TMW#39: Nancy Pelosi Gets Rich Off Regulation
Should congress be banned from buying stocks? Do they have an inside edge that the rest of us don't have? Nancy Pelosi is the 6th best investment performer amongst her peers. All this and more on today's episode.
The Ole Celebrity Pump and Dump
This is where I have a problem. Celebrities pushing this shit. Assume they’re being paid a boatload of money and they’re ultimate goal is to make even more money. When Paris Hilton or Paltrow are pushing their Bored Apes, they are pushing the value of these things upward.
They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars (or potentially even millions to own one), or they were gifted one in order to advertise it on national TV. Friends, don’t trust celebrities. BUT it does push the entire space when it comes to attention.
You don’t need chase. Find out what the next best thing is and get in early, and risk what you can lose. Like me…with this Dog Eating the Burrito NFT.
IF You’re Buying NFTs, Read This
I’m not saying you SHOULD buy any NFTs. BUT, if you’re going to, check out these steps. The last thing you want to do is spend a a few thousand bucks on a dog eating a burrito and your wallet hacked and your art stolen. Nobody wants that.
Where’s the Love Spotify?
Lots of talk around what’s happening with podcasts on Spotify due to the Joe Rogan controversy around misinformation. Big name podcasts make money. The ad dollars make sense for now. They pay really well. And the margins are much higher for Spotify.
Music is not exclusive to Spotify, and the margins are very low. Majority of costs are paid out to Labels and then artists. The money just isn’t there. If Spotify focused just on music, they would die. No one would buy the stock. But with podcasts, Spotify is trying to build the biggest ad marketplace for audio, that’s why they’re schilling out millions to get you to listen to your fav podcast on their platform.
It’s a money grab for big podcasters like Dax Shepard and Joe Rogan. When their contracts expire, we’ll see them back on all platforms again…let’s assume. Unless, Spotify offers them MORE money to stay on.
It’s unfortunate for musicians, but this why the Web 3/NFT platforms are gunning for them. They’re offering them a way to make more money from their art. I’m all for that if it works.
At First They Think You’re Crazy
I sound like a broken record, but everything sounds absurd when it first comes out. No one thought that Facebook, Google, and Amazon would change our worlds and becomes massive companies. So why shouldn’t we think the same thing when it comes to NFTs?
Again, I’m not saying to go down this rabbit hole. Eventually they will be more than art. I think the way to think about it is, if more and more talented founders are going into this space and more and more engineers are also looking to leave the Googles of the world to focus on NFTs and everything surrounding them…eventually something will click.
(Sells valuable possessions and buys Dog Eating Burrito NFT…Don’t tell my mom)
Making Sense of the Stock Market
Zoom out. Take a deep breath. Know that it’s all part of the cycle. When you zoom out, everything goes up…provided the world doesn’t blow up. But we’ve been here before, and we seem to figure it out. This is why a long outlook always trumps short term investing.
Do You Need Blockchain?
LOL. SO TRUE. Some use cases, but not all.
Nancy Pelosi- Stock Market ICON
This woman is a BOSS. She should just quit her day job and replace Jim Cramer. I want this show.
CRYPTO Fees Are the Worst Fees
It’s still early days. While bitcoin transactions are relatively lower because we don’t use Bitcoin to pay for things, they’ve developed more infrastructure to reduce costs.
BUT with Ethereum, that’s not the case. It’s used as currency. You use ETH to buy NFTs and other assets. Therefore there’s so much volume that the infrastructure is so backed up. The price to get these transactions to move go higher. Think about it as a 1 lane road in a city that’s growing really quick. They need to increase the amount of lanes to reduce the back up. In the meantime, fees are high. And they really need to figure out how to reduce those fees.
This is one of the biggest roadblocks for crypto to go mainstream. We complain about bank fees…but fees in crypto can be enormous. Give it time. Plenty of great engineers working to solve this problem. (I hope)
Google and Microsoft Are Unstoppable
These guys have been around for decades and they are still growing like a GROWTH company. It’s not like a Walmart or Proctor and Gamble that has limited growth. They invest in the future of the internet and the cloud…which are high margin businesses. They will continue to get bigger and bigger.
Given the recent earnings reports from Apple, Microsoft and Google…they are having the biggest returns of their life. Why own anything else, when they continue to dominate? Hint…it’s not Peloton that’s going to take them out.
It might be my Burrito Eating Dog NFT that does it though. (There’s no dog NFT…it’s a joke…or I’m the joke)
