CMS Holdings: The Next Bull Market Is Upon Us (How To Position For Success)

**Andy** (0:00)
Dan, great to have you back, CMS Holdings, big fan, OG. And we got the CPI print today, and well, here we are, we're ripping.

**Dan Matuszewski** (0:08)
It was in mine, there's no news.

**Andy** (0:10)
It basically was like, there's no news.

**Dan Matuszewski** (0:11)
Exactly what we thought it was gonna be, and everybody, calm down. Yeah, I hate these periods in the market. It's just, you're beholding to a bunch of information that you don't have any edge on, and people are all wound up for no reason.
It's just, I could do without it. But we're probably, it's probably gonna be the norm for a while, especially as people get worried about things sort of moving outside of historical ranges. And then obviously we have an election cycle that's gotta play out over the next couple months. So it's kinda gonna dominate the headlines. It's a lot more fun when the idiosyncratic price moves are just driven by some underlying reason with the asset, but it is what it is right now. So we're beholding to it, and we gotta just run with it.

**Robbie** (0:52)
Yeah, it feels like external forces are kind of the driver right now.
And like you said, we don't have the edges. That's another person's game. But something just occurred to me, which is like, typically it's like buy the room or sell the news. But with this current stuff, it feels like a lot like fear mongering. And it's actually like, it's the bearish sentiment. It's the opposite. It feels like you should be buying the news when it actually happens, and it's not as negative as people originally forecasted it to be. We just rip higher. But the fear suppresses the market in the meantime, as we're waiting for the event to unfold.

**Dan Matuszewski** (1:27)
Yeah, it's just hard, right? Because it's hard to know in the market in aggregate what people's level of fear is. I mean, you used to, back before perps got bigger, the financing used to be a pretty good direct indication of what interest level of fear in the market was. That's really not a thing anymore. At least directionally, we found that there's not as much edge to gleam out of it. You get it on the alts just because they can be wound up and pushed a little bit farther. Aggregate funding for Bitcoin and ETH isn't going to give you a directional side into people's bearishness or not. Or at least it's not as predictive going forward. Because it used to just be- Interesting.
When it was just BitMEX, not that it was just BitMEX, when BitMEX was the entirety of the market, the funding would be negative and you're like, you can just get long. It was kind of a brain dead signal. It didn't happen a ton. Then when the financing would be annualized over 30 percent, you just get short because it was automatically going to converge. It just could show you that the leverage was too pushed away and that people were feeling too strongly in one direction or another. But that's not the case anymore.
But that was the best market heuristic we used to historically have. It's harder now, at least I think it is. Well, I think one thing- Aging sentiment.

**Andy** (2:35)
Dan, that's interesting is actually looking at the total OI of the Altcoin complex versus Bitcoin. Once that threshold flips, so the total OI on Alt surpasses Bitcoin, you know you're kind of in a speculative environment, whether that's the end or the beginning, it doesn't really tell you, but you know that the tides have shifted as far as where allocators are trying to get outsides returns from.

**Dan Matuszewski** (3:01)
Well, allocators are speculators.
But you're right, the aggregate open eyeing of the alt complex is a pretty good signal probably. I mean, you saw it right in the 1010, right? It was basically at the highs and it just got wiped, but.

**Andy** (3:19)
What are you looking at now, Dan? What's your kind of read here? Obviously, we're up off the lows a significant amount. We just got through the CPI read, obviously I'm bulled up because I'm smashing ETH longs over the last couple of days. People are hating on ETH, it's like the worst token in the world when it's literally the best L1 smart contract platform in the entire market.
It's been a layup, it's been kind of consolidating here stronger than Bitcoin, ETHPTC looks great. Where are we at, Dan? What are you looking at to get actual signal on kind of the broader picture here?

**Dan Matuszewski** (3:53)
Yeah, so I think there's a couple of things. One is there's a basket of outperforming names that's continued to outperform, and I think that's a pretty good proxy in the market of whether people are de-risking.