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Insilico Terminal Podcast Episode 22 - Trader Magus
99 Plays1 month ago
In this episode, Magus shares his 11-year trading journey - from early tech stocks and silver to BitMEX-era crypto and full-time trading through the COVID crash. We dive deep into order flow, open interest, spot vs perp dynamics, and how market structure has evolved with ETFs and institutional flows. Magus explains his execution style, hedging philosophy, fixed sizing approach, and how professionalism, journaling, and emotional discipline shaped his edge. The conversation also explores DeFi as a “kingmaker” trade, reflections on missed opportunities like Hyperliquid, the current state of altcoins, and Bitcoin’s need to prove itself in a world where metals and equities are strong. We close with lessons on humility, ego balance, and surviving long enough to stay in the game.
00:00 Intro, Magus background, Going full-time, COVID crash and DeFi saving the year
05:02 Trading evolution, moving averages/Ichimoku -> order flow and auction market theory “light bulb moment”
08:28 Entry framework, momentum vs reversion, why open interest mattered and how that edge changed
20:45 Defending drawdowns, hedging one-to-one with perps, why most hedges “lose” but save you when it matters
31:14 Social media & FOMO, why CT warps expectations and how to avoid chasing everything
33:53 Execution + Insilico Terminal usage, market-in/limit-out, chase orders, resting orders, manual vs hard stops
53:05 Higher timeframe views, Bitcoin underperformance vs equities/metals, rotating profits into TradFi and closing
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Transcript
Introduction to Trader Magus
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome to a new episode of the Insilico Terminal podcast. Today i have with me Trader Magus. Is that how you pronounce it correctly?
00:00:25
Speaker
Yes, it is. Yes, so at the beginning, i like to ask our guests to introduce themselves. So if for people that don't know you already, who are you? What do you do?
00:00:39
Speaker
Okay, yeah I'm Magus. Thanks for having me on. I've been a fan of Encilico Terminal for a long time now.
Magus’s Trading Journey
00:00:46
Speaker
Um, let's see, I've been trading for about 11 years now total from start to finish. Uh, I didn't take it that seriously in the beginning years, so I don't necessarily always count that.
00:00:57
Speaker
Um, I started taking it real seriously, maybe 2018, 2019. Um, i went full time late, late Q1 of 2020. Um, it was really bad timing. Um, it was like right around the time when the COVID crash happened. So it was not the most ideal of,
00:01:14
Speaker
entry points to the career path. But yeah, we we figured it out and I don't know. um You want me to talk about my trading style or what? have Have you always been trading crypto if you've been trading for that long?
00:01:27
Speaker
No. So I actually started with... um Probably i would say I started with the individual tech stocks and then I actually got into commodities after that. um And my first like kind of success in markets is actually trading silver before i traded crypto ever. um I came into, I bought my first Ethereum in like late 2016, but I didn't start trading crypto more actively until the BitMEX days of like late 2018 is when I really started trade actively.
00:01:58
Speaker
in crypto. see. What first got you into trading?
Interest in Ethereum and Crypto Transition
00:02:01
Speaker
you have like a financial background or?
00:02:05
Speaker
Um, I would say i kind of stumbled into it more or less. I wouldn't say that, um, I didn't ever have this kind of path envisioned for myself when I was younger, or I didn't really have much of a path envisioned at all. I was kind of just floating around randomly in life until things kind of align themselves a little bit.
00:02:23
Speaker
Um, I'm like a, you know, I'm competitive person. I'm an analytical person. So I would say that like some of the nerdy video game stuff I did as a kid probably laid the groundwork for trading. But other than that, no, I don't have any, you know, real proper background for this or anything. I went to school for, you know, science and biology related stuff. So it's completely not applicable.
00:02:44
Speaker
So you got interested in crypto just for the sake of trading, like for the markets, not for the or anything? So I had heard about Bitcoin for a while, a couple of years, and it was cool, but, you know, it didn't really interest me that much. But when my friend explained Ethereum to me, like the programmable nature of like, you know, you can actually build stuff on top of these chains. That's when it became really interesting to me. Also, the fact that, you know, Ethereum was like 30 or 40 dollars back then. And, you Bitcoin was, I don't know, maybe three thousand dollars or something. So it was seemed like a good, you know, That was back when I had that kind of more, you know, layman's understanding of I just want to buy the cheap tokens. I want to buy the token that costs three pennies because what if it goes to a dollar? you know, it was more or less the same type of logic that got me interested in ETH originally.
00:03:28
Speaker
It could go up. And then um how did you transition into into full-time trading?
Full-Time Trading and Challenges
00:03:34
Speaker
What was that like? um Yeah, that's a good question.
00:03:38
Speaker
um So i I mean, I already had many years of trading and I had like had some wins, you know, racked up to where I had a little bit of confidence built up. i I get asked about this all the time, and I don't think that there's really ever like a proper time to do something like that. um When I was getting ready to quit my job, I thought I was ready. And then markets were tough right afterwards. And I immediately realized like, you know, I I already quit my job, so there's no going back now.
00:04:06
Speaker
But I wasn't necessarily ready at the time. Right. So there really isn't a right or wrong time for that. You know, you just kind of have to if you really want to make that path in life for yourself, you just kind of have to leap one day and work really hard and hope things, you know, end up panning out for you.
00:04:23
Speaker
hmm. But there was it was super, you know, maximum uncertainty after I quit my job. Right. i had no income streams for a really long time after that. And, you know, the covid nuke had crushed both both my crypto port and my TradFi port. Yeah. So it it was, you know, probably the most uncertain time for me. I would say probably only three or four months after that, I was already starting to wonder if I made, you know, a huge mistake.
00:04:47
Speaker
um This would have been, you know, the summertime of 2020. But then I got kind of bailed out more or less by DeFi because DeFi kind of came in created so much opportunity for everybody and, you know, went up a lot basically. So i definitely DeFi helped me out in a big, big way for becoming a full-time trader.
Trading Styles and Order Flow Mastery
00:05:08
Speaker
So what is your trading style like? Like how is and how has it evolved over over the years? I mean, I, I definitely messed around with anything that is popular. And I think that that's great for people, you know, you know, when you're new or go out there, experiment with every kind of popular thing that is in front of you and see if something resonates and clicks with you.
00:05:27
Speaker
Um, I, so I, I was a moving average Ichimoku kind of trader for a long time. Nobody really knows me for that, but that's actually what I did with like a lot of my trad fi trading. And like when I first got into trading crypto, I traded you know, Ichimoku on alts a lot and stuff in like the, the days when we actually had quote unquote alt seasons, that's how I traded.
00:05:47
Speaker
Um, but yeah, I mean, eventually I got really lucky and stumbled across some guys on Twitter that were, you know, talking about the more order flow auction market theory oriented style of trading, um, was lucky that a couple of those guys kind of took me under their wing and helped me a little bit and, uh, you know, hard work and, and being lucky to be mentored by some really professional traders,
00:06:07
Speaker
Um, you know, kind of pushed me in that direction. Definitely. That's where if if there's any like, you know, ounce of professionalism in me, it comes from the guys that I learned from not it's not from, you know, on my own necessarily. But yeah, when I when I started really learning the auction market theory stuff, it was just like a way to take Something that seems complex and just pure noise, like, you know, lower timeframe price action, all of a sudden it kind of made sense. Why? Why do why does price oscillate, you know, around these two points forever before it finally goes up or down? Right. And just kind of these basic principles. It was just a I call it the light bulb moment, more or less. Right. Where it just kind of markets made a little more sense to me.
00:06:48
Speaker
So before that you were pretty much like a moving average and then Ichimoku guy. So I guess you like, to be honest, I don't really know what Ichimoku really does, but I guess it's like a trend following tool. You can think of it just like moving averages, right? It told me where roughly where I should buy the dip, you know, and that was my style, right? I would buy on one of the lines. Don't even remember what those lines are called anymore. And I would put my stock beyond one of the other lines. And that was my strategy.
00:07:13
Speaker
see. So then you transitioned into being an order flow trader mainly. Yeah, that was a process. It definitely took, you know, probably two years of like really trying to learn and stuff.
00:07:25
Speaker
Um, but yeah, that's, that's where things really clicked for me. And I was able to build a pretty robust lower timeframe trading system. And it's like, you know, I use the same exact logic for all my swing trading and stuff too. It's just on kind of looser parameters with higher timeframes and whatnot, but it's all kind of the same logic.
00:07:44
Speaker
So what is some of the stuff? It gave me good framework to operate from. Sorry to cut you off. but What is some of the stuff that you like look for to enter a trade now?
Trading Strategies and Indicators
00:07:54
Speaker
um So for lower time frame, it's much more of a framework. For higher time frame, it's much more gut feeling because you know reading ah reading order flow on higher time frame is a lot.
00:08:08
Speaker
it's That's more of an art than a science. if I don't know if that makes sense, right? But it's a lot harder to do. So for lower timeframe, first and foremost, always, I wanna know if I'm trading reversion or momentum, because that's gonna inform where am I gonna enter and how am I gonna enter? So if I think price is trending and I wanna go with it, um basically i just buy a pullback into the mean or the view op or the point of control, whatever you wanna call it.
00:08:35
Speaker
You can keep it simple and just call it the mean for the range or the midpoint. um So for for when you want to go with momentum, I normally try to enter, strangely enough, where the most trading volume is taking place um on the pullbacks you know against that. For reversion, when I'm trading a range, it's the exact opposite.
00:08:53
Speaker
i try only to take profit in the areas where other people are trading, and you want to get the fills that are outside of the range, right? That's like the logic of where you trade, how like why you trade, right? Like why do you actually take the risk and put it on is mostly going to be about open interest changes for me. um I've been, a you know, I've done tape reading and I've, you know, done footprint reading and I've done all of it.
00:09:16
Speaker
um The edge with open interest is nowhere near as strong nowadays as it once was back when I was really first starting. to trade with that. i mean, there was a period where the, you know, average person in our space had no idea what open interest was. And that was those were the golden days for me with that stuff.
00:09:32
Speaker
um But yeah, I mean, primarily open interest changes, you know, i would prefer open interest closes as a reason to take trade more often than not, because, you know, the way that I explain it is with ah with when somebody's opening positions, it's a lot harder to know what their intent is. Right. Is this guy truly opening along here? Is he hedging out a position? Is he taking profit on something else or, you know, right? Like. It's not necessarily easy to know what their intent is, but when open interest goes down, it basically means somebody got stopped out, right? It doesn't, ri there's an or they they were forced out of their position in some way, shape or form. There's no real room for, you know, there's i can't really make an error in judgment with that as much, if that makes sense. So that's how I, that's mostly how I do that stuff. There's a little bit of other, you know, little volume pieces here and there and, you know, what's going on with resting orders. But for the viewers, really open interest is the most simple way to do it.
00:10:27
Speaker
Do you only trade Bitcoin that way or do you still trade alts as well?
Altcoins vs. Bitcoin Trading
00:10:32
Speaker
um So I don't really trade alts that much these days. i'm ah I'm an opportunist, you know, at my core, right? So if, you know, eventually alts will be fun to trade again. I know that that will happen. you just Maybe it's 10 years from now. Who knows, right? How long it takes, right? but Hopefully not. Hopefully not that long. Right, right. um So yeah, this is primarily for how I trade the more liquid assets, right? So like benchmark assets normally, but I mean, the logic would work exactly the same on alts, right? For you guys listening, if you guys go and and apply that kind of stuff to alts, it will it should work pretty well for you.
00:11:05
Speaker
Problem with alts is that they're just so much less liquid, right? And more random. And that does mean that some of the, you know, nerdy principles won't always work because sometimes there's just no liquidity there. Or sometimes a guy just like, you know, gets blown out on a trade and then your trade's not going to work because of that. But, um, if you can handle that larger risk with the alts, then the reward is probably going to be there most of the time.
00:11:26
Speaker
But it's the same exact framework. Bitcoin, and you know, the only, the only markets that I would trade differently would be TradFi because you don't have that open interest data with TradFi. I'd have to resolve, you know, I'd have to move much more towards just trading off of like a DOM is probably what I would do if I traded TradFi actively.
00:11:45
Speaker
um But all the logic is the same. It's just, you know, trying to wait for other people to make mistakes and then, you know, exploit them more or less.
Adapting to Market Conditions
00:11:56
Speaker
Do you think the importance of open interest has decreased since ah Bitcoin has been like less of Bitcoin's price discovery, I guess, is now on?
00:12:07
Speaker
traditional, not traditional venues, but like sexes and taxes on or whatever, but like also on CME and through the ETF and maybe options and stuff like that as well. um So I think twofold. One on like the thing that everybody already knows is like kind of the, if everybody knows how to use a tool, it's probably going to be less effective. So just like the general, like, you know, knowledge and, you know, base increasing for everybody knowing what it is, blah, blah. blah That's obviously been the most, you know,
00:12:34
Speaker
That's the most straightforward answer. But the the real answer is actually what you were saying, right? This has probably been happening maybe since 2021, but it really became much more obvious from 2023 on that, um you know, if you've been, if you've traded Bitcoin for a long time, you know that like back in the day, it was just like,
00:12:52
Speaker
You only traded predatory moves. You waited for everyone else to get liquidated and then you positioned, right? Because, you know, what what drove price up and down was perps, right? It was BitMEX, you know, running, you know Arthur running everyone stops. Right. But nowadays, 2023 on, it's much more of a spotlight market. Right.
00:13:08
Speaker
So you might have an instance, you know, and I deal with this all the time where it's like, OK, I just watched some shorts get blown out and I kind of wanted to short anyways. This is probably the region where I want to short. But then you'll all like look over at the tape and I just see the guy on Coinbase just buying like, you know, seven Bitcoin every second.
00:13:26
Speaker
And it's like, you know, no matter how good my order flow setup is, if that guy is just going to do a buy into me, my shorts not going to work, you know? So yeah, over the past couple of years, adapting to the spot flows and like essentially the suits coming in, it's it's been really hard. But also, i mean, don't really have an option. It's an adapt or die kind of thing for sure.
00:13:46
Speaker
what What are some and the of the right ways in which you have adapted and like, people probably this is a trend that will continue in the future. do you have any any view on or any plans for what are you going to do to deal with that in the future?
00:14:02
Speaker
um Yeah, I can say a few different things on this. um First, like based off what I just
Professionalism and Learning from Mistakes
00:14:08
Speaker
said, like just because I get a concrete trade setup with perps doesn't mean that it's valid, right? I have to respect what spot flows are doing.
00:14:15
Speaker
Back you know maybe five years ago, if I saw one of those kind of you know flow setups on BitMEX, you know or maybe maybe it was Binance back then, I would have just sent it and not even second-guessed it. Nowadays, you have to second-guess because the spot flows.
00:14:29
Speaker
Yeah. um Another thing I could say would be from an entry standpoint, um if you're ah any of the OG Bitcoin traders, like I just said earlier, they're going to prioritize their entries around when other people get stopped out or liquidated and that whole don't diddle in the middle kind of lesson, right? If there's a range, I want to wait for the lows to get swept before I buy or vice versa on the highest of short.
00:14:48
Speaker
um Because this is not a perp led market anymore and because it's so much more of these kind of passive spot flows that are leading us up and down, you can't wait for, you can't always wait for sweeps. You have to know when to front run the sweep and when not to.
00:15:04
Speaker
Um, and more often than not, you're actually front running the sweep these days because really only, really only when there's just like no momentum at all and in the market and there's a lot of open interest coming in, are you going to be getting the sweeps reliably? Right? Like you need that lack like lack of momentum for the stops to really be violent that, that way. Um,
00:15:25
Speaker
Could say a ah couple other things, but that's that's really it. Right. You like you respect the spot flows, understand that, you know, for years, everybody said we want it to be the S&P and now it's becoming the S&P and everyone's crying about it. Right. Well, this is just what's going to happen. We're just going to slow like we're going to turn into the super cycle assets slowly, but like not in the way that people envisioned it, where you're going to get rich from it because it's so slow. Right. um But yeah, that's that's more or less what I would say.
00:15:51
Speaker
Was ah like December, for example, a good um example, I guess, for more water flow driven market type when we didn't have as much liquidity and we were just like barring up and down the whole time pretty much?
Hedging and Capital Efficiency
00:16:04
Speaker
um Yes. So i would say that for... i need to look at my chart even before i even know what I'm saying here. I think that...
00:16:15
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. So December we were bottomed out by then. I had to look, like I didn't remember when the 80K low came through. So once the 80K low came through, then you like, yeah, that's pretty valid what you just said. You would, you could trade a lot more on, um honestly, I was having the time of my life at the end of December. i only traded the last two weeks and then I went into vacation mode, but that was such a good environment for me because you're right. like you're You're getting quick responses from like very like simple ah old school workflow setups. And the volatility was so high because the books were so thin that Bitcoin would actually move 4% on an intraday trade for me. Right now it's moving like 1%, which sucks by contrast.
00:16:55
Speaker
Um, I mean, there's always, there's always a double-edged sword kind of argument because when markets are less liquid, it does also mean if you fuck up that you're a lot more likely to you know, it's going to be more painful, more likely. Right. Um, cause you're not going to be able to get a good exit and maybe you're going to deal with slippage, maybe price moves further, et cetera. Um, but yeah, I mean, December was a pretty good environment for day trading. Uh, definitely because like you said, it was just.
00:17:22
Speaker
trying, you know, either Trump would tweet something or, you know, somebody would just get stopped out, any sort of kind of thing that would make the markets move and it would move a lot further than we were kind of used to it moving. So that was, that was great.
00:17:34
Speaker
How long did it take you to like master all of these order flow principles or like use them to your advantage? Well, first thing I would say is that I don't I don't view that I have ever reached that. And I think that going through life, um if you want to if you want to survive in a hyper competitive environment, it's not really wise to ever tell yourself you figured it out or you mastered it or anything because it's going to bring complacency out of you. Right.
00:18:02
Speaker
um So i always i always keep myself humble with that kind of stuff first and foremost. But um I mean, nowadays you can learn these things a lot easier because there is actually good educational sources
Emotional Management and Trading Psychology
00:18:14
Speaker
out there. When I was learning this, I had to learn either from TradFi futures traders which they're all old and boring to listen to, right? And their videos are like seven hours long. um And then i had I was lucky that I had the social resource of some of my friends. um But I mean, nowadays you can learn it a lot faster. For me, I'd probably say it took me at least a year and a half to really get things maybe down and start like really feeling like I knew what I was doing.
00:18:42
Speaker
But again, um i mean, I maybe in some regards, I got to speed run some of the things because I was mentored by like prop traders and stuff. Yeah. What were some of the biggest ah lessons that you got from that? I'm also curious, like what were since you have such a long trading career, what were like some of the biggest mistakes you've made that like or just things that you did that you learned from a lot?
00:19:05
Speaker
I definitely have some bad mistakes. We can talk about that forever. um so you just want general general lessons or or you want me to focus on the mistakes? um I think maybe you can you can do like one or two anecdotes or whatever and then just like talk a bit about what you what you learned from that.
00:19:22
Speaker
Well, i not everybody necessarily envisions me this way, but professionalism as a trader actually is really important. And that's something that I learned from my prop trader friends that, you know, they treated it like they were running a business and, you know, you really care about your, you know, expenses and efficiency, capital efficiency and, you know,
00:19:41
Speaker
not being lazy about actually, you know, reviewing and more and more importantly, facing your mistakes. Right. If I trade great, it's really easy for me to do a review for the day and say, hey, I did good. Right. But the days where you do poorly, you have to still do that same level of review. So just like discipline and professionalism are probably the main things that I got from other people.
00:20:00
Speaker
um As far as the mistakes go, it's more or less, you know, an endless list. Obviously, i think I've been lucky in some regards and my good decisions have definitely outweighed my bad ones, but I've had some really, really bad ones where I you know was wondering what
Execution Strategies and Trade Management
00:20:17
Speaker
am I gonna do next week? um I've definitely come across that a few times. So if you just like, basically, if you look at the Bitcoin chart,
00:20:24
Speaker
Um, you know, from, you know, 2017 2020, every time it went down, I lost a whole lot of money. Right. It was really only in the the days of 2021 and 2022 and, you know, more modern days where I learned to actually defend myself from drawdown and like hedge my portfolio properly and stuff. So honestly, anytime you look at the chart and it went down a lot back in the day, I probably got clapped. Like that's just the most honest, uh, honest answer.
00:20:52
Speaker
So what what did you do to protect yourself from that?
00:20:57
Speaker
Um, like moving forward after i you you mean like in the later days? Yeah. Um, so mostly it's just going like one to one on, on futures or perps against my, ah against my stack.
00:21:12
Speaker
Um, so right. If you have two Bitcoin, you go in short two Bitcoin, you know, you wait for you to get invalidated more often than not. Like if you, if you took every hedge I've ever taken in my life and you put them all, you know, on the same spreadsheet that most of them are losses for sure. But it's that one or two, right, where i maybe I have four hedges that are, you know, a scratch or I lose on them. But then the one hedge that works out really well, um I would probably say the November 2021 hedge is like that's, you know, in in October and November of 2021, hedged like three or four times. And then I had the one at 68K that like was the hedge that I, you know, it worked out for me. And then when Bitcoin traded down all the way to forty you know k or whatever, um you know, i was just in this safety position. So here's how I would explain it, right? if
00:22:02
Speaker
um in a really simple way, right? If you're if you own a lot of an asset and it goes up a lot and you say, this is probably extended, it could maybe pull back from here, you go and you short against your stack, right? And then from there, you decide if you're right or wrong on your defensive position. If you're wrong, you close out the hedge and you go back to being spot long, right? If you're right, then you make the decision, do I want to remain hedged and just stay one-to-one or do I sell some of my portfolio off?
00:22:29
Speaker
So in 2021, which is one of my better you know defensive trades in my life, I i went i shorted on the futures at 68K, which would have been 66K on spot at the time.
00:22:41
Speaker
And as we traded down towards 60K, I started selling my Bitcoin between 63 and 59. So I ended up going net short, which normally I would say you don't do, but this is just one of those moments where I was like actually confident that the cycle was over and that you know it was worth you know, really locking everything in. So that's that's how I would explain that, right? You put the hedge on and then you kind of decide if you're going to hold on to your spot assets or not after the fact. But the the hedge gives you the breathing room to, it gives you more time to react, right? So if price goes up and you decide that I want to sell my spot here, you don't necessarily have a lot of time to react. But hedging gives you more time to think over the period of, you know, I could actually take a week or two and digest it and think about it instead of just being like,
00:23:25
Speaker
You know, I've been in these markets forever. Selling my Bitcoin for that first time was actually really difficult for me, right? I had never sold any Bitcoin before then. um So I think that the hedge, I wouldn't have been able to sell my Bitcoin with without the hedge. It gave me the like the comfort and the confidence, all that kind of stuff.
00:23:41
Speaker
Mm-hmm. I think it's a very interesting like psychological perspective as well because I was just thinking what the benefit is of like hedging over just like selling your spot itself. Because I've never really done that before. I've just ah accumulated, spotted and then sold it and bought it again or whatever.
00:23:58
Speaker
and um I definitely get the feeling that like as as it moves up, you kind of don't want to sell it because ah you you feel like it will go up more. And then like if if you believe in an asset, you kind of want to like keep a a spot stack of it. But I think the the hedging
Crypto vs. Traditional Finance
00:24:14
Speaker
part is very interesting a very interesting way to to deal with that like psychologically, just to prevent yourself from drawing down as much as you did every time that Bitcoin basically went. 100%. And I learned that lesson because there were so many times where Bitcoin went down to 50% and I lost 50% of my Bitcoin worth. Right. So so many times of losing all that value, I learned to look to protect it. It's great that you brought the psychological side because that's the thing that I focus on the most. It helps you stay mentally strong and confident and come from a you know position. and You know, you want to come from a place of strength. You don't like when people are making decisions when they're underwater, right, a position of weakness, you're going to make worse decisions. You want to come from a position of strength.
00:24:54
Speaker
The more the other side that's not psychological was it is more capital efficient. Right. Like, you know, if you sat in Bitcoin for years, you know, it's different depending on where everyone lives. Right. But you're probably gonna to pay tax on it. Right. So normally it was just cheaper for me to to open up a hedge and um be wrong on the hedge as opposed to selling the Bitcoin and then having to pay cap gains on it. Because what happens when you sell the Bitcoin, you have pay cap gains, and then you're wrong and you have to buy your Bitcoin back? Well, now you have less Bitcoin than you started with.
00:25:23
Speaker
um So it's really, yeah, it's about capital efficiency and not giving all your money away to the government.
Current Market Views and Future Outlook
00:25:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. I've also never thought about that really, but that also makes a lot of sense that hedging is like better than paying taxes, I guess.
00:25:38
Speaker
Well, especially because most of your hedges are going to be wrong a lot of the time. So it's yeah a write off, you know, against my cap gains at the end of it all.
00:25:47
Speaker
I'm curious before, because you also mentioned that you, um, like, I don't think you explicitly mentioned it, but like journaling and stuff like that, or like reviewing your, your trades. I'm i'm curious about that process for you. Like what, what do you look for explicitly to, to, um, improve there?
00:26:07
Speaker
um So it changed over time. um I always want to talk about like kind of a starting point. When I came into this first, there was none of these journal journaling tools that you see nowadays didn't exist, right? So it was all like, um I used Excel on my own manually. And then the only application that I ever like but like paid for was Edgewonk, which honestly, I didn't really like Edgewonk that much because none of it was automated. It was far too much of it I had to do manually anyway. So,
00:26:32
Speaker
um Guys, don't take for granted the fact that you have all these automated tools nowadays that can save you so much time and energy. You don't you want to be the guy that does review without it being the guy that does so much review that it ends up being mentally exhausting for you. And it's like, i don't even have the energy to trade anymore because I just did review. Right. You don't. So.
00:26:51
Speaker
the The proper answer is um i use the automated journals to track all the core stats, I don't have to track the open entry, you know, what was my size, you know, when did I close it? You don't have to track any of that stuff because the APIs will do it for you. So mostly what I actually manually journal is just the kind of emotional states, you know,
00:27:09
Speaker
This week I started out trading really well. Last week I traded really poorly, right? So that's that's the main thing that I would spend the most time on is to kind of thinking about, you know, why did I have a bullish bias when I should have a bear bias, you know, for example, or why when I thought I was wrong on that trade, did I Martin Gale on it and try to just, you know, turn it into a W even though i should have just taken the loss right away. You know, I spend time on those kind of things morea more often than not like the what was going on in my head and where should it my head, you know, how else should have been thinking at the time.
00:27:41
Speaker
What are some of the the patterns that you noticed there, if you can share some? um That's a difficult one to answer just because I don't necessarily have any, any like, kind of pre-fire questions or, you know, answers for you lined up. Let me see. um I mean, I definitely used to deal with the whole kind of tilt where like one mistake kind of leads you to make a worse mistake, which, you know, then all a sudden you're just in this terrible place. Nowadays, i don't really struggle with that as much because if I just like don't trade for a week or trade poorly for a week, I just don't really beat myself up about it as much as I used to.
00:28:18
Speaker
um me see. That's a difficult one that you because it's kind of open-ended. It's kind of hard to answer that one a little bit. How did you like deal with the tilt one better now Or how ah do you deal with that better now?
00:28:32
Speaker
Just from like more experience and more, i guess, confidence in yourself? um Yeah, so it's definitely those things. And I mean, i hope this doesn't sound obnoxious, but like I've kind of proven to my i've proven to myself that I can do it too, right? Because I've already...
00:28:48
Speaker
I've already been through such hard times and made it out. So that definitely gives me that just confidence in myself. Also, I did teach myself a lot of this stuff, too. So I basically i have a ridiculous self belief that if I am interested in something, I can learn it and do it. The key is I have to be interested in because if I don't care about something, then I'm not going to put the effort in. but for For me, i love trading so much from the first days that I just didn't have any issues with motivation ever, really. um you know um ah Like I was said, almost like pretty much like 11 plus years in now and still wake up and day trade Bitcoin and stuff. Yeah.
00:29:25
Speaker
I can definitely relate to that. Like it's it's always way easier if you're interested in something to spend a lot of time into. For sure. if you're That's what like a lot of education and stuff has wrong nowadays, right? It's like, you know, you're you just do things because you have to not because you want to.
00:29:39
Speaker
hmm.
00:29:42
Speaker
Have you ever, like, ah I guess nowadays probably not so much anymore since you also actively decide against doing it a bit, but have you ever felt a bit more like FOMO when you didn't trade alts?
00:29:54
Speaker
When you see something, like, running on the timeline or everyone is, like, buying something or whatever? how do you deal with that? um So I definitely don't have any issues with that nowadays. um even like Even if my primary asset moves up or down a lot, you know i've missed I've missed so many trades now that I've become dead to the idea of missing a trade.
00:30:12
Speaker
i When people are newer and then they see that basket of alts that is just like going up a lot, I understand like you you basically cannot escape the FOMO, so you might as well just like participate in it and learn your lessons along the way, right? Learn your lessons that Most of the time when you're getting shilled to buy these coins, right? You really have no business, you know, shilling it or buying it, excuse me. um You know, are you borrowing conviction from other people? You know, these kind of things, right? If you have conviction truly on your own in altcoin or whatever, and you think it's going to go up, then send it, right? But just try not to get stuck, you know, stuck in the social media loop of thinking you need to be like these other people and stuff, right? Social media is...
00:30:56
Speaker
a great tool for traders because it can be ah like, I met so many friends through it and I was able to learn a lot, you know, but also for the the average person, it's probably one of the worst things ever for you as a trader because of how it negatively influences you, makes you think that you're worse than you are, right? The average person's perception of what good performance is, is so much, you know, so is unrealistic, right? yeah Because people think it's like, I just clocked in and made $300,000 a day like it was nothing. you know like that's you know The social media version of trading is just not remotely realistic.
00:31:32
Speaker
I feel like it's quite difficult to deal with that, especially maybe now it's not as much because nothing is really going on. But when the market is going up, everyone is all of a sudden making money and making a lot of money. And there's so many ways and you can't even keep up with everything. It just seems like you're always underperforming, but you don't really realize that it's kind of like normal Instagram or whatever. You just see like a highlight reel of the trades that people make and not really like everything else going Yeah, perfect life on their beach.
00:32:02
Speaker
Yeah. Not all yeah the losses or... anything like that What I would say when when the market heats up and you feel FOMO to chase things, people should ask themselves, are they at least, are they chasing are they chasing a whole bunch of things are they chasing something, right? Because when the market's hot, you need to chase something because otherwise you're not going to make money, right? Even if it's Bitcoin that you chase, right? Chase something. but You just want to be don't want you don't want to be the guy that's chasing everything. Right. It's that, you know, expression. He who chases two rabbits catches neither. Right. If you're the guy that just logs on Twitter and is like, oh I'm going to go chase this thing today. You're always going to be multiple steps behind the people that win. Right. So.
00:32:43
Speaker
When the markets are hot, you have maybe ah a little bit of healthy FOMO that makes you like motivate and get motivated to get out there and, you know, make your money. But there's a difference between that and feeling like you need to follow everybody. Or if, you know, if like, like, for example, hype just ripped. Right. And I have a couple of friends that made a bunch on hype and I didn't make a single dollar on it. Right. um I don't I'm not worried at all about the fact that hype went up like, i don't know, like 30 percent. aren't it It was a good run. good trade, right? Uh, I'm not worried even the slightest, you know, cause it's like what, when, when you start to feel FOMO about hype going up right now, ask yourself why do you care? Because you should have caught the trade or do you care because you think it's going to go to a hundred dollars, right? Like if you think it's going to go to a hundred dollars, you're probably, you know, doing it wrong. Cause that's not really that realistic, right? If you're mad yourself cause you had the trade set up and you just didn't click buy that's, that's totally different. Right.
00:33:36
Speaker
Um, But yeah, just try to, ah honestly, there there is no answer for how to deal with the FOMO. For all of us, it's going to be with enough time in markets, you're either going to learn that or that skill or not of not caring, right? And most people that stick around and survive for a long time, they just, you know, it becomes second nature to just kind of ignore some of the the hype that's around you all the time.
00:34:04
Speaker
a hype-coded answer. But then I want to talk a bit about execution with you because ah you mentioned before that you're an active terminal user. So I was curious about how you use the terminal for yourself in your training, in your order flow training.
00:34:22
Speaker
What are some of the tools or order types or whatever that you use? I don't use anything that's super complex, to be honest. So hopefully it's not disappointing for everybody. I don't use a lot the spread or swarm or anything. I mostly use I mostly use like, you know, chase orders a lot. I use a lot of resting orders.
00:34:38
Speaker
So normally when i normally when I enter, you know, this is for day trading, I'll use a lot of market orders to enter and then I'll exit passively. Back in the day, I used to really advocate for entering passively and exiting. That's the limit orders for the nerds in the chat. Right. um Nowadays, because we're so much more liquid and we we have decent rotations, you know, back there was periods where I would trade like 0.6% rotations on Bitcoin. You need to be limited and limit out to have a chance of making money on that. Nowadays, there's so much more wiggle room where I think you can be a taker on the entry. um no And more often than not, I actually would really advocate for being a taker on entries because if mar if if if you went along and it does some sort of big dip where people got stopped out, right, the time that you're going to have to react and get good competitive fills on that wick is, you know, you got seconds. So you shouldn't be fucking around with trying to check do chase orders or I'm going put my limit order right below the wick or something like just take be a taker. I just get in right at the opportune moment.
00:35:39
Speaker
I do think on exits, though, you should try to save some money. Right. And use limit orders. There's really no reason not to, especially because yeah I'll use the salsa tequila quote. Right. You're looking for the unlikely, you know, entries and the likely exits. Right. So if you're targeting a likely exit, it's super easy to use resting limit orders or chase orders to get out.
00:36:00
Speaker
um But that's really mostly what I do, right? I use, um you know, I don't, I'm not like the one of these guys that trades 1% of my account as my stop loss. I use fixed sizing regardless um of how far my stop is from the price. and don't really, that's something that you guys will want to hear. I don't really rely on hard stops ever.
00:36:19
Speaker
I do, if i ever if I actually do calculations around position size, which I really never do, I would base it off of the hard stop. But the goal, and I learned this from the BitMEX days,
00:36:30
Speaker
Because if you if you let yourself get stopped back in the day, it meant you were going double your stop loss a lot of the time, right? Because of slippage. um So I learned like, you know, let me just use simple numbers. If I'm short at $6 and I have my stop at eight and it's trickling up and it's seven, I'm probably just going to close it out at seven. And instead of letting myself take a full stop at $8, for example, right? So I call it like manual and hard stops. Yeah.
00:36:56
Speaker
That's not something that's actually baked into in silico terminal, but it is something that, you know, i use the hard stop obviously for it. And then that one in one, you know, one in 100 trades where things go horribly for me, that hard stop saves me.
00:37:09
Speaker
um But normally I aim to not let that get hit, but that's more or less the TLDR of execution, right? I mark it in. um I use a lot of resting orders and chase orders to get out. Mm-hmm.
00:37:20
Speaker
If you guys are trading altcoins, maybe you want to be a little bit more careful with the market orders, right? Because I'm talking about Bitcoin and I can, you know, you don't to worry at all about if I market it by two Bitcoin and I'm going slip the book, for example. Right. But if you do two Bitcoin of size in an altcoin or book, you're probably going to slip it. So do take that into account.
00:37:39
Speaker
So instead of um having ah a stop loss most of the time, you have like a hard stop loss ah at ah at a certain point. and then ah But before it reaches that, if the position goes against you, basically just like mark it out when it's a bit more liquid still and you won't get slipped as much. And that's how you like exit the position. I do try to exit with limits, but yeah, you're right. Sometimes I just say, fuck it. I'm going to just mark it out and just like, you know, take my loss and move on. Right. I'm tired of being an underwater trade or whatever.
00:38:08
Speaker
um Yeah, so for the, that's how the hard stock plays out. For the manual stop, I mean, I do kind of have like a price point, but I also don't believe like levels, you know, it's like if if price trades to this X level, does it mean I'm wrong on my trade? It doesn't necessarily mean I'm right or wrong. So more often than not, my invalidations are going to be based off of what's going on with flows. So like I was talking about earlier, you know, if I take a ah short and then I see that Coinbase is just like he's clearly firing off a TWOP right now, I'm not I'm probably not going to stay in that short. Right. Because that TWOP is going to slowly ruin my trade. um So more often than not, invalidation is going to be flow based or kind of momentum based. Right. If you
00:38:51
Speaker
you know If there's like a ah quick sell-off and I buy into it and the balance that I get is really weak and kind of I can feel it ticking back towards my entry, you know like there's not really a lot of bid liquidity there and you know you know active buyers aren't really stepping in and lifting, it's going to be an invalidation more often than not in that way.
00:39:11
Speaker
Hopefully, that's a good answer. What is like the average duration of a trade like that? um So the market does, i don't actually get to control that. The market does based off how volatile and how much active participation there is. so it does ebb and flow.
00:39:28
Speaker
um When markets are hot, you know, these trades, you know, like on Monday, for example, I had a bunch of trades because Monday was pretty volatile. I had a bunch of trades there. They only took, you know, a couple of minutes to play out. um Granted, you know, that's high volatility and that's right in the middle of New York session where you're getting the most active trading and stuff.
00:39:45
Speaker
the Markets are slower, though. That same trade could take 10 times longer. Right. um And that means that, you know, when when markets are less volatile, it probably means that my, you know, invalidation is going to be closer to price and my target is going to be closer to price, too. Right. Because I just can't swing. I can't trade, you know, if you try to trade a 4% rotation on Bitcoin right now, you're just going to get chopped forever. You're never going to have it move that far. So, yeah, I mean, just the the regime does play a big role in that kind of stuff, because at the end of the day, I don't have control over how liquid, how volatile, how active markets are.
00:40:19
Speaker
You know, if markets are really active, then my trade time can be super low, almost entering the realm of scalps, whether like a couple of minutes. um But, you know, then sometimes that the market, I'll take that same exact setup, you know, two months later and the market's slow and then all it takes two hours. Right. So it's, yeah um there's a big ebb and flow with that for sure.
00:40:37
Speaker
And I don't have any control over that, unfortunately. And when when you were saying before that you're using like fixed size, um do you mean like you're going into every single trade with ah one Bitcoin, for example, instead of like sizing it proportionally to... Yeah, 100%....wherever you would be soft or whatever?
00:40:55
Speaker
to to each their own. And I think when people are starting out, they should be the person that does the, okay, you know, if I take this setup, I should make my ah position size this, you know, based off of the stop loss, right? Like doing the classic position size calculation.
00:41:08
Speaker
People should do that in the early days because it will help them with some discipline. It'll help you not die. You know, it's very easy to just blow your accounts out if you don't practice risk management. um I've been trading for long enough, though, where I don't think about that stuff anymore.
00:41:22
Speaker
I have scaled up and down with my sizing a lot over the years to the point where I kind of know where my sweet spot is, where I like, you know, feel comfortable and don't have that extra anxiety and pressure around them. So I normally operate in in that um in that realm of where I'm comfortable.
00:41:37
Speaker
I had years where I've pushed myself, where I traded a lot bigger. And over the past few years, I've kind of scaled things back with how much of my total capital that I trade with. Back in the day, used to trade with like all my money in you know in one trade, right? you know And I was using leverage to get to that point, not keeping all of my money on the exchange. but I mean, that's when you're starting out, you got to got to be aggressive with things. But nowadays I trade with a much smaller overall percentage, like like 10 to 15 percent of my overall money.
00:42:05
Speaker
um And then that enables me to just sit down on the terminal and just say, i know I've been using the same size recently. This falls in the state. It's a good setup like the other two setups I took. I'm just gonna take the same size and not think about.
00:42:18
Speaker
How much am I going to lose or make if I'm right or wrong? Just focus on the actual, you know, execution of the trade, right? Like focus on the, uh, you know, the inputs and not the outputs kind of argument. I think that's an interesting way to look at it because it seems a little counterintuitive to me that you wouldn't like a base it on the volatility a little bit or something like that. if you're always well I mean, I do like a little bit, right? you know if like I think you know we're not in like a regime where I'm betting on like a lot of trending, but like if we were to rewind back to 2024, 2023, when there was a lot more momentum in Bitcoin, I would probably be inclined to send...
00:42:56
Speaker
you know, position sizing would be maybe more or less the same, but like in terms of percentage of my capital, it would have been larger and I have scaled back with that. But um honestly, it's mostly it's not a practical like maximizing the returns on my trades argument. It's mostly a psychological thing that I just know that if I trade within this position sizing realm, i just it's like a video game to me and I just don't stress it. Whereas as soon as I, if I'm being honest with myself, because I've done this many times, once I start to get into this certain realm of adding in extra zeros and stuff like that to the sizing, all of a sudden it becomes life or death. And it just matters so much when, you know, i need to be focusing on trading effectively and not the outcomes. and Yeah.
00:43:41
Speaker
I think that there's so much emphasis on social media about scaling up, scaling up. I got to get bigger and bigger. And um i I have a bunch of friends that are really successful traders that trade smaller size than me and have no interest in trading bigger. And, um you know, it's just so ah whatever works for you at the end of the day kind of thing, you know?
00:44:00
Speaker
hmm.
00:44:03
Speaker
Do you um do any other stuff in crypto apart from autoflow trading? I guess a little bit of swing trading, but do you do anything on chain or any like perpdex farming or stuff like that?
00:44:14
Speaker
Not really. That stuff doesn stuff doesn't really appeal to me. These days, I pretty much only trade Bitcoin. I used to love trading alts. you know if If I was bullish on Bitcoin, I would go and look at what alts are good and I would look to be long them. right or you know i didn' I didn't really play the downside as much. so i didn't really short alts, but I basically just used this simple script of you know, all coins are leveraged to Bitcoin. And if I'm bullish Bitcoin, then I need to be long on the strong alts that that stuff works so well for so many years. um But these days, it's just um it's not that it doesn't work anymore. There's just not, you know, it's not the right regime. There's no opportunity for that because there's no real big alts.
00:44:51
Speaker
Um, but no, I mean, I've traded on Dex is here and there and, you know, but I've never been a points farmer kind of person. Um, I obviously regret, you know, not doing that with like hyper liquid, for example, because I got shilled by so many of my smart friends told me I needed to get on there early. And I just, you know, I'm an, I'm an old man at heart when it comes to that stuff. In some regards, it's actually important because in crypto over the years, there's all there's been a shiny new thing thrown at us every day for years on end. So I got desensitized to where it's like I just ignore the new thing.
00:45:25
Speaker
But um you need to know like when to when to pay attention and when not to. And sometimes I get it right. Sometimes I get it wrong. I got Hyperliquid wrong where I mean, I traded it here and there. But I mean, you know some of the airdrops that my friends got were ridiculous, you know? Yeah.
00:45:42
Speaker
I can definitely relate to the mindset of like the shiny new thing always appearing. i also ah looked at Hyperliquid the same way when it first appeared. Because so when I first... Well, not when it first appeared, but when I first saw it, it was like... don't really know. Maybe like beginning of 2024, think.
00:46:01
Speaker
i think And I was definitely in this mindset of like, you know, this is not that great. Because back then it was like a little, a lot less liquid. It had like a lot huge wicks and stuff like that. And also all the other perp decks that were there before, like DYDX and GMX and all of that stuff wasn't really that impressive. So was just thinking this is just going to be like the same thing again. And it's not worth to pay that much attention to it.
00:46:28
Speaker
Yeah, somehow Hyperliquid did an incredible job of attracting liquidity and active participation and they ended up becoming a great platform. But you're right, like I viewed these viewed that in the same light where any of these platforms could end up just like the perp decks before them where no people only trade them for points and then once the point system is over, it just dies, right? Hyperliquid has clearly proven that they're not going to fall into that category, that they're probably going to survive. Yeah.
00:46:57
Speaker
But yeah, it's the past. I guess the past isn't equal. You know, the future is probably the lesson that you and I need to learn a little bit with that one. It's definitely made me like look at new stuff a bit more again, because sometimes I feel like, especially if you're in crypto for a long time, you can become a bit jaded or like pessimistic on on things because sir we have to admit that most things that come out of crypto are pretty trashy and pretty useless.
00:47:24
Speaker
So you you still got to keep that little bit of of optimism that still for sometimes every every couple of years there's like one interesting thing that is actually worth of spending some time on. I actually did think of one of you asked me if I did any of the on chain or kind of experimented. One of the things that I actually did really dip my toes in was defy. Um, I missed defy summer cause I was on vacation, but I was getting spammed nonstop by my friends, like about how cool compound was and all like the protocols that existed back then. I think wifi came out in summer too.
00:47:54
Speaker
um So that was one of the only times where I really, really enjoyed the on-chain stuff and kind of went further with it was when DeFi winter rolled around. I bet really hard on that before it was obvious. um Honestly, I called the DeFi. i So I went long on basically every blue blue chip DeFi between September and October of 2020. And if you guys look at the charts, it wasn't charts didn't look good then, to be honest. I was buying after they had sold off from their hype in the summertime.
00:48:23
Speaker
I got lucky and it worked out and all those things went up. But that was like my Kingmaker trade, right? If that tree didn't work out for me, I might have had to reevaluate my career, honestly. um So yeah, I'm really, you know, nowadays nobody cares about DeFi because it gets hacked every day and people think it's kind of a scam. But when DeFi first came out, it was a big deal for us because People had talked about these kind of protocols like that for years in crypto and they had never worked. So this is the first time ever where they worked.
00:48:50
Speaker
And um it was a wealth generating event for people that were focused up. So ah crypto will eventually, that's, you know, people are always wondering what's wrong with crypto nowadays.
00:49:01
Speaker
We need another DeFi kind of event where there's a piece of technology or idea that comes out in our space that we can believe in again. And when that happens, then optimism will maybe return and the bid will come with it too. So we need people ask me that kind of question. I just say like, we need some smart nerd to come out with the new the new thing for us. Right. And then we'll all follow it.
00:49:25
Speaker
I feel that it has it has been a little disappointing in that regard. when you like This cycle compared to the last one. Last cycle everyone still believed, you know, with DeFi and NFTs and all of that stuff, even if it looks a bit stupid from looking looking back at it now, but like everyone was really on board and thought like, hey, we're gonna replace ah everything and this is the future. And this cycle has been... like what did we get? I guess Hyperliquid, Perp Dexes and Pampfun meme coins were like the the two big things which also like created a lot of wealth I guess or extracted a lot of wealth too.
00:50:01
Speaker
um but weren't really seen in the same light. I mean, Hyperliquid is maybe a little bit in that in that's niche as well, I guess, where it's like the future of all of finance. Everything is going to be brought on chain. Everything is going to be traded through that. and Yeah, 100%. And maybe we can build on that somehow to like... Although I don't know why anybody would want to trade equities on Hyperliquid personally. I mean, I would much rather trade TradFi in the TradFi markets. But um yeah, I mean, if if you're a crypto native, I guess some people would gravitate that direction.
00:50:30
Speaker
I actually like it, even though I know that the experience isn't the best because um I've tried to make an interactive brokers account before. And I kind of just gave up because they asked like too many questions. Like the KYC stuff, it's just like, it was just so many, so many, i don't know, basically they asked for my birth certificate or whatever, like pretty much. Yeah, they they do the full rectal scan but to get you on the platform and The other thing too, is a lot of the interface on those platforms are terrible. If you, any large brokerage, um, and I use like pretty much all of them, their, their interfaces are terrible compared to something like in silico turmoil, for example, where it's like pretty obvious where the buttons are that I'm looking for, you know, yeah if you want to go and use a new brokerage, you're going to have to learn where the buttons are at. You might even have to ask Google or AI, like where, where do I click buy? Cause it's not even always obvious, you know, they're just poorly designed platforms.
00:51:24
Speaker
Yeah, definitely also like just like once you get very used to the terminal, it's it's very hit's annoying to to use anything else. Even when I tried all of these new perp decks, it's just ah really not the the same without like shitting the old product too much, but it's just a lot more convenient to to do it that way.
00:51:46
Speaker
What else did I want to ask? um Yeah, I guess like there there is some demand for for ah stocks and commodities on chain with like silver and stuff like that being traded a lot. And it's just easier if you're in crypto already is like just to deposit some money in on Hyperliquid and you're ready to go Yeah, there's a little bit too much... um What's the word I'm looking for? Like, it's a little bit too, ah like, it's not easy enough for somebody to just move their money to TradFi, right? There's like a process. And normally it'll take days to be ready and stuff too. Bank transfers are slow.
00:52:20
Speaker
um It's just not a smooth enough kind of thing. But for me, i I started there. So it was not, you know, not that big of a deal for me. I also kind of... After the 2021, um, you know, bear market kind of came through, I, I went into a kind of a diversification stage where I moved a lot of stuff over back up to the boomer markets.
00:52:40
Speaker
Um, it wasn't because i didn't believe in Bitcoin or anything like that. just because if you you, you trade for long enough, you're gonna lose a bunch of money here and there. and you learn to like, so you know, you know, we call it cockroach mode and and CT, right. You gotta design your portfolio so that when things go poorly, you don't get killed.
00:52:59
Speaker
Yeah. um Do you have any views on like the the current or like longer longer term market views on on crypto maybe like this year?
00:53:10
Speaker
or are you just like focused on on day trading and don't really care about any longer term narratives or anything like that? um Well, with any of the higher time frame stuff, it enters into the realm of, you know,
00:53:23
Speaker
guessing. um i love to guess, though, because when I when I try to guess about stuff, it does help me react when the time comes. So if I said, i think we're going to pull back, well, when the pullback comes, I'm going to be, you know, less likely to be a pussy about it. Right.
00:53:37
Speaker
um i What would I say? So for my higher time frame views are that um I have not given up on Bitcoin in any way. I do think that it will continue to be a a good asset. What I will say though is that you know a certain point it has to trade up in the face of equities and metals doing what they're doing because every month that goes by where Bitcoin doesn't show strength in the face of... you know It has permission to go up right as far as I'm concerned.
00:54:05
Speaker
on People that, you know, the large money allocator, you know, players of the world, right? Like, why would they buy Bitcoin if it doesn't go up? You know, like some some people will make the sovereign wealth argument and that's valid, right? The idea that I can move my money around. Yeah, I don't diminish. You know, I don't like I appreciate that. Right. It's not to diminish that. But at the end of the day, what anything I'm buying, i want to go up.
00:54:29
Speaker
So if if I own something, it doesn't go up. There's no reason to own it. um So I do think eventually every quarter that goes by where Bitcoin is weak is going to hurt it in the long term from a... Because we we want the passive flows. We want all the, you know, old people to passively buy this stuff slowly, right? We want to spot TWOPs. That's what makes us go up.
00:54:51
Speaker
So I do I do have a little bit of concern in the back of my mind, like every quarter that goes by if we don't trade up and i that's my job is I allocate money for this fund. Right. Like, why would I choose Bitcoin over you know silver or literally anything right now? Right. um So, yeah, I don't I don't have like a whole lot of you know crazy thoughts. That's just more or less what I would say that.
00:55:13
Speaker
um I want to see Bitcoin prove itself in the not so distant future. If we have another, you know, if 2026 is like last year where it underperforms again, there will be a certain point where I will rebalance my port because Bitcoin is the largest holdings in my port. And, um you know, I...
00:55:30
Speaker
Luckily, I had other holdings that balanced its shitty performance out, but I'm not going to sit in Bitcoin forever you know if it doesn't go up again, basically. So I'm playing it by ear. I don't have a concrete. if i If it doesn't trade to this level, I'm going to close it. I don't necessarily know exactly what I'm looking for.
00:55:47
Speaker
um And I would probably just rotate it over into TradFi if that was the case. but um Yeah, that's that's kind of where I'm at. Slowly waiting to see if Bitcoin can show you know some signs of life over the next couple of months. And if not, then i I'm probably not going to abandon day trading it. i So I have thought about this a lot.
00:56:07
Speaker
um But from like a portfolio management, like I won't keep actively buying Bitcoin. you know I haven't actively bought Bitcoin in a while now. um all my All my extra, you know, Trading profits, just they just go to TradFi. Strangely enough, my trading profits come from crypto and then go to TradFi, which is maybe a little bit of a weird way to do it, but that's how that's how we're set up right now.
00:56:28
Speaker
I guess it's a little bit like a theta decay from like like an option where as long as the longer the time goes by where it doesn't really do anything, it's kind of bearish, especially as we see everything else going up. Like it's a little concerning that gold is like moving in a way and Bitcoin is just- So if equities were in a bear market and metals were going down, then it wouldn't matter.
00:56:49
Speaker
But because of the fact that other assets are trading up the way they are, you you can't deny the fact that Bitcoin's underperformance, you know, It's going to leave a bad taste in people's mouth eventually, basically.
00:57:02
Speaker
But I think we also have to keep in mind that ah Bitcoin and crypto in general is very reflexive because I felt the same way about ETH for a long time. like um Before it went up last year, I thought it was kind of bad, to be honest.
00:57:14
Speaker
But we saw how how soon that can change again. 100%. It did hit another all-time high, right? So it's like it it can definitely happen quite fast if the the narrative is back, if the momentum comes back and whatever.
00:57:27
Speaker
Yeah. If you, one big green candle on Bitcoin would change everybody's outlooks, right? If we just traded up from, what are we at? Like 80, we're at 90 If we just traded up to 105 in one candle, everybody would say we're going 180 K tomorrow. You know, everybody would change their tune.
00:57:43
Speaker
Um, yeah, it's the, it's probably the most reflexive asset in the world in that way. Yeah. Um, So I don't disagree with you that things could change at any moment. And I'm always I've I'm clinging on to hope. Right. And I honestly, if I'm being honest, I have to cling on to hope a little bit because it's my second or it's my largest holding in my port. So at a certain point, I got to just, you know, I got to pray.
00:58:04
Speaker
I mean, it's not, it's not, uh, I don't have that much Bitcoin, but I'm still like in crypto. I'm like my, my, my job, my life, whatever, everything is in crypto. So I'm also clanging on to to, hope and then believing that we can, we're all going to make it in in one way or another. I'm not too worried about it, man. I think, I think everything's fine. Honestly, uh, all the negativity and stuff is like, it's all real. It's all comes from a real place, you know, it's all justified, but also,
00:58:32
Speaker
How do I word this? You know, that's like one of the perfect kind of things to to go viral or to be to pop up on your feet is people just like misery. So I think that on some some way, it's maybe, I don't know, maybe the audience will hate me for saying this, but in some regard, it feels blown out of proportion because everybody just...
00:58:52
Speaker
Everybody just sent the call option on memes and thought that that was going to be what worked for them, right? But this cycle, we had a lot of things. You know you said Hyperliquid was a fantastic opportunity. Nowadays, nobody thinks of Solana as being a good asset, but Solana from 2023 whatever it was, the end or the beginning of excuse me that was a you know incredible asset, right? It went from to um so there's been so much opportunity it's just not been it's not been favorable for the the trench side of things.
00:59:25
Speaker
I think, yeah, you were kind of talking about that a little bit earlier, you know, how Pump Fun affected things, you know, the ability to just make a million coins, maybe not good for us. Also, the the way that the new coins on the VC side of things played out, right, where it was just this... massive, uh, we're going to keep the supply low and the fully diluted value high, and we're going to dump on you. And you know, we're going to do that on finance over and over again. you know, that stuff, that stuff wasn't as much of a problem back in the day. Right. When new coins used to go up, you know, yeah at least, at least they would go up for a little bit. Um, so
01:00:01
Speaker
I think that you need the powers that be to shift away from the centralized exchanges maybe so that they don't just like have complete control over what coins exist and what don't and you know what gets listed etc.
01:00:13
Speaker
I mean after all even with all the bearishness we're still at ninety k which is ah in comparison to years before and whatever a pretty good price and we would all be happy about that in the past so it's it's not really not as bad as as it might seem sentiment wise.
01:00:27
Speaker
Yeah I agree.
01:00:31
Speaker
Do you have any finishing training or life advice after 11 years of training that you want to to give people? and mean i speak on this stuff constantly, so there's a million things I could say, but...
01:00:48
Speaker
Maybe the best thing I could say is just going through this whole experience and having the humility the whole way through to know that you don't know the answers to anything that's in front of you.
01:00:59
Speaker
um You know, with social media and a lot of these things, it's people telling you that they know the answers all the time. And this applies not just to trading, but everything in life. I think we go through like when we're younger and we we look at people around us and we think they know what they're doing. They have it figured out.
01:01:14
Speaker
Nobody has it figured out. no Nobody knows what they're doing. Right. And you just, you know, work hard and hope for the best. Right. That's that's really all it comes down to. um That's probably not the answer that anybody wanted, but that's the one I'm going to give you is that I think that's probably to expand upon that a little bit. It's just the natural progression that when you when you know nothing.
01:01:36
Speaker
So pick a a sport, trading, anything in life, gaming, and you know know, nothing about it. It feels like it's easy to understand. And then there's like, there's a proper term for this. I don't know what it is off the top my head, but the more you learn about something, the more you learn that you don't understand those topics. And trading is a perfect one for that because when you're five months into it, you're going to, you're going to go on a run probably and think you're the king. Right. But then two years into it, three years into it, that's when you're probably going hit that gully where you realize like, wow, I know, know just enough now to know how little I know. Right. And you got to figure out how to get through that eventually, which.
01:02:14
Speaker
Yeah, i mean, humans we always gravitate as humans towards, we want everything to be concrete. We want things to be, you know, one plus one equals two is what I'll say. But in trading, you know, some days one plus one equals two and sometimes it equals three and you got to be able to adapt to that.
01:02:30
Speaker
So humility, it balance the humility with the ego, right? If you know, that's one another lesson I say, right? if you have If you have no ego and you're just humble, you'll never make any money, right? You have to have some self-belief, but if you have pure ego and no humility, you'll make money and then lose it all. So you have to find a way to balance between the two and kind of shift between when you feel like you're hot shit and when you realize like, maybe I need to protect myself a little bit more.
01:02:56
Speaker
I think it's the Dunning-Kruger effect, if I'm not wrong, where you're getting to some point early where you're like, hey, I know everything about this topic. don't know didn't. I've made like seven videos on Dunning-Kruger, so I don't know how I didn't remember that. It just totally escaped me right now. Yeah, you're right on it, right with that one for sure.
01:03:15
Speaker
No, but I think that's very good that's very good advice. That's something to take in and and to learn from. Thank you very much for for coming on. This has been very fun, very enjoyable.
01:03:26
Speaker
Absolutely. Thanks for having me. And goodbye, everyone.