Operation Saylor - Episode 37/120
Hi again and welcome to another episode of the Operation Saylor. This is update number 37, corresponding to July 2025.
If you are reading this for first time, you might want to check Episode 1, where my plan and details are explained. That will get you in context.
Stats
- BTC stack: 1.23886984BTC
- € stack: 216.80 €
- Current total value in €: 126,581.52 €
- € into BTC: 30,000 €
- Paid back to bank: 13,183.20 €
- Outstanding debt + interests: 30,761.13 €
- Installments to go: 84
Charts
Log
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Operation Saylor. Actually, not just another episode, but the third anniversary of this journey! On this same day, three years ago, this whole adventure began with me pulling the trigger on getting the bank loan. So far, we have knocked down three years of out the total ten.
I've decided to come back for this special occasion after a few months in the dark. Don't worry much about me, all is well. Life has just been getting in the way more than usual and I've had to take some harsh choices on where to invest my time. But celebrating this anniversary is definetely worth some minutes.
Our beloved Operation is doing... pretty great actually. I'm writing this with Bitcoin sitting above 0.1M€/BTC. That's far, far higher than the Operation's entryprice, which sits around ~20K€/BTC. As you can see in the usual charts, the value of the Operation's warchest keeps flying away from the pending principal, and we're now so far away from it that, if I wanted to just payback the loan already, I would walk away with more than 100K€ in profit. Bitcoin is solid, life is good, and the sun is shining. Three years ago was a great time to get started with this crazy idea.
But today's topic is precisely on timing and its effects. I'm going to show you some data that I've been slowly tracking and building for a year, to try to answer a simple question. We know how well Operation Saylor has done so far with the great entrypoint it had... but what would things look like if, instead, the Operation would have started at an absolute dogshit time?
Let me explain you what I've done to answer this question. In case you don't remember, the real Operation Saylor start consisted on:
- Borrowing 33K€ on the 20th of July of 2022.
- Proceed to buy 5K€ worth of Bitcoin each month for the next 6 months.
If we take a look at the price chart of those times, it's easy to quickly understand this was incredibly good timing.
The purchases I made spanned from July to November 2022, which was almost the worst part of the bear market. I just slightly missed the christmas bloodbath after the FTX meltdown. Then, from Jan 2023, the price started to slowly grind up, and Operation Saylor has barely been underwater ever since, as I've been showing you during this series.
What I have been tracking, but keeping to myself for the past years, is a little spreadsheet that simulates what I call the 2021 worst case scenario. This is a spreadsheet where I pretend to myself that I run Operation Saylor in exactly the same way as in real life... but starting in the worst possible timing of Bitcoin's 4th Epoch: the double tops of 2021.
Specifically, this simulated scenario assumes that Operation Saylor started on the 14th of April of 2021. Again, the swap from € to BTC would have been spread over six months. So, the purchases would have happened between April and September '21. What was the price chart looking like at that time?
You can see how things are opposite to the real scenario here: starting in April '21 gets buys in both tops as well as the middle dip, and then once they loan is deployed, the price starts to crash abruptly, drawing down from the the ~60K€/BTC drop to ~25K€/BTC in less than a year.
I've been tracking the performance of this simulation for more than a year, just like I do with the real one. It can show us the impact of bad timing in my strategy. So, let's check: how does the simulation compare to the real scenario?
The first thing that should be noted is the length drift: we are 36 months into the real Operation Saylor, but the simulation assumes an earlier start date. Thus, the simulation I'm showing you is currently in month 52. Almost halfway through the loan length (loan duration is 10 years, so 120 months, and 60 months for half of it).
So, what is the Bitcoin stash looking like in the simulation? Fairly thin compared to reality. In the simulation, on 2025-07-20, the Bitcoin stash is of just 0.117BTC, with a fiat value of ~12K€. Quite sad compared to the real stash of 1.23BTC. In the simulation, the Bitcoin stash gets obliterated by going through the bear market of 2022: having to sell Bitcoin every couple of months at half the price of the entrypoint is a terrible blow. You can see in this chart of the simulation's Bitcoin stack over time: the burn gets very steep in 2022, only to start flattening as the next bull cycle plays out.
As you can probably guess, this anemic Bitcoin stash is not looking good against the loan: in the simulation, the outstanding principal is of ~21K€, and the total amount to payback with interest assuming the loan is held to maturity is of ~25K€. If we decided to shutdown the loan today, we would walk away with about 9K€ in losses.
And even this loss situation is a kind of decent when we compare it to the road that got us here. Below you can see the Exit Value ("how much would I win/lose if I payback the loan now in full?") and the evolution of both the BTC fiat value and the total pending amount of the loan.
As you can see, the situation in the depths of the 2022 bear market was awful. Being more than 20K deep in losses would have been a very high risk. Should one have needed to shutdown the operation due to some personal situation, the loss would have been a slap in the face.
The summary, and biggest lesson here IMO, is that applying the Operation Saylor playbook in the worst possible time of the 4th epoch would have translated into being serious underwater for years, and reaching today with a handful of sats and a big chunk of the loan still pending repayment. Not the prettiest of pictures, and not a situation I would be happy to be in. But I must say, when I started, I was very much aware things could have gone like this, and I was ready for it.
But, there's still a couple of positive takeaways I personally make out of this.
The first one is that, roughly 4 years and a half into the gamble, you still wouldn't have had to put a single cent out of your pocket! (Remember we area always assuming we face the loan installments with the stash itself, not with external income or funds). Even if there's still a significant amount of risk, losses are possible, and the way here would have been nasty, this strategy has been self sustaining for many years. And it might stay that way for years.
And the second one is that, even if it might feel far fetched... there's still some hope that things turn around. If you look at the simulation's Bitcoin stack chart, you can see how in 2025, the downwards slope has almost flattened. The recent price appreciation means the installments are payable with way less sats than in 2022, so the runway of the meager stack that is left gets extended. If we see significant price increases during what's left of 2025 and 2026, this could give the little Bitcoin stack some chance to eventually make it through in good shape all the way to the end of the loan.
So, lights and shadows. Running this simulation in the past years has helped me both be grateful for the great timing I scored (by sheer luck, don't ask me for my crystal ball for I have none) and also has given me some reassurance: even the worst case scenario is not the end of the world.
With that, we conclude the episode. Thanks for sticking around all this years. I hope you can crack a beer open wherever you are and celebrate with me that life is good. As always, thanks for reading and I'll see you around soonTM.
Previous episodes
- Episode 1: #47539
- Episode 2: #61708
- Episode 3: #71794
- Episode 4: #83670
- Episode 5: #98216
- Episode 6: #111818
- Episode 7: #124601
- Episode 8: #140816
- Episode 9: #154229
- Episode 10: #168432
- Episode 11: #181336
- Episode 12: #197688
- Episode 13: #212587
- Episode 14: #249798
- Episode 15: #265819
- Episode 16: #288719
- Episode 17: #322189
- Episode 18: #363765
- Episode 19: #394704
- Episode 20: #450792
- Episode 21: #476945
- Episode 22: #522161
- Episode 23: #550749
- Episode 24: #583121
- Episode 25: #622095
- Episode 26: #660530
- Episode 27: #695454
- Episode 28: Episode 28 never happened.
- Episode 29: Episode 29 never happened.
- Episode 30: #823687
- Episode 31: #861469
- Episode 32: Episode 32 never happened.
- Episode 33: Episode 33 never happened.
- Episode 34: Episode 34 never happened.
- Episode 35: Episode 35 never happened.
- Episode 36: Episode 36 never happened.