Weekend Reading #224

This is the two-hundred-and-twenty-fourth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 1st July 2023.

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What we’re thinking

Despite Russian markets no longer being available for us to trade any longer, it is still a country and culture with which we have a lot of history. The events of last weekend, the supposed “coup” as the western press has anointed it, left us like many others with lots of questions.  The cacophony of sensationalistic takes across the Western media once again reminds us of the heavily polluted waters from which we are offered our information. If we were simply consuming what is fed to us without the benefit of our historical understanding and network, we would have a completely different view. We can apply this to almost everything we read and see ranging from US politics to why Nvidia wasn’t going to go up to why Erdogan was going to lose the election in Turkey.

In markets what's catching our eye is two things. First commodities and secondly crypto. Industrial commodity names have been extremely weak despite the US markets pricing for a soft landing. What is that telling us? Maybe that China is in deep trouble. Crypto has been extremely strong? What is that telling us? Maybe that ETF is not so far away. It would be meaningful should it be granted. At time of writing some headlines regarding the Bitcoin ETFs crossed which saw a big down move, only to be almost fully retraced not long after. We’re sure there will be lots of reasons written about what unfolds next, all of which were created afterwards. All we know is price action guides.

What we’re reading

John Mearsheimer is someone who really divides opinion in the world of geopolitics. Some think he is the devil incarnate and some think he is a genius. Some think he is both. His overriding view that the West was responsible for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by virtue of its overtures to Ukraine to join NATO led to him being ridiculed by just as many “experts” as those who feted him. This week he took to his Substack to write a VERY comprehensive piece of where his views stand on the war. He covers the position of each party, its goals and what he thinks the likely outcome is. Even if you don’t agree with his conclusion – a long, grinding war of attrition in which Russia ultimately prevails albeit not with all its objectives, there is so much good stuff in here to think about. Worth the time to read in full. DC

How diamond-handed can one get? I came across this thread by @redphonecrypto describing a new protocol – perhaps a meme in itself – that challenges Ether bulls to put their money where their mouth is. The bet: that Ether one day trades at $10k apiece. The challenge: lock ETH and USDC into a Uniswap v3 LP position, accruing trading fees along the way until such time as ETH trades above $10k, at which time the ETH unlocks and is returned, in addition to the fees streamed in along the way, following which the protocol self-destructs. As he says, building upon the years of infrastructure put into place is what allows projects like this to materialise. Is this the best strategy for catching an ETH run up to $10k – not really, but this isn’t for everyone. Diamond handed individuals - apply here: https://exit10.fi/. And enjoy the X-files reference.

On a different note, as far as meme coins go, most of crypto would have already heard about the pepe token. Given how it’s pretty much meme season now with even the likes of BCH and LTC printing vertical green candles, I thought it’d be worth reading up on the new challenger in the meme token space, with the green meme frog seeking to supplant the Inu dogs on crypto’s front cover. The pepe website isn’t a wellspring of information, but there have been some very well-thought out decisions made for the project: no pre-sale, 93.1% of tokens in a uniswap liquidity pool, LP tokens burnt and the contract renounced, leaving 6.9% of the total 420,690,000,000,000 tokens (a well-memed token supply choice, to be sure) for a specific set of uses, with full transparency on the wallet holding this allocation, complete with an easy-to-find ENS name pepecexwallet.eth. Will their plans for a pepe community come good? Who knows. But at the very least it’s honest: it’s all a meme. A US$691m meme, as it currently stands. EL

What we’re watching

I went to the movies this week for a rare sojourn and watched Wes Anderson’s latest one called Asteroid City. Anderson has now got to the point in his career where he can attract pretty much anyone to act in his films. And in this one, the list of star studded cameos is almost endless. Jason Shwartzman is the main character alongside Scarlett Johansson but there is room for Tom Hanks, Steve Carrell, Adrian Brody, Edward Norton, Bryan Cranston, Matt Dillon, Margot Robbie, Jeff Goldblum, Tilda Swinton etc etc. The film itself is classic Wes Anderson. Its quirky, hilarious and just really strange. The plot is all over the place. A competition for gifted youngsters on the site of a town in the middle of nowhere, where an asteroid once landed. The competition gets interrupted by an alien landing to pick up the asteroid that had been sitting there for decades. All very odd.  But what makes it more interesting is that this all just the plot inside a television show created by Norton’s character and produced by Brody’s. With the screen changing from black and white to colour and the film moving around from plot to sub plot, it's all very confusing, but that’s the point as always with Anderson films. I enjoyed it, I think. Though maybe because I’m still not quite sure what happened in the end. DC

I’m usually a big fan of Christoph Waltz, the Austrian-German actor who’s renowned for his roles in classics like Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained; and so this week when I saw that he was to star in a new film, “Dead for a Dollar” I was excited to watch. However, I was rather disappointed by what I was to sat down and saw. The film is a western and in how I first described it as I finished watching the film is simply a low-grade rip-off of Waltz’ role in Django Unchained, given he once again plays a bounty hunter, this time in Wild West 1890’s New Mexico where he must help to find another character’s wife whilst encountering local villains along the way. The plot feels rather shallow, the action scenes a tad underwhelming and the character interactions with one another without the vibrancy that makes a film great. Overall, not a film I’d rush to watch again, and perhaps my least favourite of Waltz’ works. HS

What we’re listening to

I have two great recommendations this week. First up is the inspiration for our blogpost this week - a BRILLIANT conversation on the Empire podcast with Punk 6529, the pseudonymous collector of art NFTs. 6529 is famous as the purchaser of blue chip NFT art and one of the great supporters of the technology that underpins them. This conversation is the second one of this nature I have heard with him. The first was around 2 years ago in which he laid out his theory for why crypto matters. In this one he updates his thinking. And he does it so articulately. The highlight for me is his short explanation of why he bought The Goose, the most famous of Dmitri Cherniak’s fantastic Ringer generative art series. He uses the world “emergent” to describe the algorithm that Cherniak created to produce his Ringers. This is one of the few that I really do think everyone should listen to. It’s delivered through his customary voice-muffler to hide his voice. I suspect 6529 is someone really high-profile given the vast sums he invests in NFTs and the efforts he takes to remain pseudonymous. Thank me later.

Probably the greatest snooker player of all time, Ronnie O’Sullivan, was on Desert Island Discs this week. Anyone who half follows snooker, will know that he is the sport’s mercurial genius. And as with many geniuses he faces his demons. Depression, addiction, you name it he has been through it. But I had no idea of his life story. His parents owned a chain of sex shops in Soho when he was a kid and he spent much of his youth in snooker halls. He remembers being dropped off at 8am by his dad and left with the barman to look after him all day at age 12. His dad called it the creche. Then his dad got convicted of murder when he was just 16. And when his mom got done 4 years later for VAT fraud, he was left to look after his little sister while both were in jail. Tough kid. Through it all he played snooker and broke records. A great listen. His music choices are pretty cool too. DC