Operation Saylor Episode - 2/120
Hi again and welcome to another episode of the Operation Saylor. This is update number 2, corresponding to August 2022.
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: 0.4183 BTC
- € stack: 22611.80 €
- Current total value in €: 31563.42 €
- € into BTC: 10,052 €
- Paid back to bank: 366.20 €
- Outstanding debt: 43578.13 €
- Installments to go: 119
Log
First month down. This month I had to pay the first installment to the bank. Dealing with a traditional bank feels awkward, but a deal is a deal and it must be respected I guess.
These days I have been thinking into how I first got into investing years ago. As many others, I was placing my money in stocks and bonds before Bitcoin came around and completely changed the investment landscape.
I had always kind of been interested in what should I do with my money. As soon as I got my first decent job and I was having some surplus after paying the bills each month, I had this itchy intuition that just having that money sitting in my account was stupid, and that I "should do something" with it. As I guess it is the case with most of the population in the west (and probably the world), I was completely financially lliterate, so I had zero clue about how and where to start.
One day, I was doing one of my courses in coursera (something related to business metrics, can't tell which one it was exactly). The professor was using data from the SP500 for some case as part of the course. Then, my attention drifted completely from the course content to the SP500 data itself. I saw the long term performance of it and some switches flipped in my brain. As everyone, I had been told that the stock market is this crazy rodeo of wild volatility where you are risking losing everything. But seeing a 40+ years SP500 Total Return chart was painting a different story in front of me. If you combine this with learning about DCA, the Boglehead point of view, and devouring MMM style contents for weeks and months, my young and naive self was able to quickly draw a few intuitions:
- That if you are in for the long-term, you are mostly safe.
- That losing everyting is rather difficult. Even if you buy the top, the drawdowns are far from losing everything.
- That DCA smoothes the hell out of volatility, so if you are consistent and stick around for a few years, everything would feel much more calm than it looks like in the charts.
I basically fell down the FIRE and Boglehead rabbit hole, and that was my whole plan until Bitcoin came around and things changed. I still hold my old Boglehead portfolio. Should I liquidate all of that and put into bitcoin? I don't think I will for now. I will happily recognize that the traditional financial markets feel quite rigged (GME, bailouts, bonds living out of central banks stimulus, ...), which is a strong motivation to invest in something as pure, transparent and neutral as Bitcoin. But investing in companies still makes sense top me, simply from the economics textbook proof. Plus, taxes.
I would love to see a hyperbitcoinized future in which Bitcoin has won and its value has become stable due to becoming the preferent risk-free store of value and thus having a huge size. And in such a world, I dream that we would be able to buy shares from companies with our own bitcoin, and that the traditional investment, in its own version 2.0, would make sense again. Basically, only businesses that offered a reasonable reward for the risks implied in investing in them would stay afloat, because otherwise, people would just keep their savings in bitcoin. A very different picture from our current fiat system where we are pretty much forced into investing our savings into risky investments in order to keep them relatively safe from the constant currency devaluation that is opressing us (in case you want to dive deeper on this situation, it is nicely explained in the last book from Saifedean Ammous, The Fiat Standard).
So that's a brief summary. I am grateful that I started in traditional investments, even with all the flaws and risks associated. Because it was good training to:
- Getting used to see your net worth dance up and down through the chart.
- Doing research, judging an investment, drafting a plan and sticking to it.
- Growing confidence in the decisions that you make by accepting that shit might hit the fan, but that's part of life. There is always uncertainty and, if you are trying to find a way to be 100% sure that things will turn out right before you press the buy button... you will never press it.
And all of those things are transferable to bitcoin. I am not sure if I would have gone into Bitcoin in the first place had I not experienced all of that first.
Enough rant for this month. Thanks for reading and see you in the next episode.