Bitcoin

OK. What do I have to add  to the Bitcoin conversation. Only my 35 years as a trader. That's less than you might think, but I can probably smell a manipulated market when I see one. So here goes...
So far their have been 17 million Bitcoins "mined." Of those, about four million have been lost. When you send a Bitcoin and make a mistake in the address, it goes to the wrong place. But the place it goes to is non-existent (with probability close to one) and never will be. So there's no one to give it back. It's gone.
So 13 million left. Of those, about 40% are held by the 1000 largest holders. These are people who were in at or near the beginning, and accumulated their stakes at cheap prices. Since the community was smaller then, it is reasonable to assume that many of them know each other. Many of these people are true believers in Bitcoin, but I'll bet a lot of these "bitcoin billionaires" would like to monetize their stakes. However, they really can't. If word got out that they were selling, the price would crash. Bitcoin is not as anonymous as it's made out, and there are ways of figuring out if they do. So they are mostly stuck.
That leaves 0.6 x 13 MM or 7.6MM. I don't know how many of these are HODLs, but let's say half. That leaves 3.8MM as the true free float. At today's price that is about $22 billion. Think about that when you read stuff about the"market cap" of cryptos.
I believe there is a price ceiling on Bitcoin. If it goes up too much, the large holders will let some go. Given the small float, that will cap the price.
Is there a floor? Probably. Bitcoin does have actual uses. Most of those involve breaking some rules or laws, but that still counts. A lot of people in Venezuela would be worse off today if it weren't for Bitcoin. I have no idea where the floor is.
That brings us to the other issue, law enforcement. The US SEC is now saying that just about all initial coin offerings are securities. Almost all previous offerings were thus done illegally. With this font of new money cut off, it's going to be hard to get a lot of new enthusiasm for crypto.
All this would change if actual new uses for crypto were found. There are a number of obstacles to this, mostly having to do with scalability and trust-free interaction with the non-bitcoin environment. I understand that progress is slowly being made on these fronts, so time will tell.

Back into Soybeans and Cocoa

I dipped a toe back in beans, nickel and cocoa. I'm trading beans and cocoa from the long side, and I thought today's declines were a good starting point. I really want to buy beans in the 850s and cocoa around 2240.
Nickel is another story. I read a report on Glencore's view of the market. It's pretty bullish. Demand continues to be strong, and inventories are being drawn down. They are still not at dangerous levels. Longer term, the lack of enough capital investment will eventually lead them there. So I'm thinking that this is the start of a long term position. I'm hoping for a spike down to add.

What I Don't Trade

When I was just starting out in this business, I was a junior economic analyst at a large multinational. Most of my job was writing boilerplate reports on the same stuff over and over. No likey. However, some of the senior guys were fairly smart, and I did learn some stuff from them. One thing is: forecasting markets is easier, the smaller the market. For example, forecasting the overall rate of inflation is almost impossible (That's why the Fed has edged toward a reactive rather than a proactive mode.). OTOH, forecasting the price of tinplate is doable. The most accurate econometric model I ever built was one forecasting the price of shrimp. It was a beautiful example of an academic model, three equations and solved with two stage least squares (That was a hot technique at the time.). There was no futures market in shrimp, and no way to hedge (Seafood rots.). But we had a shrimp subsidiary, and I probably had the only model in the world.
I have mostly kept this to heart. I avoid the big macro futures: gold, bonds, S&P, even copper. These markets are too important, and there is too much intellectual firepower aimed at them. OTOH, there are few people looking at things like iridium and fluorspar. If you follow my articles on Seeking Alpha, you may note that they are about things like vanadium (my largest current position) and rhodium (out now).
Why is this so? Simply because there are fewer eyes and minds looking at it. For example, I'm bearish on gold, but what can I realistically add to the gold conversation. There are probably tens of thousands of smart and knowledgable people who have done my analysis and more. Sometimes the most important thing about playing a game is knowing when to not play.
Of course there are exceptions. Occasionally even the big markets get to ridiculous levels. This is usually because of macro news flow combined with momentum trading. That's why I'm now long soybeans. Here's one from today...

Their Soybeans Piling Up, Farmers Hope Trade War Ends Before Beans Rot

New York Times · 6 hours ago

So I'm trading ZS from the long side. BTW, I am trading this actively, and I don't update this blog all the time. So read it, but make your own trading decisions.