27th September 2024 > > A lovely chart & MATIC/POL.

tl;dr

A lovely chart to help us gain some perspective. MATIC has been converted to POL. You might have some action to take, and you will likely have to pay tax in the UK.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

More details of the China stimulus have been reported. The state is bailing out its domestic, state-owned banking system with $142bn of equity injection. This is similar to the approach taken by the UK over a decade ago, which turned out to be a very poor choice. TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) in the US was a much better way of bailing out stricken banks which had been encouraged by poorly designed regulation to become over-leveraged with acute exposure to subprime mortgages.

This almost continuous process of adding fiat liquidity in place of making hard political decisions afflicts all nations and all political parties. It is wrong in principle, and even more wrong in practice. Your only line of defence is to own hard assets.

Occasional Series – “The Pandemic”

Professor Sir Chris Doomsday Whitty has finally admitted to the Covid Inquiry that “we overdid it”.

That won’t help the inquiry to justify its foregone conclusions, but neither will it change those foregone conclusions. Those conclusions will be along the line of “nothing to see here” with a recommendation for more cash for the NHS. Well, the £300-400mm cost of the inquiry could have been spent on something else much better instead.

I note there is still no mention of the kids whose lives have been destroyed to help civil servants save on their personal commuting costs. I shall almost certainly wait in vain for that to be discussed.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Nice chart

Courtesy of Milk Road:

Ignore the entry for “Global Derivatives” for it refers to notional which is both leveraged, and largely off-setting. It is a nonsense number.

What this chart shows is a firm riposte to the naysayers. If you think cryptos are virtually worthless, well that’s exactly where we are right now, relatively speaking. If you believe that cryptos have use cases (tokenisation of RWA is the biggie amongst many others) and can also act as a store of value, then we have huge growth heading our way in the very near future.

This party hasn’t even started mixing the drinks into the punch bowl.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – MATIC/POL

Most MATIC holdings have been automatically converted into POL, however this is more than just a rebranding exercise.

MATIC existed on both the Polygon network and on Ethereum.

If you owned MATIC on Polygon, then all your holdings have been automatically converted to POL with no action required. Just hop on over to your wallet, and you will see the change in the ticker.

If you owned MATIC on Ethereum, and you had staked your MATIC, (https://staking.polygon.technology/) then both the original stake and all accrued staking rewards have been converted to POL. Any MATIC on Ethereum simply left idle in a wallet will not have been converted. Neither have any staking rewards that were being processed during the transition. If you find yourself in either of those situations, I heartily recommend you convert to POL as soon as possible, using this tool:

https://portal.polygon.technology/

Note that the conversion of MATIC to POL is an exchange of one security for another, and so it is a taxable event for capital gains in the UK. If you have what you consider to be unrealised gains, the taxman begs to differ, and you will be liable for CGT at 10% or 20% on those gains in this tax year. Given that it is widely expected that CGT rates will be raised dramatically in the budget at the end of October, this conversion is a blessing in disguise, protecting some of your hard-earned wealth from the voracious maw of HMRC.