The miracle of valuing the company’s stock far higher than its bitcoin holdings came unglued. Then bitcoin plunged.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
Digital Asset Treasury companies – the DATs – are getting crushed as the hot air comes out of cryptos. They’re an ingenious concept, pioneered in 2020 by Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, which is now Strategy, when he transformed a tiny enterprise software outfit from the Dotcom Bubble and Bust into the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, by funding bitcoin purchases mostly with the sale of shares and also some debt, while his fans put a much higher price on the company’s stock than on the bitcoin it was holding. And the stock price exploded. And soon there were the copycats because this was just too good to pass up.
Today, Strategy, the “largest corporate holder of bitcoin,” as it says, reported a pre-tax loss of $17.5 billion for Q4, and a net loss of $12.6 billion, and a net loss per share of $42.93, as the price of bitcoin had plunged by the end of Q4.
In its report, Strategy also gave an update on its bitcoin holdings as of February 1: It held 713,502 bitcoins, acquired over the years at an average cost of $76,052 per bitcoin.
At the moment, bitcoin trades at around $63,000, having plunged by roughly 50% from its all-time high four months ago. At this price, Strategy’s bitcoin holdings are $9.3 billion in the hole, but that doesn’t really matter as long as Strategy can keep raising new money by selling more shares.
Strategy is a money-raising machine. In all of 2025, it raised $25 billion from the sale of shares and debt, to buy bitcoin with the proceeds. In Q4 alone it raised $5.6 billion. And its fans were still buying this stuff so far this year: Since the end of Q4, it raised an additional $3.9 billion, it said today.
Strategy’s stock is kind of funny, with its two WTF spikes.
During the Dotcom Bubble and Bust, the stock of enterprise software company MicroStrategy had spiked into the sky and then imploded by 99.6% amid admissions of revenue overstatements. But it survived, unlike many other outfits of that era, and still has this business, which produced $123 million in revenues in Q4.
But in 2020, Saylor pivoted to the new and ingenious business model, a first in this world possibly, of selling mostly shares and also some debt and use the proceeds to acquire bitcoin, while flooding the media with all kinds of bitcoin hype, which caused the stock to explode to $473.88 a share at the peak in November 2024, surpassing even the Dotcom Bubble high.
Its market cap, at the peak in mid-July 2025 of nearly $130 billion, far exceeded the value of its crypto holdings of $73 billion at the end of Q3 2025. In other words, the company was valued at nearly $2 for each $1 in cryptos it held.
Since that peak, shares [MSTR] have plunged by 77%, including 17% today, to $107.01, straight into our pantheon of Imploded Stocks, for which the minimum requirement is a 70% plunge from the more or less recent all-time high.
The earnings report is through Q4 and does not yet reflect the price action of bitcoin more recently, but the stock price may reflect it (data via YCharts):
The ingenious miracle came unglued.
After the pivot in 2020, Strategy’s stock was valued at a far higher price than its bitcoin holdings. So when it sold shares via its “Common Stock ATM Program” (which allows for opportunistic sales of Class A common stock) and used the proceeds to buy bitcoin, the stock would rise further because for each $1 billion of bitcoin it bought, its market cap would rise by $2 billion or whatever, as the stock’s fans put a far higher value on the shares than what the company’s bitcoin holdings were worth.
That premium these fans were willing to pay for holding a leveraged bitcoin fund was the miracle. It was ingenious for Saylor to think it up and execute it so flawlessly.
And for a while, the price of bitcoin also surged – Saylor helped that surge along by being a voluminous very public buyer of bitcoin – and those two factors came together, and the stock price exploded.
More recently, the opposite of both has happened. The company’s stock price has fallen in relationship to the value of its bitcoin holdings as the miracle premium is getting wrung out of the stock. And bitcoin itself has fallen.
This is why Strategy’s stock has plunged by 77% though bitcoin has “only” plunged by 50%.
And in case you missed it: PayPal Shares Plunged 86% from the 2021 Goofball High and Right into our Imploded Stocks
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Most, if not all the Crypto stocks will be finding their way onto Wolf’s list of imploded stocks. Coinbase will be the next one.
Crypto, bitcoin, is a creature of the block chain arithmetic that claimed that an alternative currency was about to be approved, bitcoin, that never goes down,
Blockchain is a technology that has many uses completely independent of crypto…contracts, for example.
For better or for worse, part of the Trump strategy for reducing the threat to the dollar as reserve currency (i.e., assault on value of the dollar and ever exploding deficits) is a shift to a crypto currency. The problem space is really the dollar and irresponsible government management of its budget. One could throw past FR actions in as well…but that’s already been covered.
The problem with crypto is that there are many thousands of them; that anyone can make their own; that the whole space is run by, and is full of, reckless ruthless scheming and ingenious manipulators and gobbledygook-hype spreaders (such as Saylor) that are trying to rip your face off; that cryptos keep getting printed hand over fist by wasting a large amount of electricity; that these cryptos are backed by nothing but bullshit, hype, and gobbledygook, and represent nothing but bullshit, hype, and gobbledygook; and that the only reason to buy them is the greater-fool strategy, hoping that the price will go up due to this enormous amount of manipulation and hype and gobbledygook everywhere, so that you can sell them (for hated fiat, lol) to an even greater fool for more later.
Fully backed stablecoins might someday be an efficient and low-cost way of making cross border payments. They’re low-cost now, but they’re not efficient; they’re a hassle to make routine international payments with. And fully backed means by backed by secure and liquid instruments such as T-bills etc., not speculative assets such as gold, shares in startups, etc., whose value can and does plunge and that can become hard to sell when there is a run on the stablecoin, which would cause the stablecoin to collapse.
Wolf…that’s are business as well as user interface observations and I hold no disagreements with you in that regard.
Starting from square one, sometimes this gets confusing. I was in the cybersecurity “industry” for over thirty plus years both contractor, military and GS but always government related. Definitionally, when the term crypto is used I am conditioned to hear cryptography – more specifically, encryption/decryption. So, the usage here is a bit different since I believe the term as used here is shorthand for cryptocurrency.
I’m looking at the subject from a purely technical side of cyber and security. My mindset is instinctively neutral in that regard.
For cryptocurrency, I have never invested in it, to my financial detriment, because I found it (the market) excessively speculative. Additionally, I have been leery of the identity components of the tech set (though I understand some of the positive use cases). Finally, I was off-put by the (probably temporary) notion of having to march through dollar/crypto exchanges.
Dang it. Always review after edits!
Wolf…those are…
I bet most people here don’t even know what the money printing beast Tether even is.
If they did they would understand that crypto is not only a giant ponzi scheme, it’s also a way for China to print money.
“Trump strategy for reducing the threat to the dollar as reserve currency”.
LOL
There is no strategy. Furthermore you have it backwards, the threat to the dollar as a reserve currency has never been higher.
Get better sources of information.
Bitcoin: buy high, HODL to zero.
Correction. “All crypto stocks” will land on the imploded stock list.
Crypto is good for money laundering & criminal activity.
Crypto brings out the worst of Wall street.
Money laundering and criminal activity seem to have thrived well before crypto currency arrived on scene.
The controversial aspect vis crypto use in currency is the coupling to a government managed global identity management system. Microsoft, interestingly enough, has been working on such a system for several years now. Who have they been coordinating with to define requirements and backdoors?
Receiving drugs in the mail is so hilariously easy today. Back in 2013 you had to use a third party intermediate or p2p system to get crypto. Then you needed to have actual knowledge of how a dark web market works. Now it’s very simple for anyone to order any amount of anything with crypto they purchased any number of ways.
It has had a very real effect on the illicit drug dealing market. If anything most of the Chinese fent and everything else comes from there
Crypto has been a bubble that has risen on a wave of hope.
That many steps of that hope have been delivered along the way and those who have held it have been rewarded.
Last year it pretty much achieved peak financial legitimacy (at least in the US). So what else is there left to hope for? Without hope what value does it have?
The value is what the next fool will pay. I will commit to buying one bitcoin for $1,500. But I want an original early vintage. I don’t want any of these crappy new bitcoins they make today.
“But, but, but, the newer ones are worth more because it took more energy to create them”. /s
Imagine what good things men could have done with al that energy. And what the current price of energy would be if we didn’t waste energy on mathematical currency, and hallucinating, slob creating AI.
Quality went to heck when they started using those cheap, Chinese electrons.
At the end of the day Andy, crypto does have some inherent value. If only for drug dealing and money laundering.
That doesn’t mean that bitcoin should be worth $150,000, but I don’t think it will ever be worth $0, because it DOES have its uses.
If I had a bet I’d say it will end up somewhere right inbetween, zero and 150k….
Gold.
His next move should be to create MegaStrategy which will buy Strategy stock and sell its own stock at a 2x premium to buy more Strategy stock. Then make GigaStrategy, etc. Infinite money!
Brilliant! If there’s a catch I can’t see it. Time for an IPO!
Catch 22 is always in play. Join that “Air Forced” and you’ll never get out alive.
“it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.”
Seems ridiculous. And no fool would buy that. I’d want some options on MegaStrategy to REALLY leverage that investment.
MW: Strategy’s sinking stock, heavy losses put the policy of ‘don’t ever sell your bitcoin’ to the test
Bitcoin ETF suffers worst decline in over a year — and new investors are now sitting on ugly losses
DRUDGE: SHITCOIN
Who would have ever thought that selling binary strings of numbers that are completely arbitrary and utterly worthless would implode to zero?
“completely arbitrary and utterly worthless”
You are missing the point! fees…all those professionals cashing in along the way…
They’re not arbitrary: They require significant investment of processing time to locate, with their validity and movement verified using that same system. There is some intrinsic value in that.
The argument of intrinsic value doesn’t really hold here because the value is what someone else is willing to pay. Like a Rembrandt painting, the intrinsic value is basically zero but somehow still has value.
That’s not in any way a claim as to what that value should be! I think the price is crazy. And all those “alt coins”… Those are also kike paintings, but done by kindergarten kids. (IMO)
Rembrandt speaks to one’s heart. Bitcoin is simply a crooked poker game where the biggest, slimiest traders hold the aces.
MW: Software stocks fall for an eighth straight day, with a sweeping roster of decliners
IGV -4.97%
Wolf Man invested his life savings into cryptos. 😁
TBH, if the stock market were based on any sense of rationality, Tesla would be a $25 stock.
If Tesla investors were rational people, there would not even be a discussion about a trillion-dollar pay package for Musk. In all of its history, Tesla generated a combined profit of $41 billion. These people are so out there, they live on Mars.
I don’t know how, because Strategy is more than one stock, but somehow it’s behaving like a closed call ETF for bitcoin. It’s picking picking up yield maxing morons and crypto morons.
Bitcoin is like a religion for many who bought into it. Not convinced it’s done until the ones buying it are out of a job for a time (recession) and will need real $ to pay for their life.
The ones exploiting this bubble need to move on to other speculative assets. Maybe they already moved on with gold / silver + AI and this is the end. That would be very refreshing. But if the devotes keep funneling their paychecks into Bitcoin in the next months why wouldn’t smart money move back in to exploit it unless they are worried about bubbles elsewhere imploding and the contagion from that.
If Bitcoin is a ripple, the AI bubble is a tsunami. We are looking at a tens-of-trillions-of-dollars wipeout of imaginary money.
So the big 6 have sent so much $ to NVIDiA for AI investment. It’s almost inevitable it will be NVIDIA that folds, kinda like a Lehman.
Then I guess the government will make the others whole? Maybe a EV car ride into Washington event after the fall? Or perhaps the robots will carry litters for the billionaires.
That’s the problem. I keep seeing proof that people are investing in AI and buying AI chips/data processing as proof that there’s not a bubble.
But to me, that’s no more proof that there is a need for office space than it would be if you built tons of empty towers. The proof that AI isn’t a bubble would be actual returns on that investment commensurate with the amount put in.
I’ve seen no evidence of that so far.
Do Tesla next please
I watched some of the call. Amusing.
I don’t understand why the preferreds aren’t getting hammered. Ok, so they have lots of cash to cover them for 2.5 years. Then what? Odd that the real risk isn’t priced in at all.
what a trade if you get it right!
That ain’t the half of it wolf. The Biggest of banks also lent money to folks who bought bitcoin with these monies. Lots of money. You’ll hear none of this on tv. Not on cnbs, not on faux noise.
You know and why shouldnt the biggest banks lend money to clients in order to buy bitcoin? These banks already know that they are too big to fail. Ain’t that special?
Those loans are secured by the collateral, bitcoin. Just like regular margin loans, or securities-based loans (SBLs) for billionaires or margined precious metals or anything. If the value of the collateral drops below a certain limit, the banks issue a margin call, and if the client cannot come up with the cash, banks seize the collateral. Banks can lose some money on these deals, but not a lot. Their clients can – and do – lose everything.
Saw something today that a lot of the bitcoin miners are turning the machines off, they aren’t profitable unless bitcoin is at 70,000 or more.
I don’t follow this stuff – I feel like I should research why it takes so much energy to mine bitcoin, but I’m reminded of the old high school sports cheer:
“ apathy, apathy, that’s our cry!
A – P – A – T…h… aaahhh… whatever…”
Current average cost of mining bitcoin is being reported at ~$90,000. So only true believers will keep on mining at current prices.
I guess now the clock starts running for many ‘mining’ companies, who will try and wait for the price to bounce back so they can stay alive. And if (when) it don’t, then I would assume that some of the hardware and installations could somehow be repurposed as a datacenter for AI (at a big loss, since current mining hardware is so tailored to its use that most will just be scrapped).
From one mania to the next.
While the AI folks won’t want the hardware, they may pay a premium for the location, since it likely guarantees electrical capacity at whatever level the miners were using. No time/cost for the electric utility to build out to the AI installation.
The cost of mining a BTC is proportional to the amount of processing power currently doing that mining. As less efficient hardware, now unprofitable, gets turned off, the cost-per-BTC-mined drops. Eventually, mining becomes profitable again.
Most miners sell at the market price when the mining happens so losses are mitigated just by powering down, but so are profits. (Ignoring fixed costs and depreciation, which are significant.)
But spun electrons once bought a pizza!
Its should be called bet-con. No assets backed. Don’t be the one holding an empty bag.
When “equity” from crypto appreciation is used as collateral for new loans to buy more crypto, what happens? Is’nt this supposed to be illegal?
I’m disappointed Saylor continued to buy at the cycle top. If anyone should have seen this coming, it’s him.
Everyone saw this coming! It’s happened numerous times before. Absolutely nobody is surprised by it’s happening but nobody can guess the timing.
Dan,
You don’t understand Saylor. He is buying to PUSH UP the price of bitcoin, he is not timing the market, he is manipulating the market.
So to push bitcoin ever higher, he has to buy even after huge price spikes in order to create the next price spike.
Obviously, that business model doesn’t work forever. But that’s part of his business model.
The other part is that he constantly spreads bullshit gobbledygook hype across the media (and the media loves it because it creates clicks) in order to manipulate bitcoin higher.
During the Dotcom bubble, this same company he founded and ran was caught falsifying its financial statements and lying to investors to push up the price of its shares and to rip off its investors. And it destroyed its investors, as you can see from the first spike in the chart (-99.6% collapse).
The difference is that he is now a lot more cunning, ingenious, and sophisticated. And he got very rich already by selling part of his shares of this bitcoin treasury company, and even if Strategy shares go to zero, he will still be very rich.
I remember MicroStrategy collapsing during the dotcom bubble! It was one of the first of the high flyers to collapse, right about when the Nasdaq peaked in March of 2000.
Anyway, Saylor was on Bloomberg Television a few months ago. Bloomberg has a feature called “In case you missed it” where they replay a brief part of the appearance of a recent guest, and one of these showed Saylor claiming Bitcoin was going to a million dollars. I saw it several times, and found it to be reprehensible. Bloomberg stopped showing it, I guess if Bitcoin hadn’t tanked they would still be showing it.
Here’s the thing–which I posted on several websites when Bitcoin went above $100k– why would anyone buy something for $100,000 after it was just $2 in 2009? I mean, talk about missing the boat!!! There will be many other boats. If Bitcoin were to tank 95 percent, the people who paid $2 (or even less) will still be mega-millionaires, while the people who paid $100,000 or more will get destroyed. Furthermore, it was never really understood just what it’s purpose as a financial instrument was, or what made it so valuable. And on top of that, to this day, no one knows the true identity of the person who started it!!! (And few people seem to be disturbed by that or even question it!) As far as I’m concerned, it’s the biggest pyramid scheme in the history of mankind. Buffett called it “rat poison.”
All the people who promote or endorse crypto, they are worse than stock analysts who keep raising their price targets and pumping companies that don’t have any profits.
October of 1999, that was the first time MicroStrategy collapsed.
I always remembered it as being one of the first tech stocks to collapse.
That is the saddest part out of all of this. Bitcoin can go to zero and Saylor will still turn out fine. He has made millions over the years by paying himself a salary to run the fraudulent company. All of the naive investors will get screwed. No matter what happens, he will still be able to relax and sip Mai Tais on some Carribean beach.
Sailor has sold nearly a quarter of a billion dollars of his MSTR stock over the last few years.
I never understood why anyone would buy shares in this company as opposed to just buying Bitcoin. I also never understood why anyone would loan money to the company so it could buy Bitcoin. That said, with the stock now trading at a discount to book value, there’s a universe where it could make sense to be long the stock and short bitcoin.
It’s a religion. You have to believe in it to see it.
“Bagholders INC.” – LOL! But don’t worry, Michael Saylor made a ton of money.
Problem Saylor is gonna face is a prolonged crypto winter will give opportunities for companies to re-engineer his design with lower cost basis and more affordable/better structured debt/equity instruments. With MSTR underwater, the 2.0’s come online and there’s a goal now.
BTC has its issues, but crypto will recover. The next phase will be ubiquitous gamification across everyday apps, and the likely target won’t be BTC it will be ETH (because it all runs on ETH). If you don’t think this has value, let me remind you to send $20,000 over ETH currently takes about 4 minutes. How long does it take to do that between your bank accounts? And it’s all immediately verifiable on the blockchain – yes, this is a real technology.
Not saying this happens soon, but 5-10 years from now all your YouTube/Twitch/TikTok and video game reward tokens will be on blockchains and exchangeable. The popular and in demand tokens will command a higher price. You’ll be trading your WoW currencies to pay the bills someday 🤷♂️ gonna be crazy
That entire business model only works if crypto prices keep shooting from new high to new high. It doesn’t work at all and is self-defeating and is self-cannibalizing when crypto prices drop.
From my perspective, it’s a matter of garnering attention. If you can get the public to pay attention to your enterprise and it rewards attention through gamified tokenization and that token can be exchanged across Ethereum, the repackaging and rebranding of that exercise creates the liquidity inflows and raises the market cap.
The weak coins are definitely cannibalized, but the value comes with the spikes. If everyone is trying to trade Long on ETH, then when they buy doesn’t so much matter if subsequently your token yield spread peaks across ETH then you make money – with your TikkieTok coins, WoW blockchain currency, Twitch credits, etc as they join the public exchanges (which you can’t build right now without ETH).
It ain’t dead – it will rise again. We’re at the starting line.
Craptos – all of them – are headed to their fair value of ZERO.
Why does any of that require a blockchain?
Go to a car dealership and try to negotiate a price in Etherium. You will either get laughed out of the place or end up paying twice the price you would spend in dollars because they are uncertain of how fast they can flip the Etherium back to dollars.
There is no crypto currency that meets the the definition of a currency. They are nothing more than vehicles for speculation. Crypto-nutters will say that is no different than paintings, but at least I can hang a painting on my wall and enjoy it.
Follow the dots. Bitcoin was always a challenge to gold. The US intends to revalue its gold and place that “free” money in the Treasury General Account for any use Trump/Bessant see fit. I think they are shooting for $2T if they can get it. This requires gold at $8K
The US government is behind the rise in gold pricing and the crush of Bitcoin.
Except it’s not. Bitcoin trades like a levered tech stock.
Notice how the buy the dippers jumped in this morning, in Pavlovian fashion, and bitcoin has rocketed up at the same pace as the Nasdaq?
Mike R
“The US intends to revalue its gold and place that “free” money in the Treasury General Account for any use Trump/Bessant see fit.”
Do goldbugs ever think? So the government revalues the US gold holdings at whatever price, and then what?
That’s just a paper entry. They cannot spend any of it or pay down the debt with it or do anything else with it unless they SELL the gold.
So watch the price of gold if the US government starts selling its gold holdings 🤣
The “strategy” is this: Treasury takes the gold to the Fed- says give us $100k per ounce- we pay off the national debt- debt jubilee! The budget is magically balanced, and they are stablecoin geniuses!
It’s insane. But nothing is beyond this possibility. And the fact I can articulate how it works lends itself to some late night WTF moment.
Does this change the real world prices? Um, yes. How? UP, some crazy amount, and then that paid off debt cascade does whack crap on the entire financial system. So, pay off your mortgage with 3 troy gold things? Ok, but what happens then? Do we then just knock two zeros off of our money?
And what happens when nobody wants to buy anything in dollars?
Reality is not going to let this happen, but should someone get control of the fed, well, all bets are off.
Citizen AllenM
They can do no such thing. And they won’t. It’s just BS. But they can sell the gold to monetize it.
Bitcoin has not really been moving with tech stocks, at least not for many, many months, tech was almost at an all time high just a few days ago. The bounce with tech Friday was most likely just coincidental. Now it is very possible that if Bitcoin continues to fall it could have an adverse affect on overall sentiment for tech stocks (or vice versa.)
What evidence do you have that the US Treasury plans to revalue its 8,000 metric tonnes of gold from its present $42.42 per ounce? Please do tell.
You need to stop surfing so much and pay more attention to finacial news.
It’s been stated a number of times by Bessant himself. “Monetizing” the asset side of balance sheet is the term used. Gold is the most logical asset they will start with.
When gold and silver were ripping higher, JP Morgan came out with an $8K/ounce cap for gold. Recently, they’ve reduced down to $6.5K/ounce. They also slammed silver and gold down; more so silver. Why? Because silver was getting crazy expensive and is needed to all the AI bullshit projected. Silver had been “pulled up” by the gold rally (which continues) as it is seen as both an industrial and precious metal.
So things will settle out here for awhile. Gold will resume its climb; albeit more controlled. And I think silver will be capped around 70ish.
The story on monetizing US gold is not mine; it’s out there everywhere, including as I said by Bessant. The theory on the smackdown is mine and I hold firm to it. Silver is just too important for industrial use to let it scream to 150 or beyond. Now there is a notieable silver supply bottleneck; so anything is possible on silver price, but I never bet against the US Government; and trust me, they can manipulate pretty much whatever they want, if needed. JP Morgan has been doing for the USG for years to keep both silver and gold suppressed; for obvious reasons.
Go back to surfing.
Bessent is an idiot and a complete liar. Yesterday, Maxine Waters told him to just SHUT UP. Not a word he says has an value.
Monetizing gold means selling it.
“Monetizing gold means selling it.”
Selling it to cover the budget deficit and kick the can down the road a bit longer.
It is hilarious the nuttiness the goldbugs will come up with. On one hand they will talk about how it is the future of trade, then on the other they will talk about how JP Morgan Chase has been manipulating the price for years.
Here is a clue. If something is so easily manipulated that JP Morgan Chase can do it, it isn’t going to be come the dominate form of trade.
There are nation states with far more resources than JP Morgan. What country would ever allow their economy to be manipulated by foreign actors?
“Monetizing gold means selling it.”
Or leveraging what you have to extract money.
How about a new crypto backed by US gold holdings?
You have to put all of that useless gold sitting in Ft Knox to work. It doesn’t back the dollar anymore. Guns back the dollar. I suppose if things don’t work out, guns can back the new crypto also.
The US does not intend to do any such thing at all.
The Swiss have done the same sort of thing to gold. They printed a lot of Swiss Franks and bought gold.
This sort of behavior by governments and individuals is very bad. It makes everything a trade, a speculation a gamble.
What can you invest in today? What would you be happy buying and holding for ten years?
No, they printed a lot of CHF and bought a huge amount of US stocks and EU stocks, and USD-denominated credits and euro-denominated credits, in other words, fiat currency stuff. They don’t disclose their detailed holdings, except under US law, they have to disclose their US stockholdings in quarterly SEC filings, so we know those, and they are huge.
Certainly not gold at anything above $20 an ounce.
As always I watch the crypto space with interest but skepticism. Saylor is a financial genius and the high priest of BTC. Watching his videos is very compelling especially his digital real estate analogy. It’s pretty tasty kool aid … cherry flavour I believe. He’s probably right in the long run.
A “financial genius” for a “company he founded and ran that was caught falsifying its financial statements and lying to investors to push up the price of its shares and to rip off its investors”. These types of people are also known as conmen and frauds.
There is no effective means of securities enforcement in play right now under this administration. It is open season on gullible people and every shark knows it. Buyer beware.
Sure, in the very same way Bernie Madoff was a financial genius.
AMZN will spend a $100B on new pantries and fridges. U own the food.
Your food is stored secured in AMZN, Googl, IBM, MSFT… pantries and fridges ==> Co data are stored and secured data centers. It’s a new RE Bubble. Rent and cyber. Inflation can deflate this bubble.
Your landlords want to cook your food.
What’s going on in risk assets such that everything is up linearly? Is this a massive short squeeze? How do you look at that?
It’s rigged. All of it. Total insider trading by pigmen.
The ink wasn’t even dry on this article and the entirety of yesterday’s losses have been magically erased – in everything – as if yesterday never existed. In fact, over a long term chart in the future, you will never even see it it was such a short duration blip. The pigmen behind the scenes control everything.
Everything went literally STRAIGHT UP at the open. It all just reeks like nasty shit.
Well you know what they say if you dont know who the sucker at the table is it is you……………………
Wall Street sent the markets down to close QQQ, MSFT, NVDA…gaps.
Once done QQQ will rise > Oct 31 close. QQQ is in a trading range
since big red Oct 10. It’s not over. PnF is growing. We don’t know if QQQ is in accumulation, or distribution. $SPX [1M] RSI wasn’t in a bearish territory since Feb 2008, 17 years ago.
Robinhood’s stock is up 15% on Friday — but down 25% this year
It should be zero, as in gone a long time ago.
They say that over the years the death of bitcoin has been called hundreds of times.
And yet like today it just keeps bouncing back. And strategy up 25% in one day straight out of the imploded stocks. Time will ultimately tell.
Crazy but that’s the facts I guess
The answer to “what’s up” is: Volatility.
Volatility begets volatility.
DJI: ATH. The pattern for the recent years is this: SPX/ Nasdaq hit ATH (one, then the other, or together). DJI lags, but it tops when the others are suddenly “out of favor.”
I am not looking in depth but it appears that the smart money is probably taking the profits and the retailers are still buying the dips (which benefits the smart money).
The “January indicator” doesn’t have a lot to say, but could indicate an “up” year in markets.
Crypto volatility is the norm. PMs are (as observed many times here) susceptible to manias. In 2011 I believe silver topped first then gold rebounded to new ATHs. The same levels were not seen again for years.
BTC was breaking important support: cue the dip buyers! I’m not convinced today’s price action in any market is indicative of much besides the “up and right” narrative.
The market size is an important consideration: Crypto is still about half of the ATH peak ($2T today, vs $4T ATH). It added 0.4T in market cap, just today. It also looks like a “breakdown/ backtest” pattern, until proven otherwise.
I sense traders are getting spent by looking for opportunities and getting burned by the volatility (instead of the MOON profit promised).
Silver is a tiny market, compared to gold. All this means that a (relatively) little bit of hot money makes a big difference. Silver is maybe $4T. Gold maybe $35T. S&P $60-65T.
The article says a lot about the layers of leverage that are considered acceptable: increasing continually until the margin call.
COVID was one such call, but it was quickly and amply papered over. 2022 was a rate-driven downturn/ repositioning that has been jawboned against from the start, and the low-rate “light” for the cronies is probably soon to dawn: inflation be damned.
I don’t have a projection for any index value at “year end.” It seems like at best a 2015 type scenario: the year was “flat” but volatility picked up and the drawdown was scary.
At worst? 2003, 1929?
I only know one thing is for sure. If we continue with a situation where assets boom, so the rich and corporations feel like things are great, while 70-75% of Americans hate the economy and think it sucks, we’re looking at the White House/Congress changing parties every 4 years until something structural actually changes.
Disclaimer: I recognize that a lot of that 70-75% are actually not doing bad, and are still spending, etc., but when it comes to the ballot boxes, what matters is their perception. And as long as they perceive that the economy sucks, well that’s all that matters.
^^this. And both sides will continue to become more and more extreme to cater to the struggling masses. Promising they’ll fix it and being looked at as a savior.
Yep. Starting in 2022 or so, the elite, including Biden and his administration, went on and on about how great everything was, and the people weren’t having it.
Now that Trump has been in office for a full year, the people still think affordability sucks, and they’re not having his excuses either.
While both parties and the mainstream media often use the stock market as a barometer for the economy, the majority of the American public is tired of being told that, as evidenced by the fact that they still feel the economy sucks. And again, here, I don’t even care about reality, what I care about is perception, as that is what dictates people’s voting.
We really need more political parties, ranked choice voting, getting rid of the electoral college etc. Both parties are currently more or less forced to cater to the most extreme part of their base because those are the ones who vote in the primaries. The middle 80% or so of the electorate then has to mitigate that the only way they can: by toggling back and forth between the parties each election. That causes a lot of unnecessary dysfunction, and even when it works, the result is gridlock, which people see as better than whatever each party would have done if they had gotten their way. With the political system now frozen, we return to your regularly scheduled rapacious capitalism.
This did not disappoint, thanks for writing it up, Wolf!
Buy BITI, baby. Ride the vaporcoins down.
Just watch your timing. Very carefully.
Crypto firm apologizes for sending bitcoin users $40 BILLION by mistake when they were only supposed to get $1.37 each
South Korean company Bithumb was meant to send about 2,000 won ($1.37) to each user as part of a promotion, but instead transferred roughly 2,000 bitcoins to everyone.
I am completely unable to justify the value of all these cryptos. Perhaps I might be living in yesteryear world and personally, I think all these cryptos assets are 0 in value and each crypto just another slot machine. The problem is, when there is a profit made, policymakers are just too enthusiast to share it. Instead of discourage it they participate into it. My only concern is, if the whole cryptos shenanigans collapse someday, will the FED going to step in as they are now ‘too big to fail’.