Happy Wednesday, Barkada --

The PSE closed up 88 points to 6157 ▲1.44%.

Thank you verneornitier for pat on the back, and to StefanJanobski for being a reader since before the lockdown. Remember those days? Back when it was possible to consider a packed restaurant or bar to be "great atmosphere"? That's how long they've been a reader! That seems like forever ago.
Thanks also to Bien for the nice email, and to Mark for his approval of my puns. My puns! Compliments like that are going to make my hair wet... you know, because my head will get tubig.

Daily meme | Join MB | Today's email

COVID Update

WW: 22043508 PH: 164377 

Top 3 MB indices:

 2020 IPOs ▲5.66% Logistics ▲1.85% POGO Gaming ▲1.80% 

Bottom 3 MB indices:

 MiddleClass ▼1.17% D30 Targets ▼0.12% Fast Food ▲0.02% 

Main stories covered:

• Century Pacific [CNPF 16.20 ▲1.50%] signs $50m contract with Linaco Group, a Malaysia coconut producer… the multi-year deal will expand the cooperation between the two companies that started two years ago, where CNPF produces white-label coconut products for Linaco Group, which Linaco Group then re-sells under its own branding/packaging. This is sometimes known as “contract manufacturing”, “white-label”, or “OEM” (original equipment manufacturer), but it all means the same thing: Company A makes the product and sells it to Company B, and Company B then sells the product to the public under Company B’s branding and packaging.
  
  • MB: CNPF is a recent entrant into the coconut business, but has done well for itself since doing so, supplying Vita Coco under a long-term contract, and branching out into several coconut product categories like desiccated coconut, virgin coconut oil, coconut flour, and coconut milk. CNPF appears to be the main competitor of Axelum Resources [AXLM 2.36 ▼0.84%], which recently revealed that it struggled to source coconuts during the ECQ lockdown and left many customer orders unfilled as a result of prioritizing “its most important customers”. CNPF did not make clear if it suffered from the same supply chain issues, with the underlying coconut market growing for both, it will be interesting to see how this emerging rivalry plays out.
• Vantage Equities [V 1.12 ▲10.89%] profit ▲118% y/y… Q2/20 profit of P418m, up 118% from Q2/19 profit of P191m. V is an investment holding company that invests directly in stocks, bonds, and other companies. V owns a payments and remittances subsidiary that noted a 70% decrease in net income. V attributes this drop first to “stiff competition” in the remittance space, and second to the COVID pandemic. The other side of V’s business, the management of assets like stocks, bonds, or other securities, V said that it was “light already on equities” when the mid-March crash hit, so they were not impacted by the sell-off except in their mutual fund holdings. V said that their fixed income portfolio gains offset the losses from the mutual fund side, and then “were able to ride out the volatility and are now booking gains from the fixed income portfolio.”
  
  • MB: *Referring to COVID specifically, V says that it expects “assets under management to remain at these levels until there is a cure for COVID19 and we see a recovery in economic growth.” V is referring to the 6000-level of the PSE when they talk about “these levels”. Even more interestingly, V says that “with rising cases and a failure to contain the spread of the virus, there is a risk that asset prices may fall back to their lows.” V is referring to the 4500-to-5000 level when they talk about prices falling “back to their lows.” That’s something to keep an eye on. TL;DR: The market is sideways until we have a vaccine, unless virus spread continues unconstrained. Then we’ll re-test those scary lows. *
  • MB (1): Ok ok ok... for any of my new subscribers who were not around to read my take on V's Q1 results, you missed out on the best paragraph of MDA text that I've ever read, wherein V summarized the absolute insanity that was the social and economic context for everything that happened in Q1. It's worth a re-read so for your reading pleasure I've included it below. I just wish they'd have continued the post-apocalyptic fanfic into Q2... "The start of 2020 was not auspicious at all as first, markets were put into turmoil when Trump killed an Iranian general in a drone strike. Oil spikes 5% and USD/PHP goes from 50.60 to 51.20. Next was the Taal Volcano eruption, closing down cities as far as NCR. All of this happened in January. Also we get the first reports of a killer virus in Wuhan. This eventually spreads from China to all over the world, eventually sending the globe into lockdown. As the coronavirus spreads, US Treasury yields start falling. From around 1.8%, the 10y UST hits a low of 0.318% before eventually settling around 0.50%. The 30y UST yield hits below 1%, the first time in recorded history. Equity markets fall 3%, the worst declines since the Great Depression. The Fed has to go into crisis management and swiftly announces it will do everything to support the economy. They slash interest rates by 1%, essentially driving rates down to zero. It also promises unlimited asset purchases, with a wide scope of bonds that it can purchase, including MUNI bonds and junk bonds. Here in the Philippines NCR and Luzon is put under lockdown, with business grinding to a halt. After closing for a few days, PSE reopens and is promptly down 20% to 4000 but eventually recovers some of its losses. As liquidity becomes scarce, fixed income markets are hit hard, with banks seen liquidating their holdings. From trading at 3.125%, the benchmark 10-64 was sold to as high as 5.575 before BSP calmed markets by announcing its own bond buyback program. BSP also promptly cuts 50bp in an unscheduled meeting, and cuts RRR by 200bp. The 10-64 and bonds across the curve start being bought, with the yield down to 4.7%."
• Rockwell Land [ROCK 1.55 ▲1.97%] profit ▼108% y/y… Q2/20 loss of P47m, down 108% from Q2/19 profit of P564m. Remind me if you’ve heard the one about the Manila-based real estate developer with hotel interests that had a bad time during the pandemic and lockdown. Anyway, ROCK is not particularly different from its peers in that it suffered downturns in its residential and commercial segments, but it is also worth noting that ROCK’s hotel segment was crushed by the virus and managed to turn in a P7m net loss for the quarter.
  
  • MB: The company is not in any danger, as it just concluded a P1.68bn buy-back of its seven-year bonds under a buy-back program it started 6 weeks ago. Though it’s clear that ROCK’s NCR-heavy focus, and consumption-heavy focus (hotels, cinemas, malls) hurt the company in ways that other firms which were more geographically diversified and socio-economically diversified were not.
• ABS-CBN [ABS 7.25 ▼1.36%] unable to file Q1 and Q2 earnings reports on time… the ex-top broadcaster, owned by the Lopez Family and denied legislative renewal of its broadcast franchise by the… by Congress, disclosed yesterday that the non-renewal caused ABS’s auditor to request additional documents and extend the length of its audit. This, according to ABS, has put ABS in a position to miss the filing deadline for those quarters without incurring “unreasonable effort or expense”.
  
  • MB: Despite being railroaded out of domestic broadcasting and clearly still trying to administratively come to grips with the implications of that, ABS appears to be pivoting hard to digital, and… having some success? ABS just passed the 10 million subscriber mark for its YouTube channel, which is still the most-subscribed domestic news channel. No investor should expect some kind of Christmas Miracle here, though, as this is not like some 80s movie where a quick montage and some fighting spirit will replace the gaping hole in ABS’s revenues with an upstart digital presence. Revenue growth here will take time… and it comes with certain risks, such as how GMA’s Youtube channel was hacked yesterday to display “SpaceX Live” as its channel title and a scam bitcoin giveaway as its top video.

MB is posted to /PHinvest every Monday and Wednesday, but my newsletter goes out daily. To stay in the loop for daily email delivery, please join the barkada by signing up for the newsletter, or follow me on Twitter.

Join our Barkada here

Read today's full email here

At the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak a few interesting things happened. China introduced the "Digital Yuan / RMB" And in April the "Digital dollar" was proposed in the first stimulus bill here in the USA. And they haven't stopped talking about it since. High tables from the White house Financial committee, Federal Reserve, US congress. Aiming to have a digital currency working as early as 2021 to provide UBI / Universal basic income to the masses, all while being able to track, freeze, limit, manipulate spending throughout the economy. Starting to sound rather like a "Black mirror film" isn't it? Well...China has taken it a step farther with their "Social Credit system" watching and controlling nearly every aspect of life. . . but we're here to talk about currency. How could this even happen in America? Well, to start

• the United States is in record levels of debt. Recently going well over 130% Debt to GDP Ratio, with that ratio likely being much higher or near parabolic with the current economic slowdown.
• Continued record Government spending.
• Potential UBI / universal basic income and the inflation it may bring.
• FED Spending.
• FED buying corporate bonds.
• FED using BlackRock to prop markets. Even using SPVs to buy etfs / stocks.
• Overseas holdings / use of USD as the world's reserve currency. (And the possibility of them being dumped back on the US)
• Banks currently loaning as low at 2.8% for 30 year fixed rate loans. Bubbling the real estate market.
• Government Bonds that cant match inflation. That the Fed is buying at record rates as the buyer of last resort.
• Other countries dumping US Treasury bonds.
• Commercial real estate bubble and banks bracing for impact similar to 2006-07. putting billions back.
• Other parts of the world are dumping USDs for Gold at record rates.
• Precious metals have gone near parabolic in price as they are being viewed as a potential safe heaven for wealth.
• Digital currencies are being made to work around dealing in USD. In many countries at an alarming rate. As they dont wish to deal with the USD any longer.
• Your money isn't even safe in a bank with "The Dodd Frank Act" if you happen to hold your money in a savings or checking account at a bank, and if that bank collapses, it can legally freeze and confiscate your funds for purposes of maintaining its solvency. https://gsiexchange.com/how-dodd-frank-made-it-legal-for-banks-to-confiscate-funds-during-a-banking-crisis/#:~:text=Thanks%20to%20Dodd%2DFrank%2C%20if,purposes%20of%20maintaining%20its%20solvency.&text=To%20compensate%20you%2C%20the%20bank,equivalent%20value%20in%20company%20shares.
• Global internet / internet everywhere is being worked on with Space-x "StarLink", thousands of satellites connecting everyone globally to the internet. Therefore infrastructure for the digital currencies,
• Is your money even worth having in the bank with now with near negative interest rates? (real with inflation)
• Inflation risk.
• Inconveniences like Coin Shortages
• Diseases potentially on the currency.
• Too private makes it ideal for illegal activities. / Can't be controlled as easy, taxed as easy.

All of the above is a partial list of factors devaluing the Dollar and trust in it from several ways and views. At the end of the day it has a huge amount of enemies, that are all looking for ways to get out of it.
Some of what I'm seeing personally.

• Prices are outpacing wages.
• Education is required for a good job vs how things used to be, jobs are getting more technical for same wage value.
• Real Estate has been rapidly climbing in price, even homes that haven't been remodeled. A $80,000 home in my area is now $180k in the last 6-7 years. Wages haven't moved.
• Rents have been climbing with the real estate prices.
• Taxes have increased on said real estate
• Insurance cost are up
• Repair costs are up

It is a death spiral for the working person, where it used to be "No more than 30% of your wage going to housing" It is now well over 50%....Just look at this recent post in Frugal https://www.reddit.com/Frugal/comments/ifqah1/is_it_normal_for_a_third_to_a_half_of_you?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
This death spiral I foresee getting worse. And historically any "tax" / regulation cost will just be passed down to the consumer in form of increased prices until people / businesses move elsewhere as we've seen in several cities around the US.
​
So what can we do? Buy Gold! Silver! Bitcoin! Stocks! I hear people roar, They aren't exactly wrong as history shows... but have you considered the 30-40% tax on the "gain"? Even when that asset buys the same value before tax? What if the government makes it illegal like the 1933 order: 6102 Where you couldn't own gold for nearly 50 years? You're frozen out, or even out on taxes (which will likely be more strict and controlled later in time).
I'd say Invest in things that will

• Help you be independent
• Can help you save
• That you will use anyways in normal living
• Things that can be productive not only for you, but for others $
• Bonus points if its easy to trade off / has demand
• Extra bonus if it is durable (lasts many years)
• Helps your health

Metals are the next step when a person has plenty of the above. You get to a point where you have hundreds of thousands, if not millions that you need to condense into something real.
It is all about the savings or productivity gain of the investment. For instance I would wager that many preppers have gotten more use / value out of a $800 clothes washer than a $800 rifle. (have you ever had to do manual laundry???) Sure the rifle will hold value...but it often doesn't pay you back with time / what it saved and / or what it has produced during its life unless you are using it. Same can be said of security cameras, a generator, a tractor, trailer, garden, tools, ect.
Look at history even, in countries that have experienced hyperinflation people that already had tangibles they regularly use were way ahead. It could even be honey, a tool, extra maintenance parts, can of food, that bottle of medicine, a computer to keep your intel on point, (cough # PrepperIntel plug) use of your equipment to do or make something for someone. Real Estate is good too, it rides inflation well and has many ways of being productive.
Your metals could be sitting there like the rifle, and could be subject to hot debate and laws. Meanwhile that garden is paying back, chainsaw is helping saw up wood, or your tractor is helping a job, your tools just helped you fix something / saved you much loss, Your security stopped a loss not by a person, but an random animal stealing things. Or that $25,000 solar array is paying you back by the day in spades...while making you independent...running all your tools you're using to make things to sell, and even heating / cooling some of the house with the extra juice while places around you experience rolling blackouts. You were even smart and took the current 24% tax benefit the government has saving you $5000 on it for batteries. Don't get me started if you have an electric vehicle with solar... I'm rambling at this point...and all those stealthy / direct and passive background savings...even if the crap doesn't hit the fan.
So anyways, With out of control central banks and big governments, digital currencies, How do you think it will play out? Are we heading to dystopia?

Link to Coindesk: https://www.coindesk.com/data-centralization-2030
The next 10 years will witness the systematic manipulation of human life at a scale unrivaled in history. For all the recent controversies over privacy and surveillance, the real threat is ahead of us.
Unless new approaches to online identity and data management take hold, both governments and private actors will move inexorably from knowing you to shaping you. Blockchain-enabled decentralization will develop as the only viable response to the iron logic of data centralization.
Blockchain believers often talk as though today’s early-adopter use cases, such as cryptocurrency trading and decentralized finance, will lead straight to mass market adoption. As the inevitable ‘killer apps’ appear, so the story goes, blockchain-based systems will conquer the mainstream. One might imagine that we’ll all soon be trading digital collectibles and relying on token-curated registries for accurate information. Governments will lose control over money, and blockchain-based smart contracts will replace court-enforced legal agreements. Uber, Facebook and the banks will wither away in the face of tokenized alternatives.
This narrative is wishful thinking. In most markets, intermediaries will endure for the same reasons they always have: they provide value. The Ubers and Facebooks – and yes, even the banks – tame complexity and produce coherent, convenient, de-risked experiences that no decentralized community can ever match. Early adopters use blockchain-based systems for ideological reasons or to get rich on cryptocurrency speculation. The billions behind them in the mainstream will not. The lock-in power of network effects creates high barriers for alternative economic systems. And the need for trust disqualifies decentralized solutions that are havens for criminals, incapable of effective compliance or vulnerable to catastrophic attacks – which, regrettably, means virtually all of them today.
Truly decentralized blockchain systems will reach critical mass not out of hope but out of necessity. Powerful actors and mainstream users will adopt blockchain as a counterbalance to digital behavior-shaping by governments and private platforms. Dramatic innovations such as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), which manage activity automatically through smart contracts, will become significant at the end point of this process, once the foundations are in place.
Big data and artificial intelligence, pitched as freeing us from human frailties, are becoming powerful tools for social control. This is occurring along two parallel tracks: surveillance authoritarianism and surveillance capitalism. Through massive data collection and aggregation, China’s social credit system envisions an airtight regime of perfect compliance with legal and social obligations. Many other governments, including liberal democracies, are adopting similar techniques. The potential for catching terrorists, child predators and tax evaders is simply too appealing – whether it’s the real objective or a cover story.
"WHAT WE NEED IS A TECHNOLOGY THAT ALLOWS FOR SHARING WITHOUT GIVING UP CONTROL. FORTUNATELY, IT EXISTS."
Meanwhile, private digital platforms are using troves of data to shape online experiences consistent with their business models. What you see online is, increasingly, what maximizes their profits. Companies such as Google, Amazon, Tencent and Alibaba can build the best algorithms because they have the most data. And they aren’t interested in sharing.
Regulatory interventions will fail to derail the self-reinforcing momentum for ever more centralized data repositories. They may even accelerate it by creating layers of compliance obligations that only the largest firms can meet. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) actually increased the market share of Google and Facebook in online advertising, and so it is not surprising to see such incumbents actively welcoming the prospect of more regulation.
The only lasting solution is to change the economics of data, not to impose private property rights; that would accelerate the market forces promoting data centralization. Giving you “ownership” over your data means giving you legal cover to sell it, by clicking “OK” to a one-sided contract you’ll never read. The problem is not ownership, but control. In today’s algorithm-driven world, sharing and aggregating data increases its value, producing better models and better predictions. The trouble is that once we share, we lose control to centralized data hogs.
What we need is a technology that allows for sharing without giving up control. Fortunately, it exists. It is called blockchain. Blockchain technology is, fundamentally, a revolution in trust. In the past, trust required ceding control to counter parties, government authorities or intermediaries who occupied the essential validating roles in transaction networks. Blockchain allows participants to trust the results they see without necessarily trusting any actor to verify them. That’s why major global firms in health care, finance, transportation, international trade and other fields are actively developing cross-organizational platforms based on blockchain and related technologies. No database can provide a trusted view of information across an entire transactional network without empowering a central intermediary. Blockchain can.
Adopting any new platform at scale, along with the necessary software integration and process changes, takes time – especially when the technology is so immature. But today’s incremental deployments will serve as proofs-of-concept for the more radical innovations to come. Chinese blockchain networks are already managing tens of billions of dollars of trade finance transactions. Pharmaceutical companies are tracking drugs from manufacturing to pharmacies using the MediLedger platform. Boeing is selling a billion dollars of airline parts on Honeywell’s blockchain-based marketplace. Car insurance companies are processing accident claims in a unified environment for the first time. These and other enterprise consortia are doing the essential technical and operational groundwork to handle valuable transactions at scale.
The need for transformative approaches to data will become acute in the next five years. Every week, it seems, another outrage comes to light. For instance, users who posted photos under Creative Commons licenses or default-public settings were shocked they were sucked into databases used to train facial-recognition systems. Some were even used in China’s horrific campaign against Uighur Muslims. Clearview AI, an unknown startup, scraped three billion social media images for a face identification tool it provided, with no oversight, to law enforcement, corporations and wealthy individuals. The examples will only get worse as firms and nations learn new ways to exploit data. The core problem is there is no way to share information while retaining control over how it gets used.
Blockchain offers a solution. It will be widely adopted because, behind the scenes, the current data economy is reaching its breaking point. Outrage over abuses is building throughout the world. The immensely valuable online advertising economy attracts so much fraud that the accuracy of its numbers is coming into question. Communities are looking for new ways to collaborate. Governments are realizing the current system is an impediment to effective service delivery.
The technologist Bill Joy famously stated that no matter how many geniuses a company employs, most smart people work somewhere else. The same is true of data. Even giants such as Google, Facebook and Chinese government agencies need to obtain information from elsewhere in their quest for perfect real-time models of every individual. These arrangements work mostly through contracts and interfaces that ease the flow of data between organisations. As Facebook discovered when Cambridge Analytica extracted massive quantities of user data for voter targeting, these connection points are also vulnerabilities. As tighter limits are placed on data-sharing, even the big players will look for ways to rebuild trust.
The blockchain alternative will begin innocuously. Government authorities at the subnational level are deploying self-sovereign identity to pull together information securely across disparate data stores. This technology allows anyone to share private information in a fine-grained way while still retaining control. You shouldn’t have to reveal your address to confirm your age, or your full tax return to verify your stated income. The necessary cryptography doesn’t require a blockchain, but the desired trust relationships do.
Once people have identities that belong to them, not to banks or social media services, they will use them as the basis for other interactions. Imagine a world where you never need to give a third-party unnecessary data to log into a website, apply for a job, refinance a mortgage or link your bank account to a mobile payment app. Where you can keep your personal and professional profiles completely separate if you choose. Where you can be confident in the reputation of a car mechanic or an Airbnb or a product made in China without intermediaries warping ratings for their own gain. The convenience of user experiences we enjoy within the walled gardens of digital platforms will become the norm across the vastness of independent services.
We will gradually come to view access to our personal information as an episodic, focused interaction, rather than fatalistically accepting an open season based on preliminary formal consent. Major hardware companies such as Apple, which don’t depend on targeted advertising, will build decentralized identity capabilities into their devices. They will add cryptocurrency wallets linked behind the scenes to existing payment and messaging applications. Stablecoins – cryptocurrencies pegged to the dollar, pound or other assets – will help tame volatility and facilitate movement between tokens and traditional currencies. Privately created stablecoins will coexist with central bank digital currencies, which are under development in most major countries throughout the world.
Once this baseline infrastructure is widely available, the real changes will start to occur. DAOs will begin to attract assets as efficient ways for communities to achieve their goals. These entities won’t replace state-backed legal systems; they will operate within them. As numerous controversies, crashes and hacks have already demonstrated, software code is too rigid for the range of situations in the real world, absent backstops for human dispute resolution. Fortunately, there are solutions under development to connect legal and digital entities, such as OpenLaw’s Limited Liability Autonomous Organisations and Mattereum’s Asset Passports.
Today, the legal machinery of contracts strengthens the power of centralized platforms. User agreements and privacy policies enforce their control over data and limit individuals’ power to challenge it. Blockchain-based systems will flip that relationship, with the legal system deployed to protect technology-backed user empowerment. Large aggregations of information will be structured formally as “data trusts” that exercise independent stewardship over assets. They will operate as DAOs, with smart contracts defining the terms of data usage. Users will benefit from sharing while retaining the ability to opt out.
"DATA WILL BE TREATED NOT AS PROPERTY BUT AS A RENEWABLE RESOURCE, WITH THE COMPETITION FOR ECONOMIC VALUE IN THE APPLICATIONS BUILT ON TOP OF IT."
Many significant applications require aggregation of data to drive algorithms, including traffic monitoring (and eventually autonomous vehicles); insurance and lending products serving previously excluded or overcharged customer groups; diagnosis and drug dosing in health care; and demand forecasting for economic modeling. Collective action problems can prevent constructive developments even when rights in data are well defined. DAOs will gradually find market opportunities, from patronage of independent artists to mortgage securitization.
The big data aggregators won’t go away. They will participate in the decentralized data economy because it provides benefits for them as well, cutting down on fraud and reinforcing user trust, which is in increasingly scarce supply. Over time, those who provide benefits of personalization and targeting will more and more be expected to pay for it. A wide range of brokering and filtering providers will offer users a choice of analytics, some embedded in applications or devices and some providing services virtually in the cloud. Governments will focus on making data available and defining policy objectives for services that take advantage of the flow of information. Data will be treated not as property but as a renewable resource, with the competition for economic value in the applications built on top of it.
The most powerful benefit of open data built on blockchain-based decentralised control is that it will allow for new applications we can’t yet envision. If startups can take advantage of the power of data aggregation that today is limited to large incumbents, they are bound to build innovations those incumbents miss.
The surveillance economy took hold because few appreciated what was happening with their data until it was too late. And the cold reality is that few will accept significantly worse functionality or user experience in return for better privacy. That is why the blockchain-powered revolution will make its way up from infrastructural foundations of digital identity and hardware, rather than down from novel user-facing applications.
This vision is far from certain to be realized. Business decisions and government policies could make blockchain-based data decentralization more or less likely. The greatest reason for optimism is that the problem blockchain addresses – gaining trust without giving up control – is becoming ever more critical. The world runs on trust. Blockchain offers hope for recasting trust in the networked digital era.

The QDAO DeFi community is helping us push the project to global success! The development of the platform continues, participants accrue daily income and new products are under development. Let’s share some important updates from last week.

Cryptocurrencies and DeFi coins market analysis

The situation in the crypto market has changed dramatically over the last week. It’s correction time! Market capitalization dropped to the $320 billion mark by losing almost 20% of its value. The reason is clear – a storm in the US stock markets.
Bitcoin lost 11.54% of its price and is now trading around the $10,050 mark. The breaking of $10,000 will be a strong signal for the whole community and could cause panic. The decline will continue towards lower figures.
The DeFi market reacted to the global sinking. In just one week, the total value locked in DeFi services dropped from the $9.5 billion height to $8 billion. Further decline is possible. Here are the week’s results of some popular DeFi coins:

• Chainlink: -26.65%
• Compound: -31.31%
• Aave: -24.53%
• yearn.finance: -31.88%

Now, the crypto market is vulnerable to the events in the traditional financial markets. If the crisis continues, we can expect a further decline.

DeFi news

The DeFi Market took a short break before the next race but remains in the spotlight of news outlets. Here are the most important news feeds of the week:

• SushiSwap got slammed! The highly anticipated project SushiSwap found itself crashed after a sharp increase in popularity. The project has been handed over to FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. The decision happened after SUSHI fell from $9.5 to $1.13 in just five days.
• Binance enters the DeFi race. One of the biggest exchanges, Binance is launching an automated market maker called Binance Liquid Swap.
• Chinese users demand their DeFi freedom! Local Chinese DeFi exchanges cannot withstand the onslaught of customers. DeFi is one of the most demanded search queries – 900,000 daily!

QDAO DeFi updates

The QDAO DeFi team is working hard to ensure the wealth of the community. Only consistency and users’ support will help our project achieve global success.
We added a series of useful tutorials on our YouTube channel. You can learn many things about popular DeFi platforms, crypto wallets and the DeFi market:

• How to deposit stablecoins into the Curve platform: https://youtu.be/NP6a8Jb3brc
• Balancer tutorial for newbies, how to swap ETH for BAL: https://youtu.be/2801F2lkeGs
• Introductions for Uniswap – the automated liquidity protocol: https://youtu.be/7Z0Pc_VPsqg
• How to create a Metamask wallet and purchase Ethereum (ETH): https://youtu.be/5RuVhk4lSnI
• An Interview with Mr. Mohammed Naquib on the potential of the DeFi market (Part 1): https://youtu.be/hQgaF7_U46w

QDAO DeFi’s blog is full of crucial information. We launched a series of educational articles with one main purpose – to help you earn and share the knowledge! Recently, we added some articles of great value, check them out to improve your investor’s experience:

• How to use yield farming in 2020 wisely: https://qdefi.io/en/blog/post/placing-your-crypto-eggs-eng
• Why stablecoins are not so safe and how to protect your assets: https://qdefi.io/en/blog/post/stablecoins-article-eng
• An interview with Mr. Mohammed Naquib on the potential of the DeFi market (Part 1): https://qdefi.io/en/blog/post/defi-special-guest-part-1-eng
• Who the DeFi leaders are and how to earn using their services: https://qdefi.io/en/blog/post/who-the-defi-leaders-are-eng
• Yield Farming is evolution of DeFi or a bubble? https://qdefi.io/en/blog/post/yield-farming-en

The latest stats from QDAO DeFi PULSE

Number of active users — 7894
Total amount of users’ funds:
2691818.1984 XRP
885.110144209 ETH
201.37511519 BTC
12952411.606 ADA
…and more.
Current users’ interest balance:
70510.0591 XRP
16.0863086 ETH
2.85178881 BTC
123353.165 ADA
…and more.
Number of withdrawals made: 5769
Want to be the first to hear QDAO DeFi news and updates? Visit our website and stay in touch with us on social media: Twitter, Facebook, Telegram and LINE (for the Japanese-speaking community).

My history investing in college and my first month investing in February:

Learned about miners and blockchain validation with a chemical engineering friend before the rally.

• Bought XRP at $.15 and $.25, sold at $3.28 (I valued at $4 or $5 dollars MAX in 10 years if blockchain found adoption)
  
• Bought AMD after the rally at $11 because it was ridiculous how much cost efficiency they had introduced to the market to poor people like me unlike NVIDIA products which always seemed far removed and discouraged me.
  
• I started with Panasonic because I had missed out on the window to invest in Tesla at 200-300 range. I believed Panasonic to be similar to AMD's relationship to bitcoin; while all eyes looked at the shiny object, I looked at the boring parts that built it.
  
• The market crashed, so I DCA'd aggressively and controlled my emotions through out. I was more concerned with my performance to commitment rather than my returns at the time. I did well.
  
• My investments in March 19 was SQ and Lyft
  

My Strategy now that I have income

• I bought up to 5,000 dollars in stocks ranging from FANUC (industrial robotics) to DENNYS (logistics/real estate)
  
• I trimmed down to $2,300 but will rapidly rebuild with a different approach:
  
• I'm buying 1 stock in the company before making any further developments with. Following this, I will purchase ETFs in sectors that I want to see develop in the next 5-15 years. I will buy 1 stake into these ETFs and combine it with my 1 stock purchase to create the necessary offset.
  
• For example, I bought 1 stock of Texas Instruments for $109 followed by a purchase in SOXX ETF for semiconductors, which has the largest ETF allocation to Texas Instruments. I will apply similar logic to companies like Facebook, Paypal, etc.
  

​

• I do this "1 chip" start in multiple industries because I want to pick some arbitrary point in time but I have a lot of industries & ecosystems that I would like to reasonably participate in. This will still cost a lot of money to start off with and buys me time to study company numbers and outlooks.

​

My current market sentiment

• I consider where you start on a graph as somewhat arbitrary and see the current market stability as somewhat of an exercise in game theory and rowing a boat throat a thick fog. I believe it's optimal to row cautiously forward and to not stay still. With cautious rowing, you'll be able to react appropriately if you are suddenly met by a waterfall or a path with clearer vision.
  
• I value customer service a lot. Back in 2011 I would have said that investing in Blizzard was a good idea simply because they brought their servers down for 8 hours every Tuesday for almost a decade. They did this to ensure higher quality server maitenance in an era where online gaming was unknown territory. If I were to pick an airline, this would be my center of focus. This often means I need to participate in the market in order to invest in it. This is why Netflix beat Blockbuster in the early game and why Disney may win in the late.
  

​

• I am `BEARISH` on Amazon in the long term. I believe that slowly, but surely, the market will consume Amazon's hold on its markets. I don't believe Amazon will maintain the status quo on cloud computing due to the quality of its competitors. I absolutely LOVE Google Cloud Platform and utilize Firebase real-time database very often. Microsoft has made some extremely important acquisitions recently in Github and NPM. I wonder often how rapid Amazon systems will become maintenance and legacy based systems of a previous era of cloud software utilization.
  
• I'm currently building an edtech platform where the system records students effort in various ways and translates that effort into a donation pool. Teachers are provided a platform to share resources and utilize analytics. This is all done in real time with Google and Facebooks frameworks for frontend and Backend development.
  
• I have suspicions about Amazon will struggle internationally. I don't know if Amazon will penetrate China the way China does, or if it will succeed in locations south of Mexico against things like Mercado Libre
  
• I have suspicions that tech platforms will soon integrate in a meaningful way with financials. As in, the virtualization of stores and forwarded payments in places like the Facebook(Visa) Market Place, Twitter(Square) payment sending, Paypal(honey) & Amazon purchasing, Gaming credits, etc.
  
• I am `bullish` on Facebook. Facebook is utterly invaluable and scales globally. The reason it's adopted in Mexico, for example, is because it's cheaper and faster than other services. They also service millions of developers with React and its growing development ecosystem. They provide a standardized marketting platform for small businesses on Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and soon to be JIO. I would not be surprised if they soon enter the fintech sector.
  
• I am `bullish` on Paypal. They are seemingly repeating their previous success by servicing large online commerce that are upgrading their systems. Honey/Paypal will scrape coupons for Amazon and force organizations like Visa to compete with real-time financial services.
  

​

• I am `bullish` on cloud software and networking. I think CDNs and dedicated services for Cybersecurity will maintain. Sure Google provides these services but things like Cloudflare and Fastly have dedicated solutions to fast image processing, DDoS protection, and more that other platforms may not be able to allocate their resources to. Cloudflare has an enormous network, and Fastly provides a great system for you to enjoy content like Reddit. I think it's hard to miss the mark here - the highway of the internet is going to get faster and more assets will be maintained in the server's space - the ecosystem must grow with it.

​

• I am EXTREMELY BEARISH on Beyond Meat. I've been vegetarian for 10 years. IT'S BAD. WE HAVE NOTHING ELSE TO BE EXCITED ABOUT AND WE'RE NOT USED TO HAVING ATTENTION. VEGETARIANS ARE LYING IF THEY SAY IT'S AMAZING. IT'S LITERALLY DOG FOOD

​

• I am `BULLISH` on the long term development of Mexico. I think companies like Kansas City Southern that services Mexican-American relationships will grow well in the long run.
  
• I am `BULLISH` on Apple and Adobe. Amazing products.
  

​
​

CURRENT HOLDINGS (ordered by priority & checkup time):

​
GOOG & AMZN exposure through tech ETFs ::: priority FB
NVIDIA, AMD, Intel EXPOSURE through semiconductor ETFS ::: priority Texas Instruments
PAYPAL, MERCADO LIBRE, SQUARE exposure through fintech ETF ::: priority PayPal
Environmental Services exposure through Sanitation ETFS ::: priority Waste Management
Adobe and AutoDesk exposure through cloud software ETFs :: priority Adobe
Nintendo exposure through gaming ETFS :: priority Nintendo
Cisco exposure through cloud networking and edge computing ETFS Cicsco, Fastly, Cloudflare, etc
TELECOM networking ETFS :: priority TMobile
Manufacturing technology, industrial sectors, and robotics exposure to Fanuc, ABB, Siemens, Sherwin-Williams, VW, GM, Nissan, Toyota, Panasonic,
Healthcare services ETF :: priority Cigna
FB -- LONG
PAYPAL -- LONG
TEXAS INSTRUMENTS - LONG
MSFT -- LONG
APPLE -- LONG
ADOBE -- LONG
DISNEY - LONG
BITCOIN - LONG
TMOBILE - 2 YEARS
VISA -- 2 YEARS
JPM -- 2 YEARS
TWITTER -- 2 YEARS
SQUARE -- 1 YEAR
LYFT -- 1 YEAR
FASTLY -- QUARTERLY
CLOUDFLARE -- QUARTERLY
1LIFE MEDICAL -- QUARTERLY
FIVERR -- QUARTERLY
DRAFT KING -- QUARTERLY YEAR + CHICAGO POLITICS
GROUPON -- SPARE CHANGE JAR
​
​
​

EXCITED TO ACQUIRE

• ADOBE
  
• QQQ
  
• SHERWIN WILLIAMS
  
• TOYOTA
  
• KANSAS CITY SOUTHERN
  

Alright guys, Ive been working on this for a while and a post on here by a guy describing his portfolio here was the final kick in the ass for me to put this together. I started writing this to summarize what Im doing for my friends who are beginners, and also for me to make some sense of it for myself
Hopefully parts of it are useful to you, and also ideally you guys can point out errors or have a suggestion or two. I'm posting this here as opposed to investing or canadianinvestor (blech) because they're just gonna tell me to buy an index fund.
This first section is a preamble describing the Canadian tax situation and why Im doing things the way that I am. Feel free to skip it if you dont care about that. Also, there might be mistake regarding what the laws are here so dont take my word for it and verify it for yourself please.
So here in Canada we have two types of registered accounts (theres actually more but whatver). There is the TFSA "Tax Free Savings Account", and RRSP "Registered Retirement Savings Account"
For the sake of simplicity, from the time you turn 18 you are allowed to deposit 5k (it changes year to year based on inflation etc)in each of them. That "room" accumulates retroactively, so if you haventdone anything and are starting today and you are 30 you have around 60k you can put in each of them. The prevailing wisdom is that you should max out the TFSA first and you'll see why in a minute.
​
TFSA is post tax deposits, with no capital gains or other taxes applied to selling your securities, dividends or anything else. You can withdraw your gains at any time, and the amount that you withdraw is added to the "room" you have for the next year. So lets say I maxed out my TFSA contributions and I take out 20k today, on January of next year I can put back in 20k plus the 5 or whatever they allow for that year. You can see how powerful this is. Theres a few limitations on what is eligable to be held in the TFSA such as bitcoin/bitcoin ETFs, overseas stocks that arent listed on NYSE, TSX, london and a few others. You can Buy to Open and Sell to Close call and put options as well as write Covered Calls.
​
The RRSP is pre-tax deposits and is a tax deferred scheme. You deposit to lower your income tax burden (and hopefully drop below a bracket) but once you retire you will be taxed on anything you pull out. Withdrawing early has huge penalties and isnt recommended. You are however allowed to borrow against it for a down payment as a first time home buyer. The strategy with these is that a youngperson entering the workforce is likely to be in a fairly low tax bracket and (hopefully) earns more money as they get older and more skilled so the RRSP has more value the greater your pre-taxincome is. You can also do this Self Directed. Its not relevant to this strategy but I included it for the sake of context.
Non registered accounts ( or any other situation, such as selling commercial real estate etc) is subject to a capital gains tax. In so far as I understand it, you add all your gains and losses up at the end of the year. If its a positive number, you cut that number IN HALF and add it to your regular pre-tax income. So if I made 60k from the dayjob and 20k on my margin account that adds up to 70k that I get taxed on. if its a loss, you carry that forward into the next year. Theres no distinction between long term and short term. Also physical PMs are treated differently and I'll fill that part in later once I have the details down.
The reason why all that babble is important is that my broker Questrade, which isnt as good as IB (the only real other option up here as far as Im aware) has one amazing feature that no other broker has: "Margin Power"
If you have a TFSA and a Margin account with them, you can link them together and have your securities in the TFSA collateralise your Margin account. Essentially, when it comes to the Maintenance Excess of the Margin Account QT doesnt care if its in the TFSA *or* the Margin!
You can see how powerful this is.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So as you can tell by the title, a lot of this is heavily inspired by Chris Cole's paper "The Allegory of the Hawk and the Serpent". You can read it here: https://www.artemiscm.com/welcome#research
Between it, his interviews and my mediocre options skills at the time my mind was blown. Unfortunately I didnt know how to do the Long Volatility part until after the crash in March but I've since then had nothing but time to scour the internet and learn as much as I could.
The way I interpret this isnt necessarily "what you should have right now", but what abstracted model they were able to backtest that gave them the best performance over the 90 years. Also, a lot of my portfolio I already had before I started trying to build this.
As such my allocations dont match the proportions he gave. Not saying my allocations are better, just showing where they are at this time.
I'm going to describe how I do Long Volatility at the end rather than the beginning since the way *I* do it wont make sense until you see the rest of the portflio.
​
Physical PMs 22%
I'm not sure wether he intended this to be straight up physical gold or include miners and royalty streaming companies so I will just keep this as physical.
I consider Silver to be a non-expiring call option on gold, so that can live here too. I am actually *very* overweight silver and my strategy is to convert a large portion of it to gold (mostly my bars) to gold as the ratio tightens up.
If youre into crypto, you can arguably say that has a place in this section.
If an ETF makes sense for part of your portfolio, I suggest the Sprott ones such as PHYS. Sprott is an honest business and they actually have the metal they say they have. If you have enough, you can redeem your shares from the Royal Canadian Mint. The only downside is that they dont have an options chain, so you cant sell covered calls etc. Simple enough I suppose.
One thing to bear in mind, there is a double edged sword with this class of assets. They're out of the system, theyre nobody's business but your own and theres no counter party. That unfortunately means that you cant lever against it for margin or sell covered calls etc. You can still buy puts though (more on that later)
​
Commodity Trend (CTA) 10%
https://youtu.be/tac8sWPZW0w
Patrick Ceresna gave a good presentation on what this strategy is. Until I watched this video I just thought it meant "buy commodities". A real CTA does this with futures also so aside from the way he showed, there are two other ETFs that are worth looking at.
COM - This is an explicit trend following ETF that follows a LONG/FLAT strategy instead of LONG/SHORT on a pile of commodity futures. So if they get a "sell" signal for oil or soybeans they sell what they have and go to cash.
COMT- Holds an assortment of different month futures in different commodities, as well as a *lot* of various related shares in producers. Its almost a one stop shop commodities portfolio. Pays a respectable dividend in December
If you want to break the "rules" of CTA, and include equities theres a few others that are also worth looking at
KOL- This is a coal ETF. The problems with it are that a lot of the holdings dont have much to do with coal. One of them is a tractor company. A lot of the companies are Chinese so theres a bit of a red flag.
Obviously Thermal Coal, the kind used for heating and powerplants isnt in vogue and wont be moving forward...but coking coal is used for steel manufacturing and that ain't going anywhere. The dividend is huge, pays out in December. A very very small position might be worth the risk.
Uranium- I'm in URA because thats the only way for me to get exposure to Kazatoprom (#1 producer), which is 20% of the holdings. The other 20% is Cameco (#2 producer)and then its random stuff.
Other than that I have shares in Denison which seems like its a good business with some interesting projects underway. I'm still studying the uranium space so I dont really have much to say about it of any value.
RSX- Russia large caps. If you dont want to pick between the myriad of undervalued, high dividend paying commodity companies that Russia has then just grab this. It only pays in December but it has a liquid options chain so you can do Covered Calls in the meantime if you want.
NTR- Nutrien, canadian company that was formed when two others merged. They are now the worlds largest potash producer. Pretty good dividend. They have some financial difficulties and the stocks been in a downtrend forever. I feel its a good candidate to watch or sell some puts on.
I'm trying to come up with a way to play agriculture since this new phase we're going to be entering is likely to cause huge food shortages.
​
EURN and NAT- I got in fairly early on the Tanker hype before it was even hype as a way to short oil but I got greedy and lost a lot of my gains. I pared down my position and I'm staying for the dividend.
If you get an oil sell signal, this might be a way to play that still.
​
Fixed Income/Bonds 10%
​
Now, I am not a bond expert but unless youre doing some wacky spreads with futures or whatever... I dont see much reason to buy government debt any more. If you are, youre basically betting that they take rates negative. Raoul Pal of Real Vision is pretty firm in his conviction that this will happen. I know better than to argue with him but I dont see risk/reward as being of much value.
HOWEVER, I found two interesting ETFs that seem to bring something to this portfolio
IVOL- This is run by Nancy Davis, and is comprised of TIPS bonds which are nominally inflation protected (doubt its real inflation but whatever) overlayed with some OTC options that are designed to pay off big if the Fed loses control of the long end of the yield curve, which is what might happen during a real inflation situation. Pays out a decent yield monthly
TAIL- This is a simpler portfolio of 10yr treasuries with ladder of puts on the SPX. Pays quarterly.
​
Equities 58% (shared with options/volatility below)
This is where it gets interesting, obviously most of this is in mining shares but before I get to those I found some interesting stuff that I'm intending to build up as I pare down my miners when the time comes to start doing that.
VIRT- I cant remember where I saw this, but people were talking about this as a volatility play. Its not perfect, but look at the chart compared to SPY. Its a HFT/market making operation, the wackier things get the more pennies they can scalp. A 4% dividend isnt shabby either.
FUND- This is an interesting closed end fund run by Whitney George, one of the principals at Sprott. He took it with him when he joined the company. Ive read his reports and interviews and I really like his approach to value and investing. He's kind of like if Warren Buffett was a gold bug. Theres 120 holdings in there, mostly small caps and very diverse...chicken factories, ball bearings all kinds of boring ass shit that nobody knows exists. Whats crucial is that most of it "needs to exist". Between him, his family and other people at Sprott they control 40% or so of the shares, so they definitely have skin in the game. Generous dividend.
ZIG- This is a "deep value" strategy fund, run by Tobias Carlisle. He has a fairly simple valuation formula called the Acquirer's Multiple that when he backtested it, is supposed to perform very well. He did an interview with Chris Cole on real Vision where he discusses how Value and Deep Value havent done well recently, but over the last 100 years have proven to be very viable strategies. If we feel that theres a new cycle brewing, then this strategy may work again moving forward.
​
I want to pause and point out something here, Chris Cole, Nassim Taleb and the guys at Mutiny Fund spend a lot of effort explaining that building a portfolio is a lot like putting together a good basketall team. They need to work together, and pick up each others slack
A lot of the ETFs I'm listing here are in many ways portfolios in and of themselves and are *actively managed*. I specifically chose them because they follow a methodology that I respect but I can't do myself because I dont have the skill, temperament or access to.
The next one is a hidden gem and ties into this. I'm not sure how much more upside there is in this one but man was I surprised.
SII- Sprott Inc. I *never* see people listing this stock in their PMs portfolios. A newsletter I'm subscribed to described this stock as the safest way to play junior miners. Their industry presence, intellectual capital and connections means that they get *the best* private placement deals in the best opportunities. I cant compete with a staff like theirs and I'm not going to try. I bought this at 2.50, and I liked the dividend. Since then they did a reverse split to get on the NYSE and like the day after the stock soared.
When it comes to mining ETFS I like GOAU and SILJ the best. None of their major holdings are dead weight companies that are only there because of market cap. I dont want Barrick in my portfolio etc.
SGDJ is a neat version of GDXJ.
Aside from that my individual miners/royalty companies are (no particular order)
MMX
SAND
PAAS
PGM
AUM
AG
MUX
RIO- Rio2 on the tsx, not rio tinto
KTN
KL
Options/Volatility: varies
So this is where we get to the part about options, Volatility and how I do it. I started out in the options space with The Wheel strategy and the Tastytrade approach of selling premium. The spreads and puts I sell, are on shares listed above, in fact some of those I dont hold anymore.
Theres tons of stuff on this in thetagang and options so I wont go into a whole bunch (and you shouldnt be learning the mechanics from me anyway) but theres one thing I want to go over before it gets wild.
If I sell a Cash Secured Put, from a risk management perspective its identical to just buying 100 shares of the underlying security. You are equally "Short Vol" as well, it just that with options
its a little more explicit with the Greeks and everything. But if I use my margin that I was talking about earlier, then I can still collect the premium and the interest doesnt kick in unless Im actually assigned the shares.
But if I sell too many puts on KL or AG, and something happens where the miners get cut down (and lets be real, they all move together) my margin goes down and then I get assigned and kaboom...my account gets blown up
So what I need to do, is balance out the huge Short Vol situation in my portfolio, be net Long Vol and directly hedge my positions. Since the overwhelming majority of my equities are all tied to bullion this is actually a very easy thing to do.
​
Backspreads
https://youtu.be/pvX5_rkm5x0
https://youtu.be/-jTvWOGVsK8
https://youtu.be/muYjjm934iY
​
So I set this up so the vast majority of my margin is tied up in these 1-2 or even 1-3 ratio put spreads that *I actually put on for a small credit*, and roll them every once in a while. I run them on SLV, and GDX.
I keep enough room on my margin so I can withstand a 10% drawdown before it sets off the long end of the spreads and then I can ride it out until it turns around and we keep the PM bull market going.
Theres another cool spread I've been using, which is a modified Jade Lizard; if already hold shares, I'll sell a put, sell a covered call, and use some of the premium to buy a longer dated call. Ive been running this on AG mostly.
I have a few more spreads I can show you but Im tired now so it'll have to wait for later.
As I said multiple times, I do intend to trim these miners later but now isnt the time for that IMO. I'm also monitoring this almost full time since I have an injury and have nothing better to do until I heal :p

https://federationofglobalmerchants.com/2020/08/14/gold-and-silver-where-do-they-go-from-here/
​
Investors know by now that one of the leading indicators of an unstable and unpredictable stock market is a surge in the price of precious metals like gold and silver. In February, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the markets officially entered a recession, even though just months later several of the major indices have reached all-time highs. It was a brief dip into recessionary territory, but this sort of volatility is what gives investors hesitation in putting their money into the stock market, rather than something that is perceived to be more stable. Gold future contracts are selling well above $2000 per ounce for the rest of 2020 and well into 2021 as well showing that investors are confident that gold will continue to rise in price. Silver is also surging reaching new all-time highs on a daily basis. So investors may be curious as to how to get into this red-hot market, especially as the markets continue to fluctuate.
Gold:
For centuries now gold has been literally the ‘gold-standard’ of currency and wealth. Dating back all the way to around 40,000 B.C. in Spanish caves, gold is a naturally occurring element that has both fascinated and lured people for as long as barter systems and wealth has been recorded. Currently, gold is enjoying its highest valuations in history as investors flock to the stability of the precious metal through various streams. So what is the allure of gold and why is it so stable?
Warren Buffett once said, “Gold is a way of going long on fear.” That is quite a statement from perhaps the greatest investment mind of our generation. But what does this mean for the novice investor? Even the most successful blue-chip stocks can crash. Obviously the more prominent and profitable companies with mega market caps will not crash as easily as smaller companies, but given the volatility of the pandemic, we can see anything happen. But as stock markets fluctuate on a daily basis, the price of gold remains mostly stoic. Not as manipulatable as stock prices, gold is as steady as it gets for investors.
What makes gold so stable? It is a combination of factors, first and foremost, it is a physical and tangible element which makes it possible for people to store and stockpile. It does not corrode or wear down over time, making it durable and ensuring that the value remains. There is also a finite supply of it in the world. This reinforces that it will always keep a certain level of valuation as the supply is kept in check.
Today, as the Federal Reserve tries desperately to pump money into the American economy to stave off a global recession and keep companies afloat. Printing more American dollars helps in the interim, but it is a temporary band-aid for the bigger problem. As more of the dollar gets created the more it gets devalued as a form of currency. This is another reason why gold is skyrocketing. The two valuations always work inversely to each other, so as the greenback continues to plummet, the price of gold will continue to surge which makes perfect sense if one thinks about it. The value of gold is priced in American dollars per ounce, so if the value of an American dollar retreats, the cost of gold will rise in response.
So how can investors take advantage of the current state of gold? In the age of internet investing, there are plenty of ways to invest in gold or anything in that matter. Most American platforms give inventors the ability to buy fractional shares of companies. While this comes in handy for expensive stocks like Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), or Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), it also allows investors to diversify their funds across multiple companies to form a basket approach to an industry. There are also plenty of ETFs or Exchange Traded Funds, available for investors to consider. These funds have the diversification of a mutual fund or index fund, but trade like individual stocks. Here’s a few of the better gold ETFs to consider if you are looking to get into the industry:

1. IAU – iShares Gold Trust: One of the better known gold ETFs out there, iSHARES is a reputable brand with great overall market performance. The fund has returned over 17% to inventors already this year, and with the price of gold projected to continue to rise, this fund should keep delivering for investors into next year.
2. DGL – Invesco DB Gold Fund: Another well known and reputable ETF, the Invesco Gold Fund has slightly higher fees than iSHARES but has also had a slightly better return so far this year.
3. IAUF – iShares Gold Strategy ETF: Another iSHARES ETF, this one has parts of IAU, as well as gold futures contracts, to get a long term forecast of the price of gold so the investor gets exposure to a wider range of gold options.

There are dozens of other ETFs available for investors that cover everything from miners to the finished products. Mining company stocks are another great way to get exposure. As the demand for gold increases, these mining companies should see a rise in their revenues and eventually, their profits as well. These changes will be reflected in their stock prices and we have already seen some of this already this year.

1. ABX – Barrick Gold: One of the largest gold mining companies in the world, this Canadian company has seen healthy gains in their stock price so far in 2020. Over the last 52 weeks, Barrick investors have enjoyed a 131% increase in stock price. With mining projects ongoing in Canada, America, Australia, South America, and Africa, Barrick has already announced that it is on track to achieve guidance this year despite closures from COVID-19.
2. FNV – Franco-Nevada Gold: This stock price rose almost 15% in July alone. Franco-Nevada operates as a funding company to gold mining companies, rather than actually doing the mining themselves. Sustainalytics, a guidance and analysis company, rated Franco-Nevada number one amongst 104 precious metal companies.
3. NEM – Newmont Goldcorp: The largest gold stock by market-cap and the only stock to trade on the S&P 500, Newmont is probably the safest company for gold investors to invest in. On top of steady returns and low volatility in the stock price, the company pays a fairly healthy dividend as well.

With gold at all-time highs, we can begin to question how high the precious metal may go. With a second wave of the coronavirus making its way around some parts of the world, and America, still making its way through their initial wave, the uncertainty that exists in today’s markets may continue into 2021. Some Wall Street analysts have forecast gold to rise as high as $10,000 per ounce, but that seems like a little ambitious. Gold has just recently hit all-time highs at $2000 per ounce and to imagine that it can run up another 500% in the next few years seems far-fetched at this point in time. That would require the markets to enter an extended bear-market, which of course is possible after a decade of a bullish run, but it would also require the American dollar to continue to be further devalued.
Gold is pegged to continue to rise for the rest of this year though and well into 2021. That means investors and analysts are foreseeing a further devaluation of the American greenback as well as continued volatility in the markets and economy. Is gold a safe haven? Some people believe it is, but if you are an investor that enjoys high returns over long periods of time, investing in precious metals may not be for you. Investors love the stability of gold but the returns are never astronomical, with the last few months being an exception. It helps to have a portion of your portfolio dedicated to precious metals to diversify and protect you from any sudden market corrections, but investors should not be looking at gold as a short-term way to get wealthy.
Silver: The other precious metal that has been flying sky-high of recent months is silver, the eternal younger brother to gold. Mined from silver-ore, it is a highly malleable metal that was once valued higher than gold by the Ancient Egyptians. Today, it is relatively low in price per ounce compared to gold, reaching all-time highs recently of just under $30 per ounce. Silver is another stable alternative to gold, and at lower prices, it may be a little more affordable for the novice investor to jump into.
Like with gold, silver has an inverse relationship to the American dollar, and to all currencies in general. Again, this is another reason why silver is hitting all-time highs right now, with silver future contracts predicting a steady rise to mirror gold, well into 2021. There is also something that Wall Street calls the gold silver ratio, which is exactly what it sounds like: the ratio of the price of gold per ounce to the price of silver per ounce. This ratio has historically moved together, which makes logical sense if both precious metals are independently moving inverse to paper currencies. Historically, the gold and silver prices do move together though as the general ratio has been in the range of 17:1 to 20:1.
Silver also has numerous ways for investors to get involved in, including silver mining and production companies, as well as the ever popular silver ETFs. These Exchange Traded Funds have gained popularity amongst retail investors in recent years as a way of purchasing a diversified product as a single equity with low costs, and no trading fees if your platform allows it. Here are a few of the better performing silver ETFs that investors can look into adding to their portfolios if they are interested in the precious metal:

1. SLV – iShares Silver Trust: Probably one of the better known silver ETFs, this is fully backed by silver bullion and coins held in a vault. While usually fairly steady, this ETF has enjoyed a 52-week increase of 152% with much of that coming in the last few months.
2. SIVR – Aberdeen Standard Physical Silver Shares ETF: Very similar to SLV but with lower fees, this is an ideal fund for novice and experienced investors to get into as they start to diversify their portfolios.
3. DBS – Invesco DB Silver Fund: Again another stable ETF for investors to get into, and another good performing one as well. Just as with their gold ETF, Invsco focuses on silver futures contracts for this fund, so it is a nice long-term play if investors are bullish on silver.

Just as with gold, investors can get a slice of the silver pie by buying shares of silver mining companies as well. Here are a few of the top silver mining company stocks that investors can look into adding to their portfolios.

1. PAAS – Pan American Silver Corp.: This Canada based miner is focussed on the exploration, development, extraction, refining, processing, and reclamation of silver. They operate mines in Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, and are developing more as well for the future.
2. WPM – Wheaton Precious Metals: Another Canadian based company that deals with miners of gold, silver, palladium, and cobalt. Wheaton is not a direct miner, rather they purchase these precious metals from other mining companies.
3. AG – First Majestic Silver Corp.: Canadian companies seem to be dominating the silver industry, and First Majestic is another of those. This company focuses mainly in Mexico for gold and silver.

Silver may never be as popular as gold for investors to keep track of but the two precious metals move in a synchronized fashion, and both are looked upon by investors as safe havens for their money when the market is in flux.
The rest of 2020 seems like a wildcard right now, with many analysts expecting a further correction to the markets at any point. There seems to be an inevitability to a market crash of some sort, whether it is as big as the one that happened back in February and March, remains to be seen. Investors are looking at the precious metal industry to hold their funds to wait out any sort of correction or crash. If this does happen, we may expect a pullback in precious metals too as investors selloff to get back into some stocks at their low levels. Such is the ebb and flow of the economy during turbulent times like the current one we are in.
At the same time, what if a market correction does not happen? Will the uncertainty continue or will investors feel relatively secure in the way the markets are progressing? This could cause a reduction in the demand for silver and gold, culminating in lower prices in the future. Of course this also depends on the Federal Reserve diminishing their rate of printing paper currency to bailout the economy, which does not seem like a reality in the short-term at least.
Another point of contention for investors is the ongoing economical and political tensions between China and America. The two world powers have been feuding for the past couple of months over various things, but it escalated as China social media app Tik Tok gained popularity in North America. It was alleged that TikTok was sending data and information from mobile phones back to China, though nobody is sure of their intended use of this data. Regardless, the markets have stumbled several times lately because of this. Both sides have threatened economic sanctions and the banning of certain product use in each country. The prices of silver and gold have shot up as the tensions have escalated between the two governments, as investors flock to the precious metals. Many of the biggest companies on the major stock indices rely on China for materials or production, so any sort of breakdown in supply chains could cause an enormous change to their stock prices. An example of this is a sudden 5% correction in the price of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), as it was thought that iPhone sales would decline if China’s chat platform WeChat was banned in America.
There are other factors that may have an effect on gold and silver prices as well. In this modern economy, many of the retail investors have trended towards younger adults with a sudden influx of income. Popular platforms such as Robinhood combined with increased time at home during the quarantine, have caused retail investor usage to skyrocket during the pandemic. Many of these investors are more lured in by the shiny new objects of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Perhaps we will start thinking of these cryptocurrencies as a modern day version of precious metals one day, as many investors and some analysts, believe that Bitcoin may be a safe haven in the future. Already, the price of Bitcoin has risen above $12,000 in August, mirroring the highs of gold and silver. If the demand for Bitcoin rises higher than the demand for precious metals, we may see an investor migration to cryptocurrencies rather than tangible metals.
Conclusion: Gold and silver are staples of our global economy, and will continue to be so as long as the demand for precious metals exists. In times of uncertainty, gold and silver are viewed as safe relative to the volatility of the stock market. Sure, their prices can vary as well, but because they are tied to a less dynamic valuation that is based on an inverse relation to paper currency, their prices will not and can not fluctuate as much as the liquidity of individual stocks.
As long as the world remains in flux, there will be a general feeling of instability, especially for global markets. A second wave of COVID-19 in the third or fourth quarter of 2020 could prove to be enough to push the markets over the edge and into another recession. The bull market has been rallying for over a decade now, with astronomical gains over the last few years, especially for sectors like the big tech FAANG stocks. Another factor to consider is what a Biden government could bring to the world if he is elected over President Donald Trump in October. A new government could ease some of the tensions with China, as well as within America itself. These are all big what ifs, and could all have potential impacts on the economy and the world. As long as all of these factors are up in the air, investors will be looking to gold and silver as ways of stabilizing their portfolios and protecting their finances from a potential market crash in the future.

Keep in mind that you guys are in an echo chamber as you read what my thoughts are on bitcoin.
I honestly dont see the currency being accepted as a global currency in the near or distant future. if theres only 21 million bitcoin that can possibly exist and that amount is reached in 2140, the amount of bitcoin that will be bricked due to lost passcodes and people dying whilst in ownership of such currency in the next 10 generations will cause circulative supply to drop to such a low that the majority of bitcoin in circulation will be owned by less and less people and thus create a stagnant ecosystem. Its price will be determined by fewer and fewer individuals that have the majority of bitcoin. This goes against the spirit of community and human values that value a certain level of governing control through a majority consensus.
If it is to be accepted by the billions of people on earth then it has to have a stable price and value that can be controlled by the communities that use it or it will warp a large % of peoples minds into valuing it as an appreciating commodity and not a currency.
The effort to get people to learn fractions and technology that involve phones and usb-like devices is also a major hurdle to accessibility for most people. Our current global infrastructure does not support widespread use of crypto. But when does, which wont be in the near future, Fiat currency will remain the leader in value because through law it can be bound to a physical asset such as gold.
So to me, if I bought bitcoin, I personally see that as a move only motivated by distrust in government. People dont realise that they are their government and they have a say in it by either becoming a representative of the people or electing someone as such.
When Andrew Yang (the only technologically literate candidate to ever run for office) eventually becomes president and America is systematically reformatted to a modern up to date country, Intelligent use of fiat currency will bounce back and will be a very strong norm. Governing bodies can fund programs that value community and human centered values. Universal basic income and a booming population will require fiat currency as its stable medium of trade. Bitcoin cannot offer a properly run governing body any benefits because it literally represents the human ego in a trade able commodity that is only ever viable in a land of fear and uncertainty with donald trump. (i dont see him being reelected but he did his job throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of a broken system).
Lets talk about what the future will look like if crypto currency is actually used as a currency instead of a commodity that is only purchased for the sole reason that it will be sold for more than it was purchased for:
Think about hundreds of millions of people using the cryptocurrency trading the 10,000 bitcoins between one another in fractions in the distant future(not literally the exact amount but as an example). Then imagine a legacy owner of the currency dumping their 100,000 bitcoins into the market on a whim because they want to crash its value. Theres no governance that can step in to stop this from happening. Bitcoin isnt backed by any physical asset such as gold and its value cannot be inforced by a governing body. The one action of one individual can negatively affect the majority of other people with no safeguards. That should be more terrifying to people than a fiat currency being printed by a central banking system and then distributing funds in a less disruptive manner that allows for programs such as universal basic income to be viable that will be an inevitability in the future or community run organisations that benefit the spirit of community. Sure, Bitcoin is stable on paper, but its value is all speculation and subject to mass psychology.
This bitcoin narrative all over twitter and youtube actually require you to believe them to keep bitcoin viable. without your belief in it, its worthless. of course you can say the same thing about fiat currency, but there are benefits fiat provide that bitcoin cannot. With Bitcoin you have tax avoidance? reduced funding for community run organisations? failure of funding for public services that many use? Bitcoin does nothing for community as a whole. Fiat curreny and a competent government fills this very important role.
The fact that the way bitcoin was designed doesnt factor in the fact that the population of the human race will only keep growing; makes it an inferior means of trade on a large scale and merely a commodity to add to the list next to gold. By inferior i mean it isnt widely accepted. most stores wont accept gold nor will they accept bitcoin.
If there is any takeaway from this it is or added notes: -Bitcoin represents the ego of the human race as a trade able currency
-Bitcoin does nothing to propagate community values by its very nature which is why it will not succeed in the future.
-As difficult as it is to mine bitcoin, most people that use money in general dont really care what you did to earn it. People value stability in a currency. not rampant volatility.
-Youtube videos on bitcoin value is all speculation no matter how much you want to justify its value. People dismissing the billionaires that publicly state their gut beliefs against crypto by creating conspiracy theories are actually the real insecure people of the crypto community.
-Bitcoin is a COMMODITY dont be fooled into thinking that is a currency. It will never be a fully accepted global currency unless it can be controlled by a(competent) centralised governing body. And because it does not possess that capacity, it will never succeed in the distant long term.

12 years of disciplined boring investing almost all in SPY and later VOO and I am a millionaire in my late thirties.
900k from index funds and 200k from real estate.
Started with zero. No inheritance. Separate money from my wife (not counting her assets or contributions). Made mid five to low six figures income the whole time. One kid... now two.
edit 1
I actually did not thing anyone would respond to this but a lot of people did. Some asked for proof. Here it is. Omitting real estate holdings. https://imgur.com/a/zI9UWJa
Also including credit report - no debt outside a used car loan because I will not pay cash when I get money at 3.49%.
Edit 2
People asked for more details.
At a high level I have been investing / studying markets since I was very young. I tried everything (internet stocks, FOREX, Options, Futures, small caps etc) coupled with fundamental and technical analysis. Did OK, even won second place in a trading contest but never got what I wanted.
Like many people I made bad decisions and had divorce, job loss, etc. Even had to close out an IRA in my twenties.
Ended up turning to a disciplined index fund strategy about 12 years ago.
Strategy was to max out 401k and live below my means (old car, no cable tv, make my own food, etc). At the end of each month swept all my pennies into an after tax fund since my 401k was maxed. That is it. Make your own coffee and buy VOO or SPY ideally in a tax advantaged account.
I road this through the 2008/2009 crash - kept my investments and bought more.
I also have small (like 5% of my money) in Bitcoin, Tesla and Pot stocks. This is purely for fun.
A couple people mentioned this was just luck. I think it is important to understand the market will move up, retrace, consolidate and then move higher. The timing of this is somewhat luck. The strategy part is live below your means, buy and accumulate positions for years so when a bull market hits you are in. I guess you can call each runup "luck" except people keep living in debt no matter what their income. I would much prefer people take away an investment strategy that does work if you are a disciplined from someone not born rich and who tried a lot of different strategies.
The takeaway really is with education and discipline you can reach a level of financial independence even after many screwups. I can publish this simple system and honestly few will follow it... There are no ads, systems to buy or affiliate links. I make zero dollars sharing this. I make my own coffee and watch netflix. I invest the rest in index funds. Take a trip or buy something if it really is important to me. That is it.
Edit 3
People asked what is next. Teach my six year old and newborn savings and investing. Opening a ROTH* for the 6 year old and custodial brokerage account for the new addition. They will have millions as a safety net at retirement. They will now know about this money and will need to find their own path in life.
Staying in the market, if it crashes I will buy more.
Stating in until I reach 5-10 million. Don't need the money for a long time...

• A ROTH requires earned income, they need to be hired in a family business, mow the lawn, model, deliver papers, etc. Google and your accountant has more legal ways to do this and interesting discussion. You can google "roth ira for newborn". I did not point this out early on. Sorry.

New here and look to get the communities take on a potential leanFIRE plan. I'm Canadian so all numbers in CAD and I will have free health care for life. I've been working as an engineer for coming up on 5 years now since graduating and previously did 20 months of engineering internship as part of school in order to graduate debt free. In the last 5 years through some good investments and saving about 2/3 of my income I've accumulated about $480k of investments. I make about $100k/year after tax and spend about $2.5k/m ($30k/yr). I'll be turning 30 next August and was thinking of trying out the FIRE life for at least a couple years and then decide if I want to go back to work. I estimate I'll have approximately $600k by next August as long as the market doesn't crash. I'm thinking the investments will cover about $2000/m (4% rule) and I would work part time 2-3 days a week when I'm not travelling to make $750-$1250/m extra for $2750-$3250/m to live on. Planning to travel relatively cheaply 4-6 months a year during winter. I anticipate paying a low average tax rate of about 5-10% or less based on some calculations I've done. At this point no partnekids. Any recommendations to improve this plan or on the feasibility of it?
​
Edit: Thanks for the input everyone. For clarification I don't own a home and the money is invested in globally diversified 80/20 (stock/bond) ETFs (60%), portfolio of US and CAD REITs that pay for my rent (30%) and a small amount of gold and bitcoin (10%).

Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.
-Albert Camus, The Plague
This is my fortieth portfolio update. I complete this update monthly to check my progress against my goal.
Portfolio goal
My objective is to reach a portfolio of $2 180 000 by 1 July 2021. This would produce a real annual income of about $87 000 (in 2020 dollars).
This portfolio objective is based on an expected average real return of 3.99 per cent, or a nominal return of 6.49 per cent.
Portfolio summary
Vanguard Lifestrategy High Growth Fund – $662 776
Vanguard Lifestrategy Growth Fund – $39 044
Vanguard Lifestrategy Balanced Fund – $74 099
Vanguard Diversified Bonds Fund – $109 500
Vanguard Australian Shares ETF (VAS) – $150 095
Vanguard International Shares ETF (VGS) – $29 852
Betashares Australia 200 ETF (A200) – $197 149
Telstra shares (TLS) – $1 630
Insurance Australia Group shares (IAG) – $7 855
NIB Holdings shares (NHF) – $6 156
Gold ETF (GOLD.ASX) – $119 254
Secured physical gold – $19 211
Ratesetter (P2P lending) – $13 106
Bitcoin – $115 330
Raiz* app (Aggressive portfolio) – $15 094
Spaceship Voyager* app (Index portfolio) – $2 303
BrickX (P2P rental real estate) – $4 492
Total portfolio value: $1 566 946 (-$236 479 or -13.1%)
Asset allocation
Australian shares – 40.6% (4.4% under)
Global shares – 22.3%
Emerging markets shares – 2.3%
International small companies – 3.0%
Total international shares – 27.6% (2.4% under)
Total shares – 68.3% (6.7% under)
Total property securities – 0.2% (0.2% over)
Australian bonds – 4.8%
International bonds – 10.4%
Total bonds – 15.2% (0.2% over)
Gold – 8.8%
Bitcoin – 7.4%
Gold and alternatives – 16.2% (6.2% over)
Presented visually, below is a high-level view of the current asset allocation of the portfolio.
Comments
This month saw an extremely rapid collapse in market prices for a broad range of assets across the world, driven by the acceleration of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Broad and simultaneous market falls have resulted in the single largest monthly fall in portfolio value to date of around $236 000.
This represents a fall of 13 per cent across the month, and an overall reduction of more the 16 per cent since the portfolio peak of January.
[Chart]
The monthly fall is over three times more severe than any other fall experienced to date on the journey. Sharpest losses have occurred in Australian equities, however, international shares and bonds have also fallen.
A substantial fall in the Australia dollar has provided some buffer to international equity losses - limiting these to around 8 per cent. Bitcoin has also fallen by 23 per cent. In short, in the period of acute market adjustment - as often occurs - the benefits of diversification have been temporarily muted.
[Chart]
The last monthly update reported results of some initial simplified modelling on the impact of a hypothetical large fall in equity markets on the portfolio.
Currently, the actual asset price falls look to register in between the normal 'bear market', and the more extreme 'Global Financial Crisis Mark II' scenarios modelled. Absent, at least for the immediate phase, is a significant diversification offset - outside of a small (4 per cent) increase in the value of gold.
The continued sharp equity market losses have left the portfolio below its target Australian equity weighting, so contributions this month have been made to Vanguard's Australian shares ETF (VAS). This coming month will see quarterly distributions paid for the A200, VGS and VAS exchange traded funds - totalling around $2700 - meaning a further small opportunity to reinvest following sizeable market falls.
Reviewing the evidence on the history of stock market falls
Vladimir Lenin once remarked that there are decades where nothing happen, and then there are weeks in which decades happen. This month has been four such weeks in a row, from initial market responses to the coronavirus pandemic, to unprecedented fiscal and monetary policy responses aimed at lessening the impact.
Given this, it would be foolish to rule out the potential for other extreme steps that governments have undertaken on multiple occasions before. These could include underwriting of banks and other debt liabilities, effective nationalisation or rescues of critical industries or providers, or even temporary closure of some financial or equity markets.
There is a strong appeal for comforting narratives in this highly fluid investment environment, including concepts such as buying while distress selling appears to be occurring, or delaying investing until issues become 'more clear'.
Nobody can guarantee that investments made now will not be made into cruel short-lived bear market rallies, and no formulas exist that will safely and certainly minimise either further losses, or opportunities forgone. Much financial independence focused advice in the early stages of recent market falls focused on investment commonplaces, with a strong flavour of enthusiasm at the potential for 'buying the dip'.
Yet such commonly repeated truths turn out to be imperfect and conditional in practice. One of the most influential studies of a large sample of historical market falls turns out to provide mixed evidence that buying following a fall reliably pays off. This study (pdf) examines 101 stock market declines across four centuries of data, and finds that:

• Large falls can lead to strong rebounds - After large falls of up to 50 per cent, the probability of a large rebound is higher.
  
• Future returns after large market falls are generally positive - Returns following such a severe crash are systematically higher than otherwise.
  
• Smaller market falls, however, may accurately signal poor future returns - Smaller declines (10-20 per cent) are more likely to be followed by further declines, although the strength of the relationship is weaker and less consistent.
  

Even these findings should be viewed as simply indicative. Each crisis and economic phase has its unique character, usually only discernible in retrospect. History, in these cases, should inform around the potential outlines of events that can be considered possible. As the saying goes, risk is what remains after you believe you have thought of everything.
Position fixing - alternative perspectives of progress
In challenging times it can help to keep a steady view of progress from a range of perspectives. Extreme market volatility and large falls can be disquieting for both recent investors and those closer to the end of the journey.
One perspective on what has occurred is that the portfolio has effectively been pushed backwards in time. That is, the portfolio now sits at levels it last occupied in April 2019. Even this perspective has some benefit, highlighting that by this metric all that has been lost is the strong forward progress made in a relatively short time.
Yet each perspective can hide and distort key underlying truths.
As an example, while the overall portfolio is currently valued at around the same dollar value as a year ago, it is not the same portfolio. Through new purchases and reinvestments in this period, many more actual securities (mostly units in ETFs) have been purchased.
The chart below sets out the growth in total units held from January 2019 to this month, across the three major exchange trade funds holdings in the portfolio.
[Chart]
From this it can be seen that the number of securities held - effectively, individual claims on the future earnings of the firms in these indexes - has more than doubled over the past fifteen months. Through this perspective, the accumulation of valuable assets shows a far more constant path.
Though this can help illuminate progress, as a measure it also has limitations. The realities of falls in market values cannot be elided by such devices, and some proportion of those market falls represent initial reassessments of the likely course of future earnings, and therefore the fundamental value of each of those ETF units.
With significant uncertainty over the course of global lock-downs, trade and growth, the basis of these reassessments may provide accurate, or not. For anyone to discount all of these reassessments as wholly the temporary result of irrational panic is to show a remarkable confidence in one's own analytical capacities.
Similarly, it would be equally wrong to extrapolate from market falls to a permanent constraining of the impulse of humanity to innovate, adjust to changed conditions, seek out opportunities and serve others for profit.
Lines of position - Trends in expenditure
A further longer-term perspective regularly reviewed is monthly expenses compared to average distributions.
Monthly expenditure continues to be below average, and is likely to fall further next month as a natural result of a virus-induced reduction of shopping trips, events and outings.
[Chart]
As occurred last month, as a function some previous high distributions gradually falling outside of the data 'window' for the rolling three-year comparison of distributions and expenditure, a downward slope in distributions continues.
Progress
Progress against the objective, and the additional measures I have reached is set out below.
Measure Portfolio All Assets Portfolio objective – $2 180 000 (or $87 000 pa) 71.9% 97.7% Credit card purchases – $71 000 pa 87.7% 119.2% Total expenses – $89 000 pa 70.2% 95.5%
Summary
This month has been one of the most surprising and volatile of the entire journey, with significant daily movements in portfolio value and historic market developments. There has been more to watch and observe than at any time in living memory.
The dominant sensation has been that of travelling backwards through time, and revisiting a stage of the journey already passed. The progress of the last few months has actually been so rapid, that this backwards travel has felt less like a set back, but rather more like a temporary revisitation of days past.
It is unclear how temporary a revisitation current conditions will enforce, or exactly how this will affect the rest of the journey. In early January I estimated that if equity market fell by 33 per cent through early 2020 with no offsetting gains in other portfolio elements, this could push out the achievement of the target to January 2023.
Even so, experiencing these markets and with more volatility likely, I don't feel there is much value in seeking to rapidly recalculate the path from here, or immediately alter the targeted timeframe. Moving past the portfolio target from here in around a year looks almost impossibly challenging, but time exists to allow this fact to settle. Too many other, more important, human and historical events are still playing out.
In such times, taking diverse perspectives on the same facts is important. This Next Life recently produced this interesting meditation on the future of FIRE during this phase of economic hardship. In addition, the Animal Spirits podcast also provided a thoughtful perspective on current market falls compared to 2008, as does this article by Early Retirement Now. Such analysis, and each passing day, highlights that the murmurs of the sea are louder than ever before, reminding us of the precariousness of all things.
The post, links and full charts can be seen here.

/edit: Hi /all. While I have your attention, I want to take 5 seconds of your time and bring some exposure to something that is threatening our existence as the human race. If you aren't interested, please skip down to the main article. I'm talking about finding a way to live sustainably on this planet, regenerative agriculture, where we get our food from, and how we can make sure that our kids and grandkids have something left once we leave.
Please consider reading up on Permaculture, sustainable living, Forest gardening, Backyard Chickens, etc. Consider following what I did and do it for yourself. This all used to be a useless lawn.
Bored for a night? Go watch "Sustainable" on Netflix.
Look into people like Geoff Lawton, Mark Shepard, Sepp Holzer, these people are going to save us.
Want to make a small change yourself? Grow a tomato plant on your balcony in a pot. Reduce transport of the tomatoes you eat, and make ~$50 per plant in saved money. Want to do something bigger? Plant a fruit tree in your backyard. Maybe two. Maybe a raspberry bush. You are now part of saving the human race.
If everyone reading this planted a fruit tree, or even some wild flowers, we could save the bees.
While you are at it, planting a fruit tree has been shown to be one of the best investments on the planet. There's pretty much no investment on the planet that is more financially lucrative (while still being nearly bullet-proof safe) than planting a fruit tree.
You can get a tree at an end of sale auction for literally 5-10 bucks, and that tree will produce THOUSANDS of dollars of fruit for you in it's lifetime. Go spend $200 bucks at an end of season sale, plant 10-20 trees (if you have room), and that $200 will be worth tens of thousands of dollars of saved money.
Do it right, set it up right and it's almost no work because you offload the work to nature - as it has done for the last few billion years. Go learn how, let me show you how. If you do it right, it's zero work after you have planted and wood-chipped, and all you do is pull dollars off a tree.
Original post starts below. I apologize for the shilling of Permaculture, but I think loss of topsoil will impact us all if we don't reverse it soon. We need soil, we need bees, we need food. We need to stop buying December Bananas in Canada. We need to start supporting local permaculture sustainable farms. We need to do this or we may not make it, and our grandkids stand no chance.
I also expended the "now what happens" section, to explain how these pullbacks are a good thing, make crypto more stable, and why we keep seeing larger ceilings after every pullback... this stuff is really important for you to make money on this thing, if that's your goal....
I've made a similar post in a few spots, and this is something that is absolutely critical for people to understand... what impacts price, and what is going on lately. Price has only a very minor correlation with money invested, and a major correlation with opinion.
... and Humans are an emotional bunch.
So what drives price of any commodity, crypto, gold, pizzas, whatever? The money invested in it, right? Kind of, but not really. What if I told you that you could theoretically raise bitcoin from $15k to $20k by spending $1, and lower it from $25k to $1k by spending the same $1? Crazy right?
AN EXAMPLE
This is going to start out slow, I want to make sure I get everyone on the same page before I pick things up and lift the curtain. Stick with me here....
This is an example to help illustrate why prices aren't driven by money invested, but rather consensus and opinion. Lets imagine the following exists (we will use bitcoin as an example, but this is how everything on the planet works)
Lets say Bitcoin is currently priced at $10k (the last sale). From $11k to $99k, every $1k there is someone with a sell order of 1 full bitcoin. From $9k to $1 dollar, every $1k on the way down there is someone with a buy order of 1 full bitcoin.
So, right now if you wanted to buy bitcoin you have several options... meet the lowest seller's price of $11k, or, put your own buy order up, above the highest buyer's bid order (overcut them). If you decide to just place an order, the price doesn't change. If you decide the buy the $11k bitcoin, now bitcoins value is $11k, with a new lowest sell offer of $12k, and a highest buy bid of $10k. Someone else comes in an overcuts the buy bid and puts 1 BTC for sale for $11k. No trades are made until someone matches a buy/sell.
Okay, that's kindergarten stuff, most people here understand that. So how much money drove the price up in this situation? $11k, and BTC price raised 11/10, 1.10, or 10% from the last sale. Now the entire marketcap of BTC raised 10% (last sale multiplied by circulating supply). So it takes $11k to drive a 10% increase, right? Not at all. Lets look at what happens when news is released.
News comes out that Warren Buffet thinks bitcoin is a scam, a bubble, and he wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole because he only invests in things he understands and he doesn't understand crypto. People panic everywhere, and believe "this guy is smart, I'm overvaluing this thing".
Suddenly people don't want to buy this scam anymore, and the buy orders for $11k, $10, and $9k are taken down.
At the same time, the people wanting to sell start to panic and just want out. The guy at $32k (who just had that offer up "just incase it moons") drops down to $11k sell order. The guy at $12k, who was the lowest, now undercuts him to $10k.
The other buyers see the sellers undercutting and think that if these people want out, why am I buying in. The $8k guy pulls his offer, and so do the $7k, $6k and $5k guys. The highest offer is now $4k.
The sellers panic further and the $14k guy undercuts the $10k guy and puts up a $9k sell. The $15k, 17k and 11k guys all see this flurry of panic and now a storm undercutting is triggered, to $8k, $7k, and $6k. The $8k order pulls his again and goes down to $5k.
The price on the buy and sell orders has moved around a ton, but no sales have actually happened yet. Technically, BTC is still "worth" $11k, and the market cap reflects that. All this horseshit has happened, and it only happened in 10 seconds, but the price hasn't moved yet.
The $27k guy wakes up and checks his phone. He had a $27k offer just incase the price moved also, and he also only has a tiny infinitesimal fraction of a BTC. Well, he decides "he's out" and fills $1 worth of the part of the $4k guys buy offer.
The latest price information is now updated, and BTC fell from $11k to $4k price per BTC with the movement of a single dollar.
This is exaggerated example, but this is what moves price. Not money in vs money out. The ONLY THING that moves price is perception.
OPINION FLOW AND NOT MONEY FLOW
Now the above example only happens if everyone simultaneously believe the same thing... this the asset they are holding is a steaming turd. What happens in reality is there's no black and white, it's shades of gray. It's flow in vs flow out. But again, not flow MONEY, but rather OPINIONS.
If 66% of the holders of something all of a sudden unanimously decide that their asset is overvalued, then they panic sell. Even if 33% of the people decide they are going to buy up as much as these panic sellers sell, if the panic is strong enough, and they are slitting eachother's throat to sell, then the buyers just happily sit and let them do that, and time their buys in. Very little money has to actually change hands in order for this price to crash, all that matters is the FLOW OF OPINION has to be swift and violent, and in majority. The sellers will leapfrog eachother on the way down, faster than the buyers scoop up their sales, and the net result is a crashed price.
Note, this happens both ways... fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) as well as overhyped FOMO (Fear of missing out).
So now what happens?
Time goes by and all holders opinions of their asset hasn't changed. They still think it's worth $11k and they got great deals scooping up what these sellers were selling. The weak hands have left the market and have been replaced with holders. Overall, now a higher percentage of holders believe in the product they are holding and are unwilling to sell for the panic prices of the last week. Panic sellers were also replaced by new money, people who have wanted in for a while and are now in on their perceived ground floor.
Also, people who bought BTC at $1 ten years ago and have been looking for an exit to cash profits have now been replaced by either long term holders, or by these new people who are thrilled to have finally entered, and they are looking to hold long.
So what happens on pullbacks? The number of people waiting to jump off the ship has decreased. The new ground floor is established. Are we done? Who knows, this could go on for another year, but what matters is that people who want off are getting off and people that want on are getting on.
People who have panic sold and never believed in this in the firstplace... people who have wanted out for 10 years... they have been replaced by people who are now getting in on THEIR GROUND FLOOR, and are going to be holding long. The market is suddenly increasingly more stable today than it was yesterday, even though prices are down.
This is a good thing. This is why crypto keeps bouncing back from pullbacks and reaches new higher ceilings and floors each time. Old money who wanted out, and new panic holders, they are gone. They are replaced with adopters, holders, believers in this technology. These people aren't selling anytime soon, because they believe that this thing is going to revolutionize the world. Every crash brings more of these people in, and removes more panic sellers out.
Moving forward
Now news releases start coming out about how stock ETFs are being created, NASDAQ index funds, bank support, government support. Companies are using this tech, and companies who use blockchain for transportation are putting non-blockchain companies out of business.
The people on the outside looking-in feel they are missing out. They now start coming in and buying. They start overpricing eachother on their buy orders, and eventually it gets close enough to a sell order that someone decides they are just going to meet the sell price. The sale goes through.
Sellers (HODLERs) see this action, and they start pulling sell orders off the table almost as fast as they fill. Sure some trades go through, and incoming money is driving the price up as market orders are filled. But what's also happening is people are seeing this flurry of volume, and sellers are pulling sell orders and placing them higher.
Junk coins and pump and dump scam coins are dying by the millions. In their ashes, good solid technology projects whose coins have fundamental economic reasons for growth, these are rising. Corporate partnerships continue forming. The real world continues to create actual use cases. Companies start storing more and more corporate information on blockchain. Public companies use blockchain to store scientific research (See Canadian Research Council announcements), and blockchain acts as a Library of Alexandria. People can travel out of country without any monetary exchange, using their chosen cryptocurrency to buy the things they need abroad. The world is slowly actually USING this technology.
Money is coming in, but more importantly, OPINION IS CHANGING. Literally nothing could have happened in terms of fundamentals, partnerships, etc... this can all be driven entirely emotional, so long as it's wide-spread and strong. Infact, the market could THEORETICALLY rebound in this way from $4000/BTC to $1 MILLION PER BITCOIN by the sale of ONE PENNY. $4000 sound low? Does that number make you uncomfortable? We may go that low. We may not. If we do, I'm not panicking and selling, I'm buying more.
SO WHAT HAS HAPPENED IN THE LAST FEW MONTHS? and where are we going?
A lot of new money has come in from Nov-Jan, and they don't really know what they are investing in. Sure some of them have done great research and are smart investors but most people aren't and isntead they are buying Symbols and Names and trading on speculation. They are treating their favorite coins like a sports team, and will follow them irrationally off a cliff.
These new people came in and invested in cryptocurrency because their OPINION was heavily influenced in Nov, Dec, Jan, from media. They saw this money making machine called crypto. They were willing to pay huge, ride the wave up, keep buying, etc. They were "ground floor adopters" and were going to get rich.
They outnumber the old money by A LOT. Their OPINION MATTERS. It matters the most.
To keep this in perspective, they are also a VAST MINORITY of "new money" that will enter the game in the next decade. This cycle will continue over and over and over.
Their opinion rose nearly unbounded and price rose accordingly. Market cap rose from 10B to 750B, and it could have been VERY LITTLE actual money that did this. How much did it need to be though? Literally ONE PENNY, theoretically. All that matters in moving price is MOMENTUM OF OPINION. I believe it has been estimated that as low as 6B USD was responsible for the bull rush.
These people then started hearing "Bubble", "Scam", Fake news about governments banning. They don't understand how technology wins, always. Crypto is beyond government control. If they could have stopped Bitcoin they would have done it already.
WHO IS DRIVING ALL THIS?
Most investment opportunities go first to "accredited investors". You need to have multimillions in order to get in on the ground floor for most stock IPOs, and we're seeing that start to happen with coin ICOs. Bitcoin was a joke for the first few years, while lunatics picked it up. At this point, it was really too late to get in "early", and who would have wanted to anyways, it was all still a joke. So Wallstreet, banks, governments have generally watched on the sidelines as average Joes who were crazy enough to be early adopters and toss $100 on fake internet money slowly became millionaires.
Not only that, but the idea of blockchain started to become understood. The power and value in it became understood. Not only as a way to track "monetary value" but for many other applications as well. Platforms were created, business uses brainstormed, products started being made. This thing started taking off, and wasn't a joke anymore. But regardless, big money wasn't in on the ground floor. They have stakeholders opinions to think of, and what do they say to investors when they lose all their money on magic internet points?
But they have woken up now. This thing has "popped" many times now and keeps recovering. This thing won't die. could they have been wrong all along? If they want in, how do they get in? They are no dummies, they have been controlling the world their whole lives? Look at the media experiment that Trump is doing? He is testing just how we work... you can do literally anything and we remember it for like 30 seconds, until the next news story comes out. We change opinions very easily. We are swayed very easily. We are their puppets. Media controls the world. They know their way in.
They have ONE WEAPON against cryptocurrency.
YOUR OPINION OF IT.
And they know it.
Media.
That's why FUD is so powerful and needs to be respected. It's why we need to read more than titles on news articles. We need to question what we read, whether it's good news or bad news. We need to think about "what are the motives of the person saying this to me". Does the government have a conflict of interest when they state that crypto is gambling? Do they have skin in the game?
What about wall street? Does WEISS ratings possibly have incentive to come out with poor ratings? Do banks have incentive to lock accounts in order to "protect" customers from "unsafe investments" when their entire business model revolves around holding as much of your money as possible and making money off it? Do you think banks have any super secret hidden interest in preventing you from storing your money elsewhere? I'm not sure, maybe you can critically think about that.
Just understand that this goes both ways. When crypto is booming and Fox news is showing people how to buy $4 ripple on prime time, you may want to start putting in some stop loss orders. When the suicide hotline is stickied at the top of /cryptocurrency and everyone is panic selling, you may want to start picking up some firesale deals.
So, the question is this... Is crypto undervalued or overvalued at it's price today? Where is the price going long term? I'm not talking about it's use case, I'm talking about in the court of public opinion, where is THAT going? Because THAT is what is going to drive price in the future.
Without a crystal ball, this is of course impossible to know. Do your own research and form your own opinion. It could very well be that the technology having a use-case will in and of itself drive opinion, and thus price. But make sure you understand that it's not the technology itself, it's not the value of the business itself, it's not the use case itself that will drive price, it is the publics OPINION of that thing which drives price. They are intertwined, but they are NOT the same thing.
TLDR: VERY VERY little money has to move around in order to swing prices drastically, up or down. Money in and out doesn't drive price, OPINION does. How do you let the news you read impact your opinion?How are you being played (on both sides, shilling and FUD).
Something is only worth what people think it's worth. Often that's based on reality, value, business, money, but often it's entirely emotional.
Structure your portfolio in a balance, intelligent way, using risk methodology.. Invest money you are willing to lose. Support legitimate technology and teams who are actively driving their product to completion, coding, and marketing. Stop trying to make money overnight in pump and dump scams, or pyramid schemes.
Every day, take one coin, do a deep dive on it, learn it inside and out. Look into their team and their past. Do that every day for a year, and you just learned 365 coins inside and out. Ask yourself the following key questions:
Have those members consistently jumped ship on previous projects? Is that where you want to invest in? Is their team capable of executing on their vision? Are they trying to solve world hunger, and their team is a few 16 year olds in a garage? How active is their github? Are they adding chunks of code regularly, or is a ghost town? Are they marketing their product at all? Or is marketing the only thing they are doing?
What are the economics of their coin itself? Is it required to be used to gain access to their technology? Are there burns? How premined is it, and what portion do the founders hold?
What about their vision? Are they trying to solve a problem that needs to be solved? What are the economics of that problem and how much money does the solution potentially save clients?
These are all questions you should be asking when you give your money to someone else. We're a lot more stable than we were - a correction was bound to happen. Too much early money wanted to cash in profits. These people have been replaced by new money who is holding on their own ground floor. The whole industry in general is still in very early stages. Rest assured that anyone reading this is still very much an early adopter. Just make sure you are investing in actual technology, and supporting capable teams, and not buying air. Buy the Googles and Amazons of Crypto, not the pets.com or flooz.com of cryptos.
Happy investing everyone.
/EDIT: some have asked to donate some crypto. Do me a favour instead, sub to my YouTube channel (link at top) watch my videos how to get started properly, and plant your own trees and establish food sovereignty for your family and your community, and help save the bees, save our topsoil, and sequester carbon to reverse global warming. My goal is to get a gardener back into every home on the planet. THAT is how we heal this world.