Is Uptober still on? Crypto market analysis with Lark Davis

Transcript

GM good morning welcome to the milk Road show The Daily crypto show where we unpack blockchain Trends faster than a meme coin skyrocketing and dumping I'm your host Jay Hamilton and today we're joined by legendary crypto investor Lark Davis in today's show we're asking the question that I know is on everyone's mind right now which is is oober still on what the heck is going on and when are we going to finally see the pump that we've been talking about for so long we're going to jump into some jobs data some macro stuff we're going to talk about conflict and what that could do to the crypto markets and then we're going to end with some predictions before we jump in are you going to permission list this week the milk Road team myself included will be there and

we'd love to meet you so if you're going to be there throw a comment add us and let us know so we can meet you if you're not going to be there and you want to join we got a 30% off discount code just for you guys milk 30 hit the link in the show notes to buy your ticket today we'd love to see you there also we are almost at 10,000 subscribers on YouTube and we need your guys help getting there so please subscribe today I don't expect you to subscribe for free though we're going to hook you guys up we're giving away a bunch of free stuff so check out the show notes but make sure you subscribe on YouTube and you could win free stuff all right without further Ado Lark welcome to Today's Show how's it going man mudang of course has been the

new to Paradigm money recently who who have thought that a small little baby hippo in Thailand be worth inspiration for a meme coin to go to 300 million plus dollars this Market's crazy man this Market's crazy it's so crazy Lark other than mem coins which we will touch on later in the show because how can you not right now they're all pumping where are we at from a macro perspective what came out of macro news last week that you were paying attention to yeah macro has been very interesting last week we've got a lot of good and bad things happening and it's crazy to see how the market has priced both big events and I think the two big things we' probably want to talk about would be the Iran Israel conflict we saw the price take a pretty big tank on that particularly

when Iran threw some missiles over at Israel Demarcus didn't like it at all obviously the the thought is okay now Israel is going to retaliate what's that going to mean for the Straits of hor mov and um the oil and if Iran's oil fields get hit or Iran's production facilities get hit what could that do to the price of oil s of skyrocketing it's bad news for basically everything everywhere third or 40% of the world oil flows out of the the Persian Gulf here so it's a big concern for investors but it's one of those funny things it just keeps not happening how many years you know I've been studying political science for a long time been investor in the market for a long time and the amount of times

that I have heard there's gonna be a big war in Iran and the Straits of hor moves are gonna be shut down and the all the Persian oil Persian Gulf oil production is going to stop I mean it just it just keeps not happening maybe we're closer to it happening than we have been before before but usually there's a bunch of saber rattling some tit fortat and then nothing too much happens so let's hope fingers crossed that ends up being the case and we're not on the edge of some massive major conflict that does have a massive impact on the price of oil because if that happens welcome back inflationary forces because it would be get real nasty real fast because guess what everything in your modern world depends on the price of oil right okay so that's one thing markets didn't like that they got

spooked quite a bit by that but we did get saved by the 200 day EMA so yay for that now the second thing that came out that markets really liked was the jobs data so in the US we saw the jobs data come in very positively we had unemployment drop from 4.2 down to 4.1% we got up to 4.3% I think back in August and what's very interesting is that this number what we're near historic loads a standard range for unemployment between four and 6% it's currently going down I've seen criticism what oh but there's a lot of government jobs it's still jobs dude it's still jobs so at the end of the day we are seeing

unemployment trending downwards and with the total number of new jobs added came in well above expectations came at about a quarter million expectations were around uh 220 or something like that it was a big win for the jobs markets which is of course going to be good for just markets overall puts a lot of optimism back in I mean where's the recession at man I know there's been a lot of things that been scaring for recession for a long time we've talked about those things here and those are valid concerns to have but when we keep seeing this economic data coming you can't stay in one sort of mindset for all times because that's how you get in big trouble in markets oh everything's be bearish and I'm just going to stick to that attitude forever you see people

who've been non-stop bears for years and they just get trashed it's crazy jobs that is good CPI the inflation's coming down as long as there's no war big war in the Middle East uh we're seeing the rates falling Papa pal is probably going to cut another 25 basis points at the next meeting so everything's heading in the right direction US GDP growth predicted for 3% this quarter and with all that happening Global M2 money supply breaking out China printing like crazy we haven't even talked since all the China crazies happened man holy cow China has injected hundreds of billions into its economy everything is lining up for October to resume so why hasn't it well it's interesting I saw a guy who did some great research today he said

that um something like eight out of the 10 last Octobers you've had this sort of dip in price in the first few days of October followed by the rest of the month actually ending up being pretty bullish so look whether October literally happens or not historically October is a real thing let's just put it that way there's a seasonality in markets and October tends to actually happen November December something like um basically anytime you have an election year October November December tend to be bullish months when you have a month where September has been bullish and our September was bullish you have basically October November December being bullish months now we all know

past performance cannot indicate future performance right but markets do rhyme because human emotions rhyme we are the investors we are the ones reacting to all the stuff we see in the market at the end of the day and so it puts a lot of fuel on the fire for the fact that we could have a very bullish end of year now maybe it's not the most bullish October in the history of Octobers there's always that possibility but it still could be a very good October so when you step back and look at where things are at right now because as you said and we talked about this last week on the show with multiple guests it's just everything is lining up for banana zone for October for whatever term you want to use everything looks good right

now and I kind of feel like I I just want everyone to know that we're not pulling your chain like we're not we're not trying to misguide you like it really is looking that good I just I feel like a broken record because we've been saying it for a month now and it looked like we were getting getting the pump towards the end of September and then as you said the conflict in Iran escalated and okay now all of a sudden things have have tamed down do you think that we are going to go here at some point it's just a question of maybe it's maybe it's October maybe it has to wait until November is the election the thing that's maybe holding us back I'm just I can't think anymore other than the the conflict in Iran clearly scaring people

I just can't figure out what else would be holding us back at this point there's not really a lot and that that's the interesting thing is yeah there's always potential for some crazy to happen in the world right we had the the big Port worker strike the other week as well which was threatened and then they stepped back and then we had the big hurricane which is basically flooded four entire states which is a total mess there's another hurricane coming there's always going to be something happening this is the thing this is the world there's always some crazy happening right but markets tend to in the very short term price those one way or the other but in the long term or even the medium term markets tend not to care so much about this stuff unless it's some really big crazy stuff that happens but even War

breaking out and stuff like that tends to have very short-lived impact on markets and when you zoom out and you actually see the big picture none of this stuff really matters that much I don't think the US election here's the funny thing about the US election especially for the crypto markets no matter what happens it's going to be okay now as we've discussed before because of all the policy positions and stuff like that Donald Trump currently appearing to be a much better more Pro crypto candidate rumors currently running around crypto Twitter that the next head of the SEC is likely to be the former head of compliance or something over at Robin Robin Hood so a very Pro crypto guy if that's the case then fantastic right but even if Harris gets elected it's probably still going to be

okay it's just not going to be as good as it could be and from a regulatory perspective right look at what Bitcoin and crypto has done in spite of one of the most aggressive attacks of any Administration in the history of crypto right so there's that to consider as well so I guess outside of World War I breaking out or I don't know some kind of Black Swan monkey pox or something like that we're probably going to be okay I just got your video demonetized by the way you're welcome thanks okay so when it does come how will it flow into crypto because that's the the other big question on everybody's mind is will we see an altcoin season will the alts the alts

have some of the alts have been doing well don't get me wrong the past month they've been doing well but so far this cycle if you go back a year basically if you if you were to consider that we've been in this cycle for about a year we've seen really Bitcoin dominance continue to do really well and then meme coins have just crushed it through the first six months of the year maybe not so much the last six months the last sideways chop where do you think the money is going to flow this time for the rest of this year sure look meme coins are the story of the cycle without a doubt and if you've been fading mean coins you've been leaving money on the table and I probably should have deployed even more money to meme coins I feel like I've taken big risks by

putting six seven eight% of my portfolio in mem coins I should have done 30% in hindsight right and it's amazing to see just how much the tokenized culture communities the Cults essentially have really just seen wild wild money be made and I know there's a lot of Insider games there's a lot of BS and all that kind of stuff but the reality is if you can catch one of these fast moving trains early enough you're going to make big money and at the end of the day as exciting as crypto is as amazing as technology is the vast majority of people are coming here to do just that to make money and so you might take something like some of these big great big Tech things right we had igen layer

come out recently and the last few months we've had layer zero we've had Wormhole I mean these are great pieces of crypto technology that are fundamental to the entire blockchain space and they come out with massive massive valuations very low floats and huge amounts of investor money VC money still to come in we've seen increasingly egregious toonomic situations Celestia is a great example now Celestia fantastic technology but it's a great example of this literally they're letting the VC's stake their vested tokens I think it was Paradigm maybe they've invested $20 million they've sold so far received $80 million of staking rewards before they even get their first token unlocked

Jesus the system is crazy right now and your average investor is looking at this stuff and they're going I got to understand all this nerdy Tech and then I got to deal with all these VC unlocks and all this kind of stuff and it just the odds are stacked against the average investor then they see meme coins they're more honest they're more honest yeah there's those balls and there's Insider baseball and all that kind of stuff but you can go on to de centralized exchange you can buy it and make your best case for it fully diluted tokens there's no you know 95% Supply be dumped on you any of this kind of stuff so I can see why mem coins have taken off you know it's it's the same kind of hype and narrative and easy to understand concept that nfts had back in

the day right it's just a picture of something with liquidity essential the struggle with meme coins is just the the lack of fundamentals right like what the heck is it how are you approaching Your Meme coin strategy any particular tokens or particular chains that you're focused on are you going more Blue Chip we had a great conversation with Joe mccan last week where he broke meme coins down into sort of like three categories talked about the Blue Chips he talked about sort of like the maybe the the middle of the pack could grow to Blue Chips but they're not quite there yet and then he talked about what he would call the which are the ones that are you know really high risk maybe it goes

maybe it's nothing anyways curious how you break it down that's a that's a really good way to approach it and the funny thing with the conversation around memec coins not having any fundamental value it's true it's true but then I would I would challenge you what is the fundamental value of a lot of crypto currencies how many governance tokens are out there like oh I'm going to govern the platform though yeah okay have fun you're not going to govern the platform nobody cares unless you're actually getting real money paid out somehow in in non-inflationary tokenomics I mean the the when he does start diving into tokenomics the fundamental value question gets real gray real fast there's some very clear things like maybe a or Trader Joe or a few others Aerodrome finance that have

very clear tokenomics that pay people to hold them there's a real reason to hold their tokens because you make money the vast majority of cryptocurrencies though are hoping that someday they're going to have a network effect or someday that someone's going to use enough their things there's goingon to be a burn mechanis this kind of be a where's the fundamentals they're simply not there and then you have to still deal with all the other toonomic BS so fundamentals is an interesting question when it comes to memes now how I allocate I feel like I should allocate more money to memes and I I might over time but um right now I I like the idea of the Blue Chips right looking at sort of big stuff and I don't own like Pepe for example I've thought back and forth should I buy some should not buy some

Pepe my biggest sort of what I would consider to be a blue chip would be Brett so Brett is the biggest meme coin on Bas it's essentially a bet that the bass ecosystem is going to continue to perform very well that the hype for bass will continue to grow so I've got Brett and I've got Aerodrome Finance the two biggest basically native assets to the base chain but I also think that Bas more broadly is going to do incredibly well so I've got Benji which is the dog of Base I have miggles which is the cat of Base rumored to be Brian Armstrong's cat I don't know if that's true or not I guess we'll find out someday but these are much lower cap things right so my if you look at the percentage of my portfolio it's probably in terms of total mean coin allocation it's probably

50% Brett and then four or five others that make up the other 50% so I've got foxy on Linea as well now the interesting thing and I I like Foxy I think it's it's a nice meme a wholesome meme it's interesting to consider how some of these memes might do on these sort of more exotic chains right Linea for example more exotic chain right less common less used Layer Two we're seeing a lot of different memes pop up all over the place right and one of the hard things is where are the users at where are people actually aping money into memes so we've seen of course salana be very successful we've seen bass be pretty successful avac Avalanche has had some success with memes obviously ethereum the OG right is had Pepe and

Shibu and stuff like this pop pop on it but now we're seeing some of the newer chains like swe we had hippo another I know the hippo meta you blink for five minutes in crypto and suddenly there's new an what's the hippo meta I don't even know what the hippo so hippo came out and it went from zero to 200 million or something like that within the space of three or four days five days something like this so that one winning meme might be enough to drive enough interest into the sweet blockchain more broadly get more money coming on chain and it becom sort of a a self-fulfilling prophecy oh sweet memes do good because this one did good everybody keep saving money in so it'll be interesting to see which chains

can actually build real communities and real Cults around meme coins yeah for everybody listening in if you haven't listened to our SOI episode yet go back and check that out it's not about meme coins on sui it's just about whether sui is a good investment and how to think about it for the rest of this cycle Lark why not invest in whiff or Pepe or Bon I'm curious why you chose not to by these I mean Brett is obviously a blue chip but not at the level of those other Blue Chips yeah I still might I still might I feel like um you know part of it has just been ego right I missed the train it should have got in earlier gets the best of us right

and I still may I still may you know it's always a struggle for me with adding new coins to the portfolio it's like 20 coins 22 coins or something right now my active portfolio all the pre-sale Investments stuff like gosh darn how many coins actually need have to be successful right I don't need to add another 10 coins another five milon coins right if Pepe goes from four billion to 40 billion well my aerody drone bag is probably gonna do the same so in terms of you know risk and reward is it worth it adding to that new position right but I have thought like gosh darn my eth bags have been doing like nothing recently man maybe it's time to take some of that eth and put it down into some eth beta plays like Pepe haven't pulled the trigger yet but it's

I like Pepe meme I think it's very funny probably it would probably be one of the ones that I'd look at personally obviously dog with hat it's a bleeding edge of all meme coin technology I mean they took a dog and they put a hat on it and you can't really compete with that to be honest I mean what are you gonna do after that so let's just talk about your Brett trade what's your plan for that trade how do you approached I think that's the thing is a lot of our listeners are going to be more hesitant to get into meme coins and you should everybody lutely um because it's definitely a different trade than a Bitcoin or an ethereum or Solana or a more of a major trade how would you treat what would be your plan for let's just say your Brett

trade for example sure absolutely so with Brett I haven't actually I took a very little amount of money off back in August in order to defend my uh liquidation positions but otherwise I've kept the vast majority of the bag like 85 90% of the bag completely untouched and so I I look at this and I think okay bass is going to go Brett's the key meme on Bas and they continue to show up put in the work and produce really good content and stuff like that so I'm looking at this like okay I'm actually looking at in terms of taking profits on it right so I position sized it um I haven't checked recently but it's about three to five% given the day of my total portfolio is in Brett so I look at is okay watch what the broader Market is

doing so when Bitcoin gets to like 100k for example that's I think the signal for me to take probably like a quarter of that off the table and now by that point how high will have run the interesting is see I think this is a coin that has potential to go into potentially tens of billions of market cap it's currently a little bit under a billion I think at the moment so it's probably a potential 10 20 30X play from here to cycle Peak but to be sort of just diligent with taking profits when we get to 100K take about a quarter of that off 150k take about qu of it off and if we go up farther than that take the rest off if we don't take the rest off on the move back down so that we guarantee the the profits are going to

come in because here's the thing I like my Brett bags I like some other stuff they're you know some of the funny names smoking chicken Fish Man smoking chicken fish that's a hilarious hilarious coin I picked up you seen this have you seen this smoking chicken fish got R Pals on board other hazer on board basically so it's a it's a it's a dead chicken with a dead fish stuck in it smoking a maror smoking chicken Fish Man apparently it looks like I'm a stone anyway I'm trying to find it to pull it up here very funny so but stuff like this is totally silly right this could go absolutely crazy there you go the smoking chicken fish man it's actually a church as well believe it or not and it's on salana and it's on salana and it's on salana but here's the thing look

I like memes I think memes are hilarious you they're the nfts of the cycle they were the hype's going they where the excitement's going they're the Cults and it's easy to understand for Norm so as more normies come into the market where are they going to go they're they're not buying igen igen I mean great technology but so freaking nerdy man even chain link super nerdy but you oh I like this smoking chicken fish that's funny oh hey this is a picture of a dog that's funny this one's got a hat on it I like that it's a very simple concept people understand but here's the thing that I want to leave investors with because I know we're running short on time here and this is the thing I want to leave investors with when the bare Market comes 99% of these memes are going to go

down by 90 99.99999% liquidity is going to go to zero and if you do not sell when the retail herd comes in you're going to lose all your money straight up maybe a very small fraction of coins are going to survive into the next cycle the vast majority of that look back at nfts look back at nfts it's going to be the same thing what do you have that survived from the previous cycle to this cycle Crypt punks Bard Apes a few others Doodles few other small collections right and most of them have not performed very well I think that in the next bare Market there'll be some great opportunities if you're a big meme person and you're big meme connoisseur and you understand the value proposition behind memes and the

calls behind memes all that stuff there's going to be some epic opportunities to buy stuff like Pepe and dog with hat and maybe a few of the other memes that really I think get real sort of cult status during the cycle but those will be the only ones I'd consider putting money back into but they're still going to go down 95% during the bare market right so it's really a game of hot potato to an extent with memes you got to get out right because you don't want be the guy left holding the bag at the end of the day I want to know everybody listening in what's the Hot Potato in your portfolio that you are worried about holding at the end of this let us know what's the Hot Potato what's the meme what's the

token you're holding that you're like oh boy I don't know when to sell this let us know comment in YouTube and we'll make sure talk about that token and how to tell you to treat that trade Lark thanks so much for joining us today as always appreciate your time thanks for having me have a wicked awesome day everybody as always if you liked today's episode please hit subscribe and make sure you follow us you don't miss out on the next one there's also a link in the description to our free 5 minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh and if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game game we're going to also leave a link for milk Road Pro you get access to our portfolio where you can see exactly

what we are buying this is your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto one final note this show is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice investing in crypto or any asset is risky and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose thanks so much for listening in my friends have a wicked awesome day