Join Citadel CU. They give you a $50 Visa (V) card after 10 debit card purchases (you can, for example, buy ten individual bananas) and another $50 after 10 credit card purchases (more bananas or whatever else you want).

Then get another $300 if you direct deposit $2k to their checking account and $200 if you maintain a $5k balance for the third month that the account is open. Net, you get $600 with fairly easy requirements.

Far more importantly, you could get first dibs on cheap stock if they convert to a bank someday. This is a non-profit credit union but they could demutualize, changing their charter. Depositors could get the chance to buy discounted shares.

Another direct deposit opportunity is to direct deposit to SPCX’s X Money. They offer a $25 sign up bonus, 6% APY if Premium subscribers direct deposit ($1k within each 34-day rolling period), and 3% cash back on debit card purchases.

This is an FDIC insured bonanza. You can get $600k in APY, $273,750 in cash back, and $25 sign up bonus for $873,775 in first year gross benefits. Premium+ costs $349 for a net $873,426. Use available cash or tap a PLOC/HELOC with lower rates.

I have not used it yet but my PLOC costs $464k for $10 million, which would net a $136k arbitrage each year. Is this durable? I’ll exploit it as long as it lasts, SPCX is one of the largest companies in the world, but it seems too good to be true for long.

What do you do with it today?

Here are my best bets for orders of magnitude from $1 to $10 million.

$10 million

Put it in X Money (SPCX). As of this week it is newly available to all Premium and Premium+ subscribers with U.S. accounts. So get a Premium membership and get the best (6%) APY yield on $10 million of federally insured money and the best (3%) debit card cash back. Oh and you get a $25 sign up bonus.

$1 million

The prediction market is an asset class. I prefer Kalshi to bonds. They pay a variable 3.25% APY on all cash and positions. You can boost that with high probability events such as GameStop (GME) not buying eBay (EBAY) or the US not confirming that aliens exist. Deposit a million dollars and get a better than bonds return for less risk.

$100k

Join Frec. Put $100k in their 140/40 Russell 100 long short direct index. Watch your tax bill shrink. For compounding wealth after taxes, this is far better than index funds.

$10k

I just put $10k in GalaxyOne (GLXY) to get their $1k bonus that they offered in August. Keep a lookout for new similar offers. They briefly had sign up promos as high as $3k.

$1k

Put $1k in Public to get $100 in free stock.

$100

Put $100 in a new Roots account to get a $50 bonus.

$10

Fundrise pays $50 bonuses for setting up new $10 accounts. Get one.

$1

Get $25 when you start a new ammo portfolio with AmmoSquared. 5.56 rounds cost ~$1.

The Last Bottle Marathon is on. $10 off for first orders and free shipping. That makes some bottles close to free. Get them here.

To get $200 join Varo and receive $500 or more in qualifying direct deposits within 45 days of account opening. Offer ends August 31st, 2026.

Spain did what they needed to secure my $1 million pool. Thanks Spain. They dominated the tournament, consistent with their ranking in both the FIFA and PELE ranking.

But the real winner was Kalshi.

Exciting and entertaining part of the 3 hour soccer game here (10 seconds playtime).

I’m splitting at $1 mil pool if Spain wins. The dollar figure will be laughably small after dilution but it makes it fun. I have been long Spain from a 17% chance to 59% and have to contemplate hedges as we approach the game.

Gemini has been a great platform for World Cup bets. They pay a $50 bonus for your first $100 bet. But that is just the beginning. They’ve also paid $5 for every subsequent $25 bet with odds between 20–80% which netted $815 so far.

This has turned every bet into a +EV. They are trying to entice us into addictions. My reaction is to use the enticements as my gambling budget. Take them all but don’t give them the satisfaction (or profit) from going $0.01 beyond that.

As always, thanks to Nate Silver for actually knowing what he’s talking about when it comes to ball sport stats. He’s basically nailed the World Cup so far. At the start of the tournament, he had Argentina and Spain neck and neck followed by France and England. That has been just about right.

I hope and expect Spain to win but this is a close call. Spain could be the best World Cup team ever, but Argentina is well within the top ten.

For an absurdly specific bet: 1) Spain wins but 2) Messi makes it volatile. So I’m keeping some dry powder in anticipation of Spain dipping beneath 50% before the game is over…

Stripe teamed up with private equity firm Advent to bid ~$53 billion for PayPal (PYPL). The target has struggled with competition including from Apple (AAPL) Pay. For Stripe, the key part of PayPal’s value is getting Venmo. The bidders are offering a decent premium, but well beneath PYPL’s lows and beneath where management would get most of their incentive pay.

A deal will have to get past the target’s board as well as regulators. Both present timing risk and deal risk. PayPal’s CEO will probably recommend against accepting the bid to his board and that recommendation will probably get listened to. What would be acceptable? They would have to bump their $60.50 per share bid to over $70 and perhaps closer to $80. Exceeding the share price’s high of the past year is arbitrary yet one of the arbitrary reference points that could be necessary to sway the target’s board in favor of selling. They will be hard to convince any lower.

PayPal was a bargain under $40 but much of this news is priced in at over $55. It is a good value but volatile event that could easily fail in the short-term. An alternative to the equity market: the prediction markets. Will Stripe acquire PayPal in 2026? Polymarket placed the odds over 80% this week and is currently ~44%. PayPal acquired this year? Kalshi offers this at 63%.

The key difference is in the rules. Kalshi resolves to yes if any company announces an agreement to acquire PayPal before Jan 1, 2027. So it pays out day one in a deal with decent odds of getting announced in 2026. But Polymarket is only a yes with this specific buyer. Counter bidders could include Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), Visa (V), Mastercard (MA), or Block (XYZ). This week offered a freeroll (and still a cheap roll) on any of those outcomes. It has been an arbitrage on the merger arb market — an arb arb!

Kalshi launched Kalshi Pro, a professional desktop trading workstation. It runs on the same account, the balance, and exchange as the standard Kalshi app. It adds more professional and convenient trading tools. You can trade dozens of markets at once and act on events in real time. With this development, volume and liquidity on the platform could soar.

Kalshi Pro is free to use and available now in beta at pro.kalshi.com.

December 17, 2012

It is worth maxing out IRA or 401(k) plans, but then what? What can you do to protect a substantial amount of dollars from capital gains taxes? Tax-advantaged retirement accounts are great, but the contribution limit is low.

My idea is to use the 529 college savings plans for long-term tax-free compounding regardless of your intended use for the proceeds. In increments of up to $370,000, one can establish a 529 in Nevada with yourself as the donor and beneficiary. For couples, you can each do the same for a total of $740k. Costs for an equity index fund are low and capital gains are not taxed. I invested mine in the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund (VTSMX); you might consider doing the same.

If you do not need this capital for a long time, ideally a whole generation or longer, this is an ideal way to protect assets from taxation. But what are the drawbacks? Well, to avoid penalties upon withdrawal, you need to spend it on education. But education inflation is meteoric, so it is likely that there will be educational expenses.

But let’s imagine that you want to withdraw money and lack education bills. One could barter: pay college bills for someone who could pay your bills in return of an equal pre-tax cost. One could take college courses during retirement (wine tasting course? golf class?). Or just pay the fee: on the back end the fee is less than the tax-free compounding effect within a few decades.

July 7, 2015

Vanguard claims that,

But this is an unmanaged fund, so as long as they can keep the books straight, they could also,

for all that I would care….

… A 529 savings plan is an investment account intended for college and other higher-education costs. They are sponsored by individual states and offer various tax benefits. Earnings are deferred from federal taxes. Withdrawals for qualified higher-education expenses are also tax-free. You can make up to five years’ worth of contributions at one time without triggering gift tax. The uses are pretty generous - you can use the money for tuition, room and board, books, and other expenses…

… This is a tax-advantaged fund 67x your IRA contribution limit. For 2015, the IRA contribution limit is $5,500 ($6,500 for people 50 or older). One might as well fund it, but the scale is small. The 529 limit is $370k. If you are married, you can each invest $370k with oneself as the owner and beneficiary. At that scale, this investment has already been worth over $1.1 million since inception and over $391k since I last discussed it. This is an ideal vehicle for long-term tax-free compounding.

July 13, 2026

The initial contribution alone results in ~$4.7 million balance with expected covered expenses of around 19% of that balance or ~$875k. Want to do the same starting today? Markets are more expensive but with a long enough time horizon, compounding can still work in your favor. Give it plenty of time.

This is not here or ever tax advice but one can fund these all at once by lending the money to max them out to each kid to fund their own. Charge AFR (currently 3.93%). Gift the interest payments due back to you. That way they can get the full balance invested on day one. Today the maximum aggregate balance is $575k per beneficiary. The balance may grow with returns but additional contributions can no longer be made.

Now what? If you’re looking at ~$3.8 million more than you expect to need (or more based on subsequent deposits to kids), there are all sorts of ways to use over funded 529. Here are some of the most fun ones that you can do today. Additionally, these examples prove the point that when it comes to tax advantaged accounts, there is no such thing as too much of a good thing.

Learn to fly at Embry-Riddle. Semester at Sea could use $50k per person to cruise around the world with some classes. Visit ten countries in 100 days from the comfort of a premium cabin. Take a NOLS year in Patagonia. Coincidentally it is right around the same $50k price for expenses that can be charged to the 529. They explicitly support 529 funding --

TL; DR

In short, over funding is a fun problem to solve. And whatever you can’t spend fast enough can just be saved for subsequent generations.

It is impossible to neatly bifurcate success into talent or luck. It is never one or the other. Among the biggest successes, it is typically a lot of both. In business and investing the talent is in part repeatedly getting to the right place at the right time. Serendipity needs space, time, and resources to do its work.

My favorite evidence for successes that are among the least likely to be flukes: men who made over a billion dollars in unrelated endeavors. Elon Musk got there with Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX (SPCX). Jeff Bezos got there with Amazon.com (AMZN) and AWS. Steve Jobs had Apple (AAPL) and Pixar. John Paul DeJoria had Paul Mitchell and Patrón.

If one of their >$1 billion (in terms of personal net worth, but vastly more valuable than the amount that they personally captured) ideas were burned to the ground they would be left with nothing besides a second > billion dollar fortune. If they lost both they would probably be billionaires in short order on a third. They are idea generators who know how to think up spectacularly valuable ideas then do something about them. They dream and execute.

I don’t just admire the brains necessary to come up with more than one billion dollar idea. I deeply admire the spirit. Too many people coast on even mundane laurels. If you stay hungry, even by artificially maintaining that hunger, you can keep going with the energy that won the first fortune. If you overly indulge contemplating the earlier success, you can get fat and lazy. Hunger is better, even if it is voluntary. Forget about the wins. Keep the money but put it out of your mind.

Ivan Boesky wasn’t even a billionaire. His peak fortune of ~$280 mil is equivalent to today’s ~$800 million. Meh. But he lived ostentatiously. He had trouble optimizing dinner orders so would order one of everything on the menu to sample. In a sense this is rational: if the denominator is nine figures then almost all daily decisions round down to infinitely trivial. Money fails to serve one of its core functions of allocating scarce resources because there is so little scarcity. This isn’t fun, cool, or impressive. It is stupid. It is miserable. It is grotesque. It turns one’s mind to the tedious topic of perfecting personal comfort. It also completely alienates you from the normal lives of those around us. Happiness is almost always a matter of forging authentic connections with others and this type of ostentatious indulgence makes real connections harder.

I far prefer the example of Chris “Jesus” Ferguson. He made ~$10 million at the poker table and at least another ~$40 million off the table. After winning a net $1,490,000 ($1.5 mil first place but against a single $10k buy-in) in the 2000 WSOP Main Event, he tried to prove himself and his skills without any of the advantages of his bankroll or reputation. He challenged himself to make $10k in an infinite return on free rolls. It took weeks to make his first $2. For the first months, he made about $0.14 per hour. In six months he went from $0 to $100. In another six months he went from $100 to his $10k goal then quickly ran it up to $28k. He proved that if someone is numerate and tenacious they can make money from nothing.

I fell in love with Ferguson’s $10k challenge but took it well beyond poker. I’ve always loved investing. If I think of personal consumption choices with the overall life’s denominator, then decision quality becomes trivial. I’d be Ivan Boesky. Pass. I want to be Chris Ferguson. Yeah I like money but mostly I’m obsessed with high quality decisions that have positive expected value.

I want every play to be an advantage play. I want 100% of my money to go to investing and a net 0% to go to consumption. I like the investing but also like testing myself. I want to see if I am capable of making something from nothing. Can I eat, clothe myself, travel, and entertain myself for free on a net basis? It is a fun challenge, keeps me observant, and also hones the skills that can professionally get scaled up. If I can’t find $1, how to I expect to find millions of them?

I get reined in by my long-suffering wife from time to time. At a particularly bleak time for Detroit even by Detroit standards, I found a home in Detroit that I could rent out in summer and one in Florida that I could rent out in winter while we sweated all summer in Florida and froze all winter in Detroit for less than nothing. She declined. But there are lots of little hacks to get many expenses towards or to zero. I cycle through sign up bonuses for online content (e.g. $1 / month for AMZN Prime channels for the next few months). I cancel services when I travel to get promo dollars to resubscribe when I return. For years, all of my clothes, books, and even maxing out my IRA were paid for with credit card points. When contractions started on my first kid, my goal was to manufacture enough credit card spend to pay for the hospital by the time my wife insisted that we leave. She got irritated enough about my delay that I ordered her an apology necklace but also set up a cinch of a share class trade to precisely pay for it. Then we left (we walked).

You know that feeling when you buy something new and then start to see it everywhere? The same thing happens with free stuff. Look for mispricing, bargains, and arbitrages. Wherever you go, whatever you do. Big ones. Small ones. Just look. The more you look, the more you see. I recently spent six days in New Hampshire where I stumbled on the branch of a credit union that I wanted to join for reasons that I expect will pay for this little trip many times over. Anyone could have done it. It is free money just waiting to get picked up. Not a lot: $100 sign up bonus and $750 in credit card cash back, but ultimately three or four orders of magnitude more valuable than that. It is so fun for me that I could never be too big or too good for any of it. I love every $0.01 and want to pick up each one (other than those in the street at 57^th and Madison while oncoming cabs have a yellow light; friends have repeatedly and ultimately successfully argued that is in fact a -EV).

Riskless Arb

Or almost riskless… Sign up for Kalshi and spend >$25 on the betting no on When will EA’s take-private acquisition close? Prices move around but approximately and currently: buy ~313 contracts for “no” by April 2027 which costs ~$25.04. That triggers Kalshi’s sign up bonus which ranges from $15 to $500 with a ~$25 expected value. If the deal closes, you probably roughly breakeven on this contract. If the deal breaks or is delayed beyond next April, the contract makes ~$287.96.

Now buy 5 shares of EA. If the deal closes, you get $210. It probably breaks to ~$175. 90-95% chance of the first and 5-10% of the second. On the equity side you make ~$32.95 if the deal closes or lose ~$142.05 in a deal break. With the above free hedge, you still make ~$33 if deal closes. But if it breaks? You make ~$145.91. EA could fall to ~$145 per share before you lose any money net. I expect to be able to sell a standalone EA for more than that, but arbs can be sloppy sellers so it wouldn’t be surprising to see it briefly touch that level.

There is a conceivable (but barely) scenario in which you win both ways: the deal is delayed beyond the Kalshi strike date, you get the entire ~$288 prediction profit. But then the deal subsequently gets done so you get that ~$33 too (maybe just maybe if buyer walks, target sues, and court forces deal closed on original terms after April 2027). Or the deal could break but the shares could trade up. I expect neither scenario, but it could happen. Conversely, there is no scenario (that I can see; comment below if I’m missing something) in which these both lose.

According to WeBull:

How does event trading work?

Event trading allows you to buy and sell contracts based on whether a specific outcome will happen.
- Event contracts settle at $1 if your prediction is correct, $0 if not.
- The price reflects the market’s current expectation of that outcome.
- You can hold a position until settlement or sell it before expiration if prices move.

What is the maximum gain or loss of an event contract?

Maximum loss: the price you paid for the contract
Maximum gain: $1 minus the price you paid ($0.02/contract fees are included in the price you paid)

When can I trade Sports Event Contracts?

Sports Prediction Markets are generally available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Trading availability may be affected by scheduled maintenance periods or market-specific conditions.

What types of Sports Event Contracts are available?

WeBull supports multiple sports event contract types, including:
- Single-game contracts (Winner, spread, total points, player props)
- Futures contracts (Season-long or championship outcomes, such as tournament winners or season awards)
- Combo contracts (Multiple outcomes combined into a single contract)

Each contract type allows traders to express views ranging from short-term game outcomes to long-term expectations.

How much do I need to start?

You can start with as little as $1. There’s no minimum account size specific to Predict — if you have funds in your WeBull account, you’re ready to trade.
The total cost depends on the contract price and the number of contracts you purchased.

Deposit $2,500 in Ivy Bank via Finder

A small thing certainly happens within days and a big thing might happen within years.

• The small: you get $200 for signing up.

• The big: if Ivy Bank’s owner demutualizes, you could get first dibs on cheap stock.

An illustrative order of magnitude is getting a chance to buy five or six figures (this works well for couples who can typically buy more per household with two separate individual accounts) of stock for $10 that often pops a few bucks on the opening trade. I have done this many times in the past from $200k to $9 million with pops from 10-50% on day one and often more in the subsequent 1-5 years.

Billionaire Dan Loeb recently mentioned that this is how he got his start:

I’m emphasizing this one over other superficially similar opportunities because of three components that make it particularly conducive to sharing.

1. There is a short-term bonus that pays you for the bother of setting it up.

2. The setup process is quick and easy. I did it with no problems in <5 minutes.

3. There is a real upside here. You get a deposit that is a call option on Cambridge Savings Bank IPOing within the next several years. That could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit for tying up $2,500.

Not to overly dramatize this but…

Here’s what I l like for this month’s Prime Day (or days – June 23-26). Some stuff is on sale early.

How to pay for it? Two ways to make money on Amazon (AMZN) today. First, you can enroll for free each day in their $10k sweepstakes. Secondly, get $200 for just signing up for their Prime card. Most credit cards have required spend before they pay; this one doesn’t. So definitely get $200 and maybe get $10k!

If you have not placed a bet on TwinSpires, then today’s the day. Sign up here for a $10 freeroll. Go to the Offers to opt in to getting $10 back if your win bet comes in second or third.

Bet it on Renegade for the win Saturday. If he isn’t in the top three, then you break even. If he is second or third, then you net $10 to bet another day. If he wins, then you get a profit along with your original (promo) $10 back, coming out ahead on the day.

Everyone needs a strategy for evolving. Net, the impact will be hugely positive. However, there will be a lot of collateral damage along the way. Don’t be that collateral damage.

First, be as open and flexible as possible. Incorporate AI into everything you do. During the transition, check all of its work by hand. Learn how and when to trust it over time. But don’t just wait to be replaced. Instead replace yourself with yourself but in a new more productive and probably more interesting role.

Secondly, support data centers politically. AI skeptics have been restricting data center building through politics. They have it exactly wrong. No individual or jurisdiction can stop AI. The US can try to hold it back politically, but that just shifts it to China. Maine can try to stop it only to shift it to Texas. But the winning municipalities get a hedge in the form of jobs and tax revenue while the losers get to lose in all the ways – they still get whatever they were afraid of but also fail to benefit from the upside.

Thirdly, own the winners. If you rely on a wage but don’t also own financial assets, you will always be in a financially precarious position. Hedge your wages with the financial assets of the companies that could threaten your wages. Instead of picking individual beneficiaries (Core Scientific equity and warrants was one specific opportunity I’ve frequently mentioned) just passively own a basket of beneficiaries.

The MVIS US Listed Semiconductor 25 direct index is an AI beneficiary that has compounded at ~36% over the past decade.

Even better – while performing well net, it has generated about $160k of tax losses over the past 3.5 years on every $1 million invested. Annual fees are 0.35% and the minimum investment is $20k. So this is an efficient investment in terms of both taxes and overall expense. If AI takes over everything including your job, at least you can own the semiconductors that AI companies need. I’m an investor both in and on the Frec platform. Whatever your investing strategy, it is better done tax efficiently and the most tax efficient way to index is with direct indices.

Fourth, Meta (META) LEAPs (long).

Buried helium

Helium has strong demand for multiple industrial purposes from rocketry to data center cooling. Demand is strong and supply is constrained, especially with Persian Gulf disruption. One way to get exposure is Pulsar Helium (PSRHF), up 172% over the past six months. A big position is buried on the balance sheet of a sleepy little midwestern bank, University Bancorp (UNIB).

Buried Micron

Micron (MU) is also on a tear, up over 300% in the past six months. It is buried within California First Leasing (CFNB) which costs around $31 but owns almost $45 per share of a concentrated equity portfolio including MU, AMD, GOOGL, AMAT, and MRVL. Those five popped NAV pers share by ~$8 per share so far this quarter with half of that gain coming from MU.

Buried SpaceX

Pre-public SpaceX shares are up over 400% in the past six month. Shares are available on Hiive as highlighted last September. As we approach the imminent SpaceX IPO, a convenient way to get indirect exposure is via Echostar (SATS), which is a big SpaceX holder, having sold it spectrum for SpaceX equity. Among currently public companies, SATS could be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the SpaceX IPO.

Long gold

I’m a lifelong gold bull. There are numerous ways to hold exposure from the simple (just own a pile of good delivery bars) to exotic (buy gold calls in borrowed ¥). It has returned 33x so far in my time on an unleveraged basis but far more in ¥ calls. At this rate, it will be $60 million per bar after another 50 years. I would take the “over”. It is a bet against a prudent management of the US dollar.

Trust politicians…

… or trust gold. Gold is the inverse of confidence in fiscal and monetary policies that back our fiat currency. For some time (after Coolidge, then more after Reagan) Republicans have nudged towards Democrats on higher spending especially on transfer payments. More recently, Democrats are inching toward Republicans on targeted tax cuts. The higher spending/lower revenue combination will ultimately lead to a reckoning with few outs besides currency debasement.

How to hedge?

Here are three practical ideas. First, leveraged ETFs suffer from tracking error so they can make for attractive short candidates. Through the years, I have shorted many of them especially the inverse versions. Many lost nearly all of their value over time. One to consider is shorting ProShares Ultra Gold ETF (UGL) a 2x leveraged gold exchange traded fund (ETF).

Short ETFs and crypto

If you need a brokerage to short UGL, consider depositing $5k in a new eToro account – they’re offering $30 as a signup bonus and another $300 for new $5k deposits. Use the proceeds to short UGL. An even richer signup bonus gimmick is OKX’s: they pay $400 for new accounts and $6k for $100k deposits. Short the gold denominated Tether Gold (XAUT). It is a convenient hedge with a >0% odds of failing so could be a great short.

Bet against gold

Grab $25 for opening a new Kalshi prediction market account and bet against gold. You can freeroll with your signup bonus or scale it up further. For a specific example you could bet that gold won’t be above $4591.99 on Thursday. I have no firm view but people enthused by thinking about short term gyrations can go to town. Finally you can short specific miners. Gold mining attracts con men so good shorts abound.

Short gold miners

This is actually a long position of mine but one that could be a good short depending on circumstances. Allied Gold (AAUC) is in the process of getting acquired by Zijin Gold for C$44 per share in cash. The Canadian traded equity’s $6.70 net spread to the $44 deal offers a 106% IRR if the deal closes by August. So what could go wrong? Key mines are in Mali which is getting overrun by insane drug addled jihadis.

Short Mali stability

Insane drug addled jihadis are bad for business. However, Mali was a hellhole when the deal was first announced and “any outbreak or escalation or worsening thereof of hostilities or war or acts of terrorism or sabotage” are explicitly carved out of the definitive merger agreement (which they call an “Arrangement Agreement” just to sound more Canadian) material adverse effect definition.

The mines are as far as possible away from most of the insane drug addled jihadis. Somewhat further down the dirt road from people who no doubt want to murder you in exciting and surprising ways is faint comfort. I wish all of my resource companies were located snugly in Switzerland or Singapore, two of the rare countries not already overrun by insane drug addled jihadis nor inclined to encourage them to hop in.

I have not yet studied their policy on Fairfield County hedge fund managers attempting to capture a wide arb spread, but suspect that they aren’t big on either my “don’t steal my gold” or my “don’t murder me” policy, so intend to conduct any negotiations remotely. Other key players in the current scene include a military junta, Russian mercs, and PRC proxies vying for power. Not exactly an enlightened roster.

Don’t overthink it

Everyone should own a minimum of their one rep max bench press weight in gold, ideally their back squat. Enthusiasts can stack their deadlift. Then… then you don’t have to do anything. But if you want to tinker, then harvest the various bonus gimmicks above to hedge exposure by betting against the various goofy financial innovations the market continually promotes. They regularly end in tears / tears of joy for shorts.

Caveat

There are other stores of wealth that could both hedge against USD collapse while also offering more functionality than gold. Compute tokens have inflexible supply and surging demand; that could become a key asset class. I also have a warehouse full of ammo which could 10x or more in a crisis before gold 10xes and there are, ahem, obvious synergies to owning a lot of lead if you own a lot of gold.

Conclusion

If bars continue on their long-term trajectory then these hedges won’t really hurt all that much. If it reverses course, the hedges could help. And if shady leveraged ETFs, shadier crypto gold, or shadiest Mali blows up, then they could be alpha-generating shorts. If you aren’t worth you weight in gold, then buy more gold, lose some weight, or both.

TL; DR

Gold doesn’t do anything. The USD is down >95% in my time… so far.

If you have not placed a bet on TwinSpires, then today’s the day. Sign up here for a $10 freeroll. Go to the Offers to opt in to getting $10 back if your win bet comes in second or third.

Bet on Taj Mahal for the win tonight. If he isn’t in the top three, then you break even. If he is second or third, then you net $10 to bet another day (perhaps in the Belmont Stakes). If he wins, then you get a $50 profit along with your original (promo) $10 back, coming out ahead by $60 on the day.