Episode summary
Tice Brown | Money Stuff: The Podcast
Money Stuff The Podcast
· · Hosts: Matt Levine, Katie Greifeld · Guests: Tice Brown
Summary
Tice Brown describes Woodmont Partners as a family-office style vehicle built to pursue unusual, often illiquid trades with leverage. The discussion starts with the DAT craze, where public shells were turned into digital asset treasury companies and traded at premiums to their crypto holdings. Brown says he initially bought into one of those pipes, then hedged and later added to the position as prices changed, using the structure to get non-cross-collateralized leverage on Bitcoin.
Much of the conversation is about Brown’s preference for messy assets with wide bid/ask spreads and weak transparency. He says the firm buys and sells fine art, dinosaur fossils, and real estate, and that it has made money by exploiting auction-market spreads and by buying “weirdo bonds” and defeasing them. The host and Brown also discuss Electronic Arts’ bond dispute, where Brown frames the controversy as a windfall problem: bondholders want 101 after a change of control, while the company argues the defeasance still delivers the same payments.
Brown also sketches the financing ecosystems that support his investing: Nebraska insurance regulation for float, Arkansas banking for entrepreneurial local lending, and short-term loans that roll because they reduce capital charges. The episode ends with broader reflections on SpaceX/Tesla governance, why the Nasdaq can look expensive even when earnings are rising quickly, and how Brown’s time is best spent thinking through odd trades rather than doing administrative work.
Key takeaways
- Tice Brown says he seeks non-cross-collateralized leverage in unusual assets, from Bitcoin treasury stocks to distressed real estate.
- Brown says the DAT trade worked as a premium-to-NAV arbitrage before later flipping into a discount trade.
- Brown says art is attractive because the bid/ask spread is wide and auction-house pricing is opaque.
- Brown says defeasing bonds can create returns from headache and complexity, not just from the asset itself.
- Brown says Arkansas banks and Nebraska insurers can provide unusually flexible funding structures for his style of investing.
Notable quotes
“You could imagine it as a way to get a significant amount of noncross collateralized leverage of the price of Bitcoin”
“The spread between bid and ask is very wide”
“my job is like extremely gnarly, messy, painful stuff that you make returns off of”
“If it's a bank loan with an amount that they say write a $700,000 check and it goes away, people understand that”
How the episode opens
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. Hello and welcome to the Money Stuff Podcast. I'm Matt Lavine. I wrote the Money Stuff Colin from Bloomberg Opinion. We have a guest today, Ty Brown. Why don't you say what your deal is?
My name's Ty Brown. I'm the managing member of a group of single member LLC's that we call in collection Woodmont Partners. Okay. — But it's a family office. I'm just a guy and your title money stuff actually gives me a huge amount of cover because all the time like my wife's parents who are like well credentialed and coastal say what does Ty do? Oh yeah he does investing stuff and like people get that you know I do investing stuff
I do things that drive my curiosity and we try to make money. I didn't come from money. My dad's a community college teacher in Arkansas and my mom's a county doctor. I've tried to access leverage in intelligent ways and we have a grab bag of a lot of weird assets I can talk about.
I would like that you send me really good emails like I sometimes do like talks and people like what are your ideas? Like I sometimes get good emails from people and I try to describe like the characteristics of a good email. And I got an email from Tyus in February that is now on the record in a court case saying
I'd like to liquidate a Bitcoin treasury company. I'd like to speak publicly about it. And it's one of those things where like I'm just going along my day and that email comes in and I'm like why have I never thought about liquidating a Bitcoin treasury company? But you had. Tell me about it.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- art market bid/ask spreads
- non-cross-collateralized leverage
- rolling calls
- defeasing weirdo bonds
- valuation and pricing] }
Companies and tickers mentioned
- TSLA
- NDAQ
- SpaceX
- Tesla
- Nasdaq
- Bloomberg
Watch the episode
Watch “Tice Brown | Money Stuff: The Podcast” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
More from Money Stuff The Podcast
-
Loser Mentality | Money Stuff: The Podcast -
Friend Acquisition Rate | Money Stuff: The Podcast -
Jeremy Maletz | Money Stuff: The Podcast -
Reintegration With the Default World | Money Stuff: The Podcast -
Re-run: Midnight Madness: Ryan Patch and Jon Seale | Money Stuff: The Podcast -
Trying to Save the World Is No Excuse | Money Stuff: The Podcast
Money Stuff The Podcast, this episode and its artwork belong to Bloomberg. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; this page is an independent summary.
