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There Is No Fraud Department: How to secure your cryptocurrency, and the three ways people lose it.

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:36:20 GMT

Crypto has one feature that changes everything about how you protect it. Transactions can't be undone, and nobody can undo them for you.

There is no fraud department. No chargeback. No branch manager who can stop the transfer. If someone moves your coins, or you send them to the wrong place, or you lose the ability to prove the coins are yours, then your coins are gone.

So, the goal is simple. Don't let any of those three things happen.

Where the risk sits now

For years, when people pictured crypto theft, they pictured a big exchange getting hacked. That still happens. But thieves have shifted toward individuals, because individuals are easier.

Chainalysis reported more than $3.4 billion stolen across all of crypto in 2025 in its 2026 Crypto Crime Report . About $713 million of that came straight out of personal wallets, through recovery phrases typed into fake websites, software that quietly copied private keys, and browser add-ons that emptied accounts in the background. The same report found attacks on personal wallets went from roughly 54,000 in 2022 to about 158,000 in 2025, with the number of people hit doubling from 40,000 to at least 80,000.

Exchanges spent those years tightening their security. Individuals mostly didn't.

The real question isn't "is crypto safe." It's "where is mine, and what's the specific way that setup goes wrong."

The three places your crypto can live

All three are legitimate. All three fail differently.

On an exchange. The company holds the coins and you hold a claim against the company. It fails when the company gets hacked, runs out of money, or someone breaks into your account. FTX taught that lesson expensively. This suits smaller amounts, active traders, and anyone honest with themselves about not wanting to manage a key. For a lot of people, it's the right answer, and being told otherwise by the internet has cost people real money.

In a wallet app on your phone or browser . You hold the keys, but the device is online. These are called hot wallets, and they fail through fake websites, malicious software, and approving something you didn't read closely. Treat it as the cash in your pocket, not the money in your account.

On a hardware wallet, kept offline . A small physical device that keeps your keys away from the internet. Called cold storage. It fails when you lose the recovery phrase, store it somewhere a thief finds it, or buy a device that was tampered with. This is for money you plan to hold long-term.

There's a fourth setup some investors consider. A spot Bitcoin ETF in a brokerage account gives you exposure to the price with no keys to manage, inside an account type that already has clear procedures for custody and for passing assets to heirs. It carries a different set of risks rather than fewer. You get the full price swings, you pay an annual fee, the fund relies on an outside company to hold the coins, and you can't move or spend what you own. .

Don't keep it all in one place

The most common mistake is keeping everything in one spot. Spending money, trading money, and long-term savings all together. One bad click and all of it is gone at once.

Split it by how often you need to reach it. Spending money in the phone wallet, at a balance where losing it would be irritating rather than devastating. Money you actively move on an exchange with strong login protection. Long-term savings on a hardware wallet you set up once and rarely connect to anything. The point of that third bucket is that it has no history, so there's nothing for an old mistake to come back through.

If you keep it on an exchange

Switch from text-message codes to an authenticator app or a physical security key . Don't just turn text codes off, because no second step is worse than a weak one. Text codes get beaten by SIM swapping, where someone talks your phone carrier into moving your number onto their phone. If your carrier offers a PIN to prevent that, turn it on.

Use a password you have never used anywhere else . Thieves buy lists of passwords from old breaches and try them everywhere.

Turn on withdrawal address allowlisting if your platform offers it, with the delay setting on. Someone who gets into your account still can't send money to a new address right away.

If you hold your own keys

Your recovery phrase is everything . Those twelve or twenty-four words aren’t a backup of your wallet. They are your wallet. Anyone who reads them owns your crypto, permanently, from anywhere in the world. Write it on paper or stamp it into metal. Never photograph it, never type it into a computer, never put it in cloud storage, a notes app, or email. There's software built specifically to hunt for recovery phrases on people's devices.

No real company or support person will ever ask you for it . Not to help you, not to verify you, not to fix anything. Every single request is a theft attempt. This is the one rule worth memorizing.

Buy hardware wallets straight from the maker. Devices bought from resellers have been tampered with before being sold.

Test your recovery before you trust it . Put a small amount on the device, erase it, and restore it from your written phrase. A backup you have never tested is a guess, and the day you need it is the worst day to find out you wrote a word down wrong.

Check the address every time you send . Thieves plant addresses in your history that look almost identical to ones you use, hoping you copy the wrong one. Never copy an address out of your transaction history and send a small test amount first.

The tricks that work

Almost all of them target you, not the technology. Fake support people who contact you first. Copycat websites one letter off from the real one. AI voice calls. Fake urgent update notices. Letters claiming a product recall means you need to verify your recovery phrase.

The defense is a habit, not a gadget. Never act on a message that came to you. Close it and go to the site yourself. Slow down when you feel rushed, because the rush is the trick.

One more reason to be careful about what you share. In May 2025, Coinbase disclosed in an SEC filing that criminals had gained access to customer records through support personnel. Tens of thousands of customers had names, home addresses, phone numbers, government ID images, and account balance snapshots exposed. No passwords, no money moved. That sounds like a lucky escape, but what got out was a list of people known to own crypto, how much they own, and where they live. Thieves build target lists from records like that, from social media, and from public blockchain activity. Don't talk about what you own or how much.

The failure nobody plans for

This one has nothing to do with criminals. It's the third item from the top of this article, the one where you lose the ability to prove the coins are yours, and it's the situation people are least likely to have planned for.

If you hold crypto yourself and you're the only person who knows how to get to it, you haven't created an inheritance. You've created a loss with a timer on it. Your executor can't subpoena a blockchain. Your spouse can't call customer service.

Three questions fix it. Does anyone know it exists, not the phrase but the fact? Is there a written path to get to it, clear enough for someone who understands none of this, kept somewhere a thief can't reach but your family can? And do your estate documents cover digital assets, with your executor given the legal authority to deal with them?

Have an estate attorney draw this up. We are not a law firm and cannot prepare those documents, but it's worth raising at your next review, and it's the part of crypto security that a security blog will never handle for you.

Common questions

Sleeping Well, Waking Up Poorer

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 20:46:23 GMT

I came across a blog post recently from an organization I respect, and the premise stuck with me: the wealth management industry may be solving for the wrong risk. If I surveyed a room of retail investors and asked them to rank cash, bonds, and stocks from safest to riskiest, I’d expect this:

Cash
Bonds
Stocks

Seems logical to me. Measured by liquidity, volatility, and place in the capital structure, that order holds up. Cash provides stability for near-term liabilities. Bonds provide income and often diversify equity volatility during drawdowns (2022 being a major outlier). If short-term volatility is what we’re solving for in the stock-to-bond decision — and in my experience it usually is — this is the right place to start. But it’s only a place to start.

My frustration surfaces when the old-school 60/40 (60% stocks, 40% bonds) stops being the starting point and becomes the answer. There are worse ways to open a conversation about asset allocation, but leaving it there feels lazy. The allocation decision should be more purposeful — and it should account for at least one more risk.

The Risk that Rarely Makes the Questionnaire

Every risk-tolerance questionnaire I’ve seen asks a version of the same question: how would you feel if your portfolio fell X% or X dollars over a given period? That is a useful data point — knowing the answer helps advisors keep clients invested through difficult markets. What I have rarely seen is a single question about how an investor would feel if their purchasing power were cut in half by the time they retire. Based on the conversations we’ve all had, I suspect the answer is “quite concerned.”

Everyone knows (or at least should know) that inflation erodes purchasing power over time. If everyone knows that, why do we psychologically focus on short term volatility concerns over solving for purchasing power erosion? Consider someone who retired in 1996 with $1 million. Today that same $1 million buys roughly $457,000 worth of “stuff.” No crash did that. There was no bad quarter to point to and no panicked phone call to the advisor — just thirty years of ordinary inflation taking half. My guess is that the loss arrives too slowly to feel like a loss. That doesn’t make it any smaller.

Focusing on real returns

“Real returns” adjust nominal returns for inflation. Net out the tax cost of owning the security — a taxable bond, for example — and you arrive at a return that accounts for both of investing’s quietest costs.

This leads us to one of the biggest dilemmas that investors have with asset allocation, specifically with owning bonds. Over the course of time, government bonds have traditionally struggled with the impacts of both inflation and taxes.

This raises an uncomfortable question: what should investors do when the primary tool for managing portfolio volatility is also the tool creating their long-term purchasing power problem?

Addressing through asset allocation

Let me first caveat all of this by saying one’s risk tolerance should be a combination of one’s willingness (how they feel) and ability (the financial plan) to take risk. It’s not always the right decision to solve for long-term real returns when other considerations are in play, such as a short time horizon and severe anxiety over fluctuations in account values. Despite what my two kids think, sleeping soundly at night matters.

With that said, Jeremy Siegel did a lot of this work for us in his book Stocks for the Long Run. The following graphic shows his findings over multiple centuries. The short answer is that stocks have done a lot of the heavy lifting to assist investors in dealing with the potential for purchasing power erosion.

Source: Jeremy J. Siegel, Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns and Long-Term Investment Strategies

This is why we spend so much time with clients on asset allocation. Whether the issue is excess cash on the sidelines or an overly conservative retirement portfolio, we believe some of the worry we spend on short-term volatility is better spent on inflation. The last five years reminded all of us how quickly it compounds. The graphic below illustrates how modest adjustments to an allocation may improve the odds that a portfolio holds its purchasing power over time.

Ignoring the short-term volatility that comes with owning equities is difficult, but the financial plan may be better off for it. Sometimes the risk no one is talking about is the one that matters most.

No Dementia for Chip Stocks

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:08:17 GMT

Everyone wants to talk about memory. It’s become the old SNL Christopher Walken skit where you need to replace cowbell with ::drumroll:: memory stocks. How did a once commoditized business turn the stock market, and all South Korea, upside down?

In his most recent quarterly letter, Matt Topley wrote “NVDA was the most important stock in the world; now MU has taken the lead. The Mag 7 used to drive the entire market. Now semiconductors are driving returns.” I know I’m getting old when my first reaction to hearing memory storage is a 1GB flash drive. Leaving my boomer-ish qualities aside, let’s dig into what has happened underneath the hood in the technology sector.

Memory chips take center stage

For most of the last decade, memory chips were the semiconductor world's discount rack — a commodity that ran in brutal boom-and-bust cycles driven on slow changes to supply and demand that ebbs and flows with phones and PCs. In 2026 that script broke.

Investment Ramifications – One Giant Casino

Where this really affects markets and portfolios is through the combination of semiconductor indexes/weights and South Korea.

The clearest place to see the boom is in the semiconductor indexes. Chip funds and ETFs have been leaving the broad market in the dust: at one point this year, the iShares Semiconductor ETF was up roughly 108% on the year while the S&P 500 had climbed about 10% — a tenfold gap. The single name doing the heaviest lifting is Micron, the lone major U.S. memory maker. It has ranked among the very best performers in the entire S&P 500 in 2026, with the stock up around 200% and its market value swelling past $1 trillion. That kind of performance now puts Micron as the 10 ^th largest holding in the S&P 500. How quickly things can change.

Final Thoughts: Is this sustainable?

The responsible answer here…no one knows. On one hand, maybe this time is different. Maybe memory companies and their chip demand aren’t as cyclical as they once were. My opinion leans the other way where I tend to think chasing this trade is dangerous. These are big, important, profitable businesses so owning them in a diversified portfolio is a perfectly reasonable, and prudent, thing to do. I believe overconcentrating your portfolio or using the stock market casino that is leveraged ETFs is a dangerous game to play. It’s dangerous in general, let alone doing so with companies who have likely seen their profit margins max out in the extreme demand we’ve seen for their products.

How Well Do You Play Bad?

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:09:26 GMT

How Well Do You Play Bad?

By Patrick Greenhalgh, Investment Advisor Rep

There is a delusion every golfer carries to the course: that we, too, could have saved par from that fairway bunker, if only the bounce had gone our way.

Golf does that to a person. It is the only game I know that can make you feel like a genius and a fraud inside of about twenty minutes.

Here is what I have come to believe after enough rounds to know better. Golf is not really a test of your swing. It is a test of you.

No matter how well you play, there is always the putt that could have dropped or the shot that just missed. The perfect round does not exist, and chasing it puts your whole temperament on display: how you handle a bad bounce, how patient you can be, whether you can stand over a three-foot putt to win the hole and not come apart. Golf is 90% mental and 10% swing away.

So is investing, and that is what this piece is really about. Golf is just the clearest mirror I have ever found for the thing that actually determines whether people reach their financial goals. It is not the thing most people think. It is not picking the winning fund or timing the market. It is temperament. Once you see the two side by side, you cannot unsee it.

The pre-shot routine

Watch a good player before a shot and you will see a routine that never changes. See the shot. Pick the target. One last look. Head down, trust the tempo, breathe, and go. All of that preparation exists for one reason. So that when it is finally time to swing, you can stop thinking and just let it happen.

Good investing works the same way, and it starts long before the market ever opens. The routine is your financial plan: what you are trying to accomplish, how long you have to do it, how much risk you can actually live with, and how your money is invested as a result. You build that plan when you are calm and thinking clearly, precisely so that you are not inventing one on the fly when markets are loud and your stomach is in your throat. A good financial decision is rarely a gut call in the moment. It is the quiet execution of a plan you already thought through.

That is the same feeling as pulling the trigger on something you have studied for weeks. The work is not the point. The work is what lets you act with a clear head when it counts and then leave the thing alone. Investors who know why they own what they own, and how each piece fits the plan, do not lie awake renegotiating that decision every time the headlines change. The ones without a plan renegotiate constantly, usually at the worst possible moment.

Here is what nobody tells you, though. The routine is not there to guarantee a perfect shot, and the plan is not there to guarantee a perfect year. Both exist so that a bad one does not rattle you into doing something you cannot take back. Which brings us to the part that actually matters.

How well do you play bad?

Anyone can play well when they are playing well. Show me a person who is striping it and I will show you a person in a good mood. A round is not defined by your best shots. It is defined by your worst ones, and by what you decide to do next.

The great ones have a gift that has nothing to do with their swing. A short memory. A double bogey on the fifth does not become a triple on the sixth, because they refuse to try the miracle recovery that turns one bad hole into a lost afternoon. They take their medicine, punch back to the fairway, and move on. They play bad well.

This is where real money is made and lost, and I mean that almost literally. The single biggest threat to your long-term returns is usually not the market. It is you, in the middle of a bad stretch, reaching for the miracle recovery. When markets fall, every instinct screams at you to do something: sell, get to safety, stop the bleeding. That instinct leads to the triple bogey. Selling into a decline locks in the loss, and worse, it tends to leave you on the sidelines for the recovery that follows, because the market's best days have a maddening habit of arriving right next to its worst ones.

Study after study finds the same thing. The average investor earns meaningfully less than the very funds they own.

According to Morningstar’s annual Mind the Gap study, that gap sits at roughly 1.2% per year over the past decade. While exact causes for the gap are up for debate, a big part of it comes down to behavior. It is buying after things have already run up because it finally feels safe and selling after they have fallen because it feels scary. Volatility is not a malfunction in the system. It is the admission price you pay for the returns that come from staying in your seat.

The scorecard helps a golfer stay disciplined, because the scorecard never asks how. An ugly, scrambled par counts exactly the same as a pure one. Nobody signing the card at the end cares whether it felt good. Your account statement works the same way. It does not care whether a year felt smooth or terrifying. Twenty years from now, the plan you stuck with will not show the white-knuckle moments. It will simply show that you stayed in. The real damage in investing is almost never the down market itself. It is the panic swing you take in the middle of it. The loss is not the bad break. The loss is what you do after it.

Play your own game

Every golfer knows the trap. You get paired with the long hitter, you start trying to keep up, and three holes later your own game is in pieces. The fix is old and simple. Play the course, not the other guy. And know your real handicap, the game you actually have, not the one you wish you had on your best day.

This may be the most expensive mistake in all of personal finance. Somebody at the club is up big on a stock, or a neighbor just did something clever with real estate, and suddenly a perfectly good plan feels too slow. So, you reach for more risk than you signed up for, right near the top, to catch up to someone whose full situation you do not actually know. That is trying to match the long hitter, and it wrecks portfolios the same way it wrecks rounds.

The truth that makes all of it click is that there is no single right portfolio. There is only the right portfolio for you. A thirty-five-year-old saving for a retirement three decades away and a couple retiring next year should not be playing the same shot, because their timelines and their tolerance for a bad stretch are completely different. Your plan should be built around your goals, your time horizon, and what you can genuinely stomach when things get rough, not around a benchmark, a headline, or the guy bragging in the grill room. The best portfolio in the world is worthless if you cannot stay in it, and the surest way to bail out early is to have built it for someone else's life.

Look at Rory McIlroy. He just won the Masters two years running, and he is doing it on a schedule that looks nothing like anyone else's. He plays a famously light schedule, far fewer starts than most of the tour, and says the lighter load actually helps him. While the rest of the tour grinds every week, the best player of his generation plays his own game, on his own terms, because he knows what works for him. Your money deserves that same discipline.

Every player has a caddie

Here is the part people miss. The best golfer on the planet does not walk the course alone. He has a caddie next to him reading the green, checking the yardage into the wind, and, most importantly, talking him out of the hero shot over the water when the fat of the green is the smart play. Scottie Scheffler has Ted Scott. Rory has Harry Diamond. Nobody great does it entirely by themselves.

That is what a good advisor actually is, and it is worth being honest about what the job really is and is not. It is not swinging the club for you, and it is not having a secret read on which stock is about to take off. Anyone promising you that read is selling something. The real value shows up in the moments that never make headlines: building the plan in the first place, rebalancing when one part of the portfolio has run too far ahead, keeping fees and taxes from quietly eating your returns, and, above all, being the calm voice on the other end of the phone during the scary stretch, the one that talks you out of the panic swing. When researchers have tried to measure the value of that behavioral coaching, it consistently comes out as one of the largest things an advisor adds, larger than any single investment pick. The caddie does not hit the shot for you. The caddie keeps you from beating yourself.

Because in the end the swing was never the hard part. Standing over the ball with everything on the line and keeping your head is the hard part. Investing is not complicated, but it is hard, and nearly all of the difficulty lives in your own head. Golf is 90% mental, and so is this. The 10% is the easy part. Our job, and yours, is the 90%.

Should We Party Like It’s 1999?

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:58:56 GMT

Should we Party Like It's 1999?

By Mike Horwath, CIO

For the inaugural post, I thought an ode to our founder, Matt Topley, was in order. Matt’s quarterly

commentary — which takes its title and direction from a song — is a genuinely informative read, and one

I’d recommend to anyone interested in markets.

The ’90s gave us the buildup to Y2K, the explosion of grunge (Alice in Chains’ 1996 MTV Unplugged set is a

personal favorite), and a frenzy of technology IPOs (initial public offerings). With the recent IPO of SpaceX

— and the anticipation that Anthropic and OpenAI follow this year — we’ve fielded plenty of questions

about what it all means for individual portfolios, and whether it’s worth buying shares if the opportunity

arises. There’s a lot of noise out there, so I thought it would be worthwhile to dig into what this means,

and to share our perspective here at Lansing Street.

How did we get here?

Outside of the SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) nonsense of 2021, the IPO market has been relatively quiet since 1999 — the year companies like Nvidia, UPS, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock made their debut. Despite the growth of the overall stock market, the number of publicly traded companies has steadily declined over the past few decades. One reason: many smaller companies have either stayed private or gone private to sidestep the regulatory burden that comes with being public. At the same time, the amount of private equity capital flooding the market has looked parabolic. At the end of 2023, the number of private-equity-backed companies was 2.5x the number of public companies.

These forces have combined to create very large businesses owned by founders, venture capital, and private equity. One challenge of staying private this long is that investors eventually want to monetize their returns and diversify away from a concentrated position. That brings us to 2026, when this group of mega-cap companies has finally decided to shift from private to public ownership.

Size Over Volume

What makes 2026 so different from 1999 is that we’re seeing roughly the same percentage of total market capitalization come to market — but through only three businesses. The sheer size of these companies, and what they mean for markets, is on a far different scale than what we saw in 1999.

In hindsight, the tech bubble of 2000–2002 was predictable given how many IPOs came to market with no revenue at extreme valuations. Hindsight is always 20/20. The fundamentals for SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI have come under similar scrutiny, though at different scales. At valuations (or expected valuations) of roughly $1.75 trillion, $1 trillion, and $1 trillion, respectively, many investors are asking what the real path to profitability looks like.

For perspective, Meta’s market capitalization is roughly $500 billion less than SpaceX’s as of the end of June 2026. Meta has billions of daily active users, nearly 9x the annual revenue, and $70 billion of operating income — versus a $2+ billion loss for SpaceX. By every fundamental measure, Meta should be worth more. Markets can be funny that way.

The key isn’t where we’ve been, or even where we stand today, but where investors think we’re going. During the SpaceX roadshow, Goldman Sachs projected revenues climbing from $18.7 billion in 2025 to $474 billion in 2030 on the back of AI-related demand. Now, Goldman isn’t the most unbiased party in this conversation, so take that with a grain of salt. Either way, investors are buying potential growth — across AI for all three businesses, and space launch and satellites in the case of SpaceX.

Regardless of how you feel about each of these companies, many of you will end up owning them in your portfolio without even realizing it. Which brings me to…

Changing the rules.

Millions of investors — including us here at Lansing Street — use index funds as a low-cost way to get broad (and sometimes targeted) exposure within a portfolio. These funds track underlying indexes designed to represent a slice of the market. To keep representing that target over time, they periodically rebalance and reconstitute the underlying holdings. Those rules are documented and followed religiously by the index providers.

What we saw with the SpaceX IPO — and expect to see with Anthropic and OpenAI — is that providers are adjusting their rules to accommodate these stocks entering their universe. We expect the Nasdaq 100 (famous for the QQQ ETF), the FTSE Russell 1000, CRSP (closely tied to Vanguard), and MSCI to all include SpaceX shortly after listing. That means investors will hold the stock inside their index funds whether they realize it or not. The main holdout has been the S&P 500, which is standing by its 12-month waiting period and profitability requirements. While I personally don’t love changing the rules for one company — or a handful — there are a couple of nuances worth noting:

Free float matters. Because only about 5% of SpaceX trades publicly (the rest is locked up for insiders), the stock’s index weighting will be far lower than its market capitalization alone would suggest.
Scale is hard to argue with. It’s difficult to make the case against a $1.75 trillion business being included in an index designed to represent the market — and I’d say the same for Anthropic and OpenAI at their valuations.

Should you buy?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say… it depends. Sorry. The reality is that none of us knows where these businesses — or the overall market — will be in five years. On one hand, SpaceX may have the widest moat (competitive advantage) in public markets right now, and OpenAI and Anthropic are leading providers of large language models in artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the AI industry is still young and these valuations are stretched. Despite what some may think, price does matter.

Over the next twelve months, lockup periods will end for SpaceX insiders, bringing plenty of liquidity to market; we anticipate the same for the other two. The decision to own these companies directly — not simply as part of an index fund — should be made individually, after weighing risk tolerance, time horizon, and overall objectives (a shameless plug for the work the Lansing Street team does over here). Whatever you decide, it’s good to see new equity coming into the markets.