“Responsibly all-in.”

“I like the orange coin. A lot.”

My research and audience straddles the macro finance world and the bitcoin world. And so humorously, I get heat from both sides.

“Lyn, I love your macro work but you’re too obsessed with bitcoin; I wish you would focus less on that stuff.” -hedge fund reader.

Vs

“Lyn, since you’re a fellow bitcoiner, why do you only have a 5-10% allocation to bitcoin in your public model portfolios!? Shouldn’t you sell all your stocks and buy more?” -fellow pleb.

I talk to many institutions, as well as high net worth individuals, and medium net worth individuals like engineers and doctors. This is where individual situations come into play. I had been watching bitcoin for a while, publicly wrote about it near the top of the cycle in 2017 and (correctly) passed on it from that point, but then kept watching it during the bear market and then hardcore jumped into it during the March/April 2020 crash starting at $6,900/coin as a long-term bull, and haven’t wavered since.

For example, 2.5 years later as Bitcoin crashed amid the FTX fallout in November 2022 from 69k to sub-16k, I was at Pacific Bitcoin laughing about it. I was not uncertain.

In those initial months of 2020, I put every dollar of my liquid capital into bitcoin. I didn’t sell my existing stocks and trigger capital gains tax, didn’t withdraw from my IRA or 401(k), but otherwise most of my existing liquid cash and all of my incoming earned cash went into bitcoin. I threw like a quarter of my net worth into it. And it paid off. For me as a conservative investor, that was my version of “all-in”. I wasn’t fucking around. I never go all-in like that, but I did it for bitcoin.

I grew up poor, and then worked for 12 years in engineering and engineering management. There is no world where I would invest in such a way that there was even a 1% chance that I could be wrong and lose my entire net worth and the past 12 years of my work at that point. I would never be 100% invested unless I consider it to be risk-free, and I consider nothing to be risk-free, and so I diversify by default. I am conservative as a baseline, but opportunistic when appropriate. I put at most 5% into any one stock, but I threw 25% into bitcoin as an anomaly due to how bullish I was. My husband was like, “what are we doing?” and I was like, “trust me, here’s why”.

And then, there are eight family members and associates who, if I were to go broke, would have to radically diminish and change their lifestyles. Their housing support and their everyday income comes significantly from my earnings. It’s like running a small business. So, when I see people on social media be like, “wHy DoN’t YoU gO aLl iN?” I’m thinking like, “Bitch, I’ve gone about as all-in on this new distributed ledger as I can while still sustaining a reasonable level of lower volatility equity and other assets for tangible income and fallback support for eight people”. And then I realize the anon who wrote that is probably a single dude in his parents’ basement, and my response is unwarranted. Don’t let anons on social media affect you.

For example, our extended family ran into a liquidity issue and had to change households this year, and we got a good real estate deal but it was based on me having six figures in liquidity to just throw around at short notice, which meant having maintained adequate diversification for that possibility, which I was anticipating.

In my model portfolios, I began to recommend a 5% bitcoin allocation in early 2020, and then I took some chips off the table in 2021 near the highs after a 3x and 5x gain as Musk was pumping Dogecoin, to rebalance back down to that 5% target. Why? Because not everybody has put a thousand hours of research into it and can realistically put a quarter of their liquid net worth into it. My point was, “your portfolio has zero bitcoin, you should probably have at least 5% bitcoin, and better yet, you should buy bitcoin non-custodially at whatever size is appropriate for you. As it soars, rebalance. As it falls, buy back in.” That rebalancing worked well for my public portfolio. I warned of exuberance, leaned into fear, despite not trying to predict any short-term price action.