In commemoration of the current resurgence of one of our favorite assets, please see the links below which are a couple of short, sweet, and concise notes our founder and CIO penned back in 2014–2015
Should you invest in Bitcoin (from May, 2014)
Bitcoin Economics [for the layman] (from Feb, 2015)
These quite brief notes on Bitcoin have held up extremely well against the test time
Enjoy!
Published October 1st, 2020
Published in July, 2020
Published to newsletter subscribers on March 20th, 2020
Markets have sold off at a large scale on the back of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Many of us were able to see this coming months in advance, noticing how the events in Wuhan would inevitably spread across the globe. Fortunately, we fell into this camp and were able to hedge market risk effectively. As markets reached the 95th percentile in terms of their earnings multiple over the past 100yrs, it would have taken a lot less to bring the markets down. …
Originally published and sent out to newsletter subscribers on October 24th, 2019. Sign up for more info at otium.tech
Dear Friends and Colleagues:
We are excited to report “top of class” Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund results for 1H 2019.
Our view of global multi-asset markets proved to be prescient through the first half of the year and we successfully capitalized on the theses discussed in Q1 2019 (Blog, Newsletter). The return attribution was diversified through a variety of low correlation allocations in an effort to decrease volatility and increase risk adjusted return.
Our most notable wins included:
While this title may offend some, it is not meant to do so and I will clear the air by declaring myself as politically neutral. Populism has swept over the globe in the past few years, and one effect of this may be heightened levels of “cronyism”. Once again this is not a political take, my personal view on this is neither positive nor negative, simply an objective observation.
As the dominant cryptocurrency in this new regime, Bitcoin surfaced in 2009 and thus began a revolution in the form of a grass roots type of effort which has grown into an over $200 Billion industry of publicly traded blockchain tokens / crypto assets. The industry is substantially larger when taking into consideration the mega-companies including the likes of Bitmain, Coinbase, Binance, and so on (Bitmain is working on an IPO and Coinbase just raised at an $8B valuation).
Many renowned academics, researchers, and professionals claimed bitcoin was dead over and over — but those of us who have been involved in the industry for at least a few years understand that the recent downturn is simply part of a consolidation process which has historically represented a preparation for greater growth. Simply put: programmable, global, decentralized (or not), digital currencies will be a multi trillion dollar market. Further, while it is quite difficult to change the core code which bitcoin was built upon, the protocol continues to evolve and develop over time through the development of 2nd layer applications along with other technical improvements. …
Creation and analysis of an Adjusted Volatility metric suited for crypto assets
While we are not quite ready to go public with Otium just yet— I thought it would be a good idea to take a breather from the entertaining chaos that is the crypto-currency industry (Forks, ICOs, etc) to complete some old school investment analysis. What better playing field then the wild west of alt-coins?
There are now over 1000 coins on the market, however I chose to only pull return data on the top 30+ coins or at least the ones with data readily available (a big thank you to Alt19.com). In order to determine the most invest-able alt-coin, I pulled hourly returns in the base currency of BTC (since this is the base trading currency for most these coins) to formulate into an adjusted volatility calculation. Using these hourly returns, I then averaged the data and calculated standard deviations on a per day basis to smooth out the numbers. After annualizing, I chose a 2 week rolling average to further scrub this messy data. The analysis below shows YTD 2 week rolling average volatility, YTD median volatility (from the 2 week rolling average sample), and then top 5 rankings of each at the bottom. …