Good morning everyone. And welcome back to somewhat more exciting market!

Quick housekeeping first: if this letter has ever earned a few minutes of your week, and has been valuable, I appreciate if you forward it to one person. It's how the right rooms keep finding us. Thank you.

Now… last week I wrote that the spring was loading and that I expected a decent move on BTC within a week or two.

Four days later BTC went from roughly $62,800 to just under $79,500. Honestly - I did not expect it to happen the way it did - non-stop push without any stops, but here we are.

I'd love to take the victory lap… but I am humble guy and def I'm not going to. I applaud everyone still alive - as its the moment that we have all been waiting for.

By the end of this letter you'll understand why the s h a p e of this move matters far more than the size of it.

The catalyst was not crypto. It came out of Washington on Wednesday.

The 30-year yield had just printed 5.34%. The highest since 2007. Treasury responded by announcing it would at least double the size of its long-dated bond buyback operations. Dollar softened. And a market that was sitting on a record pile of short positioning had nowhere to go.

What followed was this: around $3.5 billion in leveraged positions liquidated inside 24 hours - this was the seventh largest liquidation event on record bytheway.

Roughly 110,000 traders wiped YIKes. Reverse 10/10th pretty much if you ask me.
Short liquidations outran longs by something like eight-and-a-half to one.

In essence, it was forced buying.

The market went from “I am probably overexposed to BTC” to “I am not sure if I have enough” in 1 hour window.

Total crypto market cap added roughly $280 billion in a single day. Still a baby learning to walk in comparison to anything else… but regardless - nobody makes a $280 billion allocation decision in a day.

Meaning - the fuel was positioning, not a short-term belief.

A quick additional note here (sorry for covering this too long, just to make sure since its actually more complexthan not)

Treasury buyback is not QE.

The Fed's bond purchases create new bank reserves - money that did not previously exist.
A Treasury buyback retires long-dated paper and funds it by issuing short-term bills.

It is a refinancing. One liability swapped for another. Total debt unchanged. Money supply unchanged.

It's a real liquidity effect at the margin, and it clearly moved risk assets. But it is a composition trade, not an expansion.

Think of it as refinancing 30 yrs mortage with lower interest rate with a short term loan with higher interest.

One important thing is that the Fed itself announced this month that it will conduct zero reserve management purchases of T-bills in the current period. Zer0 with 0 at the end. Policymakers are comfortable with reserve levels. That is the opposite of a printing regime.

One more thing worth writing on your whiteboard: the expanded buyback takes effect September 9 and is currently scheduled to run only through November 4. It is finite, and it will be reassessed.

The market repriced a refinancing operation as a regime change.

I do NOT think the good old times are coming back in the form people are nostalgic for aka 2023 where random SMA teams printed 5-10% monthly.

The era where you bought a random signal, held it, and printed a number that made you look like a geniuz… that market required liquidity depth that simply does not exist right now. We are still thin. Still ~39% below the October 2025 high of $126,198. Still below the January peak of $94,820. The 200-day sits around $69,000, and price only just reclaimed it. This is where it gets interesting.

What has changed is that things are moving again. And for anyone running momentum, vol, or trend, movement is the raw material you are crawing for so much.

Flat tape produces nothing no matter how good your models are. So yes - it gets easier from here. But It never does get easy (at least as easy as it was).

Which brings me to the actual subject of this letter.

Last week I wrote that nobody was answering. This week my inbox is full, and chats are active.

Teams I hadn't heard from since last autumn. Teams that went completely dark through the entire drought - no monthly updates, no drawdown explanations, no market commentary, nothing. Names I had honestly filed away as gone. All of them arriving with roughly the same message: "We printed a strong month. Time to raise."

ok lol tyvm for letting us know.

I have two pieces of bad news for yáll.

First: so what? everybody printed. BTC moved 22% in four days on the back of an eight-to-one short squeeze. Momentum books printed. Long-biased books printed. Trend followers printed. Half the teams that had been dead flat since March suddenly have a green month. You are not walking into an conversation with a differentiator. You're walking in with the beta of the week, holding it like it's a track record.

A month that everyone made is not a track record. It's a (beta) market condition.

Second, and this is the one that actually costs money: capital does not allocate to returns. It allocates to investability. Whether you're institutionalised. Whether your reporting holds up under diligence. Whether your risk framework survives a real question. Whether the alpha is repeatable across regimes, or whether you just caught a move that caught you. Returns are getting you in the room.

Ten months of silence answers all of those questions, and the answer is - no.

I've written this before and I'll keep writing it: institutional trust is a communication pattern, not a one-time pitch. The teams positioned to raise into this improvement are the ones who kept sending the monthly update when the monthly update said nothing happened. Who explained the drawdown without being asked. Who stayed in the field of view through the worst stretch this industry has seen in years. They didn't do it because it was pleasant. They did it because they understood that visibility during pain is the entire asset class on its own.

Those teams get the call this month. You get the polite reply: “Lets talk later.”

You're not competing on the month you just had. You're competing on the ten months you didn't.

And understand what you're actually up against: you are one of dozens sending the same message, in the same week, to the same shrinking group of allocators, all of whom can see the BTC chart.

If that's you… the fix is not a better performance email. The fix is starting the communication cycle now and accepting that it prices in over the next two or three quarters, not the next two weeks. Late is still better than never.

The best time to plant a tree was “blablabla insert a famous quote here".

A large share of allocators in this space account in BTC. Which means every team running a BTC-denominated mandate just watched its book jump 20-25% in dollar terms overnight - without generating a single basis point of alpha.

As an allocator, if you accumulated 10 BTC on a 100 BTC mandate through the drought, that stack is worth meaningfully more today than it was on Tuesday.

If we retrace toward the highs, it becomes extraordinarily valuable. That is genuinely the beauty of accumulating through a bear: you were buying units when units were cheap.

But do not confuse the two things.

One BTC is always one BTC. The 20% is not alpha. It's arithmetic.

Your allocator knows this. They have the same chart. So if your September update leads with a USD AUM screenshot that's up a fifth, you are telling a sophisticated counterparty that you don't understand your own mandate. Report in BTC, report the alpha separately, and let the denominator do what the denominator does.

Now the thing I'd actually plan around.

The Senate returns on September 14. On September 15 there's a cloture vote on the CLARITY Act. The market structure bill. It needs 60 votes. Prediction markets have it priced somewhere in the teens; Galaxy cut its odds of 2026 passage from 50% to 30%. Bernstein has floated a 10-25% pullback on failure, testing $55,000-$60,000.

I'm not making that call. I'm telling you the calendar has a binary event on it, three weeks out, and the market just repriced 22% higher partly on optimism about that exact bill.

Position accordingly. And if you're a team currently drafting a raise deck built on last week's numbers — understand that those numbers may look very different by the time anyone reads it.

European Blockchain Convention — Barcelona, September 16-17. Six thousand-plus attendees, and this year it's openly institutional: BlackRock, Swift, State Street, Citi, BNP, Fidelity on the programme. Note the date. You'll be walking into that room the morning after the CLARITY vote, which means the mood in Barcelona is currently being decided by about seven Senate Democrats rather than by anyone's Sharpe ratio. Should be interesting either way.

BeQuant is running an event alongside it, built specifically for capital allocators and quant trading teams. If you want in, let us know and we'll send an invite.

TOKEN2049 — Singapore, October 7-8, Marina Bay Sands, with side events running the 5th through the 11th. That's about six weeks out. We'll be running an event something there too, plus a few closed sessions specifically for allocators and quant firms. Ask and we'll send the links.

Real rooms, right people. That's the only kind worth flying for.

The activity is coming back. I can feel it in my inbox, and after the year we've all had, that genuinely makes me happy. Capital wants to be early, and it can smell that something is turning.

And if you spent the last ten months invisible - the market didn't just hand you a second chance this week. It handed everyone one equal chance.

The difference is that some people spent the drought building the thing that converts it.

See you next week.

Stay patient. Stay honest. Stay alive.

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