A Wall Street Pro’s View On Bitcoin, Blockchain, & Bullion
by Valentin Schmid via The Epoch Times,
ZeroHedge.com
Fri, 12/29/2017
Paul Brodsky explains the philosophy behind crypto investing…
Paul Brodsky is usually ahead of the curve. He traded options at the American Stock Exchange before they became mainstream, and then moved to mortgage-backed securities at Kidder Peabody in the 1980s.
After he figured out the flaws in the financial system, he became interested in gold — just before its bull run at the turn of the millennium.
Now he sees the next big opportunity, and he joined other seasoned Wall Street professionals at the first full-fledged cryptocurrency hedge fund Pantera Capital.
In this interview, Brodsky tells us how he came to see crypto as the next big thing, and what investors need to know to be successful in the space.
Epoch Times: Tell us more about your background in finance.
Paul Brodsky: What I’ve been attracted to has been where the most interesting aspect of finance was. Initially, when I got into the business it was options.
That ultimately got me into mortgage-backed securities which has a heavy option component.
Derivatives came after that and I got into derivative trading. All of these markets became much larger than anyone thought they would and changed the landscape of investing.
The asymmetry of returns of bitcoin and other cryptos, which haven’t run up as much, is ridiculously in your favor I think.
Then I became very interested in gold after a macro analysis of the monetary system. This led me to an appreciation of gold which I have owned from 2000 until today.
I had a small part in explaining gold’s risk-return profile and its fundamentals to people and large investors.
In the macroeconomic landscape you drill down from the top and look into what makes sense and what is sustainable, what has very good asymmetries in its return profile. This was the case with gold. Low risk and high upside.
This way of analyzing investments led me to cryptocurrencies which I’ve been in for a while; I’ve been in Bitcoin for a while.
I was going to open up a macro fund, which I had structured, but the more research I did after the Ethereum 20 tokens came out, the more I became convinced this was going to be equally if not more disruptive than the internet; call it internet 2.0.
Epoch Times: What do you like about crypto?
Mr. Brodsky: Cryptocurrencies are money over the internet. This is similar to Voice over IP (VOIP), which disrupted telecommunications. You used to have one monopoly sitting in the United States and another sitting in the United Kingdom and a copper wire running underneath the Atlantic.
With VOIP, prices went down and quality went up. It transformed the market. Bitcoin and other cryptos could be transformative in the way we look at economics, commerce and how we transfer value.
The Rest…HERE
