Ollie The Golden Mole (🌸, 🌿)

Lido fights back against self-limit false dichotomy and goes for gold. I started a new blog diving into Lido's value proposition. 1/7 open.substack.com/pub/hibiscuscu…

@santiagoroel cheapest stablecoin play

I started looking at Western Union because I thought stablecoins would kill it. Then I realized WU is better positioned than almost anyone to leverage them. Brand, distribution, 200+ countries, $923M in EBITDA. The key risk was management. They had been skeptical of stablecoins. I placed the bet in November. Since then WU has not only outperformed Solana but the broader market: WU +2.14% / SPX -6.76% / Nasdaq -11.66% / SOL -56.15% WU is a $2.8B market cap business trading at 6x earnings with a 10% dividend yield. Remitly trades at 50x on a 2.3% operating margin. Wise at 23x. The discount exists because WU revenue is declining 3.8% while both are growing 25%+. I am not fighting that. But at 6x earnings you are paying for zero recovery, zero tech adoption, zero optionality. That is the margin of safety. I was at the @blockworksDAS this week. The WU CEO was on the same stage. Very different energy from the one I had been following. Clear on the stablecoin strategy, talking about flipping negative float into positive float. They have since announced USDPT, their own stablecoin on Solana. For a 175-year-old company to go from skepticism to launching on Solana in under a year is a meaningful shift. Of course, there is plenty of execution risk. The bear case was always that they would not act. They are acting - and that alone warrants a repricing. The math I ran back in November when I placed the bet was: lose ~20-30%, cushioned by $500M in net income and a 10% dividend. Re-rate to Wise multiples and it is 4 to 5x. I am not betting on convergence. I am betting the market prices zero probability of it, and I will get paid for getting a free option. WU is part of a broader thesis that led me to start @inversion_cap: acquiring businesses with distribution at attractive prices. There is a lot of embedded optionality in those businesses. Not all will act in time. Some will die. But the ones that do will meaningfully outperform, and those gains will more than outweigh the losses. You reduce that risk meaningfully when you control that business. The greatest beneficiaries of cost-reducing technology like AI and crypto are not the startups building it. They are the incumbents with distribution that adopt it. WU is one of many. Full piece on Substack: open.substack.com/pub/obviously/… @HadickM double or nothing? Market settles November 1, 2026. DISCL: Long WU. Long SOL. NFA.

@tphuang Seems like the previous major escalation was the turning point

Looks like China has worked out process w/ Iran. COSCO Shipping is restarting services to UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait & Iraq. If COSCO is the only operator to these countries, it can charge quite the premium & this benefits Chinese exporters over others.

@LawrenceLepard @goldseek Great chart. At what point do you think not using a log chart for this 10-year depiction is better a log version which looks less aligned?

Great chart. You know what to do. h/t @goldseek

@LawrenceLepard between now and big print might we see some more capitulation? Massive value emerging. great shout Lawrence

Bought this under $1.00 a few years ago. Sold a bit a few months ago. Buying it again here. Good team, production growth, huge operating leverage.

@AngelicaOung great job on the subtitle

Did YOU want to watch CCTV's AI Martial Arts cartoon about the Straits of Hormuz crisis? Complete with fighting Persian Cats? Well I subtitled it for you so you can enjoy it in all its trope-laden glory! Remember kids, the mountains will stay standing while the green water flows, and the true art of war is not figuring out how to fight, but how to stop!🥷😼🦅

@zhusu Ngmi

Some people posting about Greater Switzerland, but after Brexit, France is the only country in the EU with a nuclear arsenal and energy independence. Explain to me why European Union won’t end up as the French Sixth Republic eventually. They just need to ban English again and suppress the Germans. The Spanish and Italian are Francophiles. Rename the euro the franc. Recruit legionnaires from the Mahgreb and install in main cities. Arabic used as the language of the empire, French for the centre. Re-invade North Africa. Revive corpse of Napoleon and create messianic concept around it, etc.

@tphuang another step forward for the 3 body problem tech forecast

中国建材/CNBM started mass production of T1200 Carbon Fiber. I thought Toray may have started already, but CNBM claims to be 1st globally to do it outside of labs. A couple of Chinese firms like CSST are already stably producing T1100, but T1200 is definitely cutting edge.

@ledgerstatus Wen episode c'mon

Crypto looks like the most obvious commodity / SOV trade left. I say crypto bc while Bitcoin makes the most logical sense for that trade, degenerates are waiting for beta and will pump the other stuff too. Long way of saying UpOnly.

@BobLoukas Let me fax that to you Bob

The singularity is approaching and I’m still using Gmail to transfer files from my phone to PC.

@Citrini7 @dreamtemple_ 4.11%

New Citrini merch from @dreamtemple_ - whoever’s closest to the closing print of the 10 year yield next Friday gets the first one

@dgt10011 well done ser. Amazing how much boredom propels rabbit hole chasing

Something caught my eye in the latest 13F filings. The biggest new entrant into IBIT, from a brand new entity, is something called Laurore Ltd. No website. No press. No footprint. The only public information is that the filer's name is Zhang Hui and it's HK based. Let's double click on that for a second. Zhang Hui is the Chinese equivalent of John Smith. It's what I like to call it a "non-anonymous anonymous" name, something hiding in plain sight buried under the statistical weight of millions to make it untraceable. The "Ltd" suffix suggests a Cayman or BVI structure, the classic offshore wrapper for accessing US markets. And the portfolio? A single holding. Nothing but IBIT. This isn't a diversified fund. It's a $436 million Bitcoin access vehicle dressed in institutional clothing. Why would you do this? Because Chinese investors can't hold Bitcoin. If this is what it looks like, it might be an early sign of institutional Chinese capital moving into Bitcoin, not through crypto exchanges or gray market channels, but through a BlackRock ETF, filed with the SEC in a regulated jurisdiction hiding in the most "transparent non-transparent" place imaginable. Funny that the name Laurore likely derives from the French l'aurore: the dawn. Smells like capital flight to me.

@RnaudBertrand Unrelated to this post. You might enjoy the Taiwan/China section of the convo youtube.com/watch?v=6sTkt0…

What an utterly ridiculous take: how is saying that the Chinese state has a long secular tradition "anti-imperialist"? Simply nothing to do 🤷‍♂️ And it's not "pseudointellectual" either: if it were then a massive proportion of Enlightenment figures - some of Western civilization's most consequential intellectuals - would be pseudointellectual too given that they made exactly the same argument. Voltaire, Leibniz, and Bayle all pointed to China as proof that a civilization could thrive without the Church. It's known as 'L'argument chinois' - the argument that China proved religion was unnecessary for a moral and well-functioning society - which was one of the central intellectual weapons of the Enlightenment. In other words that guy not only doesn't know Chinese history but he also obviously has no clue about his own 🤷‍♂️

@nickgiva1 gotta say... wot a superb piece. Don't stare at it too often, chap.

Last week I went to the Palm Beach Art Festival. Or rather: my wife made me go. Bought this for my office. Just spoke to me. And this week… All my fault, sorry. 😢

@dampedspring I can't decide whether you are more impressed with the set up over analysis

Wow. You should all read this.

@josephwang Insane spread

Sold all my paper silver and went to sell some physical for the first time. Could go higher, but honestly have only ever used this stuff as a make shift hammer. Dealer offered $90 and noted lots of people selling. Good luck. 🫡

@tphuang podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/mac… @tphuang you'll love this chat.

My thread on China's silver trade & what's happened in the past 2 months has silver px skyrocketed in China. 1st, Silver has huge & growing industrial demand, especially in the age of PVs, EVs & AI. Consumer demand is sky-rocketing in China -> Why China put in export controls.

@NobelPrize Funny how Gandhi never received one based on the above statement.

Statement from the Nobel Foundation One of the core missions of the Nobel Foundation is to safeguard the dignity of the Nobel Prizes and their administration. The Foundation upholds Alfred Nobel’s will and its stipulations. It states that the prizes shall be awarded to those who "have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind," and it specifies who has the right to award each respective prize. A prize can therefore not, even symbolically, be passed on or further distributed. For additional information, please refer to the Norwegian Nobel Committee: nobelpeaceprize.org/press/press-re…

@AviFelman 3 words - you nailed it

Market continues to be resilient, we've shaken out all the weak hands. Once Bitcoin gets going, the narrative of strength will appear -- people will project whatever they need to on it whether it's a "catch up trade to gold" or a "reaction to geopolitics" or "a reaction to politics" The reasoning is irrelevant, what is relevant is that we go higher.

@AngelicaOung You’d like this one from the cousins from 18 min on podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/geo…

Horrible to say… But I think the best play for Denmark is just to sell Greenland for a good price. For the USA would just take it otherwise. We are back in the world where power is power.

@RonStoeferle sehr heiß