Bitcoin’s Looking Great. Gold Not So Much.

A Tale of Two Assets. Plus an update on gold miners.

Today, we are going to look at gold, bitcoin, and our way of playing it, MicroStrategy (NASDAQ:MSTR), which has now 10xd (!) since we first covered it last year. Amazing.Finally, there’ll be a short update on gold miners. Remember them?

Let’s start with gold.

Gold – and most other metals – has been hit since the U.S. election last week. It’s down $200, or about 7%, with U.S. dollar strength being a big factor (the dollar has been storming higher since October).

While I think this bull market might be punctured, as I put it last week, and that gold probably has a bit further to fall, I am not unduly worried. 2024 has hitherto been a great year for gold, and it remains an essential long-term core holding.

It is an even more essential holding for UK investors. I think sterling has big problems ahead of it, and gold serves as your hedge against crap governments.

Labour or Tory – I’m no fan of either.

They’re both as bad as each other, in my view. The less government there is, the better things run. But that’s irrelevant idealism. Of greater concern here is reality: there has never been a Labour Government that did not devalue sterling.

· Blair and Brown crashed sterling in 2007-8 (though until then their record was okay);

· Under Wilson, Callaghan, and Healey, we ended up going to the IMF in 1976. Callaghan and Wilson also devalued in 1967.

· Cripps and Attlee devalued in 1949.

· Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government, which followed Labour from 1929-31, took us off the gold standard in 1931.

Why should this Labour Government be any different? If anything, it is even less competent. Sterling devaluation is coming. How exactly might not yet be clear. I rather suspect it’ll be an attempt to make us competitive against an ultra-streamlined US, but that’s just a guess. You must own some gold (and some bitcoin) in such an environment: non-government money.

Bitcoin’s Looking Great. Gold Not So Much.

A Tale of Two Assets. Plus an update on gold miners.

Let’s start with gold.

It is an even more essential holding for UK investors. I think sterling has big problems ahead of it, and gold serves as your hedge against crap governments.

Labour or Tory – I’m no fan of either.

· Blair and Brown crashed sterling in 2007-8 (though until then their record was okay);

· Under Wilson, Callaghan, and Healey, we ended up going to the IMF in 1976. Callaghan and Wilson also devalued in 1967.

· Cripps and Attlee devalued in 1949.

· Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government, which followed Labour from 1929-31, took us off the gold standard in 1931.

It’s pretty clear from the leaderboard year-to-date that investors are moving their money out of AI stocks into real-world “stuff” – the energy and commodities, natural that are the building blocks of an economy.

The crash was a major structural shock that wiped out leveraged positions and forced necessary, but painful, deleveraging across the digital asset ecosystem.

Did irresponsible marketing campaigns by certain platforms contribute to the crash? Again, I believe yes. When you incentivize users to treat a tokenized hedge fund like a stablecoin and then allow unlimited leverage on top of that, risk is amplified.

As massive as the crash was, it may have been necessary medicine. Sometimes excess leverage needs to be flushed from the system before the next move higher can begin. I believe we’re in the last stages of that process.

Gallup reports that 62.1% of Americans describe themselves as thriving in 2025, down 2.7 percentage points from 2024. Yet, only 59.2% expect a high quality of life in five years, the lowest reading on record. We wonder how many of the 40.8% of the naysayers were trading on Robinhood…

Our goal at Grey Swan is to make sure we’re in the cohort of thrivers now, five years from now… and beyond.

To that end, folks who build durable positions tend to focus on balance sheets, cost structures, and who controls the pipes — whether those pipes carry rockets, data, oil, or dollars.

In the past eight-day trading period, over 20% of S&P 500 stocks have had at least one intraday decline of at least 7%.

Typically, that kind of volatility occurs in the middle of a market correction or crash – not this close to all-time highs.

The crash was a major structural shock that wiped out leveraged positions and forced necessary, but painful, deleveraging across the digital asset ecosystem.

Our goal at Grey Swan is to make sure we’re in the cohort of thrivers now, five years from now… and beyond.

To that end, folks who build durable positions tend to focus on balance sheets, cost structures, and who controls the pipes — whether those pipes carry rockets, data, oil, or dollars.

In the past eight-day trading period, over 20% of S&P 500 stocks have had at least one intraday decline of at least 7%.

Typically, that kind of volatility occurs in the middle of a market correction or crash – not this close to all-time highs.