11 calls. Two mistakes…

In the Chair

If you missed my message yesterday, my name is Tan Gera. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Decentralized Masters and I am taking over Future Finance this week.

All week, you’re going to be hearing directly from me and discover how I’m positioning for this current market. 

Let’s go…

Anyone can tell you what they think about the market. It costs them nothing, and it’s worth exactly that.

So when I took this chair for the week, I decided you’d get something different from me: receipts.

I keep a ledger. Every call I make goes into it, dated, and delivered live to the 4,500 members of Decentralized Masters, the education community I co-founded.

More than 1,000 join live on a typical call. The rest get the recording and the memo, so there is no version of me that gets to be wrong in private.

And every move in that ledger was made with my own money. Not a model portfolio, not a paper trade: an 8-figure portfolio, the one I rebuilt after giving my first fortune back. The risk ran twice over: once in the positions, once in saying them out loud where the members could hold me to them.

Once a year, I read the whole thing back and grade it in front of everyone. The members have graded me against this ledger for years. 

Today it’s your turn.

I’m reading you my 2025 results. 

11 calls. Nine landed. Two didn’t. 

And the two that didn’t taught me more than the nine that did.

By the end, you’ll know exactly what my opinion is worth. That’s the point of a ledger.

A note before we begin. These calls lean crypto, because crypto is where my framework grew up.

But watch what happens as the year goes on: the dollar, tokenized gold, Treasury plumbing. The frame widened past crypto in 2025 and hasn’t stopped widening. This story starts in crypto and ends in macro.

The Run

Starting in September 2024, before the year I’m telling you about even started. Bitcoin (BTC) was drifting, the election drowned out everything, and I told our members it would print $100,000 by Inauguration Day.

The room was polite about it. Polite is what a room is when it thinks you’re wrong but hopes you’re not.

A month later the chart started agreeing. I called the takeoff live in October, and within days the run was on. By December, Bitcoin crossed six figures ahead of my own deadline, and the room went from polite to euphoric.

Euphoria is where the year’s first hard decision was waiting for me. Nobody tells you this about being right: the reward is a harder question. Bitcoin at $100,000 with greed everywhere asks you something Bitcoin at $60,000 never does.

I answered it live that December. I pulled my original investment off the table and told the room a heavy correction was coming before the bull market finished its work.

When strangers start explaining crypto to me at dinner, I start selling something. That month, they were explaining it to me at every dinner.

Selling into a celebration was the first time all year I stood against the crowd.

The same instinct found its next target within weeks: the dollar, over-owned, over-trusted, priced for applause. In January I said it would weaken. It fell 10% from its peak, and that slow slide became the engine under everything hard assets did for the rest of the year.

The Test

Then February arrived with the tariff selloff, and panic has a smell. That month reeked of it. My inbox filled with one question wearing fifty disguises: is it over?

I answered with a number, because numbers can be graded and “probably” cannot. I put the odds of a full recovery within 90 days at 80%, on the record, while the screens were still red.

The market beat my deadline. By April I was calling the bottom and the jump that followed, and a month later Bitcoin stood at new all-time highs.

And right there, at my most confident, the year handed me my first loss. In April I said the Fed would fold and cut rates, and I hoped out loud for June.

June passed. July passed. The cut arrived in September, a full quarter after my hope.

Nothing about the read was wrong except the only part you can trade: the date. A right idea on the wrong date is a loss with better excuses, and I logged it as one.

That miss redesigned my summer. If my clock and Washington’s clock ran at different speeds, the answer wasn’t better predictions. It was fewer of them.

Discipline Season

So the calls got boring on purpose.

May: stay with Bitcoin and the blue chips, skip the small altcoins everyone’s cousin had suddenly mastered.

Boring, and correct. By June, Bitcoin’s share of the entire crypto market had climbed to 66%. The market was choosing quality, slowly, the way it always does.

June tried to end the boredom. Iran headlines, war premiums, red screens for reasons that had nothing to do with liquidity. I gave the least popular instruction in this business: do nothing.

The fear passed. The positions didn’t.

By late summer, the discipline started paying its dividend. Ethereum pressed its high, and I took profit into the strength, moving the proceeds to tokenized gold. When gold ran, I took profit there too.

Two exits, both at levels written down in advance, neither exciting to watch. A plan is dullest at the exact moments emotions are loudest, and that’s how you know it’s working.

The Turn

August is where this week’s story begins.

At the highs, with everything working, my liquidity work showed the Treasury preparing to refill its checking account, a process that pulls cash out of markets.

I told members a correction would likely arrive within two months. In October, it arrived.

Then it kept arriving. Here is my second miss, and I want you to see it whole.

Washington shut down, and stayed shut, the longest closure in its history. The drain I had sized as a two-month storm ran deep into the new year.

Half right, and in this business, half right on size is where accounts die. Mine didn’t, for a reason that has nothing to do with brilliance: I never bet the portfolio on my own timing.

Both of the year’s misses came from the same place. Each was a bet that Washington would move on the market’s schedule.

Markets move when prices force them. Washington moves when deadlines do. I stopped arguing with that difference and started sizing for it.

Which is how 2025 arrived at its final question. November. Bitcoin above $90,000, down from a top nobody had confirmed yet, and a room full of people, mine included, wanting to hear the dip was for buying.

My ledger says what I did on November 20, 277 days ago. Tomorrow I’ll show you the whole day: what I saw, what I sold, and what the nine months after it cost.

‍Get Access To My Market Read - Twice a Week, Every Week

Grading myself once a year is the most useful thing I do. Starting Monday, I’ll be doing it weekly.

Today, I’m making a massive announcement. 

I’m launching my first-ever newsletter, and I want you to be a Founding Member.

Starting Monday, August 31, I’m publishing my liquidity reads, market analysis and all my decisions twice a week. 

It’s called The Macro Letter: my weekly read on the whole board, currencies, metals, bonds, crypto, and what I’m doing about it with my own money, dated and graded the same way you just watched me grade a year.

On the page below, I’ve laid out everything Founding Members get and how you can get access before anyone else.

Become a Founding Member → 

📊  Today’s Market

The market didn’t pause for the audit. Three things matter today.

At 1 p.m. Eastern, Treasury Secretary Bessent presented what he’s calling an economic D-Day against Iran: sanctions on anyone, anywhere, still buying Iranian oil or clearing Iranian money.

Iran’s security chief promises to neutralize it. Iran’s president says the country cannot fight forever. When one government speaks with two voices, I watch the market instead.

Oil is the key indicator here, and it eased this morning, Brent near $93 after two straight weeks of 5% gains.

The threats have been loud since February. The barrels through Hormuz haven’t moved. I grade the podium by the price, and so should you.

Last week lined up a pattern I take seriously. The economy posted its best growth surveys in four years, yet stocks fell. Long bonds stayed heavy at 5.26% even after the Treasury doubled its own buybacks.

And the money that left went to hard assets: Bitcoin above $79,000 for its best week in two years, gold at $4,675 for a fifth straight weekly gain.

Strong growth, weak bonds, gold and Bitcoin bid at once. When that many gauges point the same direction, I stop calling it coincidence.

• Watch Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) Wednesday after the close, the AI trade’s exam, with the July inflation report the same morning.
• Circle Friday: Chair Warsh’s first Jackson Hole speech at 10 a.m., plus a one-time government rewrite of the jobs numbers.
• Count 22 days to September 15-16, when a Fed decision and a Senate crypto vote share one calendar square.

💭  Final Thought

A clean track record is a sales brochure. The real ones have holes, and you’ve now seen both of mine at full resolution.

Keep one thing from this year of calls: every one was written down before the outcome. That’s the only reason the grades mean anything.

Try it with your own. Write them down today, grade them in twelve months, and it will improve your investing more than any newsletter can. Including mine.

Tomorrow, I’m telling you about one of the biggest days of my life. November 2025. 

278 days ago now.

- Tan Gera

Co-Founder, Decentralized Masters

None of this is advice. It is a record of what I did with my own money, shown to you so you can think more clearly about yours.

The Macro Letter — Founding Member Access 

Everything you just watched me do. Twice a week. With my own money on the line.

You've now read one full year of my ledger: the calls, the grades, and the two misses I logged in daylight. The Macro Letter is how you get the next year in real time, written down before the outcomes are known.

Here's what a Founding Member gets:

• ✅ The Macro Letter, twice a week - my read on the whole board: currencies, metals, bonds, and crypto
• ✅ Every call dated and graded - written down before the outcome, scored the same way you just watched me grade a year
• ✅ What I'm doing with my own money - the actual moves, not a model portfolio
• ✅ Research Report #1 - The Allocator’s Playbook: The 7 Rules That Separate a $10B fund From a Retail Investor
• ✅ Research Report #2 - Inside Tan Gera’s Private Book: How a CFA Charterholder Positions His Own Capital
• ✅ Research Report #3 - The Silent Default Portfolio: 7 Assets That Get Richer As The Dollar Gets Poorer

Become a Founding Member Today→

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Disclaimer: This content is not financial advice, it is for informational purposes only. All investments involve inherent risk. Any financial decisions you make are solely your responsibility.