'Scarcity Season' Has Begun: Ran Neuner Is Long Gold, Silver And Bitcoin

Welcome back up, Jeremy Safran. Now, between March of 2022 and October of 2023, five-year real yields in the United States rose by more than four percentage points. So real yields, meaning what is left after inflation. And on that relationship that held for about two decades, gold should have fallen about 55 percent, but it didn't. It rose 7 percent. Then, over the next two years, real yields fell by less than a single point and gold rallied 110 percent. Now, those figures come from the chief strategist at UBS Investment Bank, and his conclusion is that gold now barely reacts when real rates rise and moves enormously when they fall. Last month, gold gained better than 10 percent, its best month since January, while the market was moving towards pricing a Federal Reserve rate hike rather than a cut. Bitcoin, meanwhile, gained close to 25 percent over that same stretch. And as we speak, Bitcoin just broke in that $80,000, a level it's been failing at for weeks. We'll see if it holds. So for anyone who owns gold, the question is straightforward. If not rates, then what? My guest has argued for years that Bitcoin is driven by the liquidity cycle rather than the four-year cycle most people quote. The question is whether gold has joined that trade. Stay with me. In Focus with Jeremy Safran is brought to you by Swan, the real Bitcoin company. All right. Joining me now, Ryan Nooner, of course, who put cryptocurrency really on television back in 2017, went on to build one of the largest audiences in this market. Always good to have you back on Kitco News. Thanks for making the time, Ryan. Jeremy, so good to see you. And so good to see you in what I'm calling scarcity season, because all the scarce assets, Bitcoin, silver, gold, all now starting to run. And I think we're just in the beginning of a very big Bitcoin bull run. Interesting. All right. So I got some ears perked up by the audience right now. Let's start with that break that I talked about. I mean, gold kind of moved against real rates almost mechanically for 20 years. It stopped, I guess, in 2022. Now, you argued that liquidity drives your own market. Is that the same kind of force that broke gold's relationship with rates? And what does liquidity actually mean for someone holding metal first? Well, I mean, I think the relationship has changed. And I think you got to look at the reason for the liquidity. The reason for the is because the U.S. is literally printing more money and they're inflating their dollar away. Right. They got the U.S. debt clock hit 40 trillion dollars the other day. The estimated debt repayments are over one and a half trillion dollars. And those were all financed at about three and a half percent. Now, the real now the rate, if you look at the at the charts and you look at the 10 year U.S. treasury yield, which is currently sitting at four point seven five percent, that's going to kill the U.S. that's going to kill the U.S. lending costs. And I mean, it's massive. If you take the the U.S. debt, which is currently sitting at 40 something trillion or 40, just over 40 trillion dollars, and you work out the interest in that, we are soon heading to a world where two trillion dollars every year is going into just repaying the interest on the debt. And so what Scott Besson came out the other day and said was he basically said it in an indirect way. He said, look, we've got a big war chest and we're going to use that war chest to basically buy back the long end of the curve. And for those of you who don't know what that means, it pretty much means that they are printing money to buy back their own T-bills at the long end of the curve, which means more money in circulation, which means they are deflating their own currency away, which is why the scarce assets responded phenomenally well on that day. Scott Besson came out on the I think it was the 18th or 19th of August. That's the in fact, let me get you the exact date of the announcement. It is it was the 19th of August. Scott Besson came out with the announcement. The announcement was first simple. He pretty much said they're going to double their buyback from two billion dollars to four billion dollars. That's a very small drop in the ocean when you compare it to 40 trillion dollars of debt. However, he's sending a clear signal to the market that they're going to do anything because that was followed by interviews on CNBC. And on those interviews at CNBC, he basically came out and said, look, we've got a big war chest to go back and buy the to go back and buy our long dated bonds. And so the scarce assets actually had a massive, massive run. So you look at gold. That's the candle up on the 18th or the 19th of August and gold went up about 10 percent. Bitcoin, which was at which was in just it had just experienced one of the long bear markets that we usually have. We have about a one year long bear market actually had a massive spike. Now, the interesting thing here is that that Bitcoin went up about 30 percent. It pulled back slightly to about 21 percent. But now it's basically going up to break to break those highs. At the same time, what happened was gold actually gave up a lot of its gains. So what you can see with gold is that gold actually went up and gave up a lot of its gains and now starting to retrace. So long story short, I think that what Scott Besant did was he basically declared war against the bond market and specifically against the bond vigilantes. Right. For those who don't know what the bond vigilantes are, it's traders that don't agree with the fiscal policy of a country and believe that they can pressure the country by either buying or short selling their bonds and eventually one of them capitulates. And so now Scott Besant is at war with the bond market and the bond vigilantes. He's come out and said we're going to print money, put more money into the economy to buy back the long end of our debt, 10, 20, 30 year T-bills, and that's going to put more money into circulation. And as more money goes into circulation, you can bet that inflation is going to go up. Now, the problem is they're also dealing with a war at the moment and this war isn't ending. In fact, if you look at the charts, oil is just under $100 a barrel. It's at $99 a barrel now. And so what the market's basically saying is, look, there's inflation. They're going to inflate the dollar away. You've got to be holding the scarce assets. You've got a selection of scarce assets that you can hold, gold, silver, platinum, palladium, et cetera. And then there's Bitcoin. Bitcoin just came out of a long bear market. It is about 50 or now it's about 40 percent from its all time highs. And as soon as that happened, basically, I think it reignited the Bitcoin bull market. Yeah. Yeah. And on the mechanism there, Rand, I mean, is the simpler explanation just beta? I mean, Bitcoin kind of holding more of the move because it moves more in both directions, because if that is, it's not, I guess, a better hedge. It's a bigger bet on the same thing. Well, I think Bitcoin goes through these four-year cycles. I'm not a big believer in the four-year cycles, but ultimately the four-year cycle told us that Bitcoin was going to collapse on the 10th of October. And it did. It went down about 50 percent from there or just over 50 percent. And now it's starting to recover a year later, which is generally when the four-year cycle basically turns. Now, it is a bit of a beta to gold and is a bit of a beta to money printing. So if Bitcoin just does a catch up trade to, you know, I mean, you're talking from the high, to get back to the all time high, which is 61 percent away, that's just to get back to its previous all time high. I want to just highlight something to you, which I think is a little bit uncanny, right? So I want to take you back to the chart of Bitcoin and I want to show you something which might be of real interest to your viewers. So this is the Bitcoin chart. And specifically, I'm looking back at the 2021 bull market and subsequent bear market, which lasted from this point over here. And you can kind of say that it lasted all the way up to this point over here, which was about 430 days. 430, or let's actually even go a bit further so we can go to the 484 days. Now, what happened here? You can see there was a big green candle on Bitcoin, which effectively started the bull market. That happened on the 10th or 9th or 10th of March 2023. Now, what happened on the 9th and 10th of March 2023? Interestingly, a bank called Silicon Valley Bank went insolvent. And when Silicon Valley Bank went insolvent, the Treasury panicked that there is a banking crisis and multiple other banks will go insolvent. And so what they did was they basically came out and they just made a statement that Janet Yellen came out and she just made a statement that they're willing to backstop the banks. That's all the Fed needed to do. And they provided an extra loan facility for the banks. And that's all that Janet Yellen needed to do to give the market the illusion that the Fed were going to increase liquidity into the market. And that started a bull market in Bitcoin, which, let me just get back to my Bitcoin chart, that bull market in Bitcoin actually took us up all the way from $19,000, a 6X, all the way up to $129,000 or whatever the all-time high was. And so the structure is a very, very, very similar structure because here we are again after a long bear market. Here we are again after a long sideways chopping movement. I'll show you the chart. And I think when you see it in perspective, that's the chart. I mean, if you look at how long we've been chopping in the same price range, you could pretty much say from here all the way to here, we've been chopping in the same price range. That's 200 days. That's just over six months chopping in the same price range, which is very similar to this period over here where we chopped in a price range for about two or 300 days. No one was interested in crypto. It became the most hated asset in the world. And then there was one green candle because of the Fed, because of the Treasury. And then we got a 6X in Bitcoin. Not too dissimilar to where we're at today. Long bear market, 200 days of sideways action. The Treasury coming out with a liquidity announcement and a sharp, sharp, sharp move up, which also times to the end of the four-year cycle and the beginning of the new four-year cycle. So that's interesting. It's like a very bullish picture. Yeah, no, very interesting. I guess we could say it plainly. I mean, if the last bull market did not start with a halving or with adoption, it started because that bank went authorities kind of panicked. If that's your template, then you're not waiting for demand. You're waiting for something to break here. I think you don't need something to break. You just need them to be fighting against something to break. So if you think of like Scott Best today and he wants to reduce the long end of the curve, what tools does he have? He has no tools other than his mouth talking. And that's what he's been doing online. And then and basically printing more money or putting more money into circulation. That is the only tools that they have at their disposal. So, I mean, you've all been watching Scott Best and I think we all know the kind of character that he is. He's a very smart guy. Remember, he worked under George Soros and Stan Druckenmiller for many years. And he's also quite a strong guy. He's not the kind of guy to back away or to backtrack on something that he said, right? And he's been quite adamant that he's going to reduce the long end of the curve. Now, again, I mean, unless he's got a magic wand, the only way that he can do that is by buying back his own treasuries. And that literally puts more money into circulation. And if there's more money in circulation and you're not holding a scarce asset, well, then you're just deflating away. And so I think that, as I said to you at the beginning, I think we're in scarcity season. I'm very long gold, I'm very long silver, I'm very long platinum, palladium, etc. But I'm also very, very, very long Bitcoin because I think it's a beta. It's been suppressed for over a year. It's at the beginning of a bull market after a very long and very tough bear market. And I think now is the time where it'll probably bounce back. And you know, the thing with Bitcoin is, it's not a steady rise, like gold or silver. When Bitcoin has up days, they are very, very, very fast. And if you look at the chart, you can just see that this is one example of those up days, where you're looking at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So five, about five days, in five days, we've got a 25% move on Bitcoin. So you've got to be in the market, because if not, you could miss these five days. Now, you look at a typical Bitcoin cycle. What it does is it usually goes up. I'll quickly just show you here. It usually does these sharp moves up, consolidates for a little bit, does another sharp move up, consolidates for a little bit, does another sharp move up, consolidates for a little. So hopefully this is one of those consolidations. It looks like we're consolidating beautifully here at the 80,000, you know, between 80 and 78. You can see it's forming a beautiful flags, a beautiful flag structure. And, you know, very soon that flag will break. The longer that flag accumulates for, the bigger the move on the way up. So I think, again, I think the risk return here is really in your favor. And I'll show you one more metric, which will really give you a perspective on risk return. So this is the 200 week moving average on Bitcoin. The white line is the 200 week moving average. Now, if you go back all the way to Bitcoin's first bull market and try and get you back all the way back to Bitcoin's first bull market, which was like somewhere here, you can see that we always touch the 200 week moving average and then we recover. There's only been one out of the five or six Bitcoin cycles. There's only been one cycle. This was COVID, by the way, where we just whipped under the 200 week moving average. There's only been one cycle and that was a 2021 cycle. We went slightly below the 200 week moving average, but then we recovered and we went above the 200 week moving average. Now, when Bitcoin, before the August 19th, Bitcoin was on the 200 week moving average again. And so the risk return basically says, you know, if you're buying a good quality asset, somewhere around the 200 week moving average, that's usually a safe place from a risk return mechanism to buy an appreciating asset. And so, you know, you may think you've missed the run, but ultimately the 200 week moving average was at about 65,000. We're at 80,000 or 80, just under 81,000 now. And, you know, if we're going into a next cycle, that's the trajectory of the cycles, you know? So I think from a risk reward point of view, if you're a holder, then I think it's probably a good time to start scaling in. Hey, I got to ask you, I mean, because the thing that prices everything on my board today, I mean, I'm looking down at quite a green day. I mean, the fund rate's still sitting at three and a half to three quarters percent. After Governor Waller spoke this morning, the CME Fed has a September meeting split almost exactly down the middle between hold and a hike and zero on a cut. You know, a hike raises the cost of holding anything that pays no income, which has been gold's problem. You said flatly, they'll not kind of raise here. What's the next thing you need to see to change that? I don't think they're going to raise. I mean, you know, I think that Kevin Walsh has a job to do. And I don't think that... I think they're smart enough to realize, and Scott Bestens has come out and said this multiple times, as well as many other Fed governors have come out and said this. They're smart enough to realize that the problem with inflation is not because the economy is overheated. The problem with inflation is because we have a supply shock because of the war. That's causing oil prices to go up. That's causing everything else to become much more expensive. You can see that in the Brent crude price, which is now at $99. They're trying to talk Iran down. Unfortunately, Iran doesn't seem to be surrendering. But I think we all know that it's a phase. And at some point, this war is going to end. I don't think Iran has very much firepower left. I think there's a lot of resistance, but there's not much firepower left. And I think at some point, this war is going to be over. Now, if you're going to raise interest rates, because of high oil prices, you're not going to stop the inflation, because the inflation is because of the high oil prices. It's not because the oil, because the economy is overheating. So you're using the wrong tool to solve the wrong problem, which is why I think that I don't believe we're going to get a rate hike. I'll remind you that before the previous meeting, there was also speculation that we could get a rate hike. And as we went closer and closer and closer to the meeting, the probabilities of a rate hike faded. I'm not ruling it out completely, but I don't think the market's right yet that there's a 50-50 chance. I think it's a much, much, much smaller chance. Smaller, yeah. A headline, PCE inflation, the Fed's preferred gauge was 3.7% in July, down from 4.1% in May. Core, which strips out food and energy, 3.3%. This thing Waller said this morning, he called that evidence of disinflation and said he would support holding. Obviously, the market puts that odds of a cut at the meeting at zero. But your trade needs liquidity expanding a little bit. So where does it come from if the best case is a pause? So the best case, I guess, is a pause. If you look at the PCE numbers, the PCE numbers month on month were up 0.25%, or just under 0.25%. Annualized, that's 2.99%. So if your annualized numbers are 2.9%. So I think we're dealing with some historical numbers there, which are skewing it slightly upwards. The annualized PCE inflation right now is 2.9% and slightly coming down. Where does the liquidity come from? As I said, it's coming from the Treasury printing money and buying back its own T-bulls at the long end of the curve, because that's the only way that they can bring down the interest rates at the long end of the curve. So this is not the kind of liquidity that's coming from interest rate cuts. This is the type of liquidity that's coming in from a, let's say, a non-natural buyer. Now, Stan Druckenmiller has been quite vocal. He wrote a whole, I don't know what you call the terminology, but he wrote an article- A little op-ed, yeah. Yeah, a little op-ed as to why Scott Besant may be wrong here. And Scott Besant came back out and he said, Stan Druckenmiller has lost a lot of money in certain places, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that that is where the liquidity is going to come from. I think there's one thing the market's not pricing, but I also think that it's not happening. And what I think the market's not pricing, that the market might not be pricing is a disconnect between Besant and Wash. So remember, there's history between these guys. Wash and Besant both worked under Stan Druckenmiller and George Soros. And they know each other pretty well. They're pretty close. In fact, speculation is that Besant was one of the people that really put Wash on the map to become the Fed governor. And that's because he could work with Wash. Now, if Scott Besant is trying to bring down rates and Wash is threatening taking up rates at the short end of the curve, I'm not sure that the market's pricing in that slight disconnect, unless they believe that increasing interest rates at the short end of the curve will curb inflation and that'll bring down rates at the long end of the curve. Problem is that I don't believe that anybody believes that increasing interest rates now is going to slow inflation because the inflation is not coming from overspending. The inflation's coming from a supply shock and that tool isn't going to work. That's an interesting one. You know, I'm trying to think about it, this yields thing. I mean, they ripped after Jackson Hall, came back after Waller just spoke this week. The tier touched 4.4, the highest since January of last year, then fell seven basis points on one speech. I mean, the market is pricing, it feels like a real disagreement, you know, wherever they were doing 20 years ago. Tell me what alignment that looks like on the 16th here. So I think that you shouldn't look at short-term rates. I think the short-term rates are inconsequential. I think it's the long-term rates that matter. Why? Because I think the liquidity is coming back because they want to control the long end of the curve. Let's go back to 2023 when interest rates short that the 10-year treasury touched 5% and then they jumped in and they got it all the way back down to 3.7%. Every time, go back in history, every time we've got to around 5%, they've come in and they've intervened and they've intervened and try to get it back down again. And so I think that we're going to, you see this pattern over here, that's exactly the pattern that we're going to get. How are we going to get the pattern? They're going to put more money into circulation because they're going to buy back the RNT bills. I'm sitting here watching right now. I mean, you know, I think Bitcoin almost, almost touched 81 there for a second. I mean, it's been kind of failing at 80,000 for weeks. It's just gone through it up better than 3% while gold's holding under about 2. Now, you've talked about 125, 135 on the upside, which from here is roughly what, 55 to 70%. You've also said that you do not expect to see below 60,000 again, which is about 25% lower. So which one kind of gets tested first? Give me the time frame and give me the price that tells you the call was wrong. So look, I don't think the call was wrong. So in other words, I think that I've got a lot of conviction in this trade. Can we come down? Yeah. You know, if you have a $30,000, a 30% increase in the price or something, you can obviously have a correction. If we came down into the mid low seventies, I wouldn't be too surprised. That's what Bitcoin does. It is a volatile asset. In terms of the upside, I think 125 is to get us back to the previous all-time high. But again, I think we're in an upward trend. Like if you go in the long-term and you look at the upward trend, I think, you know, in every cycle, we have gone way over. If you look at the previous all-time high year, which was 16,000 to the all-time high year, we did a 250%. Here we did between this all-time high and this all-time high, we did another 100% or 81% or something around that. So, you know, you can imagine, let's say we do a 50%. That means that Bitcoin would be at saying like 200,000, 220,000. So, it's like to me, I'm not looking for an all-time high here. I'm looking for way above the all-time high. I just don't know how quickly it will happen. With Bitcoin, it can happen really, really, really quickly. You know, everyone says like, this is a guy, Samson Meyer said, you're living through one of those 10 to 15 days a year where Bitcoin makes the most insane gains. And that's really the pattern of Bitcoin, right? So, Bitcoin makes all its returns in a certain number of days. I think in 70 days out of, sorry, 5% of the days gave 42% of the Bitcoin returns. So, Bitcoin's an explosive asset. And that's why you want to be in the market when it happens, specifically in an up market. So, if the asset is moving up, you want to be in the asset on the way up. Now, I'm not telling everyone to go in and FOMO at these levels. Are you buying right now at this? I am, I am. I actually took a little bit of a position this morning just because I felt a little bit underexposed. I'm now back to where I want to be. But, you know, I've been buying, I've been buying all the way from 60,000. So, 60,000, I bought some. I was accumulating across the whole range over here. And then when this candle went up, I think I started to accumulate a little bit more over here. I'm also playing, which I don't recommend for your viewers, but I'm also playing MSTR, which is MicroStrategy because that's leveraged Bitcoin, so to speak. But again, it's not a strategy that I recommend. The reason why I'm buying MSTR is because I know on the down market, it grossly underperforms Bitcoin, but on the up market, it grossly beats Bitcoin, right? And so, for me, if we're going into an up market, I want to be in a leverage position. I'm not taking traditional leverage. I'm actually taking to where I can get liquidated. I'm taking MSTR, which is an equity play into leverage Bitcoin. Okay. On those reserves, I mean, Glassnode sees concentrated long-term holder supply between 83,000, 86,000. Obviously, that's supply sitting directly above where you are now. You're, what, $3,000 away from it? How does it get through that? So, there's two levels, which are very important. The first thing is the electrical cost of production on Bitcoin. And Bitcoin has never traded below the electricity cost of production on Bitcoin. And that level right now is at about between 50 and 58,000, so you kind of look at your downside and you say, in Bitcoin's history, it hasn't really traded. I mean, there may have been isolated time specifically in the beginning, but it hasn't really traded below the cost of electricity. The next level that you want is you want the short-term holders price of Bitcoin, and the short-term holders are actually in profit for the first time in a long time. I don't have the chart in front of me, but I think that the entry price was somewhere around 75,000. Now, what happened when we got this move up? You had the short-term holders, which were in a loss for a long, long, long period of time. And those short-term holders now for the first time when we went over 75,000 were in profit. So, naturally, some of them would have said, okay, we've been holding for a year, we've been down so badly, we're just broken even, let me get out, and they got out. And that's usually what that selling pressure is all about, right? Yeah. I'll try and maybe get us a chart before the end here and show you the short-term. I want you to go back to, you went to MSTR, I just want to talk a little bit about it, because are you buying it? I mean, you got into it briefly there, but just for our audience, are you buying it as leveraged Bitcoin? Are you buying it the discount to what its Bitcoin is worth? Because those are two different bets with two different exits. So, right now, it's trading at an MNAV. MNAV means the cost of the share versus the underlying value of the Bitcoin. Right now, MicroStrategy is trading at about an MNAV of one, more or less, give or take. In fact, we can actually get a much more, if we could just get strategy, we can actually see, I think it's a 1.1. So, the MNAV right now is exactly 1.1, which means that it's trading at a 10% premium to its net asset value. Now, the reason why it does that is because a lot of the Bitcoin is debt-financed, and the debt carries very low interest rates. So, as soon as we break above the MNAV of one and we go up, the MSTR holders get leverage returns on Bitcoin. On the way down, it's very scary, but we've had the way down. So, if you look at the chart of MicroStrategy, and I'll actually show you a strategy which I've been applying, and it's been a very, very, very good strategy for me for a long time. So, if you look at the chart of strategy, it's a brutal, brutal, brutal chart. If you look at it since October, October 10th, which is here. So, October 10th here, from top to bottom, it went down 75%, where Bitcoin went down about 50%, right? And now that Bitcoin's gone up from bottom 30% or 25%, I think that MicroStrategy is probably up, yeah, it's about 50% up. So, you can see it's a very, very, very leveraged play on Bitcoin. Now, what do I do? What's my strategy? My strategy is a very simple strategy. Yeah, well, at what level does it stop being cheap? I'll show you. It's a very simple strategy that I apply. And look, you got to have balls of steel to do this, but I have it because I've tried and tested the system. So, this is the Crypto Fear and Greed Index. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index. Generally, what I do is I buy, I sell MicroStrategy when we get to extreme greed, and I buy MicroStrategy when we get to extreme fear. That's literally my strategy. So, I go to the chart as soon as we get to extreme fear. So, you can see that we were in extreme fear here, 7th of June was like the bottom of the extreme fear. And if you go here, you can see that, I'll just take it to, so like here, we were in extreme greed. I buy MicroStrategy when we are at extreme fear, and I sell MicroStrategy when we are in extreme greed. So, it's a game that I play. I hold Bitcoin. I toggle between MicroStrategy and Bitcoin. When we are at extreme greed, I sell my MicroStrategy and I buy Bitcoin and I hold spot Bitcoin. So, I've still got exposure to the asset. When we are at extreme fear, I toggle between Bitcoin and back into MicroStrategy. So, I'm just buying fear and greed. That's it. It's a trading strategy that I've used for years. It requires patience because, as you know, the market can sit in extreme fear and extreme greed for a long time. I have been sitting for a long time. It hasn't been the most comfortable ride, but every time I've done this, it's yielded me great results. And so, I just toggle between spot Bitcoin and MicroStrategy and I use extreme greed and extreme fear as the indicators. Hey, I got to ask you, I mean, a question just on the investment side, because I always get from the audience, you know, they feel like it's playing in a casino on the crypto side. But here's a number I think everyone watching should kind of hear. I mean, Bitcoin is still down on the year. Take out its 10 best trading days and it would still be down closer to 50%. That's from Artemis Analytics. But if you go back to 2013 and the asset is averaged roughly 174% a year, strip the best 10 days out of each of those years and the average becomes a 14% loss. So, the whole return sits inside, as you called it, that volatility, that 10 trading days a year, and nobody can name them in advance. How does a regular or normal person carry a position in that? Time in the market beats timing in the market, especially with Bitcoin. And specifically, if you want to time the market, time it in the four-year cycles, because the four-year cycles have been pretty accurate, right? Now, we know now that the four-year cycle is pretty much over, like the downside of the four-year cycle. It would have had to bottom 430 days after, sorry, 365 days after the top. That would have taken us to the 10th of October. So, we're on the 3rd of September. So, you know, could it bottom in another month? Yeah, potentially it could. I don't think it's going to. I think we just brought everything a month forward, right? But ultimately, I mean, if you look here, you know, that's the top and that's the bottom. The top to the bottom was 364 days. So, 364 days. I think it's pretty much the same thing every year, every cycle. I mean, you've been open about this too, Rand. So, I'll ask it plainly. I mean, you've said that you lost more than that 100 million in four days when Terra collapsed back in 2022. That position got too big. That, you know, people kind of warned you, you didn't want to hear it. So, what is the rule that you now have that you didn't back then? Look, I mean, investment, I think, is about being schooled and making mistakes and learning from the mistakes. I mean, it's quite public. I think everyone knows that I lost a big amount of money. I had over 50% of my crypto portfolio in one asset class or one token class. Over a four-day period, I lost about $130 million personal account, personal cash. I think, you know, the first thing is I learned a couple of lessons. The first thing is never, ever, ever, no matter how much conviction you've got to be to be so exposed to an asset class. I think I was naive and I just thought the music would last forever. And I just learned that, you know, I had 50% of my portfolio in one token or one stock because I had so much conviction in it. And now I've got a rule that I don't have anything that's over 5% or 7% of my portfolio, except for Bitcoin, which is slightly higher. That's the first lesson that I learned. Second thing is, remember crypto is about experimental technologies, right? And so when you're dealing with experimental technologies, probably the most important people are the haters. And the haters highlight to you what the weaknesses in the technology are. Now, you could be in an echo chamber and you could listen to, I mean, let's just quickly bring it back to your audience. I know your audience all love gold. If there was a flaw in gold, you wouldn't find it in your audience. And why? Because everybody in your audience is gold bugs, right? And so you've been in a world where gold people are talking about gold and can't see the downside of gold. What I learned was that your most valuable asset are the haters because the haters will show you blind spots that you may not see, but they're only valuable if you listen to them with an open mind and you don't stick and you don't stay within your biases. And so those were probably the two biggest lessons that I ever learned. And probably a lesson in resilience because I managed to bounce back and I managed to bounce back even higher from a point where in my life I thought there's no way that I'm ever going to recover that kind of loss. And I've managed to recover the loss and then some just by literally just waking up and marching 15 miles every day. And that's how I recovered. I mean, amen. That's why we don't sell you anything on this show, Rand. We show all the different opinions here. Okay, let's stay on your money a second. Give me your portfolio kind of as it stands, percentages, kind of Bitcoin, metals, you got Ether, Solana, whatever else. Do you got some cash in there? So remember that my portfolio is slightly different because I'm very much into crypto, right? So like I segment my portfolio into two parts. One is my non-crypto portfolio and my crypto portfolio. For me, the ratio of crypto investment and crypto assets versus non-crypto assets is about 40% of my wealth now sits in some kind of crypto, right? So I think I'm a very bad example, but maybe let's go to my normal wealth. And I can say that out of my normal wealth, probably about today, probably about 15, 20% of my normal wealth is sitting in some kind of metal. So gold, silver, platinum, palladium, et cetera. Yeah. And in the pullback off that August high, I mean, were you stepping in and buying? Did you sell anything? Not really, because I think my thesis is that we are in scarcity season. And the question, if I sell it, where am I going to put it? I will sell it and put it into, I can't put it into crypto because I'm really overexposed to crypto. I think the AI trade is a little bit heated at the moment for me. And I've also got some exposure to the AI trade. So the question is, if I'm going to take it out of gold and start to try and time the market, which I think is a bad mistake when you're getting into scarcity season, unless the thesis changes, unless something fundamentally changes, I think you want to be a net buyer of scarcity, not a net seller of scarcity. All right. So listen, I mean, we got to talk about silver because I know that you're still watching that and we've seen some volatility and it's been very interesting on the board. Any thoughts in going into this? I mean, it feels like summer trading volumes over, people are back at it. Have we been seeing any action? You know, the thing with silver, silver is like a scorpion, right? It doesn't do anything until the tail just comes, until that tail comes at you at some point, right? So like, you know, if you think about the last run that we had, it was first gold that topped. So if you look at, let's just quickly go back to the last big cycle. So that's gold and that's silver. And if you kind of look at when the gold run really started, so I mean, let's go a little bit further back, but you can kind of say that the parabolic part of the gold run started somewhere around February, 2024 and really went, like started entering the parabola. I think silver was slightly delayed. Like if you look at silver, when the parabola started, it was 2025, maybe even 2026, right? But when the silver parabola came, it came like Bitcoin, it came very, very, very fast, right? So if you look at this parabola here, it came very, very fast. And I think that that's exactly what's going to happen now. Silver, as you can see, is chopping sideways, et cetera, et cetera. But that's exactly what it did over here. And then, you know, you get that parabolic move. So it's just a case of let gold run first, and then let silver follow. And to be honest, what I'm looking at on gold here is I'm looking for a higher high. So I'm looking for a price. First of all, I'm looking to break that level over there, which is 4781. So right now, the chart structure is not amazing because that's a high, and that's what they call a lower high in the charts. But if this breakout can take us to 4780, and we can go above 4780 and then above 49, then I'm looking for new all-time highs on gold. So, and again, my play is it's gold, then you've got to be really patient for silver. And then, I mean, let's not forget that when gold and silver finish their run, then copper starts its run. And copper starts. I mean, it's been on a hell of a run already this year, copper. I've been surprised to see it on the future set. I think it's just started. I mean, I think it's just started. If you look at the copper chart, I mean, it looks like it's beautifully consolidated there, and I think it's just started. So I'm long, yeah, I'm long gold, I'm long copper, I'm long silver. I'm very, very, very long Bitcoin. I just, because I think that it's the asymmetric play right now. I think it's the asymmetric play right now. It's been the most hated trade. It's been the most hated trade for the last 12 months. And I think now the hated trade is going to come in and show the haters. Yeah. And even the gold bugs should understand that because there's been times where gold was the hated trade and it came back with fierce. Hey, one more, and it's coming for this audience, no matter they know it or not, but perpetual futures are a crypto invention. You have contracts with no expiry or expiry, you can kind of lever them up. The CFTC has asked a court to dismiss the CME's challenge over prediction market contracts while separately considering regulated futures tied to physical commodities, including energy. If that structure reaches gold and silver, what comes with it? Is Look, it's an amazing tool. So leverage in the form of a perpetual future is an amazing, amazing, amazing tool. The problem is when you overexpose yourself to leverage. So the problem with crypto is that, I mean, right now I can trade, I can go to this platform here called Hyperliquid. I'll actually show it to you guys. I'm not affiliated to them in any way, just to be clear. I just want to show you how it works. So I can go and buy gold USDC and I can buy it with up to 25X leverage. So I can literally lever it 25 times. I mean, you can imagine how crazy that is to do if you're playing that kind of leverage. But you can do that and you can literally hold this contract forever as long as your margin requirements don't go down. The interesting thing is that if there's a lot of short sellers, you're earning for holding your position. And if there's a lot of buyers, then you're paying to hold the position. So it's a very interesting dynamic. It's a very fun tool to play. It's a very useful tool, but I've seen it wreck many people because they come in and they buy on 20X leverage. They don't realize that on 20X leverage on a 5% move, your portfolio gets liquidated. It's that quick. You got to research this stuff. I mean, in October, roughly $19 billion of leverage positions were wiped out inside of a day and more than 1.6 million positions liquidated the overwhelmingly majority long. So argument for it or against? So look, when you're dealing with gold, and I call gold a non-volatile asset. In our world, gold is a non-volatile asset. If you're leveraged up 2X or 3X, you're taking a chance that your portfolio only gets liquidated if gold halves. Now, I don't think gold is going overnight. The problem with crypto is that your portfolio can get wiped out overnight. Bitcoin can have a 20% move down in one night. When that happens, if you're leveraged anything more than 5X, you're out. So I think it depends on the asset. Currencies are pretty stable. You can leverage them. Gold, you can leverage. Silver, you can leverage slightly less. I think it's a great tool to use. But again, you got to be careful. You got to be careful. I've seen some crazy things happen with leverage. Leverage is scary. Do your research. Okay, well, listen, last one, man, and take your time here because somebody watching is 60 years old. They own the physical metal. They've never owned any cryptocurrency. They do not need to get rich twice. Does anything you do apply to them? And no is an acceptable answer too. So look, for those people, my recommendation is between 5% and 10% of your portfolio into Bitcoin. And if you want to be a little bit more adventurous into Ethereum and Solana, and that's effectively you're holding the top three cryptocurrency assets. ETFs you buy direct? You can buy the ETFs. The Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana ETFs, you can buy them directly from the ETFs. You don't have to custody the assets, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think it would be a miss of people not to have some exposure to what I think is the most exciting asset class in the world at the moment. And I can tell you why I think it's the most exciting asset class. I know that maybe the explanation will go above a lot of people's heads, but I think it's worth maybe bringing it up. So if you think about what Bitcoin is, Bitcoin is digital money that you can move using data. So in other words, I can send you digital money and you can send me digital money. That's basically what Bitcoin is. Ethereum is what they call a smart contract network. A smart contract network creates contracts that trigger without human intervention. So a vending machine is a very good example of a smart contract, right? If you put in $5 and you press Coca-Cola, you get a Coca-Cola. If you put in $4 and you press Coca-Cola, you don't get a Coca-Cola. That's what you call a smart contract. It's a contract that if the conditions are met, the payment takes place. So let's combine the two technologies. The first technology is Bitcoin. It's money that you can move across data. And the second one is Ethereum, which is a way to smart contract on online. Okay, now let's quickly discuss where we're at. We're in a world now where AI agents, there's thousands of AI agents. Now, I'm sure that some of your users are using AI agents like ChatGPT or Claude or whatever else. And ultimately, these AI agents right now are doing a lot of research for you or doing certain tasks for you. But in the future, those AI agents are going to need to transact with each other. So you're going to send your AI agent to book you airplane tickets or to buy you something online. And ultimately, it's going to do that and buy it from another AI agent. Now the question is, how do they pay each other? They can't really pay each other with a credit card because my AI agent may be Chinese and yours may be American. You don't know that. No one knows of an AI agent is online. You don't have a credit check. You don't have an ID book. You don't have a bank account. So they need to settle in a trustless way. And the only way to do that from two agents that meet each other online is using crypto technology. It's a combination of Bitcoin type technology for the money and Ethereum type technology for the agents to contract. And if you think about where we're going now, we're going into a world where AI agents are going to be transacting. And when they transact, they're going to transact at a pace that we can't imagine. There's going to be billions of AI agents and they're going to be transacting with each other a billion times faster than what we're used to. And so you're going to get this exponential move in the market. Now, I believe, in fact, I mean, I don't believe it. There is no other way to do it. The only money that agents can actually use, which settles trustlessly between two agents that don't know each other is a cryptocurrency. And therefore, I think we're on the verge of a massive, massive, massive shift. I think the U.S. government has seen it, which is why they passed the Genius Act, which is why they want the U.S. dollar to be the de facto online digital currency. And that's why they passed the relevant legislation. And I think that that technology is going to be blockchain technology. And so I think if in the age of AI agents and AI agent transactions, if you're not exposing yourself to what will probably be AI agent money, then I think that you may have a little bit of a blind spot in your portfolio. That's interesting. I always thought it would be the stablecoin kind of, you know, the U.S. dollar thing trying to keep it going. It is, but how does it get transacted? It gets transacted on blockchain rails, right? So it is the stablecoin, but a stablecoin trades on Ethereum, and you have to do the transactions on Ethereum. And so it's good for the crypto protocols, basically. Yeah, it's a hell of a year. Okay, we'll continue to watch this after this $80,000 breakout. Rand, appreciate this, man. Where can everyone find your work? I'm on Twitter at Crypto Man Run, or on X, and I host a show on Crypto Banter. I host a daily live show. We speak about crypto. I also have a second channel called Crypto Insider, which is a much more institutional grade channel, much less about the smaller investments, much more about Bitcoin and Ethereum. So Crypto Banter, Crypto Insider, and Crypto Man Run on X. Thanks, Rand. Appreciate your time, as always. Happy end of summer to you. We'll see you soon. See you soon. Thanks, Jeremy. Thanks, man. Now, if you're new here, that's exactly what we do. We bring on people who see the market differently. We ask them the hard part. Hit the subscribe button so the next one finds you. And in the comments, one number. What percentage of your money is sitting in one single thing? I do read them. And a big thanks to our sponsor, Swan, the real Bitcoin company. You can find out more at swan.com slash Kitco. I'm Jeremy Salfer, and I'll see you on the next one. Swan is the premier Bitcoin wealth platform serving leaders of families and businesses. Swan's mission-driven team simplifies Bitcoin investment, custody, and security, bringing you concierge service, world-class research, and exclusive events.