Operation Saylor - Episode 25/120

Hi again and welcome to another episode of the Operation Saylor. This is update number 25, corresponding to July 2024.

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.

Hello again and welcome to the second anniversary of Operation Saylor. This month we are 24 months into the Operation, with 96 ahead of us. I'm very glad to celebrate another anniversary of this little project of mine in good shape, with a great record behind us and a good outlook for the future.

The vibes in the air are completely different from when I started this. Two years ago, we were deep into the bear market. We still had not hit rock bottom, but we were pretty close to it. Leveraged players were bleeding, dodgy custodians and CEXs were dropping dead left and right, and reddit was dry of memes. In comparison, now I feel everyone is cheerful about the gains in the past 18 months, and strongly convinced that we have a bull market ready to unfold in the next 18 months. People are back to convincing their aunties that buying Bitcoin is a good idea, normies are happily throwing themselves into the ETFs and reddit is packed with memes. We will see how things unfold.

On our little corner here, things have been running great. It's been another good year in Operation Saylor: we've stuck to the plan, had no black swans of any kind, and numbers are looking good. As we had the chance to review together in the past episodes, the performance of this bet is working out nicely.

And talking about performance, let me discuss it again but switching the tone from all the cold, analytical approaches we had in the past episodes: this shit is doing great. The value of the stack has been higher than the total debt for almost a year now, and given the phase of the market we are in, I'm pretty confident we probably won't ever go below the total debt again. It's humbling to see how the current gains are already bigger than the yearly salary of many people where I live, which I've been able to accumulate with little effort (although quite a bit of risk).

I keep being confident on this playbook. The original rationale that drove me to begin Operation Saylor still makes all the sense, and if anything, empirical evidence from both my own experience and also what other players in the markets have been doing seems to validate it. I also still think that there's a lot of people out there that are missing out and could be benefit from an approach like this, but keep chickening away because of the dogma that picking up debt is bad. I personally find this to be a pity, because the more of us that we would run a play like this, the more we would pump the price and accelerate adoption. I guess it will take a lot more education and even more fiat debasement for more people to open their eyes to how this kind of play makes sense.

And let me tell you something: I'll most probably repeat this pattern again in the future. It made sense back in 2022, it makes sense today, and it will probably keep on making sense for a few decades as the fiat house of cards heads towards collapse. I've also reflected on how repeatedly pulling the get-debt-to-buy-bitcoin lever is a risk decreasing action: just like it happens when we DCA, by spinning the roulette multiple times, we minimize the risk of hitting a terrible timing. As long as the chances of coming out ahead with a positive result are above 50%, increasing the number of spins reduces the risk of losing overall. It also reduces the possibility of an outrageous win. But, in my opinion, aiming for that would be sheer gambling, not proper financial planning. Just like Lyn Alden stated about herself in her last newsletter, I'm in the area of spotting long-term trends that I can win with, not throwing dice.

Opening up the door to adding more debt brings a few questions to the table: When? How much? What's the max interest rate that's bearable? Overall, what's the right amount of risk? And how do you even measure it? These are all questions I'm currently working on answering for myself. I guess we each need to find our personal answers for these, since many of them are unavoidably tightly related to our personal finances and our life in general. I'm not in a rush, since I'm comfortable with the level of liabilities I'm sitting on today and don't feel any FOMO to pile up more of them fiat liabilities.

Thanks for sticking around for another year. I hoped you enjoyed this episode as well as all of the last year. Let's see what awaits for us in the next 12 months and what we will be looking back to in the next anniversary. As always, thanks for reading and I'll see you next month.