Crypto Winter, MetaVerse, Do-A-DIDI, “Healthy” Drinks And More

Here’s the transcript from this week’s Trading With Cody Live Q&A Chat.

Hi everyone, let’s rock. AMA. As for the action today, the indices are hiding some ugly action in many individual stocks, especially small caps. Be careful out there.

Q. Thank you Cody for your latest analysis. I like it. Can you give specific recommendations on what stocks we should be trimming?

A. I’ve been steadily trimming and reducing the names in the portfolio for the last month or so. I’d just make sure you’ve been doing some trimming and raising cash and/or putting on some hedges.

Q. Cody, A few years back we had a “crypto winter” and a few years of a bear market. Back then, crypto was far more on the fringes. Now it’s in the forefront, especially with institutional adoption. When there is a steep decline again in crypto, do you think we can go into a prolonged bear market, or is there so much interest where dip buyers (including institutions) will add to their positions causing the dips to be shorter?

A. I’m not sure it’s that cut and dried in either cause or effects. But I do think Bitcoin and Ether will not drop nearly as much as most other cryptos will if Bitcoin and/or Ether were to drop from these levels at all.

Q. Can we have your trim and nibble prices for BTC and ETH please?

A. I’d be a small nibbler of BTC near $30k and a small nibbler of ETH below $2k. I’d be an aggressive buyer of BTC near $25k and ETH at $1500. I’m not so bearish on BTC and ETH as I am bearish on just about 99.9% of the 10,000+ cryptos that exist on some 400+ crypto exchanges. I’d love to figure out how to bet against HEX crypto, for example. But there are no easy ways to short or buy puts on the thousands of cryptos that are headed to zero in the next couple years (and that will make the path to zero all that much faster when it does happen because there’s not built in shorts to buy any of the cryptos on the way down).

Q. Is ETHE a better buy than BITC?

A. If you mean Ether and Bitcoin, I’m gonna say that I like both a lot for the long-term.

Q. Hi Cody. What do you think of Robert Kiyosaki and his tweet “biggest crash in world history is coming, get more gold, silver and Bitcoin?”

A. I’m not sure the biggest crash ever is coming, but I do think there’s a lot of potential for downside and not as much potential for finding 10-100 baggers right now as there was five or ten years ago. I notice that he’s recommending bitcoin too now eh? I remember back in 2013 or so that I was pounding the table telling people and Trading With Cody subscribers to buy bitcoin at $100 over and over so much that subscribers eventually wrote in asking me to stop writing about cryptos because nobody cared. Fast forward to today and most of the questions in the chat today are about…crypto! Crypto sure feels crowded right now.

I just tried to find some articles I wrote about cryptos and bitcoin back in 2013 and here’s one of them that you might find on most anybody’s trading blog today, some 8 years and 35,000% later: “As I noted in this week’s Revolution Investing newsletter, I was shocked when during my presentation at the NYC Trader’s Expo, I asked the crowd if any of them had ever bought or owned any bitcoins. None had ever bought a bitcoin, though several of them raised their hands when I asked if they’d even considered buying a bitcoin or two at some point. I would have thought that at least a few of the people here at a MoneyShow Trader’s Expo where you’ve got presentations and booths that try to help people learn to trade forex currencies and precious metals like gold … that at least a few people would have been speculating on the bitcoin frenzy. Alas, even though $BTC is often the top most-trending ticker on Scutify, bitcoin wasn’t even a side note at the event, which means it still has a long ways to go in becoming a mainstream currency or even as a mainstream speculation vehicle. If you’re wanting to speculate on near-term bitcoin price swings, good luck to ya’. If you’re wanting to hedge a tiny bit of your capital outside of the nearly 200 available governmentally-controlled currencies, then start small and use the short-term price swings to add when bitcoins crash. And if you’re a merchant, then get on the bitcoin train by immediately starting to accept payments in bitcoin and then immediately having those bitcoins turned into dollars and use the dollars you receive just like always. Which leads me to the final point here. There is certainly a possibility that bitcoin gets truly destroyed by pirates or by a better, future digital crypto-currency. But as more and more merchants and their customers simply start using bitcoin to instantly transfer wealth to each other and make payments and as all the services and applications and developers that are right now at work to make that transfer of wealth even easier using bitcoin — well, there’s also the possibility that bitcoin holds its value because it is such a good means of exchanging value that the self-fulfilling cycles are commencing in front of our eyes.”

Q. How can I buy HNT? My brokerage does not have that symbol.

A. As I wrote in the Trade Alert about Helium: “Using Binance.us, which offers HNT trading is unfortunate because I don’t trust it as much as I do Coinbase which does not support HNT trading, I have invested a TINY, tiny bit — and I mean tiny bit of capital — into a few HNT tokens.”

Q. Can you give us your thoughts on the metaverse and how real of an opportunity this could be? What is your thought on the timeline of adoption, if any?

A. Facebook Oculus looks like the clear winner here so far to me. But it’s another decade or so before a real metaverse-ish world is here.

Q. Cody, what are chances of the anti trust case against AMZN being dismissed just like FB?

A. Not sure it matters.

Q. Cody what’s your take on DIDI, the China UBER that started trading today?

A. At $17 a share, it’s trading at 4x this year’s revenues which isn’t terribly expensive in this market. But I’ve no interest in it here. Maybe below $10 it’d be attractive to me.

Q. Solid Power recently came public via SPAC through DCRC. Valuation is significantly less than QuantumScape at about $1.3B even though they say their SS batteries are closer to market. Their CEO happens to be a Lobo who just sold another company he founded (Roccor) to Redwire Space about 8 months ago. Website is lacking but Ford and BMW are major backers along with lesser known battery companies. Something to look into maybe?

A. I’ll take a look.

Q. Hey Cody. Any thoughts on CELH? It’s not a tech stock but I think their product blows Monster Energy away. Tastes MUCH better and probably more natural. If you haven’t tried one yet, you definitely should.

A. No offense, but these products sound like the kind of food that I try to avoid: “Celsius Holdings, Inc. develops, markets, distributes, and sells functional calorie-burning fitness beverages in the United States and internationally. The company offers its beverages in various flavors, including carbonated orange, wild berry, cola, grape, kiwi-guava, and watermelon; and non-carbonated green tea raspberry/acai, green tea/peach mango, green tea/grapefruit melon, pineapple coconut, watermelon berry, and strawberries and cream, as well as sparkling grapefruit, cucumber lime, and orange pomegranate under the Celsius name. It also provides Celsius Heat, a dietary supplement in carbonated flavors, such as apple jack’d, orangesicle, inferno punch, cherry lime, blueberry pomegranate, strawberry dragonfruit, tangerine grapefruit, and jackfruit.” Fake fruit flavors (what’s jackfruit, by the way?) are fine when I’m having candy but when I’m trying to drink something healthy I tend to drink either straight water or a good mostly veggie-based smoothie/juice.

Q. Cody would you consider nibbling at SPCE with all the positives going on with the company?

A. I love The Space Revolution and think it will be a terrific place for us to invest for the next five to ten years. I’d be more bullish on SPCE itself if and when the company raises a few hundred million more dollars. I’m worried that SPCE’s business model will need much more cash to get to cash flow positive and that other competitors might have some technology advantages in coming years.

Q. Cody who is your NBA Champ? Can the Suns do it?

A. Yes, I’d pick the Suns as long as CP3 aka, Mr. Insurance Commercials, is on the court.

Thanks for the questions, rock on!