I was out visiting my parents the other weekend and on the way home I planned on stopping by the butcher store to pick up the 20 pounds of chicken breasts that we process every couple of months. As I was heading out the door, @mrsbozz said to me, "we are grilling tonight, so if you don't already have something in the freezer you might want to pick something up".
The truth is, I did already have something in the freezer, but for some reason, I wanted something a little more. Sure, I could have thawed out one of the New York strip steaks I have in there, but I haven't had a porterhouse in forever and that sounded delicious.
There it is, my $16.50 USD porterhouse steak. The strip was amazing and the filet was beyond belief. I grilled it to perfection and it fed me for two whole days. I was in heaven!
It is time again for another Finance Friday/Friday Finance. This is a series I started where I talk about random bits of financial stuff that I have seen, gathered, or experienced during the week. I hope as a reader you find it informational, entertaining, or both. I also hope it can generate some good discussion and edify the community.
Staking
Despite the debacle with UST and the FTX scam, I still think one of the big concepts pushing the next bull run is going to be staking. Again, despite past follies, I think people are looking for something more secure than DeFi. NFTs were great, but even after all this time I don't think people can wrap their heads around it like putting your assets in a fixed location and earing interest on them.
It's a safe bridge for a lot of people. Plus, the interest rates don't hurt either. Take HBD for example. No, it's not the insane 1000% rates like we were seeing with DeFi, but let's be honest, for most of us, those crazy rates didn't pan out anyway. Either the rug got pulled or things slowly fizzled out and you were left with tons of a token worth less than a cent.
Compared to that and traditional rates, that 20% isn't looking so bad now is it? You better believe if it is attractive to us, it's going to be attractive to newbies too.
I foresee a good number of people enjoying a big fat juicy steak/stake during this next bull cycle.
Crypto Scams
@mrsbozz is a bit of a true crime buff. She has Court TV running in the background pretty much all the time. She also listens to the police scanner feeds fairly often. In addition to those feeds, she follows a couple Facebook groups where people repost what they hear on the police scanner.
The other day she read a post to me. The gist of it goes that a woman was at a party store trying to buy and send crypto currency, but the store owner talked her out of it and called the police so she could file a report.
In the past, this was the kind of story that the mainstream media would latch onto and emphasize crypto currency as the "big bad". Forget the fact that scams like this have been going on for years and crypto currency could have just as easily been replaced with gift cards, cash, or any other number of things.
Hats off to the store owner (who must have one of those BTC ATM's in the store) to realize what was going on and stop the lady before she could lose too much money.
It is interesting to note that I see far fewer hit pieces on crypto now that the ETFs have launched than I did before. Perhaps that is a sign of more widespread adoption. Then again, I'm sure the SEC has some trick tucked up their sleeve they plan on dropping sooner or later.
Speaking of Scams
That potential crap token/rug pull I bought into a couple weeks ago still seems to be plugging along pretty well. At least so far the rug is fully intact. I purchased in the stage 5 or 6 range and it appears they are now in the stage 8 range. In each stage, they incrementally increase the price by a certain number of cents. The token price right now is $.100 and the next stage will put it at $.110.
The project so far has sold 284,942,953 of 310,000,000 total tokens (supposedly) and have collected over $19 million dollars in USDT.
I still keep seeing news articles mentioning this token, so their marketing machine is still fully functional. Either way, they stand to walk off with a fairly large sum of money.
My current holding is just a little over 4000 tokens. We shall see if there ends up even being liquidity to get out of them when the time comes.
Magic Eight Ball says all signs point towards "NO".
My Precious Metal Portfolio
Finally, it's been a while since I talked about the precious metal stocks that I own in my Robinhood account. My Robinhood account is something I opened up a while ago on a whim. I really don't have much invested in there, but it's something I play around with from time to time when I want to pick up a stock here or there.
Right now, my portfolio looks pretty pitiful. My five shares of Fortuna Silver Mine are still in the green though. I think I bought them at about $1.65 per share and they are now sitting at $3.22 per share. That's down from a couple years ago when the price jumped over $10, but I am not complaining.
In addition to FSM, I also picked up some shares of Kinross Gold at the recommendation of someone here on HIVE. I have five shares and I think I bought them at around $5.34 per share. The current price is $5.77 per share, so I am up a couple of bucks on that one as well.
Being up is better than being down, so again, you won't hear me complaining at all. I think it's safe to say that I am not the person to be taking stock advice from. The rest of my Robinhood portfolio is pretty sad.
With that happy thought, I hope you all have a great weekend!
Sports Talk Social - @bozz.sports
