Dan Weiskopf

Wondering what “Structure Matters” means? Here goes…read on etfthinktank.tidalfinancialgroup.com/2021/09/15/few… #Management #Compensation #Religion #Marketing #Fintech #Innovation #Technology #Blockchain #Bitcoin #finance #currency #markets #entrepeneurship #restaurants #future #fire #retirement #planning #ETFs #Tokenization

@EricLDaugh Structure Matters (SM): When I think about places I could live why would I choose #California under this leadership? Sad that a state with so much potential and beauty could be this messed up. (By the way New York is not perfect!)

🚨 HOLY CRAP. Gavin Newsom's California Medicaid program alone has reportedly lost $146 BILLION to FRAUD. Think about how much that is. Fraud raids are now RAMPING UP and arrests are happening The Trump White House anti-fraud task force has already suspended HUNDREDS of hospice fraudsters More raids are on the way. END GAVIN NEWSOM'S CAREER! 🔥

@charlessabatier @GSR_io @Figure @mcagney @fintechfrank @DeFi_Dad @Nomaticcap Great stuff! Cagney is steps an or leaps ahead of everyone! Here is an interview I did with him back in 2021 youtu.be/y_AQZfCO_Uc?si…

@GSR_io @Figure @mcagney @fintechfrank @DeFi_Dad @Nomaticcap thought you guys would find this conversation with Figure interesting

This is Wall Street's $10 trillion onchain foray. @Figure's chairman and co-founder @mcagney explained to our own @fintechfrank his journey of showing Wall Street how to reduce collateral risk, eliminate double-pledging, and blaze a trail for institutional DeFi participation.

LARRY FINK BECAME THE YOUNGEST MANAGING DIRECTOR IN HIS FIRM’S HISTORY. ON THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE BY 31. Then he lost $100 million in a single quarter. “We probably should’ve been fired for making too much money. The amount of risk we were taking was probably not a great risk reward. But there were no risk analytics.” The lesson that made him build BlackRock.

Blackstone just did something it has never done in 41 years. It opened a hedge fund to regular investors. 1.25% management fee. 12.5% of your profits. A 2% exit penalty. A 10% cap on how much you can withdraw per quarter. And the government just cleared the way for this to enter your 401(k). Here's what nobody is telling you: March 30, 2026: Bloomberg breaks the story. Blackstone, the world's largest alternative investment firm, is launching its first ever hedge fund for individual investors. The Blackstone Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund. Ticker: $BXHF $1.3 trillion in total assets under management. And for the first time in the firm's history, they're opening the door to people who aren't pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, or billionaires. They're calling them "mini-millionaires." Doctors. Lawyers. Small business owners. Professionals with $5 million in investments. The pitch? Access to the same strategies that made Blackstone's institutional clients billions. Sounds great. Now let's read the fine print. The fee structure is where it gets interesting. 1.25% annual management fee on everything you invest. That's just for showing up. Then 12.5% of any profits above a 5% return. So if the fund makes 15%, Blackstone takes 12.5% of that last 10%. But wait, there's more: 30% of the fund's assets will be invested in OTHER hedge funds. Outside managers. Third parties. And those funds charge their OWN fees. Typically 2% management and 20% of profits. So you're paying fees on top of fees. A second layer that eats into your returns before you ever see them. And if you want your money back within the first year? 2% early withdrawal penalty. Just for wanting your own money. Now let's talk about the part that should worry you most. The 10% quarterly redemption cap. This means Blackstone will only let investors withdraw a maximum of 10% of total fund assets every quarter. If redemption requests exceed that cap, you don't get your money. You wait. If the cap isn't hit, you can take everything out at once. But if enough people want out at the same time? You're locked in. And before you say "that would never happen," let me introduce you to what just happened at Blue Owl Capital. February 20, 2026. Blue Owl, a $307 billion asset manager, permanently blocked withdrawals from one of its private credit funds. $1.4 billion in assets. Liquidated. Stock crashed 6%. Investors who thought they had quarterly liquidity learned what "illiquid" actually means. Blue Owl's co-founder tried to spin it. "We sold assets at 99.7% of face value." "30% of investors will get their money back in 45 days." Translation: 70% of investors are stuck. And it didn't stop there. This week, Blue Owl capped redemptions at 5% across two more of its big private credit funds. The gates are going up across the industry. And here's the thing. Blackstone has been down this road before. BREIT. Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust. Their flagship real estate fund for wealthy individuals. Tens of billions in capital. Marketed as a stable, income-generating alternative. In late 2022, redemption requests surged. Blackstone hit the redemption cap. Investors were locked out. The fund's net asset value peaked at $70 billion. Today? $55 billion. It just barely started taking in more money than it paid out last month. For the first time since 2022. Three years to recover from a redemption crisis. Then there's BCRED. Blackstone Private Credit Fund. Another retail-facing product. In February 2026, it posted its first monthly loss in more than three years. The pattern is hard to ignore. Promise quarterly liquidity. Invest in illiquid assets. Everything works until it doesn't. Then the gates go up and retail investors are the ones trapped inside. Now here's what makes the timing even more revealing. The U.S. Department of Labor just cleared the way for private equity and private credit to be included in 401(k) target-date funds. This is the $14 trillion prize. Defined-contribution retirement plans. The money that 100 million Americans rely on for retirement. And Wall Street's biggest firms are lining up to get inside. Blackstone isn't alone. Apollo Global Management is expanding retail offerings. Ares Management is doing the same. KKR. Carlyle. All of them. Every major alternative asset manager is building products designed to tap into retail wealth. Not because they suddenly care about everyday investors. Because institutional money is getting harder to raise. Pension funds are more selective. Endowments are pulling back. Sovereign wealth is cautious. So they're going where the money is. Your money. Let's talk about what they're actually selling. Traditional hedge funds charge 2% management and 20% of profits. Blackstone's retail version charges 1.25% and 12.5%. Looks cheaper on paper. But here's what they don't tell you. That 1.25% is charged on your TOTAL investment. Every year. Win or lose. The 12.5% performance fee kicks in after a 5% hurdle. But remember the second layer. 30% of your money goes into outside hedge funds charging their own 2 and 20. So the ACTUAL cost of being in this fund is significantly higher than the headline numbers suggest. Let's do the math on a hypothetical $1 million investment. Year one. The fund returns 12%. Your gross gain: $120,000. Management fee (1.25%): $12,500. Performance fee (12.5% of gains above 5%): $8,750. Now add the fees on the 30% allocated to outside funds. That $300,000 is also getting charged 2% management ($6,000) and 20% of profits. If those outside funds also returned 12%, that's another $7,200 in performance fees. Total fees on a $120,000 return: roughly $34,450. That's nearly 29% of your gains eaten by fees. In a GOOD year. In a bad year? You still pay the management fees. On everything. While losing money. Now compare that to an S&P 500 index fund. Expense ratio: 0.03%. On $1 million, that's $300 per year. Not $34,450. $300. The fee difference compounds over decades. Over 20 years, that gap can cost you HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars. And here's the part that really matters. Blackstone's flagship hedge fund for institutions, the Absolute Return Composite, returned 11.9% in 2025. The S&P 500 returned 16.4% in 2025. After fees, the gap is even wider. So you're paying dramatically more for returns that have historically lagged the index. You might say, "But hedge funds provide downside protection." Fair point. But let's look at what just happened. The S&P 500 is down 8% from its January highs because of the Iran war. You know what else is down? BREIT. BCRED. Blue Owl's funds. Private credit broadly. The "uncorrelated" alternatives turned out to be very correlated when it mattered most. Hedge funds are supposed to hedge. But in a world where everyone is chasing the same trades, there's less hedging and more herding. And when the herd turns, everyone gets trampled. Retail investors just happen to be at the back of the line for the exits...

👇👀 Charles Schwab @CharlesSchwab CEO Rick Wurster - "5% of our clients (38 million) have exposure to crypto. We will have spot crypto in the next several months."

@GSR_io @Figure @mcagney @fintechfrank Structure Matters (SM): @mcagney What a journey - keep on innovating and paving the world! It’s not easiest to be first, but scale and moats come from determination and the grind! Great interview!

Wall Street is building faster in blockchain right now than the crypto native firms. "When they find out they can make money they lean in hard" The chessboard is completely shifting. Mike Cagney broke it down on @GSR_io’s The Crypto Tape:

Wow

Is @IBM involved? Afterall, its acquisition of Redhat for $34 billion focuses it very much on the success of the Linux Foundation. IBM's focus on AI agents and hybrid cloud through Red Hat, x402's vision of enabling autonomous AI-to-AI payments is directly relevant to IBM's strategic direction. Coinbase may be flash and IBM foundational?????

Every AI agent deserves a crypto wallet. In fact, there will be more AI agents transacting online than humans very soon. x402 is the internet payments layer (which has been missing for the last 30 years), and will enable this. The new x402 foundation will exist under the Linux Foundation, with @Coinbase, @Cloudflare and @Stripe as key contributors. Once all agents start transacting natively on the internet at scale, entirely new product and business opportunities will open up.

To be clear - arguably this is not new news! Whats new is the audacity of the overlapping timing with the bill! finbold.com/u-s-politician…

For the record, the summary of the bill introduced by @RepTimMooreNC on February 5, 2026-"the Unlocking Homeownership Act (H.R.7402) proposes to amend the tax code to allow people to use funds from 529 college savings plans toward the purchase of a first home — without the usual tax penalty for non-educational withdrawals. Frankly, the support of first time homeowner is something we agree with. Our issue is that he shouldn't be buying stock in a beat up housing developer while promoting the bill! congress.gov/bill/119th-con…

In 2021, 15 mutual funds converted to ETFs. By 2025, that number had quadrupled. The reasons are consistent across every conversion: better tax efficiency, lower costs, intraday liquidity, and a distribution channel that mutual funds simply cannot replicate. Since 2021, 190 total conversions have been completed representing over $140 billion in combined assets. And with ETF share classes now approved by the SEC, the path for mutual funds to access the ETF wrapper just got wider.

@mikebelshe I think this is a big deal in the way of Digital Asset Debt Strategies. Credit comes in many forms, but who thought New Hampshire would lead the pack?

Exciting new product! If you're borrowing against BTC or interested in lending against fully collateralized in BTC, check this out!

@dollar_mara Happy April’s Fool!!!

$MARA announced this morning that Fred Thiel will be stepping down as CEO of $MARA to pursue retirement. Thank you Fred. The board of directors has appointed Mike Alfred to succeed him. Mike has decades of experience in market manipulation and insider trading that will be useful in combating short seller collusion and options manipulation. He will also be able to help share prices appreciate with bombastic statements before dumping company shares on unsuspecting retail participants. Welcome aboard, Mike!

HPC Project terms are improving. "Contract structures have improved over the last few quarters with recent HPC contracts signed shifting to triple-net leases, which has seen estimated EBITDA margins increase into the mid-90% range vs earlier contracts in the ~70% range." -BTIG

Structure Matters (SM): @RepTimMooreNC has a history of aggressive trading and recently bought $LGIH stock @LGIHomes 7 times while promoting a housing bill? Stock is down about 40 percent vs 4 percent for $ITB in the past year. Glad he is representing his people in @northcarolina where development is taking place, but the conflict of front running the bill just screams of GRIFT! timmoore.house.gov/media/press-re…

@pelositracker This is funny and true, but worse than just that - they set the rules on what they can trade, the penalties for violation ($200) and then lowered the net so they could score easier!!

politicians to the public when asked about their trades