Matthew Sigel

What's happened in the derivatives market for Bitcoin leaves me much more bullish.

Another thing that's happened is the OG selling.

Some of that selling has eased up.

You know, we're still bullish, but we haven't added maybe as much as you might expect, given that kind of respect the cycle, respect the four year cycle.

So the internal debate among VanEck PMs is very fierce right now, both on the war and the return on capital from AI CapEx.

I think those are the two biggest things that are facing the market right now.

Is Hormuz going to open and what does that mean for the energy complex versus everything else?

And then...

Mag7 underperforming, most of those stocks below their 200 days now, and the market's demanding a return on this CapEx.

Is that return going to come through cutting heads or are there profit dollars that can materialize?

I mean, I lean bullish just because of my own internal productivity, where I'd say we've been able to not hire folks because of the work that my new analyst, Claude, is doing, especially when I integrate him into Excel.

That's been a very powerful unlock.

So at the firm level, Jan Van Eck really embraced AI from the moment ChatGBT was released, and we started licensing all of the models.

In the last few weeks, we've consolidated our budget around Anthropic, and we are beginning to aggressively build agents to automate some of the back office work.

I think our agents are going to get a 401k match at some point.

So, you know, given that my fund being crypto oriented and the Bitcoin miners are a big part of my benchmark, those companies are really the tip of the sphere in terms of this AI CapEx trend because they're levered.

They have to sell Bitcoin to fund their repurposing of the data centers.

And there's one data set that I've been looking at, which is what is the

dollars per megawatts of these leases that are being signed by Cypher, by Iron, by Terrawolf.

And each time we see a new lease, that number is going up.