Just wanted to point you toward a few things as we head into the holiday week…

New SecTreas

I listened to Scott Bessent on my friend Ted Seides’s podcast Capital Allocators this weekend and I found it to be both entertaining and informative. Scott’s going to be the next Secretary of the Treasury, equally responsible for advising Trump as well as selling Trump’s ideas to the public. Tough gig.

Scott is not as well known as Jim Chanos, Jim Rogers, George Soros or Stanley Druckenmiller, but he’s invested and worked alongside all of them over the last forty years. And at one point, he was Ted’s business partner at their fund of funds, Protege Partners.

Ted does a really good job here, I think you’ll get a lot out of listening to it:

Michael Cembalest Special

If you haven’t heard or watched it yet, we had JPMorgan Asset Management’s head of markets and investments Michael Cembalest in studio this week for a rundown of all the predictions he had made this year and how he would grade himself. Michael covered the post-election market environment with us as well and talked a bit about his big focus for 2025.

Spending time with smart, plugged-in people like Michael is the only way to elevate your understanding - we do these shows so that you can be “in the room” with us as we learn.

Listen here:

…or watch below:

Michael Batnick on Michael Saylor

Easily the biggest story of this week is the rise of Bitcoin to nearly $100,000. Back in June, I wrote a piece called “How Crypto Conquered Financial Advice” documenting the ways in which the industry had gradually broken through, despite of all the intimidation, regulation by enforcement and pressure from the authorities throughout the last three years.

This week the whole thing came full circle, as the SEC’s Gary Gensler, who had been the crypto industry’s primary antagonist, announced his resignation at the end of President Biden’s term. He announced this on Twitter (where else?) just as BTC was breaking $99,0000 and the Coin Crowd was beating it’s chest. It was impossible not to see something poetic in the timing (some would go further than poetic and say karmic instead, but I won’t).

And as Bitcoin was marching higher, MicroStrategy was flying. It became the most widely traded stock in the market - surpassing the daily volumes of Apple and Nvidia, both of which have market caps of over $3 trillion. MicroStrategy (or MSTR as it is more commonly known) saw its market cap eclipse $100 billion for a moment - making it more valuable than Starbucks.

If that doesn’t sit right with you - or even if it does - I think you’re going to want to read what Michael Batnick wrote on the subject this weekend. He explains the strategy MSTR’s CEO, Michael Saylor, laid out back in 2020 when he began to use his publicly-traded software company’s stock to acquire BTC and how well it’s been working so far:

Check out the whole piece here:

What is Michael Saylor Doing? (The Irrelevant Investor)

Mr. Cliff Asness on TCAF

Cliff Asness is the founding principal at legendary quant shop AQR. He’s also one of the most fearless, witty and respected writers on the topic of investing, having authors hundreds of papers that are regularly cited and referenced by institutional investors and academic researchers around the world.

He’s been an unknowing participant in my own personal education about how investing actually works over the last fifteen years. It was really cool to have him in studio with us this week to tackle some of the biggest topics of the moment.

Don’t miss Cliff’s ideas about market efficiency, what indexing has done to the stock market, why some factors work and others don’t, the problem with value investing and so much more.

Listen below:

…or watch it here:

Bluesky

Last thing - I joined Bluesky. I decided I need to start talking to people on the internet again to get through the winter. I’ve been pretty one-way for the last four years, having left the daily Twitter conversation back in May of 2020. It’s been almost five years and maybe that’s long enough to have been away.

I’m not going back to Twitter for the time being because every time someone sends me a link to a tweet and I follow it to that site, I’m horrified by what I see. The algorithm starts me off with something Elon Musk posted (he is always at the top of the feed), which I probably have no interest in whatsoever. Then it’s politics and crypto and Gaza and anti-semitism and stuff about trans rights and “woke culture” and within 30 seconds I have to shut it off. It’s such an awful, hateful, ugly experience that I am instantly reminded why I left in the first place and how easy it’s been to keep out of my life.

But they tell me Bluesky is different.

It’s decentralized, meaning nobody is fucking with the algorithm and feeding you the kind of depressing, enraging garbage that ruins your mood the second you see it. You can follow lists or topics or people, but you are in control at all times, by design. Jack Dorsey created it as a side-project while at Twitter, then abandoned it to focus more on his other publicly-traded company, Square (now called Block). Some of the early engineers at Bluesky simply picked the project up and ran with it. It had been in beta for a number of years and then it was opened to the public in February of this year. And during the election, it’s use exploded as people were mentally and emotionally exhausted by what they were seeing on Twitter (fine, X) all day long.

I started my Twitter account in March of 2009 just as the stock market was bottoming from the Great Financial Crisis. With just two handfuls of others, I helped create FinTwit in its original form, before all the pseudonymous hedge fund washouts and laser-eyed psychopaths came along and turned it into a crypto boiler room / schadenfreude hate machine. Once upon a time, we went there to share knowledge and learn about investing and trading. Now it’s mostly for elevating the nastiest, most mean-spirited content about politics, whipping up outrage mobs, spreading conspiracy theories, settling scores with rivals (or perceived rivals) accusing strangers of financial crimes and lashing out at people who may see the world differently. It’s hard to look at.

Bluesky is winning new users precisely as a result of how unusable “Blacksky” has become. A month ago Elon said his AI is going to be trained on everyone’s tweets whether they opt-in or not. Then he said the block feature was going to be modified so that people whom you block are now able to see your tweets again, they just can’t respond to them (this will probably be putting people’s lives at risk, great idea). The bad ideas keep coming and, this month, it just reached a tipping point. Less active Bluesky accounts became more active. New users flooded the registration page. The app shot to number one in Apple’s App Store. Time for a change.

This week, Bluesky broke above 20 million users. I read somewhere that they only have 20 employees trying to hold it all together. It’s a pretty amazing thing to watch happen in real-time. More on this here:

Bluesky user count hits 20 million and continues to grow: What to know about the platform (USA Today)

I don’t know if Bluesky ends up in the same place as Twitter wound up in ten years but, for now, it seems a lot more chill. It doesn’t appear to host quite so many misanthropes who wake up each morning looking to inflict harm on others. And many of the smart people I used to engage with about investing, economics, financial news and the like have already re-established themselves there - it feels a lot like Twitter circa 2011-2015 aka The Golden Age of FinTwit before the site became a carnival of pro- vs anti-Trump.

Or maybe that’s just a function of whom I’ve chosen to follow and how the app displays its content to me.

Either way, I’m there and maybe I’ll see you there too. Come say hello:

Downtown Josh Brown on Bluesky

Okay that’s it from me this weekend. I want to wish you a wonderful holiday with family and friends. Talk soon! - Josh