This week our experts brought you the following insights based on their experience as investors, entrepreneurs & executives.
Monday Ilias Hatzis our Greece-based crypto entrepreneur (Founder & CEO at Kryptonio a “keyless” non-custodial bitcoin and cryptocurrency wallet, that lets users manage bitcoin and crypto, without private keys or passwords and Weekly Columnist at Daily Fintech) @iliashatzis wrote The time is now… buy
Bitcoin has been trying to rebound and then it drops again. As I write this, it’s well off its April 13 high of nearly $65,000, hovering at $35.9k. Bitcoin’s price has plunged nearly 40 percent since early May, its worst month, since September 2011. This free fall comes after Elon Mush announced that Tesla would stop accepting bitcoin for purchases and after regulators in China banned Chinese banks and other financial institutions from supporting bitcoin, including processing payments, allowing customers to hold bitcoin in their accounts and converting bitcoin into yuan or other currencies. The roller-coaster in bitcoin is raising questions about its risks as an investment and viability as a financial asset. Major financial industry players, including Fidelity Investments and SkyBridge Capital are pressing the SEC to approve plans to launch funds on public stock markets that would let small retail investors tap into the rise of bitcoin prices. The SEC always been skeptical of bitcoin funds, going as far as rejecting earlier proposals by the Winklevoss twins, because of worries that the agency could not guarantee safeguards against fraud and manipulation. Given the growth of the market and increased interest, the dynamics are quite different than in the past, but the recent wild swings of crypto prices are a concern for regulators making them hesitant to agree on any regulations being put in.
Editor note: Ilias makes the bull case for Bitcoin/Crypto.
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Tuesday Bernard Lunn, CEO of Daily Fintech and author of The Blockchain Economy wrote: Patient investing works even if it is deeply unfashionable
Here is the dirty secret of Wall Street – brokers make money even when you lose. As long as you trade a lot they win – even if their service is “free”. They make very little money off you if you make few trades a year – even if you make a ton of money on those few trades.
Successful investors are patient. They buy good companies at good prices and resist the temptation to trade too much.
Most of the hype around “democratising Wall Street” is designed to make you trade a lot so that brokers make money. This is not a problem the market can solve without people committed to the impact investing goal of reducing inequality. There are many solutions. The one that appeals to me is like a birth certificate. If everybody was given $100 at birth invested in a low cost ETF and they could not touch it for at least 20 years they would a) believe capitalism could work for them b) learn how great compound interest is.
Editor note: Anybody motivated to work on this, please reach out on LinkedIn.
Wednesday Alan Scott Managing Director EMEA at 24 Exchange @Alan_SmartMoney wrote his weekly roundup of Stablecoin news.
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Thursday
Rintu Patnaik, an Insurtech expert based in India, wrote: The Underwriter’s Gambit Part 1: A New Workbench
During last year’s lockdowns, a 35-year-old New Orleans resident went online, and in the time it took to finish his freshly brewed coffee, he secured a $750,000 life insurance policy. Until recently, the same policy took over a month, requiring a battery of medical tests. The life policy was purchased from a new age life insurtech, which relies on algorithms and augments quote information with data from such sources as prescription drug databases, DMV records to gain required information to underwrite.
In a not too distant future, underwriting as we know it today would have shaken up most personal and small-business lines across life and property and casualty insurance. The process of underwriting, reduced to mere seconds, would be automated and supported by algorithms straddling data accessed through APIs. Devices provided by carriers, reinsurers, manufacturers and product distributors would push data to a variety of repositories and streams.
Editor note: Life Insurance today seems like it still the same as pre Internet. Everything else has changed, so will Life Insurance.
Christian Dreyer @x3er, the Swiss based CFA who focusses on how XBRL changes our world wrote his weekly roundup of XBRL news.
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Friday Howard Tolman, a well-known banker, technologist and entrepreneur in London, wrote his weekly roundup of Alt Lending news.
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