Bitcoin Is Dead

For the 274th time

Bitcoin price : $7,932

Last night, as I was studying “Skin In The Game” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb I made the mistake of reading a footnote and I ended up spending the rest of the night researching obituaries of Bitcoin, to the joy of my wife.

Page 145

• “Prize as a Curse: In fact, there is a long-held belief among traders that praise by journalists is a reverse indicator. I learned about it the hard way. In 1983, right before I became a trader, the computer giant IBM made the front cover of BusinessWeek as the ultimate company. I naively rushed to buy the stock. I got shellacked. Then it hit me that, if anything I should be shorting the company, to benefit from it decline. So I reversed the trade, and learned that collective praise by journos is at the least suspicious and, at best, a curse. IBM went into a decline that lasted a decade and a half; it almost went bust..A former trader who invests in the restaurant business, Brian Hinchcliffe, conveyed to me the following heuristic: shops that get awards as “The Best” something close down before the awards ceremony”

Having observed first-hand the abysmal performance of journos and pundits during the 2016 election cycle I didn’t doubt the veracity of this heuristic and I immediately asked myself if the reverse is also true. What if condemnation by the press is the best time to buy an investment asset, say Bitcoin?