Let me start with an honest confession.

This market is so boring that, quite frankly, coming up with something worth your Monday morning is getting harder. When you cover an asset class every single week and that asset class is literally flat, the ideas start running low. Even the newsletter is in a bear market.

But then I go back through my week - and I have a lot of conversations, with teams, with allocators, with people quietly building… and there's always something sitting there. This week, it's the topic I've somehow never given a full edition to: expectations. What you should actually expect to earn in this market, denominated in what, and at what risk. In my opinion, the gap between what people expect and what this market gives is where most of the damage is happening right now.

I've covered the backdrop enough already: it's been a regretful one and a half years in digital assets, and everything that applies to the asset class applies equally to the quantitative strategies we're all here for.

The key virtue in this market - the one it doesn't ask of you but forces on you - is patience. Long-term thinking. Building, researching, preparing for better times.

It's not glorious, but there are genuinely no opportunities to force against this market. There are stretches where the correct professional position is to be in quietly… and stretches where the correct position is to be out entirely.

Now look at the calendar. If the four-year cycle does what it has historically done and the bottom forms around October - and I said last week, that's the consensus, not my guarantee - then count what's actually left: half of July. August. September. October. Roughly three months.

Three months. That's the remaining runway of this entire miserable stretch, if the script holds. God Forbid this will not go as we all want.

So I run the thought experiment…

Suppose you do nothing until then. No allocations, no active positioning, no forcing trades into a dead tape. You simply show up in October, fresh, liquid, and psychologically ready, and enter what could be the start of a genuinely golden era.

Compare that to the alternative - and this is the part I need you to hear… boredom kills. Boredom is what makes disciplined people chase opportunities that don't exist. It's what turns a flat quarter into a drawdown, because sitting on your hands felt unbearable and doing something felt like professionalism. It isn't. In this specific market, doing something and forcing stuff is often the amateur move.

Honestly? The person who takes the time to go fishing in Finland right now - no position, no stress, rod in the water - may come out ahead of almost everyone grinding the dead tape. Not guaranteed ofc… Nothing is, and I'm explicitly not promising October delivers. But as an opportunistic posture, rested and unwounded at the turn beats exhausted and scarred at the turn every single time.

Doing nothing is a position. Right now, it might be one of the best ones available.

Now - for those who are staying active, here's the framework that everyone smart is quietly converging on. It solves the single hardest problem I laid out last week: nobody can time the turn.

Denominate in BTC. Because one BTC is always one BTC.

It doesn't matter if the price is 40K, 100K, or 300K. A BTC is a BTC. And the moment you switch your accounting from dollars to coin, something magical happens to the timing problem: it disappears.

The math is almost embarrassingly simple. Say you allocate 100 BTC to quantitative strategies. The strategies net you 10% over a year - all BTC-denominated. You now hold 110 BTC. That's it. That's the whole trade.

At today's tape, those 10 new BTC are worth roughly $600K. Fine. But when the market goes… 100K, 200K, whatever the next cycle prints - you still hold the same 10 extra BTC, now marked at multiples. You never had to call the bottom. You never had to time the conviction. You just accumulated coin through the boring part, and the repricing does the rest when it comes… and it always comes, unless Saylor will blow up, and this time I am not too certain he would not, but let us not go into this rabbit hole…

This is the framework. Everyone I respect in this market is, in one form or another, playing exactly this game: grow the BTC stack while the price sleeps. It's the perfect market for it - precisely because nothing (or anything at all) else works.

Easy math. Very, very hard execution. Let me give you the honest numbers, because this is where expectations go to die.

First: there simply aren't many arb strategies running BTC-denominated at all. The universe is small.

Second - and this is the killer - if you do run BTC-denominated, you take a structural haircut on your returns. Worked example from where the market actually is right now: a cross-exchange arb doing, say, 15% growth in this environment - decent, real, current. Denominate that in BTC and you're effectively giving up around 40–50% of the return (despite the fact you think its 20-30%). You net roughly 4–5% in BTC terms. And that's running clean, without stoppage and ADLs and all that… In perfect conditions.

If those numbers sound familiar - they should. I told you in the spring: the BTC-yield strategies doing 15–20% eighteen months ago are doing 4–6% for latecomers today, and anyone offering you double-digit BTC yield "risk-free" is someone you walk away from, fast. Nothing since has changed that picture. That's where the majority of the market genuinely sits: mid-single digits net, BTC-denominated, for market-neutral risk.

So how do you actually earn real BTC — the 10%+ kind that makes the accumulation framework sing?

You put risk on the table. There's no third way. And here's why almost nobody wants to: directional strategies in this regime have been losing money and behaving unpredictably. Most of them work for three or four months, then the regime shifts and they just… stop. You're getting panic attacks watching a –7% drawdown on the directional book, questioning everything. That volatility - that stomach - is the price of the BTC you're trying to earn. Risk is the toll booth.

And almost no one wants to pay it, because nobody wants to lose right now. Everyone wants to preserve. Which - let me be clear - is correct. This is exactly the market where you should preserve. I'm not telling you to reach for risk. I'm telling you what the menu honestly costs, so you stop expecting the 15% dish in the 5% environment.

So let me compress this whole edition into the choice you're actually facing, whether you've named it or not. In this market, you have exactly three doors:

Door one: stay out. Go fishing. Preserve capital and sanity, show up liquid and rested for the turn. Underrated, and psychologically the hardest. You do not want to miss an opportunity or take a chance. I get that. Personally I prefer to stay in the market, too.

Door two: take directional risk. Accept the –7% drawdown nights, the strategies that die every four months, the volatility toll - in exchange for a shot at BTC-denominated returns that actually move your stack. I know plenty of allocators who are doing even 20-30% even in this market BTC denominated. (Unless they blow the rest and still come out break-even, which I believe is common case tbf)

Door three: accept the honest number. Market-neutral, no-stress, roughly 4–7% net BTC-denominated. Not thrilling. Real.

All three are legitimate. The only illegitimate position is the one most of the market is holding: expecting door two's returns from door three's risk, while standing in door one's market. That mismatch - not the bear market itself - is what's actually breaking people.

Pick a door. Know its price. And stop being surprised by the bill.

That's the read this week.

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Stay patient. Stay honest. Stay alive.

See you next week.

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