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WTF Headline Of The Day: Blythe Masters' Ex-Husband Launches Offshored Bitcoin Hedge Fund
Submitted by Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg,
Blythe Masters is perhaps the most maligned human being on earth by silver investors due to suspicions of JP Morgan’s manipulation in the silver market. Well she’s back in the news, but it has nothing to do with silver. Rather, the news relates to the fact that her ex-husband and commodities traders, Daniel Masters, has just launched a Bitcoin hedge fund from the island of Jersey, a British Crown dependency.
We learn from Newsweek that:
Daniel Masters, a 50-year-old veteran commodities trader, started working for some of the largest companies in the world right out of university, trading in London, New York and Zug, Switzerland, for JPMorgan Chase and Phibro before moving on to the New York Mercantile Exchange, a short walk from Wall Street. By all appearances, it was your standard Wall Street career.
Then, in 2008, he moved to a tiny island off the coast of France called Jersey, which this week opened its doors to the island’s first fully regulated Bitcoin hedge fund—run by none other than Masters himself—as part of a push to create a nascent Silicon Valley in the heart of the English Channel, replete with government-funded entrepreneurial hubs and startup accelerators.
No sooner did word of the offshore Bitcoin fund get out than Reddit spluttered to life, devoting two pages, here and here, to debating whether the virtual currency’s baby steps into the institutional investing realm is really good news or bad news for Bitcoin, whose meteoric rise has thus far been mostly successful in eschewing traditional finance.
Masters, co-principal of Global Advisors Jersey Ltd.—which trades up to $2 billion of energy and equities—is the latest of a handful of fund managers trotting out new Bitcoin investment funds in recent months, as investors clamor for innovative ways to skim the froth off the digital currency’s impressive, if often unpredictable, price pops and drops and, occasionally, collapses.
He believes Bitcoin’s prices will stabilize as the currency and technology mature—similar to what has happened over the past decade with oil—but in the meantime, he estimates the value of Bitcoin could rise to $2,000 or more. “Right now, Bitcoin has about 1,000 percent annualized volatility,” he says. “Compare that to oil at 15 to 20 percent and stocks at 10 to 15 percent.” In other words, the potential upside, in the eyes of an experienced trader, are too appealing to resist.
Speaking from CoinSummit in London, Simon Hamblin, CEO of Netagio, a year-old U.K. company that specializes in secure Bitcoin storage and is a custodian for the Bitcoin fund being launched by Masters, says any fund must take numerous precautions to guard against the loss of Bitcoins. “We keep our Bitcoin in cold storage, in different forms both physical and media, and always keep it offline, heavily encrypted and in multiple locations,” he told Newsweek.
This week, Netagio, based in the Isle of Man—a Crown dependency, like Jersey—announced the debut of a London-based Bitcoin exchange that will allow individuals to trade Bitcoin against the British pound and gold. Netagio spun off this spring from Jersey’s GoldMoney Network Ltd., which stores $1.4 billion of metals in five undisclosed locations for clients across Europe.
I covered GoldMoney’s move into Bitcoin earlier this year in the post: GoldMoney Adds Bitcoin to its Suite of Services.
Hamblin, who says he stumbled into finance from a more technical field, sees Bitcoin as the “perfect merger between technology and finance.”
Masters, the former spouse of another commodities kingpin—JPMorgan Chase’s recently departed global head of commodities, Blythe Masters—says the Jersey Bitcoin fund will target up to $200 million in Bitcoin investments in the first six months to a year and ramp up from there. The fund went through a yearlong approval process via the island’s regulator, the Jersey Financial Services Commission, which offers a more streamlined process than New York and London do, Masters says. He adds, “In Jersey, you have one person playing sheriff instead of a dozen.”
“Imagine being able to walk into a car dealership, scan your phone over the price tag of the vehicle you want, and, in an instant, you’ve paid, you’ve updated your car’s ownership information, insurance, vehicle registration,” Masters says. “You jump in the car, you drive off, you never have to speak to a single person.” Because a Bitcoin wallet can be attached to inanimate objects, as well as carried on phones, the possibilities are endless, he says.
“Finance is one of the few industries that is still in need of a disruption,” he told Newsweek.
He’s exactly right. All year, I have maintained that Bitcoin was unlikely to make a major move higher until the summer. Well summer is here, and whether you like it or not, Wall Street is moving in.
Full article here.
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Best and most rational comment on this thread! But Zero Hedge serves a purpose. These hyper-negative blow hards need a place to meet
The Zero Hedge Flat Earth Society , they are the biggest Circle - Jerk . All proper haters and not one single screenshot of a bitcoin short posisiton has been posted. Bullshitters the lot of them - all mouth and no trousers.
wow..two total cunts on here at the same time...
PUSSY RIOT
Fuck off back down into your damp bunker you Flat Earth Fool. Your punishment tonight will be 3 cold cans of prepper food and 2 more chapters of "What to do when the govt. shuts down the power grid and internet - to stop bitcoin". Once you have swallowed your cold cans of prepper food you will then be allowed to fondle those silver eagles you have been praying will be worth something one day. Remember to keep those matches dry so you can light your candle.
awwww.....what's a matter fool....yer Bitcoin biting you?
again......with gusto....FUCK RIGHT OFF
fuck off....roger....
still sleeping with that guy?
you cunt
FYI: If you want to generate secure offline paper wallets with a pinter, here is one option.
Mycelium Entropy is a small USB device that uses hardware based entropy to generate printable Bitcoin paper wallets.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mycelium-entropy
this can't be good news for bitcoin, or bitcoin holders have this guy come in, especially from an island under the rule of the crown.
i'm neither for or against bitcoin, i don't completly understand it.
i'm going to do a little research, someone bought close to 200,000 bitcoins at an auction around a month ago, i'm going to see what he paid, and what bitcoins were worth on that day, i figure that was the true value of bitcoin, on that day, or maybe it was blithes new partner.
Here is Tim Draper's press conference after he won the 30k BTC auction (spoiler alert: he has never disclosed the price he paid):
http://new.livestream.com/draperuniversity/bitcoin-auction
Interesting thing is they all talk about what her job was but really we are all missing the big important questions to ask further - she was an employee who did her job; told to do so by who? Even managers don't generally act alone, at least not for the years she has been accused of manipulating over.
Bitcoin has less value to me than the last used piece of Charmin.
If it goes to 2000 , 3000 or zero, it will be a measure of the imbecilia of the masses and nothing else.
bitcon makes gold look rational.
and thats saying something
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmOqGrxfZ90