Global Market Comments
March 17, 2026
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(HOW TO HANDLE THE FRIDAY, MARCH 20, OPTIONS EXPIRATION),
(SPY), (RTX), (BA), (CAT), (GLD)
Global Market Comments
March 16, 2026
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(MARKET OUTLOOK FOR THE WEEK AHEAD or SPRING IN THE CENTRAL VALLEY)
AAPL), (GOOGL), (AMZN), (BA), (CAT), (RTX) (GLD), (B), (WPM) (MSFT), (GOOGL), (XLE), (XLU), (XLF), (XLF), (XLK) ($VIX) (USO), (JPM), (KKR), (OWL), (AAL), (BLK), (APO)
“The circulation of confidence is better than the circulation of money,” said President James Madison, America’s fourth president.
I've owned a lot of assets in my career - currencies, commodities, emerging market equities, a working Texas oil well that produced exactly enough crude to annoy my accountant.
What I've learned is that how you hold something matters nearly as much as what you hold.
Ethereum (ETH-USD) investors who get this right will quietly compound a fortune before this cycle is over.
Of the nine spot Ethereum ETFs currently trading in the US, only two actually pay you to hold them. The other seven are essentially inert wrappers charging annual fees for the privilege of exposure.
With ETH-USD sitting 60% off its August highs and the setup for a long-term recovery increasingly compelling, picking the right vehicle now is the kind of decision that looks obvious in hindsight and gets ignored in the moment.
Start with the fees, because they compound longer than most people's patience.
The Grayscale Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHE) charges a 2.50% annual expense ratio - a number that made sense when it was the only game in town and makes no sense now that cheaper alternatives exist.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Grayscale Ethereum Staking Mini Trust ETF (ETH) charges 0.15%.
The iShares Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHA), now the market leader with $6.07 billion in assets, comes in at 0.25%, as does the Fidelity Ethereum Fund (FETH) with $1.29 billion.
The remaining funds, Bitwise (ETHW), VanEck (ETHV), Franklin (EZET), 21Shares (TETH), and Invesco Galaxy (QETH), cluster between 0.19% and 0.25%.
On a 10-year hold, that 2.35 percentage point gap between the cheapest and most expensive fund will no longer be a simple rounding error. It'll be a compounding disaster in slow motion.
The staking question is where it gets more interesting.
Only two funds currently incorporate staking into their structure: ETHE and the Grayscale Mini Trust (ETH).
Through staking, a portion of the underlying ETH is delegated to validators on the Ethereum network, generating annual yields typically running between 3% and 4%.
For those in it for the long haul, that yield component is the difference between owning a static asset and owning one that quietly earns while you sleep.
The catch is that ETHE's 2.50% expense ratio nearly devours the staking yield entirely, leaving holders with the operational complexity of a staking structure and almost none of the benefit.
The Grayscale Mini Trust (ETH), with its 0.15% fee and full staking access, is the only fund currently offering both advantages without surrendering one to pay for the other.
iShares and Fidelity have the institutional infrastructure to add staking eventually, and when they do, the calculus will shift.
For now, (ETH) holds the edge.
Scale matters too, though not for the reason most people assume. Larger funds generate tighter bid-ask spreads, attract deeper institutional participation, and carry lower closure risk.
ETHA's $6.07 billion AUM makes it the most liquid option in the space. For traders moving in and out of positions, that matters.
For long-term holders prioritizing fee efficiency and staking yield, the Grayscale Mini Trust's $1.58 billion base is sufficient.
The underlying asset itself deserves more credit than the current price action suggests.
Ethereum's stablecoin market capitalization on-chain has expanded dramatically over multiple years, reflecting genuine economic utility rather than speculative froth.
Total value locked across Ethereum's DeFi ecosystem, while off its 2021 peak of over $100 billion, remains substantially above its 2022-2024 baseline.
Active addresses continue trending upward. These are not the metrics of a network in structural decline. They are the metrics of a network digesting a speculative overhang while its actual usage quietly grows.
The technical picture is less cheerful in the short term.
ETH is trading below all significant moving averages, with a weekly RSI of 32.42 - historically the kind of territory where accumulation, not panic, tends to pay off.
Bitcoin (BTC) peaked above $120,000 before this risk-off rotation took hold, and liquidity has been moving steadily down the risk curve into equities and precious metals.
That rotation doesn't last forever. When it reverses, stablecoin balances sitting near all-time highs on-chain represent a substantial pool of deployable capital waiting for the risk appetite to return.
The long-term thesis for Ethereum remains intact.
The dominant Layer-1 network for DeFi activity, the largest developer base in crypto, expanding Layer-2 infrastructure, and now a maturing ETF ecosystem giving institutional investors clean, regulated access - these are durable structural advantages.
Just make sure when the tide comes back in, you're holding the right bucket. The wrong one has a hole in the bottom and charges you 2.50% a year for the experience.
Global Market Comments
March 13, 2026
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(MARCH 11 BIWEEKLY STRATEGY WEBINAR Q&A),
(USO), (UUP), (BITO), (MSTR), (SDS), (PLTR), (VST), (MOS)
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty," said the late British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
In 1989, I watched Japanese banks, insurers, and manufacturers lock themselves into elaborate cross-shareholding arrangements called keiretsu.
Each institution held the others' shares as a permanent signal of long-term alignment. Western analysts called it cronyism.
I called it the most effective anti-panic mechanism ever built into an equity market. It kept Japanese institutions from dumping each other's shares during every minor crisis for decades.
That same mechanism just showed up in crypto, and the institutions involved aren't obscure blockchain startups. They're Nasdaq, the DTCC, and the clearinghouses that settle every stock trade you've ever made.
If you hold Canton Coin (CC-USD) or have been watching it from the sidelines, the network just changed in a way that directly affects your entry calculus.
The update is called CIP-0105. Canton Network's Super Validators must now lock between 35% and 55% of their past and future rewards to continue earning them.
Participation is technically voluntary, in the same way that declining a salary is technically voluntary. Walk away from the lock-up and you walk away from the rewards entirely.
If a Super Validator eventually wants out, only 1/365th of the requested amount becomes liquid per day. A full exit takes a full year.
The DTCC, whose board includes JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citibank, BNY, UBS, NYSE, and Bank of America, didn't stumble into this network.
They chose it deliberately, and CIP-0105 just asked them to put their coin where their conviction is.
The supply math is where this gets interesting. By Year 10 (we're currently in Year 2), 100 billion Canton Coins will have been minted, with 35 billion allocated to Super Validators.
Under CIP-0105, roughly 16 billion of those coins get removed from circulation.
Factor in the network's burn rate, currently consuming the equivalent of 30% to 65% of newly minted supply daily, and total circulating supply by year ten lands somewhere between 70 and 94 billion coins.
At the midpoint, those 16 billion locked coins represent roughly 20% of everything available to trade.
In a more aggressive burn scenario with maximum lock-up participation, that figure climbs toward 32%, making it comparable to the share of ETH currently staked on Ethereum, for a network that most institutional crypto desks haven't fully priced yet.
The fee story makes that valuation gap harder to ignore. Canton is already generating transaction fees orders of magnitude higher than Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL), yet trades at a network valuation that is a fraction of either.
Roughly 90% of the total value of tokenized real-world assets, excluding stablecoins, currently resides on the Canton Network.
Daily transactions have grown from approximately 50,000 a year ago to over 1 million today.
When fees are real, growing, and the institutions processing them are now structurally locked in, the valuation disconnect tends to close. It just rarely announces when.
The risks remain genuine. Execution at scale is unproven, and competition among Layer-1 chains chasing institutional adoption is fierce.
History is unkind to early leaders in infrastructure races, and the winning protocol usually only looks inevitable in hindsight, well after the decisive window has closed.
Canton has spent years in controlled private testing, and controlled environments have a way of flattering protocols that later crack under real-world volume.
But the architecture of CIP-0105 is sound, and the roster of institutions now structurally incentivized to see this network succeed reads like the attendance list at a G7 finance ministers' dinner.
Decades ago in Tokyo, I watched cross-ownership hold an entire market together through decades of turbulence.
Canton just built its own version, and this time, the assets underneath it are actually worth something.
As commitment mechanisms go, this one has considerably better fundamentals than the Japanese model - and fewer golf courses.
Global Market Comments
March 11, 2026
Fiat Lux
Featured Trade:
(HOW TO HEDGE YOUR CURRENCY RISK),
(FXA), (UUP),
(TESTIMONIAL)
Thanks for the advice, John.
Actually, I just got started with investing as I’ve been living close to the edge raising kids all these years. I had $100K that I could float for a few months so I had it in the Eaton Vance Tax-Managed Diversified Equity Income Fund (ETY) until my old golf buddy/broker told me about you and your Tesla (TSLA) advice.
So, I went all-in on December 30. It’s the best move I ever made. I’m an entrepreneur/risk-taker so I bought as much Apple (AAPL) and NVIDIA (NVDA) on the way down as I could, which obviously turned out far better than I ever hoped.
So, like I said, it seems now or never for me. So, I subscribed to your Mad Hedge Biotech & Healthcare Letter and I’m going to do the best I can with it.
Thanks a “million.”
Greg
Las Vegas, NV
“If you die a rich person, you’ve failed,” said steel pioneer Andrew Carnegie, who gave away $11 billion during his lifetime, including building a library in every town in the United States.
