Tuesday 4^th May 2021

May the fourth be with you… sorry bad joke.

Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger streamed their annual meeting online recently, taking investor questions for over three hours. It’s always interesting. Here’s the link to listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx-OzwHpM9k

A few of the takeaways from this years meeting:

Inflation has begun according to what Warren is seeing in his business.

Technology isn’t in BRK’s circle of competence.

The bigger BRK gets, the more difficult it is to make meaningful investments.

This low interest rate, money-printing environment isn’t going to end well according to Charlie.

The life wisdom Warren and Charlie share during these annual meetings is fantastic.

 

Monday 10^th May 2021

Today was the largest single day movement, up 1.3% on the ASX today in 10 weeks.

Ethereum is on a tear. It just crossed $3000 USD last week and it’s now over $4000USD. My little portfolio is up over 200% currently.

Am now experimenting with ‘staking’ coins for interest on one of the larger crypto platforms. Set my first one up for 30 days ‘locked staking’ at 12.79% return. The 60-day and 90 day staking periods were sold out for this coin, at around 15.50% and 18% respectively.

Will know in 30 days if this was a wise decision…

 

Tuesday 11^th May 2021

Over night tech stocks got hammered, NASDAQ down 2.55%. The ASX is also down about 1.5% today. Interestingly, nothing has fundamentally changed in the 1000’s of businesses in the past 24hrs. It’s important to keep this in mind when investing over the long term.

The Treasurer of Australia tonight hands down the budget…

 

Thursday 13^th May 2021

Gas pipelines in the US have been hacked, meaning no gas (known as petrol for us Aussies) in some states. Inflation is also on the rise in the USA. Warren Buffett talked about noticing it last week at BRK’s annual meeting and now figures are in for US annualised inflation in the month of April, up 4.2%, the largest monthly increase since September 2008 that was 4.9%. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm

It’s been a sea of red for the main indices in the USA the past few days. It’s always interesting watching people freak out online to daily price movements. Behavioural finance is probably more valuable than technical knowledge. If you don’t get this aspect locked away, you won’t enjoy the ride or stay the course when things get rough and they will get rough.

 

Monday 17^th May 2021

Bitcoin (BTC) is in meltdown currently after Elon Musk responding to new information re: the energetic cost of BTC mining. He’s said Tesla will no longer accept BTC as payment for vehicles and the Internet is flipping out.

The emotional response from many to this thinking on BTC mining is phenomenal to watch play out in real time online. Add his interest in Dogecoin (started as a joke), Elon’s personality and the loss of context that occurs in communication over text (on Twitter in this case) and there’s new information for the investing and speculating public to digest, meaning some unknown, meaning fear of the unknown, meaning people selling and BTC prices dropping. Down around 30% from it’s all time high, $43,000USD as I type.

What’s fascinating to me is watching this play out in real time on Twitter, between Elon, the BTC community and BTC prices. The media are riding it hard and we as the general public used to rely on media outlets to inform us. This is no longer the case with Twitter and the Internet. We (the public) can watch this play out, making investment decisions without any legacy media narrative at all.

 

Wednesday 19^th May 2021

Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) are below $40,000USD and $3,000USD respectively today. The ASX is down 2% today as well. It’s all business as usual though.

 

Thursday 20^th May 2021

Over night Bitcoin (BTC) had a flash crash, dropping down to $31,400USD momentarily before rising to around $38,000 this morning (Australian time). Ethereum (ETH) also dropped to the low $2000’s USD.

My little portfolio dropped from +200% up to around +85% over the past few weeks, though it’s back around +100% tonight.

Heading off to Brunswick Heads early tomorrow morning for a few days camping with a bunch of friends in USANA.

 

Monday 24^th May 2021

Had an epic time in Brunswick Heads over the weekend. With COVID shutting boarders (especially for those living in Australia and New Zealand), destination company events in USANA (and most other international businesses) have ceased. This is the second year without large in person events and we’re deep in uncharted territory. These camping trips with business partners are a direction I’ve decided to take in these restricted travel times.

We tested out the concept at Lennox Head in February and had a fantastic time at Brunswick Heads this past weekend. Everyone is already figuring out where we go next time (likely in August or September).

While we cannot come close to replicating the social proof, head office tours, meeting the scientists and the injection of inspiration being surrounded by 5,000-10,000 excited like-minded people for 2-5 days at our beach based camping trips, what we can do is include the whole family (kids, partners and parents some times), deepen relationships and therefore trust with each other, have valuable conversations and experiences camping in nature, while having a lot of fun.

I’m fortunate most of my USANA colleagues prioritise an active and outdoors lifestyle so camping slides in perfectly. The only negative is not being able to include colleagues outside of southeast Queensland and outside Australia.

When the world’s boarders re-open I look forward attending key destination company events again (benefiting everyone outside of Australia too) while retaining these quarterly camping trips to magical locations around Australia.

In other news, my little crypto portfolio is now down to about +50% via the value of alt coins dropping. Selfishly I’m ok if it gets real negative in this space for a while…

 

Friday 28^th May 2021

The ASX is flying at the moment. The crypto portfolio is at around +75% now, as money starts moving into this market.

Inflation has been a topic of discussion of late. I’ve heard it referred to as ‘transitory’ inflation too. Perhaps it’s temporary as supply chain shortages impact product prices at the moment. On the other hand, technology is deflationary. I wonder if the deflation in tech can help offset the ‘transitory’ inflation happening?

In other news, the FED in the USA is now holding about twice the value in mortgage-backed securities (MBS) than they did during the GFC. MBS are the things that triggered the GFC back in 2008 and the movie ‘The Big Short’ is based on and explains https://youtu.be/vgqG3ITMv1Q . In the past 12 months, the FED’s holding of MBS have sky rocked…

Melbourne/Victoria has entered another (their fourth) snap lockdown this week as part of Australia's attempt to eradicate COVID. I feel for everyone living in Victoria. It's been a tough 15 months for them.

 

Saturday 29^th May 2021

xxx shared Sweden is now testing the e-Krona, their CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency). This is getting interesting. In 2015 I spent some time in Sweden and noticed back then, Sweden was focused on becoming a cashless country.

xxx will now get first hand experience with it himself and it’s safe to say he’s not happy about it.

CBDC’s are a great idea in theory, but I’m not a fan of them in practice. Why? I’m not keen on the government controlling and knowing every aspect of our money exchange. With cash, we can pay for things while retaining some privacy and our daily movements are not tracked as a byproduct of our spending. We can also keep some incase of an emergency.

The risk is we can loose it or it gets stolen. The risk with a CBDC is it’s centralised and electronic. In other words, the government has access to it and can potentially shut us off from it.

This is one of the reasons the crypto space has gained so much traction, no government manipulation (no confiscation or diluted via printing like fiat currency) plus some are decentralised and private, meaning no one knows you own them.