It’s Over. (Not Really.)
Thursday February 27th, 2025 - Issue # 97
(Any views expressed below are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions.)
The best investor I know, said something this week that stuck with me: bull markets start at the beginning of recessions.
I keep thinking back to 2021. It was the middle of COVID, and I was renting an Airbnb in a Florida retirement village with my girlfriend and my puppy. Bitcoin had ripped up to $60K, then dropped back to mid-$40s, and I was just trying to keep my head on straight. One sunny morning in May, I went for my usual run—about 5K before it got unbearably humid. Four kilometers in, my phone started blowing up. BTC was crashing quickly — $35k, $33k, $32k. I ended up running straight to my makeshift office where I was fielding calls all morning before I could shower up. Bitcoin fell over 30% that day and was 50% off the all-time highs in just a matter of weeks. The entire market was in panic mode.
I was paying rent in Toronto and Florida at the same time, trying to hold it all together, wondering how the hell I had let this happen again after 2017. But then my girlfriend, who has been all-in Bitcoin as long as I have, just looked at me and said, “Why do you even look? If it had gone up 20% instead of down 50%, what would you have done differently? You weren’t going to sell anyway.”
True.
After Bitcoin’s May 19, 2021 crash, where it tanked over 30% in a single day from $43.5k to $30k, the market stayed in a two-month lull before launching into its next bull run. From mid-May to late July, Bitcoin chopped around in the $30k-$40k range, bottoming at $29.5k on July 20 before ripping higher. By early August, it was back over $40k, and by November, it hit an all-time high of $69,000.
It’s funny, I’ve been writing newsletters for so long that I can actually go back and see myself processing it all in real-time. The pain, the euphoria, the confusion. It’s all there.
El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender - July 25th, 2021
US government trying to kill crypto - Aug 6th, 2021
Celebrating new all time highs - Oct 22nd, 2021
You get the point. I used to write on Medium so if you want to check out the weekly letters back then you can find them here.
And here we are again.
But it’s not just crypto getting wrecked. The whole world is on fire. Canada is f’d. Europe is f’d. The UK is f’d. China is super f’d. Japan? f’d. The U.S. is holding up for now, but even that’s on borrowed time. And yet, this is exactly what the start of a bull market looks like.
Liquidity is coming back. The Fed just showed their cards and said in so many words that QT is coming to an end. It’s happening. Bitcoin always leads. It’s the first to get slaughtered before macro the looks bad, and the first to rip before the macro starts looking easy. And if my investor friend is right—if bull markets really do start at the beginning of recessions—then we’re damn close.
Trump has a rare window of opportunity. He is able to blame everything on cleaning up the absolute disaster left by the last administration. And he is. But what he’s actually doing is setting up the most legendary political comeback of all time—and setting himself up for a legacy play so massive that even his biggest haters will have to respect it.
Here’s the move: Clean up the grift, take out the trash, drain the swamp. Break up the bureaucratic fiefdoms that have been running unchecked for years. Use the chaos to push through sweeping financial and regulatory overhauls. Force the Fed’s hand to slash rates and get back to QE, ensuring liquidity flows again. Unleash a massive economic boom, send the stock market soaring, and watch Bitcoin and hard assets become a core part of the new financial system. At the same time—he ends the war in Ukraine, stabilizes global tensions, and somehow manages to orchestrate world peace while pumping markets to all-time highs.
It sounds ridiculous. But that’s exactly why it might work.
If there’s one thing Trump understands better than anyone, it’s narratives. He’s already flipping the script—framing the economic downturn as a necessary “clean-up” of the previous administration’s mess while setting the stage for a historic reversal. He’s making crypto part of the pro-America movement. He’s aligning his administration with digital assets in a way that’s not just symbolic—it’s foundational.
And if you don’t think rates are getting slashed and liquidity is coming back, you haven’t been paying attention. The Fed just revealed that QT is ending. Money is about to flow again. This isn’t speculation—it’s their own words.
When that happens, Bitcoin—first to get wrecked, first to rip—is going to lead the charge.
Reflexivity works both ways. It’s not over. It’s just beginning.
Oh, and did you watch the Liberal debate? Embarrassing. We need Pierre. He’s going to win in a landslide.
I’ll leave you with this:
“Volatility is essential. Volatility is what affords us the opportunity to earn the equity risk premium on stocks long term. Don’t let volatility shake you out of the market. Don’t let volatility upset you. Let’s ride this out and capture the extraordinary value that we see in the market today.” Fritz Meyer, Invesco