‘In No Way’ Is Mike Novogratz Less Bullish On Bitcoin Like He Was On Friday Morning

Mike Novogratz — who went down in flames at Fortress and was plotting a comeback in part via a $500 million digital asset fund — has been in the news quite a bit lately.

Three weeks ago, while making the rounds and talking up his planned “Galaxy Digital Assets Fund”, Novogratz set a “target” for Bitcoin of $40,000. Here’s that call, delivered (appropriately enough) on CNBC’s Fast Money:

Right. So clearly Mike has balls. Big ones. And he’s not afraid to lay ’em out on the table in front of Melissa Lee.

Given the size of Mike’s balls, there’s no way he would freak out at the first sign of trouble, right? Wrong. Because at 11:24 a.m. ET on Friday, he tweeted this:

Looks to me like a short term top is in. My hunch is we consolidate between 10-16k for a while. Extreme would be 8k. Bull market isn’t over. Just pausing.

— Mike Novogratz (@novogratz) December 22, 2017

Clearly, Mike’s balls shriveled up during Friday morning’s plunge to below $11,000. The silly thing about that tweet is that he’s trying to pretend like Bitcoin is an asset that makes sense. “Short term top is in”, “consolidate”, “extreme would be $8k”, “bull market”, etc. etc.

Let’s just be honest, he has no better idea about where Bitcoin is going than you do. Using those terms to describe the price action around a cryptocurrency is nonsense. Plain and simple. Let me show you what I mean. He told Bloomberg on Friday that “it will take the market a while to recover and bitcoin prices will probably consolidate between $10,000 and $16,000, and won’t approach $20,000 again for at least three to four months.” Again, that was yesterday. Here’s Bitcoin since then:

Bitcoin is already pushing to the top of what Mike says is the new range just hours after the Friday morning dive. So when he says it won’t get to $20,000 again for three or four months, he’s just making shit up. It could go to $20,000 by this afternoon just as easily as it could collapse to $5,000. I have no idea and neither does he.

Anyway, the punchline to all of this is that Mike informed potential investors “last week” that he has in fact changed his mind about launching his Galaxy Digital Assets Fund.

“I didn’t want to have to deal with the schizophrenic emotional side of it,” Novogratz told Bloomberg, adding that “there are just so many conflicts in that business. It was going to be more complicated than I wanted.”

Yes, it was going to be “more complicated” than Mike “wanted.” We imagine what he means there is something like this: “after thinking about it, I decided taking outside capital and plowing it into the biggest speculative mania in the history of financial bubbles was a veritable suicide mission.”

And of course Mike has been selling on the way up. Here’s Bloomberg:

Novogratz said he’s been selling cryptocurrencies in his personal account as bitcoin passed $13,000, $16,000 and $17,000 and as ether topped $600, $700 and $800. Novogratz said he lost money today as prices plunged but has profited for the month so far.

Just how much has Mike made you ask? If you recall, something like $250 million. Back in September, he said that after he paid tax on the profits he “bought a Gulfstream G550 jet.” Oh, and he also “donated an equal amount to a philanthropic project for criminal justice reform.” So that’s nice.

Speaking to Bloomberg on Friday, Novogratz explained that he “didn’t like market conditions and wanted to re-evaluate what he’s doing.” “I look pretty smart pressing the pause button right now,” he added.

Give me a break. But lest you should get things misconstrued, Mike was back on Twitter on Friday evening to Novo-splain how his $8k call and his decision to cancel his crypto hedge fund isn’t indicative of a bearish outlook. To wit:

To be clear, we delayed launching a hedge fund with outside investors capital last week because we didn’t like market conditions for new investors. In no way does it mean we are less bullish the crypto markets.

— Mike Novogratz (@novogratz) December 22, 2017

For fun, let’s just annotate the chart above:

I guess that’s what he means when he talks about the “schizophrenic emotional side of it.”

But look, we shouldn’t be too hard on Mike because for one thing, he bought a goddamn Gulfstream G550 with his crypto profits, so it’s not like he hasn’t done well in this market.

Additionally, Mike was correct when he said on Friday that “when you get kicked this hard, it takes a lot of ice to get the swelling down.”

Right. Especially if you’ve got big balls.