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September Scaries? Not This Time
PLUS: Kaizen Just Outperformed the Market Again
Welcome back to The Warmup.
Happy Friday. The weekend is here and the markets are still moving so let’s jump right in.
Here’s what we’re watching:
Market Snapshot
Tempo Is Live
Beating The Market Again
September Seasonality
What We’re Watching
Market: Crypto majors are steady, with BTC leading the pack, ETH flat, and SOL showing slight weakness.
Tempo Is Live
What’s going on:
And they didn’t come alone: Visa, Deutsche Bank, Shopify, Nubank, OpenAI, and Revolut are already on the partner list.
Tempo is built for stablecoin payments, aiming for 100k+ TPS, sub-second finality, and EVM compatibility. Fees can be paid in any stablecoin via an enshrined AMM.
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison says the goal is to bring payouts, payroll, remittances, microtransactions, tokenized deposits, and agentic payments onchain.
Paradigm’s Matt Huang added they’ll start with a diverse validator set and move toward a permissionless model.
What it means:
Onchain payments are heating up and Stripe wants in.
Credit card rails charge ~$3.20 on a $100 purchase. Stablecoins can cut that down to $0.50 or less. That’s a massive spread and a huge incentive for merchants.
Tempo is purpose-built for payments, unlike most chains today that were optimized for trading.
With Stripe’s global reach and a roster of heavyweight partners, they’ve got a real shot at making stablecoins the default rail for commerce.
That’s good news for crypto adoption overall…
Beating The Market Again
While the market chopped sideways, Kaizen Fam was cashing in. Our August picks didn’t just hold up, they delivered outsized returns.
DOLO (+138%): WLFI ecosystem rocket and biggest gainer of the month
BRACKY (+128%): AI meets sports betting hype with the NFL season kicker
AAVE (+25%): DeFi rotation with strong institutional flows
BYTE (+25%): Small-cap Base native flying under the radar
JTO (+20%): Solana staking momentum powered by ETF chatter
Members who followed along locked in triple-digit gains while BTC and ETH barely moved.
This is the edge. Conviction in early plays backed by deep research.
September has just started.
September Seasonality: Should You Be Scared?
What’s going on:
September has a bad rep for markets. Historically, it’s the worst month for risk assets.
Over the past 20 years, the S&P 500 has averaged -0.7% in September. For Bitcoin, it’s one of only two months with negative average returns.
But dig a little deeper and the story’s not that scary:
The median return is only -0.3% (less bad than the mean).
September’s “win rate” for the S&P 500 is 44%, almost a coin flip.
Plenty of Septembers have seen +2% to +5% gains.
So while the “September effect” is real in the data (it’s noisy) and not something to blindly trade around.
What it means:
The real driver isn’t seasonality, it’s the macro regime. Right now, growth and inflation look like they’re reaccelerating. A bullish setup for risk assets.
Add in the Fed likely cutting rates this month (only two other times in history that happened: September 1998 and 2024, both positive months with an average +3.3% return), and the case for a “spooky September” looks a lot less scary.
Bottom line: seasonality is fun trivia, but the bigger forces (aka liquidity, growth, Fed policy) matter way more.
 | HYPE: |
 | Lighter: |
 | ONDO: |
 | PUMP: |
What do you think September brings for markets? |
September might feel spooky, but markets are holding up better than most expect.
We still need to get through seasonality and some short-term chop, yet the bigger picture points higher.
The cycle is not close to finished, with strong assets climbing and speculation likely heating up once rate cuts arrive.
Too many people are still bearish for this to be the real top.
— The Warmup Team
Always do your own research. This newsletter is supplemental material to help educate readers as they make their own decisions. Projects mentioned here are provided to give a potential early-mover advantage.