MI REWIND: BITCOIN, COVID-19, AND MACROECONOMICS FOR BEGINNERS

W/ POMP (PART 2)

29 October 2021

On today’s Millennial Investing Rewind, Robert Leonard chats with Anthony Pompliano, better known as “Pomp,” for part two of this two-part series all about Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency landscape, macroeconomics, and the history of money from a beginner’s perspective. Pomp is the former Head of Growth at both Snapchat and Facebook, and is currently the Co-Founder & Partner at Morgan Creek Digital.

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:

  • What the best way is to deal with Bitcoin’s volatility.
  • What will happen if the government decides to step into the whole bitcoin scene?
  • For beginners, how should they start investing in Bitcoin, how is the process going to be like, and what is the finish line?
  • Why Robinhood might not be the best platform to use to buy Bitcoin.
  • Should millennial investors allocate a portion of their portfolio in cryptocurrencies or are they better off sticking to more tried and true assets like ETFs and stocks?
  • And much, much more!

TRANSCRIPT

Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present due to platform differences.

Robert Leonard  00:02

On today’s show, Pomp and I finish our conversation for this two-part series all about Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and the history of money. If you haven’t listened to last week’s episode yet, I highly recommend you go listen to that one before you start listening to this one. For today’s episode, we dive right into the conversation where we left off last week.

Intro  00:23

You’re listening to Millennial Investing by The Investor’s Podcast Network, where your host, Robert Leonard, interviews successful entrepreneurs, business leaders, and investors to help educate and inspire the millennial generation.

Robert Leonard  00:46

I think that’s a perfect example of where traditional financial education almost comes back to hurt us because when you think about it, in school, everyone’s taught that volatility is the way to quantify risk. So, when you see this type of volatility, your mind, that’s been trained for 4-8 years, automatically thinks of the risk, where, really, the risk for Bitcoin is it going to zero, not necessarily the volatility. Bitcoin’s volatility introduces opportunity, just like you said.

Pomp  01:13

Here’s a great thing. I’ve got the pleasure of being able to talk to a lot of people way smarter than me, who have decades of experience across macroeconomics and investing. I always ask them little questions to try to pull the real core of what makes them great. I have come to understand some things I didn’t before. One, the best investors seek out volatility. They actually run to the volatility because volatility means opportunity. If something just stays stable, like the dollar, and it’s pretty stable all the time, there’s not that much opportunity to find dislocations in the market. You need volatility to drive returns. That’s lesson one.

The second lesson, a friend of mine recently told me, is that the very best investors are only right 55-60% at the time. One would have thought they were right 90% of the time, but they’re only right 55-60% of the time.

The average investor is wrong more than they’re right. But these billionaire investors can make so much money because they only make bets when there’s a lot of asymmetrical return profile. They’ll enter an investment that could either potentially lose 20% of their money if everything goes absolutely horrible. But if it works how they think it will, they would potentially have a 5x increase in money. So, 20% downside, 500% upside. They will do that deal all day long because it’s asymmetric. The payoff is much higher than the risk, and there’s a capital risk on the bottom side. So, if you’re only right 55% of the time, in the probability that you’re right, you make so much money that it more than makes up for the 45% of the time that you’re wrong.

I think that a lot of investors are really told, “Go seek safety. Go seek the things that are really easy.” Now, actually, that’s good advice for 90+% of people. If you’re not a macro investor, you don’t understand nor have the time to analyze all of these super asymmetric nuanced investment ideas, and so your best bet is just to use the trend. Save in the S&P, which is compounded at 8-9% a year for 50 years. That’s much easier and gives much more peace of mind. For the best people, the professionals, the people who kind of really make a lot of money, they seek out those highly-volatile asymmetric opportunities because they know what the risk on the downside is, and it’s so attractive from a risk-reward standpoint that they can’t help themselves.

Robert Leonard  03:39

Is there any way that you’ve learned to help a millennial listening to the show to deal with the volatility? They’re interested in this topic, are passionate about it, and they want to learn about it. They’re reading the books. They’re listening to the podcast. They want to be involved with these types of assets. They don’t want to just dump it in the S&P 500. But they’re just new to all the volatility. How can they cope with that? What is the best way to deal with that?

Pomp  04:04

There are two big ideas that I share with people. The first is: What are the secrets to getting rich? This is always the disappointing part of the conversation as there are four rules: (1) Spend less than you make; (2) have multiple streams of income; (3) get out of inflationary assets into deflationary assets; and (4) be super patient and disciplined, and use the time to your advantage, especially if you’re a young person. Compounding growth is your friend. Those four rules are literally on any personal finance book. They’re in there because they work, and it’s almost too boring. I think that’s important to take away.

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