MARKET UPDATE: FED Backstops The Yen, Metals Rip, And Neoclouds Rebound

What’s freaking me out about this market is the fact that it feels like the shitcoin traders have left crypto, pivoted to the stock market, and now the stock market trades kind of like crypto used to.

Good morning, Jonah.

Good morning, Avi.

How are you?

Good afternoon.

Afternoon for me. How’s it going? How are we looking?

We’re looking good, Avi. I was just reviewing the title that Brad put beneath us here: “Market Update: Fed Backstops the Yen.” You heard it here first.

1. The Yen Intervention Trade

The dollar-yen is a fantastic leading indicator for U.S. Treasuries because Treasuries’ largest holder used to be China. They’re letting those roll off because they hate America, and America hates China. But the new number-one holder of U.S. Treasuries—it used to be number two—to the best of my knowledge, is Japan, an offshore holder, of course.

And then there’s a carry trade, obviously. For those of you out there looking for little side hustles and side projects, try to build a systematic strategy with Claude Code or ChatGPT. You should have decades of history for this, where you track the price of the dollar-yen and use that as a leading indicator. Maybe spot minus some moving average, and use that as a signal to trade Treasuries or Treasury futures. There’s an interesting relationship there.

I find it hard to grasp why Scott Bessent, of all people, is deciding to intervene in a currency market because he should know more than anybody else that interventions very rarely work. That was the whole premise behind him betting against the yen and making a fortune, and the whole premise behind him betting against the pound with Soros and breaking, quote-unquote, “the Bank of England”: Interventions can’t stop market forces.

It’s very rare for that to be the case. Every now and then, there’s a case where traders are asleep at the wheel, and the intervention wakes them up to reality. But if you’re trying to fight a market force, it’s very rare that you’re going to be able to succeed.

One of the questions that I had heading into this stream, which I tried to answer for you guys, is why. Why is he intervening in the market right now? And ultimately, what does it mean for you, the investor?

There’s obviously a big trade—the yen carry trade—where, because you can borrow yen at very low costs, you borrow yen and then sell it into dollars or into U.S. Treasuries. That obviously dampens the price of Treasuries and ultimately helps the market because, as it keeps rates low, it allows more money to flow into higher-risk assets when yields are low.

So you might ask yourself, well, why then would it be bad for the yen to depreciate against the dollar? Why would that be the case if it’s going to juice the stock market? I don’t know, Jonah, if you have an answer.

Uh.

But I have some thoughts.

You’ve put the question to me. Sadly, despite racking my brain—I knew Brad prepped us that this would be the title of the episode—I just don’t know.

This is one of those things where I’m left scratching my head. I do not know why we would intervene in a foreign currency. I’ve never seen that happen before.

Interest rates and currency markets kind of break my brain. I find myself more aligned with commodities thinking, where there’s an underlying molecule or barrel that you can attach your thinking to. I have such a better understanding of the Iran war than of this because underneath it is a barrel of oil, right? Or a nuclear weapon.

Here, I have no idea. I guess that’s unhelpful if you’re listening. But what I would say is, if you find yourself in the camp of having a good grasp of why something is going on, then you can trade it. If you’re like me in this situation, avoid it. Do not take risk on the back of these sorts of things because trading should be intuitive. Your portfolio should be intuitive. You should be able to explain it to yourself.

I have no freaking idea why Scott Bessent is doing this. It seems frankly really stupid.

I think my answer actually goes in line with what you said at the beginning. Japan is committed to defending the yen. Japan doesn’t want the yen to go crazy.

You said at the beginning, who’s the largest holder of U.S. Treasuries? Japan. So what does the U.S. not want? The U.S. does not want Japan dumping Treasuries, forcing rates up, and hurting the markets.

I think Bessent has made the calculation that the yen showing a little bit of strength is going to hurt the carry trade less—or that the carry trade unwinding will hurt Treasuries less—than Japan’s central bank intervening and selling Treasuries to defend the yen. That’s the counterbalancing effect, right? That’s the calculation that he made.

What does it mean for us? It means that this is yet another example of our government being willing to intervene to make sure that the markets are stable. We are slowly moving toward—I don’t want to say it—a state-controlled market in many ways. It’s kind of nuts. Every day we go another inch.

It looks like we’re lagging for some reason. I kind of—what’s going on here?

Oh no, fam. We’re lagging.

Oh no, fam. Who has a bad connection? I’m blaming you, Jonah. It’s probably me, though.

It’s usually your fault. Brad’s saying it must be on YouTube’s end. I see you fine. X is fine. If you’re seeing a lag on YouTube, pivot over to X. Yeah, Brad.

The internet must be paid in yen.

Oh man, that’s awesome.

That was a comment. Somebody commented, “The internet must be paid in yen.” Actually, what’s kind of hilarious is that—I’m not going to dox my location here in New York. But let’s just put it like this: I live very close to an internet provider’s headquarters, and my internet is still trash.

You live very close to a—yeah, I’m not going to dox you. I was about to make a joke that would dox you.

2. Government Managed Markets

I think the issue that I have with this is, okay, so we’re an interventionist market. The government is dabbling in things and managing price action across a wide variety of securities and commodities. What does that mean?

That means that if the government has anointed your security or your holding as strategically important, you can hold it with confidence, buy dips, tax-loss-harvest dips, and add more on dips. You probably shouldn’t be selling on rallies, and you shouldn’t be worried about rotating into other stuff. You’re good until at least 2028.

If your asset has not been anointed—which may be crude oil. Donald Trump has historically been tweeting bearish stuff about crude oil. Then that thing’s just not going to rally. It’s not going to sustain a rally. You’re not going to get your $200 oil. That’s going to be managed.

Trump has been telegraphing his management of markets since 2000, I guess, as president, since the very beginning. But well before that, he was tweeting about asset prices. The guy wants interest rates lower. He wants stocks higher. He wants input commodities lower, but not too low, because that hurts the American producer.

It’s all out there. There’s no mystery. So for me, that makes long-term investing very easy to do. You just ride what he tells you to ride. You buy when he tells you to buy, and you sell when he makes it clear that the price of something has gone too high for his preference.

The yen is way outside the remit of what I would have considered to be a market of interest to Trump and Bessent. It seems like a very stupid decision, but Bessent is maybe the least stupid person in the entire United States government right now—maybe all of Washington, D.C.

Actually, hilariously, I don’t know if you saw his tweet about Nick Timiraos.

Yeah, I did.

He said—and I quote, let me just read this for you guys if you haven’t seen it. It’s hilarious. He goes, “One of the highlights of the Warsh Fed has been watching stenographers posing as journalists, like the Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos, reduced to reporting Fed backroom gossip because they’re incapable of performing real economic or monetary policy analysis without being spoon-fed.”

Now that is hilarious.

Bessent for president.

I mean, this guy would be a great president, but he’s also ridiculously sassy. For a reason. I thought that was quite funny.

3. The Warsh Fed Playbook

Basically, it’s so interesting that on one end our government is really leaning into free markets, and on the other, they’re really leaning away. They’re saying, “We want to take…” I think when you really dig into it, what are they doing? They’re trying to take power away from the Fed and from other branches of government and consolidate that power into the executive branch, right?

They want to be able to dictate the path of the market because they view the Fed as somewhat incompetent. The whole premise here is that Trump and Bessent put in Warsh because he’s not going to give forward guidance, because they believe that forward guidance is bad.

If you thought that the Fed was competent and right most of the time, then forward guidance wouldn’t be so bad. But because the Fed tends to lag, or tends to be reactive to economic data, Bessent and Trump got together and said, “Look, we’ve got to fix this. Let’s basically give the Fed less power.”

I mean, taking away forward guidance and installing somebody who doesn’t like it is effectively taking away power from the Fed. And so what does that mean? You just have to pay a lot closer attention to, as you said, what the administration has anointed. The whole reading of the macro tea leaves—or reading the Fed tea leaves and paying attention to what they’re doing—is obviously going to be much less of a game than it has been historically, which is honestly a very good thing.

I think it’s dovish that there’s no more forward guidance. And again, to you, Avi, and anybody else listening, take this with the biggest, fattest grain of salt of all time because I absolutely suck at interest-rate trading. But just knowing Trump and knowing how he thinks, if you install a guy who’s famous for not doing forward guidance, that means that more smoke-filled, back-room-type conversations can take place, right?

That means that whatever Kevin Warsh’s weird sexual fetish is, it will be fulfilled in exchange for a 50-basis-point cut, and the market won’t be upset about that because he’s guided something sensible on a call.

I basically expect that interest-rate volatility will be higher. There will be more stuff going on behind the scenes that we hear about through the various back channels that finance people listen to. But basically, he’s less committed. He’s less locked into what would otherwise academically be a sensible interest-rate path because they can always just come out and surprise people with stuff. That’s what it seems like to me.

Obviously, Trump would not have appointed somebody who isn’t committed to the Donald Trump agenda of lower interest rates. It’s going to happen come hell or high water.

4. Metals Lead The Rebound

Look, I 100% agree. I also just want to take a step back and talk about the bullishness of the markets in general. The last time that we streamed, we were mid-blowup in memory, and now we’re sort of past this. We’re past the liquidations. I think we got the churn. We’re back on track.

The Nasdaq has gone in for the all-time highs. The S&P has already hit the all-time highs, and a lot of our favorite assets are really starting to move. Look at gold, for example. We talked about gold on the last pod and the last few pods, saying that it looked really, really primed for a move.

One of the reasons that it looked primed for a move was because I think a lot of the central banks that were selling had stopped doing so much. Not only that, yesterday we got a piece of news that the Bank of Korea is actually starting to add to its gold reserves in anticipation of rebuilding them for a future crisis, and that is extremely important for the gold price.

What you saw from 5,500 down to 4,000 was a mass degrossing from central banks selling gold at the highs to shore up their reserves, and now that process is done and is in reverse. That’s why gold is up 4% today: people are starting to realize that the flows are going to start coming back.

That is completely separate from how gold has historically acted because if you go back 10 or 15 years, gold is very sensitive to rates. I think gold is much less sensitive to rates than it is today. In fact, you could even make an argument that as these central banks acquire gold, they might be printing money, or they might be selling their own Treasuries to diversify.

They might be selling U.S. Treasuries to diversify into gold. And so you might actually see an environment where rates can go up and gold can go up as well because of flow pressure. That just takes me back to my overall thesis of where the markets are today, which is, at the end of the day, the entire thing is just capital flows. The entire thing is just where money is going to go.

It has a lot less to do with these historical correlations. I mean, if you pick up a CFA book, for example, it’s going to teach you about all these correlations that currently don’t exist. That’s why I’m very bullish on gold. I’m also bullish on palladium. The palladium chart looks phenomenal.

I’m just bullish on metals in general right now. I think that so much focus has been paid to memory, so much focus has been paid to the hot assets, and metals have been overlooked for a while. They’re starting to show immense strength right now. Silver, copper, gold, palladium—all these things, I think, are going to do extremely well over the next 3 months.

I think we could honestly see all-time highs in gold in the next 6 months. I’ve taken down some equity exposure, which I talked about on the previous pods because I was bullish on gold. I’ve allocated more to gold, really as a trade. But in general, I’m constructive on the markets.

When you look at memory, memory was just a blowup from Aschenbrenner and profit-taking, but the entire framework is still intact. Intel is still a phenomenal hold, in my opinion. And so overall, I’m very constructive on the markets, and I think we might head into just a monkey-dart situation where whatever you pick, as long as it’s not complete trash, is probably going to go up.

I think if you want to be defensive and still not just preserve but appreciate your capital, hold the S&P. If you want to be risk-on, hold the Nasdaq, Mag 7, MANGOs, or whatever you can get your hands on. Just go further toward AI.

MANGOs, I see you asking. It’s the new acronym on Twitter for Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic—something. It’s basically a new Mag 7. The further toward AI you go, I guess the tip of the spear would be Micron, SanDisk, and the KOSPI stock market over in South Korea with leverage, right? The more exposure you’re getting to the same trade.

But I agree with you—it’s just a monkey-dart scenario. Now, going back to the metals market, I disagree with you a little bit, not a lot. I do think that gold is just flows.

Gold has never been a very fundamental market, right? The central banks are just these gigantic elephants, and everybody else doesn’t matter. Sure, some of our cousins in India like to buy for jewelry demand, but it’s not like a real commodity. It’s its own little animal. It’s just capital flows.

I think it is very risky and problematic, especially for young traders, to get into the mentality of, “Oh, it’s all flows.” If you want to be really successful in a market, especially over the long run, you’ve got to understand the fundamentals. You have to understand how the barrels move, how the molecules diffuse through the pipe, and how the 10-Qs and 10-Ks translate into price action for the stock.

If you ignore fundamentals and just decide that it’s all capital flows and technicals, you’re missing out on basically 80% of the puzzle over the long run. So, with regard to palladium, there’s probably something going on with car demand or the electric-vehicle transition, the energy transition there, that I’m unaware of.

My trading idol, Stanley Druckenmiller, got on the tapes a couple of days ago, and he was asked, “If you could put on one trade with a blank sheet of paper, what would it be?” And he just said, “Copper.” They asked, “Why?”

Remember, Druck is the GOAT. He is the guy. He’s the best ever to do it, the way that he does it. He was like, “Well, the reason why copper is—chip demand, data center demand, energy demand, power-transfer demand, just building cities and stuff with wires in the buildings—the demand doesn’t seem like it’s going to go sideways or down in the next 8 years, and supply seems pretty fixed and kind of diseased. It’s not going to go up for XYZ reasons.”

The supply is just capped, and the demand is on a supercycle to infinity for all the reasons that we talk about every day. He’s like, “I wouldn’t overthink this. Just buy copper.” So honestly, it kind of makes me want to go buy some copper.

If you’re looking to express a trade, you look for the bottleneck. The bottleneck here is at the commodities level. People talk about electrons being a bottleneck. I disagree. I think you can find enough electrons globally to satisfy data-center energy demands.

You may not be building data centers in Northern California anymore. You probably end up building them overseas, but who cares? Those packets of information can get shipped back undersea in nanoseconds. The real constraint is at the commodities level.

So I think if you want the purest exposure for a long-term trade, you probably go down to the bottom of the capital stack—the AI Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. For human beings, it’s wheat; for AI, it’s copper.

I saw, on the other end of that spectrum, that a lot of people like to take a bunch of risk and buy things like Galaxy stock, like GLXY, to get their exposure to AI.

But, just to close this rant—

You have to—yeah, go ahead.

Jeff Dorman, who I think is a good guy—I debated with him a lot when we were trading against each other—wrote a tweet. He wrote, “The sad reality of Galaxy: slightly better than the horrific crypto stocks like COIN, Circle, BitGo, and Gemini, but not quite an AI stock yet. If you're going to be a conglomerate with 2 weird business lines that don't intersect at all, you better be a good storyteller, and Galaxy is not doing that well. Their CEO only talks about macro. Their investor relations team only talks about Helios and data centers. Their public-facing research team only talks about crypto.”

Basically, my point here is: don't overcomplicate things. If you want to put on a great trade, get some OpenAI in the private markets, buy some Mag 7 on the public markets, and buy some copper if you want to really take a YOLO. Don't try to get cute or creative with this trade. Keep it simple.

5. Crypto Finds A Bid

Yeah, I think I generally agree with that. I do want to talk a little bit about the crypto market because it actually, for the first time in a while, has started to look pretty good. But Jonah, what's funny to me is that I've been so burned by crypto over the last 6 months—not burned in a P&L sense, because I haven't made money on it, but burned more in the hopeful sense that maybe we get a real rally this time, maybe it's sustainable this time, maybe it'll work this time.

I do remember back in 2018 and 2019, and also 2022 and 2023, that we bottomed basically when literally nobody cared about it anymore. For better or for worse, people still kind of care, and people are still kind of allocated to it. So I don't know if we've reached peak despair yet.

But I do have to say, at least when I go look at price action, we're starting to see things look better. On Bitcoin, we couldn't really get below $60K. On Ethereum, we had that sort of wall at $1,550 that we couldn't get below, and we're up since then. There are some assets that have been up only for the last 2 months. Uniswap has actually done extremely well and is up 8% today, and it bottomed on June 10—or, actually, June 6 is when it bottomed.

Overall, the market is showing resilience in the face of stress. The real question obviously becomes: is crypto the right thing to buy? The answer over the last year has been no. Even if crypto goes up, even if Bitcoin goes from $60K to $80K, that's a 30% move, and you have your SanDisk going up 40% in the last 2 weeks, right?

So is it the right move to buy crypto? I'm starting to think yes. I'm starting to think that it makes sense as a trade. Maybe you buy Zcash, maybe you buy some of the leaders, but it's starting to look a little bit better on a 3- to 6-month time horizon to allocate some of your portfolio there.

But as I've said over previous podcasts, my preferred way of expressing bullishness on crypto is through Robinhood specifically. Other than prediction markets, which generate a tremendous amount of margin for Robinhood, crypto is, I think, 10 times more profitable on a margin basis than options and 100 times more than stocks. If crypto volumes start ticking up, if crypto starts to do well, then Robinhood starts to do well.

But Robinhood also has all these other revenue lines, so that if crypto goes sideways, we can still go up as long as Robinhood is crushing and the equity markets are doing well. So while you're probably not going to get as much juice out of it as if you buy something like Uniswap and it goes up 50%, I think from a risk-adjusted perspective, it'll go up. It'll probably outperform BTC if BTC does well.

If BTC goes to $80K, I see Robinhood outperforming. You're probably at $120, at least keeping pace. But to the downside, I view Robinhood as being able to distance itself from crypto. So I'm kind of bullish right now on the whole crypto ecosystem. I'll keep you guys updated on my thoughts there.

My main trades right now, just in terms of tickers, are Intel. I bought it when I tweeted it out, so I think at about $93 is when I got in, which obviously wasn't as good as buying at $80 at the low. But I did get back into Intel. I bought Robinhood today, actually, at kind of the same price, at $92 or $93. So I'm breakeven on that right now, obviously, because I bought it 4 hours ago.

Other than those 2 trades, I'm sitting in indexes and all of the biotech stocks that I talked about before. I'm still sitting in ARKG. I'm sitting in BLLN [?], which has been quite a good trade. I think we're up 40% on that one, and I think it's going to continue. On XBI, I think I'm at breakeven. On ARKG, I think I'm up about 10% on these trades.

This is a very concentrated portfolio right now because I just think you need to pick stuff and sit in it right now. The flows are on our side, and so I'm quite constructive on all these names. Honestly, you could be sitting in MU, you could be sitting in SanDisk, you could be sitting in DRAM. I think the main thing right now is to just be invested.

When I try to think through what could possibly happen, maybe you get another heat-up in the Iran war. Nobody cares anymore. Maybe you get rates going up. It kind of seems like Bessent's on top of it right now, making sure that's not going to happen. So I think we probably get at least a lull in news through the end of the summer. Maybe it picks back up again in September.

Then maybe we're looking at new earnings seasons again. We'll see what's going to happen in Q3. But for now, I kind of see a month of free runway for the last month of summer for people to allocate, and I'll probably clip some profits heading into Labor Day. Other than that, if we rally a ton—but other than that, I'm pretty bullish on the complex right now.

Yeah, me too. I like what you said. For me, my big risk-on bet is Micron. I bought it basically around the time of the last pod last week, slightly before. That is my trade. I'm in indices, and the biggest YOLO that I have on right now is Micron, and I'm still adding to it.

6. Build A Clean Moonshot Book

This is why private wealth management as an industry is a scam, right? As a personal investor, you have to literally make a decision. You have to say, “Am I trying to preserve and protect capital and grow it steadily, just in line with or slightly ahead of inflation? Or am I trying to swing for the fences and make a lot of money?”

Am I trying to preserve and protect, or am I trying to swing and 1,000x my money? You can do both things in the same portfolio. You can say, “Hey, 90% of my money I'm going to try to preserve and protect, and 10% is my moonshot book.” So right now, my moonshot book is some Bitcoin and some Micron, right? The Bitcoin is a longer-term position. The Micron, I'm going to be getting out of.

When it comes to a moonshot book, I do not believe in overcomplicating things. People with 63 line items in their moonshot book are venture capitalists, right? If you have a liquid book with a big mess in it and a bunch of different positions in your moonshot book, you're screwed. You're not going to monetize it efficiently.

Meanwhile, in your wealth preservation book, or your wealth steady-appreciation and inflation-protection book, you should be very diversified. Frankly, the S&P 500 contains all the diversification and exposure you'll ever need, in my opinion.

What a private wealth manager will do—for those of you who have hit it big and are starting to consider, “Should I pay 1% of my net worth every year to one of these slick, suit-and-tie-wearing executives who manage wealth for billionaires and stuff?”—the answer is, if you're listening to this podcast, no, you shouldn't.

If you're a professional baseball player and need to be babysat so you don't accidentally spend all your money at a nightclub—which is literally an anecdote I was told by my former private wealth manager, whom I fired—you should get a private wealth manager. But if you're even halfway aware of markets and if you have an IQ above 100, you should just DIY.

The reason why is private wealth management as an industry is a scam. It is literally— They don't make the distinction that I made between wealth preservation and moonshot. They're obviously not going to take moonshots. That's not their job. Their job is wealth preservation. But none of them beat the S&P 500, ever.

Now that the 30-year Treasury is trading at a 5.2% tax-free yield, that's like a 7.5% or 8% S&P-equivalent return. The 10-year Treasury is trading at a 4.6%-something yield—4.6% tax-free—so that's like 6% or 7% before tax that you would need to earn the S&P 500. There are all these incredible instruments out there to give you exposure to stocks and bonds.

They're never gonna beat it. All they're gonna do is diversify you into a bunch of illiquid, high-fee crap that underperforms the S&P in the name of a little more wealth preservation that you don't need. So frankly, to me, moonshot books should be clean. Wealth preservation books should be clean and concentrated and the right shit. Indices and bonds are gonna do you great right now.

It's a beautiful environment for that for at least another 2 years, until the Trump administration sunsets.

I think it's hilarious that—well, the main reason to get a wealth manager is, as you said, if you have a sub-100 IQ and you just cannot be trusted with money. You gotta make it hard to access.

But this is also probably something that all of us—if you made money quickly, if you're a crypto investor and you made money very quickly, it's very easy to spend all that money instantly. I've seen so many people I came up with who joined crypto with me in 2017 and actually ended up making more money than me on the way up because they're smarter, they're more savvy, or they just took more risk. Whatever the reason, they made more money than me on the way up, but basically they spent half of it.

I mean, it's insane. I've seen people buy multiple sports cars. I've seen people go to the club and drop $250,000 on a table in Vegas when they're worth $10 million. And I'm like, “Do you realize that you just spent 2.5% of your net worth?”

Were you at that party? Tell me.

I was. It was amazing.

Share some anecdotes, man.

It was unbelievable. I mean, 2021 crypto was just a totally different world because if you were worth $10 million at the time, your thought process was, “I'm gonna be worth $30 million in 3 days because this shit is all gonna 3x. So what does it matter if I spend $250,000 in a night?” It actually just doesn't matter.

People were throwing money left, right, up, down. I mean, it was just actual...

The most I've ever spent in a night in Vegas was at the Marquee at the Cosmopolitan. I think I dropped 15 Gs.

That's the most you've ever spent in a night? I think I hit 50 once. This is a super out-of-touch conversation.

Dude, I know. But I'm obviously a lot older than you, so maybe inflation-adjusted, it's the same. My point is, for 15 Gs in 2013, I got a cool table in the front row and it was fun. For 250 grand, does Diplo come over and personally hang with you? What happens?

Actually, that did happen once. We got a table at Space for Peggy Gou on New Year's, and Diplo literally showed up to our table and just sat down with a collection of the weirdest women that I've ever seen in my entire life.

Some people were like, “Oh, that's cool that Diplo's here.” And I'm like, “He's kind of mooching. What are you doing here?” After maybe 20 minutes of him just sitting there—because we had the table right next to the DJ—I was like, “Dude, if you're not gonna pay, you can't drink our alcohol. You can't have your women drink it. Get out of here.”

So I went up to him and said, “Hey, do you want to chip in for the bill if you're gonna be here?” And he looks at me and goes, “What?” And I go, “Well, if you're not gonna chip in for the bill, you kind of need to leave.” He looked at me like nobody had ever talked to him this way in his entire life. And he's like, “What?”

You launched Diplo.

A few minutes later, he left. I wasn't super aggressive about it, but I was like, “Look, dude, we don't need you here. Right? You're actually kind of a weirdo.” But he's a nice guy. He's a nice guy.

Crypto 2021.

This was when crypto people were on top of the world, and we were like, “Actually, you might be a DJ, but I trade shitcoins. Get real. Who's the real cool one here? Yeah, I made $15 million off of Jelly Bean Coin. Off of Dogecoin.”

Yeah, exactly. Get out of here. I mean, you just make stuff up at that point. Nightlife back then was totally different. I don't know how we got on this topic. We were talking about wealth managers.

Yeah, you were saying if you just can't hang on to money—the spenders.

But basically, back then, you had to be careful with how you spent your money. Even myself, I see it flow out the door now. I have all these random subscriptions on my credit card. They go everywhere.

Every month I try to review all the things that I've subscribed to, and sometimes I get overwhelmed and literally just cancel my credit card so they stop charging me. At least once a year, I've canceled all my credit cards and had new numbers issued to make sure that my subscriptions don't keep going.

Then you have to call the credit card companies and say, “Please do not update my numbers with the automated subscriptions.” They do that now because they say it's to be helpful, but really it's to make sure that you keep spending money on the card. These scammers. I used to work at Capital One; I know all their tricks.

Look, it's an important thing. Easy money is fast money. That's always been my mentality. If you made it quickly, it can go quickly, especially when you're in this business.

My portfolio went down, I think, 15% from the peak in this last drawdown. But that last 20% it went up happened in 3 weeks.

You know what's weird about the market right now—

Easy money is fast money.

You know what's freaking me out about this market is the fact that it feels like the shitcoin traders have left crypto, pivoted to the stock market, and now the stock market trades kind of like crypto used to.

I was watching the insane volatility on the Leopold Aschenbrenner blowup and subsequent hard bounce, thinking to myself, “This is not the stock market that I remember.” I don't remember bulge-bracket stocks like Amazon and Microsoft literally gaining hundreds of billions of dollars of value in a day. Everything about this market feels like 2021 in crypto.

Even private markets, like watching Anthropic rip from being worth a few hundred million to a few billion to now whatever it's worth—basically a hundred billion. It's starting to get a little silly. It feels like numbers don't have meaning anymore.

I wonder whether it's the result of what you were saying earlier in the call—capital flows—whether it's just hot money flowing in like a white-hot ball of capitalism, or whether there's something more fundamental underlying it. Maybe the AI boom is real. Maybe this is 1999 Pets.com shit. I don't know, and that's what makes me feel so uneasy as an investor.

I wrap myself in the warm blanket of knowing that Donald Trump and his ilk in D.C. are gonna protect my bags through the end of the term. That's been a tried-and-true, battle-tested shield against undesirable financial outcomes, basically since I was at Vitol 11 years ago as an oil trader watching him tweet. It works, right? So I'm cool.

But something's amiss here. It just feels a little weird. So I'm gonna hang on and ride whatever inning this is—6, 7, 8, or 9—and probably pocket some more price appreciation. But come 2027, I'm really watching the political shifts as closely as I can, and if this DSA stuff accelerates, like I know Mamdani—

Who is technically not DSA. He technically calls himself a capitalist.

Yeah. Okay.

But I don't buy it.

So I don't buy any of that. Mr. Mamdani just won the Michigan primary. Mamdani's grocery stores are probably gonna be a smash hit. I'm watching this stuff closely.

These people will take the stock market to the woodshed. They will take the pill, right? For the longest time, I've been preaching that no politician or central banker has the balls or the mandate to unwind what's happened in capital markets, right?

These people will certainly debase the currency, which is good for Bitcoin over the long run. Bitcoin might get shanked first, but they will absolutely hike capital gains taxes, redistribute wealth, and hike corporate taxes, basically taking that S&P 500 right back down to where it was 5 years ago. That's what I think.

People often talk about the politics of it. We're focused on the economics of it. And the problem is that it's a real wave.

The Democratic Socialists of America are a genuine force to be reckoned with, and you can't just close your eyes and say, “Well, that's a small group of total radicals,” because that small group of radicals changed the world in 1917 when the Bolsheviks rose up and dethroned the Tsar.

I think the world is a little bit asleep at the wheel right now. But I don't think it's gonna happen in '28, because my general framework for how these political pendulum swings work is that they come back to the middle and then swing out even further. So I think what we've actually had is probably an extended period of time post-woke right now, where the culture has actually shifted toward the right. You've seen a complete cultural takeover in many ways, except for the pockets of extreme socialism and extreme leftism that you see in Brooklyn and whatnot.

But overall, I think Americans are really not in favor of woke ideology anymore in a way that they were in 2018. And so that led to Trump getting reelected, obviously. Now, I don't think either extreme side is strong enough right now to pull a victory. I think that most Americans probably—I know this sounds totally crazy and contrarian, and nobody believes me when I say this, but I genuinely think most Americans sit in the middle now and that Rubio has the best chance of winning the presidency. Everybody, when I say that, they go, “What are you talking about? The extremists are out in force.” I'm like, “Those are actually the loud people.”

That is a contrarian take right there.

I actually 100% believe this. So I think that Rubio is probably gonna be the 2028 nominee, and that means that we get another 4 years. But then, post-Rubio, I think that we get a swing to the left. Because at that point, I think what's gonna happen is that wealth inequality in the United States has gotten even worse.

The wealth has been captured by the top 0.1% because of what? Because of the AI boom. We get a hugely disaffected population that has not participated in this wealth creation because they don't actually have access to that capital, and then those people drag us to the left. Or you get economic populism on the right, but I think it's more likely that the left captures people. So my view on this is that we do have some time, by the way.

Yeah. But when you say that people haven't participated, and maybe I am admittedly out of touch, I've been a finance guy for 20 years. I've been a bit lucky in markets and sitting pretty, thank God, for now. But I don't know if this is the same as the 1917 revolution that you alluded to, when poverty and wealth inequality were probably similar to what they are today. You had the tsars in their palaces of gold and the peasants severely underperforming.

But back then, if you were in the underclass, you were sleeping on the floor in freezing-cold Russian temperatures, and your teeth were rotting out of your face. Today, global poverty levels have collapsed, with crop yields and other sorts of innovations. Even people I know here in my community who are struggling financially have a quality of life that is objectively better than even the richest people 50 years ago, right? It's hard to make ends meet—

But they don't believe that, or they don't feel it.

That's it. That's what I was getting to, which is that I guess it's all relative now, and the internet has made it abundantly clear what you don't have, which is what scares me the most. Because things are objectively pretty darn good for people in America. Equality of opportunity has, in my opinion, almost been achieved, or it's closer to being achieved than at any other point in American history.

Why do we need to suddenly pivot to equality of outcome? That's just a time-tested recipe for societal collapse. I'm struggling a bit. I'm scratching my head. I don't understand this political movement, but it seems to be rising so quickly.

Just setting political opinions aside, the Democratic Party was really searching for a message and a leader after the 2024 loss to Donald Trump, right? They were rudderless. And Zoran Mamdani basically stepped up to the plate and hit it out of the park. That is the winning message now. And that message is taking over basically 50% of the American political discourse at the top levels in Washington, basically, and in the halls of power around the country.

Not necessarily on Main Street or where people, as you said, are mostly moderate. But in the pilot seat of that political engine, that is the ideology that seems to resonate most with people. And so, in an era of polarization, back to the George Soros saying: you see a bubble, you kind of run toward it, right? Polarization is great while it creates a bubble that you can ride. But bubbles do pop.

So now, finally, for the first time since this rally started in 2008, there's significant downside risk emerging that we need to care about, which is the lack of will to continue propelling the bull market.

And Lord knows that we have used up a lot of that will. I want to end on something fun. The SpaceX earnings: SpaceX actually beat earnings by a billion dollars. I think analysts had them at 6.8. They came in at 7.2 billion. So, look, they're making money, Jonah. They're making money.

And not only that, they actually just crashed a rocket into the moon. How many companies do you know that can crash things into the moon? Not many.

Not many.

And so, if you can crash things into the moon, it's possible that your stock price might go to the moon.

That crash has gotta be worth at least a trillion dollars, right?

You have to think past the crash, think past the headline. The fact that they were able to crash anything into the moon is really the key here. And with all that being said, I'm super bullish on SpaceX, even though we got unlocks coming up, because who else is even targeting the moon?

I'm not bullish on SpaceX. Not financial advice: don't touch SpaceX with a 10-foot pole. Why? You just saw what a little sprinkling of unlocks did to the price. It got Diddy'd. Wait until we have the deluge, the freaking Hurricane Katrina of selling that's about to hit in whatever IPO plus 6 months. Oh my freaking God.

Let the supply unlock tomorrow, and I think we run for a month. By the supply unlock, I think we run for a month. That's my take. And that's just me looking at the chart and thinking to myself, “It looks pretty good,” and completely ignoring the fundamentals, because often that actually does work.

You're probably right. I just don't want to touch it because I don't want to think about it. I got my Moonshot book. I want to ride that Micron into the stratosphere. I don't want to ride SpaceX into unlocks.

You know what's done extremely well in the last 20 minutes since we started this stream is Ethereum. Ethereum is up 1.25% in the last 20 minutes. Bitcoin and Ethereum are looking like somebody's buying. I don't know who. I don't know if it's Tom Lee, I don't know if it's Saylor, but somebody's buying. People are buying crypto again, and more importantly, people aren't selling.

Now, I'll just take it back to the tweet that I tweeted out yesterday. I don't think that any of these rallies are gonna be sustainable. I'm a seller of 75, I'm a seller of 80 on BTC, but that doesn't mean that we can't get back there. It doesn't mean that we can't trade 82.

Until equity markets really calm down, I just think that there are better places to put your money. I mean, buy some Robinhood, buy some Intel. If you have crypto already, I wouldn't necessarily sell it, especially if you're gonna incur capital gains. But I don't know, maybe ETH is good for a trade back to 2,500. It's actually—

ETH is a random number generator, honestly.

It's actually kind of like a good R/R from a pure trading perspective. If you're more comfortable trading crypto, it's pretty good because you can stop out below 1,800 and target 2,100. So that's actually a pretty good trade. From my perspective, it's a 2-to-1 risk-reward. ETH's structure is looking good. Overall sentiment is really against it, so if CLARITY does pass, we probably go there in a straight line. It's probably a good trade. I just—

I actually used ETH recently for the first time in months. I bought an NFT.

What'd you buy?

It's called HyperTopographics. I got the physical too. It's gonna be behind me in my office here soon, because this white background is too boring. But I actually used the ETH mainnet. It was fast and cheap. I guess, HyperTopographics, shout-out to—

It’s a collaboration between an AI artist and an ultra-famous photographer named Richard Bertinski, who’s been doing amazing stuff for decades. It’s basically commodity art, but AI-ified. It’s photographs of different types of commodity installations, sort of stitched together. And I got HyperTopographics number 1. I’m very excited. Hopefully it’ll be behind me when we record next week.

But yeah, it came with an NFT, which I don’t care about. I want the physical. And the NFT arrived over the old Ethereum, so it felt good to get back into NFTs.

Hell yeah, we love it. I think I gotta run because it’s 2:00 p.m. here, but we had a great stream. This was fun.

This is awesome. Great talking to you, Avi.

As always, Jonah.

See you later.

Stay good.

You too. Nothing said on the 1000x Podcast is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of 1kx Media. Our hosts, guests, and the 1kx team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.