I would like to talk to you about why I think what we learned in the past about “proper investing” no longer applies to the next era and whether or not to look at “cash flow” when investing now.” Cash flow” is what all “value investors” are most fascinated by, and the logic is simple: you invest in this project, and how much profit it generates every month/quarter/year, you can clearly see and feel” so it’s easy to prove that your investment is “healthy” and sustainable. But in bubble times, this concept needs to change.
In the beginning, before the rise of the financial markets, many investors’ love of “cash flow” manifested itself in the difference between “buying a house” and “buying a store.” Because “you can buy a store and rent it out,” many people chose to buy a store rather than a house. The result is that stores are really comfortable collecting rent, but the returns are much lower than housing prices, and there are many examples of this.
Also after the advent of the internet age, it’s a very distorted feeling that many investors who believe in value feel uncomfortable with companies like Amazon that have made little profit for years.” I know it’s the future, but buying a stock that doesn’t pay dividends and I just hold it and sell it when it goes up? How is that different from me buying other stocks for speculation?”
Then later conspicuous is Tesla, we all know that the electric car is the future, also know that Tesla is the leader, but it is losing money every year, losing money to the point that you think it is going out of business, until 18 years before it began to make money, and by the time it profits look good, it has risen hundreds of times. Applying value investing logic to it at this point would be a bit like “the last leg of a relay race” instead. Of course, there’s certainly nothing here that says Tesla isn’t worth investing in.
So, in fact, core metrics that rely on company revenue-based metrics, such as cash flow and P/E ratios, have actually started to become less useful since the Internet era. And then in the age of cryptocurrencies, there’s even less of a concept of cash flow.
The biggest reason cryptocurrencies aren’t liked by Warren Buffett is that they don’t think they generate cash flow, they don’t generate a constant stream of profits, so they think it’s an unsustainable investment, it’s a bubble.
After DEFI 2021, many people started “mining for principal”, which means buying a coin to see if it can be “mined”, and buying a coin to keep in their wallet makes them uncomfortable. This is actually the traditional value investing school of cash flow philosophy, and it’s the same philosophy that keeps many people from “embracing” popular cryptocurrencies such as public chains, NFT, gamefi, and so on. Going back to NFT, there is no so-called cash flow in the picture, but the value is rising wildly.
In the bubble era, hot spots move faster and new things are created and hot in shorter cycles. Often times it’s no longer possible for you to have a steady income, and many “unsustainable annualized” projects keep popping up. The programs you can generate income from now may not be hot in five years or even three years. And new programs are being “born” all the time. These programs don’t have the patience to wait for expectations to arrive, they just want to embrace them themselves faster.
So a good project, a project that people like, an opportunity that can be implemented is the hotspot of this era, once you miss it will be missed forever, because the opportunity is time-sensitive, and this era on the “timeliness” is constantly shrinking from the previous and the choice of the reversal of the opportunity once the hesitation, it will be lost forever, can only be regretted.
In fact, I would like to say that the logic is very simple, that is, our traditional sense of “value investment”, mainly relying on the fundamentals of the enterprise, that is, the most acceptable logic.” Invest in the company, do business, make money and dividends”, such a sustainable state. Buffett’s favorite Coca-Cola, for example, is the most perfect incarnation of this logic.
In the pre-Internet era, people liked a certain drink, a certain car, a certain consumer product, a certain piece of furniture, a certain product, and as long as there were no major problems, they would use it for many years, the so-called “loyal consumers.” For example, if you drink Coca-Cola today, you are likely to drink Coca-Cola often; if you buy a General Motors car this year, you are likely to buy a General Motors car next year; if you drink Budweiser beer today, you are likely to drink Budweiser beer next year.
So you can extrapolate the next ten years based on their performance in the last ten years because they are not so easy to “change”.
But in the current internet age, people are noticing something very wrong, unlike “products” in the traditional age, which require a long manufacturing cycle to be presented to you, it’s not so easy for people to change their habits, and it’s not so easy for manufacturers to make products.
In the era of hotspot rotation, people’s preferences become faster because there is almost no cost to switch. From traditional manufacturing to the Internet era to the blockchain era, the time it takes for people to make “products” has been greatly compressed, and as information flows faster, people’s preferences become faster, and iterations become faster. Take, for example, the quintessential example of everyone’s favorite – Nokia.
As a result, the world of the future must be moving faster than outsiders think, and using traditional past business successes to drive future cash flows and valuations will be fundamentally problematic.
So how do you see investing in this new era? One is to embrace core assets and the other is to embrace change.
Core assets, that is, assets that can appreciate in value over time, are necessary. For example, a core asset in the cryptocurrency era is clearly a native internet asset like Bitcoin, which will naturally be able to continue to appreciate as more and more people enter the cryptocurrency market and the audience for Bitcoin grows.
Embracing change goes without saying. I think everyone’s greatest opportunity comes from change. At a glance, no one has a monopoly on any industry, there is no one standard, there is no one fixed model, and everything in the world is changing rapidly in a world that is most favorable to investors.
I would also like to make a special point here that I don’t know why many investors, especially those in their 30s and 50s, are very afraid of change, especially afraid of this big opportunity filled with change of fortune, and instead prefer to go to the kind of places where it seems to others that they’ll never amount to anything to take part in the infighting.
We have to let go of the usual thinking from childhood that “stable is right”. We were taught from a young age that we need to have a stable job, and that the best path is called “doing the problem”, and that there is often a right answer, which is that if you follow the designed path, work harder and more correctly than anyone else, you will have a stable future.
But clearly, that doesn’t quite cut it anymore on today’s market environment.
The world is changing all the time, and it is difficult for many people to accept that the “knowledge” they have learned after studying for more than ten years is not really useful in society, while the world is changing rapidly. We have to adapt to the changes, rather than sticking to the rules set by the previous generation, and the way they are distributed. And as we are investors, a group of people standing on the winds of change in the world, we should embrace change, and almost all change is good for investors.
Many investors are not confident that their first reaction to seeing a hot field is to “read a few books first”, behind this is actually an extreme reliance on “other people’s experience”, and they do not believe that they are the ones who are creating the new world, or that they are standing at the door of the new world. The doorway to the new world. Has there been anything worth reading in the cryptocurrency market in the last decade or so? There doesn’t seem to be a single one. And how many people have read Bitcoin’s white paper?
When it comes to investing, many people make the mistake of focusing too much on stability and getting it right, fearing that “something will go wrong,” that “cryptocurrencies are unstable,” and that “cryptocurrencies are unsustainable.
The fear of large fluctuations in instability and unclear expectations has caused many people to give up on entering the cryptocurrency market, not realizing that this is their opportunity. But the fact is that the cryptocurrency market is currently more stable than the stock market
If you think about it seriously, you’ll realize that what you’re after is definitely not a life dictated by a weekly or bi-weekly salary that you can see the end of, but why do people still go crazy for it? The legacy of subconscious and parental consciousness is terrifying. Many people are so tired of running around every day that they don’t have time to stop and think about what they’re actually doing, so why is there so little time left for them to think about how they’re going to make money?
Similarly, the fear of risk is subconsciously developed. Like when it comes to Bitcoin, many people’s first thought is “many countries don’t recognize it”, yeah, why isn’t a project that other countries don’t recognize a good project? This is the phrase that many investors lack the most compared to successful investors. Why? And now most countries are speeding up their cryptocurrency regulatory bills, all in fear of being left behind by the times
Many people make more money in 6 months doing cryptocurrencies than someone receiving a lifetime salary, so why waste time working? Many people mine for 100% higher annualized returns than most physical investments, so why do physical investments? Many will say: it’s . unstable, right? Yes, unstable, very good question.6 months is more than a lifetime, so why does it need to be stable? It doesn’t need to be stable. Why are you asking the question “stability or not” is the crux of the matter.
When you see something new, you should see the opportunity, not the risk. Then you can consider whether you have the ability to control it and what his success rate is.
The future is destined to be unstable and volatile. Do you think your stability, is really stable? Obviously not. So, is uncertainty more frightening to those of us at the forefront of constant brainstorming about the uncertain future, or to those struggling with politics? The answer is obvious and twisted.
I want you to recognize what you are and what you want and not be bound by old thinking. You are an investor, everything is changing, maybe the cryptocurrencies we are doing now suddenly become the most needed technological and financial innovations in the country of the future?
In fact the process of cryptocurrency adoption has reached an incredible speed
Embrace change, keep allowing yourself to change, stay hungry for survival, stay ambitious and don’t seek stability because there is no stability in the world.
The above is today’s content. We are at the beginning of the 21st century, not the end of the 20th century, and every era is bound to have a dominant melody for every era. In just a few decades, mankind has used electric lights, computers, cell phones, and can travel from one side of the globe to the other in just a few days. In the past, these were myths, but now they are the most normal things. Times are constantly changing and so are investments. If you can’t keep up with the current of the times, you will just be left behind.
Just like our contract trades that yielded 80% profit margins in a single day, the ETH contract trades made today reached over 20% profit margins in just a short period of time. This is almost impossible in the eyes of many people who work hard for a paycheck, but it’s literally happening right before your eyes. Perhaps Warren Buffett could be entitled to give up on cryptocurrencies as he himself has become a reef in the waves, but what about his descendants?
You don’t drown if you fall in the water, you only drown if you stay put, you have to keep swimming forward to have a chance of surviving!
Cryptocurrencies have gone from worthless to a market capitalization of over 2 trillion dollars in just over a decade, how many opportunities have you missed? Do you want to miss its future again?