In this episode of "Trading The Close" with guest Paul Giordano from Digital Marathon Holdings, many topics are discussed such as Bitcoin's performance, the impact of the recent Bitcoin halving on crypto mining, and future prospects for digital assets.
Transcripts are autogenerated. May contain typos.
[Music] welcome to training the close on this Thursday I'm Tony valier with verified investing and here's what's making headlines today the US economy grew at a slower Pace than expected in the first quarter the GDP shows the economy grew at a pace of 1.6% economists predicted a pace of 2.
5% more buyers purchased homes in March with sales rising 3.4% from February no more open seatings Southwest Airlines is weighing changes to its open seating plan the airline stock also plunged after a disappointing earnings report Honda is looking to build an 11 billion doll electric vehicle Hub in Canada and Comcast beat earnings even as it loses more Broadband subscribers the stocks are dropping this afternoon over inflation and growth concerns and ahead of more big earnings coming out this afternoon we've actually got Microsoft Google Intel Snapchat Roku they will all
be reporting earnings this afternoon so let's take a look at where things stand got to wait for the technology here okay we've got the down 290 points 76% the NASDAQ down 119 points 77% the S&P 500 slightly back up just over seven points 0.15% oil up slightly gold up over $16 and Bitcoin up over $370 at this hour so let's bring in Chief Market strategist GTH Solway with a look at today's trading uh lot going on today it was a busy day it was a busy day so anytime meta moves 15 20% at one
point that is crazy action considering the market cap size of this company so so for the most part interestingly enough the S&P performed relatively well like today could have been one of those days with the GDP number where we got the meta news where this Market could have just collapsed and instead look at this I mean we opened at the lows and we've been trending neutral to hire the rest of the day now we're not back to the break even point we're still net negative but overall impressive little
float up the question is as we get into the Microsoft and alphabet earnings after the close will this hold or will we just dump out again and that's going to be the thing also tomorrow the pce data the inflation data will be huge for the market and I think a lot of people don't understand what's going on today so we had the GDP numbers came in weaker now normally you'd say oh wow weaker economic data wouldn't rates go down but instead rates went up and the reason they went up is because we're seeing a
lot of underlying inflation pressures but now we have a weak economy and there's something called stagflation which is really the scary like that's the monster in the closet for the economy and for investors and so stagflation just to just to kind of Define that yeah please it's where so so in a normal inflationary environment where you have 3% 4% inflation usually if you look historically the econom is always strong during those periods so people make more money and so they're like okay well prices are up 5% but I'm
making more money so I can deal with that in a stagflationary economy you have infl going up but the economy going down so people are making less money and then it's really negative because it's harder to afford the higher prices and that's what the market is starting to be concerned about now so so we'll have to see how it goes but right now at least for today's price action yes it's a down day but it's not really the worst down day ever I mean by no means is this a horrendous down day and meta had the
earnings yesterday I know you had a trade right in the middle was pretty awesome to see but they still had a lot of movement today as well yeah yeah metad definitely did I mean it was it actually and it actually rallied well off of the the lows in fact yesterday after hours Meadow was trading as low look at this this collapse here let's go to the Chart this collapse actually went we went down to $400 so basically from 500 to 400 that was where it was down 20% then the rest of the after hours into this morning it was kind of
chopping and then really the today what we saw is the float higher so again we were as low as 400 yesterday after hours we're now at 441 going into the end of the day so again little bit of action there opportunities for trades I know um uh Dr B in the trading room today he caught a nice short right off of this there was a great signal intraday and he made a decent amount of money on the short side of Meta Even though it trended up most of the day so that was an interesting mover the other ones um you know we definitely had bmy was a
pretty wild one today for bmy being down this much and I'm right now I have it on the monthly but let's go to the daily chart you can see being down 8 and 12% for Bristol Meyers that's kind of a massive move for for for a drug stock and again one of the things I'm seeing here is that Bristol Meers is actually into this longer term monthly trend line if I zoom out we can see this trend line here so so again I don't know if it's going to stop here but it you know for a drug stock that's pretty stable it is
getting into this low it has this longer term trend line here so it is something that I'm starting to pay attention to as a potential swing trading opportunity um and then of course we have a couple others IBM was a big one here IBM whipped around a lot today Ely it didn't get down to any of my targets that I was looking for I was looking at 160 and then 153 it kind of stabilized and just kind of chopped sideways for the course of the day now we'll just touch quickly on on Google and Microsoft they've got
those are going to be huge in fact they could be out at any second one minute after the let's see whoa Microsoft or yep nice little pop on Microsoft here so again Microsoft right out of the gate look at that so now all of a sudden we went from things looking so bad to now people are going to be like oh okay things are okay cuz Microsoft's ripping up here now I don't have a trade on Microsoft today so so we don't have to worry about me running off set here not going anyway um and and to be honest if
you looked at the chart right so if you look at the types of Trades I take right you know it wasn't like we were at a like this up here it wasn't like it was so I mean it was down but you wouldn't call this like way down like like Tesla was where I had to trade as well on the long side and so that's one of the reasons why I was just like you know what I have no Edge on this in terms of analysis so you just stay away and you let it do its thing now it's popping up you know if it got up to here 430 that
would be an interesting resistance level cuz that's its all-time high that's really the only level at this point we have but that's a that's a pretty impressive move and that's going to carry the S&P and the NASDAQ futures up I was going to ask you yeah the impact you think so oh yeah with being a$ trillion company this is this is a very impressive move because again from from 398 to 420 I mean it's it's about 5% on a 3 trillion company that's a that'll be a hefty move now let's quickly just
check in on Google Google here I had a level to short potentially here look at this move all right so this is a key one here so what we're seeing here guys it's 16250 I have a level basically at 165 it's the upper range so we'll see if it ends up getting there but this higher level right here around 165 would be an interesting opportunity high risk but an interesting opportunity at a short you can see how basically it bounces off it goes from the low to the highs and then comes down to the to the high to the low
and then the concept being is if it gets up to that high retrace pull back off of that resistance and again all we're doing here is we're just looking at history and seeing that this line it seems powerful and every time it hits it does pull back yeah so yeah it's uh earning season is always exciting I just wanted to check in on Intel oo look at Intel Intel getting a SM Smackdown Here um on Intel so again earnings right now it's pretty wild stuff so it seems like Microsoft and Google are the big names
those are the trillion dollar companies Intel yeah it's important but it's not a trillion dollar name so right now you would favor upside tomorrow assuming the PC data doesn't come out and scare everyone tomorrow morning exact 8:30 tomorrow morning 8:30 tomorrow morning okay um can we do Bitcoin please cuz my next guest is uh with a mining company sure absolutely so i' love to touch on that see where it's at yes so the positive on bitcoin here and by the way Bitcoin on the 10-minute chart is
actually up ticking which makes a lot of sense right we just got good earnings people are feeling like it's back to risk on you had a little bullish consolidation so bitcoin's beginning to make a little bit of a move up but really at least from a technical perspective Bitcoin continues to be stuck in between these two lines and I'll just erase that other one so we see it very clearly we have our support line and our resistance line and we're kind of in between these two so as a technician I'm just kind of neutral on
it on the bias no positive no negative and I'm just watching to see can we break above here or do we break here whichever way we break I think you get a significant move in that direction okay Gareth thank you very much I appreciate it and remember you can catch Gareth navigate the charts in real time every weekday morning before the opening bell starting at 9:00 a.m.
on his show the game plan that's right here on the verified YouTube channel now my other special guest today is Paul Giordano with digital Marathon Holdings a company that mines cryptocurrencies with a focus on blockchain ecosystem and the generation of digital assets Paul is the VP of digital Asset Management Paul thank you so much for joining me on trading the clo today how you doing thank you so much for having me back on your show great to have you back um the Bitcoin having took place last week uh each having reduces the income that
miners receive for transactions making profitability more challenging especially for those with higher operational costs so what kind of impact has it had so far on Marathon digital well you know Tony the the Bitcoin having is one of the worst kept secrets in I think the financial industry we we all know that it's coming we all have plenty of opportunity to plan for it and you're right less efficient uh less efficient uh miners will have will have trouble if they have um operations or uh electricity costs that exceed their uh
their output they're going to struggle however we've seen a nice rally into into having which we don't usually see until uh six to 18 months after and uh that's been um able to to support a lot of the uh miners that might not have uh been able to compete at lower uh Bitcoin prices what did you guys need to do to prepare for this what we needed to do is we needed to drive down our energy costs we needed to drive down our hosting costs we needed to keep uh sgna low and we've had plenty of opportunity to do that and
we've done just that and uh We've we've taken over control of some of our um some of our hosting facilities so we have a little bit more control of the uh cost side of our equation how exactly were you able to do that uh how are we able to lower the cost were we made we made uh we did not cut staff no we actually have grown um Almost 100% in Staffing over the past two years and we've made strategic investments in uh in technology we own our entire uh own pool we own our own firmware um and we've been able to control a lot of uh
of our incoming um incoming routers which uh makes our Fleet a lot more efficient okay tell us how much does it cost Mar on to mine what Bitcoin well it it uh if you think about it it costs twice as much as it did two weeks ago so uh um we uh we were in the low 20,000 before the having so that puts us in the mid 40,000 number uh it does change based on uh Global hash rate it it it changes based on how often we have to curtail our our usage based on um uh um weather and and and other kinds of factors like that so it does move around
a little bit but it's uh it's definitely uh significantly lower than the current price of Bitcoin now so how do you feel about where the price of Bitcoin is right now following the having and did you expect for it to soar in price like it did the last having in 2020 normally uh the the new highs in Bitcoin aren't reached until six months or so after a having but I think we front-loaded some of that Movement by um the approval of the ETFs that occurred early in January which opened up the ability for uh a lot of Institution s
and individual investors to invest in Bitcoin so I think we we've brought forward some of that um that new high momentum that usually comes after the having uh but we're definitely bullish on bitcoin we think we're going to see higher prices uh through the end of this year um and uh especially if we go into an easing cycle uh by the Federal Reserve we'll see U more uh Tailwind behind risk assets Bitcoin being one of those how high do you think it could go by the end of the year Well we as a company don't give out price estimates
but my personal opinion is I think we could be in uh somewhere around 120 to $130,000 per Bitcoin by the end of this year okay well how does the price um affect the mining process the price of Bitcoin so like if if Bitcoin dips too low does it cause mining to slow down at all it causes some inefficient miners to shut down their operations until the price Rises back up and uh normally after a having you see somewhere around 10 to 12% % of global hash rate come offline uh until the price of Bitcoin recovers we didn't really see that this
uh this having event because um the Bitcoin the price of Bitcoin had risen going into that to the event but should Bitcoin pull back what ends up happening is the difficulty uh for mining goes down uh inefficient machines or high cost producers uh turn their machines off and uh that usually gives some support to uh the miners who are efficient um in recent episode of Mad Money Jim Kramer advised against investing in Marathon digital he told investors to just go buy ethereum or Bitcoin instead of marathon digital what
do you make of that statement uh I I don't follow his investment advice um so I don't know the reasons behind it uh there are a lot of reasons to own Bitcoin uh individually and there are reasons to own a Bitcoin minor we tend to have a higher beta so when when the price of Bitcoin Rises our stock price tends to rise higher and faster than the price of Bitcoin but but also on the downside uh the the exact opposite does occur so it's a little bit more of a lever bet into the Bitcoin ecosystem but we're really more of a
technology company than just a Bitcoin minor we have uh we have our own um technology stack as I mentioned earlier we have our own firmware and uh we're we're doing things like uh energy harvesting and and all types of of uh ancillary businesses to to help Drive dive down that cost of production for the Bitcoin miners yeah information that maybe not everybody knows about they do now Paul thank you so much for your time and thank you for joining trading the close on this Thursday we appreciate it thank you for having me Tony and that
does it for us this week we will see you back next Monday so make it a great rest of the week
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