# How Twitter Traders BEAT Wall Street.. (Fejau) Thread Guy · 2026-03-17 · 41 min · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph3m6AIVyRc ## Transcript Thread Guy Mr. Fejau, what's up, man? Welcome back to the stream, dude. Fejau Dude, good to be back with you. You've been killing it since the last time we chatted. Thread Guy Thanks, man. You, too. I don't recommend much content to the stream, but I'm like, “You have to tap in.” It's an absolute must when you post a recording. So, it's good to see you, man. How have you been? Fejau I've been good. I've just been trying to be as non-introspective as possible, you know? Just trying not to think about anything ever. Just trying to move fast. Thread Guy Dude, I said SF taxi needs to just elect one person. He's the only one who's allowed to go on podcasts and speak, and nobody else should be allowed to. Dude, you should run their PR. I was listening to you say that, and I was just like, “It's insane.” They have these SF guys that get out there and just say the most tone-deaf things of all time, and it's brutal. Fejau It is pretty brutal. It's hard to watch, but at least it gives us some content to talk about. But, man, the last 3 weeks and my entrance into the geopolitical career have been something. We've talked a little bit, but I don't know. Give us a quick intro really quick. Set the stage real quick: who you are, what you do. I think most people here know who you are, and then we have a lot we need to cover. Thread Guy Yeah, we have a lot to chat about. I'm the head of content at Blockworks, so I oversee all our different podcasts and newsletters and help with events that we put on. That's most of my day job. I'm also the host of Forward Guidance, which is a podcast on the Blockworks network where we talk a lot about macro and crypto. I do a roundup there every week where I chat with a couple of my buddies who work at funds and that sort of thing, and we talk about what's going on in the macro world. Then I interview big macro chats every Tuesday and Wednesday of the week. So, yeah, it's fun to be on the other side. I've been a big fan of what you've been up to, and I'm excited to talk about macro and what's going on. Podcast is great, chat. You guys should check it out. I mean, I guess let's just start. Where are you right now with the oil trade in the Iran conflict? I know it's a big question, but where are we in this process, and how have you traded and thought about this conflict as it's been going on since, I think, February 28th, when the initial strikes happened? Fejau Yeah, so going into this, anybody monitoring the situation could see that the U.S. was moving a ton of military assets into the Middle East over the last month or so. So you're like, “Okay, well, either something big is going to happen, or it's going to look really stupid to move all these assets in for nothing to happen.” I kind of had a feeling, and it was pretty well telegraphed. You started to see oil and oil producers actually start to rally over the month of February into this thing. During that time, this is how I was thinking about the macro situation leading into this: last fall, we had the government shutdown. We've seen a lot of layoffs on the government side of things. Just the fact that you close out that entire sector leads to a negative growth impulse for the economy. During that time, we also had really low-quality economic data. We didn't really have a good idea of what was going on in the economy because the BLS wasn't producing job reports and that sort of thing. My thought process was that, coming out of that and into the early winter, like January, if you look at something like the ISM PMIs, it's survey data of leading indicators of what businesses are going to be doing. The manufacturing PMI, looking at manufacturers in the U.S. economy, had been below 50. For those who haven't looked at a diffusion index before, basically, if it's below 50, the economy is contracting. If it's above 50, it's expanding. The manufacturing sector was below 50 for the last 2 years, and it went positive durably for the first time in the last 2 months, January and February, at the same time that we started to see an improvement in manufacturing payrolls, or jobs created in the manufacturing sector. I was of the mind that we had gone through either a mini-recession back in April from Liberation Day and then the hangup of the government shutdown last fall, and that we were finally through these. We were starting to see an uptick in the manufacturing and industrial sectors. I thought that was going to lead to continued strength in industrial commodities like copper. I was super long copper in January. Thread Guy So everything was looking great. Then we get this energy shock, this oil shock, at the end of February. You've been all over it and kind of killing it. It's been super cool to watch you try to— Fejau Hell yeah. Thread Guy Uncover all of that. Fejau It's like, I'm not a big commodities guy, either. I'm more into bonds and that sort of thing, currencies, equities, gold, and Bitcoin, which is mostly what I trade. But I've been trying to get a good understanding of how to think about all of this. We had the initial shock at the end of February. Now, the name of the game, in terms of what's relevant to the economy and markets, is the Strait of Hormuz. Everybody's been focused, of course, on the oil market and what's been going on there. But it's also important to look at the other important commodities that flow through the Strait of Hormuz. Qatar exports 20% of the world's LNG, and that got hit by a drone from Iran. They haven't been producing LNG at all for the past 2 weeks. Even though we're seeing the occasional oil tanker from Iran still move through, those other sectors and commodities, like the LNG market, are really important. If you take off 20% of the world's LNG supply, that's not something you fix really easily. The same thing applies to the helium market, which is super important for the AI data center buildout and chips. Helium is an incredibly important commodity, and a huge portion of helium comes through the Strait of Hormuz. Those other sectors that I don't think have been talked about enough are really important to keep in mind as we think about how it trickles through. So, okay, where we are now, March 17th, the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for a couple of weeks now— Thread Guy Yeah. Fejau It's like almost 2 weeks now or something. Yeah, it's insane. But I was just looking at the futures curve, at the different CL contracts, before going on here, and it's really interesting. When you look at the front months, the first couple of months' contracts, those have been coming off the recent highs. We had the initial—where are we? CL is trading at $96 right now. Thread Guy Yep. It was at like $114 at that recent high. Fejau But then, when you look at the 2027 contracts, if you look at the February 2027 contract, we actually took out the recent high from March 9th on that one. So the further out on the curve you go, the contracts are actually still hitting new highs while the front month is chopping around. How do you digest that? We're worried about the duration of the crisis. I think the front months have had a lot of it baked in. You need to see things like the U.S. striking Kharg Island and the actual oil assets there for the front month to really start to go higher. The real name of the game now is trying to understand how long Hormuz is going to be closed for and how that gets priced into the longer-dated contracts of the oil market. The longer side of things, like the 2027 contracts, is still going higher. So things are getting worse in that longer-term aspect. That's the main thing to figure out right now: how long is this going to last? Then we could probably talk about the economic consequences. But that's how I'm thinking about things. Thread Guy One of the things that I learned, 2 weeks into my geopolitical career here, when I first entered the oil trade, is that we could talk about the Strait of Hormuz and how it's almost hard to fathom that they didn't have a plan to keep this open. But the second thing I learned when I entered the trade initially was that the levers the U.S. could pull, which were a Trump TACO and the SPR, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, were basically a complete nothingburger. Fejau [Laughter] Thread Guy They hit you with the double, the bang-bang. They have this big number, 180 million barrels or whatever, but I think the most they can release is 2 million barrels a day because these things are in salt caves in Texas. They won't implode if—yeah, you have to push water up—and they will implode if you take out more than 2 million barrels a day. We're, you know, 20 million barrels short. I was researching what's happening, and I'm like, “Wait, this is actually, legitimately, genuinely a nothingburger.” They have no other levers to pull other than getting the Strait back open. So I closed over the weekend just because I was up enough. I'm like, “I don't know about oil.” I don't want to round-trip. But I've since reopened a smaller size, higher leverage, at $93–94 crude because they can't get it open. And so, to your point, we're starting to price in these back-end contracts where everyone's just trying to figure out how long this conflict is going to go on for. Every day, it's like the counterterrorism director just stepped down. Then, a couple of days ago, Trump comes out and is basically threatening US allies to form this coalition to escort ships through. Now he's like, “We don't need you guys. You're useless.” He was begging China; now he's saying he's going to do it. But all this time has passed—2 weeks, 3 weeks—and we can't get a single ship through. Are you long oil here? Fejau I'm not long oil specifically. I'm long or short a few different things. To be honest, I think trading direct oil futures is really hard. I'm still making money, but I'm not thinking I'm going to make a career out of this, by the way. Thread Guy Yeah. Yeah, no, for sure. Fejau But it's difficult for a few different reasons. It's a very efficient and sophisticated market. There are some very well-regarded, oil-specific hedge funds that have blown up before. I don't know if people are listening, but go Google Pierre Andurand. People view him as one of the best oil hedge fund managers, and he's blown up funds. It's a really difficult market to trade. Thread Guy Or previously? Fejau No, previously. I don't remember when. I think it might have been 2008 or something. Anyway, he's a really well-known oil hedge fund guy. There are a few different things I'm looking at. My big conviction right now is honestly on the US dollar rallying—the DXY. A lot of the stuff going through the Strait of Hormuz impacts Asian and European economies. Japan is highly dependent on the flows coming through there, as are other Asian markets. Qatar's LNG capacity—all that volume—goes to those countries. The US is actually in a much better spot than in 2008, when we saw the last big oil surge, other than 2022 or the 1970s. We had the US shale boom in the 2010s, so the US can actually produce its own oil now and be largely independent. You can't say that about those other countries. My thought process is that this is way worse for Asian and European markets than for the US. I actually think the dollar will rally because all these other countries are probably going to go into recession if this holds on for much longer. You just can't operate under this situation. When I look at how central banks are reacting to this situation, it plays into the currency thing. The Bank of England is pricing in a rate hike right now. The ECB, in Europe, is pricing in 1.5 hikes. The BOJ is kind of unchanged. And then the Fed is the only one that's still mostly pricing in a cut. It's fewer cuts now—1 versus the 2 it was pricing in just a week or a couple of weeks ago. So, that doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't make sense to me for Europe to be hiking into this situation because the demand destruction is going to be a lot more acute for them than for the US. The US has plenty of oil and energy, and it's the reserve currency. I think the US is actually in a much better situation than these other countries, but the currencies don't reflect that yet. You've started to see some dollar rallying, but I think it goes further. That drives a lot of my other frameworks for other asset classes. I've been pretty negative on gold, mostly because I had a feeling that this US dollar rally—dollar going higher—would be bad for gold. So far, that's been the case. I have these other, more derivative expressions of the trade, but not directly in oil specifically. I think you missed the easy trade. I had some stuff going into it, and that was good because, like I said, when they're moving all these military assets to the Middle East, you're like, “Okay, something's probably going to happen.” You can play a pop in oil for sure. But from here on out, I think you have to really know what you're doing, and I don't. Thread Guy [laughter] Before I ask you about the dollar, do you think Bessent was in the order books trading oil futures? Fejau Smart people—I mean, yeah. Your buddy Peepee Poopoo seems to think so. A lot of smart people seem to think so, right? Thread Guy Yeah. What are the implications if that actually happened? Fejau It depends on how he's doing it. The US Treasury is an interesting one in terms of how they can do things without people knowing. There are certain facilities. One of them is called the ESF, the Exchange Stabilization Fund, where Scott Bessent basically has his own little mini hedge fund within the Treasury, and he can trade currencies and those sorts of things. That's putting it in a fun way. In reality, the way we'll say it is that they can buy or sell different currency reserve levels depending on a million other reasons, and that doesn't have to get reported for a year. So there are ways. Some people think he's basically put on a little mini— Thread Guy How much money? Fejau I think the ESF is around $150 billion or something. Thread Guy No, no, no, no. I don't know. I'm totally— Fejau Let's see. ESF size: the Treasury reported a net position of $39 billion, with total assets around $210 billion. So, yeah, it's big. Some people think he's putting on a curve trade where he's shorting the front months and long the longer-dated ones as a way to refill the SPR. That's possible. I don't know. I don't even know how to think about that. It's not really something that's truly been done before. The head of the CME, who runs all the futures, said it would be disastrous because it destroys any sort of price signal when you have the government in the order books. That's just terrible. The truth signal is—I think he made this tweet—it’s like, the thing we use to monitor how bad the situation is is no longer accurate, right? Thread Guy Yeah, yeah. Yeah, 100%. Fejau I mean, this is actually kind of funny because that is why I got into Bitcoin originally. I was originally a macro person, and I got into Bitcoin because when I really dug into what the effects of things like QE were doing on interest rates—which are used as the bedrock foundation for discount rates for literally all assets—that manipulation starts to skew the price signal you get because the discount rate is manipulated. So signal and price start to break down. Luke Gromen, I don't know if you listen to him much, but he's talked about Bitcoin being the only existing fire alarm in the financial market because it's the only one that isn't truly manipulated in that way. So you can actually— Thread Guy There's a little bit. Fejau Yeah, I mean, now you can just call it a Michael Saylor machine. I don't know. Maybe a few years ago it was more relevant. But, yeah, things break down and get weird when governments intervene in markets. Thread Guy Okay, what happens to the petrodollar from here? Fejau It's interesting. I assume you're referencing some headlines that came out last week where it was like, “All right, we're not going to let anybody go through the Strait of Hormuz unless they start to settle in Chinese yuan,” and that sort of thing. Thread Guy That. Yeah, yeah. Fejau Yeah, it's like a direct callout to the petrodollar system. Thread Guy Countries are getting attacked, and the US is sort of like, right? Fejau Yeah. I mean, if you take the argument that the foundation of how you employ and execute on having a reserve currency—a global reserve currency—is having global energy priced in that currency, then dollars are central to that. This is how it all really began back in the 1970s with the petrodollar system: crude needs to be settled in US dollars. This is a way for US dollars to get out into the rest of the world, as well as running a big trade deficit where countries like China and Vietnam produce things, those goods get imported into the US, and then US dollars get exported to those countries. Those 2 systems are the flywheel of how the reserve currency actually works. So, if you move to a world where global energy is not being settled in dollars, that's a bad situation. It can be priced in something else, but as long as it's actually settled in dollars, that's the important part. On the margin, if we keep seeing these headlines about less and less of these things being settled in dollars, I don't know. That's a bad situation. I think it was Gaddafi who, years ago, wanted to have oil settled in gold. Within a few months, the US was there, and he was dead. Thread Guy [laughter] Fejau It's a very foundational part. Thread Guy Yeah. Wait, I don't know about this at all. What's the context? Who is that? Fejau Gaddafi? He was the prime minister of Libya. And they’re a big oil exporter. He wanted to price oil in gold, or have it settled in gold, and the US did not like that. So he was basically uprooted. I mean, he was a dictator. He wasn’t a great dude at all. Thread Guy That’s insane. How much are you thinking about this petrodollar idea when you’re thinking about the trade of the dollar? Fejau I view it through the lens of when bad things happen in the world, people go for dollars. People need dollars for a variety of reasons. Whether it’s the debt that they hold at a sovereign level, which is US-dollar-denominated, or just things that need to be settled and cleared in US dollars, it all leads to a rally in the dollar. What’s been interesting is that everybody still wants the dollar when these bad things happen, but nobody wants US Treasury bonds anymore, like 10-year bonds. Traditionally, when you had these big oil shocks—and I wrote a piece on this—something bad would happen in the world, and the flight to safety would be into US Treasury bonds. This time, it’s been the opposite. US Treasury bonds have been selling off. Yields have been going higher. There is that lack of confidence in the long duration of US assets, but— Thread Guy You want dollars. Fejau Yeah, exactly. Short-term, short-duration dollars are just ultra-short-duration US Treasury debt in a way. People still need and want that, so that’s still there. I think that’s why you always hear people talk about the dollar milkshake theory. It’s also why I’m kind of a fader of the whole de-dollarization thing, because at the end of the day, when it hits the fan like it is right now, people reach for dollars because it’s the cleanest dirty shirt. Tying it back to what we talked about with Hormuz, all these other countries are so much more affected by what’s going on in Hormuz than the US. It’s sort of like the cleanest dirty shirt. I’m going to go over here, where there’s US shale, the US is energy-independent, and it has the reserve currency. It’s a good place to hide out. Thread Guy So short-term, you’re hiding in the dollar, but long-term, you don’t want to touch these bonds. Fejau Yeah, short-term US dollars, like T-bills and stuff, are a great place to be. But long-dated Treasuries are terrible. Even during these acute crises, nobody wants them anymore. Thread Guy The cleanest dirty shirt is awesome. I like that. Shout-out to—I think Brent Johnson was the one who created that whole milkshake theory. Fejau Yeah, we can call it mine, though. Thread Guy It’s crazy. My favorite topic that I’ve learned through the geopolitical stuff is that, at a baseline, finding correct and accurate information feels impossible. The news is wrong and late, YouTube is wrong and late, and everyone in the Middle East is going to jail for posting footage of what’s happening. You’re listening to Trump versus whoever is in charge in Iran. There’s maybe some level of truth, but they’re both posturing, they’re both talking past each other, they’re both LARPing. How much of what Pete Hegseth says about how many people are dead is true? There’s just a lot of posturing and misinformation going on. The people who are known for covering this in news outlets don’t do a good job. The people who do do a good job are these random anonymous accounts. The list I gave the chat was Pee Pee Poo Poo, Trump, chumba wumba, and Calvin. For a couple of hours, it got a little ridiculous, plus a couple of others. These Twitter anons are trading this. I think I saw that Citadel lost 2% on the oil squeeze, and Pee Pee Poo Poo posted a P&L of $6 million. He just destroyed Citadel on the order books. These random anons—we see this in crypto all the time, right? This is the crypto game. It’s crypto, and you’re like, “Yeah, of course. Meme coins are on-chain. Citadel doesn’t want it to trade this stuff.” Well, Jane Street was, but whatever. When you see it in oil, it’s eye-opening. Fejau And then, second, you’re starting to see this crypto FinTwit-macro crossover that has been so electric to watch. You’re one of these accounts, and you cover this better than Fox News. What do you think of this whole transition toward independent trader journalism, or whatever you want to call it? Thread Guy I think it’s the best thing ever. The other side of the argument is that people get pissed off when something happens and suddenly all of CT, or the timeline, becomes an expert in that thing. Then they get upset. They’re like, “Last week we were experts in this, and now we’re experts in the straight-up formula.” But I don’t know. I’ve seen enough of these over the years now to understand that, especially with this cohort of crypto traders, it’s so cool to see them moving into these other markets. You get the elitists who say, “You have to be Pierre Andurand to be an oil trader.” Yes, there is a certain level of respect you need to give, but I’ve seen guys like yourself, David, or Crypto Ethan—guys who have been really great crypto traders and are now starting to experiment in macro a lot more. They’re doing really well, and they’re really good at digesting information and looking for legitimate information effectively. Meanwhile, the boomers are getting distracted or thinking AI slop is real. These crypto traders have been PvPing in the trenches against people who have been extracting for so many years. They’re so war-hardened that they have a skill set that naturally developed and can be applied to these other markets. I think it’s been really cool to watch. I’m all for it. I think it’s awesome. One of the things I realized, too, is that we’re trading Trump vibes in a lot of the market. We’re trading what Trump is going to say and then quickly figuring out how much of it is real and how much of it is fake. The market got wrecked strictly on this SPR announcement, which was obviously not significant when you actually took a second and read it. The thing crypto traders are best at is that when you’re trading garbage all day, especially on-chain memes, you have to be able to pivot really quickly when flows go against you, when news goes against you, or when announcements go against you. It’s like OpenSea. Then tomorrow there’s a better version: there’s Blur, it has a token, and it has no fees. Your whole business just got uprooted in one second. That’s what can happen, right? If you’re really short equities and then Trump rips a taco, it’s like, “Okay, brand-new slate, completely new information.” My question is, how sustainable do you think it is for this hyper-online Twitter crowd to consistently be profitable just by being good at the hyper-online game? Like the Base a16z megachurch thesis, which I reference a lot. Fejau Yeah, I think it’s only going to keep continuing. I heard these same conversations back in 2017 and 2018, when WallStreetBets was starting to come forth and people were all pissed off for the same reasons. They were like, “You’re just a bunch of retail scrubs. You can’t do this seriously. Why are you slinging and punting on options? This is a sophisticated asset.” It’s the same thing from back then. People would say, “Look at all these retail degenerates doing these things. The Fed is way too loose on monetary policy. We need to hike interest rates and steamroll all the retail.” But if you look at what’s happened over the last 10 years, there’s been a steady increase. Certain people, like the ones we’ve been talking about, have come through those periods and keep improving. It has also been survivorship bias. For every one person we talk about doing well, there are 20 who have been steamrolled and are back to their day jobs. Overall, I don’t think that trend is stopping, especially as you get into this world of AI, AI side ops, and fake information. With news-driven flows, suddenly one of the biggest edges is simply which Twitter account you have notifications on for—the recent squawks of what Trump is saying—and trading off that. That’s where things matter these days. Thread Guy Maybe the oil thing was just a situational coincidence, but right off the back of this hot ball of money and the silver explosion, is this going to keep happening? Every month or 3 months, is there going to be some new commodity or some new sector that’s hyper-focused, with hyper-liquid perps and options volume through the roof? Are we going to keep getting these events? Is this a sign of the end times, the end of the market? What do you make of it? Is the silver and oil thing at all related to this hot ball of money just ripping commodities, basically? Fejau I think what’s happening is that we’re in the beginning of a commodity supercycle, which—crypto traders took the word “supercycle” from commodity traders to explain when— Thread Guy Okay, okay. Fejau You know, commodities are super mean-reverting because when you have something that could be produced quite easily depending on the price, when it’s highly sensitive to that, price goes up and suddenly miners that were not profitable at $50 a barrel, suddenly at $100, are profitable. So then you turn on those miners or whatever, and that increases supply. Once that occurs, you have too much supply, and at higher prices, demand falters and the price comes down. But during a commodity supercycle over a 10-year period, those mean reversions keep trending higher: higher lows, higher highs. And I think what’s happening is that one of the best commodity analysts out there is a guy called Jeff Currie. He was the head of commodities at Goldman Sachs. He doesn’t have a Twitter. Thread Guy What’s up with that? Fejau I don’t know. I mean, some of those real legends aren’t on Twitter. Thread Guy Yeah. Fejau He’s incredible—one of the best commodity thinkers ever. And he’s of the mind that we go through these 10-year cycles where commodities underperform and then outperform. It’s kind of similar, I think, in some ways to crypto, where what leads us to a bull market sows the foundations for the next bear market, that type of thing. So every time— Thread Guy That kind of happens. Fejau Yeah, exactly. And so that happens to commodities, too. I think we’re undergoing one of those now for the next quite a few years, because we’ve just gone through a decade of underinvestment in commodities at the same time that everybody was all long software and that sort of thing. Then suddenly it’s like, “Oh, we need a lot of commodities to be able to fund these AI data centers.” We have shortages in basically everything. At first, I honestly thought that the trend of Hyperliquid hitting 3 TradFi markets was just going to be a flash in the pan a year ago, or maybe 6 months ago, when the gold one was going off before we even saw the silver one. But now I’m sort of like, if the base case is a sustained bull market in commodities for the next decade or so, I don’t see why these rolling bubbles of hot money, of hot balls of money, would stop. The Hyperliquid thing has been crazy. Bloomberg’s writing about it. The Wall Street Journal’s writing about it every day. There was a lot of money on the table that you didn’t make if you were trading oil and you didn’t have access to Hyperliquid, especially that first pop. Thread Guy By the way, I trade crypto. You should trade crypto, not pay attention to equities. Trump announcements: “Okay, cool, we’re going to strike Iran. We’re going to wait until right after market close on Friday, and then we’re going to do it.” Right? That’s not a coincidence. Whatever happens, we have 48 hours to figure out how to solve it before Monday open, or I guess Sunday night futures open. It’s pretty crazy. Okay, a couple more. I’ll let you go in a few minutes. A lot of these guys that we mentioned, the Chumbawambas of the world, are also really bearish on macro and have been for a while. I got a little bear-pilled there for a while, and I wasn’t trading it, but I’m just thinking to myself, holy—if I was actually a bear and I was running the numbers and doing the math and I had been bearish, I would be driving myself absolutely insane, just losing my mind. Three tankers blow up in the Strait of Hormuz, the SPY is down like 0.1%—just nothing. What is your read on what period we’re entering over the next, I don’t know, 3–6 months, probably on macro, like equities? Fejau Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dude, it’s tough to be a bear. I’ve said this many times: I almost never short anything, ever. For me, it’s either cash or long. Sometimes I’ll punt on little things, like maybe I’ll buy some puts here and there as a partial hedge, but I’m always pretty much net long or just have more cash. And I think, to me, that’s just what I did on Liberation Day in April. I didn’t catch the short, but I had a lot of cash to buy the bottom. I think it’s really tough to be a sustained bear. You’re fighting so many different things. You’re fighting a literal president who wants to make sure assets go up at all costs. You’re fighting the passive behemoth of people who get their paycheck and plug it into index funds every couple of weeks. Options have just become hugely popular over the last few years, and with that growth, options now impact indices more. When you buy a call, there’s an options market maker on the other side of that trade who’s hedging that other side, and that has an impact on the market. They talk about positive or negative gamma environments. If you’re in a positive gamma environment, basically they want to keep the price range-bound, and anytime it goes lower, they will buy reflexively to hedge their books. It’s kind of the opposite in a negative gamma environment. More and more, you have options that impact markets overall. You’re fighting so many different things. It’s really difficult. Even though, thematically, I probably agree that if you look at the history of economies, you get a big oil shock like this and most of them lead to recessions 8–24 months down the line. Thread Guy That’s the sequence, too, right? Like, how do you get there? Fejau Yeah, to get there, initially you have the hawkish reaction because oil is up, inflation is up, and then central banks have to be hawkish into that. It’s only afterward that you get the demand destruction and the recession. Throughout that whole time, like we’ve been seeing over the last few weeks, my belief is that the reason we haven’t seen markets go down that much is that nobody wanted to actually sell their books. They just bought puts to hedge them, and they were hoping, “Okay, I’m going to hold these puts and then I’ll make some cash on it, and then I’ll keep my longs.” But when everybody buys puts at the same time, everybody’s hedged, and then you don’t get that move lower. So puts get super elevated. It’s an interesting contrast to these information games on Twitter these days, where everybody gets smart to the next thing really quickly. But because everybody does that at the same time, the dynamic of that reflexively makes it so that it doesn’t happen. Thread Guy That makes perfect sense. Yeah, that’s actually very interesting. I’ve seen all these charts that put skew is at all-time-high volume, all-time-high size, open interest—whatever the metric is. I also felt this feeling in a really small circle where I’m long an insignificant-to-the-world amount of oil, and I’m like, “All right, every single force—the most powerful people in the world—is actively trying to kill me right now. With every lever they have, they’re trying to kill me out of this trade. I’m not going to make it.” Originally, I had high leverage and low size, and I’m like, “Bro, I’m just not going to make it. If I want the trade to go the way I want, I’m just not going to make it there,” because Trump, Bessent, every scary-ass Pete Hegseth—everyone’s trying to kill me on this trade. And that’s like the stock market. Fejau So, to answer your question, what am I doing in that respect? I’m mostly in U.S. dollars and cash. I have some punts on different things, like long a fertilizer stock or some natural-gas producers, just kind of random. I’m not saying a stock— Thread Guy It’s like a $50 million market cap. Fejau No, yeah, you get it. But little things like that. Mostly just in cash and waiting. If we get to the other side of this and everything’s all good, I don’t mind buying a little bit higher. Or maybe we go a little bit lower and then I buy there. But I just don’t have a good idea of how long this takes, and I know that typically the situation we’re in, where the economy was in a bit of a rough shape into a global oil shock, is just a really bad combination. I think it’s hard to predict the sequence to get there, so I’d rather just wait for it. If it happens, sweet, I’ve got a bunch of dry powder I can buy. Or if everything resolves itself, then I don’t know, I’ll just buy a little bit higher. But, like, whatever. Thread Guy Okay, basically the last thing I want to ask you—and you said you don’t have a ton of a take on it, so give me surface level—but are you concerned about private credit right now? Everywhere I look, I’m seeing doom-and-gloom posts about private credit going to blow up the stock market. Is this something that you are actively concerned about and/or trying to learn more about, or is it kind of contained in this one subset that’s not that big of a deal? Fejau Yeah, it’s definitely a risk, but I would say it’s a much smaller risk than the impact of something like this oil shock. I think that’s way, way, way bigger. So, yeah, it’s not great. Everybody just got stuffed to the gills in private credit over the last few years, and now suddenly it’s a classic scenario where redemptions are being frozen at the same time that, if you look at what a lot of these BDCs that had been issuing these loans were, it’s mostly software companies. And we forget about this, but just a month ago we were all freaking out about software and the AI one-bet thesis, right? That was what we were freaking out about a month ago, but that’s a huge exposure to private credit. Fejau You know, that’s where they operate. You look at Blue Owl—they’re the ones providing private loans to Meta to fund an AI data center and that sort of thing. So, yeah, it’s all very closely tied together with a lot of leverage. I would say the most interesting thing to me around that whole situation is this: typically, when you get the classic sequence of events that leads to a recession, what you see is credit spreads going higher—risk of default in companies going higher. Typically, it’s high-yield credit. HYG is a ticker you can look at for an index of high-yield credit. There you go. They’re also called junk bonds, so it’s the riskier companies. But what’s happened is that a lot of those really risky companies now use private credit instead. They don’t issue their own junk bonds in public markets anymore. So the really degenerate stuff doesn’t get marked in terms of the credit spread live anymore in something like HYG. Instead, they all hide it in private credit. You see a situation where high-yield credit spreads are pretty tame compared to some of the stuff that we’ve seen, and I think it’s because a lot of the really risky, degenerate stuff is hiding in private credit now. Thread Guy Good to know. Okay, the actual last topic you have to answer before we leave is crypto—Bitcoin, and specifically stretch with strategy. Where are you on Bitcoin right now, and crypto in general? Fejau I like Bitcoin. I think it’s looking like we’re starting to break out again. To be honest, I was bearish on it a little too early. I think I definitely got invalidated in that regard. I thought it would come down with everything due to this oil shock, but I didn’t really take into consideration that it had already sold off before everything else. It’s this classic scenario where there were no more sellers. We had destroyed so much leverage that there weren’t many sellers left, and I didn’t consider that enough. At the same time, you’re starting to have this Saylor stretch thing coming online more and more, which has also been really interesting. I don’t have a really good take on whether stretch is a Ponzi or whatever. It just seems like the next thing that everybody’s going to debate about for the next year or so. But the fact of the matter is that it keeps reaching 100. It keeps reaching par again. So there’s obviously demand for it, and that’s going to be demand for Bitcoin. If you have that plus no more sellers, it feels like all you really need is a good narrative. That’s probably the biggest missing thing right now. The only real narrative is that Saylor’s still buying it. I don’t know—maybe gold has had its run and now it’s going to rotate into Bitcoin. Thread Guy Yeah, I mean, this is the whole thing with these cycles in crypto: the narrative comes once the price goes up. People look for a good narrative and think the price is going to go up, but the price is going to go up and then everybody’s going to find a good narrative. So maybe we’re just waiting for the next narrative. Fejau Exactly. But then I think, aside from that, altcoins are still a bit lost. Like, they’re— Thread Guy Agreed. Thread Guy I think it’s really important to solve the legal merits of altcoins. Do you have a claim on cash flows and equity and that sort of thing? Blend equity and token ownership together. I think the market is rightly validating and rewarding people who are actually solving these problems. Tokens that are just useless governance coins with no claims on anything are down only and being sold by VCs every week. It seems like we’re going to be in another year of churn around that. That’s great for people who can identify the coins that are actually fixing those equity-structure issues, go long those, and short the useless governance tokens. I know there have been some really great trades like that over the last year, and I would probably see that continue. You should keep posting about this equity-token-cash-flow problem as well, because somebody has to solve it. I don’t feel like there’s really anyone taking it that seriously yet. Fejau Yeah, there are versions of it. Just to show a little bit of what we’re doing at Blockworks, that is a big issue for us. Investor relations is something we’re going deep on because we think that if you can actually get those disclosures out there and people know what they’re investing in and what their rights are, that’s just better. We need to solve that before we see the industry actually grow up and mature. There are people and other companies working on that as well, so I think it’s all going to get there. It just takes time. Thread Guy Hey, what is the origin story of your name? Fejau, what is that? Do I say it right? Fejau Fejau. It’s just a combination of my first name and last name. Thread Guy Oh, it’s Fejau. Fejau is the first part, yeah. Okay, okay. Sick. Dude, I appreciate you coming on, man. Seriously, I actually mean it. I think you, among a couple of other accounts in our little—it isn’t even CT anymore. What are we, FinTwit? Fejau Whatever it is, yeah. Thread Guy You’ve done an exceptional job of covering things. You’re earlier, you’re more accurate, and you’re just better than traditional news outlets. I have high respect for what you do. I think the podcast is incredible, and I always appreciate you coming on, dude. Fejau Sweet. Thanks, man. Likewise. It’s cool to see you broadening out. I’m sure people give you a hard time about being a macro guy, but I think it’s awesome. It’s super cool. Thread Guy You’ve got to get there one way or another, right? You’ve got to look at some point, so let’s just rip the Band-Aid, you know? Fejau Exactly. Yeah, and I fully believe in that. Just being upfront about the stuff you don’t know. Like I said, I’m not an expert in futures markets for commodities. I’m doing my best, but there are smarter people out there. Thread Guy Fejau, you’re the GOAT, man. Thanks for coming on again, dude. Hopefully we can do it again at 100K Bitcoin or something. Fejau Sounds good, bud. Have a good one. Peace. Thread Guy Peace.