What does Bear not understand about the market's current situation?
What does Bear not understand about the market's current situation?
The economy seems to be in a deep recession, and the market is almost back where it was a few months ago pre-COVID. Some people are still scratching their heads about it, but I’m not. Actually, I profited from this crisis. My performance and equity line have skyrocketed. Let me explain why it wasn’t that hard to predict the direction of the market and take advantage of it, by limiting the risk with OTM options.
The S&P500 is our reference index in the market, and how the index is currently weighted, big Tech companies are an essential part of its portfolio. Amazon, which is now one of the most significant components of the S&P500, is up almost 50% as I am writing this.
COVID has accelerated the progress of digital society. Cloud firms, digital communication enterprises, and all the companies for which mass adoption of technology would probably have taken many more years have now reached impressive levels due to people staying home during the pandemic.
Technology is sticky; great tech companies have historically had a low churn rate. Still, when people discover and use these technologies, they get attached to them because they fall in love with the benefits. Adoption is the key to the valuation of tech companies. Its compound effect on the network is the hidden secret of those that apparently have a lousy multiple but know that once on a growing path, it can go far.
What does increased adoption mean for the network? Exponential or at least logarithmic growth. If all the assets are “just” a matter of calculating the Net Present Value (well, “just” is a euphemism), then even if there is an apparent disruption of earnings for a couple of quarters, the valuation of the company will be higher.
What else can you have if higher earnings are at the horizon due to adoption increase, and the hurdle rate is going virtually to zero? What else would you expect? Your Net Present Value now will be a result of a more significant number on top and much lower denominator for a higher valuation.
Forget about all that negativity and moaning of the street economy from your friend’s bakery or your cousin’s restaurant. The bankrupt has little or nothing to do with those tech giants with market caps of trillions of dollars that are benefiting from the digital life and their moat in this arena.
Your poor bankrupted friend who lost his job or small business, he has no access to the capital market or the Fed Power, he could probably be in deep trouble, but that has nothing to little to do, at least for now, with the best and most powerful market in the world.
Many of us were fortunate enough to profit from the last crisis in 2009. I made 20 times my money and became wealthier by using the Fed’s Quantitative Easing paradigm to invest in assets that, at the time, nobody wanted. However, a few years later, thanks to the expansive monetary policy, my real estate was available to be bought from the same bankrupted people that could not keep up before because of their credit. The same people that lost their single-family homes ten years ago, which I paid 70k for, are buying back the same property from me at 300k with the bank’s money again.
Equity, and in particular Tech, did even better. Look at Apple, Facebook, and Amazon’s stock price a few years ago and compare it to the current rate. I have some friends who kept gold and were preaching against money printing, evoking inflation and the Financial Armageddon. Gold is now returning at a price similar to that of ten years ago, while my Tech’s stock value is ten times what it was. Those friends that used to hang out with me are now not much better off than a decade ago.
This time it has been even easier to make money. It was not difficult to understand which paradigm we were under and what would happen with such a strong and motivated Fed. Trump and Powell (the Chairman of the Federal Reserve) were the certainties that the USA would do anything to bring the market up. They and their language, speech, and willingness to take care of the market were the assurance that the cheap option premium, which was indeed very cheap, would produce amazing results. OTM option premium in March and April on Tech did 7x to 10x.
It’s funny when people find an excuse not to invest because they worry about the Fed’s balance sheet. I don’t get what they think, like if having cash would help them, what damaging fear can be to even the smartest!
Cash is trash, Ray Dalio mentioned recently. The worse place you can be when there is such accommodating monetary policy is cash. Assets, in particular stocks, are the most efficient protection you can have for inflation. Intuitively people think about gold and real estate. But, the best place to be is quality equity, low debt, big moat, and resiliency to the pandemic. In other words, top tech companies.
On the flip side, I’m not worried about the debasement of the currency, and after keeping Bitcoin for so many years, I believe it currently isn’t an alternative to the dollar, and probably won’t be for the next few years. In another article, I will explain my view of Bitcoin which is, for the short term, at least, only a function of the liquidity on the market.
The US will find a way to deal with inflation, and when it happens, which I am quite sure will be in a few years, taxes will increase and drain the extra inflation away. However, I will be offshore and won’t be touched by it. Bonds and cash will be a dead beat, and your fear will become your worst enemy. If you have some savings, a medium two-to-four year horizon and plan to retire, buy stocks with leaps option, quality stock, or index if you are able to spot the right one. And buy your residency in an incredible lovely tax paradise, I am sure it will work just fine.
All this generosity by the Fed will eventually finish when the dollar is threatened as a reserve currency. Right now, they are doing all it takes to keep the economy up, but fiscal and monetary policy will drain the money away from the economy in the near future.
The wealth gap will be huge, much bigger than now. All of us that have benefited from the asset bubble towards which we are flying will be 100 times richer than those with no savings. And will, eventually, live another paradigm in which the wealthy would ultimately be hit. However, my retirement will be offshore, and my money safe from taxes.
Now please be careful, I am only advocating to go long on the top class companies in the USA. Your hedge should be being short on the countries and companies that don’t have the benefit of having a reserve currency.
I think you can be an Alpha creator if you can pick not only the winners but also the losers of the market. This market created an enormous differentiation, and now it hasn’t been effective in discriminating, so here it comes the new strategy to hedge your position.
To be more precise, the current crisis is different than the boom and bust cycle that usually leads to a financial crisis. In a typical economic cycle, the interest gets pushed up when things are going great to avoid inflation. Economic contraction starts to happen, the debt crisis will show up, and then again, monetary policy will start the expansion period to accommodate the economy.
The normal debt cycle, the way we know it, will result in credit falling, monetary policy tightening, and only after, the income will be hit before a new accommodating monetary policy kick in. However, because of the virus, we had income falling before, in a scenario where the interest rate was already zero. Credit expansion now cannot be exercised by merely cutting interest rates, so the Fed needs to adopt other policies to be effective.
Once that happens, the way out has been Quantitative Easing, but that weapon has also been used. So now the Fed is moving to something that has never happened before. More and more economies are embracing Modern Monetary Theory or MMT.
MMT has different layers and approaches, but basically it is the idea that a country could and should always run at a constant deficit. Instead of going deeper into theory, let’s focus on the paradigm’s consequences and how to structure your strategy.
Economies that have reserve currencies like the USD will be able to “print their way out” without creating hyperinflation, at least for the next few years. But all those countries that don’t have that ability will face more significant issues and a hyperinflation scenario.
Fiscal policy will be used in combination with monetary policy to send money to support the economy. Now “support the economy” does not mean the market goes up, it means that the Fed will do all it takes to promote full employment, and that is their mandate.
At a certain point, all those companies affected by COVID will eventually be picked up, to generate jobs. I would not be surprised if, in the next few months, the affected sectors receive an extra stimulus. At the end of the day, the Fed knows that the only way to reach full employment is to send money and support the old economy businesses. To incentivize jobs to the less skilled people, who are the ones suffering, that necessarily needs to be done with fiscal stimulus.
The difference between the countries without this ability, like the emerging markets in Latin America and the USA or Europe, will be enormous. The gap will increase with time, and if not dealt with, conflicts and riots will be a daily issue in those countries. Shorting Latin America, their banks, and debts would be your hedge while long on the USA market.
What will happen in the long term? Well, I recall a lesson at university in which when studying MMT, my professor was speaking about the colonies, and how they were operating their monetary policy.
Dutch colonies; for example, were printing to pay their local workers (the slaves). Printing paper currency and plenty of it, with the queen or king’s head on it, to pay to the slaves. Where was this leading? You would be thinking “inflation,” well, those colonies were obligated to pay a lot of taxes. And do you know what the Dutch army was doing with it? They were burning piles of money to drain the inflation. That was a way to get the useless paper out of the system and, at the same time, to make it less worthless.
So, we are moving into a scenario in which we will see asset pricing inflating. Those who have access to credit and assets will become more prosperous, while others will be much poorer. One day, far in the future, this large gap will have a repercussion in politics. Taxes will be the way for the poor to take back some wealth, and it will be the only way for the governments to avoid the debasement of the whole system.
If the strategy is not clear: long USA equity and short emerging markets, especially South America. Look for assets and businesses that target the rich, not the poor. Start to look for a place to run to when taxes hit hard, escaping from taxes could be an issue if you don’t prepare for it, and take all your money back. Becoming wealthy will be that easy.
About Antonio Velardo
Antonio Velardo is an experienced Italian Venture Capitalist and options trader. He is an early Bitcoin and Ethereum adopter and evangelist who has grown his passion and knowledge after pursuing the Blockchain Strategy Programme at Oxford University and a Master’s degree in Digital Currency at Nicosia University.
Antonio manages an 8-figure portfolio of his investment company with a team of analysts; he is a sort of FinTweet mentor, people interact with him online, and he has more than 40,000 followers after his tweets. He has built a fortune in the great tech years and put together a tail strategy during the pandemic that allowed him to take advantage of the market drop. “I did not time the market, and I did not think this was even a black sworn,” he says.
On the side of the financial markets, Velardo has a unique combination. He was a real estate entrepreneur that developed several projects in Tunisia, Miami, Italy, the UK, and many other countries and cities. But he has always been passionate about options trading. Still, contrary to the volatility player and quant trading, he always had a value investing touch in his blood. Antonio studied Value Investing at Buffet’s famous business school at Columbia University. Even though the central concepts of value investing are antagonists to the venture capital pillars, Antonio’s approach tries to bridge elements of both worlds in order to seek alpha. Velardo has learned the importance of spotting pure growth stories and taking advantage of their S-Curve position. This is an essential element of Velardo’s approach as he looks forward to embracing great tech stories at the right time of the adoption cycle. This applies to stocks but also to blockchain projects.
Bitcoin's scalability problem
One of the most important things when it comes to Bitcoin and scalability is the “Scalability Trilemma.” This refers to the most suitable strategy or better to say the best balance between scalability, security, and decentralization. Usually, this issue relates to each type of cryptocurrency because, necessarily, the increase in efficiency in one of the three would produce as tradeoff an effect on the other two. For instance, a protocol with a faster consensus model would enhance scalability at the expense of security or decentralization.
Due to the Bitcoin POW consensus, security and centralization seem to be covered. However, the latter is becoming an issue, especially with the Lighting Network. Segwit was the reason that caused the hard fork with Bitcoin Cash, but to be able to aboard this concisely, let’s leave it on the side for now.
From the other side, the ability to scale is the most pressure matter that has been facing bitcoin for a while. For scalability, we intent the ability for the network to grow without impacting the speed of the transactions.
Because the miners need to approve the transactions in the block and each block is 1 MB of data, each block should take 10 minutes to get approved. Although in a period of massive queues it takes longer, Bitcoin now has an average of 4 to 7 transactions per second against 1,700 of Visa. In order to solve this issue, we are going to discuss two of the most known approaches.
The first one is Segwit, which is a soft fork of Bitcoin that allowed a change in the block structure to solve the transaction malleability problem. We know that the block is formed by data of the receiver output, the digital signature, and the sender output. The way the digital signature is written with the Legacy block allows a malicious actor to change the transaction id.
The information of the witness data, which is encrypted, is called “transaction ID,” and it can be changed maliciously without changing the transaction. Simply because the digital signature can be modified in a way that the mathematical computational check its still valid according to the network even though the hash will be different.
In this way, in the Legacy block (the block prior to the Segwit change), transaction ID can be changed and causes what is called the malleability issue.
This creates many problems, firstly because it can be exploited by people to cheat others that don’t wait for the confirmation of the block. Secondly, without such significant change, the lightning network could have never been developed. The reason why Segwit was implemented without a hard fork was to change the structure of the block. Contrary to popular opinion, Segwit is an increase in block size but in a different way than it was done with the hard fork of Bitcoin Cash.
What Segwit did was to move in the signature data from outside the base box. They added an extended block in which the digital signature was included but is not part of the base block. This created two main advantages: by not being anymore part of the base box, the transaction ID would not be affected even if the digital signature is modified. And also, it has increased the available space for the witness data, so the block now has 4 MB in total, and therefore can contain more information.
So the main pros are first the elimination of the malleability issue. And that it shrinks the base box leaving more space for data to fit in the block, therefore increasing the speed of the transactions in the network. I would probably add that transactions now could be cheaper.
Thanks to this system, the Lightning Network was able to be implemented. Indeed because the second layer (Lightning Network) relies on the first layer (Bitcoin’s blockchain), then if the malleability issue was not solved, it directly couldn’t work.
It is essential to mention that we could not have increased the block size because, according to Bitcoin’s protocol, it would need to be 1 MB. So, developers had to find a solution to accept Segwit without a hard fork (as Bitcoin Cash did) to make sure that both blocks were allowed while the network was updated.
Again, another advantage of creating faster transactions is that Segwit would see the operation as a weight. What I mean by that is that miners would perceive Legacy’s block as size and Segwit’s block as what is in the witness data compared to its base. Because of the extended block, so miners can select lighter blocks to make faster transactions, and this would also reduce the fee.
Of course, this reduced fee is seen as a con for the miner because profitability could decrease. As a matter of fact, not many miners were happy with Segwit’s solution. The work of the miners can be affected in other ways, especially for mining pools. All of this has created a big debate in the bitcoin community.
Anyways, Segwit does not entirely solve the scalability issue. It just improves it a bit. Scalability is a problem that would always remain and would eventually be tied to milestones. At every stage of Bitcoin’s adoption and usage, new scalability concerns will arise.
The second method to solve the scalability issue is the Lightning Network or LN. This is an open protocol built on top of Bitcoin’s network, and its central idea is that small transactions don’t have to be recorded directly on the blockchain but rather off-chain on a second layer.
LN is a way to create payment channels among two or more people to do multiple transactions and keep a ledger between them. Then, once reached the desired number of operations, report on the main blockchain only the final balance.
In this case, once the payment channel is opened, both users will choose the initial amount, which will be the maximum amount they can use in the circuit. The transactions will be signed in an off-chain and then reported on the blockchain only when the involved parties confirm it.
The LN has a sort of fraud mechanism in case one of the users tries to cheat the system. The deposit will be used to punish the cheater and sent it to the other party. The beauty of the system relies on its interconnect ability. If you don’t have to have a direct payment channel with somebody, you still can use the power of the network to reach that person through a preferred payment rout.
The payment channels work like an IOU sort of agreement, and when the channel is closed, the IOU is redeemed. Direct Channels would be free from fees, and fees would be paid only when the ledger would be brought back on the chain to settle the balance. This allows much faster speed on the transactions within the payment channel and frees up a lot of space on the blockchain, which will be used theoretically only for more critical payments.
It appears evident as Pro that speed is the first the most important of all. Even minimal payment can be made, and fees and transaction fees will be much cheaper. The transactions are secured and encrypted, and therefore This adds an extra layer of security to transactions made on the LN
The main Cons are very debatable but mostly reside in the fact that because you have to preload the channel with the upper spending of the Bitcoin, you would use instead user route in which you know you have enough BTC. Therefore this makes a debate on centralization of the network from a big institution or even banks that want to provide liquidity to the system. I would probably also argue since all the nodes are hot wallets that security could be in the same case an issue, and nodes could be targeted by hackers and malicious players.
About Antonio Velardo
Antonio Velardo is an experienced Italian Venture Capitalist and options trader. He is an early Bitcoin and Ethereum adopter and evangelist who has grown his passion and knowledge after pursuing the Blockchain Strategy Programme at Oxford University and a Master’s degree in Digital Currency at Nicosia University.
Antonio manages an 8-figure portfolio of his investment company with a team of analysts; he is a sort of FinTweet mentor, people interact with him online, and he has more than 40,000 followers after his tweets. He has built a fortune in the great tech years and put together a tail strategy during the pandemic that allowed him to take advantage of the market drop. “I did not time the market, and I did not think this was even a black sworn,” he says.
On the side of the financial markets, Velardo has a unique combination. He was a real estate entrepreneur that developed several projects in Tunisia, Miami, Italy, the UK, and many other countries and cities. But he has always been passionate about options trading. Still, contrary to the volatility player and quant trading, he always had a value investing touch in his blood. Antonio studied Value Investing at Buffet’s famous business school at Columbia University. Even though the central concepts of value investing are antagonists to the venture capital pillars, Antonio’s approach tries to bridge elements of both worlds in order to seek alpha. Velardo has learned the importance of spotting pure growth stories and taking advantage of their S-Curve position. This is an essential element of Velardo’s approach as he looks forward to embracing great tech stories at the right time of the adoption cycle. This applies to stocks but also to blockchain projects.
The 5th P of Innovation and its existential crisis
The secret behind the growth of the majority of disruptive companies is their platform’s ability to create value for other businesses. That is the main shared element of Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, and almost all big and not-so-big tech enterprises. By building up the principles of innovation, they have created an ecosystem where many other projects can thrive, and that is one of the main reasons for their economic success.
Some innovators called “platform” the “5th P” of the “4 P’s of innovation” described by Tidd and Bessan).
In particular, the paradigm is meant to be the frame with which the organization does what it does, its business model and innovation in paradigm it’s referred to the ability to propose its services under a different model, that differentiation would create value.
Apparently, some were not happy with this definition when referring to the platform and added the fifth “P” to evoke an ecosystem that creates moat and mutual value between the business itself and its associates.
If we think of Amazon, the IOs of Apple, or even, more recently, in the success of Ethereum and Smart Contracts, we quickly realize that many innovations are the result of a change of paradigm. In particular, the business models that are disruptive in the way they are presented. Bringing value by producing an environment in which other businesses can thrive while using its creativity with the support of the same ecosystem. If we recall how much Apple IOS has created creativity and value or how many businesses were able to scale and increase their sales thanks to Amazon, we would be amazed by the power of those platforms.
What should be the way an investor would analyze the weaknesses and the strength of new businesses that leverage on those platforms? How should you evaluate a new DApps or service that will scale amazingly on Ethereum blockchain? And, from the other side, can a disruptive business that has implemented a new paradigm creating value for itself by allowing others to use its platform and scale, be disrupted? How much value the platform can create for itself and others, and what risks it faces?
Well, I would start by saying that things go great until they don’t. And some premises are riskier than others. Do you recall Zynga? Zynga was an American social game that grew symbolically with Facebook, exactly taking advantage of the paradigm mentioned above. The ability to scale throughout the platform was handy to Znynga’s growth, but it lost a big chunk of its value when Facebook changed the rules. How many businesses scale and rely on the ability to sell their products on Amazon? What about all those ICO and DApps entirely relying on EOS or Ethereum?
All those companies have what is called a big existential risk. They put the key to their success on the platform on which they operate; their growth depends on a centralized platform. Funny enough, even in a decentralized ecosystem, it’s the same.
Sometimes interest can change, or conflict of interest could arise. Regulations, economics, or political reasons for which the platform is not able to let the business run anymore with the same rules, and those changes can destroy a business. Many things, for many reasons, can change from one day to another.
When you analyze the business potential and business threats, innovation should act as a competitive advantage, and the ability to capture and keep its moat to capture the value should not be in the hands of an external centralized organization.
It’s a paradox to be in a decentralized ecosystem, like cryptocurrency, and have a business model that only allows growth on other’s platforms. Is this meant to be a decentralized economy? What is decentralized in a business that its livelihood depends on a single company, platform, or project? Are Ethereum and Bitcoin genuinely decentralized? Some movements have started to fight against this.
The ecosystem needs to produce freedom from the platform, not incentivize the growth of businesses that are born with such an existential threat. They are a click’s distance of being kicked off, and it can happen anytime without previous notice.
The key to innovative businesses is working on the paradigm of innovation and free up from preconstructed systems that have their own interests and, undoubtedly, not the ones of every single business within the ecosystem.
By the way, I think the threats go from both sides. The Companies founded on the idea of being a central institution that “allows its affiliates to grow” might be disrupted. They have the risk that businesses will, one day, be able to grow independently without relying on such a fragile symbiotic paradigm. Companies that have captured this idea and are working on creating something unique, a new path that allows them to own their future.
Somehow, in the way we are operating today, especially when it comes to marketing, we are rowing back from the “free world” we wanted to create with the internet and relying again on centralized corporations that have their own agenda. We found ourselves tirelessly trying to find out and work around their algorithms that are specifically created on the base of conflict of interest and seek to keep us tied to them forever.
For instance, I was thinking about Booking.com’s platform and its relation with Google. As a hotel owner and investor, I know the value that platforms like Booking or Airbnb can create for those who know how to leverage those platforms. However, as we have discussed, those platforms can change their rules or implement new ones that are not convenient for some businesses within the ecosystem and therefore put them in serious crisis. Imagine now that they are themselves in a similar situation with platforms like google. Many companies are at the end of a chain of centralized platforms that, in a matter of seconds, could fall apart like dominoes.
Nonetheless, the effort and the capital investment needed to bypass those platforms in order to grow are too big and often not convenient. They have reached significant traffic and user captivity that leave little or no space to alternative channels of distribution and sales.
As mentioned before, paradoxically, a portal like Booking.com itself is vulnerable to Google. Booking is one of Google’s best clients, spending billions of dollars a year, but, at the same time, Google represents Booking’s biggest threat. Google could use its data to become more efficient, copy, and improve Booking’s business model. Have you heard of “Google Hotels” and “Google Hotel Ads”? Well, Booking should be worried. There are several examples of other businesses being eaten by these big tech platforms, and, as we know, if they cannot successfully copy you, they will end up acquiring you.
Those channels or platforms that allow others to grow could become the reason for a business’s surrender. But why disrupted businesses do not tend to respond? “Often, the challenger is actually invisible because she misdirects attention. ” The Disruption FAQ – Q7
As an investor, I need to invest or create businesses that do not rely on a centralized platform that could stab me in the back anytime by completely disrupt or destroying me. It’s a Damocles sword that would limit my growth and compress my multiple due to an existential risk that could materialize anytime, and I will never overcome.
In the blockchain industry, I have spotted a company called Dfinity that is already thinking about how to disrupt centralized platforms by creating an internet computer with an advanced decentralized protocol that is run by independent data centers. The new internet computer will create internet services under a completely new paradigm protecting users’ data and disrupting the monopolistic nature of the relationship that Big Tech it’s establishing by owing and controlling all on their platforms.
About Antonio Velardo
Antonio Velardo is an experienced Italian Venture Capitalist and options trader. He is an early Bitcoin and Ethereum adopter and evangelist who has grown his passion and knowledge after pursuing the Blockchain Strategy Programme at Oxford University and a Master’s degree in Digital Currency at Nicosia University.
Antonio manages an 8-figure portfolio of his investment company with a team of analysts; he is a sort of FinTweet mentor, people interact with him online, and he has more than 40,000 followers after his tweets. He has built a fortune in the great tech years and put together a tail strategy during the pandemic that allowed him to take advantage of the market drop. “I did not time the market, and I did not think this was even a black sworn,” he says.
On the side of the financial markets, Velardo has a unique combination. He was a real estate entrepreneur that developed several projects in Tunisia, Miami, Italy, the UK, and many other countries and cities. But he has always been passionate about options trading. Still, contrary to the volatility player and quant trading, he always had a value investing touch in his blood. Antonio studied Value Investing at Buffet’s famous business school at Columbia University. Even though the central concepts of value investing are antagonists to the venture capital pillars, Antonio’s approach tries to bridge elements of both worlds in order to seek alpha. Velardo has learned the importance of spotting pure growth stories and taking advantage of their S-Curve position. This is an essential element of Velardo’s approach as he looks forward to embracing great tech stories at the right time of the adoption cycle. This applies to stocks but also to blockchain projects.
Interview with Dominican Economist Jordan De Los Santos
In this interview, we talk about the Dominican Market’s opportunities for investment growth, some hotel industry insights, and Real Capital Caribe’s competitive advantage.
About Antonio Velardo
Antonio Velardo is an experienced Italian Venture Capitalist and options trader. He is an early Bitcoin and Ethereum adopter and evangelist who has grown his passion and knowledge after pursuing the Blockchain Strategy Programme at Oxford University and a Master’s degree in Digital Currency at Nicosia University.
Antonio manages an 8-figure portfolio of his investment company with a team of analysts; he is a sort of FinTweet mentor, people interact with him online, and he has more than 40,000 followers after his tweets. He has built a fortune in the great tech years and put together a tail strategy during the pandemic that allowed him to take advantage of the market drop. “I did not time the market, and I did not think this was even a black sworn,” he says.
On the side of the financial markets, Velardo has a unique combination. He was a real estate entrepreneur that developed several projects in Tunisia, Miami, Italy, the UK, and many other countries and cities. But he has always been passionate about options trading. Still, contrary to the volatility player and quant trading, he always had a value investing touch in his blood. Antonio studied Value Investing at Buffet’s famous business school at Columbia University. Even though the central concepts of value investing are antagonists to the venture capital pillars, Antonio’s approach tries to bridge elements of both worlds in order to seek alpha. Velardo has learned the importance of spotting pure growth stories and taking advantage of their S-Curve position. This is an essential element of Velardo’s approach as he looks forward to embracing great tech stories at the right time of the adoption cycle. This applies to stocks but also to blockchain projects.