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Daily

My last post ended with “time to go relax”, and I think I overdid myself. There was a fair bit of debauchery. I was trying to avoid buying Cyperpunk 2077, so I went and spent sixty dollars on a EA Star Wars trilogy pack with three games on it. So I’m fully refreshed and looking forward to getting back in the swing of things.

Yesterday, Missus made a bunch of chocolate chip cookies. We made the mistake of leaving a tin of them on top of the microwave before we went to bed. I thought for sure that Younger was going to sneak downstairs before she went to bed to grab some. She actually waited until this morning.

She was sleeping with me and got out of bed before dawn. Missus and her regularly play ‘musical beds’ during the night, so I figured she was going back to her room, where her mom was sleeping. I fell back asleep for a moment and she came back in the room.

“Daddy, if Elder tells you that I was sneaking cookies she’s lying.” Yea, sure. I made her let me smell her breath, just as a test, I thought I smelled chocolate. I didn’t react, just rolled back over to see if I could grab another few minutes. It wasn’t to be. I went downstairs to check the cookies, and sure enough, there were only two left. Poor kid, if she hadn’t said anything to me about it I probably never would have noticed.

I didn’t punish her for it, but I did tell her that she couldn’t have any more cookies for the rest of the day, even though her sister could. She didn’t get it, and it set off a tantrum. It’s been one of those days. We’ve been having a lot of them lately. Younger doesn’t get out of the interaction that her older sister does at school, and she feel like she gets the short end of the stick as the little sister. She’s been having a hard time with it. There’s not a lot I can do till the vaccine is more widely available. I’ve been taking the girls out to the playground a lot — making them wear masks, of course — and we spent about four hours out there on Saturday. Beyond that and our Quaranteam family down the street, she doesn’t get much else in the way of social interaction. It drags on her, and us as well. She’ll start kindergarten next year, but it’s a long way to September.

Today’s markets were great though. My brokerage account was up the most it’s ever been in absolute terms. It was about eight percent overall, erasing all of last week’s downside and putting it a new all time high. Voyager ($VYGVF) absolutely killed it, apparently NFL Hall of Famer Marshall Faulk joined as key advisor. $MARA and $ETHE were up as well, all three around eighteen percent.

Not much has been going on with my crypto trades. I got stopped out on my XBT margin trade on Kraken, so I’m done for the month. I still have an ETH trade open, but it’s been ranging since I opened it last Tuesday.

I have been deploying some USD funds that I have on my main exchange. I market bought some more YFI, as well as some AAVE. I still have about three weeks of DCA funds on there right now, so I’m trying to hold some for now until paycheck on Thursday. Twenty percent weekly right now.

I did blow through all of the mined ETH on everything I could get my hands on through Uniswap. I did a table of all the coins mentioned in the Messari 2021 report, and picked up one, $NOIA, that was mentioned several times. Also PowerPool ($CVP), Aragon ($ANT). And also a few that some of my degen PRIA follows mentioned: Unfederal Reserve ($eRSDL) and Reflect.Finance ($RFI).

I also spent some time working on Ether Auction today, although I didn’t get very far. My setup is sub-optimal, and I’m not sure how to go about setting it up more efficiently. I’ve got two repos open in ItelliJ, one for the contract and the Hardhat scripts, the other for the React app itself. So I have one terminal window open for Harhat node, another to run the deploy script. Then I have to delete the data directory for my Graph node, run docker-compose, then I have to create and deploy the subgraph itself. Then, I have to run React tools in another console, and the React app in another. It’s a bit painful.

I kinda hit a dead end trying to pull data from the chain directly through an Ethers provider, since most of the stuff I need is actually in the subgraph. Unfortunately I discovered a Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) error that I’m tracking down right now.

Now the kids are in bed, and I’m ready to relax. I should probably go work out and work off some of these cookies…

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Crypto Developer Report

I managed to read the entire report today and took notes on which projects were mentioned. I had to look up several projects that I hadn’t heard of before, to see where they were traded, and I wound up opening some small positions on everything that was listed on Gemini: $COMP, $AAVE, $BAL, $MKR, and $FIL. I even threw in $CRV for good measure, and opened a much larger position in $YFI. I’m still waiting on my $SNX order to fill. There are a couple more tokens in the list that are one Kraken that I plan on taking up, such as $DOT, $XTZ, $ATOM, $ALGO, $BAL, $KEEP, and $GNO. Kraken has minimum bid limits, and I don’t have the liquidity to open positions in all of them, so I’ll have to wait. There are other projects that are listed on Binance and Bittrex that I may queue up at some point, but I’m staying off of there for now.

One takeaway from the developer report is that $EOS is actually losing active developers. It may be time to drop my bags in that. I’ve been holding this position since September of 2017, and am up over 300%. It’s not a huge tax liability, but I’m not sure if I want to wait until Jan 1 to sell so I can delay the tax bill or not. The question that’s biting at me is timing. I could spread the proceeds from the EOS bag around pretty good. BTC-wise, EOS hasn’t been doing too good, even though it’s USD value has been doing OK. There’s also the question of all these airdrops that I’ve gotten in my wallet that I have no idea what to do with. I’m going to need to do some research before I decide what to do.

As far as fiat goes, I’m being very aggressive right now, and aren’t keeping any more cash than I need to than is needed for the following month. I’m increasing my weekly set-aside to about 22% off my take home pay, and it’s getting sent straight to the exchange. The rest gets set for the next bill, and it gets paid as soon as the total is ready. Rent for January just got sent to the joint account, and I don’t even have any credit card bills due until the end of next month. I’m sitting real pretty right now, and feeling pretty good.

The big question right now of course is what’s going to happen with BTC. I’ve made a couple small buys during this dip, but it’s anyone’s guess whether we consolidate or go further down near $15,000 before the eventual moon mission begins. I’m considering exiting the Yearn BUSD vault and putting those proceeds straight into the WBTC one, but the stablecoin vault is earning 20% APR right now. If the price has any more huge pullbacks I’ll probably layer some margin bids on the levels in the following chart, and will probably go all in with the main cash reserves if we get in the $16,500-15,900.

The other token I’m considering dumping is my IDEX position. Running my staking node isn’t profitable, even with the increased rewards, and the token price has fallen so much since the Binance listing. I’m not really confident in the project given the success of the rest of DeFi and other DEX projects, so I’m really conflicted about this one. I’m really not trying to dump until the new year though, as I’ve done really well with this one. I hate to sell here though. I really feel bad about not selling in September at $0.07 a token. Now it’s just 0.03. Sigh.

I feel like I’ve been staring at charts all day. Time to go relax.

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Evening pages

It feels like a lot happened today, but not a lot of what I wanted to. I stayed up too late last night and got a late start today, and had quite a bit of work to do for Zombie, LLC. NIST-related stuff. Not fun. Will mean a lot of work for me in the future, and not the kind that I’m going to enjoy doing.

Markets were a bit crazy today, BTC was down quite a bit for most of the day but turned around before the end of the day with news that Mass Mutual Insurance Company had bought $200 million in BTC for their general ledger balance sheet. Nuts. Things are happening.

I decided to sell some Stellar that I’ve been holding onto for several years. It was a giveaway from 2017, I think I got it listening to a podcast. I sold it into my margin account for about $75. I’ll probably put it toward BTC, or maybe as a long-term play in YFI. I’m feeling very bullish on it after reading what Messari has been publishing.

I took a look at my IDEX holdings today. I hadn’t seen a payout since September, so I figured that my node had stopped. It hadn’t. The rewards have just been so lousy, even with the supposed fee doubling. I’ve seen maybe a 5x upside in price over the past year, but I’ve actually been losing in with the AWS charges for the node. It stinks. I was actually going to sell, but they have some other staking rewards going on in anticipation of their forks for Polkadot and Binance chain. It might be worth holding on for a few more months. We’ll see. IDEX has actually been on of the worst performing tokens since the DeFi “winter” these past few months. Out of two dozent tokens, IDEX is one of three or four with a negative return, around twenty percent.

I get better returns mining ETH on my rig at home.

I have the sense that my attention is getting split in too many directions right now. I haven’t gotten anything substantial done in the past week or so, and I feel like I’m slacking. I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, I am watching two kids all day long, cooking and cleaning up after them, helping them with school. How much should I be getting. I might need to sit down and recalibrate my expectations. Just getting through the day should feel like an accomplishment. So what if my output isn’t what it should be? Just who am I measuring up to? My bills are paid, my kids are clothed and fed. Who cares?

I do. I want to be done with this day job crap, having to take care of stuff I don’t care about that clients I don’t care about either. Family comes first from now on. Spending time with my kids is the most important thing. That and capitalizing on the financial edge I have. Ten years from now my kids will be teenagers, and as long as I don’t do anything stupid I’ll probably be one of the one million richest bitcoiners on earth. It’s practically guaranteed at this point.

I still want more though, while it’s still cheap during this cycle. Indications are that we’ll have a slight correction over the next few months, maybe a dip down to 15k between now an May. I don’t know how likely that is, but I need to start planning to convert some of my USD funds into crypto.

It’s time to convert some positions and buy the dip. This will likely be the last one below $20K.

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Everybody wants a fan

I managed to climb out of bed a bit early this morning and get in a short workout while I listened to a bit of this Knowledge Project episode with Randall Stutman on the essence of leadership. There’s a really powerful moment in there that that talks about the one thing that everyone wants: a fan. He tells the story of Tiger Woods’ famous shot on the 16th hole in the final round of the 2005 Masters, and says that the crowd was yelling so loud and that the earth was shaking, and that the reason that the ball finally fell over the lip of the cup after sitting there for 2.2 seconds was that the three thousand people that were there watching wanted it to go in.

Everybody wants a fan.

It stuck with me the rest of the day, and I tried to keep it in mind when I was dealing with my kids and my coworkers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Fg4sZLrjwA

I spent most of the day re-reading the Messari Crypto Theses for 2021, taking notes so I could share some thoughts on Twitter and possibly in a longer form here. I actually canceled my LinkedIn membership today and signed up for Messari’s Pro service, I know their analysis is the best in the industry, but this report really sealed the deal for me. I think I’ve been spamming everyone with it, I think it should be widely read.

Ongoing thread with notes on the Messari report

I’m taking notes in RemNote, my poor man’s version of RoamResearch. I’ve got a feeling like I’m missing out on something without Roam, but I’m going to stick RemNote for now. I need to save all the cash I can right now — it’s Christmas, and those credit card bills are going to be due next month. Just kidding! I purchased everything using points I saved up over the past year, and haven’t paid out of pocket for anything

I also touched base with Dr. Mantis from the PRIA project, he’s working on a new one, and I got him to share the smart contract code for it. Haven’t looked at it much yet, but we’ll see if I can decipher it. More to come on that.

I continue to do some small “explorations” on Kraken with leveraged trades, feeling out how things work. My first couple BTC orders have been slightly off, playing with my entry before crashing straight through to my stop loss. I may need to recalibrate things. I have ETH and XRP (I’m so ashamed) positions that are still in play, so I’m going to see how things go so I can ge a sense of the fees while I’m dealing with a small position size. I’m tempted to go in on BTC for a third time, but I’ve already struck out twice this week and can’t enter any more positions until I close or protect the two that I have open now. Those are the rules.

The one thing I didn’t do today was work on Ether Auction. I think I’m probably experiencing a sense of overwhelm with the project — the dip — as Seth Godin calls it. So I just need to take some time and plow through and make a little bit of progress on it. I was actually reading over the Yearn.Finance repositories to see how they have their website setup, and I took away some patterns from there that I may be able to put to use without having to pull another framework into the project. I just need it to work well enough. The perfect is the enemy of the good, as they say.

And one more note that has me pleased. Elder has finally seemed to embrace playing the piano. I she’s been practicing Santa Claus Is Coming To Town for a week or two now, and was bragging to her teacher that she can play it, and is going to perform it for her class over Zoom next Thursday. I’m so proud, and glad that she is sticking with it.

I myself am sloooowly making my way through Claire De Lune, and after a bit of stagnation over the past week, have been working my way through two of the hardest measures in the piece. I’ve been practicing it daily for less than three months right now, and have been drilling these long, flowing runs over and over. Just doing it day after day after day, until it becomes subconscious. Automatic. I know I can do it, cause I did it with guitar after so many years.

I suppose programming is the same. I keep at it, and I should get to the point where these languages and frameworks become invisible to me, and I can focus more on the program flow and the bigger architectural pieces.

Maybe then it won’t seem so overwhelming. I just got to keep grinding.

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Reading list

I finished a couple of books last night, Yural Navari’s Sapiens, and Kurt Vonneguts Player Piano. There’s also a couple of reports out on the crypto landscape that I’m reading over.

Sapiens didn’t feel all that groundbreaking to me, to be honest. I think that it covered a lot of ground that I was already aware of but as a book for general audiences, I think it’s great. I’ve read Navari’s Twenty Questions before, and I’ve listened to him speak, so I like what he has to say. Writing the entire history of mankind in a five-hundred page book is quite a feat, and I can see why it’s so popular. So much of it has seeped into the collective consciousness since it came out in 2014, much of the Silicon Valley techbro culture has absorbed it. Finishing it was a slog though, it took me several weeks.

That said, I did order the first volume of the graphic novel as a Christmas gift for Elder, if she likes it I suppose I’ll be buying the next four volumes for her when it comes out. Best to get her off on the right foot, I suppose.

I’ll add Homo Deus to my reading list next, after I finish The Fourth Turning. There was a lot of talk about the singularity near the end of Sapiens, which is one of those subject near and dear to my heart, so I’m looking forward to see what Navaria has to say about that.

On the other end of the spectrum is Player Piano, which I found very interesting. I had read Slaughterhouse Five right before this one, and it is downright crazy how prescient Player Piano is. It seems less science fiction than some alternate reality where transistors were never invented. In the story, much of the populace is out of work due to automation. Society is divided into the manager class, responsible for designing and running the factories which produce everything, and the common people, the now non-working class, who are relegated either to either menial public works projects or the army. IQ and aptitude tests determine one’s station in life, and most people are on a sort of universal basic income, where all needs are determined by the machines, down to the type of fiction that gets written and published. The protagonist of the story, one of these managers, becomes disillusioned and involved in a conspiracy to rebel against the machine and return man to a more honorable place among the dignity of work.

I was quite floored by the portrayal in this book. It’s hard to tell just how revolutionary Vonnegut’s ideas were at the time, it seems that he was just making an extrapolation based off of watching an automated miller make airplane props at a GE plant during WWII. Obviously we’re not using punch cards anymore, but it seems like he was spot on in many ways.

Delphi Digital has their Bitcoin Outlook for December 2020 out today. It looks at a market and on chain metrics, trying to get a cyclical sense of where BTC is headed in the coming months. The short of it is that if history repeats itself, we should see a new ATH followed by a large pullback before parabolic runs during the end of next year. Six figures, easy.

And last but not least, Messari Crypto has their Crypto Theses for 2021 out. It’s a whopping 130-page document on everything from bitcoin to ethereum, defi to NFTs. I just started reading though the opening pages on this one, but it’s very, very, well researched. There’s a lot to take in here, and this is a great resource.

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Kraken margin trading calculator

Determining position size, leverage, and liquidation levels

If we are indeed at the start of a bitcoin bull run, then it is going to get progressively harder to accumulate a full BTC. Raising the FIAT needed to buy one outright is beyond my means without taking some credit risk. Trading alts is another to do this, but I’m not willing to risk much of the BTC that I already have on alts. Instead I’ve decided to see what I can do with a small amount of fait and some margin trading. So I opened an account on Kraken.

US residents don’t have many options when it comes to leveraged trading. Kraken is one of the few, and the one that seemed most accessible to me. Getting verified was simple enough, but I was a bit shocked to find that they don’t allow ACH transfers from bank accounts, only wire. Alas. I was able to use stablecoins to transfer from my preferred exchange, as well as some BTC I had earmarked in a trading wallet, as well as some ETH I had mined.

With these meager funds, I made a small swing trade on spot. I’ll admit that I didn’t know much about leverage, but I did know that there was a call level and a liquidation level. For the life of me though, I couldn’t find a way to calculate this. Kraken’s documentation shows that they have a profit and loss / liquidation calculator, but it’s on the futures site, and not available to me. I’m not sure this is an oversight, or a way for them to get over on noobs.

I spent an hour or two last night trying to calculate these numbers myself. With a few examples and some algebra, I was able to put together a spreadsheet that allows me to plan my entry and stops, and validate that they are well outside of liquidation range.

Using an example from Kraken’s documentation: Using $5000 in equity to open a $10,000 position with 5x leverage results in a $2000 margin level. The margin ratio on the account is (5000/2000) x 100 = 250%. A ratio of one hundred percent put us in danger of liquidation. Kraken can margin call at around 80% (the exact percentage depends on some obtuse factor), and the liquidation process starts at 40%. But how to figure this out.

Kraken’s example gives us a hint. If the account takes a paper loss of $3500, this puts the equity at $1500 (5000-3500), and the margin level is now 1500/2000 = 75%. So we know have enough information to write it out as an equation. 

margin rate = (equity - original position price - current position value) / margin amount

What we really want, though, is to estimate the current position value. Using a bit of algebra we can isolate it as such: 

current position value = (margin rate * margin amount) - equity + position cost

Now we can substitute the call and liquidation rates in our spreadsheet to determine the current position value, further breaking it down by market price and position size.

In order to use the spreadsheet, fill out your equity size, entry and stop loss. The risk amount is set to two percent, change as you like. If the position size is more than five times your equity, OVERLEVERAGE will return true, which means that the parameters you’ve entered are so conservative that you won’t come close to the full risk amount. You can lower your stop loss to find the sweet spot.

In our example, we have $10,000 in equity, and are going to enter a position at $10,000, with a stop loss of $9900. This will allow us to open a $20,000 position, which we will be able to open using $4000 of margin (collateral) at 5x.

As you can see, the spot price will have to drop to $7000 before our margin level falls to 100%: (14,000 position value + 6,000 equity remaining = original position size of $20,000.) Since our stop loss is well, well above this level, we shouldn’t have to worry about getting called at 80% or liquidated at 40%.

Hopefully this spreadsheet is helpful, and please, please use risk management before you take these trades. If you’re new to leverage, as I am, I recommend you read CryptoCred’s Comprehensive Guide to Position Size and Leverage.

Enjoy.

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Bitcoin legacy

I’ve been slacking off the past couple days. Two days without posting isn’t something I want to turn into a habit, so here I am, even on days when I don’t have much to say.

I was doing pretty good this week, going to bed on time, getting up early, I even worked out for the first time in weeks. All it took was a couple drinks Thursday afternoon and everything is off track again.

We did have a campfires Thursday and Friday night, first over at our house, then yesterday at the neighbor’s, roasting hot dogs and making smores. Afterward I had to take Elder to Urgent Care for what appears to be nothing more than dehydration. Wasted two hours plus dealing with that. Oh well.

My mom came into town Thursday. We haven’t seen her since the lockdown. She brought lunch and presents for the kids, as well as some family “heirlooms” that she didn’t have room for. One was a box of Christmas Village houses, and the other were some collectible plates that my grandfather bought forty years ago.

It seems like every female member of my family was into these Christmas Villages growing up. Every winter the tops of the kitchen cabinets would get decorated with fake snow and out would come the houses. My grandmother and aunts, and my mom all had them. Missus and her family never got into them, so she was disappointed when I told my mom I’d take them. I couldn’t say no, I guess.

The plates though, oh, these plates. They’re a series of ceramic plates portraying Mother Goose rhymes. They’re by a company called Roco, and the artist is named John McClelland. My grandfather got scammed out of them big time. I looked through the paperwork that came with them, and man did he get took. He saved the solicitations, talking up the “limited” series as a hot collectible item. Plates from the first run in 1978 were going for $150 each, and there’s no way that he wanted to miss out on the rest run. And he bought what looks like is the whole set, some ten plates that went for $25 in 1981. That’s about $75 each in today’s dollars.

I checked eBay, and individual plates were going for as little as $5 each.

If my grandfather had simply invested that $250 in the S&P index, back in 1981, it would be worth almost six grand.

It should have been obvious, looking at the fact that the serial numbers on the plates have five figures. These things weren’t collectable items, they were mass produced.

Now I don’t know if my grandfather took any pleasure in the plates themselves, or if he thought he was making a sound investment in them. It looks like he started buying them the year I was born, and he passed away many years ago, so I never talked to him about them. When my mom asked me if I would take them, I didn’t want to say “no” without looking at them. I don’t have anything left of my grandfather, save a stained glass lamp that he made, so I didn’t want to throw this out without looking at it.

Now that I’ve seen them though…

I’m tempted to stuff them in a dark corner of my attic and deal with them later, but I can’t do it. They will have to go. I should just take the whole lot and stick it in the car now and bring it straight down to the thrift store. My grandfather’s name and address is all over the boxes, I don’t know if I need to bother marking them out or not. Probably not.

I haven’t even looked at the Christmas Villages. Not sure if I will.

When my mom left for her trip, she took my old bassinet with me. She had given it to us for our daughter, but it wasn’t that practical and we never wound up using it much. I asked her if she wanted me to get rid of it, but she wound up taking it with her. She wanted to save it so that my girls could use it for their kids. I asked her if she was really going to keep it for another twenty or thirty years, especially since she had told me earlier that she was moving to Portugal in a few years. In fact, the whole reason she was bringing me the plates and villages was because she had sold her mountain cabin and was trying to downsize into one home. It didn’t make any sense.

Missus said that her family aren’t hoarders like mine are, but I’m not sure if that’s quite what it is. I’m not sure if it’s some sort of legacy or heirlooms that they’re trying to leave behind. But it’s got to go.

Missus and I have been embracing minimalism. We’re starting to reject the consumerism and accumulation of wealth that we were brainwashed into, and try to get to the point where we can be free, or freer at lease. There’s a point, coming soon I think, where we’ll be able to maintain our lifestyle and only need to work for a few hours a day. If bitcoin fulfils it’s promise like I think it will, we’ll be looking at a point in the next year or two that we’ll have enough wealth to be independent. To get there, we’ve got to make lots of cuts. Not just the second car, but just cleaning out the clutter in the house.

Nothing comes in now without something going out. That’s the idea, at least. Christmas is a hard test, since I’ve got a foyer full of gifts from relatives, and have more tucked away in closets and under the tree. I’ve promised Missus that I’ll finish ordering for my overseas relatives as soon as I get done writing.

I was tempted to buy a three pack of Opendimes and load them up with some BTC to give as gifts, but ultimately decided it was too expensive. I still think it would make a good gift though, but they’re too expensive to be a casual gift. As a legacy or heirloom though, I can’t think of anything that would be more appropriate.

My grandfather also bought me a treasury bond when I was born, I can’t recall if it was twenty five or one hundred dollars. When I was thirteen I used it to open my first bank account, and cashed it in. I’ve been thinking a lot about bitcoin as legacy, not just my own kids but their heirs as well. If we’re truly moving into the next phase of Bitcoin’s evolution, then it would be wise not to ever sell what I’ve accumulated. It could be generational wealth.

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Public traded psychedelic health companies

It’s been well over a year since we wrote about the prospects for legal psychedelics, and a lot has happened since then.

A reply to this Tweet led to a bit of discovery about some public listed companies that are involved in therapeutic psychedelic research. I’ve known about Compass Pathways for a month or two now, since their listing as the first company in the space to get a listing on NASDAQ or NYSE. A few responses on Pomp’s tweet led me to a couple more, and I just finished researching all of the companies I could find. Most of them are Canadian, and have only been listed in the last two or three months as well. Most of them are available in the US on the OTC markets, so I’ve listed both the CSX and OTC tickers as applicable.

I believe this list is comprehensive, although I did not include any privately held companies, even the ones who are planning to go public. If I missed any, please let me know.

By market cap:

Compass Pathways ($CMPS): United Kingdom mental health care company. Received breakthrough therapy designation from the FDA for psilocybin therapy for treatment resistant depression in 2018. Developing a formulation of psilocybin called COMP360. Administration of the drug includes support from specifically trained professionals to support patients. Treatment involves prepraratoin sessions, a six to eight hour treatment session, and post-treatment integration session. Currently in Phase II trial. Listed in September of this year. Market cap $1.7B.

Mind Medicine ($MMED/$MMEDF): Canadian neuro-pharmaceutical. Just completed Phase 1 LSD study in Switzerland, testing LSD-assisted therapy for anxiety disorders, and other treatments. Went public via merger with Broadway Gold Mining. Also developing non-hallucinogenic version of ibogaine, regarded as a highly effective heroin cessation psychedelic. Market cap $515M.

Field Trip Health ($FTRPF): Canadian firm doing research on psychedelic molecules and therapies. Developing psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy hubs across North America. Also has a digital arm building digital tools for consciousness expansion, including an IOS app. Just listed in November, Market cap $135M.

Numinous Wellness ($NUMI/$LKYSF): (Ticker was LKYSD, anagram probably related to Lucy in the SKY with Diamonds [LSD] before bding changed the current one) Canadian health and wellness firm centered on psychedelic therapies. Has cannabis testing license and a dealer’s license, which allows it to work with MDMA, psilocybin, DMT and mescaline. First Canadian public company to complete legal harvest of psylocybe mushrooms. Also operates a integrative health solution center. Listed in June 2019, market cap $64M.

HAVN Life Sciences ($HAVLF): Canadian biotech. Fungal derived products. Two Divisions, HAVN Labs and HAVN Retail. Product lines focus on immunity, cognition, stress and energy formulations. Also doing psilocybin depression study in Germany. Listed less than 60 days ago. Market cap under $40m.

Mind Cure Health ($MCUR): Canadian mental health and wellness company. Focus includes clinical research tech, nootropics (including psychedelic compounds), product discovery and supply. Sixty day listings. Market cap $22M.

Champignon Brands ($SHRMF): Canadian company involved in manufacturing of ketamine, distribution of psychedelic medicine and mushroom infused beverages. Several subsidiaries, including mushroom cultivation and psilocybin therapeutics. Listed this May. Market cap $34M.

Mydecine Innovations ($MYCO/$MYCOF): Canadian biopharma and life science company. Working on Phase 2A clinical trials of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy to treat chronic PTSD in veterans and emergency medical personnel, with the goal of a FDA breakthrough designation. Ticker listed in April. Market cap $31M.

And for bonus points, this tidbit:

The first public company to gain FDA approval for a psychedelic-based treatment was pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ). The company’s Spravato esketamine nasal spray, which is used in conjunction with an oral antidepressant to treat treatment-resistant depression (TRD), gained FDA approval in March 2019.

Source: Psychedelics Transition from Experimental Treatment to Major Pharmaceutical Industry

Of course no sooner than I hit ‘publish’, I find that there is a Psychedelic Stock Index. Still trying to determine whether it’s available in the US.

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Roller coaster day

Last night was a full moon, Missus caught a picture of it off the front porch as it peeked out from behind a cloud before we went to bed. I knew I was going to have trouble sleeping, I was caught up, and sober, a knew my mind was going to give me a hard time without the drink. I took a melatonin, even though I knew I was probably going to wake up too early and not be able to fall back asleep, and that’s exactly what happened.

When I woke at five the moon had traversed all the way around the house, and was shining brightly in the bedroom window. I tried in vain to go back to sleep, but couldn’t manage fifteen or twenty minutes before I was awake again, and finally got out of bed. Might as well make the best out of it, I thought. I was overdue for a workout, and needed to work my bad knee to keep it in place.

Listened to a couple podcasts while working out. Finished up George Dyson on Team Human. The intro was more interesting to me, a tribute to neuroscientist Mark Filippi, who had passed away. Filippi had a theory that the phases of the moon influences human emotions, based on the phase. There are four neurotransmitters that cycle with the moon. The full moon is when serotonin is dominant, and supposedly gives us more energy and creativity. The waning moon, the last quarter, is the dopamine phase, linked to pleasure and enjoyment. The new moon is the noradrenaline, which makes us defensive, and is when people are more fearful and irritable. As the moon returns in the first quarter, we’re supposedly more receptive to other people (acetlycholine), and we have energy, but not much focus. Good for inspiration, but not detail-work.

That’s the theory anyways. Rushkoff, the host of Team Human, says that he tries to schedule his work around these lunar cycles, writing during certain weeks and editing during others. I’m not saying I buy it, but maybe I’ll start paying attention to it and see if I notice anything.

After that I started an episode of The Breakdown, this one a reading of The Complete Case for $100K Bitcoin. As I was listening, my phone beeped with a Trading View alert. We had just hit an ATH on Coinbase! I checked the TV chat long enough to see all the self-congratulation, and posted “can I quit my job now!” and finished my workout. By the time I had finished the workout and checked the price again, it had already dumped a thousand dollars.

I meditated, hung out with the girls and got ready for work. Premarket was down, looks the markets were going to take back some of yesterday’s historic gains. But as the morning went on, the dip had been bought back up a couple hundred short of the ATH, and by the time the market was open I was up a few grand.

The rest of the day was more whipsaws of volatility. I was nearly at breakeven at one point and finally stopped looking at Twitter and Trading View around lunch, after I’d dispensed with my day job duties. I needed to get some work done on Ether Auction. I stopped to look at my balance at the end of the day, and was up back to where we had started. Huh.

It’s really incredible. To think that in six months I’ve doubled my retirement account, and thought it would take me another two decades to save up as much. I had been resigned to working for my entire life, but now it seems that financial independence is within reach, and in the next few years. Remarkable.

Bitcoin to $100K seems like it’s going to be a cakewalk by 2024. Three hundred seems much more likely, at least for a peak. And I know it’s way too early to look beyond that, but it seems likely that five hundred or one million in the next five to ten years will happen. And beyond that, if I’m still around, who knows. Bitcoin will change the world.

Lord knows it’s already changed my life.

There’s one more thing I’ll share, a piece called Bitcoin Astronomy, about how bitcoin as a global reserve currency will become a driver for human expansion into space. It’s far out.

Even though we hit the Coinbase ATH today, and I truly consider all records broken, my bottle of Glenfiddich 15 still remains in the cupboard. I think celebration is a bit premature. I’m going to wait for us to breach the level and close above it, not just a wick. That moment will really signal that we are on our way. One more touch ought to be enough to do the trick, and I’m guessing we will see it within the next week.

Fingers crossed.