CryptoMaksymus

Michael Saylor talks about the events of 2025. By this time, his company (MicroStrategy/Strategy) had already accumulated Bitcoin worth about $30 billion, and the task was to attract even more capital for further purchases. The problem was that the traditional tools had already exhausted themselves: the company became the world's largest issuer of convertible bonds, and the market for ordinary shares and convertible bonds was "selected below zero" - there was nowhere to scale further in this way.
Then Saylor came to the conclusion that a fundamentally new type of security is needed — a hybrid between a debt instrument and a stock. He turned to AI (ChatGPT is mentioned in the text) to design a new type of privileged share. A privileged share, according to his explanation, is a flexible instrument: it is possible to attach almost any conditions to it - the right of repurchase after a certain period (as in a bond), a guaranteed coupon, the right to convert into ordinary shares, and so on.
The result was an instrument called STRK, a convertible preferred stock backed by bitcoin. According to Saylor, nothing like this has been produced before. When the team approached lawyers and bankers, the standard response was: "No one has done this before, so we don't think you should do it." Saylor objected: they had already exhausted everything they had "already done", so they had no choice but to do what no one had done before — using new technologies: "digital capital", "digital intelligence" and the "digital treasury company" model.
After STRK, they went further and decided to create a short-term credit instrument that would trade stably around face value ($100) — in essence, an analogue of a money market instrument, where an investor buys 100, sells 100, receives a return and does not worry about price fluctuations or sensitivity to interest rates. To keep the price stable, the dividend rate had to be made variable — that is, it changed monthly. According to Saylor, such a variable dividend in preferred shares has never existed in history. It wasn't illegal - it's just that no one had thought of doing this before, and the lawyers and bankers said again "we haven't seen this, we're not sure that it's possible."
It was at this moment that Sailor turned to the AI ​​directly with the question "is it possible to do this?" — and received an answer in the spirit of "of course it's possible, that's how it's structured." When there were objections from lawyers/bankers ("they won't like it"), the solution was to adjust the structure.
The result: this new instrument was brought to the IPO, which became the largest IPO of the year at that time — for $2.5 billion. Then it was shelf-registered (an additional placement program) and another $8 billion was sold. In total, $10.5 billion was raised on this instrument, plus about $4 billion on other instruments — a total of about $15 billion in raised capital, which, according to Saylor, is roughly equivalent to creating $15 billion in value for company

Over the past decades, major studies of retail traders have been conducted in the USA, Europe, India, Brazil, and Taiwan. Despite different markets, countries and time periods, the conclusion was almost the same: approximately 70–90% of retail traders lose money in the long term, and only a very small group of people manage to make stable money.
It would seem that after such a volume of data, interest in trading should gradually decrease. But the opposite happens. Each new bull market brings millions of new participants who sincerely believe that it is they who will succeed.
Why does this happen? Because the problem rarely lies in the absence of information. It lies in how our thinking works. Most people know that there are few successful traders. But almost everyone believes that it is he who will be able to get into their number.
We almost always see winners and almost never see losers. We are shown a trader who turned a small amount into a fortune, interviews with successful investors, beautiful profitability charts and photos of an expensive life. But practically no one shows thousands of people who lost money, closed their account and simply disappeared from the information field.
As a result, a very natural thought arises in a person: "Yes, the majority loses, but I, most likely, will be among the excluded." And this is where the main error of thinking begins.
Instead of the question "What usually happens to people who do the same thing?" we begin to ask a second question: "What if it happens that I will succeed?" It seems like a small thing, but it is at this moment that we stop leaning on reality and start leaning on hope.
Moreover, this mechanism works not only in trading. For the same reason, people open restaurants, start startups, buy franchises, start a new business or go to Gumroad with the confidence that their product will be the exception. They study success stories, but rarely study the fate of the majority.
The more I read long-term studies, the more convinced I am of one simple principle. Any serious decision should start not with inspiring history, but with statistics. First, understand what usually happens to people who have already gone through this path. And only then honestly answer the question: what exactly is so different in my situation that it gives reason to expect the second result? If there is no such answer, then, most likely, we are not analyzing reality, but simply hoping to be among the rare exceptions. That is why rational thinking begins not with optimism, but with attention to reality.