Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Insilico Terminal Podcast Episode 28 - Liquidity Goblin
0 Plays2 seconds ago
Liquidity Goblin joins the Insilico Terminal Podcast to talk about his path from TradFi HFT into crypto, how he approaches DeFi, arbitrage, venue selection, and the kinds of inefficiencies smaller traders can still exploit. The episode covers market structure, manual vs systematic trading, risk management, points farming, meme coins, prediction markets, and where real edge still exists in crypto.
00:00 Intro, Liquidity Goblin background and HFT → crypto transition
08:05 How HFT actually works: signals, arbitrage and cross-venue edges
16:31 Trading mindset: forecasts, horizons and avoiding thesis drift
25:06 Systems vs discretion: monitoring models, manual overrides and execution
33:15 DeFi strategies: flash loans, MEV evolution and carry trades
41:35 Venue selection: finding “dumb flow” and inefficient markets
49:00 Risk management: sizing, counterparty risk and portfolio construction
58:33 Retail vs quant, meme coins, and final advice on making it in trading
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction of Liquidity Goblin
00:00:13
Speaker
Welcome to a new episode of the InSilico Terminal podcast. My guest today is Liquidity Goblin. And what I like to do is to ask people to introduce themselves. So who are you and what do you do for people that have not heard of you before?
Background in DeFi and Trading
00:00:33
Speaker
Okay, ah yeah, I'm Liquidity Goblin. I spend a lot of time shitposting on Twitter, but outside of that, I mainly focus on DeFi, high-fricancy trading, um centralized to decentralized arbitrage, um another, i would say, long-tail on-chain strategies, um and I've done for nearly five years now.
00:01:04
Speaker
um ah How did you first get started with that? My background's in traditional finance.
Transition from Traditional Finance
00:01:10
Speaker
So i came in through TradFi HFT. I was market making index options um and then moved to doing HFT t in the Delta One space with Japanese ETFs.
00:01:24
Speaker
um And then after that, made the shift to crypto. um at a firm and then left to form my own firm.
00:01:35
Speaker
Did that for a while and then I've been ah since 2024 trading solo for the most part, other than hiring devs here and there. But ah as ah as a trader, managing the portfolio myself and my own capital.
00:01:52
Speaker
So what made you go into crypto?
00:01:56
Speaker
It's a good question. um Self-hatred.
00:02:02
Speaker
How many such cases? Insomnia. ah No. i I think it was two part. ah One was actually that it was sort of a bit of a nerd snipe.
00:02:17
Speaker
mom So I was doing it in my PA um whilst in a working traditional finance job. um And I had friends that were working as developers.
00:02:31
Speaker
uh in defy specifically and just you know ethereum and crypto generally yeah um and they explained flash loans and atomic arbitrage to me and i thought that sounds too good to be true surely not um and then ah you know obviously was true um and so i tried it myself and started landing transactions myself um and then it eventually became my day job as it started paying me far more than uh you know, just working a regular job.
00:03:04
Speaker
um So half by accident, ah half a sort of in an intentional rabbit hole that I went down um for the engineering challenge and just intellectual stimulation.
00:03:19
Speaker
I like an engineer yourself, like, or could you could you maybe go a bit into what you did with your TradFi jobs before? Like, how how can one imagine what you what take your day-to-day software looked like?
Trading Philosophy and Strategies
00:03:30
Speaker
Yeah, so I have a background in like software engineering, and electrical engineering, and then statistics and data science.
00:03:41
Speaker
And I was working um at an AI lab actually um almost nine years ago now. um ah And I was publishing a bit and one of my tutors from university was working at a high-frequency trading firm and asked if I wanted a job. I hadn't quite finished my studies.
00:04:05
Speaker
um And so I went down to do like an internship and then that went quite well. Um, and, and I worked continued working there part-time until I finished my degree at the time. And my job sort of went through several phases. i actually came in, I guess, more from a technical side model, you know statistical quantitative analytics.
00:04:29
Speaker
Uh, and then I moved more to a trader role, um, which I guess gave me more P and L attribution and uh you more say and responsibility uh my day-to-day initially was supposed to just be give me a bunch of data and see if i can make the models that i was working on ah outside of trading um prior uh work in frequency trading context uh and they didn't um what did work was first principles you know very simple stuff um
00:05:04
Speaker
and that was still an improvement to what they had so that was that was fun um it you know smacking simple tools in the right areas yielded far more trading penal uh improvements than trying any kind of neural net machine learning approach um which is a huge undertaking as the firms that i guess that are high frequency trading uh now uh you know they're spending millions and millions on compute and resources just to be able to train a model um so In my day-to-day was a lot of Jupyter Notebooks data, like analytics and a lot of post-trade analysis. So looking at trades we did and didn't do, why we didn't why we didn't do good trades, and and why we did do bad trades, um and to try and you know do more of the good ones, do less of the bad ones, yeah and tie them that loop.
00:06:02
Speaker
Could you maybe walk us through like an example of how a trade would look like, if you can like speak about that?
Execution Challenges and Market Making
00:06:07
Speaker
Yeah. So we invariably trade on signals. and So those signals can look like many things.
00:06:17
Speaker
Um, but the simplest is I i will give is, you know, there's a leading venue uh be it binance uh where btc usdt trades um and then we have a second venue that's uh you know a tier two tier three exchange where there's not price discovery going on for bitcoin and so what we would look at is an event that's happened on Binance. It could be a big trade or or just a tick up.
00:06:48
Speaker
Um, so the price has moved and then we want to see, you know, are we within the, you know, the propagation time across the network from Binance to this other venue, well, our box co-located to that venue.
00:07:03
Speaker
Um, are we responding and trading uh did we was there something that arrived and we didn't trade on it uh why did we not trade it um sometimes it's because you know there's we're competing with many others um yeah and we're all sending at the same time and sometimes we with variants on the network and just jitter there's another team's lands first rather than ours um but really we're trying to identify opportunities where we could have done a good trade but didn't um and also sometimes when we were maybe too trigger happy and the trade wasn't good so we might have a a trigger that could be our analysis suggests that every trade over fifty thousand dollars um on binance generally is a 20 bip uh move in the next minute
00:07:53
Speaker
um that might diminish as a signal over time as other people trade it and as that gets more efficient um and we might have several trades in a row uh throughout a week that we trade uh on that trigger on that trigger but uh maybe only move five bips or you know don't cover our transaction costs in and out or or maybe uh counter um you know they move the other way and we start losing so the there's things that we will be trying to is keep an eye out for like are signals still working or triggers um and um are we still able to act on them because sometimes we get weak edges like that's still an edge if it's still five bips but we can't act on it so we need to start looking more of like combining several into one uh and being a bit more um transaction cost aware with our approaches
00:08:46
Speaker
Do you maybe have like an ah example like out of curiosity ah where from TradFi as well? Because there, I think, they don't really have cross-venue stuff as far as I understand. like Most things only trade on like one product, one venue, right?
00:09:01
Speaker
um Mostly, but there are still cross-venue. I'll go with the simplest. um And this kind of informs why, I guess, I had the insight to be able to apply this to crypto. But the ETF ah trading, especially index ETF in Japan, you have the Nikkei 225 um futures um those futures are very liquid.
00:09:27
Speaker
and They have quite a large tick size um and relative to other markets. And there's also the Quanto Nikkei that's traded in the US, that's traded denominated in US s dollars despite the index being in yen.
00:09:42
Speaker
um So there's a lot of active trading ah in this, and it tends to be leading pretty much in every case um as far as like a broad market move.
00:09:53
Speaker
But the ETF that we were market making as the basket under it obviously replicates this this exact index underneath it. So um we could see that as that you could... you know make that parallel encrypt over the perp to spot arb on the same exchange. um So we would see, but there's also you know several events, if we see suddenly the futures shift on an interest rate piece of news,
00:10:19
Speaker
um that could very likely actually be the the futures premium the efp um the basis uh contracting or expanding um so we'd have to sort of compare how it moved across the you know the whole futures curve to know whether that's a move in the delta or is it a move in the efp um but we would both trade the individual etf against the future and also the basket um so we have to go buy all of the stocks underneath it which we can convert convert into etfs um yeah The triggers are like correlated assets.
00:10:52
Speaker
So if the S&P 500 has a big tick, there are correlations to every other major index market. um So less Japan because the market hours don't overlap so much, but still tiny bit um when you know it comes to like overnight.
00:11:10
Speaker
ah news so we um especially you know correlate in Asian indices as well um in Hong Kong Japan um even just ASX um when it's specific sector so we would look at like other other venues other markets other sectors uh and do like linear in the simplest sense you know just like a beta um and and if there was a a single event uh large enough we we would then make that trade on the same correlated assets um
00:11:45
Speaker
So I guess that's the simplest
Advanced Trading Strategies
00:11:47
Speaker
case. a more complex case I can cover would be in options specifically. So um index options are much more complicated than index futures. We have more dimensions with which we can trade and express views. the Generally, if we would constrain ourselves to one expiry,
00:12:10
Speaker
rather than thinking about the whole curve and surface, we have... ah the implied volatility, every single strike, forms a curve. um And that curve shape changes at different times. So we would... ah You know, at the 50 delta point, so the the middle point on the curve, we'd draw a tangential line.
00:12:33
Speaker
And that line represents how much we expect the curve to shift up or down depending on a move um so it's sort of the spot vol correlation um and generally when markets move down volatility goes up far more than when markets move up um especially with index markets that you don't see big jumps in index markets going up they tend to drift up and crash down um so the um
00:13:03
Speaker
what we would do is, you know, on certain triggers, like the futures just ticking one way or another, we would try and make an expectation of whether the whole curve would move up, you know, 2% as far as volatility or or down. um And that would we then have to rapidly revalue all of those options and and take the the cheaper ones that are then mispriced. What you're talking about, like, is volatility smile?
00:13:29
Speaker
basically yes yes i'm not too familiar with options so uh yeah exactly the smile um so i guess that's like a mechanic of how options are priced but still it's like a statistical correlation that we expect volatility to go up um two percent you know when it the markets drop one percent that uh you know to get out of that trade there's several things we can do in options we don't actually have to trade out of it again in the options um generally especially if it's gamma we're making our profit from the difference between the volatility we pay for the option and the volatility that we realize in our delta hedging so as the market if our forward expectation of
00:14:18
Speaker
volatility has gone up now because of this big move. um the We might buy an option that trades for 15% annualized volatility um with the expectation over the next month that we actually hedge with a 16 or 17% annualized volatility. And so the the margin we're making is the fact that you know as markets move down when we're long gamma um we buy low because we have to buy more deltas to hedge and when they move up we sell delta so we're basically scalping as we hedge and so the more volatile it is the more pnl we get because we get more swings um
00:14:56
Speaker
so the we realize that in a much you know less liquid in a much more liquid way than trying to get in and out of options which have you know spreads of 20 percent often so um so All of these things as far as our like expectations don't just move from where we think that the quotes will be, especially since you know as a dominant market maker you are where the quotes are. They also are from where where you think the variance is.
00:15:25
Speaker
So there's there's several dimensions you can look at trading like a statistical move. um And with all of these, the like the benefit the best trades of these happen often. You want to be able to increase your sample size so that your your true edge, albeit you know not perfectly, not winning every trade, but if you're winning 51% of them, the higher your sample, the more trades you do, the more likely you are to end up in profit and not be not be taken out by one trade that pulls you down and into a drawdown.
Retail vs Quantitative Trading
00:15:59
Speaker
I think it's quite interesting because like this way of ah trading is almost like a completely different game from I guess like what most people on on CT are doing. and or what most like Let's maybe not say most people on CT, but like what what maybe users of in Silico or whatever are doing, like retail people that trade there actually.
00:16:16
Speaker
um Because it almost seems like
00:16:21
Speaker
yeah're You're not really like trying to like make it big in in different moves or whatever, but you're trying to like find a way to benefit from the market consistently over time. And it's also like, ah I guess speed is very relevant. So you need like proper infrastructure to to execute all of this.
00:16:37
Speaker
Yeah, but I think a lot of the parallels when I talk to other traders can pull over and in terms of thinking about, like, what are you actually trading? Because we have all of these forecasts of where we think things will be in, let's say, five seconds time. Mm-hmm.
00:16:53
Speaker
um And then we also have what the price is now. um And that's a vote, a consensus of what everyone thinks the price should be. um And it's the midpoint in a dynamic moving game. um we But what we have is we have a price we think it's worth.
00:17:12
Speaker
That forecast is what do we think the price is. um And we can test that. And I think everyone, if they're even if they're doing something and a bit more long horizon and manual, should still at least have a concept of what is their price and what is the market's price.
00:17:30
Speaker
And also what is their horizon? Because I might have an expectation um which I can make the statement, I think the Ethereum Foundation is probably going to sell more Ethereum in the next two weeks.
00:17:45
Speaker
There's nothing quantitative you can really do about that. That's just more of a sort of vibe. um But that's a where if we break that down into like how a quant would look at it, it's a 14-day forecast.
00:17:59
Speaker
we We want it to realize in 14 days or we're wrong. Mm-hmm. So we need to, we can't just like, you shouldn't ex ante, then be like, oh, well maybe I should hold it for three weeks because it's probably going to reverse. You should just be like, no, it was two weeks.
00:18:13
Speaker
If it hasn't realized, we sort of, we should be out by then and we should do another trade. We should reevaluate and, you know, size proportionally to what our new confidence is um and whether that's the right trade at all. um There shouldn't be anything to do with the fact that we are in a trade. It should always be, where are we now? And what is our forward forecast?
00:18:32
Speaker
Um, and, uh, if you have a price, you can update that and then you can update like, should you be buying into a position? Should you be selling out of a position? Should you be shorting? Um, should you be buying back?
00:18:46
Speaker
the there are many ways to come up with what you think of prices like a simple one would be like index beta i could be like oh i think you know the correlation to bitcoin right now is 86 for ethereum um i think maybe it should be 90 like i think it was going to couple stronger and so you can tweak, let you can formulate that into a model and be like, okay, well that means that if I think that's going to be true ETH will trade here.
00:19:19
Speaker
It might then be trading at 3100 relative to where ETH is now. So you can create some kind of rough forecast and trade around that. And you can see whether you've had that validated or not because you can measure it.
00:19:30
Speaker
um So you can be like, okay, am i has this happened and i haven't it hasn't paid out? And then I should just exit because there's no there's no juice. there's Then I've got no thesis. I've got no trade that I'm doing. um Or am I...
00:19:45
Speaker
ah like you know Or it's just not happening within the horizon, uh, that I am expecting this to pay off. And so I think if you sort of constrain a trade into something that is measurable, you um you know whether you are being true to what you're set out to do in the first place and that can let you improve it ah or like how you go about trading in the future. I think a lot of people think maybe in stochastic trades they're like, I entered this trade and then I exited it and they they're sort of a bit too reflexive of if it's going
00:20:20
Speaker
poorly they might hold on or if it's going well they might hold on um real you should be thinking more on like what is the strategy and what was my pricing and the kind of tie yourself to that uh i'm curious like this you know what i've explained how would you maybe think about applying it uh through a more know retail pro tail lens uh and more manual approach what What it reminded me of is like this, um I guess it's it's not too much part of trading, but also kind of like, um you know, many people that join crypto when they don't really like get properly into trading or like in the past cycles, they would just buy coins in the hopes of ah them going up alt season and whatever.
Rational Decision-Making in Trading
00:21:02
Speaker
and um like a principle that I've often read is like, would you still hold the same positions that you have ah right now? Like, would you still enter them if you didn't if you weren't already in them?
00:21:15
Speaker
Because many people get like this this back bias of just like, I don't i don't want to sell because I don't want to like realize the loss. But um and like it reminded me of what you said about ah the thesis. Like, does it still pertain to your thesis that this will actually like do what you think it will do? Or do you just like hold it because you're already in the position that you just can't let go of it?
00:21:35
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I agree. And and the if you were to just try and be rational and say you haven't approached this every month or even every day, there's ten what are the 10 best trades you could do if you weren't in any positions?
00:21:50
Speaker
Is the expected profit of any of those more than the transaction cost just to get out of the trade that you're in? but of course of course you should switch to using your capital to doing that um so i think just because the trade is down and like i guess sunk cost fallacy um shouldn't matter it should always be like looking forward rather than where the price has been you you should be like what is the next week or whatever your horizon is um it should be re-evaluated on ah a forward-looking basis not a retroactive one
00:22:24
Speaker
How much like manual or or discretionary input is there in what do you do? um Plenty, i think. But from an axis that maybe a lot of people wouldn't think. um like None of my models are like,
00:22:41
Speaker
this is provably the best parameters, this is the best way to do it. um There's some science to it, but also a lot of art and a lot of twitter like fiddling and twiddling with parameters. um And so I'm really just making sure that things look right.
00:22:57
Speaker
uh all of of the time every day um and just adding manual input um for those that maybe have done engineering uh you can kind of think of it a bit like our trading systems are a pid um there's it's a control system sometimes we're getting to uh one way on a risk axis or to another way we might need to dampen that and the several parameters we can do there might be we might not be doing enough trades um but we may be doing too many there's different things we want to do to a like control that and there's so many moving parts and it's such a high dimensional problem that's not really like we can optimally solve it and just use algorithms for everything i still sit there and and tune all of it um daily or weekly and you know if i left it running and didn't touch it for two or three weeks um it would all stop making money
00:23:51
Speaker
um so there's a lot of manual input but uh at a higher level i would say than clicking buttons i still do manual traits um the manual parts for me often most look at like rebalancing capital between venues um unless i've already implemented something or automated um know centralized decentralized arb on a new chain um there might be several hops to be able to get my capital into the centralized venue. You know, I might have to go up a bridge, uh, and then, you know, transfer it into, you know, Bybit, Binance, whatever the venue is, uh,
00:24:26
Speaker
and vice versa several times so I will just have alerts that tell me when I've got too little or too much in one place and click go click some buttons um all but also then I will try and preempt sometimes if I'm like oh this looks like it's trending um I'll try and get more capital on the venue that's slower because we you know as it goes up we'll be buying on the slow one and selling on the uh the fast one so um trying to preempt the the capital ratio um from that regard in it's an art more than it is science right like if i like had a perfect model then i would just leave it autonomously to run and markets would be perfectly efficient but uh there is no solution um and i think a lot of what i do is more keeping an eye on how busy is the market from a volume and volatility perspective and
00:25:20
Speaker
the more there is of both of those the more i have to touch things and make sure they don't break and turn things on and off again and uh tweak parameters uh my yeah and my longer term manual thing is deciding what we trade and where we trade yeah which i think is probably where most of the edge is regardless of the strategy is sitting down at the right tables um yeah So you're basically like monitoring monitoring the the situation of your your models the whole day and like through through experience inputting whatever you think fits best.
00:25:54
Speaker
Yeah, I am monitoring the situation basically. That's a great way to put it. um And i think um like ah everything's mostly just the grafana dashboard um or i just look at like i actually use uh quite often i use the in silico terminal uh when i'm trading through the api uh because when you have lots and lots of orders come through especially when you're market making um the exchange front ends lag like lot yeah
00:26:29
Speaker
and And I might be sending hundreds a second of orders and cancellations. And ah I can't, for the life of me, bother to spend time on making a UI that shows me where all of them are and what my fills are coming through. I just look at it like after the fact on Grafana. But I will often just have in Silico up as like the only real time thing. Sometimes, especially on the 10th of October, had...
00:26:54
Speaker
i had a bunch of positions that were way too big like I was ah you things broke as everything went down and I was in all sorts of weird fun funky positions and I was in positions that were bigger than the like seven day 24 hour average volume so like getting out of them was complicated and trust trusting my systems to do that so I was manually just hacking out of trades when I could opportunistically um just right in and in silico as my like failover um clicking buttons uh and sweating sweating a lot um Like the rest of us. There's an interesting use case, actually, like ah even from a quantitative perspective that you sometimes just manually execute through through the terminal two when shit hits the fan.
00:27:43
Speaker
Well, yeah, like I'll give you, i guess, one simple example. is like I might have something break catastrophically in my code, and I've got hundreds of orders just stuck, ah still open, depending on the exchange. Some of them like allow you to cancel and disconnect, but some don't.
00:28:00
Speaker
um being able to just go in and at least cancel all of them so that you don't just have like stale orders sitting there letting me get wrecked uh is at least a peace of mind or at least check but the the um so i i guess it's my like source of truth especially when i actually can't use a lot of the uh front ends given how many um how much activity is going on um so yeah it's my fallback uh it's more trustworthy than at least um what i've built
00:28:33
Speaker
Non-paid chill. um non Non-paid chill. Yeah, I'm not paid at all to be here. what what What happens?
Monitoring and Real-Time Adjustments
00:28:40
Speaker
like ah Do you just leave everything running when you go to sleep and to the same degree? Or like how do you deal with time zones and stuff like that?
00:28:48
Speaker
Do you have like alerts set up that wake you up in the middle of the night when something goes wrong? or yeah i do um unfortunately some days that's not great uh i think my girlfriend hates it more than i do obviously um because for her it's lost sleep but for me sometimes i'm waking up and it's like great there's a lot going on the market yeah i've made a lot of i've made a lot of money but uh the so i used to use pager duty um i hooked that into alert manager which is a grafana feature um which most people can do and i would recommend like it's not you don't actually have to need need any code to set that up uh really at all um
00:29:28
Speaker
quite easy especially now everyone has llms um you can feed data into what's called prometheus which is just like a metrics collector there's several ways to do that um or even several other ways of collecting data but alert manager can just you can just set rules like you know if for us it'll be like if our trade rate goes up you know x percent so if you start going from doing like one trade a second to doing 100 trades a second it'll alert us or if we haven't done a trade in five minutes or things like we haven't or we we haven't received any data in 30 seconds um all of these different very simple rules that you could just click in the front end um then what that does is that calls out you just hook it up to
00:30:12
Speaker
what used to be pager duty uh for me and it'll buzz your phone as loud as you've ever heard it um blast sirens um and you have to approve all right or else it keeps trying and it'll call you and you can have it call backup numbers so like if you've got a landline you know an old-fashioned phone or a second phone um like it will keep going until you actually respond um and if you have several people in your team you can get it to fail over to to others yeah as well um i use grafana irm instead because it's free um for up to two or three people um and i don't even know need to host anything uh whereas pagerduty was costing me like two grand a year um so i think it's probably even worth doing
00:30:57
Speaker
ah just for manual trading depending on your time zone a lot of the interesting stuff happens when you're asleep um and to only like give yourself alerts for when interesting stuff's happening it's probably valuable as far as you know those days at least for the way i trade where i make um a month's worth of p and l in one day yeah and then the rest of the month i'm making you know tiny amounts um so really i would make way more if i could you know get 10 more out of that one day than if uh i try and really like hammer out uh big improvements on the like days where it's quiet so um yeah i think i would recommend it but not forever especially not if you've a partner um that you also it sounds quite intense like how do you deal with like the psychological stress of that that's a good question um
00:31:52
Speaker
go for a lot of runs and go to the gym, um try and get sleep when I can. But ah it's not all the time, but it's just when it is, it's often a few successive days. it would be bit tiring. um And as I improve certain things in the system, I don't have to um wake up as much.
00:32:11
Speaker
um But ah I mean, most of the time I'm waking up and I've made money. Sometimes it's a ah relatively big loss.
00:32:22
Speaker
So it's it's it's kind of balances it out. You're like annoyed that you've been waking up at 1am, but you've just just made a few thousand dollars. So it's not the worst slap in the face. Yeah.
00:32:33
Speaker
So, yeah You mentioned earlier you're also doing like ah DeFi stuff. And that's something that I'm not really like too familiar with, like Flash Loans and I guess MEV and stuff like that. Can you go a bit more into that?
00:32:47
Speaker
Yeah, so um that's where I started. I don't do much as far as Atomic MEV anymore. um I do the single side of it. a I guess this started with like on Uniswap and SushiSwap back in the day on Ethereum mainnet, the classic trade and across, you Curve and Balancer, the other DEXs.
00:33:09
Speaker
ah You'd Flash Loan from, ah let's say, Aave. which allows you, like if you write your own smart contract to borrow funds up to like $100 million, dollars fish as much as is in Aave, as long as you repay it in the same transaction.
00:33:25
Speaker
So ah you can use that money to buy on one exchange ah and immediately sell whatever that token is on the other exchange and you keep a profit. um so and if you don't make any money the transaction fails and there's there's no there's no loss because it's not your money and they also won't loan it to you unless you can pay it all back so yeah the um i mean the downside is obviously you have to pay gas for that so you're bidding against others and you're you're bidding portions of your profit um
00:33:59
Speaker
essentially uh as a way to compete so like i might be bidding 95 some guy might then be like okay i'm going to bid 96 of my profit if we've got it if it's become super efficient um but uh quickly realized that you don't have to do both sides of the trade you can just do the good side um so one will be priced fairly uh relative to the binance one will be priced poorly um and so instead of buying on the the cheap one and selling on the one with the 20-bit fee you could just buy on the the cheap one and just hold it until you sell again or sell on binance for you know what is three or five bit fee
00:34:36
Speaker
um and that keeps way more of the profit because ah you know you if you're doing like a $200,000 trade um for 40 bps edge and paying away 20 bps of it um just to atomically head get out your and then of that 20 bps that is of the bit you keep you're paying away a bunch in gas you can compete with that same guy we're using less gas and ah getting twice as much edge um out of the trade so quickly things moved towards then that's sort of how i've been trading mostly uh since um and just doing the good leg uh it reduces transaction cost yeah um and uh yeah that's sort of uh where i sit the other like i guess defy stuff
00:35:32
Speaker
is the more manual
DeFi Long-Tail Strategies
00:35:33
Speaker
long tail. um The simple example would have been like hyper liquid carry trade, um finding a bunch of spot assets, covering it with long perp or short perp, sorry. I'm just collecting the funding. um Which you can actually do as a dirty carry, you know, find a bunch of stuff that's paying positive funding, find bunch of stuff that's paying negative funding, roughly weight them so that you'll market neutral and collect carry as and and rebalance it sort of roughly every day or so. um
00:36:06
Speaker
that's something i was doing and then you also at the same time farm points and like for example for lighter um the amount of points that you would get would be relative to your open interest and your sharp ratio so if you have a very diversified strategy that you know keeps your risk relatively diverse um you keep your sharp ratio high and keep higher open interest you got a way better uh airdrop well you get way more points so you got a bet better airdrop whereas know the old just churning volume didn't work so well uh yeah so yeah there's i guess a few facets to the like defy strategy um part of that could be like
00:36:52
Speaker
the short perp on these DEXs often is paying like pretty decent positive funding, like 20%, 30%. um But you can often combine it with finding what the spot asset is and just looking really hard through a DeFi Llama to see if there's any way you can stake it.
00:37:10
Speaker
So you can stake, like a classic one was like Atom ah a year or so ago. You could stake for like 20% yield um But also the PERP was paying 11% to 20% funding.
00:37:28
Speaker
So you could be across both. So you could be in long in the staked position and short and you get sort of, after figuring out the capital inefficiencies, roughly 28% return at pretty good size. Like you could do several million relatively easy. um but you could also do that on smaller scale um in different lending protocols kind of often like on weird chains might have their own token um like the native token of that chain it might be in the their aave fork um and it might be paying six seven eight sometimes more percent
00:38:01
Speaker
um and you can sometimes loop that because they might be paying out tokens uh for people that are using the protocol um so you get levered long uh the spot that way for positive carry and then you can short on some of the on like bybit or even on like hyper liquid or um some of the other ah like decks venues which tend to have better funding and and get positive carry like 30 40 percent um The main thing for those is trying to make sure that they persist long enough because the the transaction cost on the more liquid stuff like that is like 20, 30 bps and that could be like a whole whole week's worth of yield. So you need it to stick around for ah like at least more than a week or two um to be able to make profit. But when you can, and they they tend to be very good trades.
00:38:49
Speaker
So these are like things that you still look at today to find new new opportunities? ah Yeah, I think because they are easy, like once they cross a certain threshold, then it's like optimizing the capital I have to to get returns.
00:39:05
Speaker
um I think as well ah for most people, especially probably more so the people that listen to this, this is something that they could eat quite easily trade. Yeah.
00:39:19
Speaker
you know And having many different trades, I think, is like a sensible way to go about trading, especially when you trade for yourself. um If you have one strategy you're doing, it might...
00:39:30
Speaker
not pay you know for a week or two um whereas if you can diversify yourself not just across assets but across strategies you can at least always have one that's paying uh paying you um and you can dynamically focus more on one if it starts doing better given the market conditions you might start trying to squeeze more out of it um versus another one that's just super quiet you can size that down you know you can think of it as a portfolio of strategies um And it keeps it interesting too.
Selecting Trading Venues
00:40:03
Speaker
Can you talk a bit about venue selection? And are you still like looking at perp taxes, for example, for the points farming? Or is it just like an additional thing that might do some some amount of P&L, but not like Iduzu?
00:40:20
Speaker
I still look at it. um So do you play Poker? I don't know. I play a little bit against the bots so I understand the rules but um' I don't really understand the game to be honest. But you understand it enough. um So often people talk about, I'll talk about the poker example first.
00:40:43
Speaker
So you don't, you yourself don't uh consider yourself to be like an expert poker player or like i don't know even if you think you're a profitable one um but would you say there's probably people out there that know less about poker than you yeah yeah right um so if you had a ah room full of people uh And they were kind of binned all of the tables by, um they they, they were ranked tables. So it's like a ranked competition. You could think of it like a video game. Um, you know, on the left side of the hall top left, you've got the pros on the bottom, right?
00:41:25
Speaker
You've got the people that have just walked in that ah didn't even know this competition was happening and they don't know anything about poker. Um, but they've had a few drinks and they want to have fun. Where would you sit to make the most money?
00:41:38
Speaker
on the on the bottom right. Yeah, exactly. So um you might not be able to in like, you know, the five minutes before you start playing, you're not going improve your skills ah in poker. So that's not the right thing to do to make the most money. But you can pick the right table. And picking right the right table actually is often the...
00:41:56
Speaker
the best strategy most of the time because it's easier to do than you know getting better at poker um because only everyone can be so skilled but a lot of people know when like picking where to play ah you can probably make way more money. like There's people out there that are I would say average um as far as their poker skills um on the spectrum of you know super skilled but they probably they make a good living just going around like local community tables winning $500
00:42:26
Speaker
uh on a tuesday night and then on a wednesday night they're another they're just consistently making money from people that you aren't very good at all um and that's way better than once a month getting a thirty thousand dollar pro tour win yeah um because you don't have to be as good as more reliable um so table selection i think is the most important uh thing you can do in trading as a smaller player and uh the key bits are finding people that are worse than you who
00:42:57
Speaker
um So if I was to ask you again, like if you were to pick a DEX, what would you look for to try and find someone that's worse at trading than you?
00:43:08
Speaker
I guess those of retail volume, like less HFT and then MM participation and where it is just like many people that trade that aren't very sophisticated.
00:43:20
Speaker
Yeah. what What do you think that would look like? Would it be just like some chart crimes? ah the There might be some like egregious bars where it's, you know, if you compare it to Binance, there's just someone's paid 10% through. Like in the early days when Hyperliquid first started its spot markets, you could see that it was just trading like all over the place.
00:43:41
Speaker
um Like I guess, yeah, what would you, if you were to frame that, like what specifically do you think you would look for yourself as far as like, so I guess like little liquidity. So it's like easier to... to like i'm I'm not size constrained because I'm small myself. But then um there's like these price arbitrages, I guess, that you could benefit from. Like for example, Lider is maybe not the best example. but it And I also don't know if it was real, but like they had recently a candle where Bitcoin went down 10k more or something than everywhere else. And if you had like a PerpDex where something like that happened...
00:44:19
Speaker
you could probably abuse it quite well if you're a smaller size person. Yeah, exactly. um And they they're real. ah Often it's, I think a lot of people catch themselves ah in the, our markets are efficient, so like this won't be an opportunity, I'm just wrong. Mm-hmm.
00:44:38
Speaker
Most of the time in crypto, that's actually not the case. Especially you know if you're thinking Binance and Bybit, I can click trade out of these, ah maybe rethink that. But if you're like at least being sensible enough that, oh, there's this new PerpDex that's only got like a million daily volume, and it looks like it's often slower to move than Binance, you're probably right.
00:45:01
Speaker
um And you could be, figure out whether you're right or wrong very quickly by clicking it and see if you do a few trades. um The, I guess the things I would look for right exactly is like low volume um and low liquidity um or like what I find often is really a good imbalance is that a mismatch between the volume and the liquidity.
00:45:28
Speaker
Barring, you know, some of these new venues do wash trade, which often you can see because you just look at the volume and it's like very consistent. And and But like if there's volume in excess of the liquidity, there's more opportunity.
00:45:44
Speaker
And similarly, it could be also the case that the other way. like If there's more liquidity than there is volume, and that can be quite good because that like the cost to transact is really low. So you can exploit some illiquid edges um just because it might be that there's a market maker there that's contractually obliged to put 100K in the book. But this thing's doing... like 200k volume a day which means it's like super liquid um so it doesn't move it might move quite easily but you can get a trade in and in and out very cheaply um but like i call them pay throughs but you know when someone pays like executes just like a dumb market order and pays like through several orders like several layers of the book several times you can see that easily just even looking at like candlesticks um and when liquidity just like disappears um
00:46:34
Speaker
those are really good signs that there's like opportunity to be had and you don't have to be like crazy smart um to get anything out of it it's like okay what is this dude doing you know like is this guy like if you can be like oh this guy's clearly you know he just wants to trade or it might be like that he thinks that he can farm points by doing volume and he's just trying to market 100k in and 100k out you can just click trade market make him as he's trying to do this this happened a few times on uh on lighter and extended i've seen it happen a couple times um often happens when the funding rates are really really high so like when they're really funky um someone's just trying to get in the trade way too big for the liquidity that's there and you can tell um that there's more trades coming often a lot of people will think
Market Behavior and Incentives
00:47:25
Speaker
i'll just farm the funding
00:47:26
Speaker
um Better trade often in those cases is just to buy in the same direction as the flow and then scalp out of it in like a couple minutes as it's moved more that side.
00:47:38
Speaker
um Because the edge versus the how long you have to hold it for to realize it is way better than you know having to have successive funding rate cycles to actually realize anything. um And often those things might only last a few hours anyway, by which point the funding rate's cooled back and you've got to get out of the trade.
00:47:58
Speaker
um so yeah the a lot of like flow-on effects of like if you can rationalize what they're doing is they're dumb or there's some like incentive like farming farming points um where people are happy to kind of torch money a bit because they think they might get some may drop those are like great opportunities um for example one hyper liquid uh TWOPs are pretty visible her because for whatever reason, well when the transaction goes out on chain, you can see that they've started this user started a TWOP.
00:48:33
Speaker
Which which you can circumvent by using in Silica Terminal, by the way. Exactly. Nice plug. um But yeah, so if people just do it through the UI, it puts it on train that they're going to do, like let's say, 5 million um over this amount of time. like You just see the parameters.
00:48:51
Speaker
um And then you can just see, well, obviously, that's going to shift the price up every time that that trade comes along. So you can trade it in the same same direction because you can just see that there's a big trade executing in that direction.
00:49:05
Speaker
um And that doesn't take any code or genius to do, really. There's like dashboards out there to screen for that. um and that's like a clear example of an inefficiency like added by a retired you know perverse incentives because if if you were smart you wouldn't use that feature um so that's a table like if someone's using that as a table i really want to sit down and play poker with um Because, you know, there is no rational way to do that if you know what you're doing. So if someone doesn't know what they're doing, you could have far better chance of, uh, taking them for a ride than, uh, if they've got a, you know, bit of an idea.
00:49:44
Speaker
How do you weigh the risks of um like the the tables that you play at? I guess you can make an analogy, like if if you're going on the table with the with the drunk people, they might be stupider and less good at the game, but there's also like this opportunity or and not the opportunity but the possibility that they become mad at you when they lose and they just won't give you your money.
00:50:06
Speaker
yeah um there's a bit of venue risk obviously you know if i was to say just go and degen on mexy um we all know that they're not that trustworthy of a venue um especially when it comes to perps because they market make it themselves um so you you have to kind of, i guess, weigh up, you know, is this a friendly community center ah or am I in some back alley in Macau and I'm going to have the triad, the triad are going to keep all of my money yeah and my clothes. um
00:50:45
Speaker
So, you know, there's a bit of counterparty risk there. I think also the the thing is as well, It's not just that they might not give you the money, but playing against people that have no idea can just be incredibly annoying because it's completely unpredictable. Like they don't even think about strategy. um yeah So it's it's just noise at that point. You can make money consistently, but also that just comes with way bigger P&L swings because they might you know go all in when they shouldn't. and You can make money from that, you might not, but the the the variance becomes way bigger. So yeah. um
00:51:20
Speaker
a It can come with just ah extra risks. um But there's still, I think, money to be made. It would be a case of probably sizing proportionately um and also being patient, waiting for them to make a mistake.
00:51:36
Speaker
But yeah, I think risk is ah something I think a lot of people think about very poorly. Mm-hmm. the dimensions of risk uh you know you've got returns like your position size like how much do i have at the table um how much volatility is there um ah like two very simple like risks as far as a position but you also have obviously counterparty risk which is only measurable when it goes catastrophically wrong. um So it's a very fat tail on it, ah like with FTX, as everyone painfully knows, um or getting hacked. ah you know People get their wallets hacked or their accounts that stolen or SIM swapped. um
00:52:23
Speaker
So like how do you measure those? ah You can't. You kind of just have to rule of thumb it. But mitigating them is often pretty easy. um you know If you're worried about counterparty risk, spread yourself across many venues.
00:52:38
Speaker
That's easy. If you're worried about getting hacked, you know make sure you use several different wallets. Don't use hot wallets. you know Spread yourself. Diversify. it like Diversification is an easy one. If you've ever done engineering, you have your like likelihood of occurrence and severity of outcome and then ah and then you can go through and be like what controls are the easiest to put in place and you just work from the lowest hanging fruit like okay like making sure use a hardware wallet and making sure I use several of them.
00:53:07
Speaker
Make sure I keep one out of my house so that you know if my house gets broken into, it's not all gone. um Also, like one thing I advocate for is actually having a honeypot wallet.
00:53:20
Speaker
um So if you keep a hot wallet on your computer um and make sure it's got enough money in it that it's worth stealing, the uh let's say a thousand dollars and you can have some alerts on that um you know whether your computer's being compromised because that will that'll be the first to go be the easiest um and so if that happens uh you can actually you know respond to do something wipe your laptop move all your assets into a different wallet things like that um so the the and that's an easy risk mitigation strategy it'll cost you a thousand dollars but it might save you your whole portfolio um so
00:54:01
Speaker
the uh i think the way i see risk uh and they're like are like not things not problems to be solved uh but things to be like massaged around and sort of mitigated by being like, okay, I think it's quite risky. It doesn't mean I won't do it.
00:54:22
Speaker
I'll just do, I'll put $200 there. But there might be the chance I turn to two hundred dollars into a $200 into $1,000 or I lose my $200. still worth it. um if Especially if you've got 100 grand, you should be doing those kind of bets every day. yeah So yeah I think risk is never binary. You should be kind of putting yourself along a scale and deciding with that frame of mind.
00:54:47
Speaker
do you have any thoughts in this regards to like meme coins or prediction markets?
Meme Coins and Prediction Markets
00:54:54
Speaker
People that are trading there it don't seem so sophisticated either. Are those worth exploring for like smaller people?
00:55:01
Speaker
Yeah, I would say so. I think...
00:55:07
Speaker
Prediction markets, harder. There are opportunities, but everyone I know that's in like a big firm um is doing prediction markets trading in their PA.
00:55:19
Speaker
um So, and those guys are pretty good. You know, these are guys that like Citadel, yeah Optiva, and in you know high frequency trading firms hedge funds um that are on like seven figure salary packages and have phds those guys in their personal account are doing this stuff so got to remember i guess you are competing against those guys um albeit with less time You know, those guys have a busy job, but still. um I think meme coins are still depending. Like, the meme coin meta is always to be first mover advantage. always It always is. So I think a lot of people maybe lose out by beating old dogs. um
00:56:02
Speaker
Like, if you're still trying to buy Solana meme coins using Telegram bots, um that's been and gone. Mm-hmm.
00:56:15
Speaker
Solana meme coins made money when it was hard to trade. soon as it becomes easy to trade. Like, what edge do you have against the army of a hundred other people that also have an iPhone? Or the thousands of people?
00:56:26
Speaker
That's what I think. ah There's a bit of a... The the edge shouldn't be too easy. it should be annoying it should be really like painful like if it's a new chain it might have a really buggy wallet it's not metamask it's not phantom wallet it's some like dog shit implemented by the main devs that never touched again and the block explorer sucks um and you're going and buying on a dex whose front end looks like you know maybe it was vibe coded or maybe he's just got terrible design choices um
00:57:02
Speaker
but that's going to make more money like xrp when those meme coins came along like those things went to the moon but then yeah we've not we've not heard about them since uh but you know on base base meme coins had a moment but it was only when it was like early before you anyone heard about it so i think like if you were going to try and make money trading meme coins it should always be in like the new places uh and if you're not new you're not early in your exit liquidity um you should be buying in markets not just like tokens that have low overall liquidity um and and they're really like a ah weird beta exposure to like whatever that chain it could be monad for example it might be like if you think monad's gonna grow you could buy monad or you could buy a basket of shit coins
00:57:52
Speaker
and if Monad gets really hot, people will be buying them, uh, you know, because there's Zergs coming in and cycling into the system, playing around. Um, uh, Meme Coins are never a free lunch. They're more of a like effort to reward. Um, cause you kind of, the the effort is in trading, uh, when it's annoying before you've got like the convenience of a Telegram bot.
00:58:16
Speaker
Um, and also just constantly churning and trying to find new places. Um, you know it's most of you probably a case of like most of them will probably not pay out but one in a hundred might go to like the moon and make you a hundred two hundred thousand dollars um so if that's the case then you really want to do as many as possible and the only way to like diversify is to try and find as many different like new places um so i would say that i think as well not to like put people off of prediction markets there's still money to be made um but i'd want to be comfortable with maths and stats uh even to just like an undergraduate first year stem degree level um because then you can make way more it's the same as sports betting or anything like you can make money arbitraging um or doing some simple modeling um
00:59:12
Speaker
think there's probably, like a classic one would probably be like rebate farming. A lot of, if there's a market that's on Polymarket and also on like a sports betting app in where whichever country you're in, they often give you like 200 bucks for free.
00:59:26
Speaker
um If you put $50 in or something. uh and you can you know get a free hedge on one side and trade the other side of polymarket and just basically capture those 200 uh for free across many different sports accounts maybe farm get get an account in your brother's name your sister's name your mom's name your dad's name your grandmother and farm things that way that's like definitely a way to make good money um so there's ways you could do it if you're smart about it but like i would say
00:59:58
Speaker
as far as left curve turn your brain off like meme coins you can make money but you just got to shovel a bit of shit uh you know rather than having anything served to you yeah
01:00:14
Speaker
I guess it's a good a good um summary of like this the whole quant versus
Sustainable Trading Mindset
01:00:20
Speaker
like retail trading debate a bit as well that pops up every once in a while where it's like when people say no, don't trade and retail people are like, hey, you can still do it.
01:00:30
Speaker
Yeah, I sit somewhere between the two is I think most people shouldn't be trying to trade for a living. And um and if you couldn't ah get hired to do it for someone else.
01:00:47
Speaker
You should evaluate whether you have the what it takes to do it for yourself. ah Because those other people have more capital, so you'll make them even more money than you can make for yourself. um And more infrastructure, more support.
01:01:00
Speaker
ah So it's either you're not experienced or have enough of the skills to make it work. um And also I think it's a part of it like if you're asking that question at all.
01:01:12
Speaker
ah You know that saying? There's the like a Mozart quote or like an anecdote of uh a like 25 year old um composer uh went to mozart and asked um like what does it take to write a great symphony and he said don't worry about it you're too young he's he's like but mozart you wrote your first symphony as a child and he said but i also didn't go around asking people how to write a symphony
01:01:45
Speaker
um and i think part of that is like the people that are going to make it and do it themselves they're not going to go around trying to ask others they're going to you know inflict the pain and get it over with so uh i think there's there's edge and money to be made it's just don't get caught up with all of the sexy trades. Like, don't think you're gonna be the hedge fund manager as a solo dude. You're not, like, you've gotta be doing the dirty stuff, the annoying things, the things that are, like, beneath everyone that works as, you know, full-time as a hedge, like, they're not gonna be doing meme coin, like, filtering through a bunch of, like,
01:02:23
Speaker
put terrible dashboards just to find the new chains that might be like something happening on and trying to find the decks on that chain no they're not doing that there's probably there's returns there but for their the value of their time it's not worth it um especially when you know they they have more dollar the more dollars you have the more you need it to scale and these edges don't yeah um so if you make sure that you're playing in an area where the return on your time and the return on your capital kind of fit uh for the scale you definitely can make money but you just have to be honest about not trying to be like if you're just doing trying to scalp like es like the s and p 500 and think that that's going to like long term make you consistent money i think it's like you should probably reevaluate you need to be playing in far more inefficient markets um or far smarter you know
01:03:15
Speaker
you shouldn't be playing tennis against like Djokovic you shouldn't be trying to beat Djokovic you should be trying to you know beat a grandma who has a lot of money and pays you fifty dollars every time to play her it's uh the knowing your limitations I think as a ah retail trader is the most important bit um and then you could probably make quite a lot of money um but yeah to everyone out there don't give up your day job um But if you're like someone that's going to make it, you're not going to ask me or listen to me. So it's the almost pointless statement, but I'll say it anyway.
Future of Crypto and Political Impact
01:03:55
Speaker
Do you have like a view on on crypto um in the future? Like the opportunities are still here. Obviously right now everything is kind of grim and and not looking too well. But do you think there's still money to be made for like sophisticated people and unsophisticated people?
01:04:12
Speaker
I think,
01:04:15
Speaker
very long term, I'm quite bearish. Um, I think.
01:04:23
Speaker
crypto pumped a whole lot after the last US election. like Most of these like major macro and economic things are tied to American ah geopolitics, um unless there's some global conflict breaks out, which could also happen.
01:04:36
Speaker
I think we've sort of tied crypto as a market too much to one side of politics rather than maybe not involving and being bipartisan.
01:04:49
Speaker
And so the risk is that that side of politics don't win again. and suddenly crypto gets lumped in with the enemy um and they will clamp down real hard. They'll start seeing that it's the industry that enriches their opponents and they'll do everything they can as they were doing prior to the election. you They were trying to close up ah all of these things and this like all of these donations to Trump and the campaign were kind of like in retaliation to that.
01:05:20
Speaker
But I think that comes with a cost and that Now they're gonna see, and seeing that that worked to beat them, they will climb down even harder because they don't like that. um Especially with what the Trump family has done publicly.
01:05:34
Speaker
they're very involved in crypto yeah and so yeah to a lot of Democrats crypto is Trump and Trump is involved with crypto so they will probably get far stricter and um things will become a lot harder to do America Americans will lose access the market will get cooler they'll start coming off the SEC will probably start coming after a bunch of different projects uh things will probably tighten up and they'll want to you know kill it i don't think the true crypto will ever die because that cyberpunk um background but i do you think that it's a pretty big systemic risk uh and it kind of hangs on the balance of whether a republican or a democrat wins the next presidential election yeah um
01:06:23
Speaker
And I think, I don't think that a Republican will win given where we are right now with global conflict. um But I also, yeah, I think
01:06:37
Speaker
in the meantime the the big trades are all uh will a big go like they're all know oil uh and you know crypto beta is like a risk asset and risk off asset um we saw with the invasion of the in 2022 of russia into ukraine um the crypto market really took a huge tank um but that was a great buying opportunity it was a like over like crypto markets as far as i like true believer shouldn't sell off in uncertainty and conflict. They should be the things that people want um as like safe ha harbor assets, things that can't be taken away by sanctions.
01:07:21
Speaker
things like that so i think i mean that would be a trade i'd be looking out for if we see an escalation in conflict and crypto you know drops as to broader markets um i'd be better betting more on the decoupling of the correlation between tradfire and crypto in that event but i also am like very cautious on that longer time frame to 2028 think i think um it's a high uncertainty like i have no horse in the race being not an american so don't like i hope people that are listening don't take this as like a political view um but like my just weighted assessment of like what maybe the voting outcome might be is it's pretty uncertain it's like a coin toss and i don't want to make bets on a coin toss with my whole portfolio so um
01:08:11
Speaker
the The smarter thing I think I'll be doing leading up to that would be risking off into stables and fiat assets um and then waiting and then re-entering the market. We've still got like ah two and a half years left in in which we can have fun more or less, I guess, if the world doesn't doesn't collapse. or maybe maybe like the ironic thing about the cyberpunk ethos is that we're actually hoping that they establish like a fascist dictatorship so the other side never comes to power again exactly yeah we yeah yeah i i think that's the ah also the irony of the like the crypto uh
01:08:54
Speaker
like community or all these foundations involving themselves heavily with what is looking tangential, if not fascist, um is that it kind of at odds with, like, it libertarianism is at odds with authoritarianism. little bit, yeah.
01:09:13
Speaker
um and uh i think the true crypto bull case is that like libertarian use case um and yeah i think should things get a little frosty that that's the like if i was to pick certain crypto assets it would be the ones that are the most censorship and most resistant most decentralized um the theorem's pretty decentralized um it's not super censorship resistant as far as getting your transactions on chain just with the block builders but things like Monero privacy preserving things that they obviously don't like Bitcoin Bitcoin is pretty decentralized it's still mined but it's still like it's not like Hyperliquid's blockchain which is kind of a group of eight you know different groups of people that are kind of all controlled by it's not truly decentralized right I think it's 16 though no so
01:10:11
Speaker
Maybe as a good buy anyway. yeah um Yeah, I think that's the like the long-term case. But yeah, I would i would say you've got two what two and a half years to make it out of the permanent underclass.
01:10:27
Speaker
ah would Use your user time well.
Lessons Learned and Final Advice
01:10:33
Speaker
ive like I have one more question before we wrap up. um Because I want to ask you about, since you've been doing this for quite a while, like what have been like some of the biggest mistakes that you've made during it and the the lessons that you've learned from that?
01:10:46
Speaker
who There's a few big ones. um I'd say the biggest one is probably jumping in
01:10:57
Speaker
to like getting distracted. Mm-hmm.
01:11:02
Speaker
And I guess what I mean by that is a lot of crypto is very prone to shiny object syndrome. Yeah. um And, you know there's everyone talks about narratives and, you know, what is hot. But I think decoupling yourself from the crypto Twitter timeline um and just thinking more in like,
01:11:25
Speaker
put your businessman's hat on and be like, okay, how am I approaching it? Like, especially if you're doing it as a job, treat it as a job. Don't treat it as the same as if you were just sort of passively engaging. um Do things, you've got make the decisions that are the most beneficial as a business owner. um So do the unsexy stuff that's guarantee more guaranteed to make you money. Don't chase like a holy grail long shot.
01:11:50
Speaker
um And I think the like from those mistakes of like chasing new things is like I've made big trading mistakes and lost big amounts of money. But the the biggest things I've lost this time, like just wasting like two months on a project that realistically I knew I should have never started.
01:12:12
Speaker
And most people know that, right? Like if you're just honest with yourself, um, and knowing like when you're fucking around and wasting time, um So like just almost always the most difficult thing to do is the right thing.
01:12:30
Speaker
Mm hmm. And I don't mean that in a like. Do something like. ah Like you're not a rocket engineer and you don't need to build a new shiny system and solve all of the world's problems, but that's actually less annoying and less like shitty than click trading something that you knew made money today and doing it all day and you'll spend 18 hours at a screen grinding for two dollars every click um and it's pretty gross but they made you money today rather than potential money in two months yeah so and it's it's not fun but it's like that is trading um and i think you know
01:13:17
Speaker
what are you doing today to make more money today is really the question you've got to ask yourself. Um, so yeah, I think avoiding getting distracted and being honest, just getting on with the the things that, you know, you probably need to be doing, but they're kind of don't want to.
01:13:33
Speaker
Um, it's never the fun stuff that makes money.
01:13:39
Speaker
yeah that's a good uh that's some good wisdom to to leave everyone with thank you very much for for coming on today this has been very interesting and enjoyable and yeah i guess unless you have any final words
01:13:58
Speaker
no i said stay short-term speedy long-term greedy okay thank you goodbye everyone bye