $70 million!A meme you can just, like, have for yourself, online... for free. I also saw Kings Of Leon released their whole new album as an NFT with NFT artwork. I went into the auction to check it out and everything was going for insane prices. People are even paying the huge fees that ETH is charging right now too to make these transactions. The NFT thing feels preposterous to me to be totally honest, but you really can't argue with the numbers. The amount of money going into NFT's is mind boggling. People love owning little things and anyone around my age can remember the hype of baseball cards when we were young. The biggest problem with memorabilia has always been the same; fakes. Some estimates say that 80% of all memorabilia is fake. NFT's solve this problem. Maybe even with 3D printers, people can make physical copies of their stuff, too. I'm just trying to keep an eye on everything, really, and am staying away from any hard and fast rules. You gotta keep your head on a swivel around here. This space is fast, it's bizarre, it's constantly changing and evolving and it sure is fun being a small little part of it. It really is an interesting time to be alive.

But anyway, back to ethereum. Its' price action has been frustrating since everyone seems to think ETH is way over due for a major breakthrough. And I have to agree somewhat. The BTC/ETH valuation seems out of whack to me. I don't see how BTC can be almost 5 times worth more than ethereum (in market cap). It leads me to think that either BTC is overvalued or ETH is undervalued (or both).

The negatives with ETH right now seem to be A) its network is clogged, slow and costly B) it's had some technical issues C) the miners 'show of force' threat D) it has a lot of competitors. 

The first point doesn't bother me at all really. It's like saying a bar is going to go out of business because it's too busy. The reason the network is slow and expensive is because everyone is using it. Now, the networks ability to deal with the increased traffic may be a problem in the future, but right now this isn't something I worry about too much. 

The technical issues centered around the fact that the ETH network was released probably too early and it came with glitches. The basic idea was we'll release it and fix as we go. This got them first mover advantage but it does have its drawbacks obviously. There is supposed to be some new fork or a 2.0 platform coming out, so we'll see about that. 

The miners show of force threat was basically ETH miners trying to band together and get control of 51% of the ETH network just to show that they could. This was in response to ETH miner rewards being decreased (to deal with the high fees). This was big news when it came out a few weeks ago but it seems to be a non issue now. I haven't heard or read anything about it in weeks and it was always dubious as to whether that was even possible.

Cardano is currently ETH biggest competitor. Actually, the guy who started Cardano initially was a co-founder of ETH and split off to make Cardano. I think if you're going to buy a large position of ETH, it wouldn't be crazy to buy some Cardano as a hedge (which was my thinking). I don't know enough about it to write anything, but I'll be watching Cardano closely. 

(Small disclaimer about everything I just wrote: I do not understand ethereum nearly as much as I do bitcoin and some of this stuff may not be 100% correct. If you have any corrections, feel free to comment).

It feels like ETH has been moving sideways forever but it's actually up 26% the past month, which is largely fueled by its 21.8% growth this past week. It finally broke though 2k, topped out at 2139 and has been falling a little bit since, currently at 2050. If its falls through 2k and back to 1850ish I'm going to be really confused, but I'll probably be buying.

Also in my last post I mentioned how youtube has been a great source for learning about crypto and I mentioned 'BitBoy' as my favorite guy to watch. He still is the best to watch for a general overview of the crypto world, but his trading advice and tutorials can be ignored. He's a little bit salesman-y so you really just gotta use him for news. Don't follow his (or anyones, really) trading advice. People complain that he and others are a little click baity with the 'O face thumbnails' and ridiculous price predictions. But he and others have addressed this and I can't say I disagree. They don't want look absurd in their thumbnails and call for a million dollar bitcoin, but it's the only thing that works! People don't click on boring thumbnails. So don't judge a youtuber by his thumbnails.

The best guy on crypto-youtube though is "ben crowen". Just search him and you'll see what I mean. I like bitboy for all around market news and ben crowen for market analysis. I also watch 'crypto zombie' who is almost like bitboy and ben combined. One of my biggest strengths in sports betting was always knowing who was smart about what and learning as much as possible from them, and right now all that stuff is mostly going on at youtube. 

That's about it for now. Haven't been doing much betting but I plan on getting back into hockey props soon. My model is great but as always I don't have many places to play, and the model takes forever to use. NBA was going ok until I had one horrible week and just sort of lost interest. You really need to be following the leagues if you want to bet props night in and out and popping in a couple days a week isn't cutting it. With players being out of the lineup all the time with covid it's especially tough, and I haven't found a good way to incorporate the fact that NHL teams are virtually playing the same opponent every night. At the very least, I'll be betting hockey props in the playoffs (and may even give out some picks!), which are always super high ROI. As far as the lack of posting, if you are a reader of this blog I  really do appreciate it. I always plan on writing more but one or two a month seems to be the norm. I'll never just abandon it though, and if I ever do decide to stop I'll make a post. So bookmark me and check back at least once a month and you should see something new. Until next time!

Political Wrap-Up, Year In Review And CRYPTO CURRENCY DEEP DIVE

Long-time no see, huh. I didn't mean to take such a long break, there just wasn't a whole lot to talk about really. Politics was bananas obviously but by the time I wrote my last post I was well passed tapped out credit-wise and was just waiting for all my bets to settle. The last political bet FINALLY settled a few weeks ago so I can say that the 2020 political betting season is officially in the rear-view.

So what can we take away from it? I've been thinking about this for a little while and to be totally honest...I don't think we can take away all that much. It was as simple as using PredictIt as the 'true line' and betting things that were far enough off to be +EV. The only real skill in this, I suppose, is having access to these accounts that have these ridiculous price discrepancies. As well as actually getting paid and staying at them/finding more. I could write forever about trying to time the market and mining comment sections and analyzing (the right) polls (the second they come out), and there are absolutely guys out there doing that and making a living, but honestly for the most part, I just looked for price differences and clicked the buttons (except for the VP race. I feel like I was pretty spot on there and made plenty of market price bets that were +EV imo).

Nuts and bolts wise, I made just under 26 units in about 10 months of political betting. I made most of my profits early by betting on states and nominations. From February to March I had only one losing week. Some of the early numbers I was getting were eye-popping, some of the biggest discrepancies I've seen in my entire life, and Ive been bashing PPH's for almost 15 years now. The wins weren't huge with the small limits and small amount of places to play, but they were consistent, easy and added up. I had another nice 10 unit jolt in August around the time of the VP announcement, and pretty much broke even after that in the overall presidential race. Even with having some bets deleted and losing a couple accounts, it was definitely worth it. My only regrets are being a little gun shy at the start (I literally couldn't believe what I was seeing at certain points) and probably over-hedging/spraying. Especially in the VP race. I would have liked to get way more volume down, too. My ROI was absurd but the unit count should be higher. Next time I'll be better prepared before it all starts.

Overall 2020 was a strange year betting-wise. I had the highest ROI year of my life but the volume was way down. Other than NHL shots on goal and the 2020 super bowl, I didn't do much in the way of props this year. Politics and stock market bets covered some of the missed volume, but not all of it. I ended up down money on straight bets which is extremely confusing since all I do is bet off market stuff (and hedge teasers which I made money on so that kind of evens out). Every week during the NFL it seemed I was finding unreal numbers and setting up huge middles which just basically never hit (I remember hitting exactly one clean). I had an UNREAL position on the Superbowl. One of my books put up KC -1.5 even and ML -145 when the market was all 3 and 3.5. So I maxed out KC (for almost 5 figures - it wasn't a rinky dink little book) and bought most of it back on TB +3 and some 3.5 (and even a little bit of +4). So if KC won by exactly 2 or 3, which should happen between 10 and 15 percent of the time, I'd win both. Obviously that didn't happen but those are the exact kind of spots I was generating all year. I ended up having a great 2021 super bowl by absolutely crushing props, especially my all time favorite props to bet; cross sport props. Actually, making the cross sport bets got me to dust off my NBA player prop model which I re-discovered was actually quite good. I kinda forgot how good that model is. I've since updated it a little bit and have been using it with great success the past couple weeks on NBA. I'll probably have a post later on going into more detail about that specifically, but I really want to talk about something else.... Crypto currency.

'Yea yea' you might be saying...'bitcoin...we get it. You're about 6 years too late.' Yes, obviously it would have been better to get in when it was under 10k, but I think it still has a looooong way to go.

 I'm going to explain what I know about crypto, ask some questions that maybe people in the comments can answer, and lay out my theory on what it is and where it's going.

So first off let me just say that obviously I am no computer/crytpo expert. Far from it. But I have researched it quite extensively and can safely say now that I officially 'get it'. I get the problem that bitcoin/the blockchain solved and why it's such a big deal. The 'hows' are still a little murky to me but I think A) I will understand it all eventually and B) you don't really need to know all the tiny technicals to know why bitcoin is so special.

Bitcoin (aka BTC) was 'invented' by a person or more likely a group called Satoshi Nakamoto. He (I'm just gonna call them 'he' from now on) simply uploaded a 9 page pdf to a hacking forum and then disappeared forever. You can read the 'white paper' pdf here.

In short, 'a bitcoin' is really just a long string of unique characters on a public ledger, aka the blockchain. "Miners" (regular people with fancy computers) compete and are incentivized to verify transactions and add to the blockchain. They get paid in tiny amounts of BTC for this service and the amount they get per block is halved every 4 years (I think it's 4 years) so the supply trickles out (you may have heard of 'the halving' before - thats what that means.) As the blockchain grows and grows, it gets stronger and harder to hack. HOW the miners compete exactly and HOW the chain is impossible to hack is a little above my pay-grade. All I know is that really smart people/coders all agree that the code behind blockchain is basically perfect and it is essentially un-hackable. (Fun little bit of info I got from the white-paper, and this is up against the limits of my understanding and may not be completely accurate; but the blockchain is created in a way that it doesn't make sense to hack. If a bad actor tried to reverse engineer the chain and "catch up to it", he could in theory 'take back' any bitcoin he previously spent. However, he would actually make more money just keeping the legit chain going. Why/how, exactly, I don't really know. But I do know that hacking the blockchain is basically impossible/wouldn't make sense to do, which is really all you need to know about it. ...I'm pretty sure.)

That's some of the technical stuff. The economics behind it though are what really gets my attention and none of this stuff is over my head. If you accept that the technology behind BTC/blockchain is sound, as I do, then the rest is eye-popping stuff, honestly. Besides the code, the best and most interesting thing about bitcoin is that the supply is fixed. Permanently and forever. Let me repeat that. The supply is forever fixed. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin in circulation (right now there's about 18 million and we'll get to 21 million in the year 2140ish). The importance of that simply cannot be overstated. Imagine how much one dollar would be worth today if the Fed stopped printing more money once there was 21 million in circulation. So bitcoin isn't only a hedge against inflation, it is literally inflation proof. (Oh and let's not forget about how many bitcoin are simply lost. So there will actually be less than 21 million in total supply.)

Bitcoin was initially invented as a currency to replace cash. And while I think that will eventually happen, it doesn't have to to have enormous upside. Have you ever seen a gold bar? I haven't. Have you ever paid for anything in gold? Besides buying it to store, have you ever even heard of a single transaction taking place that involved gold? I haven't. Gold isn't used as medium of exchange, it's used as a store of value. And yet we all agree that gold is worth a certain amount of money. So an asset can be valuable without becoming an actual, everyday tradable currency. If ALL bitcoin does is replace gold as a store of value, which I think it will, then the price per coin will be roughly 500k. (You can read a really in-depth piece by Tyler Winkelvoss here.) But the money shot is this: gold has a market cap right now of about 9 trillion. That means the total known supply of gold in the world right now is valued at 9 trillion USD. If you assume BTC is at least as good as gold, then the market will value BTC at 9 trillion. Right now the market cap of BTC is roughly 1 trillion with a 55k price per coin. If you assume the market cap gets to 9 trillion, then that means you 9x the current price per coin. That would put a roughly 500k price tag on one bitcoin. And again, I think that is the absolute floor.

'But poogs' you might be saying, 'how are strings of numbers on something called a blockchain possibly worth more than gold? Shiny gold, with its forever-track-record and that people use in electronics and that I can hold?' Well good question. First off, the supply of gold is unknown. People are always finding more gold, there's a ton of gold in the ocean and on the ocean floor, and oh by the way, theres a TON of gold in space. It isn't out of the realm of possibility that Elon Musk or someone else will be mining asteroids for gold in our lifetime. Possibly huge amounts of it, too. That would cause a huge upward shock to the supply of gold which would plummet its value (instantly). Secondly, gold costs money to store and moving it is extremely costly, AND depends on several rent-seeking middlemen. Conversely, bitcoin isn't physical so it only costs server space to hold on to. It's extremely easy to move around and is peer to peer. If I want to send you btc, I click a button and it goes directly from me to you. Not from my bank (who we just have to trust), to a 3rd party (who we just have to trust), to your bank (you get it now). It isn't tied to a country or an economy, it can't be stopped and can't be hacked. 

Completely on its own, I think BTC is an absolute game changer and most likely the currency of the future. But when you add on the other stuff going on right now, it makes it even better. Do you know how much dollar printing the United States is doing right now? It's absurd. Because of the pandemic, TRILLIONS of dollars are being printed out of thin air and pumped into the economy. This might help in the short run, but it's a very dangerous game. Every time a new dollar gets introduced to the system, the value of every dollar goes down (you have less a percent of the total amount in circulation). It's why a million dollars was a lot more money 10 years ago than it is now (and a million today will be worth less than that in 10 years). So normally this would be a good time to buy gold, but it just happens that the New Gold is out there now, only it's selling at about a 90% discount.

Also, there's a nice little generational gap right now that I think affords even more value. For the most part, older people just simply do not get this. Like, at all. The range of attitudes seems to be on one end you have Olds who are threatened by it, call it a scam or a bubble, say it won't work, etc. Basically what Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were all saying up to about a month ago. Then on the other end of the range you have Olds who know that they don't get it but see how other people talk about it and say 'well I don't get it but the smart people that do seem to love it so I'm not against it.' You don't really see any huge acceptance of BTC by the big, old school institutions and fund managers just yet, and I think that as time goes on and some Olds in power die off and get replaced by younger guys who grew up online, you'll see institutions start to come on slowly at first, then super fast because no one wants to be left behind. (I think that's actually a little bit of what's going on right now with these huge spikes in price. I think lots of firms are finally realizing that this is a race and they can't get left behind, so they're buying up in bulk before announcing anything. Once they all start to announce the price could go up even faster).

You can learn all you need to know about BTC and crypto online for free. This has been far from everything I understand about it, and everything I understand about it is far from everything there is to understand. I learn more about it every day and I find youtube to be a great source. There are a bunch of academic papers on it too, which are fun to read. The econ and computer guys absolutely love it and you can learn a lot from their papers. I've read one or two academic papers by people who just clearly don't get it though, and you can still learn from them. It's useful to know HOW people are misunderstanding something. My favorite guy right now for this stuff is "bitboy crytpo" who you can find on youtube. Don't worry if you think you don't quite understand it yet...I've found that most people don't and they're still making plenty of money. Even (especially) the stock people who fell into crypto. I'm only really scratching the surface of the whole thing so far but I at least know what I don't know which is important.

The downside: Now one of my all time favorite truisms has always been that you don't fully understand something until you can intelligently argue against it. So let's play devils advocate and look at potential risks of BTC and investing in it:

1) The government eventually won't like competition against its currency and will 'ban' it. I am not worried about this whatsoever anymore. Just this week, Nigeria 'banned' bitcoin and guess which country leads the way in BTC use percentage wise right now? Nigeria. BTC is basically immune to restrictions. Short of turning off the internet, you can't turn off crypto currency. Which brings me to my next point...

2) You're reliant on the internet. This is (I think) actually a legit risk and something I haven't seen mentioned a lot. The internet is reliant on satellites, which rely on governments and companies. (I know there are actual hard wires backing a lot of stuff up, but if all satellites went down we would be in deep trouble). I am far from an expert in this field so maybe I'm wrong, but it does seem like a dangerous problem that you could knock the whole thing down by disabling satellites, or our ability to communicate with them. I'll look into this more for next time.

3) Crypto currency takes off but bitcoin gets left behind. This is probably my biggest concern and the thing I've been trying to learn most about recently. The only technical problem that people seem to agree that bitcoin has is that it's actually a little bit dated. The computations per second aren't as impressive anymore as they were in 2009. My fear is that crypto currency takes off, bitcoin does all the leg work of introducing itself to the public, and then some other random, newer coin takes off and becomes the new accepted currency. Honestly, I'm not even sure if this is possible? Bitcoin refers to actual bitcoin currency, but it also refers to the blockchain behind it. So is even possible for BTC to get left in the dust? Could crypto take off and bitcoin be worth nothing? I don't know for sure but I promise I will have that answer next post.

4) Its a bubble/ponzi scheme. If you hear anyone call bitcoin a 'ponzi scheme', just know that you're talking to someone who not only doesn't understand bitcoin (or ponzi schemes) at all, but doesn't understand that they don't understand, which is doubly worse. A ponzi scheme has levels of sellers all kicking the empty can down the road. Bitcoin is basically technology that allows users to create trustworthy 'smart contracts', as well as trade actual currency. They're not even close to the same thing, and anyone saying that is just repeating cool, smart sounding words to try to poo poo something they don't understand. Now, is it a 'bubble'? Is the housing market a bubble? Is the US dollar a bubble? There are bull and bear phases in any market and wild swings in price are not unusual for an emerging asset during price discovery. Is the whole thing a bubble that will pop and see the price go to zero? Sure, it's possible. But I don't think it'll happen. Elon Musk is betting 1.5 billion dollars against that, as is Blackrock (the biggest asset holding firm in the world who, by the way, just released that they're 'dabbling' in it. And you can see the interview with their boss who does this weird little coy smile twice when he says 'dabbling' which I took to mean they're doing a lot more than dabbling).

5) It isn't an income producing asset/you can't hold it in your hand. This was Warren Buffet's line, and again, just shows how early we still are. Is an internet domain name worth anything? Can you do anything with a dollar bill besides spend it? (spending it on an investment is still spending). Things are worth what we all decide they're worth. This is probably the flimsiest argument against btc that Ive seen and I've seen it a lot which, like I said, is a good thing.

6) You're too late. This is the big one. People see its price skyrocketing price and think 'damn I missed it, if I got in at 20k it would be great but the price is too high now.' Well, I (read: Tyler Winklevoss) laid out the clear path to 500k per coin, and that's if bitcoin ONLY becomes a store of value. If BTC becomes the currency of the internet or the world, you're looking at each coin being worth well over 10 million each.

For me personally, I got in at 39k a couple weeks ago for a small amount and have been adding on pretty much as much as possible every week. I was selling some at the 'tops' but I don't think I'll ever sell it again, honestly. Not for a long time at least.  I was a little gun shy to jump in as the trader in me absolutely hates buying into anything at the literal highest its been ever. But it was at an all-time high at 20k, then 30k, then 40k, etc. All I really do now is look for dips and buy as much as I can afford. I'm breaking my own rules by not being SUPER price sensitive because I just keep thinking, if this thing does reach 500k or more, is it really going to matter if I got in at 54k or 55k? Not really. And I'm not fomo-ing in at the top because everyone is and it's fun, I legitimately think BTC is going to 500k eventually at the very VERY least and probably a lot higher. I also think BTC will prove to be the most valuable asset in the history of mankind. Yea I know that's hyperbolic but that's truly how I feel about it. The future is de-centralization, and what better asset to de-centralize than money?

I'm also buying some Ethereum (ETH) which is a whole other thing. I'll probably get into ETH next post. 

Till next time!

State of the Union

Well it sure has been a long time, hasn't it? After the hot dog eating contest there was a good month or so of basically no action for me, almost at all. It was probably the smallest volume month I've had in like a decade. All the free money Covid stuff, the stock market bets and the horse matchups and video games and the hot dog eating contest and the NFL Draft even, all that stuff either came and went or I lost access to betting on them. Things have picked up ever since the NHL playoffs started, and now especially with football in full swing. But before we get into what I'm up to now, let's do a little house keeping on the hot dogs and a little politics.

Joey Chestnut won the contest, of course. It wasn't even remotely close. I got that at -850 which was somehow still a steal. That won me .75 units. Miki Sudo DID win the womens group, however, and that cost me .5u. Both of them went over their totals (but not in my middle range) which netted me 1.93. So a final win of 2.18 units. Really not bad considering the amount of time and "research" this took. I wish I kept better records early on, I would love to know how much I'm up lifetime in the July 4th hot dog eating contest. Every year I just bet on Chestnut and usually the over, and usually have arbs too. One-off events that draw a ton of attention like that and the Draft and the Super Bowl always offer all kinds of opportunities.

The other development is the VP was picked! Kamala Harris! If you've been reading along, you know I've been following this market especially close. And even though my initial prediction was wrong, I feel like I was pretty on top of what happened. The Dems threw out a lot of names and nothing really stuck, so they kind of backed up into Kamala. No one can argue that Kamala was the clear choice all along, it was obvious they were looking at and floating the names of a lot of women. After Klobuchar became radioactive, it felt like a long, meandering walk to begrudgingly pick Kamala. 

So how did we do? Well, pretty good it turns out. On paper at least. My final position on Kamala was 12u to win 20, which won. I had 12.8 units on everyone else, so I ended up plus 7.2 units in the VP market. I say 'on paper' because I didn't end up collecting all of that. A couple of my later Kamala bets got "deleted" before they settled, which is just awesome. It's the cost of business though I suppose. When you're a AAA ball player hitting off a tee, you can't cry when the other team goes home. Or something.

They also finally officially nominated Biden for the Democratic nominee, so those bets all settled. That was a win of 12.5 units. So I've scooped up a nice 19.7 (paper) units on politics and 2.18 on hot dogs since we last spoke. Since I decided to include stiffs and "deletions" in the official record (my reasoning being that the risk of not getting paid on winnings must be factored into any official record I have due to the nature of the markets I bet on), the official politics win was only 13 units. 15.18 additional units total since the last count.

So what now? I've added some political bets in the past couple months. A few states and I've added to the House and Senate positions as well as some more on Trump vs Biden. I need to update my own records though, once I do that I'll make a post with everything I have pending. 

What I've really been focusing on though is NHL player shots on goal bets. I have been on fire with them this post-season, too. It sucks I can barely get anything down on them, and they take FOREVER to do, but it's been worth it. Up almost 40 units since early August. It's due to a combination of A) these props always being generally very soft B) one of my books that takes them has no idea what theyre doing C) my model is legit and D) maybe running a little good? Although to be honest I don't think that's true. I can't even get down a full unit on these plays most of the time. It's grinding out pieces of units every bet...that's an honest 40 units if you ask me. 

This model started as an off-shoot to one of my very first models. It was for NHL player vs player total points. Compared to what I have now, it was very simple but it had a certain clever elegance to it. To this day, NHL player vs player props is one of my very best prop sub sets and it was profitable right out of the gate.

The basic logic behind it was to use a players Corsi per game for the current season as a starting point. I'd take this number as his 'true talent' level and assume any change in this number was due to an increase in actual skill, not random variance. Then I'd use some some combination of his career numbers and his last 3 years of "corsi into goals". There was never really an official name for this stat, but basically a players shooting percentage but using shots AT the net instead of shots ON the net (corsi instead of shots). Like shooting percentage, but even more so, that number fluctuates wildly and has a big impact on a players performance. It can be very fluky, even for an entire season. A player's 'corsi per game', or his shot attempts per game, however, is not so fluky. A sudden increase in a players corsi per game is much, much more likely to be the result of an increase of actual skill rather than a fluke, as opposed to how often his converts those chances into goals. (Or he's playing with better line mates which is fine too.) So I'd use current season numbers for Corsi per game, career/L3 years numbers for 'corsi into goals', adjust for the opponent, factor scoring effects in a little bit, and I'd get a pretty good number for the players expected goals. 

Then for assists, I would assume each team would get the average number assists that their expected goal total would suggest, give a bump to primary assists and a ding for secondary assists, and bang. Add em up and you get expected points. Then use poisson to convert them into percentages against each other, which you then convert back into betting odds and you got yourself a model.

That was the original one that got this new one started. I eventually got kicked off of every account that offered head to head matchups, so I had to adjust. First thing I tried was just using the model to bet at a new account that offered over-unders on players goals and assists. This did not work for assists, and in the old format, didn't work for goals either. I figured out that the model was really only good at matching up players and finding ones who were running good or bad. The actual numbers they were spitting out weren't all that accurate (this new book is very sharp, too. Its a real-deal one, not a PPH mickey mouse club member.) 

I then started looking at shots on goal. This new account offered them and I thought if I took the same logic as before but improved on it and applied it to shots instead of goals, I might have something. I scrapped the old model completely and started from scratch. I made so many improvements: I started using 'per minute' instead of per game and came up with a really good way to predict power play time for each team and player. I think that was probably the biggest improvement, as well as more accurately adjusting for the opponent. Lots of other things too that all add up and have come together to make a model I am most proud of. Of course it's in a market that almost no one offers and when they do it's for a couple months a year and you can only bet like 1 or 200 hundred on, and if you have a good week or two you'll get noticed like a sore thumb but hey, a profitable model is a profitable model, damnit!

I would love to post my plays on here for a few games but it probably won't happen. They take forever to do and I'm always firing right up until the game starts. I will try though. If I do you best get down on em. It's not even so much that the edges are huge, it's just deadly accurate. I'm fine with betting stuff only 5 cents off of my expected number which is a pretty low margin of error. I feel like I need to push every edge I have in this market though since it'll be gone soon.

That's it for now, expect another update relatively soon with some football stuff.

New Post Coming Soon

 Hello everyone! Ill have a new post up soon, within a couple days at least. Just wanted to let everyone know this blog aint dead! Lots to discuss so check back soon!