Today’s Letter is Brought to You By Ledger x Moonpay ! Security and simplicity don’t have to live in separate worlds. Experience the best of both with Ledger and MoonPay.Buy crypto instantly with the world’s most trusted hardware wallet, powered by MoonPay. Use your card, Apple Pay, PayPal, Venmo, or bank transfer directly in your Ledger Live.Together, Ledger and MoonPay make crypto simple and secure, combining cold storage protection with an effortless on-ramp trusted by millions in more than 180 countries. Your assets stay in your hands while MoonPay connects you to the entire crypto universe.Ledger is your vault. MoonPay is your key to open every digital door securely.Buy, store, and manage crypto, your way with MoonPay + Ledger . To investors, The market sell-off on Thursday and Friday last week has spooked many investors. They are wondering if the bull market in stocks is over? Are we on the cliff of a 75% drawdown in bitcoin? Will the doomsday pessimists finally have their day in the sun? These are all legitimate questions. But before we can pontificate about the future, we must analyze what is happening right now in the market. Dan Niles, founder of Niles Investment Management, had one of the best explanations over the weekend . He writes: “There were two factors driving this market this year: * Easy money due to the resumption of rate cuts. * Continued optimism on the AI trade which was also helped by the easy money to fund debt related CAPEX build outs. Recently these twin pillars of the market have been called into question: * A December 10th rate cut seems to be a toss up for the Fed with four or more dissents likely even if there is a cut. * OpenAI talking about a government backstop forced investors to question whether a company that will generate run rate revenues of $20B exiting this year can fund $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments. * As a result of the above, high valuations for the market in general and especially some of the more speculative sectors reliant on easy money are now being called into question. As a result, this past week while the S&P was up 0.1%, the Magnificent 7 were down 1.1% while my AI index was down 3.2% due to the concerns above. The Russell 2000 in which over one-third of the names are unprofitable and therefore more reliant on easy money was down 1.8%.” Dan’s point about investors questioning the future is hard to argue with. You can see sentiment shifting in real-time online and market prices are the signals that never lie. The White House and President Trump’s administration is not one to sit on the sidelines while the fear-mongers run wild. White House Economic Advisor Kevin Hassett went on ABC and explained why the new economic policies under the current administration is actually helping Americans: “Purchasing power dropped by about $3,000 under Biden because the wages didn’t keep up with prices. Under Trump, it’s already gone up by about $1,200. We understand that people still feel the pain of the high prices, but we’re closing the gap fast.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sees an even bigger boom in purchasing power on the horizon. He was on television yesterday explaining to Maria Bartiromo how American citizens are poised to see their real purchasing power “substantially accelerate” in the first half of 2026. Take a listen: Energy prices are down. Interest rates are down. Those are both important facts when evaluating the economic policies that Bessent, Trump, Hassett and others have put into place. But my favorite part of Bessent’s conversation was his pledge to refrain from telling the American people how they are feeling. I remember when the All-In podcast guys interviewed Bessent earlier this year, they asked him if he believed the official economic data. Bessent said “no.” But more importantly, he explained that the data had been saying one thing over the last few years, but the American people were screaming from the rooftop about a different personal experience. In that situation, who are you going to believe? Do you listen to the data or do you listen to the people? Take Ritholtz’s Ben Carlson as an example. He wrote a great piece titled “What If Things Are Better Than They Seem?” In it Carlson points out the following data points: * 54% of Americans with incomes between $30k and $80k now have a taxable brokerage account and half of them have entered the stock market in the past 5 years. * Robinhood has something like 25 million customers. For half of them, it’s the first brokerage account they’ve ever opened. * Nearly 40% of 25-year-olds now have investment accounts up from just 6% in 2015. * Households with incomes below the median now account for one-third of JP Morgan customers moving money into investment accounts up from 20% in the 2010s. We’ve gone from housing being your biggest investment to the stock market. Just look at the increase in stock holdings for people under 40: Besides that being an insane chart of a 300% increase sinc
