$SATA is trading more dollar volume than the five largest bank preferreds combined. Avg daily, Sept 1–21, 2026: SATA - $55.2M WFC-L - $11.1M JPM-D - $6.0M JPM-K - $5.2M BAC-B - $4.4M C-N - $4.3M Top 5 combined: $30.9M. Traded more than all 5 combined in 13 of 14 trading sessions in September.

It is impossible for me to not be bullish on Bitcoin right now. Bitcoin is RISING through a real-yield regime it has literally never seen before. The 10Y real Treasury yield hit 2.68% this week - the highest level of the entire Bitcoin era. But the crazier number is 2.44%. That’s the average 10Y real yield over the last 40 Treasury sessions. The highest sustained 10Y real-yield regime in Bitcoin history. Bitcoin is up 17.4% over those same 40 sessions. This matters because real yields are the hurdle rate. When the government will pay you ~2.5% above inflation to sit in Treasuries, the opportunity cost of owning a non-yielding monetary asset is enormous. For much of Bitcoin’s history, collapsing or negative real yields were gasoline. Right now the gasoline is gone. The macro headwind is sitting at a record. And Bitcoin is going up anyway. The lazy model that “Bitcoin only goes up when money is cheap” just ran into a very inconvenient chart:

ASST and SATA combined are at $4.4 billion in combined dollar volume for September... ...and September is only 13 trading days in. Combined dollar volume through the first 13 sessions of each month: Jan: $1.73B Feb: $0.97B Mar: $0.66B Apr: $0.76B May: $1.05B Jun: $1.96B Jul: $0.75B Aug: $0.68B Sep: $4.40B That is 6.5x August, 4.1x the Jan to Aug average, and 2.2x the prior record set in June. ASST alone traded $3.69B. SATA added $0.71B, its second best month on record.

Digital credit's Bitcoin beta has split in two. In late July, all five preferreds moved with Bitcoin almost one for one. Since August, they have sorted themselves by price: STRK ($75.42): 0.63 STRD ($74.19): 0.42 STRF ($104.00): 0.17 STRC ($98.51): 0.14 SATA ($100.01): 0.03 Par acts as a ceiling. This year, STRC's beta was 0.04 after closes at $99 or higher and 0.32 below that. SATA shows the same pattern, 0.08 versus 0.41. The complex as a whole still tracks Bitcoin closely. The composite's 30-day correlation sits at 0.72, the highest since March. On Bitcoin's biggest days this year, it ran 0.89. Interesting results:

First week at Strive in the books. Absolutely exhilarating. The pace, urgency, and intensity of this team are phenomenal. Everyone is moving with purpose, and there’s a real sense that we’re building something that matters. Couldn’t be more excited for what’s ahead. So much to do. Time to get after it.

Bitcoin's 120-day correlation with gold just hit the 99.5th percentile of every reading since 2020. Its 120-day realized volatility sits in the bottom fifth. Low volatility. Extreme gold correlation. The cross-asset picture gets even more interesting. Over the same 120 days: BTC / Gold: 0.52 BTC / SPY: 0.34 BTC / QQQ: 0.33 For most of the post-2020 era, Bitcoin traded like a high-beta tech stock. Its median correlation ran 0.40 to QQQ and 0.11 to gold. Gold led QQQ in only about 10% of all windows. In September 2022, Bitcoin sat at 0.64 with QQQ and 0.22 with gold. That relationship has inverted. The gap between Bitcoin's gold correlation and its QQQ correlation now stands at +0.19, the widest reading in the entire post-2020 dataset. Control for QQQ, and Bitcoin's link to gold holds at 0.45. Control for gold, and its link to QQQ falls from 0.33 to 0.17. The equity exposure remains. It just moved to the back seat. Bitcoin's dominant macro driver is rotating from pure risk appetite toward the monetary, hard-asset complex, with positive equity beta still along for the ride. Right now, Bitcoin trades less like leveraged tech and more like a monetary asset with a risk-on call option attached.

Strive Tracking Day 128 $ASST is now ranked 1,390th largest public US company by market cap. Jumped 47 companies today. 42x to top 100. 6x to top 500. 440th largest by dollar volume. $475,000,000+ traded today.

What an extraordinary career Warren Buffett has had. He built one of the greatest companies in American history, compounded capital for generations of shareholders and perhaps most importantly, earned a level of trust over a lifetime that very few business leaders ever achieve. Buffett and Munger made Berkshire’s annual meeting a place where shareholders could hear directly how they thought for hours at a time, year after year, whether times were good or bad. In many ways, it was the long-form shareholder communication model before we had a name for it, and I think that consistency was an important part of the trust they built.   That is something we have consciously tried to build on at Strive. We joke about leading in “podcasters per share,” but there is a serious principle underneath it: shareholders should have regular access to how management thinks, not just when things are going well. Berkshire understood that long before most companies did.   Buffett and I certainly do not see eye to eye on Bitcoin. But I really don’t care. Those of us building the next generation of Bitcoin-focused companies can learn an enormous amount from Berkshire about thinking in decades, allocating capital, building a lasting institution, and earning shareholder trust through both performance and a willingness to let shareholders understand how you think. We may be applying those principles within an entirely different monetary framework, but the principles themselves endure.   An extraordinary legacy and a life’s work worth remembering. Job well done.

BITCOIN DIMINISHING RETURNS? THINK AGAIN. I have never been more bullish on Bitcoin. No bad news is tanking the price. Absorbing demand in the worst conditions. We're goin' higher. FULL BREAKDOWN:

We are now 200 days past the Bitcoin/gold cycle low. Every prior cycle has passed through this exact spot. Here is what Bitcoin did next, measured in dollars, from 200 days after each BTC/gold low: 3 months: −2% 6 months: +32% 9 months: +57% 12 months: +90% 18 months: +268% 24 months: +352% Those are medians across the 2013, 2017 and 2021 cycles.

The year is 2044. Bitcoin is $2.7 million. Your uncle is explaining at Thanksgiving that it’s still “too volatile.” He owns: $14,000 of Bitcoin $187,000 of home equity a bass boat three commemorative silver coins and $46,000 of Ford stock because “America isn’t going anywhere.” He is extremely concerned about your portfolio.

🔥ASST VS. BITCOIN IN 2026🔥 I ran the entire matrix. Every possible entry date. Every possible exit date. Same trading days for ASST and Bitcoin. 174 shared trading sessions. 15,051 possible holding windows. ASST beat Bitcoin in 10,255 of them. 68.1% of the time. The interesting part is what happens when you separate the results by time. 1 day: 50.3% 1 week: 55.0% 1 month: 61.4% 3 months: 69.4% 4 months: 92.2% 5 months: 97.1% That 4-5 month region is absurd. Across every holding period from 84 to 105 trading sessions, there were 1,749 possible trades. ASST won 1,681 of them. 96.1%. The median ASST return in those windows was +28.9%. Bitcoin: -8.7%. The median ASST investor finished with 39.6% more wealth than the equivalent Bitcoin investor. Across the entire 15,051-window matrix: Median ASST return: +9.4% Median Bitcoin return: -4.8% Median ASST wealth advantage: +15.6% And from January 2 through September 11: $10,000 in ASST became $15,973. $10,000 in Bitcoin became $8,576. The heatmap is what I find most interesting. At short durations, the thing looks almost random. Then the green begins to consume the chart. The 4–5 month band is nearly uninterrupted ASST outperformance. There are orange regions too. They matter. Six- and seven-month windows weaken because those durations increasingly lock you into particular early-year entry prices. That's why I wanted to test every window instead of choosing one convenient starting point. The result isn't “ASST always beats Bitcoin.” It's more interesting than that. In 2026, the probability of ASST outperforming Bitcoin has been profoundly dependent on how long you gave the capital structure to work:

GOOD MORNING. Your ancestors survived famine, war, disease, wolves, and childbirth without anesthesia so you could wake up and store your life savings in a currency whose supply is managed by a committee. Buy Bitcoin.

The U.S. national debt went from $321 billion in 1966 to over $40 TRILLION. Washington has opened a bar tab in your unborn grandchildren’s names and ordered another aircraft carrier. And somehow owning Bitcoin is the financial decision that requires a psychiatric evaluation. Fine. I’ll take my chances with the 21 million.