Get to where it's going to be

THE iconic ice hockey coach, Wayne Gretzky, used to tell his teams: "Skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it is."

That, of course, is a recipe for huge success in any sport but equally on the financial markets. If you can figure out where they are going to be next week you will be very rich indeed.

I read a lovely article from the Adam Smith Institute promulgating an AI-driven modern Domesday Book which would make the vicissitudes of the chain in housing transactions a thing of the past.

That is definitely somewhere we should aim to be, not where we are at the moment when one person dropping out of a chain can invalidate months and months of work and lead to it all having to be started again.

I was asked this week whether I thought it would be a good idea to get out of the markets, and by extension crypto, entirely. Arguably people who sold to drop markets recently did so after others (I'm thinking of Warren Buffett) had already done so, a perfect example of going to where the puck was going to be.

It’s hard to be sure but at a guess he has saved himself $40 billion to $50 billion in losses. Or made a profit of a similar amount, looked at another way.

My view was this is a pause for thought – the markets are one of the areas where interference is pretty limited, and in fact already we are seeing realignment and rethinking making a difference.

Even Bitcoin, recently flat on its back, is staggering to its feet. It’s well up over the last few days. Ignore possibilities at your peril. It’s almost floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee. And the Fear and Greed Index – recently as low as 15 which is end of the world stuff – is almost back to 50, which is 'Neutral'.

I've talked before of the thousands and thousands of altcoins vying for attention and how the vast majority of them have no purpose and no value. Meme coins are a perfect example. If ever there was a weapon of mass financial destruction, here it is. And this is not financial advice, merely common sense.

Markets move ahead of sentiment and being merely up with the game is a recipe for mediocrity at best and disaster at worst.

One of the more interesting things recently was the repeal of SAB121 in America. In essence, until now, if any banks held crypto assets (even if they belonged to third parties) they counted as liabilities on their balance sheet. So guess what - they didn't.  The Biden administration vetoed the repeal last June.

Now, President Trump and his much-more-friendly-to-crypto administration have repealed it.

And, frankly, so they should. It was a ridiculous situation where something belonging to a third party was used as a minus as far as your assets were concerned.

To appreciate how imbecilic it was, think of having 100 books of detective novels. Your next door neighbour asks you to look after his cowboy books for him, of which he has 30. The book police say you therefore only own 70 books.

Also this week it appears the XRP appeal and court case is finally over. Why didn't XRP shoot up in price, you may ask? Very simply, it did - but last October and November. It went to where the puck was going to be. As ever, buy the rumour sell the news.

Where do we go from here? I read a lovely article talking about how President Trump was being a fabulous poker player. By being inconsistent, he is wrong-footing his adversaries.

He has already got his way in a couple of areas, and made what I shall call “The Others” look both flat-footed and incompetent.

And before you shout at me, I don’t in any way applaud him at all. But as my granddaughter would say (she who bribed her class to make her class rep) you’ve got to admire him a tiny little bit.