Acha Etiendem

Hey there! How's the new year been for you? hopefully yours is as productive as mine has been, and I hope this momentum continues. Let's talk empathy, shall we?  Empathy ensures we are able to understand why individuals and groups of people act in a certain way. It doesn't have to be about agreeing with certain actions, but more about understanding where some people are coming from. It helps our clarity and gives us a better way to approach situations or perhaps be more self‑aware. I'm saying this because, on the surface level, it makes perfect sense to nurse hate and resentment with events such as land grabs. The US's push to acquire Greenland, Russia's advances in Ukraine, China's push to claim Taiwan, Israel's advances in the West Bank, and a whole host of others. These are not only matters of today but trends that have existed since the beginning of time, and literally a key characteristic of living organisms. When you go through taxonomic classifica...

Hello and welcome. For starters, this write-up will portray the current events in Iran as a special case study for the appeal of Bitcoin (BTC). So, if you don’t want to hear another person talk about BTC, you’re more than welcome to go about enjoying your beautiful day. Since you’ve chosen to read on, I want to state that I’ve spoken a lot about BTC and will use this piece to perform a sort of data visualization of BTC trends emerging from Iran as the government shuts down the internet amidst nationwide protests. Iran has been struggling for a while. I had a classmate back in 2018 who was from Iran, and we would often talk about geopolitics and the country as a whole. At that time, their currency was faring poorly against the US dollar, and as I write today, the Iranian Rial (their domestic currency) has no value. Read that again, it’s not a typo. The Rial has no value, meaning you can’t exchange it for anything because nobody wants it. What happened? Who is behind this? A host of ques...

Wow! And just like that, here we are in 2026. When you realize that in 80–100 years all of us will have departed this earth, you begin to truly appreciate how quickly time passes. I hope 2025 unfolded in the way you envisioned and planned. Even if it didn’t, and I know for most people it didn’t, I want you to be proud of yourself and be gentle with yourself. We cannot figure everything out in a single year, for we are only human. Now that we’ve stepped into 2026, there’s no time to waste. I’ll begin with a review of 2025 and then share how I envisage 2026 to unfold.                      "For vision is clear, but my path, not so much. I must stay disciplined." If there’s one thing I got right about 2025, it was that interest rates would dominate the conversation. Where I missed the mark was in predicting Trump’s vision for America and the impact of DOGE. Pardon my optimism (I tend to be that way by default), but DOGE proved ruthless ...

Introduction Growing up, I always wondered why there were things I couldn’t have. Perhaps that was a narcissistic way of looking at life, because it meant I prevented myself from seeing the full picture, a picture rooted in empathy, where you acknowledge what you could have but also understand why you don’t have it. As usual, it’s almost midnight, my best time to reflect, and I’m dwelling on this topic of inequality yet again. I don’t want to ramble. I want this to follow a structure, to show clearly the angles I’m approaching this from. So thank you for tuning in, and I hope it’s worth your time. The Individual I looked at my family, and we don’t look exactly alike. I looked at my village, and everyone is different. Everything and everyone differs in some way height, weight, skin color, strength, beliefs, values, and IQ. For some reason, these differences are often treated as simple or trivial, but in reality, they are anything but. So I pondered: did nature err in its design of us? S...

Hey there, thanks for sliding onto my blog. I don't post often, because I now use this place to put down some thoughts that refuse to leave my mind. It used to be because I wanted to generate some Google AdSense income from people like you coming to read. So, my target was always about retaining readers so they keep coming back to my blog; not anymore, unfortunately. Now let's get to the point.  I recently watched the Squid Game show/movie. Every time I observed participants talk about games and money, my mind would wander between fear and greed. I have talked about fear and greed in a previous post on inequality . When some participants voted to end the games, I knew it was fear driving their decision, and those who voted to continue were being driven by greed. Being someone who trades/invests in markets, I could appreciate another aspect of this show that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. I have had positions go up by thousands of dollars and still lost because I held on...

Have you found yourself wondering what all this talk about central banks holding more gold reserves than US treasuries means? Well, you’re not alone. I did a little digging and just thought I would share what I found. Like Ray Dalio, I had to look back in history for periods when this has happened before. And for that, we would look at the 1970s (Post Bretton Woods) and the 1990s (Pre-1996s Crossover). If seeing is believing, then let’s see this chart. Figure 1. Gold vs U.S. Treasuries historical crossover I may have referenced Google Gemini as a data source, but rest assured, the data comes from a variety of sources such as reuters.com, fxstreet.com, etc. I just couldn’t claim the credits to be honest. 1970s:  So, back in the 1970s, we had a gold rush when the US ceased the convertibility of dollars into gold. What happened was a spike in inflation to as high as 13.5% as many flocked to gold as a hedge against inflation. This was not the only reason for gold accumulation by centra...