Digital Asset News host Rob covers Bitcoin, midterms, gold, and the Binance hack in a solo NFA Live session
Rob from Digital Asset News hosts a solo edition of the NFA Live show after co-hosts Ben and Guy were unavailable.
Summary
Working through questions originally prepared for the full panel, Rob tackles four main topics in a solo NFA Live session. He covers four main topics: the impact of Democrat midterm wins on markets, the ongoing Iran conflict and its effect on oil and inflation, gold's recent price movements, and Bitcoin's resilience following a major Binance hack. Rob argues that while overall markets and crypto are holding up well in the short term, the longer-term picture depends heavily on geopolitical developments — particularly whether the Iran conflict escalates or de-escalates. He notes that the Federal Reserve is likely to continue hiking rates toward its 2% inflation target regardless of the midterm outcome, and that Bitcoin's maturation as an asset class is demonstrated by the market's muted reaction to the Binance hack compared to past exchange collapses.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and Context
Rob: Welcome to NFA Live. Today there were some pretty good questions that Ben had put out for the NFA Live show. Unfortunately, Guy is feeling under the weather and Ben is indisposed, so we canceled it for this week. Next week it'll be on Ben's channel. But the questions were pretty good, and I thought, well, I've already got my thoughts and some speculation on these, so why don't we just go forward with that and let everybody decide what they think.
Democrats Win the Midterms — How Will This Affect Markets?
The first question — and they're all really good when we do this type of thing — is: Democrats win the midterms. How do you think this will affect markets?
I know everybody's tired of this. I know everybody's tired of midterms and politics and some of that, so let's just keep this brief and get to the good stuff.
First of all, the markets are great so far, so we'll see how this actually works out. But I mean, today — who had this on their bingo card? We all knew that Democrats were going to take over, right? We took a look at that from Polymarket, we can look at the sentiment, we can look at the average American who's like, "Hey, I can't afford squat." It's great if you're in the markets like us — things are looking good — but as far as how much is gas? Damn, that's a lot. How much to put food on my table? Damn, that's a lot. How about just a regular house? God dang, that's a lot of money. So there are those two things. But as far as the markets go — because the markets are not the economy, it's totally different — Bitcoin's looking pretty good. Over the last 24 hours, 2.3% below 80K, but a lot of people were saying it would go much, much lower.
I still stick to my thesis that in Q4 anything can happen. We can have World War III tomorrow. All the hacks that are going on right now, all the different organizations and terrorism and the things happening throughout the globe, and then of course the economics and the flow of oil — if this actually continues and we get more strikes for the war to continue, anything can happen in Q4. So we'll see. I remain cautiously optimistic, but again, taking a look at the last three or four midterms, Bitcoin usually finds its bottom afterwards. But so far, pretty good. Altcoins are doing great. Ethereum up 4%, XRP upgrade — great, great, great. That's good for my portfolio over at the ITR, where I'm using their AI to make trades and sells, and it's working pretty well so far.
We can see across the board things are pretty good. Now, in the last hour, a little bit down, but that's just how it is. What about the broader markets? Taking a look at what's going on with the S&P — let me refresh this. Up 2% today. I'll take it. And looking at five days, a month, six months, one year — over time things look pretty good for the S&P 500. The QQQ, more with the riskier assets, is up a percentage point today, looking pretty good.
The ones that are hurting, of course, will be AI stocks, and the reason for that is because the people ushering in control of the House and the Senate — the Democrats — are not a fan of data centers. And without data centers, it's really hard to do things in AI. Because of that, you're going to see things like SpaceX down. Let me refresh — nope, still down. Tesla, of course, still down. The energy sector? Bloom Energy down 6%. Over a month, down 30%. These are the things that are going on.
To answer the question of how this will affect the markets: it's going to be great for overall markets for a bit. I expect a little bit of downward momentum going into the end of Q4. We might get a Santa Claus rally, but as far as the long term goes, we'll see how it goes, especially as we usher in a whole new era with Democrats controlling the House, the Senate, and governorships. Let me know what you think about that in the comments section.
The Iran War, Oil Prices, and Whether Markets Think It's Over
The next question was: Trump said Republicans lost because of the Iran war. Oil has now dropped a lot, which is great. Do you think markets are convinced the war is over now?
If the markets are convinced the war is over, I just don't think that's how it's going to be. I don't think Trump is going to say, "Well, let's just get out of here." This is geopolitics, and it's all speculation anyhow.
But what I think about is this: was there a better setup than what we had for Bitcoin in 2024? Just hear me out. For Bitcoin, we only did a 2x from all-time high to all-time high. There is a diminishing returns effect. Now, if you go from the low to the high, you're looking at a clean 8x. But in 2024 moving forward, we had a Bitcoin ETF, we had institutional adoption, you've got BlackRock coming out with Larry Fink saying that Bitcoin is the greatest thing of all time and doing other ETFs. Fidelity Digital Assets the same way. You had government support, which we didn't have before. And as a quick reminder, the ETF was approved under the Biden administration, and if it wasn't for Gary Gensler casting a deciding vote, we wouldn't even have a Bitcoin spot ETF. Something to think about. CFTC and SEC support. We also had the so-called crypto president, also a crypto president for his altcoins. And we had digital asset treasuries and the four-year cycle minimum. What other setup do you want? It was looking pretty good.
But as far as getting out of this war right now — I think there was an issue. I believe it was Nick from Coin Bureau who said this first: the mosaic defense strategy has worked pretty well for Iran. What Iran did was essentially this: you can bomb us as much as you want, but we'll stay resilient. They even borrowed a term from us — a decentralized defense strategy. All they had to do was, like the civil war for America or for the British, decentralize the object of power. When one head gets cut off, another one just grows back, and they keep going and going. Iran is quite resilient, and there's a lot of talk about how they'll just wait out Trump anyhow.
However, there are some conflicting stories here. The Iranian president said the country wants a deal with the US made before midterms — this was September 24th — and here we are today after midterms, and no deal has been met. Some people say Iran is actually happy with this because of the dissolution of American political unity. But this is from Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei: he said US hostility towards Iran would continue regardless of political changes in Washington — this was from November 4th — warning that any renewed American attack would trigger a much wider Iranian response.
So if you think the Iranian war is going to stop just because there's a whole new group in, I think you are mistaken. And it's not like we had to go to the Senate to get this approved. This was an executive decision. I believe no declaration of war has been issued since World War II, and this has all been under the president's discretion going all the way back to George W. That's my thoughts on that.
Federal Reserve Rate Hikes Despite Lower Oil Prices
Ben also asked: despite lower oil prices, Fed odds to hike remain high. Why is that?
Here are the probabilities of a rate hike — looking at December 9th, we're still at an 80/20 split. So they're probably going to hike rates. Why? Because the Federal Reserve still has an idea, and that idea is we want 2% inflation. Looking at the CPI — the consumer price index — ever since the war started roughly around February 28th, 2026, we have seen a massive hike in inflation. Most of that is due to oil. If you can't get cheap oil, you can't get cheap gas. You can't get cheap gas to move and dispense goods and services, so those also go up. That's what happened, and right now we're at 3.7%.
Now, that's the consumer price index. If you take a look at the personal consumption expenditures, you can see that over the last year or so, it's gone up. Of course, the Fed wants to drop it down to 2%, and they may get that if there's some kind of agreement with Iran that opens up the Strait of Hormuz and brings oil prices down. Don't hold your breath. And if that happens alongside rate hikes, they might be able to get back to the good old days of below 2%. Look at that — November 2019: 1.64, 1.63, 1.76. That's the personal consumption expenditures. If you go all the way back and look at the consumer price index, same thing: 2.1%, 1.8%, 1.7%, and so on.
So if that's their objective — and they have a dual mandate: keep inflation low, keep jobs high — they can do both those things. I think Fed Chair Waller is going to come out of this a winner. And it really does come down to the Iranian war, even though he really can't call it a war because there's no declaration.
Gold — Can Metals Catch a Sustained Bid Into Year End?
Ben also asked: metals had a nice rally. Do you think metals could catch a sustained bid here at the end of the year?
First of all, you have to understand that with gold, gold is all speculation. I don't care what gold bugs say. I personally own it, so I'm not going to sit here and say it's used primarily for industrial use cases, conduction, and things in space — because that's not what it's used for. Almost 50% goes to jewelry. Another 22% is private investment. Another 17% is central banks. That's all the gold above ground — 216,000 tons. If you want to visualize that, it looks like an eight-story building, 72 by whatever. And what about the gold coming out currently, like last year? Same breakdown: investments 40 to 50%, jewelry again, central banks again, and actually technology and industry is even lower.
So why are people buying gold? It's because they believe it's a hedge against inflation, a store of value — the same thing I think Bitcoin is. And that's why there's a mirroring of the two.
Taking a look at how gold has done — I know gold bugs love it, and it rounds out my Roth IRA and IT trust — but as a reminder, you're down 20% from its high. And why did the gold price go so high? January 28th, 2026. Anybody remember what was going on there? It was tariffs. It was talk about tariffs to Canada, and that freaked everybody out. So they went into their store of value, which was gold. Then as the tariff narrative kind of ebbed away, you can see it pulled back. And then all of a sudden there was another big spike on February 28th, 2026. What happened then? There was this little thing called the Iran war we were just talking about. So gold gets bought as a hedge, and that's why you can see those spikes — because of uncertainty. It's actually dropped since, but then there's a little more uncertainty around the midterms and what's going on with Iran.
I don't see it hitting all-time highs anytime soon unless we get massive, massive escalation or something else happens. We'll see where it goes. I still have it in my portfolio.
Bitcoin Rallies to 81K Even After the Binance Hack
The last question was: Bitcoin rallied to 81K even after the Binance hack. Thoughts?
I think this is the best thing noted for the markets themselves — we really grew up. Remember what happened with Voyager, Celsius, BlockFi, FTX? Now it's a lot different, because those weren't so much hacks like Mt. Gox — I think that was 2015, correct me in the comments, I always get these years confused — but during that time everything collapsed. Then we saw the problems with the Ponzi schemes that came out with the exchanges. Now we're seeing more hacks, and we see it all the time, especially because of AI.
But what happened here is that $6.5 billion was covered by Binance, and I have to tip my hat to them for doing it. On top of that, they have a reserve of $128 billion. So as the outflows came in and they said, "Okay, we're going to pause withdrawals — you cannot take it out, we're going to investigate the situation, we're going to fix the situation, then you can withdraw" — guess what? They did it, and they're still doing it right now. Four years ago, this would have been the black swan event. This would have pushed us down and the four-year cycles would have been attacked. But as we grow up — congratulations, Binance, and shame on you, North Korea, if it is you; it might be the FBI, who knows — as we grow up, we start to see more stability. Unfortunately, with more stability, there is a diminishing return on investment.
Live Q&A
Good morning from Cali. Barrow Beach — please hit the like. Hi from Melbourne. Yeah, hit the like for Rob holding up live solo. Hey, just trying to keep it going. I thought to myself, I've got all this data, let's just put everything out there and people can disseminate the information and go from there.
I've got to tell you, I'm personally happy the midterms are behind us. I know if you're a Republican, you're probably pretty bummed out. If you're a Democrat, you're probably on cloud nine. Just know that these things move and they ebb and flow and things can change. So if you're in a bad mood or a good mood, just realize that things can change, and be happy with what you've got or work towards what you want.
Someone says they only paid a buck sixty for diesel. That was per liter, especially here in Puerto Rico.
And here we go — Representative Thomas Massie just put in the request to find and impeach Pete Hegseth, who is the Department of Defense head, which has the support of outgoing Republicans. Wow. Iran sees this coming. This could be influencing the decision-making process.
I believe it was Khamenei who said, "Look, we don't have to beat America. All we've got to do is just wait you out for two years when Trump steps down, and then we'll take a victory lap." That's what they're going to do. It's a bummer. I feel bad for the Iranian citizens as they get wiped out by their own government. Did you see that 5,000-plus, I think, were killed by their own government for protesting? Yeah. Not someplace you want to be, but I guess you're stuck there. But it's all over the world — it's not just that one place. There are plenty of places that are really bad.
I think we as Americans just see everything through the scope of America. I remember I talked to my friend Jonas from Poland, and he was saying, "Rob, what are the three things you look for when you're looking for a new property?" And I was like, well, for us — because we do mid-term and short-term and long-term rentals — I said we have to have adequate square footage, more rooms the better, close to the beach is a plus, and close to social activities is a big thing. Then of course we look at price first, then we look at that, then we start to look at bids and our comparables. And he says, "What about safety? Like, people coming in and attacking and wiping you guys out?" I'm like, I don't think about that. He goes, "Yeah, it's because you're an American. Where I move, that's the first thing I think of." And it just made me realize — I am spoiled as an American. This is how I see the world: that it's safe and it's good. That's not the case everywhere.