Mark Moss: The "Structured Seller" Dumping Bitcoin Every Day at 9:30 AM
Summary
Market Mechanics: The selloff was framed as a leverage flush driven by record options expiration, market-maker failures, and automatic deleveraging, not a valuation reset. Structured selling and ADL cascades amplified volatility across venues.
Bitcoin: Despite a roughly 33% drawdown, oversold signals and whale accumulation suggest long-term strength, with institutions buying the dip. The guest views forced selling as being absorbed, remaining bullish over a multi-year horizon.
MicroStrategy (MSTR): Positioned as a bitcoin-backed structured finance vehicle, not a passive fund, creating products to grow BTC per share. While preferreds trade at distressed levels, the accretive model works if BTC’s return exceeds cost of capital, and coupon coverage appears ample.
Gold: Presented as the primary risk-off asset supported by central bank demand and China’s push, with expectations for continued upside. Markets currently price gold as defensive and Bitcoin as risk-on despite similar long-term debasement drivers.
Debasement Trade: Anticipated rate cuts, QT ending, and potential QE along with global stimulus (e.g., Japan) underpin a liquidity wave. The guest argues persistent currency debasement is bullish for both Bitcoin and gold.
AI: Massive AI capex is a major tailwind for liquidity but carries bubble and idiosyncratic risks. The fund is hedging AI-related exposures via puts to manage downside while staying broadly long risk assets.
US Reindustrialization: An estimated $8T-plus commitment to rebuild U.S. industrial capacity, including mining strategic minerals and refining rare earths, is a key structural theme. This supports a constructive view on commodities and related materials exposure.
Market Outlook & Risk: Expect swift policy support to counter future liquidity shocks, favoring V-shaped recoveries. Watch for QT ending, falling rates, and renewed government spending as signals of a bullish liquidity regime.
Transcript
In focus [music] with Jeremy Saffron is brought to you by Swan, the real Bitcoin company. >> Welcome back. I'm Jeremy Saffron. All right, taking a look at Bitcoin. It's currently chopping in the mid $80,000 range, capping off a brutal month where it shed roughly 20% of the market cap. And if you look at the charts, you see a market fighting to hold support. And I should say on the other side of that trade, gold is up today around $4,100 on the spot side. But again, if you look at the economic data crossing the terminal today, the picture is much more fragile. We're entering a period of what's being called data blindness. Now, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has confirmed that they will not be releasing an October CPI report due to collection failures. So, the Federal Reserve is now navigating interest rate policy in a total vacuum. And despite the blackout, the CME Fed Watch data is showing that the market is aggressively pricing in around 70% probability of a rate cut. These odds have literally been at the odds with one another all day. Traders are effectively bullying the Fed to cut rates. And this is happening against a very interesting environment of massive mechanical volatility. According to data from Goldman Sachs, this past week marked the largest options expiration in history. Over $3.1 trillion in notional value is rolling off. Now, these suggest that the price action you see could be driven by leverage unwinding, not fundamentals. Meanwhile, the credit markets are flashing warning signs. Strategy, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin is seeing its preferred stock trade at distress levels, while City reports that retail trading volumes have collapsed by nearly a third. All right, so the pilots at the Fed are flying blinds. The credit signals are flashing red and the retail buyer has left the building. We need to separate the signal from the noise and there's no one better to do that. Joining me now is Mark Moss, host of the Mark Moss Show and then among many other hats. Uh, good to see you, Mark. thanks for joining us on a busy day. >> Yeah, it's a busy day. Thanks for having me on. It's always a pleasure to sit down and talk with you. >> Yeah, let's uh let's start with that plumbing that we kind of talked about. I mean, we're seeing this volatility in the $80,000 range, 90,000, you know, but the institutional notes I'm reading suggest that this isn't a valuation reset. It's more of a a a leverage flush. I mean, we talked about that Goldman Sachs report, $3.1 trillion in options expiring today. It's a massive amount of mechanical selling. On top of that, I mean, I'm sure you've heard about it. Uh Tom Lee of Fund Strat issued this note this week calling this recent crash a mechanical glitch caused by market maker balance sheets deleveraging. Um Mark, when you see Goldman and Fund Strat attributing a 20% drop to the market mechanics and the you know these glitches that we're talking about, do you worry that Bitcoin has become hostage to the plumbing here? Well, I think that's a really great point that you brought up. And so to answer the question, no, I don't think it's a hostage to the plumbing. I think what it does is it comes down to what your time frame is. So I look at this market personally, how I think about it, personally investing into it, but also as my fund has to think about it. And so those are two different hats and we approach the market two different ways. First of all, uh we can get back to that. But and to answer the question, yes, it does appear that the price action, the short-term price action is hostage to the market. I don't think it means that the asset is a hostage. So, what are we talking about? Um, sort of what you said, it's a plumbing issue. So, what happened, I think, is leading up to what really caused this to happen. We'll get into that what Funstrat said, but since the ETFs went live on Bitcoin, we've seen the volatility collapse. >> Mhm. In order to overcome that, what we've seen is that the trading has become overleveraged in Bitcoin and the crypto market overall. And so we've seen this massive buildup in leverage because that volatility has been lower and the complacency was high. [snorts] So you sort of have that buildup. Then what happened is on October 10th 10:10 um Trump put out one of his tweets that likes to move the market and he said he was going to slap 100% tariffs on China just like we saw in April that sent the market reeling the market started collapsing and what happens because one we have the overlever as I already said. Number two we have so much of this algorithmic trading going on. So, as the market starts moving down, it starts sending a cascading event, and it created the largest liquidation event ever recorded. About $20 billion in leverage positions were completely wiped out in less than 24 hours. It hit about 1.6 million accounts. And normally that would happen from, you know, massive macro shocks, something like that, an exchange blew up, something like that. But, but that's not what happened. It was uh to the point that Tom Lee made you you brought up a major market maker blew up and so we've seen a couple of them that have actually blown up. Um looks like um Wintermute maybe went down. Uh maybe another exchange went down. He doesn't really want to name them. Uh but we started seeing this liquidation and what happens is you have something called ADL. It's automatic deleveraging. So what happens is as this liquidity starts to dry up, these accounts looks like Binance being one of them started to liquidate or close people's positions even though they're in profit. So it closes positions indiscriminately and it's taking the profitable trades and sort of socializing the losses if you will. And that's exactly what we saw. U we saw the other account I think what maybe he didn't want to name them but it looks like stream finance that's a major delta neutral fund. about 200 million AUM. It literally blew up because of this ADL cascading. And so that seems to be what happened. It was like this anomaly. It was the plumbing. He calls it a glitch. I don't know if that's the right word for it. It's just the way the system is built. We probably need to take a look at that, rethink how that is. Uh but that seems to be what happened. >> There's so many ways we could go here. I mean, if it doesn't really tell us why the unwind cascaded across every venue at once. Was this simply kind of money taking profit or or did we see something else blow up here? >> Well, what happened is you have these major market makers and and uh blowing up. And so then what happens, they have to unwind these positions. And I saw this chart this morning on Twitter. Um it looks like every single morning at 9:30 a.m. Eastern, a big seller is coming to the market and dumping Bitcoin into the market. And so what that is is it's structured selling. Somebody's trying to unwind a position. Healthy markets wouldn't do that. And so somebody is showing up every single day dumping, dumping, dumping. And what's interesting, if you look at some of the onchain or not onchain indicators, but more of like the technical analysis indicators, we can see the lowest daily MACD in history. Now, what's interesting is it's the lowest MACD in history, but Bitcoin's only down 33% from its all-time high. Now, only 33%. What do I mean by that? Uh well, if you zoom out and look in this bull run that we've been on since about 2022 when Bitcoin was down in the was about 16 to 20,000 range, we've this is the third pullback of about 30%. So 30% draw downs in Bitcoin are are kind of somewhat normal. Um in other bull runs that we've seen in the past, like in 2017, we saw seven of them happen. Um and so while it's only down 33%, not 80 or 90%, the MACD is at the lowest point in history. We see RSI at 21. It's only been that low four times in 5 years. We're talking the COVID crash, the FTX collapse, but like we're nowhere near that, right? We don't have this macro shock going on. There's no credit event going on. And like I said, Bitcoin's only down 33% which is sort of in line with it. And what I would say, we can talk about more, but what I would say is that when you see this forced selling, >> a fund is being forced, this destroy distressed market makers being forced to unwind this position. I would look at the opposite and go, man, the market is absorbing that and scooping that up like like a boss. >> Yeah. Yeah, it has been. Obviously, uh corporations have been at an all-time high doing that as well, buying this dip. What's different this time? because we've never really had a Bitcoin draw down while the Fed is flying blind with no CPI while 3.1 trillion in options expire and the largest corporate holder is kind of priced like a distress credit. I mean, historically, they've never really it's never really faced all three at once. Talk to me about this president, what we're actually using here. >> Yeah. Well, obviously to your point, right, we're flying blind. The Fed doesn't know what to do. >> Yeah. >> Come on. We We know what the Fed needs to do. They're going to cut rates. They already told us they're going to cut rates. You know, again, uh, personally, I think about this from a little bit of a longer term perspective. Trump has been very vocal. He wants rates down at 1%. He's told us that. He's told us that for a year. He's always been banging on the Fed to lower rates. Trump has a way of getting what Trump wants. Uh, Powell said they're going to lower rates. Not only are they going to lower rates, they're ending quantitative tightening. QT is ending December 1st. Um, a lot of the Fed Fed presidents are saying they'll start QE again, start buying assets again. And either way, Jerome Powell's out next year. Trump will replace him with a dove. And I'll make the prediction here. Before Trump leaves office, we'll probably see rates closer to the 1% number Trump won. So, that's very bullish. But where are we at, you know, for this next meeting that's coming up here in a couple of weeks? You know, Derome's flying blind. Again, if you zoom out, I don't think it's that big of a deal in the in the big picture. >> Yeah. Well, I want to switch gears here. I mean, we only have so much time and it is a Friday going into the weekend, but we've been talking on the corporate side because this is kind of where your perspective as an executive at Matador is kind of critical. I mean, this Bloomberg data this morning showed that Strategy's preferred stock is trading deeply below par around 66 cents on the dollar. Uh the bond market is effectively demanding a 15% yield to lend to them. And all of this is happening as index providers debate whether companies holding more than 50% of their assets in Bitcoin even belong in the equity benchmarks at all. Now Michael Sailor fired back on X this morning with this defense uh will show it here. It says we are not a fund. We create structure issue and operate a bitcoinbacked structured finance company using Bitcoin as productive capital. So I mean Mark let's talk about this you know looking at it. I mean Sailor calls it structured finance. The bond market calls it distressed junk. Who's right? Because right now the yield curve and the tweet are telling two different stories. >> Yeah. Well, um it's both. And so what Sailor is really doing is pioneering something completely new. And most of us can't really understand what it is because when new technology comes around, it gives us a new set of building blocks to build new things that we can't imagine. So we try to understand them by relating it to something that we can't understand. So for example, when electricity was first invented, the first killer app, the first use case was like a light bulb. So like what is this electricity? I don't know. It's sort of like a digital candle. Okay, it was, but it's it's so much more. The internet, right, in its first killer use case really was email. Oh, it's sort of like a way to send electronic messages and maybe one day we'll buy stuff online. Sure. But we didn't really imagine this world that we have today where everything like we're doing what we're doing now. Um, and so what Sailor is doing is he's taking Bitcoin, which is the first new financial asset we've had in over 400 years. >> And what is it? Well, it's sort of like a digital gold and it's sort of like a digital currency and it's sort of like all these things, but it's something different. And he's he's coined the name digital capital. And now with Micro Strategy, he's creating digital credit on top of that. So, you're taking Bitcoin, which has about a 50 is a 50 asset, but not everybody wants to manage that volatility. Nobody wants to stomach that wait four years as we can see people on Twitter crying today about the 33% draw down. And so, he's stripping the volatility and giving people certain preferred instruments at different yield ratings. So some of them are institutional grade and some of them are jump bond level. So to your point are they more like jump on bonds? Some of them are designed to be more like jump bond. So you can sort of decide where you want to get in. He has four preferreds out right now. Some are more like a stable coin, more like a money market account and some are more like institutional grade with a convexity with a convert on the upside. Um so I think the I think there's a couple things going on. Number one, it's all of those things because there's four of them. Number two, the market really hasn't figured out what's going on. This is all really new. This is all just this year alone. Um, and then number three, you know, throwing the baby out with the bathwater when Bitcoin starts to crash as it is now. Micro Strategy, the common stock goes down and then of course those preferred are going to get dragged down with it. You have everybody online already talking about where's his liquidation price and all these talks from 2022 are being revived. So, I think it's just a narrative. It's something new. people don't understand it and it's sort of maybe to be expected this early in the game. >> Okay. So, so if we look at the math, I mean the cost of capital stays around 15%, the accreditive issuance model might break, right? I mean, if companies can't borrow cheap money anymore, do they become kind of forced sellers just to pay the coupon? Is that a risk here at all? >> Well, the accredit model doesn't really break unless the cost of capital goes up more than the return on capital, right? So right now again if Bitcoin is going up at 50% a year over a long period of time over a couple of years and he's paying out to your point you said 15% it's not that high but 15% when you're making 50 that's a pretty good deal. So it really obviously comes down to the return they're making. Now to the question that you asked will they have to liquidate some assets to cover that coupon payment? Uh I mean the answer as of right now is no. It doesn't look like that's coming up at any point anytime soon. I believe at the current cost today, at the current price of Bitcoin today, I believe they have somewhere about 77 years of capital to cover the coupon if they needed to liquidate some, but they're a long way from that. There's so many tools in the toolbox to cover that coupon before they get to that point. >> Explain that Sailor tweet. I mean, you and I were talking about it just briefly off air that it's kind of misunderstood, but you kind of, you know, explain that. I mean, the fact that they're they're not a fund. says that they're, you know, a Bitcoin back structured finance company and Bitcoin is productive capital. Um, productive in what sense? Like you explain that to our audience a little bit. >> Well, it it's a structured finance company. That's what he said. So, we're not a fund. We're not like P we're not a passive fund. So, an ETF, for example, is a passive fund. I can buy IBIT from BlackRock and I have the Bitcoin, but I'm actually losing Bitcoin every year because of the fees that I have to pay. What what uh Micro Strategy is doing is they're structured finance. So they're creating additional financial products on top of it to increase the amount of Bitcoin that they hold on the balance sheet which over time increases the amount of Bitcoin per share that I own. So unlike unlike an ETF, a passive fund where I'm losing Bitcoin every year, in the Micro Strategy case, I'm gaining the amount of Bitcoin I have per share. >> Yeah. Are you buying the dip here? I mean, you're you're kind of I'm hearing you kind of talk about this is kind of one of those draw downs and a lot of people are and we know that the institutions are buying this dip. Are you going into the market? Is this kind of a a little bit of a sale for you right now? Is that your take on it? >> Yeah, I mean that's a great point. And you can see that and I said this earlier, right? Even with this forced liquidation, somebody's buying all this up. And so you can see the wells, the amount of wallets that hold more than a thousand Bitcoin are accelerating. You see some of the big funds that have been coming out. even Harvard, you can see that their buys are going up. And so the whales, the what we call the smart money, they're buying the dip. I think this is a great time to add to your bags, to buy the dip. Uh I'm certainly a buyer at this range. >> I was going to ask you about gold. You and I were chatting about it, too. You know, you're never shy about talking about gold. I mean, it's still on the same side when it comes to some of this policy with the Fed and with with, you know, sound money. But when we talk about it here, I mean at $4,100 and it's kind of acting as a little bit of a a stable force here. Uh what are your thoughts? I mean obviously it's taken on this AI. I mean if the whole market is riding the coattails of the AI bum boom. I mean what happens right? >> Well I I became a gold bug after 2008 after the great financial crash and I realized that it was fiat money. It was the leverage in the system. It was the banking system. It was the fractional reserve banking and that was the problem. So, I became a gold bug at the time. Um, I I got into Bitcoin and realized I'm really a sound money advocate, but to your point, we're both on the same side of this, right? It's about sound money. Um, I think that it's sort of a regime change. You have sort of a generational thing where my grandparents would never buy Bitcoin, my grand, you know, the grandkids would never buy gold, right? It's sort of like this generational thing. But I think to the point right now, we see that gold is still the main riskoff asset for central banks. we can see this sort of global regime change trying to ddollarize, trying to get into a new system. China's been pushing gold and so we can see there's this massive demand for gold and I expect it to continue to go up uh at at a really good rate. But I would say that maybe the drivers the demand drivers of Bitcoin and gold, while I might look at them as both this long-term riskoff asset, the market doesn't really see it that way. And so gold is still that riskoff asset whereas Bitcoin the market is still sort of pricing it like this risk um this risk trade. Now we saw guidance from JP Morgan. They put out a report maybe a month ago and they called it the debasement trade and they put both Bitcoin and gold together saying that both of them are going up because governments will never stop debasing the currency. They'll never stop printing money. So they showed that the mechanism for both Bitcoin and gold is the same. government's debasing their currency, but at the same time, the markets are sort of pricing those two assets differently as we're seeing right now. So, when there's liquidity crisis that's happening right now, to your point earlier, the markets uh the Fed's flying blind from data, etc. In this risky environment happening, Bitcoin's selling off while gold is going up. So, the underlying long-term fundamental drivers per JP Morgan are the same monetary debasement. But in the shorter term, the drivers are a little bit different. Yeah, you just brought up the Fed and you brought up I want to look at the macro picture there because the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirming that there will be no October CPI report is kind of a massive curveball. But but here's the part nobody's really talking about. It's the data is missing. The $7 trillion inflation market is triggering this fallback mechanisms for the first time in history. But Bloomberg is reporting uh confirms this morning that the the bond market tips and the derivative market, the swaps are now using different formulas to calculate a synthetic CPI number. These fallback calculations were designed for short-term disruptions, not for a complete CPI failure, and they've never been activated at this scale. And Wall Street risk desks are openly admitting that they they don't even know these formulas and how they're going to behave under real trading stress. Um, with that being said, Mark, I mean, does this terrify you? I mean, we had the Fed sitting setting rates in the dark and now we got this the US Treasury pricing 7 trillion in assets based on untested synthetic math. Could we see a liquidity freeze in the Treasury market itself? Because if the Treasury market wobbles, I mean, everything wobbles, mortgages, grow credit, global funding costs. It's not a small glitch. >> Yeah. So, let me let me break those those that piece into two separate pieces. So, number one, uh the rates. We don't know what the inflation is, the CPI. We're going to have to come up with some some in synthetic like >> whatever. Who cares? It's 2.2. It's 2.3. Do you really think that makes a difference? The answer is no. Of course not. So really it's the other side which I'll break into which is the liquidity. That's really what matters. And so when you look at the underlying fundamentals as JP Morgan the debasement trade governments will not stop printing money. We know that we are in a period of fiscal dominance. But the problem has been [laughter] that the main driver of the market is fiscal dominance but the fiscal spending has been shut down. We just finished the longest government shutdown in history. >> So the government hasn't been spending. That's what's created this liquidity pocket that we're in right now. We see the TGA, the Treasury General account, the checking account is full. They're ready to start spending again. And on top of that, you have this massive bullish movement of AI, all the capex spending that's there. And sure, there's talk of a bubble. And that's a different subject, but we have a lot of capex spending. We have more demand than can be fulfilled. We have eight trillion dollars of in of of investment capital that's been committed to build in the United States as part of Trump's re-industrialization era. I believe that it's a military imperative, strategic, you know, strategic um national imperative to rebuild our industrial base. We're talking mining gold, silver, the strategic minerals, um refining the rare earth elements all in the United States. And so we're going to see a massive move to liquidity. We're going to see rates coming down. We're going to see a lot of spending happening. and we're going to get through this little pocket right here. >> But I expect the rest of the year, next year to be uh game on. >> Yeah, I was going to ask you too. I saw this headline. I'm sure you did. Uh where we got some real liquidity today. Japan just approved $135 billion stimulus package. Um if you know, does this Japan if CPI doesn't matter, does the Japanese stimulus kind of matter? I mean, if if if it does, walk us through exactly how that liquidity travels from Tokyo to the market's price. Yeah. I mean, if we want to think about this very simply, which I think for most people, we should think about this a little bit more simply. Like, who cares if it's 2.2 or 2.3, a little bit more simply, the reason why we'd want to look at CPI is if CPI is high, if inflation is high, then banks would be reluctant to put more shrimp on the barbie. They'd be reluctant to put more gas on the fire, right? They'd be reluctant to put the more liquidity in because inflation's already so high. So, if inflation comes down, they can put more liquidity in. But, we're at a point where it doesn't matter. Japan needs to fire the monetary bazooka or their market's going down >> and and they're to your point right now, they're ready to throw that in. China's already been doing that for the last several weeks. And so we're in this situation where the major central banks of the world are all basically in the same same place. Now, to the mechanics that you're talking about of how does Japan get that money into the market, uh, I'll just be honest, that's probably not my expertise to talk about the actual mechanical way that money gets into the market and what that could potentially do to unwind or not unwind this carry trade, the Japan carry trade that a lot of people are talking about. I think there's a lot of fear uh, what we'd call FUD being put into the market about >> if Japan puts that money into the market, it could unwind the carry trade. There's a little bit of truth to that. I don't think it's quite as scary as most people make it think or make it seem. >> I don't know if you read this story. I mean, it still pertains to the east. Uh there's reports now that are being confirmed that the UAE in China executed a live transaction on Mbridge this week, bypassing both Swift and the US dollar entirely. So, I mean, it comes back to this talk about, you know, sound money and where we are right now with debasement. I mean, if if they stop recycling dollars into US treasuries, who funds the US deficit? So it we're sort of at this point where bad news is good news depending on how you want to look at this. I remember in 2008 when you know the great financial crash happened and uh the US government had to come together with the TARP package if you remember I think I think it was 700 billion is what they proposed at the time and I thought no they can't do this you can't just drop 700 billion and you're going to ruin everything right um but we're sort of at this point now where there's just no other way um all the major central banks of the world need to put in trillions now and it's really bad it's really bad and it's going to create inflation and it starts to exaggerate things and you start to see malinvestment everywhere and it's really bad. But we're on investment show here, right? We're on KitKo. So, from an investment standpoint, I mean, it pushes our bags up, right? So, gold's going to go higher, Bitcoin's going to go higher, our assets are going to go higher. And so, um, that's what's going to happen. It's it's bad, but it could be good for us from an investment standpoint. Um, so yeah, bad news is good news. >> Yeah, true. And I mean, you're not just running to Bitcoin at that point. I mean, I know you can't be giving that much financial advice, but I mean, what are some of those classes that you're looking at here in this market? I mean, where we're kind of confused and the data is switching from day to day. >> Yeah. Well, I mean, Bitcoin and gold, right? Sound money, the debasement trade, I think that's the place to go. I would probably say other commodities. So, you know, for me, it's typically things that really can't be printed, right? Alternative investments. So, you start to look at the re-industrialization of the United States. um this race to build uh commodities these min these strategic minerals here in the United States I think there's a good base case for uh commodities overall gold and bitcoin but you know from from my standpoint I mean bitcoin is the best performing asset over any time frame 15 10 5 three uh maybe not the last nine nine 10 months um but you know for me it's sort of like starts at Bitcoin uh some of the Bitcoin treasury companies the micro strategies um and then if I was going to it go out from there probably a little bit of commodities, gold, thing like that. >> Yeah. Interesting. Uh I got to ask you, I mean, if we're heading into the this new global liquidity wave because there's really no other way out. I mean, what's the first market signal our audience should watch for? What's the canary >> uh for when the liquidity is coming back in? I think number one, I mean, we look at the Fed's ending QT uh December 1st and most likely starting QE again. I think that's that's really big. Number two, we'll start to look at those rates coming back down. I think that's going to be really big. Um, and then I I think we'd continue to look at a lot of the spending that's happening as well. Um, so I, you know, keep an eye on all the major central banks. Um, keep an eye on those liquidity levels. Um, we can see that in the US specifically sort of this liquidity levels have been dropping as I said because the government's been shut down, things like that. But I think all that's reversing. Um, and yeah, I expect it to be pretty strong and pretty bullish through next year. All right, Mark, our time always goes too fast, but I mean, a lot of leverage investors watching right now are scared. They see these forced liquidations, options expire, this credit stress that we're talking about. They're wondering if this gets worse before it gets better. What What's happening? I mean, what do you say to someone sitting in a leverage position right now watching their margins evaporate even as we're long investors? >> Well, I'm going to quote the oracle of Omaha with this one. And what he would say if he was uh here talking to you today is he would say don't buy anything that you wouldn't be okay holding for at least 10 years. That's what the oracle would say. The oracle would say I what he said is I don't buy stocks. I buy companies that just happen to be trading publicly. So he would say understand what I bought and value is what you buy. Price is what you pay. Don't look at the short-term price. You're driving yourself crazy. Okay, that's what he would say. Now, how would I answer the question? I'd say I'm gonna I'm gonna approach it from two different angles. Uh what Mark Moss personally thinks about and then how I think about it as a partner at a fund that we have to manage other people's expectations. So, from the personal side, I agree with the oracle. I'm buying stuff that I'm okay to buy for 10 years. I look at short-term dips as buying opportunities and I keep buying. >> But from a short-term basis, you said people are afraid, you know, options are expiring, they're blowing up, things like that. They see potential uh risk in the market. From the fund side, the Bitcoin opportunity fund, we have to manage other people's money and we do have to think about our performance on a quarterly and on an annual basis. And so from that perspective, we're hedging a lot of our positions. So we're long, right? We're long Bitcoin and Bitcoin companies. But at the same time, when we're seeing like right now, we're looking at a lot of the um potential uh risk in the AI sector for example with OpenAI. And so we're starting to put some puts in there, some hedges, um using options and other strategies like that to hedge our position. Now, that will dampen our upside, but it also limits our downside volatility. So, if I'm that person seeing this risk and I'm worried about what that could do to my portfolio, I'd want to think about the time frame of my investments. And so, money that I'm going to need shorter time frame that I don't want to stomach the volatility in, I'll probably want to bring that into some safer investments that have lower volatility, some better fixed income type assets. Um, if I do want to stay long on some of these more volatile assets, I'd want to lower that volatility by hedging my positions using options and other strategies like that. >> Yeah. Interesting. And go to, you know, go to kind of the worst case scenario. I mean, uh, do you think we're at the end of this for selling rally? I mean, it could get worse before it gets better here, right? So I mean my overall position and again it depends on what time frame you're talking about but yeah >> I'm bullish on assets because I believe the governments will always have to print money. Now to your point there are some dangers that we see in the market. We can certainly hit some more liquidity pockets. We could certainly trip some more circuit breakers like we saw here and we could see some selling but I think any type of selling that we'll see in the market overall broadly will be swiftly met uh with with more money printing and more stability. So I think any type of uh you know maybe black swan or gray swan events that might trigger some some liquidity crisis in a broad general market sell-off event I think will be swiftly dealt with by the Fed and so we'd see like this very rapid V-shaped recovery in my opinion would be so fast I'm not going to try to trade that position again uh because I'm a little bit longer term I'll look at that as a buying opportunity but if I'm shorter term then I might want to reduce my exposure in some of these areas where I see some risk like the AI stuff I might want to hedge some of my positions if that's the case for me. >> Yeah, well said. All right. And meanwhile, the US is sitting on nearly 36 trillion in debt. 35.7 I think today we're adding roughly a trillion every 100 days. So, I guess we'll leave it at that, Mark Moss. Always appreciate the reality check. Be sure to check out the Mark Moss show uh as well. You're up to lots over there, my friend. >> Yeah, thanks so much, Jeremy. Always good seeing you. >> Thanks, Mark. Appreciate it. And a big thanks to our sponsor, Swan Bitcoin, your partner for generational wealths. You can get started right now. swan.com/kickco. Now folks, the data is noisy right now. Don't just watch the price, watch the signal. We'll be here tracking it for you. I'm Jerry Sapper. Hit subscribe. [music] Thanks for watching. Swan is [music] the premier Bitcoin wealth platform serving leaders of families and businesses. Swan's mission-driven team simplifies [music] Bitcoin investment, custody, and security, bringing you concierge [music] service, world-class research, and exclusive events.
Mark Moss: The "Structured Seller" Dumping Bitcoin Every Day at 9:30 AM
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In focus [music] with Jeremy Saffron is brought to you by Swan, the real Bitcoin company. >> Welcome back. I'm Jeremy Saffron. All right, taking a look at Bitcoin. It's currently chopping in the mid $80,000 range, capping off a brutal month where it shed roughly 20% of the market cap. And if you look at the charts, you see a market fighting to hold support. And I should say on the other side of that trade, gold is up today around $4,100 on the spot side. But again, if you look at the economic data crossing the terminal today, the picture is much more fragile. We're entering a period of what's being called data blindness. Now, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has confirmed that they will not be releasing an October CPI report due to collection failures. So, the Federal Reserve is now navigating interest rate policy in a total vacuum. And despite the blackout, the CME Fed Watch data is showing that the market is aggressively pricing in around 70% probability of a rate cut. These odds have literally been at the odds with one another all day. Traders are effectively bullying the Fed to cut rates. And this is happening against a very interesting environment of massive mechanical volatility. According to data from Goldman Sachs, this past week marked the largest options expiration in history. Over $3.1 trillion in notional value is rolling off. Now, these suggest that the price action you see could be driven by leverage unwinding, not fundamentals. Meanwhile, the credit markets are flashing warning signs. Strategy, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin is seeing its preferred stock trade at distress levels, while City reports that retail trading volumes have collapsed by nearly a third. All right, so the pilots at the Fed are flying blinds. The credit signals are flashing red and the retail buyer has left the building. We need to separate the signal from the noise and there's no one better to do that. Joining me now is Mark Moss, host of the Mark Moss Show and then among many other hats. Uh, good to see you, Mark. thanks for joining us on a busy day. >> Yeah, it's a busy day. Thanks for having me on. It's always a pleasure to sit down and talk with you. >> Yeah, let's uh let's start with that plumbing that we kind of talked about. I mean, we're seeing this volatility in the $80,000 range, 90,000, you know, but the institutional notes I'm reading suggest that this isn't a valuation reset. It's more of a a a leverage flush. I mean, we talked about that Goldman Sachs report, $3.1 trillion in options expiring today. It's a massive amount of mechanical selling. On top of that, I mean, I'm sure you've heard about it. Uh Tom Lee of Fund Strat issued this note this week calling this recent crash a mechanical glitch caused by market maker balance sheets deleveraging. Um Mark, when you see Goldman and Fund Strat attributing a 20% drop to the market mechanics and the you know these glitches that we're talking about, do you worry that Bitcoin has become hostage to the plumbing here? Well, I think that's a really great point that you brought up. And so to answer the question, no, I don't think it's a hostage to the plumbing. I think what it does is it comes down to what your time frame is. So I look at this market personally, how I think about it, personally investing into it, but also as my fund has to think about it. And so those are two different hats and we approach the market two different ways. First of all, uh we can get back to that. But and to answer the question, yes, it does appear that the price action, the short-term price action is hostage to the market. I don't think it means that the asset is a hostage. So, what are we talking about? Um, sort of what you said, it's a plumbing issue. So, what happened, I think, is leading up to what really caused this to happen. We'll get into that what Funstrat said, but since the ETFs went live on Bitcoin, we've seen the volatility collapse. >> Mhm. In order to overcome that, what we've seen is that the trading has become overleveraged in Bitcoin and the crypto market overall. And so we've seen this massive buildup in leverage because that volatility has been lower and the complacency was high. [snorts] So you sort of have that buildup. Then what happened is on October 10th 10:10 um Trump put out one of his tweets that likes to move the market and he said he was going to slap 100% tariffs on China just like we saw in April that sent the market reeling the market started collapsing and what happens because one we have the overlever as I already said. Number two we have so much of this algorithmic trading going on. So, as the market starts moving down, it starts sending a cascading event, and it created the largest liquidation event ever recorded. About $20 billion in leverage positions were completely wiped out in less than 24 hours. It hit about 1.6 million accounts. And normally that would happen from, you know, massive macro shocks, something like that, an exchange blew up, something like that. But, but that's not what happened. It was uh to the point that Tom Lee made you you brought up a major market maker blew up and so we've seen a couple of them that have actually blown up. Um looks like um Wintermute maybe went down. Uh maybe another exchange went down. He doesn't really want to name them. Uh but we started seeing this liquidation and what happens is you have something called ADL. It's automatic deleveraging. So what happens is as this liquidity starts to dry up, these accounts looks like Binance being one of them started to liquidate or close people's positions even though they're in profit. So it closes positions indiscriminately and it's taking the profitable trades and sort of socializing the losses if you will. And that's exactly what we saw. U we saw the other account I think what maybe he didn't want to name them but it looks like stream finance that's a major delta neutral fund. about 200 million AUM. It literally blew up because of this ADL cascading. And so that seems to be what happened. It was like this anomaly. It was the plumbing. He calls it a glitch. I don't know if that's the right word for it. It's just the way the system is built. We probably need to take a look at that, rethink how that is. Uh but that seems to be what happened. >> There's so many ways we could go here. I mean, if it doesn't really tell us why the unwind cascaded across every venue at once. Was this simply kind of money taking profit or or did we see something else blow up here? >> Well, what happened is you have these major market makers and and uh blowing up. And so then what happens, they have to unwind these positions. And I saw this chart this morning on Twitter. Um it looks like every single morning at 9:30 a.m. Eastern, a big seller is coming to the market and dumping Bitcoin into the market. And so what that is is it's structured selling. Somebody's trying to unwind a position. Healthy markets wouldn't do that. And so somebody is showing up every single day dumping, dumping, dumping. And what's interesting, if you look at some of the onchain or not onchain indicators, but more of like the technical analysis indicators, we can see the lowest daily MACD in history. Now, what's interesting is it's the lowest MACD in history, but Bitcoin's only down 33% from its all-time high. Now, only 33%. What do I mean by that? Uh well, if you zoom out and look in this bull run that we've been on since about 2022 when Bitcoin was down in the was about 16 to 20,000 range, we've this is the third pullback of about 30%. So 30% draw downs in Bitcoin are are kind of somewhat normal. Um in other bull runs that we've seen in the past, like in 2017, we saw seven of them happen. Um and so while it's only down 33%, not 80 or 90%, the MACD is at the lowest point in history. We see RSI at 21. It's only been that low four times in 5 years. We're talking the COVID crash, the FTX collapse, but like we're nowhere near that, right? We don't have this macro shock going on. There's no credit event going on. And like I said, Bitcoin's only down 33% which is sort of in line with it. And what I would say, we can talk about more, but what I would say is that when you see this forced selling, >> a fund is being forced, this destroy distressed market makers being forced to unwind this position. I would look at the opposite and go, man, the market is absorbing that and scooping that up like like a boss. >> Yeah. Yeah, it has been. Obviously, uh corporations have been at an all-time high doing that as well, buying this dip. What's different this time? because we've never really had a Bitcoin draw down while the Fed is flying blind with no CPI while 3.1 trillion in options expire and the largest corporate holder is kind of priced like a distress credit. I mean, historically, they've never really it's never really faced all three at once. Talk to me about this president, what we're actually using here. >> Yeah. Well, obviously to your point, right, we're flying blind. The Fed doesn't know what to do. >> Yeah. >> Come on. We We know what the Fed needs to do. They're going to cut rates. They already told us they're going to cut rates. You know, again, uh, personally, I think about this from a little bit of a longer term perspective. Trump has been very vocal. He wants rates down at 1%. He's told us that. He's told us that for a year. He's always been banging on the Fed to lower rates. Trump has a way of getting what Trump wants. Uh, Powell said they're going to lower rates. Not only are they going to lower rates, they're ending quantitative tightening. QT is ending December 1st. Um, a lot of the Fed Fed presidents are saying they'll start QE again, start buying assets again. And either way, Jerome Powell's out next year. Trump will replace him with a dove. And I'll make the prediction here. Before Trump leaves office, we'll probably see rates closer to the 1% number Trump won. So, that's very bullish. But where are we at, you know, for this next meeting that's coming up here in a couple of weeks? You know, Derome's flying blind. Again, if you zoom out, I don't think it's that big of a deal in the in the big picture. >> Yeah. Well, I want to switch gears here. I mean, we only have so much time and it is a Friday going into the weekend, but we've been talking on the corporate side because this is kind of where your perspective as an executive at Matador is kind of critical. I mean, this Bloomberg data this morning showed that Strategy's preferred stock is trading deeply below par around 66 cents on the dollar. Uh the bond market is effectively demanding a 15% yield to lend to them. And all of this is happening as index providers debate whether companies holding more than 50% of their assets in Bitcoin even belong in the equity benchmarks at all. Now Michael Sailor fired back on X this morning with this defense uh will show it here. It says we are not a fund. We create structure issue and operate a bitcoinbacked structured finance company using Bitcoin as productive capital. So I mean Mark let's talk about this you know looking at it. I mean Sailor calls it structured finance. The bond market calls it distressed junk. Who's right? Because right now the yield curve and the tweet are telling two different stories. >> Yeah. Well, um it's both. And so what Sailor is really doing is pioneering something completely new. And most of us can't really understand what it is because when new technology comes around, it gives us a new set of building blocks to build new things that we can't imagine. So we try to understand them by relating it to something that we can't understand. So for example, when electricity was first invented, the first killer app, the first use case was like a light bulb. So like what is this electricity? I don't know. It's sort of like a digital candle. Okay, it was, but it's it's so much more. The internet, right, in its first killer use case really was email. Oh, it's sort of like a way to send electronic messages and maybe one day we'll buy stuff online. Sure. But we didn't really imagine this world that we have today where everything like we're doing what we're doing now. Um, and so what Sailor is doing is he's taking Bitcoin, which is the first new financial asset we've had in over 400 years. >> And what is it? Well, it's sort of like a digital gold and it's sort of like a digital currency and it's sort of like all these things, but it's something different. And he's he's coined the name digital capital. And now with Micro Strategy, he's creating digital credit on top of that. So, you're taking Bitcoin, which has about a 50 is a 50 asset, but not everybody wants to manage that volatility. Nobody wants to stomach that wait four years as we can see people on Twitter crying today about the 33% draw down. And so, he's stripping the volatility and giving people certain preferred instruments at different yield ratings. So some of them are institutional grade and some of them are jump bond level. So to your point are they more like jump on bonds? Some of them are designed to be more like jump bond. So you can sort of decide where you want to get in. He has four preferreds out right now. Some are more like a stable coin, more like a money market account and some are more like institutional grade with a convexity with a convert on the upside. Um so I think the I think there's a couple things going on. Number one, it's all of those things because there's four of them. Number two, the market really hasn't figured out what's going on. This is all really new. This is all just this year alone. Um, and then number three, you know, throwing the baby out with the bathwater when Bitcoin starts to crash as it is now. Micro Strategy, the common stock goes down and then of course those preferred are going to get dragged down with it. You have everybody online already talking about where's his liquidation price and all these talks from 2022 are being revived. So, I think it's just a narrative. It's something new. people don't understand it and it's sort of maybe to be expected this early in the game. >> Okay. So, so if we look at the math, I mean the cost of capital stays around 15%, the accreditive issuance model might break, right? I mean, if companies can't borrow cheap money anymore, do they become kind of forced sellers just to pay the coupon? Is that a risk here at all? >> Well, the accredit model doesn't really break unless the cost of capital goes up more than the return on capital, right? So right now again if Bitcoin is going up at 50% a year over a long period of time over a couple of years and he's paying out to your point you said 15% it's not that high but 15% when you're making 50 that's a pretty good deal. So it really obviously comes down to the return they're making. Now to the question that you asked will they have to liquidate some assets to cover that coupon payment? Uh I mean the answer as of right now is no. It doesn't look like that's coming up at any point anytime soon. I believe at the current cost today, at the current price of Bitcoin today, I believe they have somewhere about 77 years of capital to cover the coupon if they needed to liquidate some, but they're a long way from that. There's so many tools in the toolbox to cover that coupon before they get to that point. >> Explain that Sailor tweet. I mean, you and I were talking about it just briefly off air that it's kind of misunderstood, but you kind of, you know, explain that. I mean, the fact that they're they're not a fund. says that they're, you know, a Bitcoin back structured finance company and Bitcoin is productive capital. Um, productive in what sense? Like you explain that to our audience a little bit. >> Well, it it's a structured finance company. That's what he said. So, we're not a fund. We're not like P we're not a passive fund. So, an ETF, for example, is a passive fund. I can buy IBIT from BlackRock and I have the Bitcoin, but I'm actually losing Bitcoin every year because of the fees that I have to pay. What what uh Micro Strategy is doing is they're structured finance. So they're creating additional financial products on top of it to increase the amount of Bitcoin that they hold on the balance sheet which over time increases the amount of Bitcoin per share that I own. So unlike unlike an ETF, a passive fund where I'm losing Bitcoin every year, in the Micro Strategy case, I'm gaining the amount of Bitcoin I have per share. >> Yeah. Are you buying the dip here? I mean, you're you're kind of I'm hearing you kind of talk about this is kind of one of those draw downs and a lot of people are and we know that the institutions are buying this dip. Are you going into the market? Is this kind of a a little bit of a sale for you right now? Is that your take on it? >> Yeah, I mean that's a great point. And you can see that and I said this earlier, right? Even with this forced liquidation, somebody's buying all this up. And so you can see the wells, the amount of wallets that hold more than a thousand Bitcoin are accelerating. You see some of the big funds that have been coming out. even Harvard, you can see that their buys are going up. And so the whales, the what we call the smart money, they're buying the dip. I think this is a great time to add to your bags, to buy the dip. Uh I'm certainly a buyer at this range. >> I was going to ask you about gold. You and I were chatting about it, too. You know, you're never shy about talking about gold. I mean, it's still on the same side when it comes to some of this policy with the Fed and with with, you know, sound money. But when we talk about it here, I mean at $4,100 and it's kind of acting as a little bit of a a stable force here. Uh what are your thoughts? I mean obviously it's taken on this AI. I mean if the whole market is riding the coattails of the AI bum boom. I mean what happens right? >> Well I I became a gold bug after 2008 after the great financial crash and I realized that it was fiat money. It was the leverage in the system. It was the banking system. It was the fractional reserve banking and that was the problem. So, I became a gold bug at the time. Um, I I got into Bitcoin and realized I'm really a sound money advocate, but to your point, we're both on the same side of this, right? It's about sound money. Um, I think that it's sort of a regime change. You have sort of a generational thing where my grandparents would never buy Bitcoin, my grand, you know, the grandkids would never buy gold, right? It's sort of like this generational thing. But I think to the point right now, we see that gold is still the main riskoff asset for central banks. we can see this sort of global regime change trying to ddollarize, trying to get into a new system. China's been pushing gold and so we can see there's this massive demand for gold and I expect it to continue to go up uh at at a really good rate. But I would say that maybe the drivers the demand drivers of Bitcoin and gold, while I might look at them as both this long-term riskoff asset, the market doesn't really see it that way. And so gold is still that riskoff asset whereas Bitcoin the market is still sort of pricing it like this risk um this risk trade. Now we saw guidance from JP Morgan. They put out a report maybe a month ago and they called it the debasement trade and they put both Bitcoin and gold together saying that both of them are going up because governments will never stop debasing the currency. They'll never stop printing money. So they showed that the mechanism for both Bitcoin and gold is the same. government's debasing their currency, but at the same time, the markets are sort of pricing those two assets differently as we're seeing right now. So, when there's liquidity crisis that's happening right now, to your point earlier, the markets uh the Fed's flying blind from data, etc. In this risky environment happening, Bitcoin's selling off while gold is going up. So, the underlying long-term fundamental drivers per JP Morgan are the same monetary debasement. But in the shorter term, the drivers are a little bit different. Yeah, you just brought up the Fed and you brought up I want to look at the macro picture there because the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirming that there will be no October CPI report is kind of a massive curveball. But but here's the part nobody's really talking about. It's the data is missing. The $7 trillion inflation market is triggering this fallback mechanisms for the first time in history. But Bloomberg is reporting uh confirms this morning that the the bond market tips and the derivative market, the swaps are now using different formulas to calculate a synthetic CPI number. These fallback calculations were designed for short-term disruptions, not for a complete CPI failure, and they've never been activated at this scale. And Wall Street risk desks are openly admitting that they they don't even know these formulas and how they're going to behave under real trading stress. Um, with that being said, Mark, I mean, does this terrify you? I mean, we had the Fed sitting setting rates in the dark and now we got this the US Treasury pricing 7 trillion in assets based on untested synthetic math. Could we see a liquidity freeze in the Treasury market itself? Because if the Treasury market wobbles, I mean, everything wobbles, mortgages, grow credit, global funding costs. It's not a small glitch. >> Yeah. So, let me let me break those those that piece into two separate pieces. So, number one, uh the rates. We don't know what the inflation is, the CPI. We're going to have to come up with some some in synthetic like >> whatever. Who cares? It's 2.2. It's 2.3. Do you really think that makes a difference? The answer is no. Of course not. So really it's the other side which I'll break into which is the liquidity. That's really what matters. And so when you look at the underlying fundamentals as JP Morgan the debasement trade governments will not stop printing money. We know that we are in a period of fiscal dominance. But the problem has been [laughter] that the main driver of the market is fiscal dominance but the fiscal spending has been shut down. We just finished the longest government shutdown in history. >> So the government hasn't been spending. That's what's created this liquidity pocket that we're in right now. We see the TGA, the Treasury General account, the checking account is full. They're ready to start spending again. And on top of that, you have this massive bullish movement of AI, all the capex spending that's there. And sure, there's talk of a bubble. And that's a different subject, but we have a lot of capex spending. We have more demand than can be fulfilled. We have eight trillion dollars of in of of investment capital that's been committed to build in the United States as part of Trump's re-industrialization era. I believe that it's a military imperative, strategic, you know, strategic um national imperative to rebuild our industrial base. We're talking mining gold, silver, the strategic minerals, um refining the rare earth elements all in the United States. And so we're going to see a massive move to liquidity. We're going to see rates coming down. We're going to see a lot of spending happening. and we're going to get through this little pocket right here. >> But I expect the rest of the year, next year to be uh game on. >> Yeah, I was going to ask you too. I saw this headline. I'm sure you did. Uh where we got some real liquidity today. Japan just approved $135 billion stimulus package. Um if you know, does this Japan if CPI doesn't matter, does the Japanese stimulus kind of matter? I mean, if if if it does, walk us through exactly how that liquidity travels from Tokyo to the market's price. Yeah. I mean, if we want to think about this very simply, which I think for most people, we should think about this a little bit more simply. Like, who cares if it's 2.2 or 2.3, a little bit more simply, the reason why we'd want to look at CPI is if CPI is high, if inflation is high, then banks would be reluctant to put more shrimp on the barbie. They'd be reluctant to put more gas on the fire, right? They'd be reluctant to put the more liquidity in because inflation's already so high. So, if inflation comes down, they can put more liquidity in. But, we're at a point where it doesn't matter. Japan needs to fire the monetary bazooka or their market's going down >> and and they're to your point right now, they're ready to throw that in. China's already been doing that for the last several weeks. And so we're in this situation where the major central banks of the world are all basically in the same same place. Now, to the mechanics that you're talking about of how does Japan get that money into the market, uh, I'll just be honest, that's probably not my expertise to talk about the actual mechanical way that money gets into the market and what that could potentially do to unwind or not unwind this carry trade, the Japan carry trade that a lot of people are talking about. I think there's a lot of fear uh, what we'd call FUD being put into the market about >> if Japan puts that money into the market, it could unwind the carry trade. There's a little bit of truth to that. I don't think it's quite as scary as most people make it think or make it seem. >> I don't know if you read this story. I mean, it still pertains to the east. Uh there's reports now that are being confirmed that the UAE in China executed a live transaction on Mbridge this week, bypassing both Swift and the US dollar entirely. So, I mean, it comes back to this talk about, you know, sound money and where we are right now with debasement. I mean, if if they stop recycling dollars into US treasuries, who funds the US deficit? So it we're sort of at this point where bad news is good news depending on how you want to look at this. I remember in 2008 when you know the great financial crash happened and uh the US government had to come together with the TARP package if you remember I think I think it was 700 billion is what they proposed at the time and I thought no they can't do this you can't just drop 700 billion and you're going to ruin everything right um but we're sort of at this point now where there's just no other way um all the major central banks of the world need to put in trillions now and it's really bad it's really bad and it's going to create inflation and it starts to exaggerate things and you start to see malinvestment everywhere and it's really bad. But we're on investment show here, right? We're on KitKo. So, from an investment standpoint, I mean, it pushes our bags up, right? So, gold's going to go higher, Bitcoin's going to go higher, our assets are going to go higher. And so, um, that's what's going to happen. It's it's bad, but it could be good for us from an investment standpoint. Um, so yeah, bad news is good news. >> Yeah, true. And I mean, you're not just running to Bitcoin at that point. I mean, I know you can't be giving that much financial advice, but I mean, what are some of those classes that you're looking at here in this market? I mean, where we're kind of confused and the data is switching from day to day. >> Yeah. Well, I mean, Bitcoin and gold, right? Sound money, the debasement trade, I think that's the place to go. I would probably say other commodities. So, you know, for me, it's typically things that really can't be printed, right? Alternative investments. So, you start to look at the re-industrialization of the United States. um this race to build uh commodities these min these strategic minerals here in the United States I think there's a good base case for uh commodities overall gold and bitcoin but you know from from my standpoint I mean bitcoin is the best performing asset over any time frame 15 10 5 three uh maybe not the last nine nine 10 months um but you know for me it's sort of like starts at Bitcoin uh some of the Bitcoin treasury companies the micro strategies um and then if I was going to it go out from there probably a little bit of commodities, gold, thing like that. >> Yeah. Interesting. Uh I got to ask you, I mean, if we're heading into the this new global liquidity wave because there's really no other way out. I mean, what's the first market signal our audience should watch for? What's the canary >> uh for when the liquidity is coming back in? I think number one, I mean, we look at the Fed's ending QT uh December 1st and most likely starting QE again. I think that's that's really big. Number two, we'll start to look at those rates coming back down. I think that's going to be really big. Um, and then I I think we'd continue to look at a lot of the spending that's happening as well. Um, so I, you know, keep an eye on all the major central banks. Um, keep an eye on those liquidity levels. Um, we can see that in the US specifically sort of this liquidity levels have been dropping as I said because the government's been shut down, things like that. But I think all that's reversing. Um, and yeah, I expect it to be pretty strong and pretty bullish through next year. All right, Mark, our time always goes too fast, but I mean, a lot of leverage investors watching right now are scared. They see these forced liquidations, options expire, this credit stress that we're talking about. They're wondering if this gets worse before it gets better. What What's happening? I mean, what do you say to someone sitting in a leverage position right now watching their margins evaporate even as we're long investors? >> Well, I'm going to quote the oracle of Omaha with this one. And what he would say if he was uh here talking to you today is he would say don't buy anything that you wouldn't be okay holding for at least 10 years. That's what the oracle would say. The oracle would say I what he said is I don't buy stocks. I buy companies that just happen to be trading publicly. So he would say understand what I bought and value is what you buy. Price is what you pay. Don't look at the short-term price. You're driving yourself crazy. Okay, that's what he would say. Now, how would I answer the question? I'd say I'm gonna I'm gonna approach it from two different angles. Uh what Mark Moss personally thinks about and then how I think about it as a partner at a fund that we have to manage other people's expectations. So, from the personal side, I agree with the oracle. I'm buying stuff that I'm okay to buy for 10 years. I look at short-term dips as buying opportunities and I keep buying. >> But from a short-term basis, you said people are afraid, you know, options are expiring, they're blowing up, things like that. They see potential uh risk in the market. From the fund side, the Bitcoin opportunity fund, we have to manage other people's money and we do have to think about our performance on a quarterly and on an annual basis. And so from that perspective, we're hedging a lot of our positions. So we're long, right? We're long Bitcoin and Bitcoin companies. But at the same time, when we're seeing like right now, we're looking at a lot of the um potential uh risk in the AI sector for example with OpenAI. And so we're starting to put some puts in there, some hedges, um using options and other strategies like that to hedge our position. Now, that will dampen our upside, but it also limits our downside volatility. So, if I'm that person seeing this risk and I'm worried about what that could do to my portfolio, I'd want to think about the time frame of my investments. And so, money that I'm going to need shorter time frame that I don't want to stomach the volatility in, I'll probably want to bring that into some safer investments that have lower volatility, some better fixed income type assets. Um, if I do want to stay long on some of these more volatile assets, I'd want to lower that volatility by hedging my positions using options and other strategies like that. >> Yeah. Interesting. And go to, you know, go to kind of the worst case scenario. I mean, uh, do you think we're at the end of this for selling rally? I mean, it could get worse before it gets better here, right? So I mean my overall position and again it depends on what time frame you're talking about but yeah >> I'm bullish on assets because I believe the governments will always have to print money. Now to your point there are some dangers that we see in the market. We can certainly hit some more liquidity pockets. We could certainly trip some more circuit breakers like we saw here and we could see some selling but I think any type of selling that we'll see in the market overall broadly will be swiftly met uh with with more money printing and more stability. So I think any type of uh you know maybe black swan or gray swan events that might trigger some some liquidity crisis in a broad general market sell-off event I think will be swiftly dealt with by the Fed and so we'd see like this very rapid V-shaped recovery in my opinion would be so fast I'm not going to try to trade that position again uh because I'm a little bit longer term I'll look at that as a buying opportunity but if I'm shorter term then I might want to reduce my exposure in some of these areas where I see some risk like the AI stuff I might want to hedge some of my positions if that's the case for me. >> Yeah, well said. All right. And meanwhile, the US is sitting on nearly 36 trillion in debt. 35.7 I think today we're adding roughly a trillion every 100 days. So, I guess we'll leave it at that, Mark Moss. Always appreciate the reality check. Be sure to check out the Mark Moss show uh as well. You're up to lots over there, my friend. >> Yeah, thanks so much, Jeremy. Always good seeing you. >> Thanks, Mark. Appreciate it. And a big thanks to our sponsor, Swan Bitcoin, your partner for generational wealths. You can get started right now. swan.com/kickco. Now folks, the data is noisy right now. Don't just watch the price, watch the signal. We'll be here tracking it for you. I'm Jerry Sapper. Hit subscribe. [music] Thanks for watching. Swan is [music] the premier Bitcoin wealth platform serving leaders of families and businesses. Swan's mission-driven team simplifies [music] Bitcoin investment, custody, and security, bringing you concierge [music] service, world-class research, and exclusive events.