원문 보기
I think that this is the year where we've seen more policy shocks coming. I think the White House is being more aggressive. I don't know if it's because they want to get things done before the midterm. I would imagine that's part of it. Yeah. And and so that makes it harder for people to hold things with conviction.
Okay. So I think all of that means the market can look like last year which we have a big draw down. However, there is good news. You know, um the rule of first 5 days which is on the right side on the tailwind side. Yeah. It came in positive. Okay. Which is a good thing. But this is more akin to the end of the selling, not the beginning.
So So you don't think we're seeing another leg lower? Well, for instance, Ethereum might go to 2400, but it's a touch and then that's the bottom. But that's going to coincide with precious metals peaking. I mean, remember, precious metals has sucked all the risk appetite out of speculation, out of crypto, right?
A lot of it's come out of crypto into precious metals. Tom Lee begins by framing 2026 as a near mirror of last year's market behavior. His base case is a three-phase market cycle. Early strength followed by a sharp drawdown that feels like a bare market and then a powerful rally that drives markets to new highs.
He points out that markets historically experience at least one meaningful correction per year. In 2025, that correction reached nearly 20%, deep enough to qualify as a bare market. Yet, it occurred without triggering an economic recession. Because the downturn was not tied to collapsing fundamentals, the recovery was rapid, producing a textbook V-shaped rebound.
Lee believes a similar pattern is likely this year. The catalyst for a draw down will probably not be economic collapse, but rather policy shocks and institutional uncertaint. growth. Thanks and enjoy the video. We just think 2026 will look like last year. So um our base cases we are strong in the first part of the year
okay but then we have a draw down that feels like a bare market okay but we'll rally strongly and I think at least a 10% gain maybe more now so we had uh we had that how how deep was the draw down last uh April last March it was 20% it was a bare market okay and that did not did that start from an all-time high or not really I forget
uh yeah It did. It did. So, it was rare. Um, but maybe that's why it recovered so fast cuz it wasn't based on anything other than words. That's right. If you have a decline and it's not leading to an economic downturn, those declines are usually V-shaped and symmetrical. Okay. Do you think that this one this year that I mean it's we have one every year.
You think this one might have the potential to be based on an economic decline or probably not? Uh I I I if I was guessing because it's like I'm just guessing in the future. We're all guessing. Yeah, we're guessing. Educated guesses. That's what we're doing. Yeah, it's educated guess is that it can be a a policy shock like something coming from the White House or the market testing the new Fed.
Okay. And or both. But that is probably like last year then. So it's a market decline cuz people take risk off the table, but it's not really an economic downturn. So it's so we end up recovering really quick. So walk us through what you're telling people they should expect in 2026. I I think it's a lot like 2025.
Um fundamental story better, but one difference is instead of a hawkish Fed, we have a Fed that eventually the market will realize is dovish because we have a new Fed share and they're also not inclined to hike anymore. Yeah. So that's a positive. Uh but the negatives are there are some signs of stress in the economy now because of high rates whether it's consumer or private credit and we know valuations are more expensive because we have 3 years of gains behind us back to back
right and I I think that this is the year where we've seen more policy shocks coming. I think the White House is being more aggressive. I don't know if it's because they want to get things done before the midterm. I would imagine that's part of it. Yeah. and and so that makes it harder for people to hold things with conviction.
Okay. So I think all of that means the market can look like last year which we have a big draw down. However, there is good news you know um the rule of first 5 days which is on the right side on the tailwind side. Yeah. It came in positive. Okay. Which is a good thing. But the first 5 days were upwards.
Yes. Okay. But we just completed some additional work and Matt Cermanro probably has like similar stats. But if the first week is positive and then the first month is positive, the probability of an upear jumps to like 92%. Can you tell us a little bit about the crypto market over the last 3 or 4 months because it was a very it was like a it was on fire and like the story made sense like all right, you have pro- crypto administration in the White House.
Now the SEC is on board. Now like everybody everything fell into place and you had people on both sides of the aisle Congress falling all over each other to collect money from the crypto lobby and it just looked like all right finally it's a regulated market. It's accepted. Products are rolling out.
People are using it. Inflows are hitting the funds and then it like hit a wall. And I don't like have theories or whatever. We had JC Poretsz on last week uh two weeks ago. He's just like, "Oh, this is easy." They started trading options on Bitcoin. That was the top I which I guess was someday in o in October.
I don't know what's your story for why it's been so directionless over the last few months. Uh yeah, crypto was doing well until October. What? So do you buy that story, the option story? A few things happened in October. Okay. Um so crypto was actually up like 36% and then from October to the end of the year it actually had a in some cases like a 40% draw down.
Yeah. Uh one was there was a big deleveraging. There was a basically a pricing exploit that took place on one crypto exchange that led to a what they call an automatic deleveraging. Then that cascaded across all the crypto exchange and it was the biggest deleveraging event in the history of crypto bigger than what happened with FTX after SB.
So what happened to people with leverage got unwound and they were forced out of longs and it kind of wrecked the wrecked the trend. Correct. And it was a it was a pricing error but it liquidated over 2 million accounts globally. Um, it wiped out I think a third of all market makers which are important for they're the equivalent of central banks and it crippled a lot of crypto exchanges.
So their balance sheets had took a huge hit. Coinbase is in a 50% draw down. I think it's second 50% draw down since coming public and Coinbase is a big company. So if that stock looks like that, you can only imagine the privately held players in the ecosystem what that must have meant to them. Yeah.
So Coinbase let's say is a fortress balance sheet. Then imagine those who have like okay balance sheets. Okay. Um does that run its course? The in in 2022 it took about 8 weeks 8 to 12 weeks before risk appetite could recover. So we're like kind of in that outside window. Well Salana's hitting new lows today.
So Bitcoin is down six. ETH is down seven. It has not run its course. It maybe it might be accelerating to the downside. Yeah. But it's so weird with the like juxtaposed to gold like it was supposed to be supposed to be digital gold. Yeah. Well, there's other things happening. So, like in Bitcoin, I think there is a a turning of the holders because one of them is, you know, Bitcoin's like 14 years old.
So, like the the the crypto punk, the 20-year-old is like becoming a mature person and and and many of them made fortunes. Yeah. So, there they've been selling their Bitcoin. Okay. Um and then, as you know, there's this quantum risk that is more Bitcoin specific. Uh because quantum developments are h are accelerating.
Yes. And about a third of Bitcoin wallets are not upgradable. So they're actually quantum vulnerable. But this is more akin to the end of the selling, not the beginning. So So you don't think we're seeing another leg lower? Well, for instance, Ethereum might go to 2400, but it's a touch and then that's the bottom.
But that's going to coincide with precious metals peaking. I mean remember precious metals has sucked all the risk appetite out of speculation out of crypto right a lot of it's come out of crypto into precious metals it's like unthinkable 6 months ago nobody could have foreseen back to we said nobody knows
I've heard that I have heard that story that the people trading crypto have moved over to gold and silver because it's working working better um they're probably telling themselves that they're being conservative right now but there's another story that I've also heard from crypto people which is that if you thought Bitcoin was a store of value away from the dollar.
Now with the ready access to stable coins and the full acceptance in the banking world of stable coins and pending legislation that might even allow stable coins to earn uh interest stable coin holders to own what what purpose does Bitcoin serve? Like if we were using Bitcoin to get money out of fiat currency or get it out of the traditional financial system.
Well, now Bitcoin is fully a part of the traditional financial system. That's number one. And two, it moves too much to be useful as a store of value. It's useful as a trading vehicle. Stable coins are amazing as a store of value cuz it's a dollar and it's always a dollar. So, did the advent and mass popularity of Circle and and all of these stable coins now, Fidelity launched one uh this week.
Did that steal some of the use case away from Bitcoin? Well, there's Have you heard that before? I I know I'm not the first person to say that. I have. But there is a really big story um around blockchains which is Wall Street dismissed blockchain and crypto as like uh just experiments but now financial institutions are rebuilding settlement layers using blockchains.
That's what standard charter said at Davos. The UBS CEO says that in a few years there's a convergence between digital assets and traditional finance because blockchains offer finality and a lot more security. And and Larry Frink says he thinks that the entire financial system is going to operate on one common blockchain.
But why is that good for Bitcoin? Well, it's pro it's probably good for Ethereum. Lee offers a stunning statistic. Tether, a single stable coin issuer, generates over $20 billion in annual profits, rivaling the world's largest banks with only a few hundred employees. This profitability explains why major financial institutions are racing to launch their own stable coins.
The economics are irresistible. Tokenized dollars backed by treasuries generate enormous interest income with minimal operational cost. As banks, brokerages, and fintech firms enter this space, blockchain adoption will accelerate exponentially, reshaping financial intermediation at its core. Lee examines digital asset treasury companies, firms that hold large crypto reserves as a strategic asset.
While many have failed, only a few have succeeded at scale, most notably Micro Strategy and Bitmine. These firms generate returns not merely from price appreciation but from staking rewards, interest income, and treasury optimization. That's really where stable coins have been built. Uh it's a you know, you do smart contracts so you can lock information and prevent it from actually being altered.
You know, you could put a million page legal document on the Ethereum blockchain. If someone tries to change a period on that blockchain, the the hash fails, right? So that's how you protect information, right? um it's a 100% uptime. This is what Wall Street as they think about the narrative around the future is they're building their entire system on contracts like Ethereum which is really bullish for Ethereum.
What is the timeline when you say they're building their entire system? I would say 99.99% of the whole financial system now has nothing to do with blockchain at all in 10 years. Is that 50%. Or is it 5% like what would be the bull case on the financial rails of let's just leave banking out of it. Let's just do Wall Street for example.
So trading settlement etc. How much of that is on running on on Ethereum rails? Well if any I might be able to give you a snapshot. Okay, so as we talk about Okay, so if we talk about stable coins, Tether has about 160 billion of US tokenized on their as Tether is a company. Yes. Um and it but it's mostly running on on Ethereum even though it's only 168 billion which is less than 1% of M1.
So it's not even like risk assets. It's not credit equity tokenization. They're going to make $20 billion this year. Actually, because of their balance sheet, they might be making like 24 billion. That's just interest on the treasuries that they own to back the the dollar value of the coin. And because they're because they're over collateralized, they actually own like now almost $30 billion worth of gold or something.
Oh, wow. Right. Okay. But they're So, let's say they make 20 billion, not 24, but somewhere between 20 and 24. They're a top five most profitable profitable bank in the world. It's amazing. They make more money than Goldman or Morgan Stanley. That's amazing. And that's just a single A monoline product with 300 employees.
Okay. Now, everybody is coming for that profit margin. As you know, JP Morgan, Fidelity, everyone will have their own in-house stable coin because why on earth would they allow something like this to continue? Yeah. What's better for the banks than a stable coin? I don't have to pay you anything. We just have to keep it all.
Yeah. Correct. Okay. And that's one product. So now you can uh build stock trading which you know Vlad and others want to tokenize stocks. Nicely too. Not using ETH though, right? They Well, they'll use an L2. Yeah. They might try to use other chains. There's other chains and some banks are using these privacy chains which I'm not going to try to throw shade, but
some have had exploits. Some have had famous exploits in other countries. So, okay, but I'm not like get me in. I don't want to be suicided. You think if if they if they are build if they are tokenizing assets, you think if they're smart, they either build it on on ETH in an existing L2 or they come up with a new protocol, but like that's the right world to build that.
Yeah. So, let's say the Wall Street tries to do their own blockchain because they want to control the narrative. Then there's going to be a new JP Morgan that is like Tether that'll be built on the public chains cuz Tether is built on public chains and it's better than, you know, JP Morgan has 300,000 employees.
Tether is 300 and they make almost as much money as JP Morgan. Crazy. Tom, I got to ask you about Digital Treasures. This was all the rage. Um, you entered the game, I don't know, eight months ago. You can correct me if I'm wrong. And this was the way that people got exposure to crypto with leverage.
If Bitcoin was up 2%, strategy was up a lot more than that. Strategy is now in a 70% draw down. Bit miner is having similar pain given that nobody wants to own the underlying. Let's assume that there is a bottom coming soon for these strategies for these assets. Why get exposure through a digital treasury company as opposed to just owning the underlying?
Um, so digital asset treasuries really only two have been successful. I'm I mean empirically like since October only two have actually been able to buy more crypto. Micro Strategy and Bitine. Um, both have bought more than $2 billion. It's a scale business. It's not a it's not a cottage industry. There shouldn't be 50 of these.
Yes. Okay. Now, Bitmine is still because the the Ethereum, which is what it holds, generates revenue. Bit's got about a billion dollars of cash and it's staking rewards from its Ethereum is going to be almost $400 million this year, okay? And they're earning $40 million from their cash holdings. Okay?
So, it's a very profitable company. Lee emphasizes that while these structures carry higher risk, they also provide leveraged exposure to digital asset adoption, potentially delivering outsized returns when crypto markets recover. Tom Lee's 2026 outlook extends far beyond price targets. His thesis captures a deeper structural transformation underway in global finance.
Markets are navigating volatility not because fundamentals are weakening, but because systems are evolving. Monetary regimes are shifting. Financial infrastructure is being rebuilt. AI is reshaping productivity. And blockchain is redefining settlement and trust. Within this turbulence lies extraordinary opportunity.
Corrections are likely, but they serve as resets, not endings. The convergence of macro stability, technological adoption, and institutional integration suggest that 2026 may become a pivotal year in financial history.
Comments 0