I've started a "fund of funds" hedge fund to enable my Substack subscribers to get above average returns in volatile markets (like the kind we might be entering now).
I've updated the article to respond to Crawford's hit piece on me.
It is remarkable that he is attacking people like me rather than focusing on the people who brought you the shots.
DId you see his alternative for generating funds to fund the legal and other efforts to fight back? I missed that.
The bottom line is this: If you know of a BETTER way to create a pool of MILLIONS of dollars a year for organizations like VSRF and others to fight back, please let me know in the comments.
Bottom line: If you are going to criticize me for creating a cash flow to fight back, do so by telling me the superior alternative. thanks.
Critique is so hateful. Icing people out while their family is being targeted with kidnappings and assaults...that's downright friendly.
Which universe do you live in? Does it look like clown world?
I just did Steve an enormous favor---unless his primary goal is to suck up money from the crowd. I just raised a ruccous that may keep him from making an enormous and critical mistake with other people's money. Do you have any idea how many hours I've given freely trying to steer him away from this mistake? Was that out of hate?
I'm not attacking you. I'm challenging your direction, and it needs challenging. We're talking about $100M dollars and zero industry experience.
This is not a hit piece. It's a critique with facts, not fallacies.
Since I have multiple times offered you better information, and ideas on creating cash flows, this response is a little weird. That you ignored me is not the same as I didn't offered ideas.
"So if you are going to criticize me, do so by telling me the superior alternative.
Here's one that you never responded to, and then wound up relating to the Died Suddenly documentary (and you never answered any of the meat of my critiques): run a virtopsy service so that we can find out what's really going on. This was my suggestion all the way back in 2021.
I talked with you about better ways to run a hedge fund for hours. There are a ton of them. You've picked close to the worst model, but it's also likely because it's the easiest model and you don't have the time. A hedge fund is a complex business on an active level. It's juggling knives. You can go "fund of funds" to not juggle the knives, but now you're giving up enormous amounts of money to have tiny bits trickle in to fund medical research. That $100M could simply fund the medical research.
I have other ideas that pair education with trading, but we didn't quite get to those conversations because...."Squirrel!"
Had I any idea at all that this was the direction that you would go---plowing forward right into a war time economic scenario that distinctly cuts off past returns as meaningful---I'd have offered more advice (though I suspect it would have been ignored). But here is one that's fairly personal: I have a business model for distributed education, and with millions of new homeschoolers in the U.S. searching for models, it's a ripe market. It's one of the ONLY ripe markets right now.
Oh, right, we're talking about the company I was starting to build in 2020. It's too important to keep me invisible so that nobody is embarassed over getting the DMED data terribly wrong, to be pushed out by psychological warfare operations groups. But I bet the ROI is 10x what a fund of funds would deliver.
Here's another: I invented a superior form of cryptography (which I told you about over the phone one day) that would help citizens not get spied on so easily. I bet with the right team it's a spectacular ROI.
You need more? I literally have stacks of notebooks and legal pads with business models on them. You don't find that out by throwing me under the bus to be buried. That's your choice, not mine.
For those reading, here is what Steve had an ignored---a free advisor who was hired to run a multi-billion dollar account at the age of 20 due to a combination of practical math ability and communication skills. I'm not talking about an Ed Dowd $12B large cap stock portfolio, which is the hedge fund equivalent of juggling one ball. I'm talking about a $12B bond portfolio leveraged 120-to-1 with large box trades designed for long-short bond-swap spread relative yield curve bending, and performing Monte Carlo simulations to price lottery bonds rigged by the Yakuza, mostly in the wake of the LTCM collapse. That's the hedge fund equivalent of juggling five flaming knives while walking a tight rope over a pool of sharks with friggin laster beams on their heads. That wasn't an accident. It was at the same firm that employed Jeff Bezos and ex-Harvard president Larry Summers. But they let me drive the largest bond account a few weeks after I could legally drink.
I've never designed a losing trade, and my current portfolio was up 40,000% over less than 4 years when I met Steve. I gave him plenty of background and advice, and tried patiently to teach him some fundamentals of trading. He either wouldn't or couldn't remain focused on a conversation long enough to hear what I had to say. This is sort of like ignoring Peter McCullough to listen to Rachel Maddow talk about myocarditis, then complaining that nobody is offering alternative viewpoints.
Maybe we should enter into a million dollar bet: my returns in 2023 vs. your fund of funds?
Wait, I'm not as rich as you, but I'd do $50k, no problem.
I'm working on my education company again, and along with my substack and research, that means I probably can't spend more than 5% of my time trading. But I still think it's an easy dunk.
I have written an article titled "15 Reasons Why The Freedom Movement Has Been Failing(and Solutions for a Fighting Chance)". I can present this to you on zoom, it is not public.
I know a better way. All the doctors are great at commentary and making videos but not figuring out a step by step plan/strategy. Would you agree?
How much will your fund raise for the warchest/fighting fund? Is the intention to raise $5m? , $10m or $50m?
You will give a return to investors, then you might take an administration fee'? is this admin fee going to the warchest or is it the returns from the fund( or part of it)?
I am thinking entreprenuerial. It is better to reverse engineer success.
I have given ideas previously here, but I know it's a busy space and can be easily overlooked.
How much is required in funds as a starting point? What are the expected costs of legal action, outreach, advertising, staffing etc?
Now figure out a way to generate this amount.
I have two ideas both in alignment with the cause to preserve medical freedom, liberty. Both are my projects which I conceived with the aim of raising fund, however I require a co-founder) .
Unfortunately, I am not one for making youtube videos/writing substacks to gain traction however would consider a co founder/investor with an audience to accelerate things. To grow and raise funds. It needs to leverage an audience like yours with a co-founder like you?
I am happy to pitch it to you if it interests you on a 10-15 minute zoom and explore options?
Hi Steve - I checked the VSRF website but couldn't find any info on how and where the money is being spent. Can you please provide us with a link to VSRF financials? Thanks.
I like your idea for those who can help that way! I think the one who responded 17 min ago, Oozie, is in the ozone! Very sarcastic & mean, sounds like a liberal demoncrat.
I was just thinking about the huge difference between Capitaliism & Communism! A free enterprise & an elite ruling class who wants to make everyone else a slave!
I just wish there could be many Billboards across Americas HIghways
telling the truth about the jab & Hospital Protocals forcing Remdesivire & the jab!
I was one of the critics of this idea. I feel even more strongly about it now after reading the "Update 2/15/23". Mr Kirsch, We don't owe you a superior alternative. You only hold yourself hostage with your $100MM-for-closing-the-fund ultimatum. People respect you for a body of work and great contributions, but even Isaac Newton lost all his wealth in the South Sea bubble. With your last two ideas - hedgefund plan as well as PAC for RFK for president - you stepped over the line of insanity. Step back before it's too late.
I never said you owed me a superior alternative. I asked you to suggest one if you think that my choice was poor, simply give me a better option for making lots of money quickly. Instead, you just criticize me and not provided a superior alternative. Your criticism is destructive. If you want to criticize me, constructively, simply provide a better option.
For anyone reading...I have offered Steve so many ideas over the past 21 months that he completely ignored---seemingly without giving them a thought---that his response here is entirely bizarre. I wish I had auto-notes, but all the way back in 2021 I had the notion as Steve acting as "CEO of the pandemic" so that we could sort through something along the lines of Game B-ish feedback loops and careers. I brought it up twice, and both times he interrupted me with rejection of the idea before I even got finished explaining it.
Also, "I can't think of a better way, therefore this use of $100M of other people's money is a good idea," is an amazingly irresponsible fallacy.
1)Long Pfizer Puts (Deep In the Money to minimize premium cost)
2) Long Moderna Puts (Deep In the money IBID)
3)Long Physical Gold
4)Long SCI US Largest Funeral Home Operator
5)Long Prudential Puts (Large Life Insurance Company)
I am the inventor of the Worlds first tradeable ETF back in the early 1990s in Toronto, today about 6 Trillion (!) is under management with ETFs.
I agree with Matthew Crawford's post and would stay away from hedge funds as an investment and especially funds of funds where fees are wasted twice.
I am not a fan of shorting unless the downside is limited and cost of borrowing stock is not too high, hence deep in the money PUTs are a less risky and cheaper alternative.
I am also a fan of truly decentralized blockchain systems but that is beyond the scope of this discussion.
Generally I would advise against taking in outside money in a regulatory environment where COVID Dissidents could be unfairly targeted for non compliance.
The above suggestions have strong upside potential and low enough downside that you could probably place these positions yourself without having the burden of getting others involved.
.20 + aroound 5% opportunity cost of $22.00= 1.10+.20- 1.30 per share year. PFE will drop alot more than 1.30 in a year from where it is now and if it does not the above risk is acceptable.
I am very happy to take that bet all day long and do not see any premium for implied volatility built into the price
Next lets take a look at Moderna
MRNa
Bid 163.10 Offer 163.65
MRNA Put Jan 19 2024 expiry strike price 240.00
Bid 74.80 offer 75.70
Intrinisic value 240.00-163.65= 76.35
Premium 76.35-76.60= .25(!)
Interest cost for a year on 5% on 76.60= 3.88
total cost int cost + premium =3.88+.25 = 4.13
Another good bet that Moderna will drop more than 4.13 in a year that again is a totally acceptable risk. You would simply go long these stocks and put on the above positions that allows you to be a partner to the profits and only a partner to very limited losses as described. Your risk parameters can then be set depending on how much of the position you want to hedge going long. .
So if anything the implied vol cost is nill for deep in the money puts.
I ran a profitable public company on the TSX for almost 20 years that owned a floor broker on the CBOE. The options division and currency hedging division were the companies two most profitable divisions. "Failed trades" were not part of our vocabulary. Sometime we had trading errors but never failed trades because we could not count.
Paying implied volatility for out of the money or at the money puts is a suckers game we never engaged in. If most of the value is intrinsic you are not at the mercy of the market maker because worst case you unwind the thing at expiry.
The inverse of this trade would be to buy deep in the money calls for PFE and mRNA and sell both PFE and MRNa short. Implied volatility premium
costs minimal on deep in the money calls but not sure of the availability of this stock to borrow but if borrowing costs are reasonable this is a nice trade as again the risk is approximately the same as the other trade except you are partner to this thing going way down and minimal losses if it goes way up.
i also was the architect of the first hybrid trading platform and trading systems for the CBOE that married the floor trading to options matching engines on the floor and off the floor (other Exchanges)
Not trying to make trouble but in my opinion you are incorrect on these trades possibly because deep in the money is a unusual strategy in options that served me well for many years. i agree with you that it is not an easy game and for anyone to go into this game without a lifetime of experience such as SK and rely on second rate middle managers to structure investments and then expect to make millions of dollars doing so on a part time basis is also plain wrong and simply fanciful thinking.
The difference is that you or I can argue the logic of a trade because we know the business. Steve has to rely on others for advice because he is an amateur in this area. It does not instill confidence and I am with you that it is a really really bad idea.
"i also was the architect of the first hybrid trading platform and trading systems for the CBOE that married the floor trading to options matching engines on the floor and off the floor (other Exchanges)"
I appreciate your work. I quit my job at Susquehanna while working at the CBOE when I realized that I could make a lot more money trading the morning sessions from home with an IB account arbitraging between the CBOE and Pacific/NY exchanges. The months before the tech bubble crash were juicy with so many callups ignored by the floor traders.
There may be profitable put buys for Moderna/Pfizer at this moment. But when Bannon's War Room brought Dowd on in 2022, it had all the hallmarks of a pump-and-dump. Implied vols were jacked up to more than triple the prices of long-dated options. Millions were lost.
But it may also be that these aren't even the best put buys give that we may be at the precipice of a massive crash.
"The difference is that you or I can argue the logic of a trade because we know the business. Steve has to rely on others for advice because he is an amateur in this area. It does not instill confidence and I am with you that it is a really really bad idea."
A better idea would be for a pooled investment fund where (if you, Sid and maybe a few others where willing to provide trading strategy) to hire a kid to do market execution. Covid Safety Family Office. Keep the pool members relatively low as to not run up the compliance and reporting costs.
I appreciate that you entered the dialog. You seem to read my comments as concern trolling. Let me assure you it's far from it. I believe a superior alternative to connecting your hedge fund to the VSRF initiative is: not to connect it. But I've been wrong before. I'll watch with interest how things unroll.
I could be mistaken about this but I seem to recall that Ed Dowd was contemplating starting a hedge fund. This fund would focus on investments that were Covid related. For instance, shorting Pfizer when it looks like their fraudulent gene therapy product is becoming a liability. Or, leveraging funeral home stocks because of the huge increase in business. In other words, use his assessment of the Covid scam to make money.
I don’t have hedge fund type money, but if I did, I would consider this “stick in the eye” fund just for the satisfaction of it.
I have followed you for a while and saw Crawford's article. I wouldn't call it a hit piece. Likely he is trying to talk you out of bad idea. A tech person going into finance raises a bunch of red flags for me personally. I am also primarily in tech but trained somewhat in high finance, enough to know that I wouldn't go in without a whole lot of knowledge.
Creating a fund of funds and diversifying simply leads you back to market alpha. Market alpha right now is decidedly negative and likely will be an insiders game for some time. To beat alpha, you need a thesis with a few select stocks. This is what the actual pros do. I was taught by them and went to school with several. I also know several of the quants running some of the markets.
You may be able to beat the market by not playing in the market such as in Search Funds or other areas. Some Private Equity does this, creates a thesis and then buys companies and transforms them such as what the Artemis group is doing.
A diversified funds of funds is not a valid thesis. This is a dumb money idea that low level advisors at Fidelity tell people to get them to trust with their dumb money.
Tech people that go into investing tend to do a bad job. The finance people do better. Just look at the return of VCs as a whole - only a few select funds managed primarily by finance people do well and the rest almost always below market - and these worse funds are run mostly by tech first people.
You mention that you are doing this as an easy way to make money. Having a fund does throw off cash to the manager - but this is usually at the expense of lesser returns for the investors. The funds themselves don't rarely beat market unless you are an insider, otherwise there is no easy way to make money. Good ideas fail - a lot, and for a lot of exogenous reasons. We have a lot of those exogenous reasons (such as a war on humanity) happening right now. You have made it harder by wanting to do good while making money. Competing fairly with sharks is extra hard.
However; there are two items that also make me heavily question your motives in creating a fund. First, that you have a CBDC company. While the backend of banks need a lot of improvement, CBDC are tools for authoritarian control disguised as money. These CBDC also fundamentally ruin an economy as we are now seeing in the de-evolution of the Chinese economy which has been an early adopter. We have seen a prelude of these CBDCs will be used with Canadian Truckers and the geo-fencing that goes on in China. It calls into question the motive of all that you are doing, but especially around money.
The second of these extra items is that the other account you have about creating a fund, you announce that you were working with FTX??!! Is this your account? Investing with FTX would have wrecked all of your investors and they may have just gotten lucky on FTX going bust early.
Go for it. Criticism is good. Since my investments are elsewhere I have no stake, but lesser men have started funds and done well. This may be the first "ethical objective fund" (EOF) in the health-space. I wish you every success. Love the idea
Steve: I share the concern that this is a difficult time to start a hedge fund, as we are headed for cataclysmic changes. But that does not mean there is not opportunity out there. Still, having seen how much money was lost shorting Tesla in the last few years... etc. The pharmaceutical complex should be getting wiped out almost entirely, and in theory that spells opportunity, but what's that going to look like and how long will it take?
In any case, I am at the other end of this, as an entrepreneur, and in a sort of a prolonged start-up mode, thanks to Covid. I am a co-founder of https://www.bcmindustries.com and we had just launched our first round of clinical trials for our autologous organ repair business, when Covid came to mess up the whole schedule and the process took about 2-3 times longer than it should have, but eventually it was completed, and the results were satisfactory. Since we re-grow organs from the inside out, using the patient's own cells, we are an alternative to organ transplants, and far cheaper.
Funnily enough, during Covid, my partner designed a computer line of neural computers using live neurons (from animal sources), and we are going to launch a line of computers that range all the way into super computer territory, but with orders of magnitude lower power consumption, and 1000x faster than current technology. Also storage in the Exabyte range.
But then, we realized that post Covid, there is a new issue. We don't like the prospect of patients who have an immune system that is attacking their own organs. That would seem to endanger the healing process we have to rely on. So for now, we are repositioning our organ repairs to service in the first instance the unvaxxed, but we are exploring to what extent the vaccinated population can recover from the vax injuries enough, and it would seem that there would be a lot of organ repair that will be needed. In short, we are looking at the organ repair business very different today, and we feel that we will be part of an alternative approach that will come to the fore in these post covid times.
Our situation is in some ways more of a venture capital prospect, however, we have enough of a track record at this point that things are going to open up, and we expect more likely strategic investors both on the organ repair front and on the Live Neural computing front.
I personally think that we are the kind of breakthrough technology that will change the game completely and therefore in one way or another we are part of the radical restructuring of healthcare, and we represent a major financial opportunity.
I would love to talk to you. My partner is around the corner from you in CA. (I am in NYC).
Steve - you are so right! It is nice to be able to have people give open and honest comments pro/con!
I personally think that it’s a great idea and it demonstrates how leveraging who you know helps to get ahead in this world. When many are in that high end class and all part of the government narrative, there must be a way to fight back using the same methods to generate wealth.
I hope to be a part of this 🤞winning formula to fight back
What's needed is not so much money, which has just corrupted everything, as courage, as shown by brave people like Katherine Watt and Sasha Latypova. Bought and paid for efforts will never be as good as the personally inspired.
At the battle of Trenton, Patriots, some barefoot and bleeding in the snow, surprised the well paid hung over Hessians the day after Christmas and turned the tide of the war. Sound corny?
Please let people know what will happen if share value is preserved in a new multipart digital currency but personal savings are diluted along with cash.
Is it your position that the stock exchange is safer than cash and physical gold?
Could such a fund not invest in a vulnerable media outlet and purchase it to get news out to those addicted to mainstream media? I believe if there was a legacy media that was part of the propaganda machine that succeeded after moving to actual facts dissemination you would have a lot of people following the outlet and investing in it.
One idea I’d like to work on if I could would be an Internet TV station focused around the word discussion, which I think is about the most important concept we need to promote right now. The station would publicly invite and beg well-known (and selected other) people to engage in public discussion with others who disagree with them, for the sake of people who are trying to make up their minds with regard to various critical and important issues - under a format which tries to guarantee moderator objectivity, fairness and civility in the discussion. I think that’s what people are hungry for right now, and with enough start-up capital so that it’s done well and people hear about it, it might do very well as a business and, in any case, some good discussions would be aired and archived on the site.
How about Steve gives us VSRF's financial details and we, 1 million subscribers on this sub stack, will each donate 100 dollars? It's a lot for many people, including me, but Steve cannot fight alone. We all need to do our part. As for the hedge fund, who ever wants to invest, it's that person's decision. We are all wise people and can make decisions ourselves. Steve is not forcing anyone to do so.
I've updated the article to respond to Crawford's hit piece on me.
It is remarkable that he is attacking people like me rather than focusing on the people who brought you the shots.
DId you see his alternative for generating funds to fund the legal and other efforts to fight back? I missed that.
The bottom line is this: If you know of a BETTER way to create a pool of MILLIONS of dollars a year for organizations like VSRF and others to fight back, please let me know in the comments.
Bottom line: If you are going to criticize me for creating a cash flow to fight back, do so by telling me the superior alternative. thanks.
Yeah, I unsubbed from him over that. He seems to have a hate-on for you, and "I hate Steve" isn't a subject I'm interested in.
Critique is so hateful. Icing people out while their family is being targeted with kidnappings and assaults...that's downright friendly.
Which universe do you live in? Does it look like clown world?
I just did Steve an enormous favor---unless his primary goal is to suck up money from the crowd. I just raised a ruccous that may keep him from making an enormous and critical mistake with other people's money. Do you have any idea how many hours I've given freely trying to steer him away from this mistake? Was that out of hate?
Unsubbing from you means I don't want to hear from you anymore.
Good trolling. Effective.
I'm not attacking you. I'm challenging your direction, and it needs challenging. We're talking about $100M dollars and zero industry experience.
This is not a hit piece. It's a critique with facts, not fallacies.
Since I have multiple times offered you better information, and ideas on creating cash flows, this response is a little weird. That you ignored me is not the same as I didn't offered ideas.
"So if you are going to criticize me, do so by telling me the superior alternative.
Thank you."
Tried that. For months and months.
Here's one that you never responded to, and then wound up relating to the Died Suddenly documentary (and you never answered any of the meat of my critiques): run a virtopsy service so that we can find out what's really going on. This was my suggestion all the way back in 2021.
I talked with you about better ways to run a hedge fund for hours. There are a ton of them. You've picked close to the worst model, but it's also likely because it's the easiest model and you don't have the time. A hedge fund is a complex business on an active level. It's juggling knives. You can go "fund of funds" to not juggle the knives, but now you're giving up enormous amounts of money to have tiny bits trickle in to fund medical research. That $100M could simply fund the medical research.
I have other ideas that pair education with trading, but we didn't quite get to those conversations because...."Squirrel!"
Had I any idea at all that this was the direction that you would go---plowing forward right into a war time economic scenario that distinctly cuts off past returns as meaningful---I'd have offered more advice (though I suspect it would have been ignored). But here is one that's fairly personal: I have a business model for distributed education, and with millions of new homeschoolers in the U.S. searching for models, it's a ripe market. It's one of the ONLY ripe markets right now.
Oh, right, we're talking about the company I was starting to build in 2020. It's too important to keep me invisible so that nobody is embarassed over getting the DMED data terribly wrong, to be pushed out by psychological warfare operations groups. But I bet the ROI is 10x what a fund of funds would deliver.
Here's another: I invented a superior form of cryptography (which I told you about over the phone one day) that would help citizens not get spied on so easily. I bet with the right team it's a spectacular ROI.
You need more? I literally have stacks of notebooks and legal pads with business models on them. You don't find that out by throwing me under the bus to be buried. That's your choice, not mine.
For those reading, here is what Steve had an ignored---a free advisor who was hired to run a multi-billion dollar account at the age of 20 due to a combination of practical math ability and communication skills. I'm not talking about an Ed Dowd $12B large cap stock portfolio, which is the hedge fund equivalent of juggling one ball. I'm talking about a $12B bond portfolio leveraged 120-to-1 with large box trades designed for long-short bond-swap spread relative yield curve bending, and performing Monte Carlo simulations to price lottery bonds rigged by the Yakuza, mostly in the wake of the LTCM collapse. That's the hedge fund equivalent of juggling five flaming knives while walking a tight rope over a pool of sharks with friggin laster beams on their heads. That wasn't an accident. It was at the same firm that employed Jeff Bezos and ex-Harvard president Larry Summers. But they let me drive the largest bond account a few weeks after I could legally drink.
Maybe that was an accident.
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/the-monetary-wars-part-vi
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/everything-in-high-finance-is-conspiracy?s=w
I've never designed a losing trade, and my current portfolio was up 40,000% over less than 4 years when I met Steve. I gave him plenty of background and advice, and tried patiently to teach him some fundamentals of trading. He either wouldn't or couldn't remain focused on a conversation long enough to hear what I had to say. This is sort of like ignoring Peter McCullough to listen to Rachel Maddow talk about myocarditis, then complaining that nobody is offering alternative viewpoints.
Maybe we should enter into a million dollar bet: my returns in 2023 vs. your fund of funds?
Wait, I'm not as rich as you, but I'd do $50k, no problem.
I'm working on my education company again, and along with my substack and research, that means I probably can't spend more than 5% of my time trading. But I still think it's an easy dunk.
I have written an article titled "15 Reasons Why The Freedom Movement Has Been Failing(and Solutions for a Fighting Chance)". I can present this to you on zoom, it is not public.
I know a better way. All the doctors are great at commentary and making videos but not figuring out a step by step plan/strategy. Would you agree?
How much will your fund raise for the warchest/fighting fund? Is the intention to raise $5m? , $10m or $50m?
You will give a return to investors, then you might take an administration fee'? is this admin fee going to the warchest or is it the returns from the fund( or part of it)?
I am thinking entreprenuerial. It is better to reverse engineer success.
I have given ideas previously here, but I know it's a busy space and can be easily overlooked.
How much is required in funds as a starting point? What are the expected costs of legal action, outreach, advertising, staffing etc?
Now figure out a way to generate this amount.
I have two ideas both in alignment with the cause to preserve medical freedom, liberty. Both are my projects which I conceived with the aim of raising fund, however I require a co-founder) .
Unfortunately, I am not one for making youtube videos/writing substacks to gain traction however would consider a co founder/investor with an audience to accelerate things. To grow and raise funds. It needs to leverage an audience like yours with a co-founder like you?
I am happy to pitch it to you if it interests you on a 10-15 minute zoom and explore options?
Project 1) "Social Network meets Activism" app- Freedomtribe.net ( web/mobile app).
Project 2) Freedombumperstickers.com
my email is yogi.kansagra@freedomtribe.net
Hi Steve - I checked the VSRF website but couldn't find any info on how and where the money is being spent. Can you please provide us with a link to VSRF financials? Thanks.
I like your idea for those who can help that way! I think the one who responded 17 min ago, Oozie, is in the ozone! Very sarcastic & mean, sounds like a liberal demoncrat.
I was just thinking about the huge difference between Capitaliism & Communism! A free enterprise & an elite ruling class who wants to make everyone else a slave!
I just wish there could be many Billboards across Americas HIghways
telling the truth about the jab & Hospital Protocals forcing Remdesivire & the jab!
GOD BLESS YOU STEVE!
I was one of the critics of this idea. I feel even more strongly about it now after reading the "Update 2/15/23". Mr Kirsch, We don't owe you a superior alternative. You only hold yourself hostage with your $100MM-for-closing-the-fund ultimatum. People respect you for a body of work and great contributions, but even Isaac Newton lost all his wealth in the South Sea bubble. With your last two ideas - hedgefund plan as well as PAC for RFK for president - you stepped over the line of insanity. Step back before it's too late.
I never said you owed me a superior alternative. I asked you to suggest one if you think that my choice was poor, simply give me a better option for making lots of money quickly. Instead, you just criticize me and not provided a superior alternative. Your criticism is destructive. If you want to criticize me, constructively, simply provide a better option.
For anyone reading...I have offered Steve so many ideas over the past 21 months that he completely ignored---seemingly without giving them a thought---that his response here is entirely bizarre. I wish I had auto-notes, but all the way back in 2021 I had the notion as Steve acting as "CEO of the pandemic" so that we could sort through something along the lines of Game B-ish feedback loops and careers. I brought it up twice, and both times he interrupted me with rejection of the idea before I even got finished explaining it.
Also, "I can't think of a better way, therefore this use of $100M of other people's money is a good idea," is an amazingly irresponsible fallacy.
Sigh.
Superior Alternative
1)Long Pfizer Puts (Deep In the Money to minimize premium cost)
2) Long Moderna Puts (Deep In the money IBID)
3)Long Physical Gold
4)Long SCI US Largest Funeral Home Operator
5)Long Prudential Puts (Large Life Insurance Company)
I am the inventor of the Worlds first tradeable ETF back in the early 1990s in Toronto, today about 6 Trillion (!) is under management with ETFs.
I agree with Matthew Crawford's post and would stay away from hedge funds as an investment and especially funds of funds where fees are wasted twice.
I am not a fan of shorting unless the downside is limited and cost of borrowing stock is not too high, hence deep in the money PUTs are a less risky and cheaper alternative.
I am also a fan of truly decentralized blockchain systems but that is beyond the scope of this discussion.
Generally I would advise against taking in outside money in a regulatory environment where COVID Dissidents could be unfairly targeted for non compliance.
The above suggestions have strong upside potential and low enough downside that you could probably place these positions yourself without having the burden of getting others involved.
Even that put trade has been failing. The implied vol got pumped ahead of the buys. This game is not easy.
Not sure which position you would consider "failing." So I will start with PFE
Bid 42.95 Offer 43.00
Pfizer Put Expiration Jan 19 2024 Strike 65.00
Bid 21.95 Offer 22.20
Intrinisic =65.00-43.00= 22.0 P
Offer Price 22.20 Premium Price =22 .20-22.00=.20 per share for one year
https://www.barchart.com/stocks/quotes/PFE/options?expiration=2024-01-19-m
.20 + aroound 5% opportunity cost of $22.00= 1.10+.20- 1.30 per share year. PFE will drop alot more than 1.30 in a year from where it is now and if it does not the above risk is acceptable.
I am very happy to take that bet all day long and do not see any premium for implied volatility built into the price
Next lets take a look at Moderna
MRNa
Bid 163.10 Offer 163.65
MRNA Put Jan 19 2024 expiry strike price 240.00
Bid 74.80 offer 75.70
Intrinisic value 240.00-163.65= 76.35
Premium 76.35-76.60= .25(!)
Interest cost for a year on 5% on 76.60= 3.88
total cost int cost + premium =3.88+.25 = 4.13
Another good bet that Moderna will drop more than 4.13 in a year that again is a totally acceptable risk. You would simply go long these stocks and put on the above positions that allows you to be a partner to the profits and only a partner to very limited losses as described. Your risk parameters can then be set depending on how much of the position you want to hedge going long. .
https://www.barchart.com/stocks/quotes/MRNA/options?expiration=2024-01-19-m
So if anything the implied vol cost is nill for deep in the money puts.
I ran a profitable public company on the TSX for almost 20 years that owned a floor broker on the CBOE. The options division and currency hedging division were the companies two most profitable divisions. "Failed trades" were not part of our vocabulary. Sometime we had trading errors but never failed trades because we could not count.
Paying implied volatility for out of the money or at the money puts is a suckers game we never engaged in. If most of the value is intrinsic you are not at the mercy of the market maker because worst case you unwind the thing at expiry.
The inverse of this trade would be to buy deep in the money calls for PFE and mRNA and sell both PFE and MRNa short. Implied volatility premium
costs minimal on deep in the money calls but not sure of the availability of this stock to borrow but if borrowing costs are reasonable this is a nice trade as again the risk is approximately the same as the other trade except you are partner to this thing going way down and minimal losses if it goes way up.
i also was the architect of the first hybrid trading platform and trading systems for the CBOE that married the floor trading to options matching engines on the floor and off the floor (other Exchanges)
Not trying to make trouble but in my opinion you are incorrect on these trades possibly because deep in the money is a unusual strategy in options that served me well for many years. i agree with you that it is not an easy game and for anyone to go into this game without a lifetime of experience such as SK and rely on second rate middle managers to structure investments and then expect to make millions of dollars doing so on a part time basis is also plain wrong and simply fanciful thinking.
The difference is that you or I can argue the logic of a trade because we know the business. Steve has to rely on others for advice because he is an amateur in this area. It does not instill confidence and I am with you that it is a really really bad idea.
"i also was the architect of the first hybrid trading platform and trading systems for the CBOE that married the floor trading to options matching engines on the floor and off the floor (other Exchanges)"
I appreciate your work. I quit my job at Susquehanna while working at the CBOE when I realized that I could make a lot more money trading the morning sessions from home with an IB account arbitraging between the CBOE and Pacific/NY exchanges. The months before the tech bubble crash were juicy with so many callups ignored by the floor traders.
There may be profitable put buys for Moderna/Pfizer at this moment. But when Bannon's War Room brought Dowd on in 2022, it had all the hallmarks of a pump-and-dump. Implied vols were jacked up to more than triple the prices of long-dated options. Millions were lost.
https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/the-big-short-a-warning-about-ed
But it may also be that these aren't even the best put buys give that we may be at the precipice of a massive crash.
"The difference is that you or I can argue the logic of a trade because we know the business. Steve has to rely on others for advice because he is an amateur in this area. It does not instill confidence and I am with you that it is a really really bad idea."
Indeed.
A better idea would be for a pooled investment fund where (if you, Sid and maybe a few others where willing to provide trading strategy) to hire a kid to do market execution. Covid Safety Family Office. Keep the pool members relatively low as to not run up the compliance and reporting costs.
I appreciate that you entered the dialog. You seem to read my comments as concern trolling. Let me assure you it's far from it. I believe a superior alternative to connecting your hedge fund to the VSRF initiative is: not to connect it. But I've been wrong before. I'll watch with interest how things unroll.
I could be mistaken about this but I seem to recall that Ed Dowd was contemplating starting a hedge fund. This fund would focus on investments that were Covid related. For instance, shorting Pfizer when it looks like their fraudulent gene therapy product is becoming a liability. Or, leveraging funeral home stocks because of the huge increase in business. In other words, use his assessment of the Covid scam to make money.
I don’t have hedge fund type money, but if I did, I would consider this “stick in the eye” fund just for the satisfaction of it.
https://www.zillow.com/east-palestine-oh/houses/
Hello Steve,
I have followed you for a while and saw Crawford's article. I wouldn't call it a hit piece. Likely he is trying to talk you out of bad idea. A tech person going into finance raises a bunch of red flags for me personally. I am also primarily in tech but trained somewhat in high finance, enough to know that I wouldn't go in without a whole lot of knowledge.
Creating a fund of funds and diversifying simply leads you back to market alpha. Market alpha right now is decidedly negative and likely will be an insiders game for some time. To beat alpha, you need a thesis with a few select stocks. This is what the actual pros do. I was taught by them and went to school with several. I also know several of the quants running some of the markets.
You may be able to beat the market by not playing in the market such as in Search Funds or other areas. Some Private Equity does this, creates a thesis and then buys companies and transforms them such as what the Artemis group is doing.
A diversified funds of funds is not a valid thesis. This is a dumb money idea that low level advisors at Fidelity tell people to get them to trust with their dumb money.
Tech people that go into investing tend to do a bad job. The finance people do better. Just look at the return of VCs as a whole - only a few select funds managed primarily by finance people do well and the rest almost always below market - and these worse funds are run mostly by tech first people.
You mention that you are doing this as an easy way to make money. Having a fund does throw off cash to the manager - but this is usually at the expense of lesser returns for the investors. The funds themselves don't rarely beat market unless you are an insider, otherwise there is no easy way to make money. Good ideas fail - a lot, and for a lot of exogenous reasons. We have a lot of those exogenous reasons (such as a war on humanity) happening right now. You have made it harder by wanting to do good while making money. Competing fairly with sharks is extra hard.
However; there are two items that also make me heavily question your motives in creating a fund. First, that you have a CBDC company. While the backend of banks need a lot of improvement, CBDC are tools for authoritarian control disguised as money. These CBDC also fundamentally ruin an economy as we are now seeing in the de-evolution of the Chinese economy which has been an early adopter. We have seen a prelude of these CBDCs will be used with Canadian Truckers and the geo-fencing that goes on in China. It calls into question the motive of all that you are doing, but especially around money.
The second of these extra items is that the other account you have about creating a fund, you announce that you were working with FTX??!! Is this your account? Investing with FTX would have wrecked all of your investors and they may have just gotten lucky on FTX going bust early.
*edited for clarity and grammar
Go for it. Criticism is good. Since my investments are elsewhere I have no stake, but lesser men have started funds and done well. This may be the first "ethical objective fund" (EOF) in the health-space. I wish you every success. Love the idea
Steve: I share the concern that this is a difficult time to start a hedge fund, as we are headed for cataclysmic changes. But that does not mean there is not opportunity out there. Still, having seen how much money was lost shorting Tesla in the last few years... etc. The pharmaceutical complex should be getting wiped out almost entirely, and in theory that spells opportunity, but what's that going to look like and how long will it take?
In any case, I am at the other end of this, as an entrepreneur, and in a sort of a prolonged start-up mode, thanks to Covid. I am a co-founder of https://www.bcmindustries.com and we had just launched our first round of clinical trials for our autologous organ repair business, when Covid came to mess up the whole schedule and the process took about 2-3 times longer than it should have, but eventually it was completed, and the results were satisfactory. Since we re-grow organs from the inside out, using the patient's own cells, we are an alternative to organ transplants, and far cheaper.
Funnily enough, during Covid, my partner designed a computer line of neural computers using live neurons (from animal sources), and we are going to launch a line of computers that range all the way into super computer territory, but with orders of magnitude lower power consumption, and 1000x faster than current technology. Also storage in the Exabyte range.
But then, we realized that post Covid, there is a new issue. We don't like the prospect of patients who have an immune system that is attacking their own organs. That would seem to endanger the healing process we have to rely on. So for now, we are repositioning our organ repairs to service in the first instance the unvaxxed, but we are exploring to what extent the vaccinated population can recover from the vax injuries enough, and it would seem that there would be a lot of organ repair that will be needed. In short, we are looking at the organ repair business very different today, and we feel that we will be part of an alternative approach that will come to the fore in these post covid times.
Our situation is in some ways more of a venture capital prospect, however, we have enough of a track record at this point that things are going to open up, and we expect more likely strategic investors both on the organ repair front and on the Live Neural computing front.
I personally think that we are the kind of breakthrough technology that will change the game completely and therefore in one way or another we are part of the radical restructuring of healthcare, and we represent a major financial opportunity.
I would love to talk to you. My partner is around the corner from you in CA. (I am in NYC).
Steve - you are so right! It is nice to be able to have people give open and honest comments pro/con!
I personally think that it’s a great idea and it demonstrates how leveraging who you know helps to get ahead in this world. When many are in that high end class and all part of the government narrative, there must be a way to fight back using the same methods to generate wealth.
I hope to be a part of this 🤞winning formula to fight back
Love your work. But I don't think this is a good idea. Please do not mix the mission you are on with this. Nothing good will come of it.
All I can say is I’m out but hope you find a way to fund a very important mission.
Steve, you are clearly a critical thinker, given your body of work on the vaccines. I would expect this venture to be successful.
Is there an inverse fund for Pfizer, Astrazeneca, and Murderna?
I'll never understand why people think certain people should work for free. I think it's a great idea. I hope it's extremely successful! Good luck.
Do you know about the work of Michael Burry such as "The Big Short" ?
Perhaps he has thoughts on how you could make money with data you have...
https://www.yahoo.com/now/big-short-investor-michael-burry-184625496.html
What's needed is not so much money, which has just corrupted everything, as courage, as shown by brave people like Katherine Watt and Sasha Latypova. Bought and paid for efforts will never be as good as the personally inspired.
At the battle of Trenton, Patriots, some barefoot and bleeding in the snow, surprised the well paid hung over Hessians the day after Christmas and turned the tide of the war. Sound corny?
Dear Steve,
Please let people know what will happen if share value is preserved in a new multipart digital currency but personal savings are diluted along with cash.
Is it your position that the stock exchange is safer than cash and physical gold?
Could such a fund not invest in a vulnerable media outlet and purchase it to get news out to those addicted to mainstream media? I believe if there was a legacy media that was part of the propaganda machine that succeeded after moving to actual facts dissemination you would have a lot of people following the outlet and investing in it.
One idea I’d like to work on if I could would be an Internet TV station focused around the word discussion, which I think is about the most important concept we need to promote right now. The station would publicly invite and beg well-known (and selected other) people to engage in public discussion with others who disagree with them, for the sake of people who are trying to make up their minds with regard to various critical and important issues - under a format which tries to guarantee moderator objectivity, fairness and civility in the discussion. I think that’s what people are hungry for right now, and with enough start-up capital so that it’s done well and people hear about it, it might do very well as a business and, in any case, some good discussions would be aired and archived on the site.
How about Steve gives us VSRF's financial details and we, 1 million subscribers on this sub stack, will each donate 100 dollars? It's a lot for many people, including me, but Steve cannot fight alone. We all need to do our part. As for the hedge fund, who ever wants to invest, it's that person's decision. We are all wise people and can make decisions ourselves. Steve is not forcing anyone to do so.