The Passive Bid Has Already Come for Crypto

One of the most important trends underpinning markets today is the passive bid.

That’s simply the term for the fact that money comes into the market. If you’re participating in a 401(k) plan, you’re part of the passive bid. Each payday, the money that gets deducted from your paycheck goes into your investment funds.

In turn, that money moves down to individual stocks that get bought up. Payday after payday after payday.

In time, this trend could reverse. A rising unemployment rate. Higher withdrawals from retirees from stocks as they shift to bonds.

Until that shift changes, it’s a structural reason why stocks are the best game in town – and why investors should buy market pullbacks.

Today, the passive bid is also drawing capital to crypto. Just consider how Vanguard’s small-cap ETFs are regular buyers of Strategy:

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Vanguard’s Strategy holdings now top 8% of the company – and rising

Strategy – formerly MicroStrategy, until its market cap hit $100 billion – is best known today for aggressively buying bitcoin and holding it. Given that Strategy is in a number of funds, there’s already passive money flowing to shares today.

The money flowing to Strategy could soar even higher if the company is added to the S&P 500 later in the year.

For now, we prefer bitcoin to Strategy, given that shares trade at a premium to their bitcoin holdings. With positive crypto legislation on deck from Congress this week, however, expect both bitcoin and Strategy shares to add to their recent gains.

~ Andrew

This is Elon Musk’s Next Tech Disruption…

And it could turn the entire AI market upside down.

Click here to see the details and learn how to prepare.

P.S. We see cryptocurrencies as a key part of President Trump’s Great Reset plan. However, it’s more likely that stablecoins, rather than bitcoin, Ethereum or the like, will get the most attention in the coming months.

Stablecoins take a dollar, issue a token, and then the process is reversed at some point. But stablecoins also invest those dollars into U.S. Treasurys. With stablecoin demand increasing, it could become the lynchpin for refinancing America’s debt at a reasonable interest rate.

As always, your reader feedback is welcome: feedback@greyswanfraternity.com (We read all emails. Thanks in advance for your contribution.)

One of the most important trends underpinning markets today is the passive bid.

In turn, that money moves down to individual stocks that get bought up. Payday after payday after payday.

In time, this trend could reverse. A rising unemployment rate. Higher withdrawals from retirees from stocks as they shift to bonds.

Until that shift changes, it’s a structural reason why stocks are the best game in town – and why investors should buy market pullbacks.

Today, the passive bid is also drawing capital to crypto. Just consider how Vanguard’s small-cap ETFs are regular buyers of Strategy:

Turn Your Images On

Vanguard’s Strategy holdings now top 8% of the company – and rising

The money flowing to Strategy could soar even higher if the company is added to the S&P 500 later in the year.

~ Andrew

This is Elon Musk’s Next Tech Disruption…

And it could turn the entire AI market upside down.

Click here to see the details and learn how to prepare.

As always, your reader feedback is welcome: feedback@greyswanfraternity.com (We read all emails. Thanks in advance for your contribution.)

As copper flowed into the United States, LME inventories thinned and backwardation steepened. Higher U.S. pricing, tariff protection, and lower political risk made American warehouses the most attractive destination for metal. Each new shipment strengthened the spread.

The arbitrage, once triggered, became self-reinforcing. Traders were not participating in theory; they were responding to the physical incentives in front of them.

The United States had quietly become the marginal buyer of the world’s most important industrial metal. China, long the gravitational center of global copper demand, found itself on the outside.

Under the frost-crusted shrubs, the bears are sniffing around for scraps of bloody meat.

They smell the subtle rot of credit stress, central-bank desperation, and debt that’s beginning to steam in the cold. They’re not charging — not yet. But they’re present. Watching. Testing the doors.

Retail investors, last in line, await the Fed’s final announcement of the year on Wednesday. Then the central planners of the world get their turn: the Bank of England, Bank of Japan, and the European Central Bank.

Treasuries just suffered their worst week since June. And in Japan — the quiet godfather of global liquidity — something fundamental is breaking.

Silver continues its blistering ascent. Gold and bitcoin have settled in at $4,200 and $92,000, respectively.

It’s absurd, really, for any politician to be talking about “affordability.”

The data is clear. If higher prices are your goal, let the government “fix” them.

Mandates, paperwork, and busybodies telling you what you can and can’t do – it’s not a surprise why costs add up.

In contrast, if you want lower prices, do nothing– zilch. Let the market work.

For 30 years, Japan was the land where interest rates went to die.

The Bank of Japan used yield-curve control to keep long-term rates sedated. Traders joked that shorting Japanese bonds was the “widow-maker trade.”

Not anymore.

On November 20, 2025, everything changed. Quietly, but decisively.

The Bank of Japan finally pulled the plug on decades of easy money. Negative rates were removed. Yield-curve control was abandoned. The policy rate was lifted to a 17-year high.

Suddenly, global markets had to reprice something they had ignored for years.

What happens when the world’s largest creditor nation stops exporting cheap capital and starts pulling it back home?

The answer came fast. Bond yields in Europe and the United States began climbing. The Japanese yen strengthened sharply. Wall Street faltered.