Bitcoin Is The Best Hedge Fund That's Ever Existed | Jordi Visser

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Jordi Visser** (0:27)
I see you.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:28)
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**Jordi Visser** (0:35)
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**SPEAKER_1** (0:36)
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**Anthony Pompliano** (0:43)
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**SPEAKER_1** (0:45)
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**Jordi Visser** (0:56)
You don't find Bitcoin, Bitcoin finds you. You don't find Bitcoin until you're either personally or your business has been so destructed that you can't get out of a hole that you're looking for something to park your money while you figure out a plan. In his case, Bitcoin went higher and allowed him to do what he's done with strategy, but that's why most people think this is a scam. In my opinion.

**Anthony Pompliano** (1:18)
What's going on, guys? Today's conversation with Jordi Visser is a great one. We talk about the slowdown in AI stocks, what happened with Ken Griffin and Leopold and the entire book. Then we go into what happened in Korea and Japan and all the liquidations that have happened there. We talk about Kevin Warsh and the Federal Reserve and all the interest rate decisions. And then of course, we talk about crypto, Bitcoin, Ethereum, much more. Today's conversation with Jordi Visser is full of insights I think you'll find very valuable. So here's my latest conversation with Jordi.
All right, Jordi, there's a huge week. We've got a lot to talk through. Let's start with the unwind and AI stocks. Leopold and Situational Awareness. They basically are forced to sell their entire book, it sounds like.
You've lived through a couple of these unwinds. What are your takeaways given what's transpired over the last week or so?

**Jordi Visser** (2:05)
Well, I guess there's two parts of this. Yeah, I was in Brazil in 1997 and 1998 into 99
And I was a part of the LTCM unwind. I was a part of the true unwind, meaning I came back to the US in the beginning of 99 and I took over the S&P book. And later on in 2007, I was managing a macro portfolio during the quant unwind, which was really a GARP unwind, which was during the great financial crisis, but very early. And that I would even say Archegos or Archegos or whatever the name he had for his thing that blew up in 2021
I've been through a bunch of these. And here's the most important thing, and I don't think I've seen this in the news yet in terms of the way it's written.
So the one interesting thing about leverage in the hedge fund world is eventually when you get to the end, meaning where you've had a drawdown and that is so significant, you have to try and find buyers for your portfolio or it needs to be liquidated. And that happened in all three of those scenarios. And once that starts to happen, where you start needing to either call people up or your prime brokers know everything and they're calling people, which is normally what happens because prime brokers at the investment banks are the lenders of these. And once they're involved, everyone starts to see the portfolio, they look at their own risk and say, where am I exposed? And they start hedging. So the one thing I want to want to make sure people know, this was a cleansing event in my opinion. It doesn't mean that we're not going to see continued volatility. But what he went through is a situation where you start losing money, mainly because of the reasons I talked about the AI mid-cycle slowdown, which is when things become too crowded and everyone has the same positions. And especially when you're dealing with someone who got all of this fame for making so much money and you could see his positions reported in 13F holdings. And he hasn't been through this before. And he believes in the fundamentals. Stock prices diverge from fundamentals all the time. We saw that with Liberation Day last year. You can have the stock market fall 20 percent. Nothing change economically. Nothing change earnings wise. And it can snap back just as fast. So the AI trade to me started getting narratives about Anthropics in trouble, the hyperscalers are in trouble. We're never going to get the revenues. Open source, all of these things every week. It was a new thing that we had to talk about. When the reality is for the month of July, we saw record factor unwind. It took down Leopold to a level that he needed to get out of the portfolio. What we don't know all the true story about is when did Citadel find out? When did Millennium find out? I bring this up because these were the names that were reported in the paper. Once they see things, they have exposure to this as well. There was a four-day move beginning on Friday of last week into this week with the final part being in the two hours after the Fed.