@JasonMutiny 3. And while prices did skyrocket in Q4 2020 for many of these assets, it turns out the long-term returns are actually pretty competitive with traditional assets.
(If you believe the numbers, at least.)
@JasonMutiny 4. Here’s a price graph of Lagavulin 21 plotted over time (scraped from auction site data).
It’s gone semi-exponential in price lately.
But you can also see March 2020 stick out like a sore thumb!
5. There are some interesting fractures in the scotch market that can lead to opportunity.
For investing, it might make sense to stick to the "blue chip" names.
But for those who plan to drink it, there are some other interesting wedges to exploit...
6. For a few of those ideas, check out BadaBing Whiskey.
Full disclosure: I'm a private investor in Lighter and continue to hold and stake 100% of my $LIT airdrop. Take everything below with that in mind.
Below is my attempt at an honest audit of what I think went wrong and what's quietly working.
A quick recap...
$LIT hit a $4.5bn FDV in pre-market perps.
It now sits at ~$1.1bn, down 65% since post-TGE highs.
Bitcoin is down ~22% over the same period. Yes, it's a bear market, and yes $LIT has a higher beta, but the market clearly isn't the whole story.
The deeper issue, as I see it, was a systematic erosion of goodwill that compounded with every passing week post-TGE:
- Points values came in at the low end of expectations, after a longer-than-expected points season and a community allocation at the low end of the stated range (25-30%)
- Undisclosed market-maker deals surfaced immediately after TGE that feel "shady" in hindsight
- Significant TVL concentration from a single whale was discovered post-launch
- Poor communication on token withdrawal timelines left holders in the dark
- Poor communication on full token utility added to the uncertainty
- Backchannel rumors circulated that the team was deliberately withholding information to let airdrop farmers dump, which created a self-fulfilling prophecy as long-term holders front-ran the expected selling
Every one of these, in isolation, might be survivable.
The most obvious edge is when you know precisely who your counter-party is and precisely why they have to act in a way – usually constraints – that leads to your profit opportunity.
You can then soften your certainty across both axes (counter-parties and behavior).
Here's a recent example of something that looks like a reasonably precise edge.
Sycamore Partners just acquired Walgreens Boots Alliance for $11.45 / share and non-transferable divested asset proceed ("DAP") rights.
The DAP rights represent a potential payout of up to $3.00 per share, with 70% of net proceeds from the sale of the VillageMD assets going to DAP right holders, capped at that amount.
If you held $WBA at the time the merger closes, you inherit the DAP rights. The difficult-to-value, illiquid nature of this right makes it unappealing for many funds.
So, it's not terribly surprising that when the official merger close date was announced, $WBA started to sell off as funds shed their exposure.
Someone who was willing to warehouse the DAP right risk could have stepped in to buy it at a meaningful discount – and it even repriced upward meaningfully into the merger close.
Another example here was the levered token rebalance on FTX.
There were public documents that explained precisely when they would trigger a rebalance every day.
You could easily figure out how much they would trade, when they would be trading it, and the state of the orderbook before hand.
It was a non-profit-motivated actor completely telegraphing their market-impacting behavior.
the back story here is I was trying to run a strategy on a new crypto exchange.
with 2.5bp taker and 0bp maker fees, i was trying to execute all my trades as limit orders to reduce t-costs, but constantly found myself immediately underwater by 15-20bp. on both entry and exit.
the problem is that the exchange does, on average, ~$400/second in BTC volume. the median is likely $0/second.
so, if I put a $10k limit order on the best bid or best ask, the odds of organic taker flow hitting me was unlikely.
in reality, it just sat there until a market maker saw that the market price was 10bp+ away from where markets were pricing on another exchange (e.g. Binance) and then just trade through me.
so, I was just absorbing toxic flow over and over.