Lester Golden
1 min readMar 11, 2024

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Yaakov, you might find this story of how I took the other side of the Gamestop mania by shorting super high implied volatility put options. Bizarrely, they rose in price with imp vol of 400-800% as the stock went parabolic, leaving free money on the table just waiting to be picked up. When the stock was $250 a $12 or $15 strike put was selling for $3-4. The most outrageously overpriced hedging cost I'd ever seen.

https://ljgolden55.medium.com/how-not-to-be-dumb-money-datadriveninvestor-c57fe6f9ac1a

The same might happen when BTC craters as you outlined at the end of your article.

BTC is just another risk asset. If a put on a crypto ETF has lower imp vol and costs less than a VIX put, then that's just a cheaper way to hedge a long only portfolio, which might be a good idea as we get closer to the election.

What institutional investors are consistently underestimating is the Keynesian effects of the IRA.

That's why they're continually surprised by the job numbers and tight labor market in the fact of elevated short term rates. The countervailing headwind to the US economy is the China's collapsing bubble economy, which will make 1990s Japan look like a picnic. All autocracies and their economies are Ponzi schemes and China's bubblicious real estate-driven pyramid makes Mr. Ponzi look like a piker.

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Lester Golden
Lester Golden

Written by Lester Golden

From Latvia & Porto I write to share learning from an academic&business life in 8 languages in 5 countries & seeing fascism die in Portugal&Spain in1974 & 1976.

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