The Loan Book, Honestly

May 2026 · Operator's Logbook

Operator's notes only — not financial, tax, or investment advice. This letter is a record of what I am doing in my own accounts and why. Nothing here is a recommendation. Before acting on anything you read here, please consult your own qualified advisors.

Last month I promised to dig deeper into my Ledn loans. Issue #1 made the basic point: I'm not paying interest every month. The interest gets added to the balance and rolls over when the loan renews. That's true, and it changes how you think about the cost. But it also lets you avoid the harder question — how big is this thing, really, and what happens to it if Bitcoin has a bad year?

That's the work for this issue. I'll walk through these loans the way I look at them myself — six of them, their rates, when they come due, the math that makes the strategy worth doing, and the math that shows where it gets uncomfortable. The dollar figures are scaled so I'm not publishing my actual account balance in a newsletter. The rates, the LTVs, and the ratios are all real. Only the absolute size is adjusted. For context: this loan book sits inside a net worth of about $500,000.