Feeling down

I finished reading The Ascent of Money yesterday, and immediately started on The Bitcoin Standard, by Saifedean Ammous. The book has been touted on perhaps the best book on bitcoin economics, but Ammous remains a bit of a firebrand to me. I follow him on Twitter, and he’s a bit of a Coronavirus skeptic. Not necessarily from the disease itself, but from the shutdowns and economic effects that they’ve had.

He’s very vocal, say the least, and a bit arrogant. He was actually just on Laura Shin’s Unchained, and she asked him about his response to something Yuval Noah Harari said in Sapiens about debt, and Ammous said something to the effect that “I have no interest in what a Marxist anthropologist has to say on economics,” before going off for several minutes on the subject. That’s not to say that the man isn’t brilliant or hasn’t written a great book, but he comes off as a bit insufferable. I should have known when I saw the introduction was written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

I spent way too much time today on Zero Hedge, questioning everything. Now I’m ready to short hotel chains with put options, hoard my cash and set tight stops on all my equities positions. Apparently Europe is about to institute martial law or something and go back into lockdown, and we’re about to have a huge market correction. I don’t know. I went down the rabbit hole a bit today and looked at a blog focused on economic collapse. I haven’t felt this paranoid since I was into 9/11 trutherism and peak oil. The proximity to the election is a bit a unnerving.

My Amazon position stopped out this week, closing a position I’ve held for over ten years. Now my portfolio is a quarter cash, another quarter $GBTC, and the rest is split between three dozen or so equities, with $NFLX and $ATVI being the largest of those.

I have added Compass Pathways ($CMPS) to my watch list. They have a synthetic version of psilocybin that they currently have in phase three trials for treatment resistant depression. It’s something I’ve been interested in for a while. MAPS co-founder Rick Doblin made the rounds on Tim Ferriss and Peter Attia‘s podcasts last year, and it amazing to think that they may actually get this approved in the United States.

Other than that, I haven’t been too active today, just taking it easy with the family.

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