I made a dumb bet

💡 The Lightbulb
There is no Bitcoin ETF!

As we are all aware…

The market has gone mental over the last 12 hours or so, after Bloomberg reporter, Eric Balchunas tweeted the below…

Gaslighting!: Has Eric gaslit us into thinking the ETF is here?

Well, kind of actually.

I mean, trusts can become ETFs, sure.

GLD is a trust but considered (wrongly) as an ETF…

But wasn’t the market moving up and down a while ago on the ETF APPROVAL (and not the creation of a trust)?

I had a chat about this on TikTok earlier…

@fink.tok

Blackrock has NOT launched a #bitcoinetf but they have launched a #bitcointrust. #bitcoinnews has not covered this very well at all and so... See more

Logic: if the market had been waiting for ETF approval before, but only the trust product has been created, then what rational thought follows that this is the ETF?

Trusts aren’t the same as ETFs, which is why NAV was mentioned so much with the GBTC product…

And there is a certain irony with the fact this market has moved being due to — really — the name of Blackrock coming into the crypto sphere…

Who cares though? Number up and I’m having to do a run with lingerie on at some point…

⚡ The Spark
Trust The Data

We’ve been riding this bandwagon & flogging this dead horse for a while now…

You can’t blindly trust ANY data

Studies can show all kinds of things, mainly the bias of the researcher, but conclusions should always be taken with truckloads of salt.

There are sampling issues, biases, and all kinds of issues.

But there’s usually an assumption that economic data is somehow, superior. 

But that’s absolutely wrong

Economic data could actually be even worse than the studies. There’s actually a chance of getting paid for taking part in science.

Not so much for filling in a survey.

Which is why the response rates look like this:

That’s for the UK’s labour force survey (LFS), taken from this excellent Alphaville write up (and it’s only got worse since 2016).

Survey response rates across the world have plummeted, creating a huge challenge for stat compilers and economists. Doubts about reliability have understandably surfaced.

The UK’s ONS is undertaking a MASSIVE overhaul of how they collect economic data.

In the digital era, how can they rely on asking people to fill in forms? 

Even our market veteran says that’s like collecting antiques.

So, today saw the first publication of the new employment metric:

This metric will replace the Labour Force Survey next year. And there’s more change to come, right across the entire stats field:

UK stattos leading the way once again. Remember when the UK’s GDP growth was so unbelievably terrible and people shouted at us for explaining why it actually wasn’t…?

🧠 The Big Brain
Why we can ignore the EU economy

We’ve seen enormous changes to the global economy over these past few years.

Some countries have changed more than others, reversing decades of long trends.

For others… “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.

So, where can we look for policy changes that might actually matter to markets?

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