저자: TomLee · 외국인
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자막 기준 Fed 금리 인상이 최악 시나리오이며 금리 동결·소폭 인하는 주식에 중립~긍정이라 주장. PPI 서프라이즈에도 시장이 보합인 것은 투자자들이 뜨거운 PPI에 베팅(포지셔닝)해 둔 탓이라 설명. 비트코인은 기관 노출이 거의 0인 비대칭 셋업으로 하반기 기대, 국부펀드·연기금·national account 플랫폼 관심 증가. 비트코인 집중도는 낮아 위험 제한적. 이더리움은 최근 5년간 비트코인 대비 부진하며 알트코인은 기술 플랫폼이라 가치저장 자산 역할이 어렵다고 주장, 향후 3~6개월 내 이더 내러티브가 흔들릴 것이라 봄. 비트코인은 장기 글로벌 준비자산으로 현재 2.3조달러 가치가 훨씬 커질 것이라 주장.
다듬은 글
you know, as we think about the rest of this year and next year, I think that the thing that's the worst case for investors is Fed hiking. Um, if the Fed does nothing between now and year end, I think some would actually argue that's half full because the economy can handle these higher rates. Um, but if the Fed does 25 or 50 between now and year end really to normalize real interest rates, that's actually positive for stocks.
So I think unless the this was going to bring in the odds of a hike this I think that's why markets had a muted reaction. Tom Lee observes that despite a surprisingly strong PPI producer price index print which typically stokes inflation fears the markets were essentially unchanged. A dip at the open was quickly bought into and the market stabilized.
His point the headline PPI number doesn't necessarily signal runaway inflation. Certain components might be skewing the reading. removing those. It's not as worrisome as it first appear. Uh I I think that the arguments and elements for a rally to continue are in place because even today with a hot PPI print, the stock market is basically flat.
So we had a down open. I think investors bought that dip. Part of it is I I don't think that the PPI is sending a message that inflation's soaring there. There are some things to sort of sort of cut out of that number. Sure. I I agree and and people have, you know, said that throughout much of the day, but it seems to have changed the conversation if nothing else about the the amount of rate cut we might get in September.
Is that fair? Yes, it's very fair. That is correct. But if you know, as we think about the rest of this year and next year, I think the the thing that's the worst case for investors is Fed hiking. Um, if the Fed does nothing between now and year end, I think some would actually argue that's half full because the economy can handle these higher rates.
Um, but if the Fed does 25 or 50 between now and your end really to normalize real interest rates, that's actually positive for stocks. So, I think unless the this was going to bring in the odds of a hike, this I think that's why markets had a muted reaction. Well, what if they don't do anything? I mean, Steve Leeman, who's going to join us in a minute, made the argument earlier today that this changes the conversation from, you know, 25 or 50 to 25 or nothing.
What happens if we go on the side of nothing? Can this market stand up under that? Uh, yes. I mean, because number one, and I'm sure Steve's going to talk about this, that the economy doesn't seem to be suffering under the the weight of these current interest rates, even though the Fed is much higher than the rest of the world on policy rates.
And the second part of that is, of course, that if the Fed does 25, it's still a dovish move. Well, it could be a hawkish cut. Leaseman's thrown out that too, right? if they cut 25 and leave us with the feeling like all right you got your little lollipop here everybody and now we're going to wait and see.
Yeah, I think the market reaction of course is really how people are positioned and we at Fund Strat we're finding a lot of investors are positioned as if we're going to see a pickup in inflation. So to to them they were expecting a a really hot PPI number thought this was going to start a decline in stocks and that's why I think markets didn't fall as much because I think many people have been positioned for sort of a hot set of PPI numbers.
Yeah. Look, the remarkable thing about crypto right now is there's so many positive things to point to. Whether it's regulatory progress, institutional adoption, limited supply, the growth of stable coins, the growth of tokenization, we mentioned even deep um you know AI agents. There are these enormous positive trends and yet the vast majority of institutional investors still have zero exposure to Bitcoin.
That asymmetric relationship between the fundamentals underlying this industry and the current ownership I feel is like this fleeting moment. I don't think it will be around for a long time. That doesn't guarantee the market goes up. Of course, it's a volatile market. Of course, they're extraordinary risks, but I do think it's one of the best risk adjusted setups for crypto that I've ever seen.
And I'm really excited for what the second half of the year brings. We are talking to sovereigns. We are talking to pension funds. We are talking to national account platforms. We're talking to individual adviserss. I would How many of them Matt are inbound versus outbound? How many are now reaching out to you initially as opposed to you guys knocking on doors?
Significantly more. I would say the category that's changed the most over the last 6 months has been the national account platforms. So that means sort of wirehouses whether you know it's it's Wells Fargo or UPS or Morgan Stanley or Bank of America or uh more national account uh platforms like Raymond James etc.
Those have gone from not wanting to talk about crypto to aggressively due diligenceing it and trying to make decisions about how to gain exposure. That's really been a sea change. We're definitely getting more interest from sovereigns and more interest from pensions, but that's still more onesie. Um, it's not like the majority of pensions are reaching out to Bitwise.
It is the case that the majority of national account platforms are aggressively researching this fake and making decisions they already have or they will in the next few weeks. That's a really big trend. It would of course be risky if someone owned 25 or 50% of Bitcoin because they would have economic su direction of the asset.
If they didn't like something that developers were doing, they could threaten to sell their Bitcoin and that would be negative for the market. But it actually has this remarkably low genie coefficient. You mentioned Sailor like one of the largest holders of Bitcoin in the world. It's 3%. Think of another company where the largest holder is a 3% position.
Doesn't exist, right? It's one of the most broadly distributed assets in the history of mankind. Even at 3% that is a lot of Bitcoin, but having three votes in the Senate would get you nowhere, right? Like you still have a long way to go before it's a risk. I think there's some risk that these companies will raise debt on unsustainable terms and a few of them will run into issues in the future.
That's that's natural. That's part of capitalism, but I don't worry about it as any sort of threat to the Bitcoin network. is still extremely decentralized, extremely distributed, one of the most distributed and decentralized assets in the world. Lee steers carefully through the Ethereum narrative. He recognizes that many made fortunes on ETH and some still do, but warns against the sweeping narrative that Ethereum could outstrip Bitcoin.
In fact, ETH has underperformed Bitcoin significantly over several years. Lee argues that altcoins and blockchain platforms are better viewed as technology plays aimed at utility and specific use cases, not long-term stores of value or reserve assets. Wall Street's tendency is to latch on to narratives, but those narratives can vanish just as quickly.
A lot of people very bullish on Ethereum, right? Um before all the uh Ethereum uh folks come after me and try to put my head on a stake. Um be careful. Bitcoin folks are probably coming after you, too. I I that's fine. I'd sit in the middle. Um I started out mining Ethereum, Ether. Uh I think I was mining somewhere in the like $6 to8 range.
Uh it's like $4,000 now. Like that would have been a lot of money. I was dumb. I sold most of it um or all of it at the time at $150 or you know, some crazy number and then eventually, you know, try to like make up for my mistakes, all stuff. Um, but I think that there is this narrative that Wall Street is going to put on an asset which will lead to some flows.
But there's one thing that Wall Street has historically shown that they do not understand, which is the disruption via innovation of technology. And I think that's what we're watching play out here. So, I publicly have come out and said that I believe in December of 2023, I sold uh Ethereum that I had and I bought Salana.
I'm probably not going to be holding Salana 10 years from now, right? Probably not even two years from now. But from a pure short-term speculative trade, I said Salana is going to go up more than Ethereum will that has played out, right? Um, but I understand where the narrative is coming from. The reason why I understand where the narrative is coming from is because Wall Street is driven by narratives.
But narratives can disappear as fast as they appear. And I think what you are going to watch here is you are going to see an assault on the Ethereum narrative over the next 3 to 6 months where a lot of the things that they've been hanging their hat on are going to look very very wrong. So I saw recently somebody went on television in the uh Ether community and they said that Ethereum could be bigger than Bitcoin.
Stop flipping. Stop. Stop it. Um I think that Ethereum over the last year is still down like 20% against Bitcoin, right? It has crashed against Bitcoin over the last, you know, 5 years or whatever. The Bitcoin rate of return of most altcoins is negative. Now, that doesn't mean people can't make money today, right?
There's a lot of people who are going to go buy this. There's yield there. There's all these stories to it. I think that what we are going to find out though is specifically in the public markets. If you are going to use an asset as a reserve asset, you want something that is built to store value. That is not the role of most of the altcoins.
They are more technology platforms. They are, you know, trying to do other things. It's not good or bad. Just is what it is. It's like all people want to put all this like morality and uh tribalism and all this like look at this technology, right? And you may agree with it, you may not agree with it, you may want in your portfolio, you may not want in your portfolio, whatever.
I I don't blame any of these people. I know people who have made an absolute killing holding Ethereum. I know people who are like, I lost a ton of money. I'm an idiot. And they went and they did something else, right? Like everything in between. But I do think that people are drastically underestimating Bitcoin's potential to serve as a global reserve asset, which means that if it is valued at $2.3 trillion today, it's going to be worth a lot more than that in the future.
Simultaneous to that, I think that they are overestimating this whole like world computer blah blah blah, whatever. And what I think you're going to start to see is general purpose is not going to be a thing because what you're going to start is if you try to build a general purpose blockchain, you want people to use it for all these different reasons.
There will always be someone who can show up and build something specific for a use case that will likely serve that customer base better. Right? If you think about marketplaces in the traditional world, forget crypto for a second, name one general purpose marketplace, people might say maybe Amazon, right?
Or whatever. Well, I would argue that Amazon actually is not a general purpose marketplace. Amazon sells a lot of stuff, but there's a lot of stuff it doesn't sell, right? How many people are buying sports cars on Amazon? How many people are buying antiques on Amazon? How many people are buying cars on Amazon?
How many people right we can just go through? Oh, there's a lot of products that aren't sold there. Now, they do sell a lot, but what do they specialize in? Usually things that are lower value, things that if you press a button, you want them to show up quickly, right? Things that if you have a logistical network that is efficient and uh kind of uh um very uh adept at being able to get to you, Amazon is really really helpful, right?
There's a price component to all these different things. He even shares a personal anecdote. He sold Ethereum in late 2023 and bought Salana as a speculative short-term trade, not as a long-term hold. It worked out in the short run. But he's clear this kind of narrative-driven speculation is very different from the broader, more enduring role Bitcoin could play as a reserve asset.
If Bitcoin currently sits at a $2.3 trillion valuation, its potential as a store of value suggests much higher upside relative to those speculative narratives.
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