As we wrap up the year and celebrate the festive season, we wanted to share some of our favorite moments from one of your favorite Speak Up interviews from 2024: Tom Lee with Anthony Scaramucci. Enjoy!
All the best for a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year!
Original interview aired Nov 29, 2024: https://youtu.be/RVqm779p5U8
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Andrew Brill 0:00
Happy Holidays from all of us here at wealthion. To all of you, I’m one of your hosts here at wealthion. Andrew brill, we took a look back at this year, and hope you enjoy these favorite guest moments from one of our best interviews of 2024
Anthony Scaramucci 0:18
you are genius level at predictions. Okay, so let’s imagine on the show Bitcoin, it was in the mid 50s to high 60s range. You said we’re going to 100,000 I said, What are we getting? 100,000 you said, by the end of the year? Okay, yeah. So why did you say that? What did you see and what do you see for Bitcoin over the next six months?
Tom Lee 0:45
One of the reason we have stayed constructive on Bitcoin is the price is falling closely the prior having cycles. The having cycle for your viewers, is when the block reward gets cut in half. That happened earlier this year, so there’s a reduction in new supply, and the sweet spot of that price gain as supplies cut starts to happen towards the end of this year and then into next year. And I think that that has supported why we expected Bitcoin to be 100,000 and over the next 12 months, I think something over 250,000 is possible, but maybe highly probable based on Just this following this price cycle. The second reason I think Bitcoin has maybe more upside than that is because the new administration is running, has run on a pro Bitcoin platform. And I think that the possibility of the US not only legitimizing Bitcoin but make making it a strategic reserve asset, I think raises the raises. What would be the possible price scenarios for Bitcoin? Because if the US government, as they intend, ultimately gets to a million Bitcoin, they’ll be the largest holder of Bitcoin in the world, and they’d exert enormous positive influence on legitimizing Bitcoin, and maybe I would just add to that, it’s almost like taking a playbook from MicroStrategy, because MicroStrategy has proven that using Bitcoin as a balance sheet asset has really created a lot of value for MicroStrategy shareholders. So
Anthony Scaramucci 2:39
I’m a Bitcoin holder. I believe you’re a Bitcoin holder. There are other coins out there. Some of those coins have not done it well at all. They’ve diverged from Bitcoin. And there’s a few coins like Solana, that have done quite well. I had an investment in something that I think you did some research on, called algorand, unfortunately, has not done well. So away from Bitcoin, are there things that you like? Are there tokens that you think, from a utility perspective, from a use case perspective, that you like, away from the store of value Bitcoin?
Tom Lee 3:16
Yeah. I mean, the answer is yes. We’ve recommended to our clients that if they didn’t want to be Bitcoin only, that they could look at Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana, because we put those largely in the same category as like sort of core cryptos, we are also entering what I think is Alt season. You know, next year is really when I think the crypto market could broaden. And this is where those who are really experts on crypto, and I know you run a crypto fund, actually, we’re gonna, are gonna have some alpha, because that is actually when many alt coins could do really well. I think that the stronger bitcoin is, the stronger the ecosystem becomes. And so so many of these utility tokens and things that are tokenizing really start to have a lot of expected value. But I, you know, I don’t follow this as closely Sean Farrell is much closer to sort of how to play alt season. And, of course, sky
Anthony Scaramucci 4:31
bridge, you know, you’ve previously predicted that the S, P would reach 15,000 by 2030, and what I loved about what you said is it would be factors like Gen Z finally entering into the market advancements in AI, use you sticking with that? Have you moderated it anyway? If so, how and what are some of the key drivers that support your forecast?
Tom Lee 4:57
Yeah, it’s, um, yeah, that’s still our K. Base you know our base case that the we’re in a an earnings driven cycle, aided by AI, also supported by this prime age workforce surge coming from millennials and then also Gen Z, because those two generations are larger than Gen X. So Gen X is the generation born between 1960 to 1980 roughly, and and those folks are, you know, just in the heart of the prime ages now. And now they’re exiting, and now you have two huge generations behind it. So that’s think of it as like a second wave driving further growth. S and P earnings next year are roughly 300 for, let’s say, just sort of simple measures. And so that’s why S p6 1000 is just 20 times earnings, right, which I don’t think is that demanding. By 2030 we estimate S and P earnings could be 600 to 650 Okay, and and I think multiples will be higher because of the larger share coming from AI and technology earnings, which naturally have higher PE multiples. And so if you just apply a 20 to 25 multiple, you’re getting, you know, 15,000 so I know it sounds like people say, well, 15,000 sounds crazy. And two years ago, it might have sounded crazy, even though we that forecast was in place more than two years ago. You know that forecast been in place probably for five or six years, but you know now that we’re at 6000 we’re that much closer to 15,000 it’s not a quantum leap any you know any longer. How
Anthony Scaramucci 6:56
do you assess the impact of the artificial intelligence you know, and is it all positive? Is it’s could it be dystopian? Could military adversaries of ours get a hold of it? Could, could someone figure out how to put an artificially intelligent worm into our Pentagon or our power system, or are you just not worried about any of
Tom Lee 7:25
that? I would say, if based on my conversations with our clients and with other sort of folks following this, I do think we’re underestimating the negative consequences of AI, you know, foremost, because in in a human like in our human intervention endeavors, you know, we, we work with ethical boundaries. Because even though there might be a shortcut, like, let’s say you’re waiting for coffee, you know, you wait in line and other people in front of you, but in an AI world, there’s no benefit to being ethical, you know, so that in the AI world, that machine will just cut the line in front of everybody to get coffee. And I haven’t seen any attempts to create ethical boundaries within AI, especially other nations pursuing it. So to me, this means there’s going to be much greater risk of cybersecurity hacks, and it’s going to be much harder for us to protect our identities in this world of AI and social engineering and generative AI videos, and it’ll be very easy to spoof people. And so I think profits are gonna do fine. There’s gonna be a much higher cost in the economy around cybersecurity. And already. JP Morgan, you know, 7% of their activity. Well, all banks, really, 7% is now suspicious. It’s actually been rising. So in a world of cybersecurity, banks are kind of losing the war, because there’s more fraud now than less. And so I think that’s makes crypto so much more important, because it does secure your information. I think that’s one solution, but I Yeah, so I think there’s a lot of risks, actually, personally, I, you know, I think if, if you unleash AI systems in the financial market, there’s going to be a lot of people who make dirty trades that trick people and spoof people, and there’ll be fake headlines, because that’s how you manipulate markets.
Andrew Brill 9:34
Thanks again for watching these favorite moments of 2024 and we hope we can continue to provide you with information that will help you invest wisely and be financially resilient, wishing all of you a healthy, happy, safe and prosperous 2025.
