Tariffs. For Real? - NGMI Newsletter #10

Trump, Tariffs, Fortune & Fartcoin, NGMI Capital updates & more.

The newest Commander in Chief seems pretty determined to fuck around with markets as much as possible.

We can go into all of the background: Scott Bessent pouring honey in Trump’s ear and using tariffs as a roundabout way to repay the national debt, how tariffs are actually just a tax on the consumer or whether they’re just his way of whipping his dick out on the international stage and telling everyone how it is, a la ‘Art of the Deal’ style — but none of this really matters when assessing the effect of tariffs on our beloved internet tokens.

Uncertainty & Overhang

Trump’s tomfoolery with tariffs has two main impacts on the market: uncertainty and overhang.

Uncertainty is a simple enough thing to understand. No one likes investing in hyper-speculative assets when Orange Man could make something financial awful occur at any waking moment just because he feels like it.

Overhang is a little more complex. (I’m probably not using the proper definition of the term perfectly, but this is my newsletter so who cares.)

At the most simplistic level, there are still lots of suppliers with their goods stuck in ports around the world, and the effects of the tariffs that Trump has decided to go ahead with (10% baseline on all US imports and many more reciporical ones on other nations) are yet to be absorbed by the market in the long term.

Anecdotally, I know of several business owners who still haven’t been able to get goods shipped from China into the US. Extrapolating this, along with mainstream data and reporting, there are a whole lot of core materials and produce sitting in shipping containers on docks in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen - essentially delayed until further notice.

While everything may in fact already be “priced in,” nothing is priced in until it’s priced in.

I expect there to be more days of fear and chaos ahead, which is a good reason to keep a little bit of dry powder USDT/USDC sitting on the sidelines.

While Trump’s unmatched propensity to wake up and randomly decide to slap a multitrillion-dollar economic zone with a tariff is a little tiresome, overall, the macro table is still set for a very bullish end of the year for digital coins.

The US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, avowedly pro-crypto and has said the US should “take the worldwide lead” on digital assets, Trump’s pick as new chair of the SEC is Paul Atkins, a guy who runs a crypto consulting firm. The administration has withdrawn a swathe of pointless lawsuits against crypto companies, and it’s even gone as far as making memecoins kind of legal (for now).

While these are all slow-burning moves, there’s literally never been a better regulatory setup on which to justifiably ship the entirety of your net worth into crypto assets. While this trade may feel like consensus, I still think the vast majority of normies that would need a justification to invest meaningfully in something as maligned and misunderstood as crypto are still only just stumbling upon it now.

In short: higher for longer, but not without

Bitcoin

Bitcoin looks good here. Bitcoin just ripped through to a new ATH of $111.8k and a weekly close at $109k (the highest weekly close in BTC’s 15-year history).

There’s very little to be bearish on a mid-term timeframe when looking at this chart.

With this in mind, we’ve just witnessed nearly 7 weeks of pure UpOnly, so expect a few gentle pullbacks in the coming fortnight. Ideally, $109k becomes support, but failing that, $106k looks like a good level to hold on to.

If everything continues as planned, I expect to see >$125k Bitcoin by the end of next month.

Ethereum

For the first time in nearly two years, I’m low-key inspired to buy ETH again.

The core developers appear to have realised the error of their ways with the trainwreck that was building out infinite ghost L2s to “scale” the network.

They seem to have heeded the cries of horrified onlookers and beaten down ETH holders, finally shifting the narrative toward scaling the L1 and creating a system that creates short and long-term incentives that make the ETH token worth owning.

Just look at Ethereum researcher Dankrad’s Feist plan to vigrouously scale the native Ethereum network and re-inject the Ethereum dev community’s stance toward building with some much needed virility and aggression.

This is both dank and rad.

From a TA perspective, ETH has been consolidating nicely after last week, which is pretty standard considering the giant green dildo that blessed our battered ETH soldiers a few weeks ago.

I don’t intend to jink ETH performance, but I see no reason to be bearish here. Once the weekly closes above $2600 (Q4 2024 open), expect to see more glorious upside.

If ETH falls through $2150 (HTF support) anytime in the next 2-3 months, it would be truly disgusting.

If this occurs, I will gladly call for the shutdown of the network and condemn it as an accursed, smelly boomer chain, a network and asset never to be used or purchased ever again.

Solana

Predicting ETH outperformance does not necessarily mean that SOL has to start underperforming.

While the two networks are competing for dominance as the smart contract/application chain, it’s nowhere near being a zero-sum game as of yet.

We still have alt-L1 contenders in the form of SUI and Aptos, etc., but I do think it will be at least 6-9 months before SUI poses any legitimate threat to either network, especially considering their brutal CETUS (the largest AMM/DEX on SUI) exploit last week.

The prevalence and robustness of memes and AI ponzis as well as the recent launchcoin (and general launchpad) meta on Solana, is a very good flywheel for mid-term price appreciation that accrues back to SOL.

It’s rallied well from March lows, and I expect to see SOL hold well above $200 in the coming months, especially if BTC ranges for the next few weeks.

Memes

Memes have been making a wonderful recovery since the mid-March lows.

While established Solana memes like Fartcoin, Popcat and Fwog (and some much newer contenders like Housecoin and Labubu) have all rallied insanely well considering that many were prematurely gravedancing on both Solana and memes as an asset class — Fartcoin and established memecoins on ETH are probably where I would go for the most risk-adjusted upside moving forward (MOG and PEPE).

There are two reasons for these picks:

1. If you put a gun to my head and told me I had to full port one meme and hold it for the remainder of the cycle, my pick would be Fartcoin. This is because it demands the most mindshare and has the “funniest” possible name that could be repeated by talking heads on CNN finance shows when they are flabbergasted as to why it’s worth more than Ford Motors or such.

2. If the time of ETH outperformance is nigh, then owning ETH memes (leveraged ETH beta) is likely a relatively safe play if you want to maximise upside.

As mentioned before, I know there are a lot of people who think that SOL memes like Popcat, Dogwifhat, Fwog, etc. will pump especially hard in the return of mania bc they have solid communities and “good pumpamentals” all that jazz but I just can’t see these getting back to all-time highs or far exceeding them.

This is because it’s far too easy to launch new coins and there’s far too much diversification of attention across the shiny new things to meaningfully pump assets like these to ATH’s in the absence of catalysts like spot CEX listings and massive price cheer KOLs (many of whom have dumped their bags and said goodbye to the asset forever).

If you want to hear more about ETH memes and a DeFi protocol that’s working to establish better/safer price action, I’d recommend checking out this episode with Gami, the head of the International Meme Fund (IMF). It’s very good, trust me bro.

Attention Is Vapid

The biggest risk with memes is that there’s always a newer, funnier, or more novel idea that vamps the current frontrunner. Attention is a cruel mistress, and now more than ever, it shifts towards the shiniest object in the room.

When you bid the living Christ out of an actual memecoin (something with absolutely zero traditional fundamentals and not some other breed of narrative ponzi), you are betting on the fact that this token will continue to garner increased attention and drive upside returns from this.

Just know that whatever your favourite memecoin is right now, it will probably be replaced by something in the next 12 months.

Getting MSTR Pilled

I hadn’t really delved into the MicroStrategy ecosystem before speaking with Adrian Morris, a MSTR expert and crypto/AI consultant who knows the MicroStrategy (now Strategy) ecosystem better than anyone.

For anyone still thinking that Saylor’s exposure to Bitcoin is somehow dubious for Bitcoin long-term, I strongly suggest checking out this episode.

To save you some time, 12 minutes is where the good stuff kicks in.

NGMI Capital Updates

The CIO of NGMI Capital took two primary trades in the last week.

1) Fitcoin

Of all the Internet Capital Markets tokens to show up in the launchcoin meta, the CIO likes Fitcoin (FITCOIN) the most — largely because he was early to it and was able to size accordingly.

Fitcoin represents tokenised “shares” of an AI-powered app that creates outfits for you. The team have worked quickly to put out a roadmap and there’s plans for integrations of the asset into the app moving forward.

To answer the question at hand, does the CIO truly believe in the powerful and world-changing utility of an app that creates outfits for you? Not exactly, but he does really like the narrative potential and the fact that the team are dedicated to shipping crypto hard and fast.

It has all the good ingredients of a successful project, and if the performance of DUPE (a similar project aimed at second-hand furniture) is anything to go by, Fitcoin should perform well, assuming that Ben Pasternak can implement the right changes to the Launchcoin protocol.

2) Memes via Perps

Overall, the CIO has lacked the necessary balls to take a meaningful position in spot memes and has been gaining exposure to Solana memes primarily through perps on a wonderful app called Flipster (I work there now, so full shillio).

In terms of overall position, the CIO has secured reasonable and healthy gains on perp exposure to memes, but not without blowing an entire account trying to long the pico-bottom of Mantra (OM) when it destroyed itself a month ago.

Portfolio

The CIO is currently holding personal long-term positions in the following coins.

(Listed by order of approximate weight)

• USDC (USDC)

• Fitcoin (FITCOIN)

• Solana (SOL)

• Bitcoin (BTC)

• AicroStrategy (AISTR)

• Dream Machine Token (DMT)

• Pyth Network (PYTH)

• Pendle (PENDLE)

• Celestia (TIA)

• Dymension (DYM)

• Prime (PRIME)

• A long list of complete Solana dogshit I do not feel comfortable sharing with anyone who could and would judge me for it.

Disclaimer: None of this is financial advice. This is just one (not very smart) guy’s opinion and taking any immediate action based on this newsletter would be a very silly thing to do.

All words contained within this newsletter are my opinions and mine alone. You should do your own research and have the wherewithal (and self-respect) to make your own decisions independently.