Lately, I’ve been getting people on my Twitter and personal chats asking when I’m writing a new blog. I know I’ve been silent for a while, for good reason. This blog is mostly written for fun and to share some of my experiences, I didn’t know people were actually waiting on new content.
Thanks for that!
If you follow me on Instagram, you’re well aware that I’ve been living in Mexico for a while now. This wasn’t planned at all, but right now I’m sure I’ll be living here for the foreseeable future.
From my poker and startup days, I realized I work best in sprints. For a period of 2-3 months, I can spend most of my time on work and growth. However, I need some time to recover and rebuild motivation for the next sprint. As I always have multiple balls in the air, sometimes I got to drop a few to create some breathing room. During my poker days, this was simple to realize. I would grind 100k hands a month for a few consecutive months and then take a well-desired holiday and chill for a few weeks in some exotic places.
Nowadays that works differently, I can’t leave my business behind, and crypto goes up and down, whether I’m behind my desk or not. Luckily, I do find ways to reduce the workload from time to time.
Mexico the COVID Refugee Valhalla
October 2020, I flew to Mexico, with a plan to visit 1 or 2 months before moving on. Due to COVID, traveling became more difficult, and the easiest thing was to stay put. So I did. And now I’m still here..
So what happened?
Mexico became the perfect place for digital nomads. The regulations to enter and exit the country were very low, compared to other countries. On top of that, life is normal here. The COVID restrictions are very soft. Yes, you have to wear a face-mask to enter most places. But basically, everything is open, bars, restaurants, gyms etc. So life here is quite normal, besides the occasional hurricane.
This is not the case for all of Mexico, but in Playa del Carmen where I am, life is good.
Over here, there’s a ton of poker players and crypto investors. There’s a weekly crypto meet-up in Tulum, which I occasionally join to meet other crypto enthusiasts.
Last but not least, beaches as far as you can see.
During my time here, I fell in love and got married. Last month, I bought a house and will be working on remodeling that over the next couple of months. So it seems like the real nomad days are over. Sunshine for life.
While I bought a house in Mexico, I’m also selling some real estate in Germany. I’m only part owner of this 7 figure property, but let me know if you have any crypto-rich people who are looking to buy something with their Bitcoin profits in the upcoming months. I have a commission for the closing lead. Otherwise, you might see me NFT this thing. Stay tuned.
But enough on my personal life, let’s get into the things I’ve been learning about and working on.
mexico cozumel
NFT Summer of 2021
If you’re on crypto Twitter, or follow some of the crypto news outlets, you’ve probably come across some of the insane NFT sales of the past summer.
While Bitcoin was snoozing, the JPEG’s took over and conquered the world.
Cryptopunks, Bored Apes, and even rocks are going for hundreds of ETH, which are Millions of dollars. Since December 2020 and in the first quarter of this year. The NFT art scene exploded. I saw Beeple, Trevor Jones and other artists have the craziest NFT drops. But during the summer, the focus shifted to Profile Picture (pfp) type NFTs.
This trend was started by the CryptoPunks, when holders of the NFT changed their social media avatar to their NFT. But the Bored Apes really took it to the next level. Nowadays, I’m even rocking my Mutant Ape as my pfp on Twitter. I have to admit, I aped in hard.
Good morning to everyone, except those who right click save my NFTs
— Morten Christensen (@Mortpoker) September 2, 2021
While I’m on the Mutant Ape subject, this was the craziest NFT airdrop I’ve ever seen. All Bored Ape holders basically got a 5-digit airdrop, and some of them even got a million dollars for free. Read more about that here. And in case you’re wondering, no, I didn’t get mine for free.
More Gains?
The pfp NFT industry is growing so rapidly it’s hard to keep up with the pace. Some of my friends want to jump in because they read all the news about insane gains. We’re even discussing pooling some money together to buy a few punks. The floor of punks now is about 92 ETH. Jeez, but today we see VC funds and even companies like Visa buying punks to put on their balance sheet. I expect the floor to multiply a few more times over the next few years, maybe even in the next few months. So if you have any good ideas about this, send me an email to morten@cornelius-ventures.com, cause I’m interested to hear your opinion.
Even though I have my finger on the pulse on this NFT industry, the pfp hype was unexpected. Besides my ape, I didn’t want to FOMO in to 30 projects without a proper strategy. Like often in crypto, once you blink, you’re too late.
While my brother visited me in Mexico, we strategized about NFTs. Right now he is going all-in on pfp NFTs and I’m helping him strategize. This is a very time-consuming game, more on this later.
Crypto, Are We Done Yet?
Bull or Bear?
It depends on which timeframe you look at it. I tend to look at a multi-year period, so for me, the bull was never over. I expected the bull market to continue until late Q4, and right now it looks like we’re heading that way.
However, if you’re looking more at weekly or daily timeframes. The summer was a bear market. I do make some short-term moves, but the majority of my portfolio is a long-term strategy.
That being said, in my last blog I discussed an exit strategy. Right before I wrote that, I hit one of my targets, so I spent the summer finding the right exits for BTC, ETH, and some of my alt positions. Because the market went down, the consequence was that I had to rebalance some of my alts. To get to a risk profile that I’m comfortable with. Nothing too big, just shifting alts to BTC or moving BTC/ETH to Fiat.
Right now, Bitcoin is trying to break $50k. I think life is going to be pretty damn good over the next few months, where I expect BTC to top between $150,000 and $350,000. A pretty wide range, I know. But it’s hard to guesstimate the level of greed we’ll see towards the end of the bull cycle. #nofinancialadvice
I’ll most likely write more about crypto in the upcoming months, there is just too much to catch up on right now. The most important thing is, you should have crypto exposure.
Business is Booming
As most of you know, I’m involved in several businesses. One is my own, and I co-founded another, on top of that I advise some companies here and there which I invested in.
All of them are either crypto or tech-focussed, so as you can imagine, 2021 business is booming. One of the positive side effects of COVID is that people adjusted to remote work way quicker than before. So I can comfortably work from my chair here in Mexico.
My platform always profits from a nice bull market. We see organic traffic grow every month, amount of clients is at an all-time high, and MoM growth in revenue. So you can imagine, this takes up a bunch of time and mind-space at the moment.
In parallel, my partners are working on a video platform and the release of a course for Jared Tendler. He is the leading mental performance coach in poker, most famous for his books “The Mental Game of Poker part 1 &2”. This year he released his 3rd book focussed on trading, which every crypto trader should read. Yes, I’m biased here. Not only was he my coach for years during my best poker days. Now I’m working with him on a weekly basis, and got to know him way better than I did before. So take my opinion here with a little grain of salt.
The video course he’s working on is for his core audience of poker players. Now with something brand new. It will be released in September, so you’ll have enough time to work through the course before the WSOP, if you’re planning to go there. Hit me up if you want pre-access or if you have a poker following, you can become an affiliate.
From Mexico to the WSOP in Vegas
The last time I visited Las Vegas was in 2017. The last time I played the WSOP was last year, but the last time I played at the WSOP in Las Vegas dates all the way back to 2011, when this picture was taken.
Due to COVID, the last WSOP was online on GGPoker. This year, with some strict regulations, the WSOP is back on in Vegas!
Usually, it’s quite the commute to get there. But now that I live in Mexico, it’s only a 4 hour direct flight. That’s not bad at all, and I’m expecting to jump on more events while I live here.
You might wonder, can I still beat the game? Online high stakes cash games, hell no. Live tournaments? Lol, for sure.
To prepare myself I’m playing some tournaments online, kind of like a warm-up. Tweak my ranges a bit, get into the rhythm. I’m not expecting to beat the best of the world, but I’m confident my skill levels beat the average field, so I’m heading there with a positive ROI.
And of course, I’ll work with Jared’s video course once it’s online. Gotta play that solid B-game!
Right now, I’m only planning to play the Main Event. If you got this far in the blog, you know I’m juggling many balls in the air. Poker is just one of them, and I don’t want to lose too much time on it. The Main Event is just one of those special events, that happens once a year and since I’m close now I’m going to play.
Next Blogs
As I discussed above, I can write about several things in the upcoming weeks and months. While I’m at the WSOP, I’ll be sure to give you guys some updates, as I know most of my readers are poker players.
But I know I also gained some crypto followers along the way. So let me know on Twitter or in personal chats what you like me to write me about next. So I can create a shortlist of ideas.
Till next time.