Digital asset investment outlooks in a turbulent market
Liz Young, David Duong, Jeff Dorman Taylor Culbertson
TC: I am the moderator of the panel. I am the CEO of Hedgehog. What is Hedgehog? We were the first company to register with the SEC as a registered crypto advisor in the US. Build your own custom ETF. Davis is head of insittutional research at Coinbase, Liz is head of strategy at SoFi, and then we have Jeff Dorman. We're here to discuss two different things. The first is digital investments and how to build a portfolio and how that has changed in the last 10 years, and then we're here to talk about our outlooks on the market and then maybe about inflation, interest rates, and regulation. How does this effect the markets and what might we be able to do? Liz, you are our traditional finance representative up here.
LY: We call that TradFi.
TC: There's a lot of changes in finance lately. From an institutional standpoint, what are some of the biggest changes you have seen?
LY: I am excited about this microphone challenge. I feel like we're up here doing an experiment. I think a lot has changed. I made a big transition from TradFi where I spent all my career up until I joined SoFi in really traditional asset management companies and banks. SoFi is the first company that I worked for was that less than 100 years ago. That transition for me was eye-opening, a little terrifying but eye-opening. I got to the company and I got tlak with some of these newer investors, and to frame that, about 60% of our investment platform is people aged 20-40 years. Traditional asset management clients are between 60-65 years. So it's a way younger clientele and it was fascinating to hear what they were interested in and the ways the industry has changed. One of the reasons I made the leap was because you could feel the shift and the changes in these individual investors and the huge community building around crypto and all the ways you could invest and be creative about it, which flew in the face of which we were doing traditionally in TradFi. I think it's fascinating, and still not entirely educated on it myself, which is why I come to events like this and get more educated on crypto. It's a real thing and it's not going anywhere anytime soon.
TC: Whenever I talk with anyone about crypto, even people who are industry experts, they say well I'm not an expert. There's so many aspects to stablecoins, DeFi and a littany of data that is available. You look at this data constantly whether it's straight from the blockchain or otherwise. What are the most important bits of research that you do when you construct a strategy? What are some of the new things you look at?
DD: Well Taylor, I am an expert in crypto. No, I mean, there's a lot of information and coming from the TradFi space, one thing that I had expected when I moved into crypto was that I expected everything to be fully transparent where we would have all the data mark-to-market by the second and have on-chain analysis and so on. It's there, kind of, but it's remarkably hard to data mine, and there's so much data in fact that it's hard to get into this space and understand what's driving dynamics. Sometimes I think you look at a token and its value, and you say it's fairly priced, or you say this is a month away from a pricing to emerge or a major theme that should be in the analysis. Sometimes I look at a Chainlink or a Polkadot and say, well this has got to be a cheap play that people haven't looked at? But then you look into it, and you find out markets were kind of right. So I look at tokenomics which is a broad term at this point.
.....
Tweet:
Transcript: Digital asset investment outlooks in a turbulent market https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/coindesk-consensus-2022/turbulent-market-investment/ @CoinDesk @HedgehogDotApp @jdorman81 @ddthats3ds @Coinbase @LizYoungStrat @SoFi #Consensus2022