A week ago, I spoke with Clem Chambers, entrepreneur and CEO of ADVFN, Europe’s number one stock and shares website. It was one of the most thoughtful interviews in a series dedicated to investment/trading topics. Chambers gave me detailed answers to questions regarding his investment strategy, the crypto market, the coins in his own wallet and his view on the Bitcoin price’s future movements. If you want to know more about the tulip bubble, the differences between stock market trading and crypto trading and what is so special about DeFi, don’t miss this piece!
Clem Chambers: I have been running ADVFN for 20 years. It’s a site that’s about private investors, traders and financial information. When Bitcoin came out, there was a lot of interest in it. Pretty soon thereafter, we put Bitcoin up on the site. We found it very hard to sustain the feed because everything was pretty primitive back then. So, we backed out of it.
But around 2015, it was obvious that things were going to be pretty amazing. I had that Damascene moment, that “holy cow” moment, when I went, “Oh, this is gonna be…just wow.” And I personally started working in the Bitcoin arena. Later on, OBC Online, which was the original listed company behind ADVFN, became involved because it has always been a technology incubator. So, we have a very strong crypto offering, and OBC has Umbria and various other properties that are extremely exciting.
That’s the history of how we go into it. In 2016, funny enough, I was saying that Bitcoin is a bubble. Of course, I was absolutely right. It’s a boom-bubble-bust, boom-bubble-bubble-bust, boom-bubble-bust financial instrument. That’s its cycle. That doesn’t stop it from being important because bubbles can be real. It can be a real bubble, but what is bubbling? What survives a bust is normally incredibly important.
If you go back to the history of financial markets, to the original bubble that people talk about—the tulip bubble back in the 18th century—it was caused by Turkish interest in tulip bulbs. They used to lock their princes up when the sultan died. He had so many sons that one would become king, and they murdered the others. They decided that that’s a bit brutal. So, then, they would imprison them. They had little prisons, and they had gardens, and all the princes got interested in tulip bulbs. They were competing with each other to have the craziest, most marvelous tulip bulbs. That drove the whole tulip bulb mania in Holland. Then came the tulip bulb crash. But tulips are still a multi-billion-dollar industry in Holland.
People forget that bubbles also create massive companies. The dotcom bubble created Amazon, the biggest company in the world! Microsoft, the biggest company in the world, and Google, one of the biggest companies in the world, and Facebook and so on. The fact that Bitcoin was a bubble about four times now, and a bust about four times now, does not stop Bitcoin as a whole from being a massive, hairy deal and crypto being a massive, change-the-world event. Once I’d had the epiphany that this was world-changing, we then pivoted quite heavily at Online Blockchain and also pivoted at ADVFN, and investors helped to provide crypto information. That’s a long answer to your short question.
