I’ve gotten a bunch of questions about Teeka Tiwari’s “Trump Tower” teaser pitch recently, so although the ad is actually very old now (it’s still got a January 29, 2020 date under the signature) I thought I’d re-share our solution. It is still circulating heavily, and it’s an ad for Palm Beach’s “entry level” newsletter called The Palm Beach Letter ($49, renews at $129).
What follows was last updated on April 6, 2020, in the throes of the Pandemic Panic, so the story for all of these stocks has obviously changed dramatically… as have prices for cryptocurrencies, with Bitcoin now up about 650% since then… but the actual ad and the stocks he’s teasing remain largely unchanged. I have kept my notes unchanged as well, though they may now sound foolish given the year we’ve had, so be gentle :).
The basic pitch is that blockchain is going to revolutionize the world, and that all the big guys are invested in it and we’re just getting started, with 295,000% gains coming (that comes from the World Economic Forum’s assessment that the blockchain ecosystem will store 10% of the world’s GDP by 2027, which might as well be a made-up number — there’s a free Palm Beach note about that here).
Tiwari even throws Warren Buffett in there as being part of this “investment of the decade” in blockchain technology, though that’s a pretty spurious name-drop (he implies that Buffett is “all in” because 21 of Berkshire’s 25 largest holdings have “invested in Genesis technology” — meaning they’ve done some kind of work with blockchain or cryptocurrencies… since I expect that almost every large company has done some work exploring or researching blockchain, that’s probably pretty meaningless).
But anyway, yes, his basic argument is that “Genesis Technology” is about to go mainstream and reach heavy adoption, and that as it becomes a huge part of the global economy you’ll get rich if you own the right stocks. Which, of course, he can tell you about for $49.
To be fair, Teeka Tiwari was one of the early mainstream newsletter guys who was recommending cryptocurrencies early on, back in the Summer of 2016, and particularly got into Ethereum before most pundits, so he’s not making up those historically excellent returns he probably had at that time. I would imagine that Ethereum pick in 2016 is probably what boosts the high average return that he brags about for his newsletter portfolio, much like the early picks of Netflix or Amazon fuel David Gardner’s average performance at the Motley Fool, and Tiwari these days is probably recommending little tiny cryptocurrencies right and left to try to replicate that 1,000% return magic.
But this one’s about stocks — so let’s find out what he’s pitching, shall we?
Before we get started, though, I should note that the “Trump Tower” part of this tease seems to be just name-dropping — he uses it as an example of a property evolving to “highest and best use”, as happens with lots of real estate eventually (a long spiel about a vacant lot becoming townhouses becoming a department store tower becoming Trump Tower, and adding value along the way). Somehow he applies this to blockchain, but mostly it’s just a way to drop the Trump name for attention… here’s how the connection is drawn…
What is blockchain’s “highest and best” use? More from the ad…
“Well, here’s the thing…
“At its core, blockchain is really just a very secure way to store information…
“It is the safest way to store information that has ever been devised. Because you can’t ‘hack’ the system.
“So, blockchain’s potential uses are wide and varied—I can’t possibly go into all of them in detail.
“But, to give you a taste, blockchain is being used today…
* To help modernize the $217 trillion real estate industry…
* To combat the $1.7 trillion in counterfeit goods sold each year…
* To improve the electoral voting system, making illegal votes a thing of the past…
* To help greatly reduce healthcare costs….
* And, also, to secure the food supply.”
But the big market, no surprise, is “money”…
“You see, while I was in Manhattan, I discovered something major going on right now…
“And that is this:
“The finance industry is ALL OVER blockchain!
“We talked about the “adoption curve” earlier.
“Well, we’re right at the “take off” point.
“Mass adoption has started…
Are you getting our free Daily Update
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just click here...“Have you ever heard of the DTCC, the “Depository Trust Clearing Corporation”?
“That’s the major organization that clears more than $54 trillion in stock, mutual fund, and other financial trades each year…
“Well, get this…
“The DTCC just announced they’re moving $10 trillion onto the blockchain!”
OK, so that’s the basic background to his pitch — that blockchain is going mainstream. And while he does tease and tout some specific cryptocurrencies in his other pitches for higher-priced newsletters, in this ad he’s pitching stocks that are connected to blockchain. So what are they?
Let’s get into the clues… here’s the talk about number one:
“Well, soon, we’re going to see a brand new blockchain exchange hit the markets.
“And one company has positioned itself as the sole ‘gatekeeper.’
“You see, it’s the only company cleared by the SEC to trade blockchain investments…
“That means, as blockchain goes mainstream…
“And more and more investors rush in, and new financial blockchain products are introduced…
“This company will make a cut on every transaction.”
Other hints about this one? This is what we get…
“It’s got a huge competitive advantage—a ‘moat,’ as Buffett would put it.
“Insiders LOVE it. They own 93% of the company…
“Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street. They’ve all scooped up a ton of shares.
“But—today—you can still buy cheap shares while it’s flying under the radar.”
Not much certainty here, there are lots of companies setting up to try to become the toll-taking “exchanges” of the blockchain world, but my first thought was that this is very likely Overstock.com (OSTK), which has been investing in building a blockchain-focused venture capital arm for a few years. That division is called Medici Ventures, and the star of the portfolio is tZero, which is indeed trying to become a big exchange for security tokens.
I don’t know where they get the “insiders own 93% business,” though — there are essentially no publicly traded companies where insiders own that large a percentage. Yes, Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street all own “a ton” of shares of Overstock, but that’s not really useful informaion — that’s true of pretty much every single stock of any size in the public markets, if you’re in any of the indices, from the S&P 500 to the Russell 2000 to any major sector index, then a large number of your shares will be held by index ETFs, and those are the three big managers of those index ETFs so they’ll always show up as major owners of any nontrivial company.
Readers called to my attention, though, that Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) is a much better match. ICE is a great company, they own a couple dozen exchanges and really benefit from market volatility so it’s probably a good idea here (better at the trough, of course, then in January or now, but one never gets timing perfect), but I’d be very surprised if it ends up being dramatically impacted by trading in cryptocurrencies or security tokens. They do have an interesting business in BAKKT that might turn into something big as this evolves, but I would be surprised if that makes a financial impact on the company in the next five years — the NYSE and their commodity trading exchanges are far, far larger than the bitcoin/altcoin trading opportunity right now. Energy futures trading is by far their largest market — energy, agricultural commodities and metals make up about half of their actual trading and clearing revenue, which is their highest margin business and is pretty volatile, but their data and analytics products and services provide a pretty steady revenue foundation. I do like ICE a lot more than OSTK, so that’s good, but wouldn’t base my valuation on their potential in cryptocurrency trading.
Here are the notes I shared on Overstock, before shifting my focus, in case you’d like to see them…
Sadly, Overstock still owns its disappointing ecommerce division, Overstock.com, and they’ve probably missed the opportunity to sell it and get out of their own way in that division. It was an exciting e-commerce growth story 15-20 years ago, but they lost that battle to better-capitalized unicorns and Amazon, to say nothing of the improving ecommerce offerings from Target and Walmart, and it strikes me that they have been trying to create a survivable niche ever since. Faced with the pressure from giant money-losers like Wayfair, they decided about two years ago to ramp up their investments in advertising instead and try to lose money as fast as the other guys to grow the business, promising that they could grow even better and more efficiently than their new competitors. Then they kept losing even more money, and realized it might not be easy to get more, so they pulled back on that (this is my perception, at least, it might be unfair).
And through the past decade of ups and downs they’ve essentially been riding the waves generated by their unpredictable (now ex) CEO, Patrick Byrne, who has spent 20 years angering regulators and espousing conspiracy theories and fighting against the insular Wall Street titans (not an unreasonable thing to do all the time, of course, but it rarely ends well for public company CEOs to tilt at windmills — Patrick Byrne has often been compared to John McAfee in the past year, which is fun but probably not healthy), then got caught canoodling with an accused Russian spy, and finally stepped down from his position and sold his Overstock shares late last summer (selling a huge stake right before Overstock announced disastrous results and saw the share price drop, coincidentally enough).
Byrne’s story is a fantastic one, you’d have a hard time believing it if it were a novel — there’s a good summary here following his resignation if you’re curious, and a longer Forbes piece here.
On the plus side, the stock has certainly come way down in price now, and they are still trying to build up their tZero and other blockchain-related investments that have been Byrne’s focus since 2016 or 2017, though it’s going to become a bit more financially precarious unless they start getting some revenue fairly soon. They aren’t going broke immediately, they did sell some equity late last year so they have more than $100 million in cash still, and they borrowed money against their Peace Coliseum headquarters and are having their Medici companies raise third-party capital where feasible, but cash is likely to be spent pretty quickly — the actual ecommerce business performs best in the fourth quarter, as you’d expect for a retail operation, but they always burn cash the rest of the year and this year will probably be unusually bad in that regard.
Still, if you have a lot of confidence about tZero then maybe it’s worthwhile to you that you are getting that and the other Medici Ventures investments “on the cheap” here by buying Overstock shares.
Their big push now at tZero is to open the first regulated national exchange for trading security tokens, the Boston Securities Exchange (BSTX), but they don’t yet have regulatory approval in hand (tZero does have one SEC-registered broker dealer in its portfolio, tZERO ATS, which facilitates trades of equities and digital securities, so that technically matches the clues but the trading volume is minuscule so far). My guess would be that having Byrne involved as a major Medici shareholder (I don’t think he sold his separate shares of Medici Ventures, just his OSTK shares) is still a substantial negative, since nobody knows what he might do next, but some of those businesses, including tZero, do look appealing. They’re also issuing a “digital dividend” using the tZero platform at some point soon, though the details of that (it gets the designation OSTKO) are still seemingly uncertain.
The big push is in “tokenization”, which is different from the first wave of cryptocurrencies — most cryptocurrencies were designed (if any thought went into an end market at all) to serve as “utility tokens” to help with the exchange of money or establish platforms for exchanging or authenticating other assets, but the “security tokens” being issued more often now are often much more like regular financial assets — they’re often “securitized” real assets, like pieces of real estate, or pieces of ownership in a company. Instead of chopping your company up into pieces and selling those pieces on the NYSE, then, you might chop them into pieces, create a blockchain “token” for each piece, and let people trade those tokens through an exchange like tZero. It’s not really any different, except that the infrastructure and regulatory overhang are much lighter, so the costs are much lower. At least theoretically. That tokenization is what Patrick Byrne has long called the “killer app” for blockchain, and he’s not the only one who believes that… though what it might be worth, who might “own” it, if anyone, and how money will be made are all open questions.
Will security tokens take off as a way to sell and exchange assets, in place of stock markets or bond markets? I have no idea. Maybe. And tZero and Overstock are an early mover in this space, though the idea that they’ll be able to “disrupt” the big exchanges and create a meaningful-sized business still seems a little optimistic to me.
At this price, With Overstock.com now trading at a market cap of just about $200 million, it may be worth considering and it might be that they’ll get beyond the collapsing e-commerce business and that the departure of Byrne will let Wall Street take them seriously again someday… but be careful — at this point, I think, you’re catching the falling retail knife of what I’d guess is a dying ecommerce business and hoping that tZero and the other Medici Ventures companies can grow up fast enough for it to be worthwhile. The e-commerce business is cheap, and they still say optimistic things about it in their presentations, but revenue is still falling pretty sharply so I’d hesitate to bet a lot on their survival in that business. If you want to start digging into where they stand now, you can see their last quarterly presentation here (transcript here).
And what’s the next stock? Let’s check our clues…
“The Next Visa: The Blockchain ‘Payment Stock’ I Predict Will Go Up 16x! ….
“As I mentioned earlier, I believe our current debit and credit cards will soon disappear…
“They’ll be replaced by better, much safer ‘blockchain-backed’ cards….
“One payment company right now has already implemented blockchain into its system!
“It’s not Visa. Mastercard. American Express. Discover. Or PayPal, either.
“And, already, this company’s revenue has skyrocketed 16-fold…
“That’s eight times faster than Visa. And six times better than PayPal!
“And the number of payments processed is blowing up…
“But it’s not done yet…
“In fact, I predict blockchain stock #2 will become ‘the next Visa’… meaning it could still climb 16x from here… turning every five grand into $80,000!”
And a couple other clues…
“… the company has attracted Goldman Sachs’s former CFO to its board of directors. As well as former secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers….
“Vanguard, Blackrock, and Morgan Stanley have already stockpiled 51 million shares between them…
“Goldman Sachs was also an early investor, participating in a $150 million round of funding…
“And billionaire hedge fund managers Andreas Halvorsen and Stephen Mandel have taken positions.”
That’s Square (SQ), and yes, that stock has been tied to the blockchain story since the emergence of bitcoin as a big deal a few years ago — partly because the Square Cash app was one of the first mainstream ways that regular people could easily buy bitcoin. And this one is nice and definite, since we can confirm the match with some numbers — the tease indicates that this “secret” company had $3,298 million in revenue in 2018, and that’s exactly what Square reported.
The bigger story for Square, though, is their actual business — providing point of sale hardware and cloud payment processing services for retailers. They are indeed pushing bitcoin as a payments solution, including accelerating their development of the Lightning Network that is intended to make bitcoin more scalable, so there is a real connection there still (I’m not an expert on this, but here’s how I think about it: bitcoin processes transactions very slowly compared to conventional payment networks, way too slowly for it to be useful for everyday commerce, so there are a lot of “speed it up” networks that try to build on that with a second layer, processing payments much more quickly and then communicating those transactions back to the base bitcoin network… somehow).
Whether they’ll become the “next Visa,” though, I have no idea — certainly they have pretty good economies of scale to invest in blockchain, but it’s also true that Visa and Mastercard and everyone else in the fintech or payments space is also investing in blockchain projects. Nobody wants to be beholden to a network they have to pay for in the future, partly because everyone’s pretty grumpy about the fact that in so many ways we’re all beholden to the expensive Mastercard and Visa networks now.
Square gets teased pretty regularly, and I’ve invested in it in the past though I don’t currently own shares, so I’ll just leave you with what I wrote when Christian DeHaemer included Square as one of his “MVPS” stocks to lead the next payment revolution:
Square is in a more competitive situation [than Paypal, Mastercard or Visa] and is less established, and that’s reflected in the volatility of the stock, but it is a strong emerging brand for retailers, and as more small retailers during the coronavirus panic start to rethink how important it is to have an online retail option and be able to easily take card payments it’s probably doing OK (our local shops have long had the little signs up saying “please pay cash to keep it local” for small purchases — but when they had to shift to delivery or online orders, those with Square or a similar product had a head start). I’d guess it will probably make more incremental progress in building its customer base, but we shouldn’t discount the competitive pressure of so many terminal companies trying to acquire customers… payment system customers are hugely lucrative over the long term, because they’re sticky and you therefore get the inside edge on a little share of the payment processing fees for a long time, but everybody knows that so acquiring customers is probably going to continue to be very expensive….
Square (SQ) had a nice bounce recently because they’ve announced that the COVID-19 impact will not be as dramatic as some might have feared — but that’s because the stock fell by more than 50% in the initial panic. Part of that is some relief that their Cash app for transferring money between people is still growing and doing well even as the merchant network is taking a hit, and part of it is their guidance for the first quarter, updated on March 24th, that has shrunk by less than 10% since their last update, with revenue guidance still close to what analysts are expecting. That’s just one quarter, and we don’t really know how long this retail “pause” will last or how customers will behave in the recovery from this “stay at home” period, so things are very fluid still — but any numbers or reassurance from companies these days is so far being taken very well. Guidance and updated numbers make things seem manageable, and predictable, and that’s really all that investors want these days.
Next?
“The Modern-Day ‘Cisco’…
“When most people think about the big Internet winners… they think of the Amazons, Googles, and Facebooks.
“But, for every Amazon, there’s a secret ‘behind the scene’ company like Cisco that returned a lot more!
“You see, back in the 1990s… Cisco was the decade’s 5th best stock… and returned a whopping 67,491%.
“It almost seems like a conspiracy… but the truth is, the “boring” companies like Cisco and Qualcomm get ignored….
“… behind the scenes, these companies provided the hardware that was needed to power the internet’s big boom….
“Now, it’s set to happen again…
“One company has brilliantly positioned itself to scoop up billions in revenue by supplying the hardware needed to power the blockchain boom.”
OK, so some kind of blockchain-enabling hardware company. Any other clues?
“Honda has already started working with this company.
“And, again, the big institutions are lining up…
“JP Morgan. Blackrock. Vanguard…
“Fidelity, in fact, loves this stock so much, it’s already scooped up 7.5% of ALL available shares!
“You can buy it straight from your brokerage account, too.
“And I recommend you do so soon.
“See, this stock has already started a big move… shooting up 57% in the last 6 months alone.”
This one is a bit odder, since there are quite a few possible matches — and I’ve got one that matches the stock pattern they show precisely… but the percentage gain cited does not match.
Here’s what I mean — this is the image from the ad of “Blockchain Stock #3” for the “last 6 months” of this stock’s price movement…
And here’s the price chart for NVIDIA for roughly six months from late June into January…
So the stock chart is an exact match, down to each little dip and jump, so this must be our match… but it rose more than 80% while following that chart pattern, not 57%.
And yes, NVIDIA (NVDA) is one of the chipmakers that has been closely tied to the blockchain revolution since the beginning — which became a problem when bitcoin collapsed, because that exposed the fact that the marginal retail demand for NVIDIA’s higher-end GPUs, which were mostly designed for high end video game systems, was actually coming from cryptocurrency miners. That ensuing inventory crisis has now abated, for both NVIDIA and its major GPU competitor Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, which apparently remains the pick of the decade for fellow Agora affiliate Paul Mampilly).
I suppose that NVIDIA might get some boost from a more blockchain-heavy world, because one aspect common to a lot of blockchain projects is the concept of “mining” — mining basically means that computers which participate in the network, racing to complete computations in order to earn the right to validate transactions, will get rewards for that work… so the fastest processors earn the highest rewards. That’s becoming less of a driver for the GPU makers, since those chips weren’t really designed for cryptocurrency mining or blockchain specifically and a lot of specialized chips (ASICs) have been developed in the last couple years for bitcoin and other mining, but “need more high-throughput computing” is probably another part of the reason to consider buying AMD or NVIDIA.
And yes, to circle those clues, NVIDIA does work with Honda and lots of other carmakers — though as far as I know, not on blockchain projects, the more important work for NVDA in the automotive space, by far, is their work in designing self-driving car AI systems for those vehicles. Speeding up artificial intelligence both in cars and in data centers are key areas of growth for NVIDIA, though visual processing chips are still the largest part of their revenue, and still largely because they continue to push the envelope with faster and better chips to support high-end computer gaming, with that technology then gradually trickling down to cheaper GPUs for everybody else. I own shares of NVIDIA, but more because I think gaming will continue to be surprisingly profitable and because they have the lead in establishing the most accepted AI operating system than because of any benefit they’re still getting from blockchain.
And in case you want a little perspective, we can look back since we know that the ad was first sent around in late January — here’s how those stocks have done since the ad was created (that’s NVDA in orange, SQ in blue, and OSTK in red… with the S&P 500 in green for comparison):
And as for blockchain itself? It seems really interesting, though it will have to get more efficient as it grows (checking each entry or transaction against lots of computers around the world, and making “miners” fight for the privilege, consumes a lot of electricity and time), but I’m sure it’s already made a lot of progress in that area.
The key, for me, is to think about it as a foundational idea for developing next-generation internet technologies and platforms — which means that it might be huge and we might not really know until years later who, if anyone, “won” blockchain… nobody owns the http protocol, nobody owns the basic technology of blockchain, or became the only company who could sell database or spreadsheet technology, and everybody is trying to figure out how to build better technologies that use blockchain but also might be proprietary enough to make them some money. But it’s still very early, so don’t bang your head too hard on the table trying to find the one “winner” for this next evolution, you can probably stick with actually watching the financials and identifying obviously profitable businesses run by managers who are pushing growth in the right direction, and trying to buy those when the price gets relatively appealing.
I feel pretty good about NVIDIA still in this neighborhood, though not because of blockchain, (and the stock has perhaps recovered too quickly for my taste of late), and Square looks more appealing than it has in the past year because of the coronavirus drop but could have a truly incredibly awful year with retail stores closing down right and left and might find it hard to dig out of that to resume growth if this “pause” extends beyond the spring… so I could perhaps talk myself into either of those positions over time, and have owned both (I own NVIDIA today, but not Square currently), but I really can’t talk myself into owning Overstock just yet, there’s just too much baggage to carry and I am probably a little too cynical after hearing huge promises about tZero for the past couple years.
So there’s my take, at least… but with your money, of course, it’s your take that will matter — have a hankering to add any of these blockchain stories to your stock portfolio? Prefer to dabble in the actual cryptocurrencies, or have different favorites? Let us know with a comment below. Thanks for reading!
Disclosure: Of the companies mentioned above, I currently own shares of and/or call options on NVIDIA, Google parent Alphabet, Berkshire Hathaway, and Amazon. I will not trade in any covered stock for at least three days, per Stock Gumshoe’s trading rules.
Hi Travis, thorough as usual. This is a really old pitch. ICE has been going sideways lately while OSTK done really well. But Teeka never recommended OSTK. He did (and continues to) recommend ICE. And to the haters, Ethereum went back to 1,200.
Hi Travis. You say:”At this price, With Overstock.com now trading at a market cap of just about $200 million” . Isn’t it Overstock.com Market Cap closer to 3 Billion?
Also, how can Teeka tease people on Square and NVDIA with hoep that they will be 16x multibaggers?
They are not small companies, Square is already a 100 bn cmopany..
They often run these ads for ages, even when the info is way out of date and they sell these hyped ideas without offering refunds.
These picks did well, obviously, and the ad worked to pull in people… sometimes ads like that run for years and years and don’t get updated (this one is right at its first anniversary now)
Actually picked AMD at $10.55 and have done very well out of it.
Hi Travis. Thank you for your hard work. I received Teeka’s siren song of a pitch in my email today. So I trotted over here, and read your article. As usual, you dissected the ad and pull out the teased companies for inspection and analysis. Totally awesome. You know you can never die and stop doing what you’re doing, right?
Thanks mouse… planning to keep waking up every morning to go to work for my favorite readers for as long as I can 🙂
that wasn’t quite what Teeka was referencing, but close
What do you mean, what was he referencing?
Hello
What is the best way to invest in Crypto’s ? We know nothing??
Please register in one of the exchange like Binance.US or coinbase and buy your Cryptos and ALTCoins. If you want to stick to BTC and ETH only you can use Robinhood app !!!!
Wait ’till AFTER they crash?
Crypto.com
Coinbase will get you hacked
These are the blockchain stocks he’s pushing as ‘genesis technology’
Signature Bank (SBNY)
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)
ARK Fintech Innovation ETF (ARKF)
Nvidia (NVDA)
Square (SQ)
Does anyone know the tech royalties Teeka promoted tonight? Would you be willing to give us some info? Would be very grateful.
I dont do stocks only tokens in the currencies but i just posted 4 out of my top 5 holds,
World Mobile Token is launching soon am considering going and making a vault and getting in the first round, but only if there is a small minimum and small costs.. because I am already in those amazing opportunities heh.. I was lucky to be told about ALBT at the first vertical zone and have spent so many hours researching it and thinking about how the institutional grade AI and other tech coming into defi will be implemented by them. The design is art, absolutely a defi game changer this one, am almost at a life changing 10000 ALBT stack , will borrow against them in 2025+ never selling
BTW everyone.. 2025 is key because of ISO20022 (chainlink is the result of the need for a single secure API gateway for SWIFT gpi to become a new digital finance backbone)
You’ll soon see over 3000 US banks be upgraded to crypto capable savings and investment portals, those will use FIS global banking software services and API, it won’t be a costly overhaul of backend hardware/software.. that is the beauty of full digitization the “API WORLD” we want so much.. one connection with the beautiful 20022 specification.. quick and easy. “We will all finally speak the same language” said one financial institution 🙂
For people with important investment research needs, yes ARK is the best place you can go. All their podcasts are so invaluable as is their open research publication, which I only recently found out they do LIVE.. as in they publish early and interact with experts in the specific sectors so they can really get the group-effect
I have been looking for ways to invest in blockchain overall, not coins, like a picks and shovels approach. I have ha Nvidia for several years(cost basis$91) and have taken profits regularly. I think it was Ray Dalio who said that, since mining consumes so much electricity, invest in utilities near large miners(Riot) Or in Eaton, which also dovetails with data storage facilities.
https://www.coindesk.com/us-man-installs-crypto-mining-rig-in-hybrid-bmw-sportscar
I would hope that these people are smart enough to promote a low power proof of work (not full proof of work) game changer coming soon.. not just software.. absolute game changer. There is nothing in any sector with the kind of mass adoption potential of this one, but keeping it a semi-secret for now. I don’t have enough.. I haven’t tried to hide it but people did not do videos about it when I was screaming for them to do so, so the vast majority of the crypto scene is oblivious.
Noone will be able to avoid seeing it, in just 3 years it will be known by a large % of people if not already becoming mainstream.. without doubt. The mining is done with secure mini PC’s at less than 50W and it is the most secure system that could be designed. Also only a few hundred miners secures the network to a higher standard (aviation grade security) than 100,000 miners > 1kW each when it comes to Bitcoin
While it is the invention, Bitcoin is the benchmark anti fiat device, it is not something to be meddled with trying to upgrade.. R&D of the last 5-10 years has put us on track for an internet of blockchains, ATOM is another one I should have mentioned earlier.. along with the beautiful IRIS / IRITA. China created the abstraction away from the technology already, a business development portal the BSN which doesn’t require development or understanding of blockchain technology. It is even free to use up to at last check 300 API calls a day to your application !
Wish people would stop hating on China, start hating on big pharma poison ! broken science ! refined sugar anyone ? absolute poison and so much more addictive than I realized until it was far too late. It may have been the biggest mistake of our generation, or at least closely linked to the big picture one, globalization which created so much wealth disparity and such a broken political system due to money=power in the time of ego and corruptible humans. We are still evolving, don’t stop trying to be better.. giving is getting
“PAY IT FORWARD” !! thanks for the article, people need to be taught carefully btw.. crypto is a mess of dogshit memes and copy-paste high % promises and no substance. And this in the context of 99% of people being relatively the poor side of the coin, and 99% of people also being essentially COMPUTER ILLITERATE ! not coders, not technically minded, not critical thinkers etc etc etc
God help us !
“ok” said Satoshi 🙂
I’ve done pretty well with HVBTF, Hive Blockchain Technologies. ( Yes I own it and yes I hope it keeps going up in price.)
I’m confused, you said you would buy Square now that its in the $40s but its trading around $237
Sorry for any confusion. As noted at the top, this is a re-posting of an older article.
Wish I could say, in retrospect, that I had put all my money into SQ at $45 last year in the pandemic collapse, but sadly did not.
I’ll toss in a few comments on this topic.
Palm Beach added ICE to its portfolio in December of 2018. Since then, ICE shows up in various PB publications and is always presented in a positive light.
As for BTC and Alt-coins, I entered this wild world in March 2018. Took PB’s course and paid a bunch of money to do so. My wife “pushed” me into exploring cryptos as one of her talk show hosts talked about it daily. So, I said I’d take a chunk of money and “invest” in cryptos. I told my wife to remember that we could, perhaps, lose EVERYTHING. I said that if we did, I’d just push back my retirement and work a little longer. But we only invested an amount of money that we knew we could afford to lose. We had a “plan” and said that we would stay with it for 5 years. A set amount of money going in and nothing coming out. A true 5 year commitment to cryptos.
In April 2018, I started buying. Our plan was to take 50% of our money and buy BTC. Next, 25% went to ETH. Finally, 25% went to alt-coins. With the alt-coins, a fixed amount went into each token. Same weighting. Within 6 months, we were slightly in the hole on BTC and ETH. We were >85% down on all alt-coins. Ugh. Was thinking, well, I guess I delay retirement. But we kept telling ourselves, we have a 5 year plan.
At perhaps the height of dark times, I kept listening to Teeka. He actually reminded me of Michael Burry in the movie, The Big Short (?? I think). Teeka kept saying, “hang in there, stay the course, don’t sell out”. Almost pleading.
Fast forward to this past weekend. We departed from our 5 year plan. We sold one BTC at the all-time high. Our reasoning was simple, we got back every penny we invested almost 3 years ago and are now dealing with “house money”.
We have been lucky and have made “life-changing ” amounts of money in cryptos. As a perspective, yes BTC and ETH are hard chargers. But the alt-coins are the wildcard. We still own about a dozen alt-coins that continue to be >85% losses. But we also have about 6 alt-coins that have >1000% gains. Bought at fractions of a penny and are now worth a couple bucks and more. When you score on alt-coins, a few will far out-weigh the other total failures.
I continue to follow Teeka but I also do my own research. There are a couple other extremely valuable resources that cost nothing to follow.
I’m an older guy who still has to have his grandkids fix the TV and DVD remotes as I can’t make the TV work or watch movies. Crypto investing is the most complicated thing that I have ever done. I’ve even experienced the “push the wrong button” and poof, IT’S GONE. Over the years, I’ve lost two alt-coins completely by the wrong button.
I love the volatility of cryptos. Love it. But I only invested what I said I could afford to lose. My wife and I talk each night about cryptos. One night, “hey Dear, we made $50K today”. Next night, “hey Dear, we lost $30K today”. Because we are lucky and in a way, don’t fret about the money, we actually laugh and this leads us to spend time talking to each other about other things in life.
I learned a long time ago that if you want to invest in the stock market, you need a plan, need to make a commitment, be disciplined and stay with the plan. If you want to dip your toes into the crypto world, I suggest you ramp up the last sentence logarithmically. Right now it requires a certain mindset. But when the time comes when anyone can go to any major exchange and buy cryptos (if it ever happens) without a hassle or worrying about wallets and security, the crypto world will explode. If that never happens, it will probably fizzle out.
Just thought I’d share some of my experiences. I apologize in advance if I bored you out. But hey, cut me some slack as I am an old man and felt like sharing a yarn tonight.
@elk82070 are you able to share the other resources you’ve found to be valuable? I’ve done some research and invested a bit here and there with the plan to let it ride, but am always looking for additional knowledgeable starting points to my own research.
Thanks!
I find satoshistreetbets on reddit to be a good starting point for general knowledge regarding micros but be wary of pump and dumps.
Tx for sharing your experience. Older retirees here with $ in bank earning next to nothing. CD’s paying so low we decided to take $20k last Apr, bought AAPL Canopy, Southwest, Allegiant, Delta, Moderna, Exxon, CRM, & couple others I can’t recall. Stocks are doing well. Thought of selling Mrna when it was $183 but decided to stick to plan of long term. Bought at $31. Plan to buy MSFT & QCOM but looking for guidance & would like to learn about crypto; just not sure where to start. We’d only invest what we can afford to lose but having hard time grasping “virtual ” money when we’ve bought gold for years. Investing requires learning a whole new vernacular. Advice where to start with very basics of crypto? We’ve no debt & are in good IRA’s we’re not touching. Would like to find way for our money to work for us so we can just go fishing. Is crypto too volatile for us newbies? TX in advance for thoughts on this subject. I’m sure we sound like total rubes we are. Just average older folks.
iluvs2fish
Hi, I got into crypto at 50+ although I hate digital hassles. I follow the instruction videos of a youtube channel called Coin Bureau; they are really good and fun too:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqK_GSMbpiV8spgD3ZGloSw
Best of luck and remember what Elk said above!
Does anyone know the tech royalties Teeka promoted tonight? Would you be willing to give us some info? Would be very grateful.
And where is he recommending buying them? He mentioned Coinbase but then said Coinbase would be charging high fees.
Curious to know what his top 6 picks are as well. I know he’s big on Ethereum this year.
this refers to Ethereum staking
Ether staking is essentially equivalent to a covered call in stocks. You own the underlying ether, in this case 25,000 minimum as opposed to 100 shares. Ether v 2.0 was expected to have widespread adoption among governments and businesses, however it is not as efficient in transaction process time, nor as secure as some of the more recently created micro currencies and as such it’s future is speculative.
What he calls ‘royalties’ is the transaction fee (gas) you collect for people trading ether using your resources. Essentially you are agreeing to use your resources to process transactions for the network in return for a fee.
On the expectation that ether will be widely used 5 years from now
To this end, Nvidia has changed to offering a processor specifically designed for people to have sitting around on a box in the corner of their house dedicated to farming Ether specifically. The CMP-HX which is to replace the graphics intensive use the RTX-3060 was designed for.
The magnitude cannot be understated here – Nvidia apparently fully expects everyone to have a crypto rig mining away before long and they are using Ether as the underlying premise.
Thx so much for this information. So it’s a minimum $25k buy in? I assume there are other projects that will also offer tech royalties? Are those also $25k minimum.
Thx so much for this website. Whoever started it. It’s such a relief discussing valuable info with other investors without them asking me for $2500 for the next “big super biggest block on a blockchain” program. I Wish you all so much success in this huge 2021 opportunity
25k to spin up yes for Ether, but you cannot compare Ether to the rest of the market as it is somewhat of a progenitor. This whole ether thing relies on contractual agreeements long since established and seems somewhat inescapable. Other projects vary widely and the real money these days is in DeFi. There is a huge scramble to get regulated crypto on the market with alt coins all their own such as INX, Co2B, and countless others going back to IOTA and beyond, who have tried. The government of Norway, I think, just made their own. If you want to partake in this field you have two options really: Do what Elk said and buy a fistful of random alt coins with a modicum of due diligence to avoid pumps, and you’ll probably do alright. Otherwise, use those old laptops under your bed for a mine, or maybe get one of those fancy new Nvidia chips and become a part of the chain, but really I would suggest ARM instead.
My best guess is he’s talking about ATOM, XTZ, DAI, ALGO, possibly Vechain. This is pure speculation based on Coinbase’s current offerings and marketing. He talks about Coinbase being the catalyst to set off tech royalties. I would hope for $2k these aren’t the picks and it’s more about what’s in the pipeline for Coinbase.
Outsider, that’s interesting but won’t I don’t understand is how teeka talks about how you could invest $1,000 dollars and make all that potential money doing such. Yet, the price for ethereum currently is above that amount. He doesn’t explain much at all with his presentation he held leaving a lot unknown for people listening in. Also seems like it could cost quite a bit to have the setup for doing as such?
That’s his style. 90 mins of slow steady half done info that leaves you begging for a little more info at the very end. But that’s gonna set you back $2000-$2500.
NOW…. so many are now pissed off suckers mad about losing that time and they eventually fall into it and pony up the $$$. How do I know that?
Sincerely,
Pissed Off Sucker 2020
PS. But, I personally have gotten some great info from Teeka and many of his crypto’s have done well for me.
@elk82070 Thank you so much for your perspective. My husband and I are retired and I am very interested in the crypto market and learning more about it. I’d like to dabble but feel like I need to be better informed as I cannot effort to lose 50K in a day, at least not yet!! Are you able to share the free resources you’ve found to be valuable? I’ve done some research and invested a bit in Eth and Riot with the plan to let them ride, but am always looking for to add to my knowledge.
Thank you so much.
As a follow up. Teeka’s PB “free” recommendation on Tech Royalties was ETH. Yup. That was it. Next, I speak with absolutely no authority and limited, at best, knowledge. Tech Royalties sound pretty interesting to me. But they are long-term, with emphasis on long plays. As I understand it, tech royalties are associated with proof of stake (PoS) blockchain cryptos. An example of such a token is Cardano (ADA). You could research “staking cryptos” and there is a lot on Goggle to read.
The three “free” sources that I use are Messari (but you can also pay for additional research which is pricy but worth it if you want to get serious, but the free application is also good). I read Coin Rivet. Finally, I get Coindesk.
Almost 3 years after paying a lot of money to take the Crypto Training class and now that I have a marginal, at best, understanding of cryptos, there are a boatload of videos on Youtube that will or could provide you with all the information you need to know to go from your bank (fiat) to an exchange (Gemini, Kraken, Coinbase), to the market and ultimately to your wallet.
Finally, as a perspective, we have half a dozen adult kids and a double digit grandkids. When the kids have come to me and said, Dad, should we invest in cryptos; I tell them, I wouldn’t. Stick with equities and once you understand those, maybe you could explore cryptos. They walk away disappointed but I don’t think that they have the money to lose. But behind the scenes, my wife and I have “added” to our crypto accounts and allocated percentages for all the kids. Yeah, they’ll get hit with taxes and probably won’t know about it until I am dead, but should cryptos continue to grow, they’ll have a piece of the pie.
I do not recommend cryptos. I just love to talk about them. For me, they are the ultimate “moths circling the campfire” and we all know what happens before the night ends.
I completely agree with ELK. What you don’t know can really, really hurt you. There is a learning curve, so be prepared to invest time in order to curb risk. It’s not just about which coin to invest in anymore (there are over 2000 of them, by the way.) It’s also not about which coin has the most positive attributes (it’s not BTC). Rather, it’s about popularity and manipulation and fees and wallets and hackers and tokens and contracts. Learn about how to keep your crypto coins safe and how to store them before you attempt to buy. I have accounts open with Coinbase and BinanceUS. Coinbase is much more user-friendly to me. I do not keep my money in either of them, My first book on the subject was one of those “For Dummies” books. “Cryptocurrencies for Dummies”, I believe. It was extremely helpful as a starting point. I recommend getting a knowledge base from a reputable source. Youtube is a wealth of information BUT it is also a wealth of MISinformation, so I would not recommend blindly diving in there. For me, the real benefit in learning about the technology is that I’m better at doing my DD in that sector now. The more I learn though, the more I realize I’m still a dummy 😉
elk82070 you mentioned Gemini, Kraken and , Coinbase. Witch one you recommend?
I want to thank you for all your guidance , really appreciated.
Gemini has the lowest collect of coins so you might want to avoid that . Coinbase is most popular but you do not have ADA and DOT so you might want to look at Kraken. I use Binance.US,Coinbase and Gemini and so I do not have DOT.
aibdlytics , thank you so much. I am very new at this, could you tell me what is ADA and DOT? Do not worry, if this is too much to ask.
Cardano is a platform. ADA is the cryptocurrency that operates on the Cardano network. Polkadot is a protocol – a community in which DOT is a token.
DOT = Polkadot
ADA = Cardano
Yes you can sign up for Teeka’s “tech royalty” cryptos. My guess is that this application is different than simply buying and selling cryptos. With royalties, you are looking for existing and new tokens that you will buy and hold for a long time. In order to get the value of the royalty, you have to hold the token. If you want to develop a four or five year plan and hope that Teeka makes the correct picks, then the subscription might be worthwhile. I find staking tokens to be another “campfire” to fly around, but for the moment, I think that I’ll do my own research and picks. Or I may just give up and stick with my more simple buy/exchange cryptos. I would guess that one or more of the tokens that I currently hold will be recommended for “tech royalties”. I just need to teach myself on the process of staking.
I have been using Coinbase but have gotten tired of it and am trying others. Exodus (mostly a wallet that you can exchange quite a few tokens for a fee) and Voyager. more tokens on their exchange and they offer very good interest rates depending on balance. Also, Voyager is already a public company.
OTCMKTS: VYGVF- Voyager Digital Ltd – is their ticker
coinbase ipo?
Tesla’s new thing
For $2k he will give you play book on how to buy crypto to get royalties on 7 stocks that will pay big time for generations
Teeka Tiwari… permanently barred by FINRA from affiliating with any FINRA-regulated investment companies. Even in a murky universe like the Agora companies, that pretty much takes the cake. Says everything about how they look at their customers….
https://www.tradingschools.org/reviews/palm-beach-group/
The 3 stocks are #1. ICE, 2. ARKF and 3. SBNY These are mentioned in the report The 295,000% Revolution: The #1 Blockchain Stock to Own Today.
Sounds like he has updated the report since last year, without updating the date for the ad — interesting.
not happy with cathie wood
Cathie Wood’s done great for a couple of years, but the market itself is changing to reflect the perception of higher interest rates and the concern that bonds become more preferable plus this inflation concern where up until yesterday it was deflation that was driving the mentality. She can’t just stop out of 1/3 of her positions with all that money in the various ARK funds to control her downside.
Yeh, im just disappointed in gilt, she’s done me well thus far and i expect now is the buy opportunity otherwise she wouldn’t be pumping so much into arkx
sorry for bringing my emotions to the table
She’s had an extraordinary couple years, don’t know how she’ll do from here but the history of hot money managers who beat the market dramatically has always eventually been “reversion to the mean”
Wood = Tesla. Still does not compute for me.
https://247wallst.com/autos/2020/12/22/tesla-is-worth-more-than-all-big-car-companies-in-the-world-combined/
I remember to well the .com debacle.