New Amsterdam

The next big onchain narrative appears to have arrived - tokenised equities. These are shares of actual public companies, wrapped up as a token and set loose onchain, primarily on the Solana and Robinhood chains.

For an old City man like myself, this is approaching the realms of science-fiction and not a little disorienting. The core asset, an equity, is of course something I am very familiar with, but the terrain they now negotiate is entirely uncharted.

The important thing to understand, as binji put it on X, is that a tokenised asset is not merely the same asset with longer trading hours. Because once a share exists onchain, it can be poked, prodded, and twisted by any smart contract or onchain actor that cares to interact with it.

The equity is no longer purely a certificate of ownership, it has become a component. (What a fantastic and fantastically vague word!)

NetNet Capital are building new sorts of things with tokenised equities, and recently sketched out some of the ideas they are experimenting with:

“A tokenized share of Nvidia is a programmable object. It can sit in a game’s escrow. It can be the prize inside a sealed box, committed to a public randomness beacon before any money moves. It can be bought by a 401(k) inside a video game, held at risk on a corporate ladder, and swept into a reserve portfolio when the career holding it dies.”

If that sounds like a speculative plan for some distant future, consider also what happened over a recent August weekend:

A memecoin called $BONER was created on Robinhood Chain. $BONER has been set up so that it only trades against tokenised shares of $HIMS - a real NYSE-listed company going by the name of Hims & Hers Health Inc.

This means that to buy $BONER, you must first buy tokenised $HIMS. So when the $BONER price started to rally over the weekend, every new buyer rushing to catch the move had to buy $HIMS first. But there were only about 15,000 tokenised $HIMS in existence, and by Sunday roughly 81% of them had been sucked into the BONER trading pool.

Result: tokenised $HIMS traded some 37% above the real share price in New York. With Wall Street shut for the weekend (how old-fashioned!), a memecoin had cornered the supply of this company’s tokenised shares.

Now, the real company was untouched by the whole malarkey. Its 225 million actual shares sat in New York entirely oblivious. And on Monday, at Wall Street open, new onchain $HIMS tokens could be minted and the onchain price returned to normal.

But for one weekend, a memecoin held a real stock’s onchain supply hostage. Most disconcerting for an old dog like myself.

I don’t think anyone knows where any of this is heading.

In 1606 the modern stock market was born in Amsterdam. More than four centuries later we might be witnessing the first labour pains of something equally momentous in the domain of corporate ownership.

But I am getting a tingling in my old City bones. Something is shifting, deep down in the foundations.

And the old guard are shaken.

On entering at the right moment

I’ve missed my fair share of entries over the years. Back in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, everyone had decided property developers could only go one way. For once, the market seemed determined to prove everyone right.

But I never pulled the trigger. I convinced myself there would be a better moment to enter with size, but the bloody market kept going upwards.

My old friend and colleague, the legendary Korean trader Jinwoo Park, didn’t make the same mistake.

I asked him one afternoon whether he was worried he had entered too high.

“Of course,” he said. “But I am more worried I will never enter at all.”

There is a peculiar arrogance in waiting forever for your number. Markets do not owe you a retracement.

In an upwards market, the right entry is rarely the cheapest one.

A trip to Skegness with Simon Pennyworth

One of the best parts about being retired is getting to visit holiday destinations when everyone else is working. Tourist attractions without the tourists, a wonderful invention indeed.

So it was that this past week, Pennyworth and I decided to take a couple of days up in Skegness, just as the British summer drew to a close.

The crowds of young families who descend in July and August, like flocks of unruly starlings, were no more. They had packed up their buckets and spades and returned to school and to work and to whatever else people do with their time nowadays, leaving behind them nothing but empty stretches of sand and the odd discarded vape.

As we strolled down to the beach on the first morning, my eyes alighted upon a horde of donkeys, nodding easily in the sun.

Donkey rides on the beach, a staple activity of Skegness and a personal favourite of mine since I was a young boy.

It works like this - you sit on a donkey and the donkey walks in a straight line across the beach.

It is even more fun than it sounds. Pennyworth and I agreed to take a donkey ride.

I chose a sleepy donkey by the name of Sandra, nineteen years old and looking twice that but possessing of the most lovely, calm eyes.

Pennyworth spent ten minutes selecting his donkey, peppering the donkey man with a series of curt questions, including whether any of them had “seen action”, and which was the most responsive to the spur, and so on. I waited patiently.

Eventually we set off, two donkeys swaying slowly over the sand, each crowned with a very relaxed old man, also swaying slowly.

The sun was warm. How lovely this was. I confess I closed my eyes, my thoughts drifting back to happy childhood memories.

Suddenly, I was jolted back to life by a bellowing voice I recognised all too well.

Pennyworth was leading a one-man cavalry charge on the deckchair enclosure. Standing ramrod-straight in his stirrups, brandishing a plastic spade in the air with outstretched arm, roaring warlike exhortations to imaginary comrades.

“At ‘em boys! Death or Glory! Hurrah! HURRAH!”

As Pennyworth and donkey stumbled slowly and sadly into a mass of empty deckchairs, Sandra and I came to a halt and watched on.

Pennyworth slid from his mount, landing face-first in the sand just as he released a final “hurrah!”.

An older lady, seated further down in the deckchair enclosure, looked up from her knitting and scowled.

Later, after extricating Pennyworth from a tangled mass of canvas, donkey, and pivoting wooden struts, and paying off the donkey man, we retired to the safety of an ice cream parlour on the pier.

“Pennyworth, old chap. What on earth just happened?”

“The deckchairs held for a moment”, he explained, staring grimly out to the horizon. “Then they broke, like the cowards they are.”

The next day, I returned to the beach on my own and took Sandra out for a second, considerably more sedate, ride along the shore.

I brought sugar cubes. Sandra enjoyed them very much.

Ask Richard

Bryan Ferry, Dire Straits, New Order, Sade, Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, Talking Heads, INXS. George Michael, too, whether one admitted it or not.

It was a very particular time. A couple of pints after work would soon turn into a raging all-nighter at someone’s Chelsea flat. There was a lot of nonsense in those years, certainly, but the music was magnificent.

Here’s one particular favourite to wet your whistle to.

-R.E.P.

But, of course, a not inconsiderable number of you people were more or less “sidelined” as the more vocally unkind crypto commentators on X would have it.

In all honesty, underpinning the delicious light-headedness of these past few days is a slight bitterness at not having fully deployed all of that capital that I had earmarked to be used in the next bull run.

But, as investors, we must never expect to make perfect investment decisions every time. That would be unrealistic. Instead we should aim to make good enough choices, often enough.

So, no moping at the back there. The bull market is young, and we must practice the equanimity we so often preach.

The asset is the technology

Most assets are claims on something else.

Equity is a claim on future earnings, for instance. A bond is a claim on someone’s promise. Crypto-currency tokens, I’ve found, can be claims on all sorts of things. Protocol revenue, governance rights, or simply the hope that a stranger might one day pay more for the token than you did. But regardless, the asset is the pointer, whether that be a piece of paper or a database entry, indicating value stored somewhere else.

What I find fascinating about Zcash (ZEC) is how it deletes the pointer.

The value of ZEC lies not in its features or what it entitles you to, but rather the technology itself. The mathematical guarantee of financial privacy that one enjoys simply by using it.

This has happened at scale just once before, and I missed it. Bitcoin, of course, was the first asset of note to work this way, and my point here is not that early Bitcoin holders were eventually proven right. My point is that early holders of Bitcoin were not mere spectators. Every stubborn Bitcoin holder was the adoption. They were not betting that permissionless money would work; they were the working of it. I was vaguely aware of all this at the time, but rather than act upon it, I finished my tea.

My regret always was that I had been handed an invitation to take part in something and had treated it as an invitation to speculate on something. By the time I understood the difference, the door had closed.

Being long Bitcoin today is just being long. Perfectly respectable. A spectator’s position, like all my others.

Because that is what a position normally is. In forty years of markets I have been long a great many things, and my capital never once improved any of them. You can hold a share your entire life and contribute nothing to the company but your patience. The trade sits outside the machine, wagering on it.

Zcash is, for me, that door opening again. To buy ZEC and shield it is to use the technology. Privacy is a network good, which changes everything about what holding means. An empty shielded pool protects nobody. A deep one protects everyone in it. Each holder who steps inside thickens the anonymity set and makes the guarantee stronger for every other soul in the pool.

The holder is not a bet on adoption, but rather a unit of adoption. I know of no equity that works this way; no shareholder ever made the product better by owning the share.

So the trade and the thesis are, for once, the same act. I confess this produces an exhilaration I had assumed left the market with the last of the early Bitcoiners.

I have a view. I am long. And for the first time in decades, the position is not a wager on the thing. It is part of the thing. I am, in my small way, inside the machinery I am betting on.

Late, yes. But this time I did not finish my tea.

The problem with wrappers

For the uninitiated, goodalexander is a trader and writer of the apocalyptic school. I’d say he’s comfortably the best of the breed, and is arguably the only prophet of doom one would be pleased to see one’s daughter bring home. Do have another scone, young man.

The Executive Order 6102 that he refers to is better known as the gold confiscation of 1933. Nothing was confiscated in the cinematic sense. There were no raids or gold pried from clenched fists. US citizens were instead instructed to bring their gold to the bank, where it was politely purchased at $20.67 an ounce. Everyone got a receipt.

Then, with the gold safely in federal vaults, the government repriced it at $35.

So one could say that the state did not steal the asset but rather compulsorily bought it at yesterday’s price, and then devalued the money it paid with the day after.

Why does this matter now? Well, because of the conditions that created this very situation.

In 1933 the United States was drowning in obligations. But such a situation did not necessitate a default. After all, why default on money you can simply print more of?

Instead, the government chose to reprice the things its citizens held that were not its paper. The debt may have been in dollars, but the gold provided a solution.

Fast forward almost a century, and the United States today carries debt at war-footing levels without the excuse of a war (well, not a real one), and the interest bill is doing to the budget what woodworm are doing to Pennyworth’s deck.

I make no prediction about what happens next. I merely note the similarities and the precedent.

Now, a confiscable asset must be three things. Valuable, visible and held at an address.

The Zcash narrative, of course, is that ZEC is neither visible nor held at an address.

An ETF, by construction, is all three.

And so we have this week been gaily celebrating the arrival of Zcash wrapped in the one format to which the entire 6102 procedure can be applied.

Zcash is a privacy technology, yes. But when wrapped up into an ETF, the privacy part vanishes entirely.

To me, that appears to be rather missing the point.

Dear Richard…

I wouldn’t worry too much about finding your niche.

In my twenties I tried all sorts of things, including, rather disastrously, managing a New Romantic band. That was before more or less stumbling into finance.

But I consider none of that time wasted. I learnt how to read people, sell an idea, recover from embarrassment and recognise when something simply isn’t working. Those skills, so it turned out, travel rather well.

And in a world changing as quickly as this one, I suspect being adaptable is a much safer bet than being perfectly specialised.

But first, it would be remiss of me not to note that the broader crypto market has risen sharply of late, with green candles appearing in places one had almost forgotten existed. $HYPE, in particular, has surged to new all-time highs following a proclamation by tangerine tycoon and US president Donald Trump that the CFTC is working on bringing Hyperliquid into the United States on a regulated basis.

When I first came across Hyperliquid some two years ago, I was floored by how it had managed to condense so much of finance, and so much of the excitement of trading, into one remarkably simple terminal.

Here was leverage, liquidity, price discovery and risk, all moving at considerable speed, yet packaged in a way that even a man of my vintage could navigate without summoning someone from IT.

I had spent much of my career watching increasingly elaborate systems being built around the relatively simple business of buying something and hoping to sell it for more. Hyperliquid seemed to have gone in the opposite direction. It took the machinery of a trading floor, stripped away much of the machinery, and put the interesting bit on a screen.

At that moment, I became a convert.

What strikes me now is how early we may still be. Most of the people I traded alongside in my former life would have no idea what Hyperliquid is. These are not financially illiterate people. Quite the opposite. They spent decades trading markets, managing risk and moving serious amounts of money around the world.

And yet Hyperliquid remains, to them, effectively invisible.

That seems rather extraordinary. Crypto has a tendency to make you feel late because everything moves so quickly. Hyperliquid reminds me that, viewed from outside our little corner of the internet, an enormous part of the financial world has barely arrived.

There is considerably further to run.

$ANSEM is a city

Coming from 40 years in traditional finance, memecoins initially bedevilled me.

Unlike every other asset I’ve traded, they arrive complete, without product, roadmap, or revenue. Nothing to build and, therefore, nothing to break.

The trouble is that once the culture moves on, and it often does at a dizzying pace, there is nothing left behind either.

When I first came across $ANSEM, I expected the same old story.

But upon closer inspection, I discovered something rather more compelling.

Around this crypto-currency there is a population, already gathered and conducting daily economic activity. Taxes are collected through creator fees. Hackathons fund builders. Volunteers have constructed public works: trading radars, liquidity pods, staking vaults and onchain terminals.

There is lore. There is capital. And there is a founder sitting on most of the supply who shows every sign of staying.

Then the thought struck me.

$ANSEM isn’t a memecoin.

It’s a bloody city.

Why cities happen

Cities accumulate organically, and they do so where natural resources already exist.

A deep harbour, a navigable river, good soil, a major crossroads.

The resource comes first. Then the people, gathering around the resource. And then an economy, condensing out of the gathering.

In $ANSEM’s case, the resource is attention. It’s built on a decade-deep spring of the stuff, and a million-odd people are camped along the banks. I’m seeing many more arrive every day.

Ansem describes $ANSEM as memecoin speculation fused with the creator economy, but I think he undersells it. What he has is not a merger of two product types. It is something completely new yet at the same time, older and simpler: a settlement, in the original sense, of people settling where the resource flows.

He has said as much himself, perhaps without noticing. All he did, by his own account, was adopt the coin and direct attention to it. The building happened on its own. That is not how products get made. It is how cities are born.

$ANSEM: A walking tour

There’s no better way to discover a city than on foot. Let me show you around.

The river. Attention, as established. The flow is strong and the spring is deep. But the river answers to no one, including the mayor. Rivers have moved before, and whole cities have woken up inland.

The citizens. Don’t mistake our holders for customers, who leave whenever a product disappoints. Nor are they shareholders, who rarely stay up at night arguing about a founding myth. No, these are residents, and this is their home.

Civic works. This is the part that convinced me. The call radar, the liquidity pods, the staking index, the live terminal. Everything built by the community, largely unpaid and undirected, the way barns used to get raised.

Taxes. Creator fees flow to the founder, and flow back out again as staggered airdrops to the most active citizens. A tax system with redistribution for the public good.

Governance. A benevolent dictatorship, undisguised. Yes, one man holds all the power, but this is often the case. I find the honesty refreshing.

Lore. Founding myths sustain great cities.. The unusual feature here is that the founder of the myth is alive and posting daily. This might be the city’s greatest asset or it might be a succession problem lurking in the shadows. Perhaps both.

And just this week, news came in that ansem.io has launched. The city just built a permitting office and a stock exchange in the same afternoon. Or even, if one squints hard enough, a toll booth.

Is $ANSEM crypto’s first city?

I’m increasingly of the belief that $ANSEM is the first true city to have emerged from crypto-currency.

As with all cities, it has a population that has over time chosen to assemble around a natural resource.

That population has begun to build its own economy, organically and without direction from a central authority.

And the whole thing was not planned. That’s the truly beautiful part. Cities arise contingently, in non-deterministic layers, and because the conditions for growth are right.

With $ANSEM, an anonymous developer launched a token and walked away. A population gathered on unclaimed land and started building. Ansem adopted the settlement afterwards.

This is not merely a memecoin with extras. Instead, it is the first onchain network to satisfy the actual conditions of city-hood.

A new category

Why does the category matter? Because categories are how things get priced.

A memecoin can only fade. While a city can certainly fail, it can also compound. Activity attracts activity. Residents attract residents, and the place grows more valuable simply by persisting. This is something no memecoin has ever managed.

So while the outcome is uncertain, the category, to me, is not. Buying $ANSEM as if it were a memecoin means mispricing both its risks and its possibilities.

I don’t know whether the small, young city of $ANSEM becomes a sprawling metropolis or merely an interesting ruin. Neither does anyone else, including its current mayor.

But something has been demonstrated that outlasts the question. A population can now gather around an identity, on-chain, and build itself into an economy, resource first, people second, infrastructure last, the way cities have always sprung into existence.

And cities, once shown to be possible, multiply. That is the story of human civilisation.

Where do the next cities grow? I hope to have provided a framework that helps us identify these early settlements - wherever the next deep spring of attention is, on whatever ground happens to be underneath it.

Watch where the people are, chaps. The rest gets built around them.

On Leadership

While Pennyworth spends his evenings reading, I have been pondering what sort of leadership, if any, a memecoin actually needs to succeed.

The sector likes to celebrate community and decentralisation, but in practice the coins that endure often seem to develop a recognisable figure around which all else orbits. Sometimes that person creates the coin. Sometimes they simply become its most effective evangelist.

For what a memecoin is attempting is really a type of alchemy. The transmutation of a meme into a financial instrument. For that alchemy to work, the culture ought to belong to everybody. That is the theory, at least.

In practice, even the most community-driven coins tend to acquire leaders. Mr. Murad became almost inseparable from $SPX6900. Mr. Ansem played a similar role around $WIF. Neither necessarily controlled the underlying idea in the traditional corporate sense, but both became important distributors of attention.

And attention, in this market, is rather close to capital.

This creates an awkward contradiction. A memecoin is most compelling when nobody owns the story, yet stories usually spread because somebody’s rather good at telling them.

Pump.fun’s creator-fee mechanics were an intelligent step in this direction. They allow someone to benefit economically from a coin without needing to accumulate a large position. That does not remove leadership, but it does separate it from the most obvious financial conflict.

The more difficult case is the deliberately led memecoin.

Ansem’s $ANSEM experiment is interesting precisely because it makes the tension so visible. He appears deeply engaged in developing the project and seems to understand that a lasting memecoin ultimately needs to become larger than the person who started it.

But he holds more than half the supply, and much of the community still looks to him for the next development.

That is not necessarily a criticism. Early movements often require a missionary before they can become a religion. The question is whether the missionary ever manages to disappear.

So do memecoins need leaders? Probably, at first.

But if the coin can only survive while one person remains at the centre of it, your exposure is to a person, not a financial asset.

The strange ambition of a successful memecoin is therefore to begin with leadership and end without it. It is to take something consciously pushed by a few and turn it into something unconsciously carried by many.

Only then is the alchemy complete.

On Zcash

Regular readers will know that I hold high hopes for Zcash over the coming cycle.

I’ve been particularly impressed by the recent rollout of zcashtocash, which tackles the oldest problem in private money: the exit. I’ll leave the more technically-minded of you to dig into the details, but the gist is a peer-to-peer conversion of ZEC to fiat, with the coins released only once the fiat payment is verified. In other words, private money you can actually leave with.

Equally encouraging is the source of this new launch. It comes from a group of chaps calling themselves Zcash Labs, an independent organisation taking on the unglamorous plumbing of adoption.

That third parties are building out the Zcash ecosystem supports my suspicion that the recent unpleasantness around a vulnerability discovered in the Zcash protocol may have been, perversely, excellent news.

Yes, a serious bug sat undiscovered in the shielded machinery for four years. But consider that the ecosystem had hired someone to go looking for exactly this. When it was found, it was patched within days, importantly before anyone else knew it existed, and with no sign it was ever exploited.

Most projects discover their critical bugs in the post-mortem.

Pro-active leadership and a growing third-party ecosystem of builders solving one of money’s oldest problems? My hopes remain at altitude.

On sniping

I found crypto trader Verso’s discussion with Rasmr on the finer points of crypto-currency “sniping” most entertaining.

His team apparently kept a spreadsheet of crypto influencers, dividing them into tiers according to their ability to move markets. If an influencer promised his next post would contain the details of a particular memecoin, Verso’s team would scrape his profile every millisecond, ready to buy almost instantly.

This sounds extraordinarily crypto. It is, of course, extraordinarily old.

Finance has always rewarded whoever gets useful information first. Nathan Rothschild understood that two centuries ago. His family built a formidable private network of agents and couriers across Europe, which helped its London bank receive news of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo before the British government’s official messenger arrived.

Speed of information was already a competitive advantage in 1815.

In 2010, one company reportedly spent around $300 million building a more direct fibre route between Chicago and New Jersey to shave roughly three milliseconds from communications, selling the high-speed data to trading firms.

Mr. Trump is even getting in on the party, selling faster access to his own market-moving posts for $100,000 a month.

Ultimately, markets are just information being priced. The fortunes are made in the brief gap between someone knowing something and everyone knowing it.

Karaoke confessions

Hong Kong in the 1990s had a way of making business and pleasure difficult to distinguish.

One evening, after dinner in Tsim Sha Tsui, a broker took me to a karaoke club. I spent much of the night with a strikingly beautiful hostess called Vivian, who laughed at precisely the right moments, kept my whisky topped up and displayed a surprisingly sophisticated interest in a small property company I had been quietly accumulating.

By midnight I had told Vivian rather more than I should have. What we liked about the company, where we thought the market was wrong and, most stupidly, roughly how much stock we still intended to buy.

The following morning, nursing several different forms of embarrassment, I discovered another firm had swept the market before we could finish our position. The price opened sharply higher.

Vivian, it turned out, had a rather close relationship with one of their traders.

I had been seduced, front-run and partially undressed in the space of about six hours. There are more sophisticated forms of corporate espionage. Few are quite so memorable.

Dear Richard…

Over the decades, I’ve heard people describe the markets as boring more times than I can count. Almost invariable, what they actually mean is that nothing obvious is happening.

But the important things are rarely obvious while they are happening. The most successful traders tend to be the chaps who are paying attention at times like these.

Fortunes are seldom made in the exciting bit. They are made in the dull weeks, months and years beforehand, when there is still time to think.

-R.E.P.

Base instinct

I’ve always found it a little paradoxical that Coinbase decided to build a decentralised network. But that is not my main problem with Base. My bigger issue is that it has always felt like a chain created by people who had read about crypto rather than lived through it.

A new blockchain needs to build a sticky culture and make people bloody well feel something. I like to think of it as building a small religion.

To do this you need a messiah. Ideally someone with charm and a large dollop of devil-take-the-hindmost chutzpah. I’m thinking a crypto version of 2003 Jose Mourinho, knee-sliding across the Old Trafford turf.

Brian Armstrong, the Coinbase CEO, was never going to be that man.

Crypto’s very own Mr Spock, Brian is a plodding rationalist, and rationalists build reliable, compliant infrastructure but they do not, historically, build religions.

And so it was that Jesse Pollak was chosen from within Coinbase to be the prophet for the new Base religion. He had the rabid conviction required. A kind of crypto L Ron Hubbard, if you will.

Jesse’s problem was that he was convinced of the truth of things that turned out not to be true.

“The first quarter of 2026 was a punch in the face,” he wrote, conceding his social-first strategy had failed.

Which brings us to Cobie, now running the Base app with a mandate to make it, in Pollak’s words: “the best damn app for onchain you’ve ever seen.”

And Cobie certainly gets crypto product. He will not, one suspects, spend two years building an onchain Instagram and then express surprise when nobody comes.

This gives Base a fighting chance. The committee has, at last, hired someone from the congregation.

SpaceX beats. Stock drops.

Last week I wrote that SpaceX’s quarterly earnings would underwhelm, having been picked clean of good news for the IPO prospectus. I owe the company a partial retraction.

Revenue came in at $7.8 billion - well ahead of the $6.9 billion consensus - and the net loss narrowed to $541 million, considerably better than the $1.9 billion analysts had pencilled in.

One applauds the performance. One also notes that they somehow found nearly a billion dollars of revenue that nobody was expecting, in their first earnings report as a public company, two days before the insider lock-up expires. Almost one billion shares become eligible for sale today.

Remarkable timing. The City of London has produced some creative accounting, but even we would have raised an eyebrow.

Musk was, characteristically, playing the long game on the call. “It’s not out of the question that at some point Starlink will deliver the majority of the world’s internet,” he twitched, eyes a-swivel.

The company is spending heavily on AI infrastructure, while declining to explain in any detail what the return on that infrastructure might look like. One analyst described the capital expenditure trajectory as “difficult to underwrite at current valuation.”

This is analyst-speak for: “I have no idea what they are building and neither do they.”

The market, to its credit, was not fooled. The stock dropped eight percent in after-hours trading on results that technically beat on every headline metric.

The lamb chops will be served up to Elon and his chums today. As I said last week, please try to ignore the bleating sounds.

Hyperpump?

I will keep this brief because the details are thin, but there are whispers that Pump.fun is exploring some form of deployment on Hyperliquid.

Regular readers of this newsletter will know that I have maintained the deepest admiration for both teams independently.

Jeff and the Hyperliquid chaps for building with rigour and long-termism, and the Pump.fun crew for creating the most culturally significant onchain product since, well, perhaps ever?

What is particularly delicious about the rumour is that Sapijiju questioned Hyperliquid’s long-term business model (perps) just last week with a rather cheeky rhetorical question: “What’s bigger, Bloomberg or Instagram?”

If this is real the implications are considerable. Pump.fun brings the one thing Hyperliquid currently lacks: an organic, chaotic, bottom-up retail culture that cannot be manufactured or marketed into existence.

London calling

I shall be attending Breakpoint in London in November. I am told it will involve several thousand cryptocurrency enthusiasts and a great many lanyards.

I have attended enough finance conferences over the years to know that the most memorable business is rarely conducted in the conference hall.

Should any cryptocurrency company be considering putting on something genuinely remarkable around the event, do drop me a message.

I am not especially interested in another panel, branded tote bag or lukewarm rooftop drinks reception. But a proper spectacle, an unusual gathering or something with a little imagination behind it? That could be worth discussing.

My messages, as ever, are open.

On being alone

It has been a couple of months now since the fourth Mrs Ptardio and I separated, and I want to report that I have been feeling something that might, if I’m not careful, develop into equanimity.

The early weeks were difficult. I missed her dreadfully and was simultaneously furious with her. An exhausting combination.

My friend and nemesis Simon Pennyworth, who has been kind enough to lend me his spare room, has yet to comment on the situation. Over dinner each evening we simply reminisce about our younger days, a sort of awkward emotional ceasefire conducted with the solemn British conviction that no crisis cannot be contained by roast potatoes.

But something has shifted. The spiritual independence of a man alone is a strange and underrated thing.

You remember, gradually, that you have opinions about how long to cook a steak, that certain music is unbearable and certain books essential, and that these preferences are entirely yours, without negotiation. To be alive and untethered in one’s seventh decade is not the defeat it initially appeared to be.

On certain evenings, with the right glass of claret sitting in Pennyworth’s garden, it is something close to magnificent.

And yet. A man has his needs.

Last week Mrs Albrecht, Pennyworth’s housekeeper, a stoutly German woman of approximately fifty-five brought in the grapefruit at breakfast. The light caught her calf as she set down the tray and something moved in the Ptardio regions that had been entirely still for months.

I stared at the grapefruit for some time. Mrs Albrecht is altogether too Prussian to be a realistic option, but good God. The soul had stirred.

I miss love. Not the institution of it, which has cost me considerably in every sense, but the actual thing. The physicality of it, the way another person can reorganise your insides just by stepping into the room. I miss that.

So I find myself back on the market, but unsure how best to put myself in the shop window. Dating apps exist, I am told, though whether they are appropriate for a man of my vintage is a question I have not yet resolved.

How does a man of my age, temporarily between homes, find love in 2026?

Answers to the usual address, and make them good. A man has his needs, after all.

Dear Richard…

Congratulations to young Rasmr on winning the first WSOP Solana Showdown. I’ve always been a bit of a poker player, and I must admit I was disappointed not to receive an invitation. Perhaps next year.

I played fairly regularly myself in the 1990s, usually taking the Friday evening ferry from Hong Kong to Macau and returning on Sunday with less money and, occasionally, a better understanding of human nature.

Macau was not yet the gleaming gambling mecca it is today. There was no Cotai Strip and no Venetian. Instead, it was a fading Portuguese colony of smoky casinos, damp colonial buildings and occasional triad gunfire.

On one such weekend, I found myself in a private room near the Lisboa playing fixed-limit seven-card stud. Three cards down, four exposed, and nobody pushing their entire net worth into the middle before the flop. A more civilised age.

Opposite me sat an elderly gentleman in a cream suit who had spent two hours folding and drinking tea. Then I made three kings on fifth street.

He called.

I filled up on sixth.

He called again.

By seventh street, I had begun to feel sorry for him. This is generally the moment at which a financial decision becomes expensive.

I raised. He raised. I raised again.

He turned over four twos to win the pot.

As he gathered the chips, he looked at my kings and said: “Very impressive.”

I thanked him.

He nodded. “They certainly impressed you.”

I have carried that sentence through several bull markets, and the lesson has saved me considerably more than I ever lost in Macau.

SpaceX: Shitcoin du jour

SpaceX IPO’d at $135 on June 12th. It hit $225 within days. As I pen this newsletter, it is currently trading at $112, having touched an all-time low of $110 last week. And, of course, all this heart-warming price action after having been added to the Nasdaq-100 and the FTSE Russell indices, thereby ensuring that billions of pounds of pension money were hoovered in at precisely the wrong moment. A remarkable achievement.

This week, the quiet period expired. I’m referring to the regulatory window during which the banks who underwrote the IPO are forbidden from publishing research on the stock. All ten have now published and all ten recommend buying. Quel surprise!

Price targets range from $200 to $300, with a consensus somewhere around $236. Morgan Stanley, who collected a substantial fee for their role in bringing this to market, has a $300 target.

“Equity analysts,” my friend and nemesis Simon Pennyworth once told me, “are in the business of being optimistic about things that have already happened to other people’s money.” I have never found a cleaner description of that profession.

The timing of this wall-to-wall buy consensus is not, one suspects, unrelated to what happens on August 6th, when the first tranche of insider lock-ups expires. “Here are your raw lamb chops, Mr. Musk. Please ignore the bleating sounds.”

Quarterly earnings arrive two days prior on August 4th and my strong suspicion is that they will underwhelm. The best news was already extracted and polished for the IPO prospectus.

There is also the small matter of AI exposure. SpaceX merged with xAI in February and lost nearly $5 billion in 2025, the majority of it on AI capital expenditure. The company is, in other words, not merely a rocket business but a very expensive AI bet wearing rocket business pants and socks. Should the AI bubble begin to deflate in earnest, SpaceX has very helpfully ensured it has significant exposure there too. Belt and braces, chaps.

So if you are looking for a clean Ptardio prognosis, I’ll give you this. The stock will, one day, be a buy. It is not a buy now. It is probably not a buy until deep into 2027, or even later. The business is real and the ambition extraordinary. The valuation at IPO was an act of collective delusion facilitated by people who charged handsomely for the privilege.

Patience, lads. New lambs are born every spring.

Kids these days

I watched the Threadguy and Ansem interview the other night and enjoyed it enormously.

Young Ansem is a compelling storyteller. Precise about his craft, and honest about the bad trades. He is also cheeringly enthusiastic and positive about the world.

Threadguy himself has evolved into something unexpected: a marvellous chat show host. He has the instinct of the greats (Carson, Letterman, Terry Wogan) in that he frames his guests generously, and stays out of the way.

What struck me most, watching two young men discuss the mechanics of permissionless financial speculation via a live stream that anyone on earth can watch for free, was the sheer distance travelled from where I started.

The so-called “Big Bang” in 1986 deregulated the City of London, opened the floor to electronic trading, abolished fixed commissions and even let the Americans in. It felt, at the time, like the most dramatic possible transformation of financial markets.

Yet looking back now, it was a rounding error compared to what followed. Threadguy mentioned, almost in passing, that retail investors couldn’t even listen to public earnings calls until the early 2000s. Now a twenty-two year old in Lagos with a Phantom wallet and a Threadguy tab open can trade the same assets, read the same on-chain data, and watch the same price action as any institution on earth.

The phrase for this is financial democratisation, and it’s true of course, but the dimension of financial democratisation that doesn’t get discussed is that of age.

I spent the first decade of my City career being told, in various ways, that my ideas were interesting but that I lacked the experience to act on them. The experience in question was largely the experience of being older.

I watched senior men make decisions I knew were wrong, about assets I understood better than they did. There is a certain information advantage conferred to the young, call it an instinctive grasp of where things are going. In my day, that was systematically discounted by institutions that confused age with wisdom.

In late 2022, Ansem bought Solana at $8. He was, by any measure, a young man with an unfashionable view and no institutional backing. He was right in a way that no amount of seniority could have manufactured. What crypto has done is remove the gatekeeper who would have told him to wait his turn.

I find this, on balance, rather wonderful.

Arundel Castle on a warm Tuesday

Pennyworth has been most generous of the last few weeks, allowing me to stay in his spare room following the departure of Mrs. Ptardio. For those who don’t know, I worked with Pennyworth for many years on trading desks in London.

As a small thank you for his support, I took the chap to Arundel Castle the other day.

Arundel is an extraordinary place. Nearly a thousand years old, built by the Normans, besieged twice in the Civil War, and home to the Dukes of Norfolk for the better part of six centuries.

We wandered the gardens, which are magnificent, and took tea and scones beneath a stand of chestnut trees. As we walked the scones off, we found ourselves in front of six men in medieval armour and a hand-painted sign announcing: Authentic Medieval Combat Experience. £10 per person.

Pennyworth stopped walking. I have seen that expression on his face twice before, both times preceding something that required a solicitor.

Twenty minutes later we were both suited up.

I had been given the padded gambeson of a minor infantry archer. Sensible, anonymous, the medieval equivalent of business casual.

Pennyworth had, by some negotiation I did not witness, acquired the breastplate, gauntlets, and full-face helmet of a mid-ranking Crusader knight, and was holding a blunted longsword.

The instructor, a patient young man named Craig, walked us through the basic guard positions. We tapped swords against shields. We learned the distinction between a thrust and a cut. It was all pleasantly educational.

Then, because it was a very warm day and I am not as young as I was, I began removing my helmet. I looked up to find Pennyworth executing what I can only describe as a running diagonal leap-slash combination against two gentlemen in peasant costumes who had been standing at the side holding prop axes and not, crucially, expecting to be involved.

The first peasant went down immediately. The second attempted a retreat but caught his foot in the rope barrier and went over sideways into a display of replica polearms.

Pennyworth landed, raised his visor, and announced, to no one in particular: “That’s a feint into a cross-cut. Devastating against unarmoured infantry.” Craig was already on his radio.

We left at a pace I will not describe as running, through the rose garden and out via the lower car park, Pennyworth still in his gauntlets.

He was entirely unbothered and spent the drive back explaining that the peasants ought to have been in a more defensive stance.

Both peasants were fine, I should add.

Pennyworth wants to go back on Saturday.

Leopold’s lesson

I see Leopold Aschenbrenner, the precocious young AI trader, is in trouble amid the AI stock rout. His $20bn fund was up a scarcely believable 439% by June, helped by leverage and concentrated bets on the likes of Oracle, AMD and various AI neoclouds. Now it is reportedly seeking fresh capital after the trade reversed.

The extraordinary part is that Leopold had no trading experience before launching the fund. He simply possessed strong convictions and a large cohort of X followers.

Don’t be giving me ideas…

Dear Richard…

Butter and marmite before the beans, obviously.

Markets, like breakfast, require a properly prepared base. Otherwise you’re just pouring liquidity onto an asset with no underlying conviction.

- R.E.P.

Mind the gap

Excitement around $PUMP is beginning to build again.

I wrote about its prospects a few weeks ago, and those chaps who followed me are already sitting on gains of roughly 50%. I mention this not to crow, of course, but merely in the interests of accurate historical record.

The more interesting question is why $PUMP continues to trade at such a considerable discount versus its revenues compared to Hyperliquid.

Part of the answer is trust.

Jeff and the Hyperliquid team are held up, quite rightly, as one of the industry’s rare examples of chaps who say what they intend to do and then proceed to do it.

Pump’s record is rather less immaculate. We were promised a $PUMP airdrop, for instance, which remains somewhere between delayed and metaphysical.

Still, there are signs that the Pump chaps understand the problem. Communications have improved, the operation appears more disciplined, and there is a conscious effort to rebuild credibility with the market. Additionally, the core launchpad product is being further optimised, although my reaction to this week’s announcement of the so-called BOOST mode, whereby dead liquidity is reinjected into bonded coins, was: “why wasn’t this already happening?”.

Hyperliquid deserves its premium. But premiums need not remain permanent.

With trust still depressed and revenues holding firm, there remains plenty of room for $PUMP to run.

On $HYPE and the particular danger of watching what the pike are doing

Speaking of Hyperliquid, Multicoin Capital moved approximately $37 million of $HYPE to Coinbase this week and unstaked a further 211,000 tokens from the Hyperliquid platform.

Selini has been doing something similar in the background. The price has drifted accordingly, testing $58 support before recovering somewhat. My feed has been full of commentary ranging from mild concern to full capitulation.

A small observation before the hand-wringing gets out of hand.

Professional money managers will do things that they are qualified to do and which the mortal retail investor should leave well alone. This includes following the hot ball of money from one asset to the next, and throwing a nifty sidestep by unstaking large amounts in order to soften price and manufacture a more interesting entry over time.

The important question is not what they are doing. It is whether you should be doing something similar. The answer is almost certainly a resounding “no”.

The relevant lesson here is an old one. Understand, as a small retail tadpole swimming in the shadows of marauding pike, what your competence and risk level actually are. The pike has teams, models, OTC relationships, and the ability to absorb being wrong in ways that would be career-ending for the rest of us. The tadpole’s edge is patience, simplicity, and the absence of a quarterly LP letter requiring justification of every position.

Keep it simple. Stay patient. Believe in the thesis.

And that thesis is worth restating. Jeff and the Hyperliquid chaps are building something with a rare ambition and single-mindedness. The protocol has earned $2 million per day in fee-funded $HYPE buybacks at recent volumes. It commands nearly 10% of all perpetual futures open interest.

These are not the metrics of something that is breaking. They are the metrics of something that is being temporarily inconvenienced by people taking profits. The network has earned our patience. Keep your $HYPE staked and earning. De-risk a little if your position size is keeping you awake at night, because no thesis is worth that. Otherwise, wait.

One final thing worth noting. Multicoin Capital bought $HYPE at $30, but Hyperliquid’s earliest and most committed retail holders got in well below the prices these sophisticated professionals paid.

How clever are they, really?

Post Script: So, it seems Multicoin unstaked $HYPE so they could pump their privacy bags. As you were.

Soho, 1984. A brief and formative humiliation.

Musing further on London institutions, I was reminded of an experience long ago at one of the great London institutions, the Coach and Horses pub in Greek Street.

In my early twenties I had the ambition to become a pop musician of note. Someone told me that the Coach and Horses was where the real bohemians drank. Artists, writers, people who had done interesting things and felt no obligation to explain themselves. I went there one Thursday afternoon with a notebook, a secondhand corduroy jacket and the working theory that proximity to creative genius was transferable.

The landlord, a chap by the name of Norman, was a tall, magnificent misanthrope who ran his pub the way a hawk runs a field: with total authority and no apparent affection for anything in it. Norman was famous for barring people for reasons that were entirely his own, yelling “You’re barred, you bastards!” across the pub as he did so.

Slouched at the end of the bar was a fairly well renowned newspaper columnist who I won’t do the indignity of naming here. I introduced myself and mentioned, unwisely, that I was hoping to make it as a musician.

He looked at me for a long moment. “Are you any good?” he said.

“I think so,” I said.

“That’s the problem,” he said, and turned back to his vodka.

Norman, unprompted, reached under the bar and placed a packet of cigarettes in front of the columnist, who didn’t even look up before taking one out.

I understood, in that moment, that I was witnessing a relationship that required no acknowledgement to function, and that I had nothing remotely like it in my life. I quietly retired my musical ambitions sometime around Christmas.

Some institutions tell you exactly where you stand. The Coach and Horses was one of them. The City, I would later discover, was another.

HIP-4 evolves

A brief footnote on HIP-4. The flagging of permissionless prediction markets on Hyperliquid is interesting, and I’ve been watching it with a degree of cautious enthusiasm.

My honest view is that it will bring us closer, quite quickly, to some of the gnarlier questions this vertical has been avoiding. What is the genuine demand for prediction markets beyond sports and elections? How permissionless can they really get before the regulatory headache becomes material? And in a world where multiple deployers can build on HIP-4, does this simply accelerate a trade.xyz monopoly, or does real competition emerge?

I don’t have clean answers. I’m watching. These questions will matter more than the Multicoin unstaking within about six months.

Love and markets

Now that I am once again a single man following the departure of the fourth Mrs Ptardio, I have found myself reflecting on the hazards of mixing romance with markets.

I learned the lesson properly in Hong Kong in the 1990s, when I became romantically entangled with a brilliant young analyst named Victoria Lee.

Victoria was razor-sharp, devastatingly beautiful and some fifteen years younger than me. I did my best to keep up.

We would stay late at the office, where she would perch on the edge of my desk in a silk blouse and explain derivatives structures as though she were reading Byron.

One evening I let slip that I had heard whispers of a devaluation coming out of Thailand.

Victoria smiled sweetly, poured me another glass and changed the subject to jazz.

Two weeks later, the baht broke. Victoria made an absolute killing from a beautifully constructed position, while I missed the move entirely.

A little wounded, I asked why she had not at least given me the courtesy of a warning.

She gave me that lethal smile of hers.

“Richard,” she said, “in markets and in love, it’s all fair game.”

It was an expensive lesson, though by the standards of my later marriages, remarkably good value.

I must give Victoria a call one of these days…

Dear Richard…

I’m not sure money is the thing a man ought to “get” before marriage. A little judgment, some patience and a functioning sense of humour will take him rather further.

But don’t, old boy, treat a wife as a prize awarded once one has accumulated enough capital.

Marriage is not the final stage of a savings plan, nor, despite the efforts of several lawyers I’ve known, is it primarily an asset-allocation exercise.

- R.E.P.

The Oldest Trade

Chris Burniske put out a note this week declaring Zcash (ZEC) the big macro-crypto play for this cycle.

Now, Burniske remains a personal favourite of mine on long-horizon crypto. He’s one of the few chaps who thinks in decades rather than days, and I must confess, I am coming around to his way of looking at things.

To shield one’s wealth from prying eyes is perhaps the oldest financial instinct that exists. Medieval merchants buried coins in the garden and told the taxman the harvest had failed. The Knights Templar built an entire cross-border banking network largely so that wealth could move without every duke en route taking a view on it.

Humanity has spent a thousand years paying handsomely to keep its wealth out of view, and ZEC appears best positioned to deliver upon that promise in the world of crypto-currency.

I understand the Winklevoss operation is accumulating with a price target pinned to capturing a mere one percent of global offshore wealth, which is, I note approvingly, the first crypto valuation model I’ve seen that a 15th-century Florentine banker would immediately understand.

This all reminds me of an old chum of mine, a chap known affectionately as Bunty, who spent the better part of the nineties attempting to shield his family’s money from Her Majesty’s Revenue.

He had the entire works in place. Liechtenstein foundation, Manx trust, and at one memorably desperate stage a llama farm in Powys claiming agricultural relief. Inevitably the whole jenga tower came tumbling down and he ended up paying millions to lawyers and accountants on top of the tax bill he’d failed to avoid.

Bunty’s woes won’t stop others trying, however, and the man who supplies financial privacy cheaply and credibly will quickly become extremely wealthy.

If ZEC can capture even a slither of this demand, Mr. Burniske’s argument begins to look extremely compelling.

JTX opens to 100k strong waitlist

JTX launched this week, with more than 100,000 chaps reportedly waiting at the door.

For now, it offers spot markets and tokenised equities, with perpetual futures promised later this year. So we should perhaps resist crowning it the Hyperliquid killer before the perps have actually arrived. This industry has a habit of pricing the triumph before the product exists.

Still, the proposition is interesting. JTX comes from Jito, the team behind much of Solana’s execution infrastructure. Its argument is that Solana’s trading applications have failed to match the quality of the machinery beneath them.

I think that criticism is broadly fair. Solana has the activity, the liquidity and the culture, but it still lacks a truly great trading venue.

Hyperliquid showed that traders will move mountains for a product that simply works. Should JTX deliver comparable execution while retaining Solana’s peculiar energy, it may have something.

I am patiently awaiting my invitation. You can join me in the queue here: https://jtx.com/ref/richardptardio

The Zuckerberg Doctrine

I see Meta has released a new and cheap AI model, known as Muse Spark, aimed squarely at the three-and-a-half billion souls who wake each morning inside its apps like hens in a very well-lit barn.

The strategy is elegant in its cynicism. The model needn’t be the cleverest in the room. It merely needs to be good enough for the simpler agent tasks, whereupon Meta’s biblical reach does the rest. Distribution, not intelligence. I operate on the same principle with my ex-wives.

The stakes, of course, couldn’t be higher. Mr. Zuckerberg knows that if Meta doesn’t find a way to make AI work within its sprawling ecosystem, his company dies.

And a cornered Zuckerberg is a formidable thing. He has already pivoted the company through apps, video, the metaverse, and more with the serene persistence of a man who does not experience embarrassment as you and I do.

So the bets will keep coming until one pays off. The market already likes what it sees, and $META jumped some 10% upon the release of the model. I’m of the mind that it may continue rising as people realise that in technology, the finest product does not always win. The product already in your pocket often does.

Lost causes

To quote the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, a gentleman is interested only in lost causes. Lucky, then, that I have spent several decades supporting England.

Last night’s defeat to Argentina was painfully familiar. I had been impressed by Mr. Tuchel, but he eventually fell into the oldest English trap of all: sitting back, surrendering possession and hoping for the best.

It was the footballing equivalent of hedging a winning position until there was nothing left but the downside.

Argentina, of course, had enough quality to punish the hesitation.

It is a shame, because this England side possesses the technical quality to play with far greater ambition.

One day, perhaps, we shall trust it.

Dear Richard…

The trenches have been unkind for some time, but I do sense the shift you mention.

It is a welcome correction in this age of compulsive fiddling. Markets have trained people to mistake activity for intelligence. Every dip must be traded, every headline decoded and every position resized constantly.

Conviction fell out of fashion because it demands patience, humility and the willingness to look wrong for longer than is comfortable.

Some of my best returns came not from finding more ideas, but from recognising the rare one worth leaving alone.

- R.E.P.

On $ANSEM and conviction

Last week, I wrote about $ANSEM and expressed some skepticism that we would ever again see a memecoin catch fire quite like they did in the good old days.

Well, chaps, I was wrong.

Since that piece went out, $ANSEM has continued to soar, which is no small thing. But perhaps more impressive is the fact it has accrued some 120,000 holders in remarkably short order. A crowd is forming.

I must also say I have been mightily impressed by young Ansem. Last week, I voiced certain reservations about the nature of his character, which now seems perhaps a touch uncharitable.

It is clear to me the chap is deadly serious about using this movement to bring new people into crypto. He has the experience, the reputation and, crucially, the contacts book to make a proper go of it.

And yes, I have been onboarded too.

I have some rather exciting plans in the works for how I intend to repay his generosity.

Watch this space.

Robinhood challenges Solana on its own turf

Robinhood appears to have looked at the memecoin casino and decided that it ought to own the building.

That will be concerning for Solana, the de facto home of memecoins and the current venue of choice for young chaps attempting to turn $400 into generational wealth before supper.

CEO Vlad Tenev has built unrivalled distribution over the last few years, with millions of youngsters using Robinhood to trade stocks, options and crypto. The company has now launched its own blockchain and, while the official language is all very serious, Mr Tenev is quite clearly eyeing memes too.

$CASHCAT is the early winner, up roughly 100x and trading close to $150m at the time of writing. More will surely follow.

Solana still has the culture and the speed, but Robinhood has the punters.

And in markets, chaps, that is often what makes the difference.

England march on

The first draft of this newsletter was written under conditions of some personal difficulty. England had defeated Mexico the previous night at the Azteca and it had been a heavy one.

The match itself was extraordinary. Bellingham was, once again, from a different dimension. The kind of player who makes you forget that England have historically treated tournaments as an opportunity to lose in slightly more heartbreaking ways than the previous time.

Could football be coming home? I have been English long enough to know the correct answer is no, and to feel, against all available evidence and accumulated historical trauma, that the answer might be yes.

Two more prediction markets but questions remain

The prediction market space acquired two more Solana-native entrants.

World.xyz went live on July 1st inside Phantom. Pascal followed shortly after, positioning itself as a trader-first exchange with an API and OTC desk, which suggests it is aimed at a rather different audience than the person opening Phantom to bet on England vs Mexico.

I am broadly in favour of prediction markets. Back in my day we called them betting exchanges and in early 2000s London you wouldn’t find a finance man who wasn’t punting large amounts of money on Betfair.

World.xyz is the one I’m watching most carefully, partly because the Phantom distribution is real and immediate, and partly because I think the coming integration with Jito’s JTX exchange could be transformative if it materialises. I understand Jito has actual trader flow and that’s a particularly interesting combination alongside World’s tech.

Will it emerge as a genuine challenger to Polymarket and Kalshi?

Perhaps. I have heard worrying whispers about Polymarket equity trading at discounts in the secondary market. That’s a Polymarket, which, six months ago, was the undisputed champion of the category and was being discussed in the same breath as serious financial infrastructure.

It is remarkable how quickly a category leader can lose the thread. The CFTC’s new posture under Selig is permissive, which should help everyone, but regulatory clarity alone does not manufacture users.

Sports betting via prediction markets works (at least, where there’s no other way to bet on sports). We’ve established that. The Kalshi numbers on World Cup volume are staggering.

But the dream of prediction markets as a genuine epistemic tool, a place where people come to trade information about elections and policy and macroeconomics?

For me, that dream keeps colliding with the reality that most people, when given access to a betting platform with good UX, would like to bet on football. Which is fine. It is simply a different product than the one that was promised.

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On Pennyworth and betrayal

Since Mrs. Ptardio left me a few weeks ago, I’ve been living in the spare room of my old friend and nemesis Simon Pennyworth. A few of you have been asking about the chap, so I thought I’d share an old story that should tell you everything you need to know about him.

When I returned to London in the early 2000s, after several glorious years in Hong Kong, I was older, battle-scarred and clinging to relevance by the fingernails.

Simon Pennyworth, meanwhile, was already becoming rather unavoidable. He was the golden boy of the new generation, with slick-backed hair, pink shirts and a dangerous sort of charm.

I took the lad under my wing and showed him the sacred art of the four-hour lunch that somehow becomes dinner. For a while, we were formidable, though when two egos burn brightly enough, the curtains eventually catch fire.

It happened at the Christmas party.

I had been carefully wooing a Swiss family office. Proper old-money types, fond of discretion and ruinously expensive wine. I was days from signing them, so naturally I brought them along.

That’s when I saw Pennyworth holding court by the punch bowl, the Swiss hanging off every word. By midnight, their lawyer took me aside with the sort of pitying smile one reserves for wounded animals.

“They’ve changed their mind,” he said. “Mr Pennyworth will be handling the account.”

Poaching a colleague’s client is frowned upon. Doing it at the Christmas party is treason.

I found Pennyworth soon after, and he met my fury with that ghastly little smirk.

“It’s just business, old boy.”

I have never quite forgiven him.

–

On the subject of Pennyworth, and for nothing more than my own amusement, I shall send $100 of $ANSEM to the first person to publicly tweet the following: “Pennyworth, you dreadful little scoundrel.” Make sure to tag me so I see it.

Dear Richard…

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. I made plenty over the years. Just make sure they are honest mistakes, not ones born of laziness, cruelty or pretending to be someone you are not.

Take risks, but don’t worship them. Chase success, but don’t let it turn you into a dreadful little person. Look after your friends. Call your parents. Go outside. Fall in love. Read things that don’t make you richer. Laugh at yourself.

If life has taught me one thing, chaps, it is that the point is not to have been right more than everyone else, but rather to have stayed generous, curious and decent in a world that will give you endless excuses not to.

- R.E.P

(Chaps, if you have a question you’d like answered, do send it to me on Twitter).

On $ANSEM and a potential memecoin revival

There has been quite a lot of excitement this week around $ANSEM, the eponymous memecoin launched by one of the more popular young chaps on Twitter.

Ansem is clearly a smart lad. I have no issue with that. In another era he might have been a perfectly effective junior gilt trader, which is not necessarily a compliment.

But I do have some reservations.

This is, after all, the same fellow who encouraged me into $WIF, an amusing dog in a hat, and then began speaking grandly about projecting the creature onto a giant sphere in Las Vegas. To the best of my knowledge, the sphere remains tragically un-hatted.

Now, one must admit that $ANSEM running to more than $150m in market capitalisation is impressive. But the liquidity looks thin, and the structure gives me pause. Ansem himself appears to be holding back much of the supply, which reduces float and creates the appearance of a much larger market than may actually exist.

There are also his airdrops. Generous in theory, but rather than distributing small amounts to a broad base of loyal holders, large allocations seem to be finding their way to a handful of recipients, many of whom promptly sell.

What the trenches really need now, in my opinion, is a completely organic memecoin that grows like wildfire without a whiff of involvement from the industrial-memecoin complex. But is such a thing possible nowadays? And was it ever?

Dollar-won and disgrace

Following South Korea’s early exit from the World Cup, fans demanded that manager Hong Myung-bo “kneel before the entire nation and leave the football world forever”. A touch dramatic, perhaps, but it did get me thinking of my old friend and trading colleague Jinwoo Park.

I worked with Jinwoo on trading desks in Hong Kong during the 1990s. He had that old Korean instinct that failure was never entirely private. A bad trade did not simply lose money; it embarrassed the room.

After one especially ugly morning trading dollar-won NDFs, a junior tried to apologise to Jinwoo directly. Jinwoo stopped him.

“Not to me,” he said. “To the team.”

So at lunch the boy stood at the end of the table in a Central barbecue restaurant, poured drinks for everyone, bowed and said he had damaged the desk’s reputation.

Nobody shouted. Nobody resigned. Jinwoo simply nodded and told him to eat.

“In Korea,” he told me later, “shame is about making sure you come back stronger.”

A very brief oil crisis

When the US and Israel struck Iran in February and the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, the commodity bulls had what appeared to be a gift. Twenty percent of global oil supply through one narrow channel, suddenly inaccessible.

The thesis wrote itself and for a while it looked like one of those rare trades where the obvious call is also the correct one.

It was not. Brent peaked north of $110, retreated to around $78 on the ceasefire, and is now sitting barely seven percent above where it traded the day the war started. The bulls were right about the disruption and catastrophically wrong about the duration.

What they missed was that the ceasefire would arrive faster than expected, and that all the crude trapped inside the Gulf would hit the market simultaneously the moment the Strait reopened, creating a glut precisely when sentiment was most exposed.

Jeffrey Currie, who has forgotten more about commodities than most people will ever learn, is not capitulating. His argument is that yes, there’s a surplus today, but the system is fragile.

Inventories depleted, refinery margins stretched, shipping risks unresolved. He thinks the selloff has overshot and that the market can flip from so-called surplus to very real squeeze at the drop of a hat.

My own prognosis over the next six months? $72 to $95 Brent, direction determined almost entirely by whether the Strait stays (half) open. A new outbreak sends the price through $90 immediately. Sustained tanker traffic and we see $68.

As for the idea that a lower oil price would be a tailwind for crypto? Well, bitcoin is at $59k. Oil is down twenty percent from its highs. Someone should probably look into that.

England wobble, France glide

I must confess, England’s narrow win over DR Congo did little for my blood pressure and even less for my confidence.

They survive, of course, but watching them feels like watching a trader sit on a bad position and insist the market simply hasn’t understood him yet. Occasionally it works. More often, it ends with a phone call from risk.

France, meanwhile, look increasingly like the side I backed before a ball was kicked. They are a level above: quicker, calmer, more ruthless and, crucially, far less interested in making life complicated for themselves.

Germany, as predicted, have been a profound disappointment. I spent much of my life watching them efficiently win tournaments like men filing paperwork, so I will not pretend there isn’t some pleasure in seeing them reduced to chaos.

It has been a dreadful tournament for dark horses too. Turkey gone. Japan gone. Ecuador, my own speculative little position, gone. The value plays have mostly blown up. A familiar feeling, in fairness.

Dear Richard…

My dear chap, at your age, the compound returns on effort at that age are outrageous.

But do be careful. A young man can mistake constant motion for progress. There is an important difference between grinding and being ground.

At 19, your job is not simply to optimise yourself into some ghastly little productivity appliance. It is also to collect material. Friends, mistakes, romances, bad decisions, odd jobs, strange rooms, long nights, conversations that go nowhere but stay with you.

I was profoundly lost well into my thirties, but in my twenties I was at least lost in interesting ways. I managed a rock band for a while. I wrote poetry. I made a fool of myself.

So work hard, but do not become narrow. A man needs capital, but he also needs stories.

- R.E.P

During the 1980s, I would fax a daily investment note to trading desks across the City. Despite some mishaps, it was read by brokers, fund managers, junior analysts and, on one unfortunate occasion, my ex-wife’s divorce solicitor.

Consider this its spiritual successor. I will be using it to share my views on all aspects of finance and crypto-currency, in the hope that a few of you may learn from the many expensive mistakes I’ve made over the years.

Do enjoy.

Don’t expect the bulls to return this summer

Chris Burniske posted something last week that I thought deserved more attention than it got.

The cycle has been “disappointing for most”, to use his words, and that kind of disappointment tends to paralyse rather than resolve.

People hold through drawdowns hoping for a return to previous highs that may not come on the timeline they’re imagining.

I think Chris is right. This hasn’t been a clean bear market with obvious capitulation. Yet.

It’s been a slow-motion frustration cycle, one where most retail participants have been underwater for longer than expected without a dramatic enough flush to feel cathartic.

That structure tends to resolve downward, not upward, because the people who were going to buy the dip already bought it, often more than once.

My best guess is that we remain range-bound for the rest of the summer, and then see a final leg downwards in the autumn, when marginal holders finally crack.

The trouble with being unbothered

The tweeting duck called DonAlt laid out Saylor’s $STRC structure with admirable clarity the other day.

His conclusion that this is “the worst ponzi I’ve ever seen” may be a touch dramatic, but his underlying point is not wrong.

It is a machine that works magnificently in one direction and becomes structurally destabilising in the other.

I should tell you that I met Michael Saylor once. It was 2002, or thereabouts, at one of those interminable networking evenings in the City.

He had just survived the MicroStrategy accounting scandal, which had temporarily obliterated the company.

He was, I’ll give him this, entirely unbothered. Not stoic, but actually unbothered.

I remember thinking that this is either the disposition of a genius or of someone who will one day do something catastrophically large-scale and feel perfectly fine about it on the way down.

Twenty years later, I am no longer uncertain which one it was.

The situation seemed to be deteriorating as this newsletter went to press. It might not end badly this cycle. But it ends badly eventually, and when it does, the man in the middle of it will be on stage somewhere explaining why it was actually fine.

A brief note on my current domestic arrangements

Following the departure of the fourth Mrs Ptardio, I have taken up residence in the spare room of my oldest friend, Simon Pennyworth.

This is not exile. It is, I keep telling Simon, a strategic relocation.

Pennyworth and I have known each other since 1988. He is extremely rich and almost entirely without warmth. But to his credit, he has asked very few questions about the liquidation of the house, the pension or Mrs P’s decision to leave.

The room is comfortable, if aggressively floral. I have been given a small desk and strict instructions not to use the downstairs loo.

In return, I am expected to attend his dinner parties and laugh at his stories.

It is not ideal, but until I get myself back on my feet, it will have to do.

$PUMP and Circumstance

There has been a lot of noise recently about Solana being ready to take the next step as the blockchain for all of finance (pardon the loan, Hyperliquid friends). Of course, everyone has an opinion about precisely which Solana ecosystem tokens deserve your hard-earned.

I have some sympathy for the general thesis (Solana is primed for what we might call its Phase 3) but rather less for much of the proposed investment execution on my timeline.

Most of the tokens being touted are governance tokens attached to protocols with thin revenue, chunky unlocks and very little reason to exist beyond the current mood.

The one I think is undermentioned is $PUMP.

The token hasn’t fared well since launching almost a year ago. We’re some 80 percent off its September highs, despite running one of the more extraordinary buyback programmes in recent crypto history.

I met the Pump.fun boys on a call last year. Lovely haircuts, excellent manners, and some strong convictions on how youngsters of today engage with content and value.

The lads are rolling out new features with regularity and daily revenue remains significant. Mindshare is incomparable (still).

There are near-term risks, notably an upcoming token unlock, so I wouldn’t be as bullish as some have been (and here I would ideally link to a not inconsiderable number of badly-timed $PUMP shills by Michael Dudas last autumn, if only he didn’t make it a habit of regularly deleting his tweets). But to me, this has room to run and is still one of the more undervalued SOL ecosystem plays out there. Just be patient.

The grim business of tournament football

I write to you having sat through England’s 0-0 draw with Ghana last night. An utterly drab affair which England could easily have lost.

Still, tournaments are not won in the group stage, and England do have the tools for a deep run.

That said, it is difficult to see beyond France, frankly. They look built for the grim business of tournament football.

If pressed for a dark horse, I’ve been mightily impressed by the Japanese. Whether the draw is kind to them is another matter, but they look like exactly the sort of side nobody sensible will want to face.

Dear Richard

I came to crypto-currency, as I have come to most things in life, slightly late and wearing the wrong shoes.

Back in 2024, after more than thirty five years in traditional finance, I was made redundant. A brutal phrase, redundant. Makes one sound like a fax machine. One day I was a senior man with opinions on gilts, commodities and counterparty risk. The next I was being handed a cardboard box.

When I told my colleagues I was exploring crypto-currency, they were vile about it.

“Richard, you are too old for crypto,” one former colleague said. “It is for teenagers, criminals and men who wear baseball caps indoors.”

But the truth is I have never loved banks, or offices or committees. My passion has always been the markets. The cruelty. The absurdity. The way a price can humiliate a room full of clever people.

And as I’ve come to discover over these past two years, crypto may have given us the purest market to have ever existed.

- R.E.P

Got a question for Richard? Send him a message on Twitter.