My father and grandfather used to buy eggs on the CME in the 40s and 50s. One time my father “speculated” in onions and on delivery date onions were essentially worthless. So my Dad took delivery, placed the onions in his garage and let anyone who wanted onions come and take them. I always thought the story was apocryphal until years later an article in the WSJ referenced the Great Onion Crash on the CME.
It's an amazing story. Gerald Ford led the process in the House to make it so onions could never be traded. When you look at price volatility today, what has more variance? Onions or crude oil? Onions do because there is no futures contract to hedge. Pretty amazing what happened back in the day when sacks were more valuable than the onions. I traded with a guy (ADH) was his badge. His father traded onions and took delivery because his biggest client was Campbell's Soup! He had other clients who were long onions, and when he told them to get out they got greedy and lost everything.
I have noticed over the past few years that as any derivatives tied to crypto are introduced, the direction of the price fluctuation is nearly always downward, because the vast majority of positions are long, not short, which I suppose is to be expected in a spot market LOL and thus downward pressure is presented because people have a new opportunity to finally get short.
As a markets guy, which cryptos do you think have the best chance of actually building something meaningful besides being speculative instruments. For those that don't know, Mitch has 30+ years in the commodity business.
Thank you for writing that Bitcoin is neither a hedge against inflation nor a store of value.
I travel in circles where people speak glowingly of crypto as possessing quantum-theory deep genius that can't be fully understood but its brilliance is self-evident. I find it all mercurial, and like gold before it, there are apologists at each stage of the way to explain why it is not going up but down. and that this is a good thing. I've seen Ponzi schemes run with more clear rhetoric but hopefully I am wrong, and that this computer generated token won't eventually go to zero.
I remember in the early days of Web 1.0, it was similar. Dot Com meant you were a billion dollar company. I think there are cryptos running real businesses that will be meaningful. Others like Ethereum or Algorand allow software people to build decentralized businesses on top of them. However, it's still VERY cumbersome. I want to invest in a Bitcoin mining operation and I can't easily exchange my USD coin for Bitcoin. It's next to impossible to do and I am trying to use the best crypto company out there by market cap, Coinbase.
My father and grandfather used to buy eggs on the CME in the 40s and 50s. One time my father “speculated” in onions and on delivery date onions were essentially worthless. So my Dad took delivery, placed the onions in his garage and let anyone who wanted onions come and take them. I always thought the story was apocryphal until years later an article in the WSJ referenced the Great Onion Crash on the CME.
It's an amazing story. Gerald Ford led the process in the House to make it so onions could never be traded. When you look at price volatility today, what has more variance? Onions or crude oil? Onions do because there is no futures contract to hedge. Pretty amazing what happened back in the day when sacks were more valuable than the onions. I traded with a guy (ADH) was his badge. His father traded onions and took delivery because his biggest client was Campbell's Soup! He had other clients who were long onions, and when he told them to get out they got greedy and lost everything.
I have noticed over the past few years that as any derivatives tied to crypto are introduced, the direction of the price fluctuation is nearly always downward, because the vast majority of positions are long, not short, which I suppose is to be expected in a spot market LOL and thus downward pressure is presented because people have a new opportunity to finally get short.
As a markets guy, which cryptos do you think have the best chance of actually building something meaningful besides being speculative instruments. For those that don't know, Mitch has 30+ years in the commodity business.
Thank you for writing that Bitcoin is neither a hedge against inflation nor a store of value.
I travel in circles where people speak glowingly of crypto as possessing quantum-theory deep genius that can't be fully understood but its brilliance is self-evident. I find it all mercurial, and like gold before it, there are apologists at each stage of the way to explain why it is not going up but down. and that this is a good thing. I've seen Ponzi schemes run with more clear rhetoric but hopefully I am wrong, and that this computer generated token won't eventually go to zero.
I remember in the early days of Web 1.0, it was similar. Dot Com meant you were a billion dollar company. I think there are cryptos running real businesses that will be meaningful. Others like Ethereum or Algorand allow software people to build decentralized businesses on top of them. However, it's still VERY cumbersome. I want to invest in a Bitcoin mining operation and I can't easily exchange my USD coin for Bitcoin. It's next to impossible to do and I am trying to use the best crypto company out there by market cap, Coinbase.