A few weeks ago I was talking with a friend. An entrepreneur, well-positioned, with real assets. He was telling me enthusiastically how he had taken out a loan backed by his portfolio to buy a second property. He didn’t want to sell. He didn’t want to pay taxes. The logic was clean: asset as collateral, cheap debt, inflation erodes the liability over time.

I listened. Then I asked him one thing.

What if inflation doesn’t come back?

He went quiet.

That question is uncomfortable because it touches the invisible assumption holding the entire Buy Borrow Die strategy together: that money always loses value over time. That debt, in real terms, erodes on its own. That time works for the borrower.

It’s been true for fifty years. But it’s not a law of nature.

It’s a consequence of monetary design. And that design is being challenged by something central banks don’t control: technology.

Jeff Booth laid it out with brutal clarity in The Price of Tomorrow. His central argument is simple and disturbing: technology is deflationary by nature. It reduces the cost of producing almost anything. It does more with less. And it does so exponentially, not linearly. If you let it act freely, the natural result is falling prices, a given salary buying more each year, money appreciating rather than depreciating.

The problem is that world is unbearable for any modern state carrying massive public debt.

Because if money is worth more, debt is worth more. And the public debt of developed economies, hovering around 100-120% of GDP on average across major powers, becomes unpayable in real terms. Deflation is the worst enemy of an indebted sovereign.

That’s why central banks have spent decades printing money: not to generate prosperity, but to fight a force that, without intervention, would naturally reduce prices.

They’ve won the battle for decades. But the war is getting more expensive.

What we’re seeing right now is an acceleration of the deflationary forces Booth described as a trend. Artificial intelligence is not a technology headline: it’s a massive compression of costs in sectors that were until now relatively rigid. Professional services, analysis, writing, code, customer support, medical diagnosis. Areas where the marginal cost was human and therefore rising. That is changing at a speed that traditional macroeconomic models aren’t capturing.

The debate about reducing working hours sweeping across Europe right now is a symptom of this. Progressive parties are pushing it with arguments around wellbeing and work-life balance. They may be right for the wrong reasons. If productivity per hour worked grows sustainably because technology amplifies every task, then working fewer hours doesn’t mean producing less. It means the cost of production per unit falls. That prices should fall. That money, again, should appreciate.

In that scenario, the mechanics of Buy Borrow Die reverse.

Think about it clearly. The strategy works like this: you hold an asset that appreciates, use it as collateral to borrow, live off that debt without selling, and when you die, your heirs receive the asset with a stepped-up cost basis and cancel the loan. Time works in your favor because inflation reduces the real value of what you owe.

But in a deflationary environment, every dollar you owe is worth more next year than it is today. Your debt grows in real terms even if the nominal rate stays the same. And if the asset you’re using as collateral doesn’t appreciate fast enough to outpace that appreciation of money, you’re losing wealth while believing you’re being efficient.

You don’t get liquidated all at once. You bleed out slowly.

That’s the risk nobody names, because nobody has lived through this scenario in the context of leveraged personal portfolios. Personal finance books were written in a world of structural inflation. The financial intuition of most managers formed between 1970 and 2020, a period where betting against money was almost always correct.

That period may have been the anomaly.

The answer isn’t to abandon intelligent leverage. It’s to calibrate it more precisely and use it only on assets that have a structural reason to appreciate even in deflation. Bitcoin fits that category not because it’s technology, but because it’s the only monetary asset with an absolutely fixed supply independent of any central bank.

If money appreciates, the asset competing with money in scarcity appreciates too. Gold follows a similar logic, though more slowly.

A mortgage on a property financed on the hope that inflation will dissolve it over time is a bet on monetary policy. And monetary policy, in a context of technological deflationary pressure, can surprise you.

The question you should be asking isn’t how much can I borrow.

It’s: what asset am I borrowing against, and is that asset harder than money in a world where money might start winning?

If the answer is no, time isn’t working for you. It’s working against you.

A few months ago I published something that generated more reactions than anything else I’ve ever written.

I called it infinite money. And I know that sounds like a YouTube thumbnail. But I kept it, because technically it’s the closest thing to the truth I’ve found in years of looking for structures that actually work.

It’s not magic. It’s not reckless leverage. It’s not a scheme.

It’s a strategy that has existed for decades, used quietly by institutional managers, that most retail investors will never know about because nobody has an incentive to explain it to them.

Many of you read it. Few fully understood it. And one of you left a comment so good it deserves an entire article in response.

The question was this:

“Fantastic article, Carlos. Arbitrage-type strategies are my favorites, but I wasn’t familiar with this one. Could you give a concrete example with expiration dates, strike prices, and costs? How many times a year do you need to set it up? Is there a risk of one leg being executed and the box being dismantled? And could this work with 50,000€ just to generate regular cash flow?”

Perfect questions. But before answering them, I needed something more than theory.

So I implemented it myself. Three months. Real portfolio. Real money.

Today I’m telling you exactly what happened.

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Last year I was sitting in a conference room with the operations director of a mid-sized manufacturing company. He was explaining, with visible pride, how they had just renegotiated the collective agreement. Three years of stability. Good terms. A happy workforce.

I asked if he knew what a Boston Dynamics Atlas robot cost in production.

He didn’t.

I told him. $320,000. Annual maintenance: $9,500. Works 24 hours. Doesn’t rest. Doesn’t get sick. Doesn’t negotiate. And learns across the network: when one unit optimizes a movement in Georgia, every other unit knows it in real time.

He looked at me like I’d told him the sun rises in the west.

There is a moment in economic history when resistance to automation drops to zero. Not when the robot is better than the human. When the robot is cheaper than the human. Those are two different thresholds. The first was crossed decades ago. The second was just crossed now.

Hyundai has announced 30,000 humanoid units per year by 2028 in its “Software Defined Factories.” This is not a pilot program. Not a demo for investors. It is a statement of intent about the structure of industrial employment as we know it

McKinsey estimates 400 million displaced workers by 2030.

But here is the problem with every conversation this generates: people focus on the job. On whether they’ll have employment. On whether AI will steal their position. On how to train for new skills. On which sectors will survive.

That is the wrong debate. And while you’re stuck there, the real theft is happening in silence.

Because what nobody tells you is this: the robot doesn’t steal your job all at once. The fiat money sitting in your bank account steals the work you already did, slowly, every single day, without making a sound.

Think about it coldly.

You have €50,000 saved. It sits in a current account, maybe a deposit paying 2.5%. You feel like you’re being prudent. Responsible. That you’re building security.

Meanwhile, the eurozone monetary base has grown 400% since 2008. The real accumulated inflation, not the official CPI, but the one you feel at the supermarket, in rent, in energy, erodes that capital year after year. You don’t see the movement. But it’s happening. It’s so slow and so constant that your brain normalizes it.

Fiat is the oldest robot in the system. And it has been doing its job for decades.

The difference between Boston Dynamics’ Atlas and the central bank is this: Hyundai’s robot at least produces something. The monetary machine only redistributes what already exists, from those who save to those who owe, from those who work to those who own assets.

This is why mass automation is not going to destroy the world. It is going to destroy the world of those who don’t understand where real capital lives.

When 400 million manufacturing jobs disappear, there will be two kinds of people. Those who lost their income and had their wealth sitting in a bank. And those who lost their income but had their wealth in assets that cannot be printed.

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I almost never write about the news.

Most of it adds nothing that will still matter a year from now, and this newsletter is about thinking in decades, not headlines. But today I’m making an exception. Because someone is giving us a live lesson in financial engineering, and I want you to see it before the noise buries it.

This week, STRC, designed to orbit $100, collapsed. It closed near $89. It touched $83 intraday. A 17% move in an instrument they sold as stable. The Sharpe ratio everyone bragged about, gone.

The headlines say “death spiral.” I see the opposite: a textbook opportunity waiting to be executed.

Let’s run the numbers.

Strategy holds a cash reserve of around $1.1 billion, built to cover dividends and debt. Suppose it spends half ($600 million) buying back STRC in the market at $85, the average price during this week of weakness.

It buys roughly 7 million shares. It retires $705 million of par value. Discount captured on entry: $105 million.

This is where the order is everything.

If you raise the dividend first, the price returns to $100 and you lose the cheap-buyback window. If you buy back first and raise the dividend after, which is what’s going to happen, you capture the discount and then push the price to par. The 7 million shares you bought at $85 are now worth $100. Locked-in gain: $105 million. And the higher coupon is paid on an already-shrunken stack.

Strategy draws it as a rocket gaining engines. Sell MSTR, sell STRC, sell BTC: each lever, a way to push more Bitcoin per share. What I want you to see is that he holds the two elements this game requires, an infinitely liquid, finite asset (Bitcoin) and an instrument whose price he himself steers through the dividend. That combination is something almost no one in public markets has.

And here’s the close of the loop, the step that actually ends in Bitcoin.

When STRC trades back above par, the ATM program reactivates. Strategy can re-issue the shares it bought back at $85, now at $100. It recovers the $600 million plus the spread. That $105 million difference, bought cheap, re-issued at par, is fresh cash. At a Bitcoin price of $63,000, that’s roughly 1,660 BTC. Accumulated, literally, from arbitraging his own paper.

Buy your own paper cheap when the market panics. Lift the price with the lever you control. Re-issue at par when confidence returns. Turn the spread into Bitcoin.

That’s the full game. And he can run it every time the market hands him a drop.

It isn’t magic. It’s owning two perfectly complementary assets, one scarce and liquid, the other with a steerable price and the discipline to move capital between them at the exact moment. Bitcoin is the anchor. STRC is the instrument. The levers are his.

One warning, because I hate posturing: spending $600 million of the reserve in the middle of a confidence crisis isn’t free. That reserve is also the visible signal that Strategy can pay. Pull the lever too early and you spook the market instead of calming it. Timing here isn’t a detail. It’s the whole thing.

That’s why this isn’t for everyone.

Both MSTR and STRC are extraordinarily efficient ways to articulate one of the largest Bitcoin treasuries in the world, 846,842 coins, 4% of all the supply that will ever exist. But they’re instruments for someone who understands exactly which engine is firing and why. Enter without understanding the mechanism, and you enter late, when the Sharpe looks like magic. And you exit even later, selling the bottom, convinced the ship is crashing when it’s only switching engines.

So don’t criticize Saylor this week. Study him.

While everyone watches the price, he’s playing with the levers.

And that difference, understanding the mechanism when others only understand the price, is the only arbitrage that truly matters.

Now our portfolio…

📈 Asymmetric Finance Portfolio

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Last week I received a message from a subscriber. He told me he had read my analysis, agreed with everything, and still hadn’t moved anything in his portfolio.

I asked him why.

His answer: “I don’t know, I was waiting to see what happened.”

That is exactly the problem. And it’s the problem that will cost more money in the next crash than any analytical error ever will.

Most investors are going to lose significant money in the next correction. Not because they picked wrong. Not because they lacked information. But because when the moment to act arrives, they won’t be able to. Their minds will be too saturated, too scattered, too loud to execute what they already know they should do.

The most underrated asset in finance isn’t a screener. It isn’t a factor model or a macro framework or even a great allocation strategy. It’s mental clarity. And almost nobody talks about it, because it’s not something you can sell.

There is a specific type of investor who consistently outperforms across a full c…

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The other day I told you about one of the books that blew my mind recently.

Today, I’m going to show you how you can use its ideas to make a lot of money.

No overcomplication. No hustle.

Just thinking like an outsider.

Like a real investor.

Let’s dive in.

This book profiles some of the greatest CEOs in history.

Not the usual suspects. Not the Forbes cover guys with motivational quotes.

No.

The ones who took normal companies and turned them into true baggers. 10x. 20x. 50x.

And they didn’t follow the playbook.

They followed a principle: capital allocation is the highest leverage point in any business.

And whether you’re a CEO, a solo founder, or just investing your own money, the same rules apply.

1. Cash flow is king.

These CEOs ignored reported earnings. They focused on real cash flow. The kind that actually hits the account and gives you choices.

Because that’s what lets you reinvest, repurchase, acquire, or distribute.

As a company, it’s easy to offset interest payments with dividends, that’s your core economic activity.

But as an individual? Almost impossible.

That’s why I prefer to generate my own flow.

On demand. Using decentralized protocols.

So I create liquidity without selling, without taxes, without waiting on anyone.

2. When the market hates what you own, buy more.

One of these CEOs bought back more than 90% of his company.

Because he knew the market was wrong.

And he acted before buybacks became trendy.

I do the same.

Bitcoin at 16k? I buy.

Gold gets smashed? I buy.

If I own something that’s clearly worth more than what it’s priced at, I don’t need to go shopping elsewhere.

3. Forget marble offices. Buy freedom instead.

I love this one. None of these CEOs built flashy HQs.

Why? Because high fixed costs bleed your returns.

They leak out in silence.

There’s something way more valuable: freedom.

Choosing when to work, who to work with, and what to focus on.

And you only get that when your burn rate is low.

Sure, it has downsides. But it’s worth it.

4. Think different. Always.

We’ve said it before: you don’t need overpriced subscriptions or magical products.

No one knows what the market will do next.

It repositions itself.

So the goal isn’t to guess direction.

It’s to hold uncorrelated assets and build an asymmetric portfolio that can take hits and still strike.

5. Simple structures. Decentralized control.

These CEOs didn’t bottleneck decisions. They empowered operators.

Things moved fast.

And that’s what I aim for too.

Modular design, distributed intelligence, speed.

Your system should run without you.

And when you show up, it’s to refine, not to babysit.

6. No plan survives first contact.

Muhammad Ali said it best: everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

You can plan all you want, but when the market drops…

Only one thing matters: are you ready to act?

My rule is simple: when prices crash, I buy.

Whether that’s today, in a year, or in two.

That discipline compounds.

7. Wait. And strike hard.

One CEO waited over a decade before making a move.

Not because he was scared because nothing was priced right.

That patience is lethal.

I’ll happily sit still for a year if it means going big when everyone else freezes.

That’s how you make the 10x.

8. Use debt, but make it work for you.

These leaders didn’t use leverage to show off.

They used it to buy productive assets, ones that spit more cash than they cost to finance.

I do the same.

Only when I know the asset produces reliable flow.

Plus, interest payments reduce taxes.

Better to pay interest than capital gains, if the numbers work.

9. Taxes: the quiet battlefield.

Malone had a full in-house tax team. They met every month.

Not because he was greedy, but because he knew every dollar not paid in tax could be reinvested.

I do the same.

Don’t sell. Borrow.

Don’t realize gains. Optimize.

We’ve talked about this plenty in the newsletter, with three or four smart moves, you can reduce your tax bill by 30% and double your real return.

10. Use your assets as leverage.

As a retail investor, you can’t issue shares. But Michael Saylor can, and he’s done it repeatedly.

Bitcoin surges, stock price follows, he issues new shares, and buys more BTC or undervalued assets.

I do the closest thing:

When my assets are at all-time highs, I go to the bank.

They lend more.

And I use that to buy what’s cheap and forgotten.

11. One napkin. One clear idea.

This one hits hard.

Most of these legends could explain their strategy with a sketch on a napkin.

No slides. No stories.

Same here.

Cash flow, margin, liquidity, optionality.

If I can’t explain the logic in one sentence, I don’t own it.

12. Contrarian isn’t optional. It’s foundational.

Buffett said it: be fearful when others are greedy, greedy when others are fearful.

It’s not a quote. It’s a system.

It’s not about being brave.

It’s about being prepared.

If you have flow, if you have margin, if you have liquidity… you can be contrarian without sweating.

And the crowd becomes your edge.

13. When the world panics, you act.

After Lehman, Buffett deployed over $80 billion.

And more than $15 billion in the first 25 days.

That’s the play.

Be liquid. Have targets. Be ready.

And when the system breaks, go in hard.

No permission needed.

None of this is theory.

It’s what I try to apply every single day.

And what you can use (no matter your size) to stop playing defense and start building real financial freedom.

The kind that doesn’t rely on luck.

The kind that doesn’t require being right all the time.

The kind that comes from thinking like an outsider.

And living like an owner.

Now our portfolio…

📈 Asymmetric Finance Portfolio

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A few weeks ago I published a piece saying I wanted to sell all my stocks.

I got criticized for it.

“But everything’s at all-time highs.”

Exactly. When are you supposed to sell, at the lows? Of course you exit at the highs. And the longer this lasts, the worse the day it ends.

But that’s not the point. Today I want to make one clarification. I’m not going to teach you anything new. I just want us all on the same page.

Let me start with the obvious: I don’t recommend buying stocks.

The moment you buy one, you’re already losing. You pay the spread. And the day you sell, the taxman takes 25% of the gain in the best case. You worked, you were right, and you still hand over a quarter of what you made. By design.

And here’s something almost nobody stops to consider: when you pick an index, you’re rejecting every other one.

Choosing the S&P 500 is not the “neutral,” “passive” option they sold you. It’s a bet. A concentrated one, on large U.S. companies, that you made without thinking. You didn’t cho…

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I remember my grandmother telling me she bought her first apartment in Madrid for the equivalent of three years of her teacher’s salary. The apartment still exists. My grandmother’s salary, adjusted for what it could actually buy today, does not.

Nobody declared a crisis that year. There was no Lehman moment, no black swan, no front-page collapse. There was just a slow, invisible process of subtraction. Year by year. Category by category. Until the math stopped working for people who played by the rules.

That process didn’t stop. It accelerated. Groceries are up 35% since 2020. Rent in any major European city is up 40% or more...

Insurance, healthcare, energy, all running between 30% and 60% above pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, median wages in real terms have moved maybe 15%. The spread between what life costs and what work pays has never been wider in the post-war era.

Most people feel this. Very few understand the mechanism behind it.

The mechanism is simple, and it has been running since 1971. Governments discovered they could spend money they didn’t have, finance the gap with debt, and repay that debt with currency worth less than when they borrowed it. The political cost of this is low, inflation is invisible enough, diffuse enough, to avoid direct accountability. The economic cost is borne by anyone who holds their savings in the currency being debased. Which is almost everyone.

The reset isn’t coming. It has been running in slow motion for fifty years. What we’re experiencing now is just the phase where the math becomes impossible to ignore.

Understanding the mechanism is one thing. Knowing what to do about it is another.

The first thing to accept is that the system will not fix itself. There is no political constituency for fiscal discipline when the alternative is printing. There is no central bank that will sustain pain long enough to truly purge accumulated debt. The incentive structure points in one direction: more debt, more debasement, more erosion. Anyone waiting for a return to sound money through official channels is going to wait a very long time.

So the question becomes practical. Not philosophical. Not political. Practical.

What does a person actually do to survive and ideally benefit from a monetary reset that plays out over decades?

The answer has three concrete layers, and they need to be built in order.

Getting out of cash as a store of value

The first layer is getting out of cash as a store of value. Not out of cash entirely, liquidity matters. But holding savings in a bank account denominated in a currency whose supply is controlled by people with every incentive to expand it is not saving. It is slow liquidation. The first move is reallocating the savings that aren’t needed for near-term expenses into assets that governments can’t print. Bitcoin. Gold. Productive real estate with real cashflow. Equity in businesses with pricing power. The exact mix depends on your timeline and risk tolerance. The direction is non-negotiable.

Bitcoin deserves a specific mention here because it is structurally different from everything else on that list. Gold is scarce but not absolutely scarce mining expands supply. Real estate is tied to geography and political jurisdiction. Equity is exposed to management, competition, and regulation.

Bitcoin has a fixed supply cap enforced by mathematics, is borderless, is seizure-resistant with proper custody, and cannot be debased by any authority. It is the only asset in human history where the supply schedule is completely immune to price signals or political pressure. For a portfolio designed to survive monetary debasement, that property is not marginal. It is fundamental.

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I read the article during a sleepless stretch, scrolling without much intention. And something caught.

The argument was familiar: Bitcoin has run out of narrative. It’s not digital gold because gold outperformed it this year. It’s not freedom money because it doesn’t scale. It doesn’t protect against inflation, USDT has claimed that use case. It doesn’t diversify a portfolio; it trades like Nasdaq with more volatility and no dividend. Even its unconfiscability is in question if quantum computing advances far enough.

The chameleon is running out of colors. That’s what they said.

What surprised me wasn’t the argument. It was who was making it. Bitcoiners. People who’ve been in this for years. Who survived the 2018 winter, the 2022 collapse, the capitulations, the obituaries, the scammers and the politicians. And now, with Trump in the White House buying strategic reserves and ETFs absorbing billions, the conclusion is that Bitcoin has nothing left to say.

There’s something structurally broken in that reasoning.

To understand it, I need to talk about the sexagesimal system.

The Babylonians chose to count in base 60. Twelve integer divisors. Divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. No awkward decimals for almost any practical daily operation. That system outlasted empires, religions, scientific revolutions, and the arrival of the metric system. We still measure time in units of 60. We still divide the circle into 360 degrees. Not because anyone imposed it by decree. But because it was objectively superior at what it did.

Nobody needed a narrative for minutes to last sixty seconds.

It worked. And what works doesn’t need a sales pitch.

The problem with people who say Bitcoin has run out of narrative is that they confuse the map for the territory. Narratives are adoption tools, they are not the asset. They’re the marketing layer over something that exists or doesn’t exist independently of what’s said about it. Gold doesn’t need anyone to build it a story. A square meter in a city center doesn’t either. Neither does time.

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My advisor had been in the business for twenty years when he said it.

“Park it in US government bonds. Four percent. Steady as she goes.”

He said it with the smile of someone who thinks they’re doing you a favor. Like he’d discovered something. Like prudence and intelligence were the same thing. And I remember looking at him and thinking: this man confuses not losing with winning.

Let’s run the numbers cold.

One million dollars in US Treasuries at 4% produces $40,000 a year. Bi-weekly, that’s $1,538. Sounds reasonable, until you remember the IRS gets first dibs before you see a cent. At a 37% marginal rate, what actually lands in your account is $981 every two weeks.

Nine hundred and eighty-one dollars.

That’s what your million (the capital that took you decades to build) produces clean after taxes. Slightly more than an unemployment check. Enough for cat food, daytime TV, and quietly hoping Medicare doesn’t collapse before you need it.

They call it conservative financial planning. I call it aging in slow motion while your capital works for the government, not for you.

The problem isn’t the yield. The problem is the architecture.

Bonds were designed for an era when inflation was transitory and governments had fiscal discipline. Neither of those conditions exists anymore. What exists is a sovereign system with debt levels that make a return to monetary normalcy mathematically impossible. Central banks are not independent institutions. They are fiscal agents. And the only politically viable mechanism for resolving sovereign debt is inflation.

In that context, lending money to the government at 4% nominal, while the real devaluation of purchasing power runs at a pace no official index correctly captures, isn’t conservative.

It’s subsidizing the problem.

What I’m about to share here you won’t hear from your advisor. You won’t see it on CNBC. It’s not in the portfolio model your private bank sent you last week.

You’re seeing it here first. That’s exactly what Asymmetric Finance exists for.

The 99% of serious investors are still staring at the same old menu: bonds, index ETFs, the occasional REIT, and the vague promise that “the long run always works out.” Meanwhile, there are instruments operating on a completely different frequency, ones the mainstream hasn’t discovered yet, or doesn’t want to discover, because they don’t fit the business model of people who get paid to manage your money passively.

Two of those instruments are called and .

They are not traditional investment funds. They are not index ETFs. They are cash flow vehicles designed to pay bi-weekly distributions, like a salary, except the capital does the work, not you. And the distributions they pay are classified as Return of Capital, which means the IRS doesn’t touch them the moment you receive them.

Let’s get to the number that matters.

One million dollars split equally between $STRC and $SATA produces over $122,000 a year. Bi-weekly, that’s $4,702 deposited into your account. No immediate withholding. No government taking its cut before the money reaches you.

Compare that to the $981 the sovereign bond leaves you after the IRS is done.

The difference isn’t yield. It’s architecture.

$STRC combines exposure to productive assets with a distribution structure designed to maximize visible cash flow for the investor. $SATA complements that structure with a different risk profile but an equally consistent payment mechanic. Together they form what I call a flow machine: capital generating real income, bi-weekly, with tax efficiency built into the design of the instrument itself, not bolted on as an afterthought.

The tax doesn’t disappear. It defers. And that deferral matters more than it looks.

Every year the IRS waits is a year that capital keeps compounding for you. If you also use these assets as collateral to access liquidity instead of selling them, and eventually pass them to your heirs with a stepped-up basis, the tax bill the government was planning to collect becomes something that may never fully materialize. The system has a back door. It’s available to anyone who knows it exists.

Your neighbor with the 60/40 portfolio and the gray-suited advisor doesn’t know it exists.

You do. Now.

And in markets, that’s the only thing that truly matters: the right information before it becomes obvious. When $STRC and $SATA show up on the radar of the average institutional investor when the Wall Street Journal runs its first piece on “the new generation of bi-weekly flow instruments” the window you have right now will just be another story you tell in retrospect.

The goal of this newsletter was never to explain what everyone already knows. It was to take you where very few have arrived yet.

A million in bonds gives you survival. A million in $STRC and $SATA, architected for flow and tax efficiency, gives you real independence, the kind that doesn’t depend on the market, the political cycle, or the mood of the central bank that week.

Real security doesn’t come from the sovereign bond of the most indebted government in modern history.

It comes from the flow that doesn’t depend on it.

Now our portfolio…

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It started in 2017. I remember looking at the bank notification for my first real paycheck. It was supposed to be a milestone, the moment where “adult life” began, but to me, it looked like a trap.

I realized that if I traded my time for that specific number every thirty days for the next forty years, I would end up exactly where everyone else ends up. Mediocre. Tired. Dependent.

I decided I needed an exit strategy before I had even fully entered the building.

I stumbled into the markets like someone walking into a high-stakes poker game knowing only how to play Go Fish. I didn’t know the rules, but I knew I had to be at the table. My early moves were clumsy.

I looked at the standard advice, the index funds, the diversified baskets, the “safe” plays that promise you 7% a year if the world doesn’t end. It felt suffocating. It felt like waiting to die slowly. The banking system and the regulatory hurdles in Europe made it even worse, blocking access to the best instruments, forcing you in…

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The other day a thought kept circling in my head.

Why has no one done before what Saylor is doing with Strategy?

I think it’s a reasonable question.

Why did it take until now for a public company to say, clearly and without apology, we are going to convert our balance sheet into a scarce asset and we are not going to sell it?

My mind initially went to absurd places. Imagine a company accumulating an infinite stock of chairs. Or tables. Or plants.

Buying just to never sell.

Obviously nonsense.

Depreciating goods are not monetary assets. They multiply. They break. They lose relevance. There is no structural scarcity.

So I corrected myself.

This would only make sense with monetary commodities. With assets that function as reserves. Oil and copper crossed my mind briefly, but both are consumed. Both respond to price with increased production.

Then I remembered something important.

This has actually been done before.

In 1961, the Central Fund of Canada was created. It later became what we now know as Sprott Physical Gold and Silver Trust, ticker CEF. Its purpose was brutally simple. Buy physical gold and silver. Store it. Do not mine. Do not operate. Do not trade. Just hold bullion.

Its balance sheet was metal.

That’s it.

During the 1970s, while traditional equity markets suffered under stagflation, this structure became one of the cleanest proxies for gold ownership. Investors who did not want to store physical metal could simply buy shares.

Then came the real test.

In 1971, the gold standard ended. Gold was $35 per ounce. By 1980, it had reached around $850.

That is roughly a 24x move.

The Central Fund allowed investors to capture that repricing without ever touching a coin or bar. The company did not innovate. It did not optimize operations. It simply held.

And that was enough.

Decades later, in 2018, it was absorbed by Sprott. But the principle had already been proven. A publicly traded vehicle can derive its value purely from what it stores in its vault.

No narrative. No product expansion. Just custody of scarcity.

Now compare that to what Saylor is doing.

Strategy is not a mining company. It is not a Bitcoin exchange. It is not a trading desk. It is effectively a treasury vehicle holding digital monetary property.

But there is a critical difference between gold in the 1970s and Bitcoin today.

Gold’s supply grows at roughly 1 to 2 percent per year. It is scarce, yes. But it is not fixed. If price rises, exploration increases. Mines expand.

Bitcoin does not behave like that.

Its issuance is algorithmically fixed. Supply growth declines every four years. It does not respond to price signals by increasing production.

That difference changes everything.

Central Fund captured a monetary repricing when gold was reintroduced to market pricing after decades of artificial suppression. But gold’s supply system remained intact.

Strategy is accumulating an asset whose terminal supply is capped.

And here is the real question.

What happens when you combine public equity markets with an asset that cannot expand supply?

You create a structural absorber.

Every time Strategy raises capital to buy more Bitcoin and declares it will not sell, it removes liquidity from the float. Not temporarily. Permanently.

The Hunt brothers tried to corner silver by buying aggressively with leverage. They misunderstood elasticity and regulatory power. Silver supply could expand. Rules could change. They were forced sellers.

Central Fund did not try to corner gold. It simply stored it.

Saylor is closer to Central Fund than to the Hunts.

But he operates in an environment of persistent fiat debasement and structural fiscal deficits.

That context matters.

In the 1970s, gold repriced because the monetary regime changed. The dollar was severed from convertibility. Inflation accelerated. Confidence shifted.

Today, we are not officially abandoning the system. We are slowly eroding it.

Permanent deficits. Political incentives to inflate. Central banks trapped between growth and stability.

In that world, a company that converts its treasury into scarce monetary property is not acting irrationally.

It may be acting early.

Now let’s address the uncomfortable part.

These strategies are volatile. Extremely volatile.

Gold in the 1970s went 24x. Then it spent two decades underperforming. Bitcoin has experienced multiple drawdowns of 70 percent or more. Strategy’s equity has amplified those moves both up and down.

This is not smooth compounding.

It is monetary conviction expressed through volatility.

The deeper lesson is not about copying Strategy. It is about understanding the structure.

If you believe the base currency will continue to lose purchasing power over long periods, then holding monetary assets with constrained supply becomes rational.

Not to trade.

To store.

Central Fund proved that a balance sheet of bullion can create enormous shareholder value during monetary transitions.

Strategy is testing whether the same logic applies to digital scarcity in a structurally debasing world.

The market will decide over time.

But the thought experiment remains powerful.

What if the most asymmetric move is not diversification.

What if it is concentration in the right monetary reserve.

Now our portfolio…

📈 Asymmetric Finance Portfolio

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The human brain is biologically incapable of intuitively understanding exponential growth. We are designed for a linear world where one plus one equals two, and where the threats we face move at a predictable, constant speed across the savannah.

We think in straight lines.

But wealth is not generated in straight lines. Real wealth, the kind that creates generational freedom, is generated exponentially. It compounds. It doubles, then doubles again.

And this mismatch between our linear biology and the exponential reality of high-performance assets creates a massive psychological trap.

This is the reason why most people sell their winners too early and hold their losers forever.

This glitch in our software becomes painfully obvious when we look at what has happened with Bitcoin over the last two years. In November 2022, the world felt like it was ending. FTX had just imploded, leverage was being flushed out of the system, and the “experts” were declaring crypto dead for the hundredth time. I…

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I’m dropping something I wish someone had told me 10 years ago.

If you’re employed, read this twice.

Not motivational quotes. Not theory. But real, battle-tested rules.

The kind that helps you:

• Escape quietly

• Build real wealth

• Never depend on a paycheck again

Let’s go.

Build Early

There’s something powerful about building a home in your 30s instead of your 50s. It forces clarity. It aligns your priorities. Whether it’s rural or urban, the place you build becomes an anchor, a center of gravity.

Many wait too long, trapped in the illusion of stability provided by company housing or cushy rentals. But comfort is dangerous when it’s borrowed. Build early. Let your family grow into it, not inherit it when you’re done.

Go Home

You are not the spine of your department. If you vanish tomorrow, someone will be in your seat by Monday.

The company will not collapse. Your family, though, that’s irreplaceable. Don’t confuse presence at work with value.

Go home.

Often.

Touch base. Remind yourself who you’re really building for.

Master Your Craft

Chasing promotions is a full-time job. It distracts you from the actual work. From the craft. Become exceptional at what you do. Learn deeply. Stay curious. If a promotion comes, fine.

If it doesn’t, that’s also fine.

The real win is internal leverage. That calm, quiet confidence that can’t be taken away by office politics.

Stay Out of Gossip

It’s not worth it. Office gossip is a tax on your integrity. A few words in the wrong room can tarnish your name for years. Stay clean. Build a reputation that doesn’t need defending. People remember.

No Competition

Your boss is not your rival. Your colleague is not your enemy. Trying to outshine everyone is exhausting and unnecessary.

Build in silence.

Let the work talk.

Your real opponent is your past self, not the people sharing your Zoom link.

Build a Side Game

The salary treadmill always speeds up. Inflation, expectations, lifestyle creep. At some point, the math stops working. Don’t wait for that moment. Build a side business now. Even a small one.

Get used to income that doesn’t come with a contract. Let your future freedom compound in the background.

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A few days ago I read a PDF that was very, very interesting. I genuinely think it can help you.

It wasn’t the usual motivational piece about “thinking big.” It wasn’t a technical guide on asset allocation for family offices either. It was something far more useful. A brutally honest collection of founder profiles who have already played the game at different levels. Some worth $10 million. Some worth over $1 billion. Some who never sold. Others who exited early and then lost their way.

And the most interesting part wasn’t how much they made.

It was where they messed up.

Because if you study their mistakes carefully, you realize something uncomfortable: if you make those same mistakes with a $500K, $1M, or $2M portfolio, it won’t cost you ego. It will cost you decades.

One of the most repeated mistakes was this: selling too early the asset that was actually making them rich.

The compounder who never sold understood something most people don’t when they’re still building. His company wasn’t j…

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There’s a well-known quote from Charles Munger (who, sadly, left us just before turning 100):

“I’d like to know where I’m going to die, so I never go there.”

It sounds simple, but there’s deep reflection behind that.

Taleb understood this perfectly. That’s why his portfolio is completely asymmetric, built to withstand any possible event.

I think a mix of both Taleb and Munger led me to build the asymmetric portfolio.

A portfolio that benefits from market fragility.

And markets are getting more fragile every day.

Do you remember just a few months ago when silver and gold moved as much as 20% and 40% within a few sessions?

That meant roughly $7–9 trillion was wiped off the markets, in other words, the value of the 2–3 biggest companies in the world, gone in just a few days.

Is that even possible?

Is there really that much money moving around?

No. And no.

The reason this happens is simple: most people don’t understand that:

1. The price is just the last trade made between two people

2. There’s an endless web of financial derivatives that makes prices move violently

Knowing all this, and following the logic of Taleb and Munger, today I want to explain how not to die in the world of investing.

Some of it might sound obvious. But it’s worth saying out loud, because humans have a cognitive bias: we forget pain quickly.

And when we forget pain, the same mistakes get repeated. Again. And again.

At the end, I’ll show you how to avoid this trap and the best way to structure your portfolio to survive.

Not knowing your fixed costs

This is the most common mistake people make. If you’re a person, anything you pay on a recurring basis is a fixed cost. You can only go broke if your fixed costs exceed your income.

I know some will talk about variable costs, but if you’re a person, it’s easy to cut those when necessary.

The most common fixed costs?

• Mortgage or rent

• Utilities

• Subscriptions

• School tuition

• And if you’re a true financial suicide case, a second home

If you’re running a business, the biggest fixed costs are:

• Payroll

• Raw materials

Bill Gates understood this when Microsoft was still a young company. He said he came up with a hyper-conservative strategy: keep enough cash in the bank to pay salaries for a full year, even if zero revenue came in.

Warren Buffett echoed a similar idea when he told Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in 2008:

“I’ve promised to always run Berkshire with more-than-abundant liquidity. If I have to choose, I won’t trade a single night of sleep for the possibility of extra profits.”

What happens most of the time is that we assume an optimistic bias when taking on risk, the “Russian Roulette Syndrome”:

It’s the emotional attachment to a favorable probability, even when the downside is utterly unacceptable.

The odds are on your side in Russian roulette.

But the negative outcome outweighs all potential upside.

Yes, you need to take risks to make progress.

But you should never take a risk that could destroy you.

Leverage

This one’s the clearest.

If you have Bitcoin in a Ledger, no one can take it from you.

If you have gold in a safe, same.

Even if you own a Nasdaq ETF, it’s still relatively safe, even though some of those companies might be leveraged, they’ll likely be replaced by others with stronger balance sheets over time.

But it’s a different story when you’re the one holding leverage… and you’re the weak link.

And yet, all of that breaks into a thousand pieces if leverage is misused.

Leverage itself isn’t bad. In fact, when used well, it’s what turns a good portfolio into a lethal weapon. But the problem isn’t leverage. The problem is who’s holding it.

If your assets are leveraged, and you don’t know it, you’re already dead.

If your lifestyle is leveraged with fragile income and high fixed costs, you’re also dead.

If you need to sell assets during stress just to pay your bills, you’re already dead.

People think financial ruin hits like lightning.

In reality, it’s a small wound that gets infected slowly until one day you can’t walk anymore.

And the worst part is you knew it, but ignored it.

That’s why there’s only one kind of portfolio that survives all of this:

A portfolio that never forces you to sell. That pays you just for breathing. That feeds off chaos.

An asymmetric portfolio

One that clearly separates your assets into three boxes: flow, core, and optionality.

One where your core is never touched, it’s your foundation of power.

Where your flow covers your fixed costs every single month, letting you live with dignity without touching your core.

And where your optionality lets you strike when others are paralyzed, because you have liquidity, margin, and patience.

If you don’t build this, sooner or later the system will force you to sell your soul to pay rent.

It doesn’t matter how hard you work or how much you earn. If your portfolio lacks antifragility, the system will wipe you out in the next dislocation. Or the one after that. It’s just a matter of time.

As Munger said, “I’d like to know where I’m going to die, so I never go there.”

The funny thing is: in finance, we do know where most people die.

They die from lack of liquidity. From being forced to sell. From a lifestyle that demands they do.

And yet they keep walking straight into that trap, over and over again.

Taleb understood this perfectly. That’s why his portfolio is built to benefit from chaos, not resist it.

That’s where real wealth is born.

Not from predicting the future.

But from designing a system that works even when you’re wrong.

If you want real wealth, forget about “earning it someday.”

Focus on living from flow right now.

Make sure your core is never touched.

And keep liquidity (and courage) to strike when everyone else is panicking.

Because wealth isn’t in the number.

It’s in the structure.

Now our portfolio…

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From time to time I write notes. Like Naval says, it’s a way to compress what I actually think into very few words. No decoration. No performance. Just signal.

What I’ve noticed over the years is that many of those notes age well. Some even get better with time. I go back to them often. I reread them. I extract what still holds. And I discard what doesn’t. That loop alone has probably been one of the highest return activities in my life.

That’s why I keep saying this, even if it sounds arrogant. If you remove the time cost from the equation, reading (my) Notes has an almost infinite return. One or two minutes. That’s it. No threads. No noise. No dopamine farming. Just a thought that either survives contact with reality or doesn’t.

A few days ago I went back to September. Almost a year ago. And I stopped on one specific note. I read it again and said to myself, this one is not timeless. And precisely because of that, it matters.

The core idea was simple but uncomfortable. What if we never see a real recession again.

Not a correction. Not a 20 or 30 percent drawdown that gets bought within months. I’m talking about the kind of recession people still reference decades later. 1929. 2008. COVID, for a few weeks at least. The kind of event where assets are destroyed, not just repriced. Where time itself becomes the enemy.

The theory goes like this. The system can no longer afford sustained deflationary collapses.

Debt levels are too high.

Political tolerance is too low.

The monetary response function is now asymmetric. Pain is not allowed to compound. It is absorbed. Socialized. Monetized.

That doesn’t mean volatility disappears. Volatility is the price of the illusion. But it does mean that the market structure we grew up with may no longer produce decade-long bottoms where you can buy quality assets at a 70 percent discount and wait patiently for normalization.

Or, as Taleb puts it, keeping a large portion of the portfolio in cash (the barbell strategy).

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A few months ago, I received a reply to one of my articles with an investment strategy I want to share with you today. A strategy that lets you accumulate the asset of your choice at a lower price, build a long-term position, and generate income. All in one.

Today I’m breaking it down step by step so you can implement it and start generating income right away.

As you know, I believe wealth comes from circulating capital. I’ve written about this several times.

If you need 2k a month to live, and you own funds like JEPQ or others I’ve recommended before, with half a million (in the currency of your choice), you can be free.

But the best part isn’t being free. It’s the feeling of being free. It’s the mental peace that comes from placing your attention where it actually matters. Because that’s when everything starts to flow.

You’re sitting in the “F**k you money” seat. And ironically, that’s when income starts to show up from everywhere.

If you want to dig deeper into this, there’s a book I always recommend, Die With Zero. But if what you want is the step-by-step, the practical method to actually implement this today, I’ve got you covered.

The returns? Way better than real estate.

I used to run this strategy all the time.

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Everyone wants to look busy. It signals purpose. It soothes the ego. It feeds the illusion that motion equals progress.

But most of the wealth I’ve built came from doing… nothing.

Not passive. Not lazy. Positioned.

That’s a different game. And most people never play it because it doesn’t look like anything. It looks like sitting. Waiting. Watching. Not chasing.

But that is the work.

We’ve built a world addicted to events. The spike. The announcement. The moment. The top. The crash. The next. The now. Everyone is tuned to the dopamine loop of “what’s happening” instead of “what am I becoming?”

That’s a problem. Because nothing asymmetrical comes from noise.

Asymmetry only reveals itself to those willing to live through the flat, uneventful periods. Those who structure systems that don’t depend on action. Who can watch the market convulse, headlines scream, politicians fail, and still not touch a single position.

Why?

Because the real process is invisible.

It’s how you prepared months ago. It’s h…

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Many times I’ve shared the techniques the wealthy use to grow their net worth at an incredible pace.

Since I started implementing all of them, I’ve been able to more than double my personal wealth year after year.

Yes, you heard that right.
If you start with 100k:

Year 1, 200k
Year 2, 400k
Year 3, 800k

…

I could go on, but I don’t want to tease you too much.
What I like most about this is the feeling of security, knowing I can face almost anything.

Most of what I’ve taught you is based on a very well-known technique, Buy Borrow Die. It works incredibly well because, whether you believe it or not, you are saving a huge portion of taxes.

The State, believe it or not, is better than many hedge funds. AQR, Bridgewater and many others would love to have this advantage, and yet the State is the one taking it.

Good thing you found this newsletter. Welcome, let me open your eyes.

A euro money market fund today yields around 2%.

It charges a 1% management fee and then the State takes 20% of the gains.

So you go from 2% to 0.75%. Impressive…

But I don’t want to get lost in that today. Another day I’ll show you ways to avoid this taxation. Today I want to share a different tax trick, one that very few people use and that I find extremely profitable.

Actually, extremely profitable.

Even more than Buy Borrow Die.

Because when you implement Buy Borrow Die you face one problem. If you borrow 100k, you will always have at least 100k of debt. If you don’t have cash flow, reducing it is almost impossible. Or is it?

Today I want to talk about this only to paid subscribers.

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