➡ Investing in Bitcoin, like any other investment, shouldn’t be seen as a simple win or lose situation. Instead, it’s about understanding the odds and making decisions based on probabilities. Many people either invest too early or wait for a certainty that never comes. The key to successful investing is to think in terms of scenarios and probabilities, not just binary outcomes.
➡ The article emphasizes the importance of thinking in terms of odds rather than outcomes when investing. It suggests that success comes from finding your unique edge, where your view of the odds differs from the market, and watching the positioning rather than the noise. The article also highlights that the biggest opportunities often arise when the odds are improving but the positioning hasn’t caught up yet. Lastly, it underscores that investing isn’t about being right or predicting the future with certainty, but about having a repeatable process for making decisions when the future is uncertain.

Most people look at Bitcoin and ask a very simple question like does it win or does it fail? Which sounds logical. But that’s not how serious investors think because markets don’t operate in a yes or no. They operate in probabilities. And when outcomes are uncertain, when the stakes are high and the information is incomplete, the smartest decision makers in the world don’t think in binaries either. They think in odds, they think in scenarios, they think in positioning. That’s why people tend to do one of two things with Bitcoin. They either go all in way too early, or they sit out entirely waiting for certainty that never comes.

Both usually in the same way. So in this video, I’m going to show you how elite investors think about uncertainty so you can evaluate Bitcoin and markets like an intelligent allocator of capital instead of a headline or reactor. Because once you start thinking this way, Bitcoin starts to look very different. So let’s go. Alright, so jumping right in, we got a lot to cover. But let’s just jump into why this matters more than people realize you see, because markets don’t punish you for being wrong. They punish you for using the wrong decision model.

So if you think in binaries, like yes or no, or win or lose, you end up making the right decision, but at the right time, binary thinkers tend to do one of two things. They go all in early based on conviction instead of odds, or they sit out completely on the sidelines, waiting for certainty or clarity. Now both approaches feel disciplined. Both of them feel responsible, but usually fail during major transitions. What actually separates people who build wealth in these periods isn’t prediction. It’s how they deal with the uncertainty. They think in probabilities, they look for an edge, they pay attention to positioning before the crowd moves.

And that’s true in markets. But it turns out it’s also true in places where the cost of being wrong is far higher than losing money. Because when intelligence agencies studied their biggest failures, they didn’t find a lack of information. They found something else. The problem wasn’t information. It was how decisions were being made under uncertainty. And that’s where the story gets really interesting because the exact problem showed up somewhere. The stakes were far higher than investing. I’m talking about the central intelligence agency or the CIA. Now inside the intelligence agency, analysts, they weren’t short on data.

They were drowning in it. But in case after case after case, they had massive intelligent failures. And they all shared the same root cause. Not that they were missing data. It was the way the decisions were being made under uncertainty. And the problem was they kept asking binary questions like, is the threat real or not? Is this report true or false? Is this actor hostile or friendly? And analysts would lock onto like a single explanation early. And then once that narrative took hold, everything else got filtered through that narrative. It was confirming evidence that felt obvious or contradictory evidence got dismissed as noise.

And over time, this didn’t create better decisions. It created confidence. And that’s what made the failure so dangerous. So inside the CIA, something important changed. Instead of asking, is this true or false? Analysts were forced to now ask a much harder question. What are all the plausible explanations? So they changed the way the decisions were made. Every competing hypothesis had to be listed. Each one assigned a probability. And as new information came in, the probabilities were updated. Now, even if it meant admitting the original narrative was weakening, this approach became known as analysis of competing hypotheses.

And the goal wasn’t to predict the future with certainty. The goal was to avoid being confidently wrong. Because in intelligence work, being wrong isn’t always the failure. Being certain and wrong is. And once you understand that distinction, you start to see the world completely differently. And markets work the exact same way. The future, it’s uncertain, right? Information is incomplete. The narratives they get really loud and the cost of being wrong, it’s not evenly distributed. Now, is this asset good or bad? Does this win or fail? Am I in or out? You’re using the same decision model that caused intelligence failures.

Because markets don’t reward certainty, they reward process. They don’t care how confident you are. They care whether your positioning makes sense, given the odds. And once you see investing through that lens, the goal stops being about prediction, it starts being about handicapping. Now, let’s look at the story most people are fall apart. The official story sounds reasonable, like Bitcoin’s volatile. It’s speculative. It’s already up a lot. I could have got it cheaper before institutions are interested, but they’re cautious. You know, they’re waiting for regulation or stability or clarity. And the advice that comes from the story is familiar, then we should diversify broadly, we should probably reduce our position size or concentration, avoid extremes.

Now, in many environments, that advice makes sense, like risk matters, volatility matters, position size matters. But here’s the problem. That story treats Bitcoin like it’s a normal asset in a normal cycle, it assumes that the future will look like the recent past. What it doesn’t ask is a more important question. Is this a normal market? Or is this a transition? Because if you’re inside a transition, then waiting for certainty doesn’t reduce risk, it changes the odds. And the story doesn’t break because it’s completely wrong. It breaks because it leaves out the variables that decide outcomes during these regime shifts, these transitions.

So instead of arguing opinions, if we if we dig in, and we look at the structure, we can see there’s three specific cracks that show up every time markets move through a regime shift like this one, crack number one, price is not the same thing as odds. Now, most people treat price like it’s a probability, right? If the price is high, they assume the odds are low. If the price is low, they assume the odds are high. But that’s not how markets work. Markets are not forecasting machines, they’re allocation machines. Price tells you where transactions have already occurred.

It doesn’t tell you how capital is positioning going forward. Odds aren’t revealed by price, they’re revealed by the positioning. So like who owns it, who can’t own it yet, who still needs to own it. And that distinction matters a lot, a lot more than people realize. Crack number two, is that the real mispricing isn’t price, it’s disbelief. Now, when people say that, you know, smart money is already in, they usually mean there’s been some exposure. But when you look closely, the largest pools of capital in the world, I’m talking about pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, they’re still barely allocated.

They’re not overweight. There’s no meaningful size in there. In many cases, they’re not even involved at all. So that’s not like deep conviction. That’s sort of like disbelief. And disbelief is a form of mispricing. Because when capital has to move later, it doesn’t move gradually, right? It’s gonna move under constraint. And then crack number three, is that great investors don’t wait for certainty. If you study how capital actually moves during transitions, you’ll realize that there’s a pattern that shows up every time. By the time certainty arrives, the odds have already been shifted.

Regulation doesn’t lead capital. Adoption doesn’t lead capital. Clarity doesn’t lead capital. Positioning does. The people who build wealth in these periods aren’t the ones who waited to be sure. They’re the ones who sized intelligently while the outcome was still uncertain. Not betting the house and not ignoring the opportunity either, right? This is where the official story starts to kind of collapse. Because if markets were about being right or wrong, then waiting would make sense. But if markets are probabilistic systems, then waiting changes the odds against you. And if we zoom out for a second, because this isn’t just about Bitcoin, right? This is about markets.

It’s not a Bitcoin problem. It’s a decision making problem. Every major transition shows the same pattern. People wait to be sure. And by the time they are, the opportunities change shape. The edge isn’t prediction, it’s handicapping. Listing the outcomes, assigning probabilities, positioning so you survive being wrong, and benefit if you’re right. Alright, now let me show you the actual framework. And this is how real investors think when the future is uncertain. Not by predicting outcomes, but by handicapping them. And handicapping is just a disciplined way of answering one question. Given what I know right now, how should I be positioned? Now there’s four parts to this.

Step one, I could do the work, right? I could do the work before the price. This is where most people already go wrong. They start with the price. They start with the charts. They start with the headlines. But price is the last thing that you should be looking at. Handicapping starts with building an independent case. What forces are already in motion? What trends matter over years, not weeks? What would have to be true for this to play out? And what would break it? This is where you study fundamentals, incentives, constraints, second order effects, not to be right, but to understand the landscape that you’re going to be operating in.

All right, step number two, thinking odds, not outcomes. All right. This is the mental upgrade here. You’re not asking will this happen? You’re asking what are the plausible outcomes? How likely is we each one of these outcomes? So you separate the process from the outcome. Now sometimes you make the right decision and you still lose money. Sometimes you make a bad decision and you get lucky. Handicapping cares about the decision process, not the actual short term result. If one outcome has a modest probability, but a massive upgrade and the downside is survivable, that’s worth paying attention to.

You don’t need certainty. You need favorable odds. Step number three, find the edge. This is where most people get uncomfortable. Your edge is simply where your view of the odds differ from the markets. If you see the same probabilities that everyone else sees, you’re not going to outperform by definition. Edge comes from doing work that others won’t, thinking in timeframes others can’t or understanding constraints that others ignore. Sometimes the market’s wrong because it’s emotional. Sometimes it’s wrong because it’s constrained. Sometimes it’s wrong because it can’t move yet. Your job is to predict when that changes.

It’s to recognize that it eventually will. And step number four is watch the positioning, not the noise. Now this is the most important step. It’s the most misunderstood step. Positioning tells you more about future price than any chart ever will. Like who already owns it? Who can’t own it yet? Who will have to own it if certain outcomes materialize? You see, capital doesn’t move smoothly. It moves in waves. It moves under pressure and it often moves all at once. The biggest opportunities usually show up when the odds are improving, but the positioning hasn’t caught up yet.

And it’s that gap between improving odds and delaying positioning is where asymmetric outcomes come from. And this is the anchor idea to keep in mind. You don’t need to be right. You need the odds on your side and the position to change in your favor over time. Now, once you start thinking this way, price stops feeling like a signal. It starts feeling like a lagging indicator. Now let’s apply this to Bitcoin. If we look at sort of the big stage here, we can see that government debt is basically unserviceable. We can see that the debasement is policy.

We can see that AI is accelerating everything. And so Bitcoin sort of sits at the intersection of all this. This is the Q wave. It’s what I call the quantum wave, the quantum leap. It’s a once every few decades transition. So institutions aren’t going all in, but they’re allocating 1%, 2%, 5%. Bitcoin’s moved from unthinkable to now at least taking a small allocation. And this is where people ask, should I lump some in or should I dollar cost average in? And that question assumes certainty. So let’s flip that. What probabilities do you assign to each outcome? If you think there’s, let’s say, I don’t know, a 50% chance that price goes lower, why stay 100% in cash? Maybe you allocate 50% now and then keep 50% dry, right? That’s not guessing.

That’s handicapping. The same question at a higher level is Bitcoin zero. Or does it have a five, a 10, a 20% chance of success? If the answer isn’t zero, then all in or all out both fail. Allocation proportional to odds is the rational response. That’s how serious capital thinks. And this isn’t about timing. It’s about survivable positioning. If volatility would force you to panic, then you’re probably oversized. The goal isn’t to avoid drawdowns. It’s to sigh. So drawdowns don’t break you. Handicapping lets you adjust systematically as odds change, not emotionally, not reactively.

That’s the discipline. Now at the end of the day, this is what investing really comes down to. It’s not about being right. It’s not about having the strongest opinion. It’s definitely not about predicting the future with certainty. It’s about having a repeatable process for making decisions when the future is uncertain. You see, markets don’t reward intelligence. They reward conviction. They reward structure. They reward people who can think in probabilities, size intelligently, and stay positioned long enough for the odds to play out. Now that’s the difference between reacting to the world and operating inside of it.

And if this video helped you think more clearly about markets, go ahead and like this video, hit the subscribe button real quick. If you can, it helps a long form breakdowns like this get seen by more people. And that’s what I got to your success. I’m out. [tr:trw].

See more of Mark Moss on their Public Channel and the MPN Mark Moss channel.