The Pomp Letter

To investors, Many financial assets are trading sideways as we enter the summer months. This can cause investors to question whether certain investment ideas have been disproven and/or should be shut down. Humans are really bad at being bored. But Charlie Munger said it best when he stated, “ the big money is not in the buying and the selling but in the waiting .” To those who can survive these si...

To investors, Former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers put together a Twitter thread back in February which was widely ignored. In his comments, Summers makes an argument that increasing interest rates drastically accelerated the true inflation rate experienced by an average citizen. He specifically calls out this increased inflation was missed by the current CPI measurement. For example, Su...

To investors, The crypto market is separate and distinct from the stock market in many ways. The assets in this new industry trade 24/7/365, are available to anyone with an internet connection, and historically have gone up or down based on different value drivers than public equities. But it would be a mistake to completely ignore what happens in the stock market when evaluating crypto assets. Fo...

To investors, A popular bitcoin maximalist talking point for years has been “bitcoin is the only crypto commodity and the rest of the tokens are unregistered securities.” How do I know that has been the talking point? Because it is something that I believed for a long time. It is something that I have heard repeated over and over again by various bitcoin friends. But over the last 12 months I’ve c...

To investors, A few people have been asking me why bitcoin spot ETF inflows have been occurring, but the price of bitcoin is not drastically increasing. This is a good question, so I figured I would do my best to answer. We must first understand that financial markets are highly complex. There is almost never a single answer for why the price of an asset is moving up, down, or sideways. Bitcoin is...

To investors, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed over the weekend from former House speaker Paul Ryan titled Crypto Could Stave Off A US Debt Crisis . In the article, Ryan highlights the impending crisis our country faces: “The American experiment is being tested. Nowhere is this more evident than in the trajectory of the national debt. The U.S. is headed toward a predictable yet avoidable...

To investors, The public markets are starting to embrace bitcoin globally. MicroStrategy started the game with their announcement of a bitcoin treasury strategy. MicroStrategy owns 214,400 bitcoins as of May 1, 2024. The company claims the average purchase price of these bitcoin is $35,158 per bitcoin with a total cost of $7.5 billion. Next we saw Tesla and Square (now known as Block) get in the g...

To investors, There are two goals when investing — protect your downside and optimize your upside. Most investors focus on the latter, but protecting your downside is critically important when investing in new asset classes. A good investor must understand the risks. They must underwrite all possible situations. The more you know what you can lose, the more you can mitigate those situations. But s...

To investors,  The last 15 years of investing have been dominated by private market investors. The average venture capital fund returned ~ 17% compounded. During the same time period, QQQ compounded at 13% annually.  This 400 basis points of outperformance would make any market participant salivate. But the analysis is not that simple. First, the average venture fund is probably holding shares in...

To investors, Franklin Templeton is considering a big push into the altcoin market. This is the latest development for large financial institutions based on reporting from Yueqi Yang at The Information . This fund would be targeted at institutional capital with a focus on crypto exposure outside of bitcoin and ether. While that may sound like a high-risk strategy, it actually is a natural progress...

To investors, Robinhood announced this morning they are buying crypto exchange Bitstamp for $200 million. This consolidation in the exchange space is a continuation of what I wrote to this group last week. As a reminder, the big traditional exchanges want to get in the crypto game. Here is an excerpt from that letter: “Yesterday, the NYSE President stated the following at the Consensus conference...

To investors, Bitcoin has been lulling the market to sleep in recent weeks. However, as the digital currency continues to trade sideways, the ETFs are quietly accumulating more assets. Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas pointed out this morning : “The bitcoin ETFs on a 15-day inflow streak, pulled in $2.4b in the past month (only two ETFs have taken in more $SPY & $VOO ). YTD net +$14b. The ability to bou...

To investors, Bitcoin has been trading sideways for a number of weeks. This follows the euphoria from the bitcoin spot ETF approvals, along with the market-wide exhale post-halving. As I previously shared with you all, bitcoin historically has not performed exceptionally well following the halving, so this is not necessarily an unexpected outcome. But now there is a new narrative forming — is bitc...

Today’s letter is brought to you by Consensus 2024! Consensus 2024  is happening May 29-31 in Austin, Texas. This year marks the tenth annual Consensus, making it the largest and longest-running event dedicated to all sides of crypto, blockchain and Web3.  Don’t miss Bitcoin: We Are So Back, where Anthony Pompliano will discuss what the next bull market will look like, how it will differ from prev...

To investors, The SEC approved important rule changes for various traditional exchanges yesterday which will allow them to list spot Ether ETFs in the near future. This is another step towards Wall Street allocating to the second largest crypto asset in the world. It is important to call out that the actual ETF applications from various issuers have not yet been approved, but it is now obvious tha...

To investors, The recent 180-degree change in the Democratic party related to crypto may have global repercussions. As I wrote to you yesterday, there has been a noticeable shift in the way politicians, especially Democrats, are treating the crypto industry. The Ether ETFs continue to increase their odds of approval. The DTCC listed VanEck’s Ether ETF ticker yesterday , which confirms the accelera...

Today’s letter is brought to you by Meanwhile! Meanwhile  is the world’s first licensed and regulated life insurance company built for the Bitcoin economy. Protect your loved ones with sound money built to manage life’s uncertainty and a broken financial system. Their BTC-denominated Whole Life Insurance policies allow HODLers to pass more BTC on to their loved ones and a tax-advantaged way to acc...

Today’s letter is brought to you by Consensus 2024! Consensus 2024 is happening May 29-31 in Austin, Texas. This year marks the tenth annual Consensus, making it the largest and longest-running event dedicated to all sides of crypto, blockchain and Web3.  Don’t miss Bitcoin: We Are So Back, where Anthony Pompliano will discuss what the next bull market will look like, how it will differ from previ...

To investors, The last few weeks have been filled with fear, uncertainty, and doubt in financial markets once the Fed made it clear that the anticipated interest rate cuts would not be coming as quickly or aggressively as most market participants were hoping for. But don’t let market sentiment fool you. The good times are still rolling. In a Wall Street Journal article this morning titled “ Invest...

To investors, The Sohn Conference, where investors pitch their best investment idea, was hosted on April 3rd. The next day, I wrote to this group and said that I would have pitched DeFi Technologies, Inc (NEO: DEFI) (GR: R9B) (OTC: DEFTF) if I had attended Sohn this year. You can re-read my analysis here . Here is an excerpt on why I thought DeFi Technologies was highly undervalued: “By my calcula...

To investors, OpenAI announced GPT-4o yesterday. The demos were incredible, including real-time language translation, a clean verbal interface where users can speak to the model, the model’s use of photo and video inputs, and the ability for AI bots to speak with each other to accomplish tasks. The most impressive part to me was the voice interface. If humans are able to transition from typing on...

Today’s letter is brought to you by Consensus 2024! Consensus 2024 is happening May 29-31 in Austin, Texas. This year marks the tenth annual Consensus, making it the largest and longest-running event dedicated to all sides of crypto, blockchain and Web3.  Don’t miss Bitcoin: We Are So Back, where Anthony Pompliano will discuss what the next bull market will look like, how it will differ from previ...

To investors, There was more than a 70% chance of a recession occurring in 2023, according to Kalshi prediction markets in July 2023. Not only did the recession never come, but nearly one year later the same Kalshi market is predicting an 8% chance of a recession throughout the rest of 2024. People are obviously feeling good about where the economy is at the moment. Another way to gauge the positi...

To investors, The President of Argentina, Javier Milei, is running one of the largest economic experiments in history. He assumed power with the country experiencing 300%+ inflation and a population that was quickly losing hope that the future could see improvement. Milei won the Presidency by promising radical reform that would unleash free market capitalism and bring economic prosperity back to...

Today’s letter is brought to you by Consensus 2024! Consensus 2024 is happening May 29-31 in Austin, Texas. This year marks the tenth annual Consensus, making it the largest and longest-running event dedicated to all sides of crypto, blockchain and Web3.  Don’t miss Bitcoin: We Are So Back, where Anthony Pompliano will discuss what the next bull market will look like, how it will differ from previ...