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Thank you for joining us today. We're excited to bring you a brand new show from the On Ramp Media umbrella. Wake Up Call is a weekly show that will be streamed live on LinkedIn every Monday morning. To catch the premiere of each episode, follow On Ramps LinkedIn page and add Wake Up Call events to your calendar. After the live premiere on LinkedIn, we will distribute each episode across On Ramp Media's podcast channels and YouTube page. Wake Up Call aims to educate financial professionals on the merits of the Bitcoin investment thesis, how this asset represents both a threat to legacy financial service businesses and an opportunity to differentiate oneselves and retain and attract new clients. Hosted by Mark Connors, Onramp's Head of Global Macro Strategy, and Rich Kerr, Onramp's President of Managed Wealth, this show seeks to provide financial professionals the wake up call they need, prompt them to have an open mind with respect to Bitcoin, rethink their prior assumptions, become more educated on the topic, and learn from others who are already farther down this path. Mark and Rich bring a combined 60 plus years of experience across traditional markets and financial services and will share their unique perspectives and how their peers and colleagues can approach the realm of Bitcoin. Wake Up Call will feature guests from various backgrounds and industries will also share their own journeys to Bitcoin and how others can get up to speed. Now time for the show. Well, good morning, everyone and good morning, Mr. Connors. Good to see you. Good. Morning, Mr. Kirk. Yeah. Good morning, Kevin. Kevin Jang, CIO and Portfolio Manager of Virgo Digital Assets, Welcome to the show. We appreciate you joining us this early Monday morning for you. Thank you, Rich. It's a it's a honour to be here. We're delighted to have you. And you know, it's interesting, we were talking in in prep. You know, Kevin, I think you're out on the West Coast of Canada, if I'm not mistaken, Vancouver area, is that correct? Yep, that's correct. And you had a couple of black bears this morning rummaging through through the neighborhood and and giving you quite a show. So we're we're off to a a banner start on a Monday then. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Like there's, there's quite a bit of wildlife around here around my neighborhood. It's good. Yeah. We keep our garbage garbage pretty safe. Well, good, good. We're delighted to have you today and, and also with all of your, your incredible experience in the digital asset space and, and you know, helping kind of pave the way our pioneer ETFs in in Canada. What was that? I believe 2020, March of 2020 when when Canada rolled out their initial ETFs. And so we're delighted to kind of pick your brain on the things that you've seen in Canada and Australia. And then at the same point in time, you know, just some of your observations on how things are going here in the United States. So, but before we, before we get into all of the fun and interesting things that you have to share with us, I, I, I figure maybe we'll kick off as we often do with, with Mark and, and some of his insights. And you know, Mark, I, I obviously, I always scan the news and, and try to find newsworthy events. And obviously what's happening in the United Arab Emirates. They had a nice and interesting announcement for cryptocurrency holders in the UAE. And I think what it wasn't last week, we had Ralph Gibran in, in and you know, who lives in the UAE. And so the announcement they're not having taxes on, on cryptocurrencies, I think was quite an interesting one. But it always seems to come back to global debt, global money supply, GDP, deficits. And so I I'm curious what what's on your mind today? Yeah, I mean governments are playing with a whack a mole of deficit stomping, trying to keep down the expenses. As you know, tax revenues are what 4.4 trillion and you have deficits, you know approaching 7 I mean expenses over you know 7 and and growing. So that the the headlines this week Rich were all about unemployment on Friday and not for no reason. We had a very surprised 50 basis point cut. Everyone's very happy, everything rallied. And then we had an unemployment number that declined from 4.2 expected to 4.1. And we had a jobs, non farm payrolls that went up by over 100,000 jobs. I think it was 155 up to, you know, 245. But that's relatively noise. It's relative noise because if you look at, you know, the trajectory of unemployment, it's it's, it's got a sort of a, a bear, a band of error that's about that amount. So what put pushing that down? The real signal was from the fiscal year for the US closing September 30th. So on Tuesday, October 1st, which was the day before, we had our macro spaces, which really fed a lot of what Jesse Myers. We had Larry Leopard on, we had Peruvian Bull. And the reason I'm highlighting is because we started talking about, you know, about the unemployment number and about debt. And then as it happened, someone brought up these numbers that just posted on on the Treasury website. Debt was up 6.7%. So if you put that in your head year over year, GDP now, which is coming out this week from the Fed is Atlanta Fed is expected to be 2.5. You cannot make up for that spread in volume. You can't you're, you're, you're spending to buy growth. It sounds too simple. And we're going to come down with some concrete numbers to show what advisors can do to kind of stay ahead of, of purchasing power for their clients. But that's, that is the Riddle me this Batman comment of the year. Everyone has to have if debt continues to grow at 6.7%, it's actually grown at 9.5% over the past four years. And it grew 204 billion on the next day in the new fiscal year. That's a rate of over 50% annualized. Crazy number, but just to show you, when debt increases, all of a sudden maybe 3 or 4% on your T bill or four or five isn't a good number. So that's what we're here. I'll kick it off with. Don't focus on the data of unemployment and what individual companies are doing and they're hiring. They're going to ebb and flow with people. The real issue is that the government doesn't have innovative abilities like an Amazon, like a Meta, like an on Ramp or Virgo who are trying to go after new opportunities. They don't have that cycle rate. So only the only lever they have to pull is issuing debt. And so with that, Rich, that nice little nugget, let's go get some things that people can be happy about or opportunities because we think that's going to grow. And given that on the market side, our advisors are aware of this. Rich, I'll throw it back to you and Kevin, do they kind of not need to know about it because equities are up 20% in the year and they're fine kind of playing that game? Right. Like when we when we talk, we would see like debt that's being issued by sovereign countries, that's really a dilution in purchasing power over the long term, right? Like I heard a story about, you know, like two soldiers going off to a Vietnam War or, you know, like 1 buries $1000 in his backyard in cash and the other buys $1000 worth of stock, right? Completely different, different outcome for the two. So that's, that's a reduction in purchasing power in cash versus the compounded return of something that just that just grows, which is the US capital market. And but for investment professionals like we're, we're not really evaluated on the reduction of purchasing power, right, Nobody is. We're evaluated on the rate of return on the investment and the risk that we're taking to achieve that result. So, but for clients, client for for clients that purchasing power really matters. So I guess there's a huge opportunity there, right, like for advisors and for asset managers to kind of differentiate themselves by, you know, mentioning purchasing power and how we manage that through investments for their clients. I've never heard it stated that way. And it's really powerful, Kevin, you know, the fact that, you know, financial advisors, you know, financial professionals are, are, are not measured on the purchasing power of the individual, but the return characteristics that are provided by the advisor. And it you know, it, it's never lost on me. And I've said this countless times on this show, that every time I speak with an advisor or I go into an advisor's office, you know, I'm always asking them what are clients concerned about? And inevitably over the course of the past, you know, six months, it's, it's been inflation, right? And I think about it, inflation obviously, you know, is and loss of purchasing power are, are are tethered together quite well. But but you know, I think it's the idea that we're not providing solutions to the pain that an individual client is experiencing, not fully. And you know, I think you have to go out and really take a look at how individual investors are having to modify their investment plans in order to keep up with this loss of purchasing power, which is continued to erode. And I, and I say, you know, you know, largely it's not the 15 year track record of Bitcoin that you need to be paying attention to. It's the 111 year track record of, you know, the US central bank debasing the currency and, and the loss of purchasing power of the individual that is causing the, you know, the challenges that we face today. And, and it inevitably, I think people will wake up to that and be able to, you know, you know, demand some level of solution, whether that comes from their financial professional or, you know, the government in, and, you know, that is issuing the currency or whatever it might be. I think ultimately people are going to feel a lot of pain here and are experiencing a lot of pain and and taking undue risk with their capital in order to be able to try to keep up with the loss or the degradation of their purchasing power. I don't know. But I love the way that you just stated the incentive there. So thank you. Yeah, Rich, following on that and Kevin, the the part I love working with you is that you were always thoughtful and approached it from a first principle standpoint that I thought was unimpeachable and pressing. Your point about advisors aren't necessarily graded by that, but investors invariably and this is the assumption invariably are more sensitive to what their money's able to purchase. When will that flow back to the advisor and change behavior to know that the hurdle rate is no longer, you know, 3 or 4% risk free, It's really 8 or 10 because their insurance for their house, their education for their kid, everything is growing at 8 to 10% a year. We have the data. So Wendy, like do you see that at all? Like you're talking to investors now as the CIO of Virgo is. Is that something that still kind of isn't top of mind for folks or is it changing? I think a lot of people are more of becoming more aware of the overall global macro environment now, like in the past 30-40 years, we were in the period of globalization, right, which means things were being offshored, the daily household items were cheap or you know, like, or we're not seeing a huge reduction in personal power in that particular sector, which make up like most of our day-to-day purchases, right? Like if you a number of transaction wise that could be, you know, like 90% of our daily transactions, we only pay tuitions once a year. We only buy a house, you know, once a couple of decades. So like, So what we know this on a day-to-day on a, on a day-to-day level is low inflation over decades, which is, which is what we, which is what kind of took us to a long period of 0 interest rates and inflation was, were not higher, right? Even though we were, you know, increasing our, our, our deficit year over year. Our, our national debt is increasing in both the US and Canada. And there's a lot of government spending, right? That was the reason, globalization was the reason. And now that music, right, is changing it's tune a little bit in the coming years, right? Everybody knows that. So, So what we experienced in the past, the inflation we've experienced in the past few years, right, was caused part by monetary policy and part by supply chain constraints. And that's just a taste of what's to come, right? Should this world get any crazier than it already is? Yeah. So at that point, people will become more aware of the reduction purchasing power. So like for example, in Canada, like real wage growth in the past 10 or 15 years has been pretty much 0 real wage growth, right? I could, I could, I could hire intern right now for the same salary that I earned when I was an intern 20 years ago. One thing, when prices go up, people really do notice because their paychecks is not getting any bigger. They're getting higher and things are getting more expensive, right? So yeah, definitely people will know this well, Kevin. I, I could tell you what, you know, one, one thing I that I always like to do is just maybe take a step back and share with our audience a little bit about your background. Mark and I have a little terminology that we often say, you know, we always love having bilingual guests and, and what we mean by that our guests that that came from the Tranfi world and, and are fluent in, in, in, you know, that, that system. But at the same point in time are really well acquainted with the digital asset space. And, and, and I'm fascinated. I mean, you are, you've been in the industry for roughly 15 years, I believe 10 of that in traditional finance. And then you, you made the, the move into the digital asset space, you know, what, 4-5 years ago. And, and so I'm, I'm fascinated by, you know, what was your triggering event and what pulled you over into the digital asset space at, at that stage in, in, in your career? Great. Thank you. That's a that's a great question. That's a question I keep asking myself as well, like, because 'cause like I, I, I've, I've been a trader for a very long time in the traditional world. And there's the saying like, like, if you're not bullish, you should, like if you should get out of your position, right? If you're not bullish on your, on whatever you're holding, right? And that goes the same goes for, for your career, for your job as well As for your, for your portfolio. So that's the question that I constantly ask myself. But in the digital asset space, what I see is an opportunity for explosive growth. I've kind of seen that in the previous cycle. We kind of we kind of saw that last year or or this year when, when the when the ETFs are introduced in the US. And I know we're going to see that when the options on the USETFS eventually come out. They were recently approved about two weeks ago. God knows when they will actually list and start trading, but but that's going to be another area of explosive growth right. Some people expect to see like a GameStop type of scenario once we have hedge funds start shorting those options for yield and then retail just come in right Dama, squeeze the heck out of them. I I don't know if that will happen, but I one thing I know is that the market will just get bigger. You'll get more liquid. We have institutions and professionals will have more tools to hedge. There will be ways to generate yield. There's, there's many, many ways to cook with this ingredient of this amazing ingredient of Bitcoin. So, so yes, so digital assets is an area for explosive growth. And that's why I that's why I came into this space and that's why I'm still here. At Onramp, we believe that Bitcoin is the most important asset of the 21st century. The hard part is securing it right. There are shortcomings with keeping your coins on an exchange, but also with setting up your own self custody arrangement. On Ramp solves for these concerns. Our multi institution custody solution maximizes security and minimizes counterparty risk, ensuring that your Bitcoin remains securely in your possession and provides built in inheritance planning to ensure your family is protected as well. On Ramp provides Peace of Mind for your Bitcoin journey, whether for your whole stack or for part of it as a compliment to your existing self custody set up. For more information, check us out at on rampbitcoin.com. Yeah, that's it. It's, I wish I had the foresight that maybe you did. You know, I, I spent 33 years in, in the traditional finance side of the equation. And you know, similar to, you know, I think a lot of people when you, when I first heard about Bitcoin, I kind of poo pooed it and, and dismissed it. It just seemed like a, I don't know, a fad not worthy of my time and attention, not serious money. And I just kind of dismissed it and I dismissed along with it my intellectual curiosity and I, I, I only later circled back and really kind of started doing the work and, and, and then I, you know, was like, well, jeez, I don't, I love it. I'm, I'm fascinated by it. I'd love to see it kind of integrate into our company and find a way to to be a first mover or. You know, or close to at least the first mover in the United States and and bring forward Bitcoin solutions. But but I don't think our company was broadly at that place and and I didn't have the wherewithal at the point in time to just be able to say, am I bullish like you, like you just described right. And so I kind of stayed in and just focused on, you know, providing client care and in the best way that I could and bringing, I guess, credible solutions forward in the traditional sense. But there became that point for me as well where I just said, OK, I'm so bullish on on Bitcoin. And I really do feel that I have a responsibility to kind of step forward with my point of view. And, and, and, and, you know, that's what ultimately led me here to on ramp. But, but yeah, I, I love the simplicity of just being able to say if I'm bullish on something, you know, then go all in on what it is that I'm, I'm wanting to do. So whether that be portfolio or career, it, I guess it all kind of aligns. So thank you for sharing that. Yeah, both of you came in for, I won't say different reasons, but I loved how Kevin took his practitioners discipline of examining the portfolio, you know, minute by minute and saying yes, yes, yes, no, no, no. Do I want to remain long? And then and then pulling it back and saying, well, how about the guy making the decision? Am I long, long? Yes, yes, yes, on, you know, trading fixed income arbitrage or, or the like and, and trying to meet certain benchmarks. And you said no and moved it. And then Rich, you're not putting words in your mouth, but you know, after 30 odd years of Schwab, you decide to come in and and be able to speak to something to advisors that you thought was pretty big as well. Do you think this is I was going to potentially, you know, we're talking global debt, we're talking about the advisor market, kind of big topics. What do you think about bringing up a little bit of data to try to feed the data junkies out there that like numbers? Yeah, yeah. You got the terminal handy. You got something interesting you want to share? I got the I got the terminal. So what Rich just referenced and Kevin, we're going to not sure if we told you, I think we shared this a little bit about what we have here at onramp is we call it the Bitcoin, you know it's the Bloomberg of Bitcoin. So what we try to mix here is have a research and markets based single point of access for anyone interested in Bitcoin. So when you talk about Bitcoin, everyone loves price. So we start with that. I don't know if it was Kevin's point about the portfolio, but someone moved the market up here on the day we talked about equities being up 20%. I think people forget that Bitcoin is up, you know on the order of 5048% on the year to date. Where's that number? 51 point, Yeah, 52% on the year. Yeah, like the it's the best performing asset class this year again, reigning champion. Reigning champion and it beats everybody over a A10 well since inception 10 year five year three-year. It even beats a software and services sub index of of equities. But if anyone wants to dive in, you know, we can give a call, you know, just hit this up and you can contact one of our specialists. I'd like to look at the 200 week moving average kind of, you know, taking that that daily chart and getting a little perspective. So we're going to look at Bitcoin, we're going to look at Bitcoin in context. We're going to look at Bitcoin relative to the market and then bring it back to what Kevin said about the options as far as it relates to the broader market. So this shows you the 200 week moving average, which has been a point of resistance. I won't go into why now, but it has been a good resistance line and the color coding just tells you the distance from it. You know, is this a good entry point, a little toppy here as we found out in 2021. This was obviously the dip here in the winter, December 22 and we're kind of in the middle ground here. So you know, that's, I won't talk about price recommendations, but make your own own opinion. The other metric that I've highlighted and you can take these are my favorites is dominance. So there are 10s of thousands of tokens. There's dog with hat, you know, Elon's Doge and all that. But when you look at Bitcoin currently and this is the blue line, this is the dominance. It is currently 56, almost 57% of the entire 2.22 point $3 trillion market. It is also the 10th largest asset in the world, larger than Berkshire Hathaway, which I love because the irony there is not lost on on hopefully anyone here where you have Warren Buffett and the recently departed Charlie Munger, call it rat poison. Maybe they're a little jealous because it's got a larger market cap than the in 15 years than what Berkshire did over a what, 70 year, 55 year, 70 year career. So it is a digital asset market. And then the last metric that I like to look at is bringing it front and center to what advisors try to do is just look at what's happened. Kevin talked about the catalyst of options, 50 billion right here, 50 billion, 49.2 of ETFs. And as Eric Balkunis at Bloomberg said highlighted, I think BlackRock got it there in 49 days and I think Fidelity got to 10 billion. Sorry, rolling back to I bit and Blackrock's ETF and Fidelity's ETF were the two fastest ETFs to a billion. BlackRock took 49 days, Fidelity took 72 or 77 days. The previous record was it AJP Morgan Equity ETF and it took over I think 2 1/2 years. So they smashed the record. You know, even if you do inflation adjusted, it was a pretty big number. So Kevin, to your point about why we have a yuan here, you've been here for four years, you've seen the ETFs in Canada, you've watched it happen. You weren't surprised what happened to the US and now you are highlighting unprompted by us are highlighting the fact that the options markets going to invite more of the market in and you think that's a net demand, not a net long short, you think that's net plus? Yeah. So for options like the the most, like the most use of it is for hedge funds or institutions to to generate yield, right. Bitcoins option market will have about 60 to 65% implied volatility, which means that like if you know how to delta hedge property, you can sell all the money straddle like 25D straddle for perhaps 20 to 20 to 25% annualized yield, which is very lucrative, especially now that our risk free rate is, is, is going down, right? Like it's, it's at 4% right now. One year Treasury that, that number could be 3 or 2 1/2 in a year, a year from now on, right? So, yeah, 20 to 25% delta neutral, right. If, if the, if, if the hedge fund knows how to hedge, which they show well, they, they know better. They know how to do that better than anybody else in the world. And Bitcoin's a continuous trading asset. So there's no gap risk, right? Like for like, for example, GameStop, right? Like one thing that that really hurt, hurt them was that it will always gap up at the open and they will have no way to kind of cover their short. But Bitcoin's a continuous trading. So they, if they, they have an exposure, they can hedge up Coinbase or they could, you know, they could find their way offshore, hedge with a perpetual contract and rather than wait till the market to open. So, so, yeah, I think I think a lot of institutions are probably licking their chops right now and they're going to get in this market. And so, so if they, if they, and if they do that and there's a directional market movement, they are going to delta hedge, right? Which means that that's just going to be rocket fuel to, to whichever direction that Bitcoin's going, probably probably more so on the upward direction than on the downside. So so yeah, definitely that's going to that's going to bring a lot more new capital into the space. That's. Crazy Rich So when Kevin and I, you know, coming from the the markets side and me from risk, you know Kevin from trading the derivatives market, it's like it is people can't get enough of it. It's cheap liquid, often listed options are wonderful. It's a leverage way to get exposure. It's quick on quick off and many times spot can be a little more problematic. So what we want, I want to relay just from my side and I don't know if it rich questions to you of if you look at the the derivatives market, the reason we had the OA crisis, one of the big ones is because of the size of the derivatives books on the banks. People didn't trade spot. They said, oh, let's just trade a derivatives contract. And they didn't even close them out. They just said, you know, I have one long, I'll buy a short, I'll net it off. I don't have to cross a bid ask. It's a technical issue, but the size of the derivatives market for like say a bond issue, could it be 100 times larger one could be a billion dollar issue and have 100 billion of derivatives against it. 1010 to 50 times is kind of normal in the fixed income area. Equities might be a little less because of the higher ball. But the point the the reason I mention this is because the number of players that are that are going to be attracted to this, I think, and I don't over, I don't want to overstate anything. It's going to be larger than just the spot ETF. It's going to be a larger levered players are going to come into what Kevin said. So I guess Rich, is that I know advisors are into alternatives as a way to differentiate their books, but do they have an appreciation for like, what's an example of them saying, I saw the opportunity to get into call, you know, call overwrites or some sort of alternative product that was able to give them value? Do they appreciate the fact that derivatives will give demand or is that something that they just going to have to see it happen in price because they don't appreciate the derivatives market? I. Think a very large segment of US registered investment advisors. Independent registered investment advisors generally do not stray into the derivative space on their own right, because they're small business owners and that competency may or may not live inside of their firm. And more likely than not, it, it doesn't live inside of their firm. So they usually will, if they, if they find something interesting right in, in the derivative space, they may look to partner with an asset management firm that has created a solution that embeds, you know, whatever type of hedging and, or yield generating strategy that they, they, they are intrigued by. And so I think that they they will outsource that component of the portfolio through an asset management product. By and large, there are firms that have that competency. I don't want to dismiss that and there may be some of them that are listening here today that would have disagreed with that. But but I would say that's, that's the rarer element, right? Because now you have to have a trading desk and you have to have somebody that is intimately familiar with the options markets and, and know how to put those derivatives in place. And they also have to have a client base that is that they feel it's appropriate for. And that's the key thing, right? Because if we're registered investment advisors, everything is, is run off fiduciary standard inappropriateness versus suitability. And so they're constantly evaluating does that have a place in inside of the portfolio? And I think that the if they do believe that they need to integrate it, they'll usually look to a partner who has a competency or an expertise above and beyond what they have in house to be able to implement such a strategy like that. Mark. Got it. Yeah. Thanks for that. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the broader dynamic, right, it's usually asset allocation, modern portfolio theory, you know, and, and based off of a strong financial plan, right. It's the financial plan that leads, it's the portfolio that follows based off of risk tolerances. And that's the general way that that most Rias will approach things. So they'll have a core allocation and then they might have an Explorer satellite around it. And that that might be where something you know a productized solution might fit in for those types of firms that are looking to add some alpha to a portfolio. Got it. So when where we look at Bitcoin, especially for an RIAA as a gateway drug to the and we think final to the digital asset community is that we we think that the alphas and the beta because if it's unique return asymmetry, more upside than downside its returns. But Kevin, obviously you at at Virgo are are harvesting a lot of that actively. So you're, you're, you're like, you are one of those specialists who's deep into the vowel structure and the ball surface. Not to put words in your mouth, but maybe explain a little bit about just to information about your firm that can help advisors understand what the options approval might mean for demand and why people are interested in it. Sure. Yeah. So options, it's, it's quite a powerful instrument, especially for, for, for an asset, explosive asset like Bitcoin, right? There was a story that came out of Canada like over the weekend, there's one guy, a Carpenter, he grew an $80,000 portfolio into $400 million trading nothing but Tesla options, right. That's how powerful you could get. Like it's, it's a 10X stock. But, but, but yeah, that's, that's how powerful options can, can get. Like if you know, if you know how to time the market, if you're, if you're on the right direction at the right time, then yeah, it's, it's, it's the most powerful thing that, that, that most individual investors or institutions can get their hands on. So we actually have like we, we use options in a variety of ways, right? Like, for example, one of our products is principal protected. We actually buy U.S. Treasuries and we take the interest from those treasuries in our, and allocate into our actively managed options strategy. So that allows our our investors to participate in Bitcoin's growth while having their principal investment protected by the US Treasury. And that strategy has returned 22% year to date after fees. There's another option based strategy that we do, which provides our investors with a levered Bitcoin upside potential and an unlevered risk profile. So when the market is kind of chopping and kind of tracks a Bitcoin, you know, as it's chopping back and forth, but when it goes up, you know, our, our strategy goes up exponentially. So there's like options are like a magic ingredient and that you could kind of dabble a little bit into a variety of strategies and that will give you a totally different risk return profile for your clients. So it's quite a, quite, a, quite an amazing thing. And Canada actually has Bitcoin spot Bitcoin options like on our, on our Stock Exchange, they were listed when we, when we had our spot Bitcoin ETFs back in 2021. So they've been, they've been there for three years and 3 1/2 years. And the liquidity on them are, are pretty good, pretty decent. So, but, but still like, you know, like we, we just can't imagine the size of the market when, when the options start trading on, on the, on the US Bitcoin ETFs. I haven't I haven't caught the the news, but are they going to release options on all of the ETFs or is it just a few of them? I hadn't I hadn't heard what what the final statement was. I would just I any any insights there? Yeah. So they officially approved the options on I bit, I guess each firm submitted different applications and I did had the most ready application and they were approved first. But then we all knew that SEC are they don't want to play kingmakers in this game. If one ETF had options on them and the other didn't didn't that would be a huge advantage for that one particular issuer. So, so, yeah, so they're probably just doing what they did when they approved the ET FS, which is wait for everybody to get ready and then give everybody the green light at the same time. OK. Yeah, Yeah, it's going to be fascinating to watch the dynamics that come from that. I guess that you can you can parse it a million different directions, you know, how they're being utilized to enhance or augment portfolios versus what it does potentially with the liquidity, you know, to price. So it's going to be fascinating. So yeah, well, Speaking of ETFs and and the whole 9 yards, so we're nine months in. So generally speaking, what's your observations relative to, you know, what you experienced with Canada 4 years ago, you know, with the United States? Obviously Mark shared, you know, we've, you know, seen some tremendous flows that are record-breaking for some of these ETF products. And, and I'd, I'd be curious about your point of view kind of historically looking at Canada when you rolled out the ETFs, you know, in 2020 versus, you know, here we are 20249, you know, nine months in. What are what are your your thoughts as in as a professional in the industry and expert in ETFs? Right, so thank you for asking that. I, I used to be the portfolio manager on one of Canada's largest Bitcoin spot ETFs. And during my time, my time, one thing I noticed that was that institutions use ETFs for liquidity. Because if you look at Blackrock's prospectus, right? Like what index is Ibid tracking, right? It's tracking. They call it the Bitcoin benchmark rate New York variant, which is they call it the New York variant. Sounds like a virus, but it's yeah, it's good to say who chose that. Who chose that language? Is, is doing a a tee wah a time weighted average pricing like trading between 3:00 to 4:00 PM New York time rather than the London variant, which is London 3:00 to 4:00 PM London time. So it's, it's just AT wall, right. So if you're, if you're a large institution or pension fund, you're looking to buy $100 million worth of, you know, Bitcoin to allocate. You're not going to get get a trader or set up an all go just to kind of punch in waters repeatedly. The easier way is to just go to that ETF insurance, call them and say, hey, I want a million, $100 million worth of your your fund. Please sell them to me at net asset value. And being ETFs, they're kind of obligated to do that provided that you submit your order in time, right? So that reduces tremendously reduces slippage for large volumes of transactions going in and out. And it's very noticeable, right? We've had ETFs that had a billion dollars inflow days multiple times, right? And if you look at the hourly candle between 3:00 to 4:00 PM New York time, you're not seeing like a huge candle either way, right? It's mitigated like the market is absorbing that liquidity a billion dollars boom, nothing, right, not even not even the splash. So that's that's one thing I've noticed like they've. Really Master is that is that absorption because they're not going to the ETF market, which is say 50 billion. Now what those redeem and create people are doing is they're going to the spot Bitcoin 24/7 365 market and are they creating or is or or are they actually creating ETFs and buying later? How does that? I'm just trying to think of where why there aren't candles if there's a billion coming in? Right. So they buy from, they buy from liquidity providers or market makers. So those are the likes of Coinbase, for example, right? And they provide that service and they disclose that they provide that service for, for most of the ETF issuers. And they probably also have other sources of liquidity providers. And if they're smart, which they are, they they are, they're brilliant. They're going to, you know, shovel their like allocate their trades across a variety of liquidity providers so that they can get best execution. Got it. But ultimately those liquidity providers, they have to buy their Bitcoin from somewhere, right? And they have greater outreach than BlackRock or Fidelity because obviously BlackRock will will have a hard time from a compliance perspective to find themselves on the on the Binance spot Bitcoin market. So, so they are absorbing the ETFs, are absorbing liquidity or using liquidity from a global market rather than the US market. And that is why, like, even on $1 billion days, you're not seeing like a big green candles or red candles between 3:00 to 4:00 PM. That's yeah, you just made me a little bit smarter, Kevin. So thank you for breaking that down for us. And I'm sure our guests are are are going. Oh, that's interesting. So yeah, thank you for sharing that. So Kevin, I know we're kind of coming to the close here on on our time on the show, but I'd be curious, could you share with with the audience a little bit about Virgo? I know that you've sprinkled it in throughout. You know how you help investors, but you know how? How would an advisor find your firm? Sure. Thank you. So our website is that virgo.co/vdam that stands for Virgo Digital Asset Management. We're a regulated license asset manager based out of Canada and we're trying to get our US licenses. Hopefully in the near future, we'll be regulating in the US as well. And we provide alpha seeking products actively managed to to to provide our investors with a superior risk adjusted return compared to Bitcoin. Then we use like Bitcoin as a benchmark for quite a few of our strategies. Our flagship, our flagship strategy returned over 200% in the past 2 1/2 years, right. And that's, that's beating Bitcoin by about 150%. And of course, it's it's accredited investors only. And right now it's just Canadian accredited investors. So thank you. Thank you for asking that. So once again it's Virgo dot CO/VD AM. Excellent. All right. Well, Mark, if, if you don't have any further questions, we'll let Kevin get back to his exciting work. And Kevin, just want to say thank you for joining us. I know it's early out there in, in Vancouver area and we appreciate you joining us early in the day and, and wish you all the very best. And thank you for sharing some of your insights and, and experiences. Frankly, you know, in the space, I think, you know, it's always good to have different perspectives, join us and talk with our with our audience. And so we appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you, Rich. Thank you, Mark. It's a, it's a, it's a lot of fun hanging out with you guys. So I really appreciate. It good, excellent. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that Onramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.
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