What's up everyone? All right. So in this episode, I'm going to share with you an unpopular opinion that I have and you know this is something I've been ridiculed for over the years, but I have stayed firm on this opinion and it's that I don't trust cryptocurrencies I never have and I don't know that I ever will. With the collapse of FTX that only reaffirmed my gut intuition on trading crypto that I don't trust it, it doesn't feel good and I don't like it. and I think for me being someone that has been in the market for a long time, it goes all the way back to 2011 12 13, 2013 when uh, you know Silk Road right? So for those that aren't familiar with the Silk Road it was this underground dark web black market for trading illicit Goods drugs for sure and a lot of other things.

and as the currency used for buying and selling these Goods cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin And so for me from the very beginning, Bitcoin to me was associated with these you know, unsavory and illegal and just in some cases really awful things that were going on. And so for that reason I Ca from the very very beginning I couldn't um, detach the two in my Association and so over the years, no doubt like many YouTubers and I don't like to call myself a YouTuber but of course we have over a million subscribers and so like many people, have a lot of subscribers, I've had tons of messages. Hey, you know this cryptocurrency, this you know platform.

Promote it, promote it. And for all of that I have just like ignored. Don't care? Not interested? Go look somewhere else. Um, you know.

Could I have made money promoting some of these cryptocurrencies or exchanges over the years? Sure. but I didn't want to and I didn't feel good about it. Could I have made money trading some of these cryptocurrencies over the years certainly because some of them went up a lot. And yet I didn't do it because I never felt comfortable I never felt safe I never felt really like I could trust my money with a lot of these exchanges.

that that for me was sort of the ultimate route. uh I mean of course it was the association with things that are unsavory, but but there's also this feeling that I couldn't trust the exchanges completely. Uh, so you know one of the things I trade stock right? So I and I've been doing that for a long time. I got introduced to the stock market in like 1990, 8, 1999, 1997.

Somewhere around there it was during the.com bubble and you know it was. It was an exciting time, it was a school project and so anyways, that was like my first introduction I set up my first account in 2001 or two and so for me, trading is something that I've always been interested in, which could have made me very inclined to take you know, a stab at crypto. But one of the things that I didn't trust was um, this the the way pricing is different on different exchanges and just this feeling of is my money that's in an exchange actually safe and you know we've seen some of the footnotes of some of these companies that have speculated that you know if they went bankrupt, your um, assets might not be protected which is really scary. Now you know I'm not an expert on all the different exchanges out there and the different firms because some might be better than others.

but I was left feeling like I just couldn't trust it. And so this is one of the things where I I don't ever like to take a trade or a position where the equity that I put in in its entirety is at risk that doesn't work for me I use my cash in my account that Equity as a tool. So for instance, if I bought a house for two hundred thousand dollars and I put fifty thousand dollars into fixing it up and then I sold it for 300, I would get back the 200 and the 250 that I put in that money was a tool you know I wouldn't ever want to be risking that because that's what allows me to keep trading. And so that's why I didn't trade Silicon Valley Bank Because I said no if I buy that stock, it could get halted and resume at zero and it resumed at 40 cents.

but that's close enough to zero because it was trading like forty dollars a share. So if I had ten thousand dollars in that trade at 10 000 shares in that trade, that would have been about four hundred thousand dollars, it would have resumed at a value of four thousand. So a loss of 396 thousand dollars, that is, that is not tolerable. That's not something that I would have ever felt comfortable with.

And so with cryptocurrencies, you know I've had students over the years who have said Ross I'm trading crypto and it's you know I can trade the same patterns that you're trading both Flags flat top breakouts. There's so much opportunity there you can make so much money and I I just continued to say no I just don't feel like I'm comfortable I don't feel like I can trust it. and um, it has been an unpopular opinion that I've had and sometimes I wonder if I just am biased. It's just a bias and I need to sort of check those biases because there are times where you can form a bias on something and it's it's not healthy.

Um, and so you know there's different ways you can sort of check that bias for me. On the other hand, I also feel like it's important to trust your gut and your intuition and so that creates a real challenge because gut and intuition can become a bias and it could be. Um, you know that it could be an unhealthy bias and it could keep you out of opportunities. whatever those might be.

And in my case, I Think that obviously what we ended up seeing with FTX Um, and some of these other you know, just the collapse and the crypto markets. uh, the Nfts and everything else. It just sort of reaffirms that it was a very speculative Market Um, you know where values weren't really based on anything. Now you could say that it's true with stock that the value of a stock in its share price can be very disconnected from the book value of the company.

That happens all the time. It certainly happened with Tesla it's happened with Amazon It's happened with a lot of these companies that trade at really high P E ratios. They traded those ratios because of their perceived future value. So they traded a price today that's a very high multiple of maybe the current Book value or current earnings because of what people think that the company is going to do in the future.

So you know in the case of cryptocurrencies, sort of similar trading on the speculation of what it could be worth down the road. But to me, one of the whole ideas of a currency is that it's stable, right? And so a currency that's not stable I Don't know how you could possibly trust that as the basis of any economy. You need a stable currency And you could certainly argue that inflation right now is, you know, destabilize the US dollar to a certain extent. Um, but but all of that is still a fraction of the instability that we've seen in the crypto markets.

So you know I I don't I'm not a um, you know I I Get this, If crypto has worked for you and you like it, do what works for you. But you know it's just been my strong opinion that I I've never been able to trust it. and I don't see how that could change, especially after what we've seen in the last, you know, six months with the collapse of these Nft prices, cryptocurrencies, different coins, and then of course the collapse of FTX It sort of feels like, especially when we found out how much FTX was, sort of putting you know, taking customer money, then putting it back into the exchange into the these currencies, like just inflating their value, inflating their value, inflating their value. And then you know people are like, where'd all that money go? It's like, well, you know, if you bought a billion dollars of Silicon Valley Bank at forty dollars a share, the money's gone because the bank is worth nothing now.

So it's just, it's like it just oh, it just disappears and it is a little bit hard to get your head around that um how that uh how that money can just really kind of disappear and you know it obviously is transferred. Of course every buyer there's a seller and this and that. So if you bought a billion then someone would have sold a billion so you know they have some. but you know it's just it's just the way the market is.

and so the long and short of it is that I continue to be a Trader of stock and I'm not going to say that we're having a great year trading stock. I mean last year was definitely better. We have the spike in oil which created a lot of opportunities in in the oil industry. Um, this year we've just had this huge drop in Regional Banks which has created a lot of fear and a lot of panic.

So we're in a slow Market but uh, certainly not to the point where I would ever at this point consider going and trading crypto or something else. I just I I just can't get my head around feeling feeling good about it. So you know I I saw I could get really really hyped up I sort of was like oh maybe I'm just gonna be like a really late adopter to this thing. um but you know I just could never get my head around it and that's where I'm at now so maybe some of you share this unpopular opinion with me.

I I mean I know I'm not alone in this, but in this space that we're in it seems that um, so many people have been just super exuberant on Crypto in the last three, four, five years and I have felt like a bit of a, um, you know, an outsider to that. Circle So anyways, if you're also an outsider, uh, now you know you're not alone. So anyways I just thought I'd come on here and share that unpopular opinion with you. and I hope you enjoyed this episode and hope you tune in for another one real soon.