Bitcoin Reclaims $90k: Have We Bottomed?

What’s up, Jonah?

Hey, Avi. How are you doing?

I’m good. I’m really good today because the markets are really good today. It always lifts your mood, right, when you see a smattering of green as opposed to the bloodbath of red.

Yeah, I got a little scared last night. I’m not going to lie. I’m normally pretty even-keeled, but I started to panic a little bit—not enough to sell, but just, “Oh, man, how bad is December going to be? How much volatility am I going to have to ride? How stupid am I going to feel not selling now after it goes down another 20%, when I could have bought there?” But, yeah, I didn’t sell.

1. Have We Bottomed?

I mean, basically, the thing that made me really happy, to be completely honest, is that by the end of the day, by Monday evening, we had retraced from that 84,000 level. We had bounced off it, and now, when you look at the charts, things look really good. And why do I say this? Just as a trader, generally, you tend to bottom when the selling stops, not when the buying begins.

It looks like, at least now, especially if we’re going to hold this level, we got the last of the panic sellers out of the market. If you go to a daily chart and look at the volume on Friday, the 21st of November, you had a massive volume spike. That’s when we got down to 80K. And then this more recent sell-off is, I think, just the last stragglers.

So this is generally a classic bottoming pattern where you get the major sell-off and the huge capitulatory moment. And then, when we recorded—I think we recorded around 87K BTC—we were saying, “I think this is the beginning of the end. This is where we’re bottoming.”

But what tends to happen is when price rebounds to the previous level where a lot of people bought—and that previous level where a lot of people bought was the 92 to 93 level—you can see it on the daily chart, that little hammer, for those following along at home, on Tuesday, the 18th of November. That’s what you call a demand zone. We blew right through that, which means that there were a lot of people who probably averaged in around 92 to 93.

And then, once price got back there after trading at 80, people started offloading. They’re like, “Okay, I’m back at breakeven. Let me get off.” Then you get that slow-volume retracement, which is just straight profit-taking. But profit-taking selling is a lot better and less scary than all of the derisking and getting-out-of-the-market selling that we’ve been seeing since the top.

Basically, I think that started around 100K. Once 100K broke, people got very panicked, and a lot of that was people throwing up their hands and going, “Okay, let me get the shit out of this market.” What we recently saw, I think, is just people who got caught in bad positions at 92 to 93 puking the last of it. Then you hit a massive demand zone, Bitcoin goes up 5%, and we don’t make a new low.

That’s really the key: not making a new low, because that sets up traders really well to buy with an easy stop-out. The stop-out being now 84, right? So, if you’re a trader, you look for triggers in the chart. You look for good risk-reward.

And now there’s a really nice trade here where you can buy 90, 91. You can look for all the way back to 100K if you want, as a short-term trader. That’s a nice 10% move, and you can stop out 8% lower, at 84. So it’s slightly better risk-reward than before, where you’re like, “I have no idea where this freight train is going to stop, so I’m obviously not going to get in front of it.”

Does it all make sense?

Yeah, no, it all makes sense. You brought up a lot of interesting points that I was looking through on the charts while you were talking. I think the big thing that happened—yeah, I love your phrasing of how the bear market stops when the selling is exhausted, not when white-knight buyers just step in to save us all.

There’s a lot of fear and doubt out there, particularly around Strategy, Saylor, and co., but the selling—let’s talk about the selling that stopped, because that, I think, is the most relevant thing to your point. Funding flipped negative right around Thanksgiving for Bitcoin, or went from being solidly positive to wrapped around zero, negative on some exchanges.

And then the OG whale selling that we’ve talked about being the main driver of Bitcoin’s depreciation—we said it was going to slow down below 100K. It turns out it slowed down below 90-ish K. The way that you would track that, if you don’t have Glassnode, which has a metric for whale wallets and their transfers to and from exchanges—I don’t subscribe to Glassnode because I’m lazy and cheap, but everybody should—is to go into Grok, which is useful because it’s connected to Twitter, and ask about OG whale selling. You prompt it with basically the chart from Glassnode and ask if it’s slowed.

Based on tweets, it stitched together a thesis that the OG selling has indeed slowed below 90K. It cites a bunch of different tweets from people who do subscribe to Glassnode, talking about how those whale wallets stopped transferring coins to exchanges, and now it seems like, over the weekend, the whale wallets actually accumulated rather than sold.

I think we’re right. I think basically there’s going to be a wall of selling, maybe above 100K. Maybe the OGs have more to go, but that’s finite, right? And that supply is getting gobbled up. It seems like the equilibrium price is 90K—the buy-with-both-hands price—where your mom, your friend who’s a no-coiner, the guy who laughed at you in 2021 but now gets it, your buddy’s buddy—they’re all calling you, asking if they should buy in the 80s. I think we go right back up to 100K.

But it’s going to be a super-choppy December because you usually don’t get a lot of risk commitments from institutions in December, as we’ve talked about. It’s more of a retail market, or a market that’s being driven by CTAs and not much else. So I think it’s just going to be a super-choppy December.

You’re supposed to buy below 90K. You’re probably supposed to do nothing if it’s above 95K or 100K. And then I bet we get big inflows during the first couple of weeks of January.

2. Will Trump Announce A Fed Chair In 2025?

One last thing that’s kind of crazy, Avi, I wanted to talk to you about this. Have you been looking at the Fed chair appointment on Polymarket? Something huge.

Tell me about it.

So basically, Jerome Powell’s term is up on May 26th. One second, let me pull up Polymarket so I can share the screen here. Trump announced that he has selected a new Fed chair. He said the decision is made, so I’m just looking at Polymarket here.

As soon as he announced that, the previous most probable outcome—no announcement by December 31st—dropped to 20%, and Kevin Hasset went up to 70%. We all know that the Trump administration—love him, he’s a big, snuggly orange, crazy character—but his administration is a little bit corrupt. We know everybody’s trading on Polymarket when they hear stuff that the market doesn’t know. Polymarket basically tells you what’s going to happen, and the grifters in the administration are taking retail money.

Yep.

So Kevin Hasset’s going to be the next Fed chair, it seems. I bet Trump makes that announcement this week. And you Google Kevin Hasset. I’m going to do that in the same Chrome tab so that we can keep sharing our screen.

Kevin Hasset’s crypto background: He owns between $1 million and $5 million worth of Coinbase stock. He worked on the company’s advisory council as a paid adviser there. His previous crypto experience was that he worked for One River Digital Asset Management. We don’t need to belabor the point here.

This guy really likes crypto, huh, dude?

He is an economist. So, on paper at least, he is qualified for the job of Fed chair, right?

Right?

He’s cartoonishly, stupidly dovish—cartoonishly [slur] bullish on crypto. He is basically Mr. Pump Your Bags. This guy should literally be on the $2,000 bill, on the cover of the 2026 edition of Monopoly.

This is Trump’s way of, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, telling the market, “Your bags are going to the moon next year. I’m not going to have a bear market in the middle of the midterm elections. Buy now”—wink, wink, nudge, nudge—“because this guy is going to send everything.”

3. Ads (Kraken OTC, Peaq)

And also, just having him as a shadow Fed chair—okay, Jerome doesn’t leave until May, but if this guy gets announced in December, it puts pressure on Jerome. The only thing that could possibly be more bullish for crypto and for risk assets than this guy would be if Trump had appointed Don Jr. or some other ridiculously unqualified acolyte.

4. Time To Squeeze The Bears?

But here's, I guess, a question for you. By the way, as we're talking, markets continue to rip. God, I love it. I love it when the bears come out in force and then they just get smacked in the face. [laughter] So many people on that last candle were saying, “Ah, people called the bottom. You guys are dumb.” But—

Oh, you know, quick one—quick sidebar. Speaking of bears getting daddied, have you ever seen a picture of a bear without hair?

I have never seen one. No. Check this out. How terrifying is that?

What the fuck is that? Jonah, why are you looking this up?

I don't know. I saw it on X, and I was just like, “That's the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life.” They look like alien space predators. I mean, that's what all the bears are going to look like in about 2 weeks. They're going to be so stressed, they're going to lose all their hair. [laughter]

Sorry. I thought it was a funny segue. Anyway, go on. So, yeah, you love it when the bears—

No, that was good, Jonah.

Yeah, I like that.

Old man got jokes.

Old man really likes hairless bears. [laughter] On the last podcast, what were we talking about? We were talking about survival tactics. On this podcast, we're talking about hairless bears. Now, hairless chimpanzees are a whole other story. There's a whole meme with Joe Rogan about that from a long time ago. I don't know if you remember that.

No, I don't.

On every single podcast, Joe Rogan would bring up hairless chimpanzees.

Joe Rogan would be like, “They're jacked, man. They're totally jacked.”

Yeah, he's a crazy guy.

Yeah.

But what was I—before we got completely sidetracked?

Basically, you were saying that you love the charts rallying. You love when bears get destroyed.

I love when bears get destroyed. So, for people that—

We're talking about the Fed, too.

—for people that are curious, this is sort of what I've been looking at. This is the Bitcoin chart, and when I tell you guys that volume really is everything, okay, there are 2 things that I think are important to note. From top to bottom, on the previous pullback, about 32%. From top to bottom on this pullback, 35%. Not a huge difference, but I think basically, once Bitcoin—

On the previous pullback, it was about 33%. This has been going on now for more than a year, this type of pullback. You can even go back over here and look at that. Okay, that one's a little bit less, at 18%. This one is 20%, but that's sort of in an uptrend. Whenever you get these periods of consolidation, Bitcoin tends to pull back about 30%, consistently.

And I think that's just because of the type of market participant that exists in the Bitcoin market. Now, these are slower-moving, large-ticket investors that are willing to be patient and wait for good entries. It seems like 30% off the high is the good entry for Bitcoin. That's when the risk-reward starts to look good.

5. Can ASTER Compete with Hyperliquid?

I think it specifically starts to look good because, if you look at it the other way, 30% down is about 50% up. I think 50% back to all-time highs is a good trade. If I buy it here, I can get 50% on my money, and I'll cut if it goes down another 20%, because then we're probably in full-on bear-market territory.

So, that's why I think that 30% has been respected over the last 3 major pullbacks: it represents the best risk-reward for the type of investor that is now, candidly, driving the price of Bitcoin. Apes like me and you, trading on Hyperliquid, buying in a Robinhood account, or pushing through a buy on Coinbase—we're not driving the price as much as the big boys allocating, like the Texas pension and whatnot.

I don't know if you just recently saw the news, but Vanguard's actually allowing crypto—

Bank of America just allowed their RIAs to recommend up to 4% of the portfolio in IBIT.

Yeah, which is huge. And so then you combine this with 2 other things. One is, when you get a ridiculously high-volume candle like this, and that high-volume candle coincides with being 30% off the highs, that's generally a good sign for bottoming. But this is very—

Wait, sorry. I want to make sure I understand this. So, you get the 30% sell-off, then what's the signal you look at for bottoming?

Look at this volume. Look at this candle. Here, I'll make it a little bit clearer for those who are listening. This is what I'm looking at right here. You see that massive volume spike right here?

Oh, okay.

In the midst of the sell-off, down to where the wick went—to $80,000 BTC—there was gargantuan volume. Let's call it 3 or 4 times the average daily volume bar. That basically tells you you're—

Yeah, well, it happened here on October 10, but this was not 30% down. You were not 30% off the highs, which, again—

October 10 was a weird one also. That was a lot of forced liquidations, and—

This was liquidations, but it was a lot of spot selling, and that's actually what you need to look for—

It's not derivatives. Liquidating derivatives is kind of the first step, like liquidating your apes. That's the first thing that happens. The last thing that happens is you liquidate panic spot buyers, and then you get this sell-off over here.

Let me just switch back and get rid of this to clean it up for you guys. Then you get this sell-off over here yesterday. This is the demand zone that I was talking about. That's where a lot of people bought. So, when price got back up to that level, generally the bottoming pattern is: you sell off hard, you bounce back to where the prior demand zone was, you sell off a little bit, and then you go back up.

That little bump there—you probably get a few of those. You'll probably get that at $100,000 again. You'll get up to $100,000, maybe come back down, and then go back up, because basically what you're doing is getting out all of the people who got in at that bad price, saw their position decrease, and are now back at break-even.

6. Is ASTER A Buy?

Break-even is a very psychologically powerful thing. So, what you get is that profit-taking. But basically, the whole point here is that I think this is a pretty clear bottoming pattern in which, over the next 1–2 months, I would expect Bitcoin to break up above $100,000 again and get back up to—honestly, we could go to all-time highs. I think that might take 2 months.

But this, to me, smells a lot like a bottom. Once we start going back up again, you kind of have to get in, because once we start going back up, it's just going to look even worse.

I mean, Solana is another great example of this, right? You retest that $126 level, you bounce off of it, and now people know, “Oh, fuck, I can't believe I didn't buy that $126 level again.” Solana's probably going to do very well, too.

God, I love this chart. Robinhood—you get this. Holy. It's beautiful, right? I bought here around $112 or $113, when I said I was buying, and people clowned me, but I'm up 14%. So, I'll take it.

You know what else is going to—the other thing that looks like it's bottomed, that I want to buy here, that I think I'm going to start click-buying during this podcast, is Galaxy.

Galaxy, GLXY. You ain't got no alibi. You galaxy.

Let's take a look at Galaxy. Let's see what we got.

Yeah. What do you think of that chart? Basically, you know how I feel about crypto, crypto-related things, and speculative things. I don't like catching falling knives. I love buying after they've bottomed. I'm not a big technical-analysis guru or short-term trader, but what you said really resonates.

When you get huge-volume wicks as this thing is tanking, it usually means that the sellers are tapped out, and the sellers being tapped out is usually the best bottom signal there is.

The sellers are exhausted. It happened after FTX.

It's a little mini version of that happening now.

Let's talk about Robinhood. It's just a rocket ship. That thing is going to be up only for decades.

Robinhood is a secular bet. That's basically the best way to bet on boomers transferring wealth to younger generations who want it.

No questions asked.

That and Bitcoin, basically.

So, when you see something like this again, Robinhood really collapsed from the highs yet again. Look at that: 33%. What a magic number. If there's 1 thing that you take away from this podcast, it's that 33% for these assets seems to be a magic number, a lot more for things like Solana, because I think the makeup of the people who buy Solana is—

Solana's off a lot more than 30%, though.

That's what I'm saying. It's off more because it's a much more speculative asset. Obviously, Bitcoin is extremely speculative, but Solana is next-level speculative. So, what do you think of Galaxy and MicroStrategy?

I think Galaxy is looking pretty good here.

I think Galaxy is looking good here. That's a place to deploy some skrill. And then MicroStrategy—there's a lot of talk about how they're underwater. Basically, to summarize, their market cap is below the value of their Bitcoin holdings if you subtract the debt from the value of the Bitcoin holdings. So, they hold—I don't know how many billions of dollars of Bitcoin, minus, I think, $9 billion or $10 billion worth—

$55 billion of Bitcoin—

Minus, like, $9 billion or $10 billion worth of debt. That gets you to—I think that Bitcoin minus debt is still above their market cap. And you have the huge volume bar there on the lows with all of the FUD. Basically, don't kill me for saying this, Avi, but I think, for the very first time in my life, I actually want to buy MicroStrategy.

Is it going to get worse or better from here? If MicroStrategy blows up and sells Bitcoin, the whole market's going down to $50K. But if they don't, we always talk about how the second derivative of the news is more important than the current state of the news. Are things going to get worse or better for MicroStrategy's narrative? It feels like it's hard for things to get worse unless they start basically getting liquidated.

Well, here's the thing: I get nervous about MicroStrategy because I think the DAT game is over. I think that era of retail piling into these effectively holding vehicles is over, especially now that it's so much easier for your average person to access crypto.

I also think that once the Overton window shifts, once people start talking about, "Oh, you know, MSTR is going to have to service its debt," that's a problem. They came out and said they could sell Bitcoin derivatives. That, I think, is a lot of what spooked the market and got people very nervous, and what caused that little secondary sell-off in BTC.

When I look at the MSTR chart, I don't see it from a technical-analysis standpoint. I don't see it from a fundamental-analysis standpoint. I don't really see it from any standpoint as to why I would buy this thing, other than maybe you get a quick 30% bounce because it got sold off so hard.

I'm not a buyer here with my eyes closed. I'm a buyer like—and I personally wouldn't even take this trade. I think there are just better trades out there. For example, I think HYPE is a phenomenal trade right now. I think that it actually held up remarkably well for an altcoin during this most recent sell-off.

I think that it was tamped down by all the fears of the supply coming out from the team vesting. I think those fears are massively overrated. Also, HYPE continues to print money like nobody's business.

When I look at HYPE on a weekly chart—I mean, when you look at Bitcoin on a weekly chart, you see that you had 4 weeks of just straight down, and then this huge buy-up. You see the demand zone when you go to HYPE. You kind of see that at the $32 level, this $29 to $31 level, people just can't get enough of HYPE below here. It just keeps getting bought up.

You would expect an asset that has a lot of supply coming online to break that level and cause panic, but it hasn't. I think what you see is that you're probably looking at $50 HYPE in the next, call it, 6 weeks. That would be my guess.

I just don't see it with MicroStrategy because I think the story for MicroStrategy has been attacked too much over the last few weeks, and so it's much harder to make the case for MicroStrategy.

7. Ads (Kraken OTC, Peaq, Katana)

Yeah, fair enough. The case for MicroStrategy is that it trades below NAV. It trades below NAV minus debt. So, unless they blow up, it's basically GBTC. And if you're bullish on BTC, it's levered BTC. But it'll probably never go above NAV anyway, so basically it's kind of like—

The issue is obviously dilution. Saylor knows now that—I'm not saying I know this for a fact; I'm just following a logical sequence of events—they said that they might sell Bitcoin derivatives if they need to service the debt. Saylor knows that would be an absolute death knell for his business model.

The only way that he can stay alive is, when MicroStrategy rebounds, to sell as much stock as he possibly can. I don't like fighting that mentality, where I know that what he needs to do in order to be successful is sell stock. Why would I own something that needs to be diluted in order to exist?

Okay, you just talked me out of MicroStrategy. Fuck that. Knowing my luck, now it's going to rip 50%. But at least there are so many good trades in this market right now. I just don't see why.

You know what trade I think everybody's sleeping on? I'm getting more and more pilled on this trade every week. I know it's an embarrassing trade. It's a stupid trade, but I think it's a 5-bagger.

What is it?

Aster.

So, can I share my screen?

Go ahead. I'll stop sharing mine.

I welcome everybody to double-check these stats. Aster has been live for 75 days. Today's metrics on perps: Aster has 110% of Hyperliquid, meaning $10.3 billion in Aster volume versus $9.3 billion on Hyperliquid. It's 38% of Hyperliquid's fees. Aster generates the exact same fees as Hyperliquid: $1.9 million a day on both.

For open interest, Aster is 46% of Hyperliquid: $2.5 billion of OI on Aster versus $5.5 billion on Hyperliquid. Their buyback oscillates between 60% and 90% of Hyperliquid's—$1.15 million versus $1.7 million. HYPE is valued at 4.5 times as much as Aster.

To flip Hyperliquid in market cap—or maybe circulating supply; I don't know which this guy's using—that's $4.20 right now. Aster's trading at $1.01. You're on mute. Thanks.

What I'll say is that I'm a hater. I'm just a hater of this asset, mostly because I think that it's fake. I think that all of the data you're spewing is probably fake.

But wasn't all of Binance's data fake until it wasn't? Aren't Trump and CZ—not Trump, but the World Liberty Financial crony squad—in bed with CZ? To me, it feels like one of those things that will be faked until it is made, and then it'll all be real. To me, this is a great bet on crime and corruption, and I like those bets.

That is exactly where I was going, which is that I'm probably mid-curving it. I was going to provide 2 sources of bullishness for your thesis, despite me thinking that this thing is a complete scam and utterly fake.

It looks really good on a weekly chart. It's refusing to go down too much. Since November 1st, it hasn't broken below $0.90, and it just continues to—clearly, nobody's selling this thing. CZ controls it, so the question is: Why is nobody selling this thing? What plans do they have for it?

Why wouldn't you? If you go and look at the market cap of this thing, it's $9 billion fully diluted and $2 billion outstanding. If you own a substantial amount of the supply of this thing and the market is going down a lot, it's a great time to sell. That's not so bad. Why not cash out? Why not just take it and say, "You know..."?

Nobody's sold it. So, I do think that there's potential here. They might be holding on to it for a reason, and that's that they think this thing could be a short bet.

The other thing I was going to bring up is that you're right: In the beginning, everyone looked at Binance and said, "Oh, this thing is just wash trading. Oh, it's a Chinese scam. Oh, it's this. Oh, it's that." And guess what? It won.

Yeah, apparently I glitched out. It's because—you know what it was? It was Aster. Aster [censored] DDoSed me [laughter] for talking [censored].

Aster glitched out your computer. You know, it's funny—

It glitched me out. Thank God.

And none of what we're saying will ever be financial advice. If you ever follow our advice, it is highly likely that you end up with no money because Jonah and I have no money. And therefore—

It's a bad bet most of the time.

You're screwed.

So don't follow us into the abyss. But back to what we were talking about.

Yeah, go ahead.

Aster. In terms of things that aren't financial advice, I'm not interested in Aster because I think that the data is real. I'm not interested in Aster because, obviously, I live in the US. I would never use Hyperliquid, but from what I've heard, the Aster user experience is super terrible relative to Hyperliquid. Not super terrible, just a little bit worse, right?

Sorry, that guy just made me laugh a lot.

Yeah, there's a guy in the comments who said, “We know you have no money. That's why you run ads.”

Basically, I'm not interested in Aster because I think that it's going to legitimately, via its superior product or use case, take over the entire market for crypto liquidity. It's not even really decentralized. It's basically a centralized exchange with a Web3 login, right?

It's not going to win fair by fighting fair. It's going to win because I think CZ is in with the right people. CZ knows how to bootstrap an exchange. CZ controls 95% of the supply. So when the price goes down a little too much, he's like, “Hey,” or one of his acolytes tweets out, “Sorry, it's been such a volatile time for the Aster community. We're going to make the price go up now.” And then it rallies 30%.

Something fishy is going on here. I think they're gunning for Hyperliquid. I think you could easily see—whatever the FDV of Aster is isn't real FDV because CZ controls so much of it. I could easily see it flipping Hyperliquid in terms of circulating supply to circulating supply.

Again, nothing against Hyperliquid, which is obviously a superior product. It's more decentralized. It's more just like these are the Gs, you know? CZ put FTX out of business. CZ put Binance in business. CZ is in with the World Liberty Financial guys, and they can certainly send Aster via some regulatory backdoor upwards.

It just feels like a nice levered bet on the DEX space, which should come roaring back with crypto. Basically, I think it'll be the fastest horse in the revenue meta that we're in as Bitcoin recovers. So I kind of like having a little bit of Aster in the back pocket. I'm long some Aster perps with 2x leverage on Aster. Did a little farming. Nothing crazy. I think it might be a good 5-bagger in a best-case scenario.

Yeah, I think that's fair. The other angle is that they can both grow in parallel, in the sense that both Coinbase and Binance won because they were actually going after a different subset of traders, right? Coinbase is going after the American, more retail trader, which I think is what Hyperliquid is doing. It's going after more European—you know, your European-based traders, your American-based traders—and Aster could go after your Chinese, Japanese, that sort of section of the world.

It's a no-KYC capital-control-evasion portal, right?

And so I think that there is obviously a benefit. I don't think a ton of those people are trading on Hyperliquid right now. I think Hyperliquid is very Western-focused, and you can have, obviously, an Eastern-focused one. I think that's fair.

I do think, in terms of the DEX space, there are just so many different DEXs coming out. This person here has a good comment: There are a ton of new DEXs coming out. Everyone's really excited for Lighter as well. Personally, I don't think that the Lighter guy has a lot of rizz. I don't know if you've seen him on Twitter. He's no Jeff, I'll tell you that. He's a little weirdo, but he's really damn smart. So you weigh the two: Do you want a charismatic rizz leader, or do you want somebody who's like Albert Einstein when it comes to HFT trading—

In the era of AI—

Let's see who wins. It's like the classic Chad-versus-nerd debate. In the era of AI, everyone is smart, so all that's left is rizz. That's the only thing we humans have.

It's a good point. It's a good point, but I think there's so much to be said about the deep-set autism of being an HFT guy at Citadel.

8. How To Be Long AI

Yeah. No, no, I'm only half kidding. Basically, what I think—honestly, this is my real opinion and sort of how I'm trying to educate my kids—is that the value of being in the top 1% of intelligence is going to skyrocket in the new world. If you're Jeff-from-Hyperliquid smart, if you're Citadel-HFT smart, the value of that is already so valuable, and it's only going to multiply in value from here.

For the rest of us who are in the 99th percentile and below, instead of the 100th percentile, I think intelligence is basically going to be commoditized. It's all about charisma and sales skills [laughter], and maybe morals and ethics, and just knowing right from wrong. Knowing how to reason between the output of these AIs and just interpret them properly is going to be important, unless you're obviously Jeff-level supergenius.

You know, I think you're 100% right on that. One thing that you got me—you turned me on to this last episode—Google Gemini is out-of-control good.

So good.

It's out-of-control good. It's my new portal to the internet. In the same way that ChatGPT took away my desire to Google things, Gemini has taken away my desire to use ChatGPT, just because it's a lot better.

It's a nicer user experience, too. There's something about the design language of Gemini that I really like. And that is ridiculously bullish for the markets, because think about this: Everyone's freaking out because OpenAI is signing these huge contracts, but they're losing money hand over fist.

If OpenAI goes down and goes to 0, that only matters if they're the only game in town. If they go to 0 because Gemini is just better than them, ends up taking up all the contracts, and ends up making an existing business more profitable, I mean, Google has the infrastructure to make AI profitable. OpenAI seemingly doesn't have the infrastructure to make AI profitable.

But it tells you that people are getting it wrong when everyone's running around saying, “AI is not making any money. It's just a bunch of hype and glorified BS.” That's just because everyone's been focusing on ChatGPT not making money. There are plenty of companies out there that, because they're using AI, are going to make a lot more money. Google is one of them, which is why I was so bullish on Google and I bought some in that tweet that I sent out.

Honestly, I might need to buy more because it's sort of lagged the market a bit over the last few days.

But yeah, I’m super bullish on the rest of the year. First of all, like you said, a new Fed chair coming in is not only good for crypto. It’s good for cutting rates, and it’s good for what Trump wants to do.

Trump wants to supercharge this market. Trump wants to send this thing to all-time highs and far beyond. He really cares about it, and screw what happens down the line. Forget if inflation comes back on the back end; he’s out by that time, most likely. If he supercharges the market for the next 3 years and sends it up in a straight line, and then inflation comes 4 years later, he doesn’t care. He’s not going to care.

I do think there’s tremendous incentive for him to basically just push this thing higher. When you combine the incentive from Trump to push this thing higher with the fact that I think AI will make money for the right companies, the fears of the AI bubble and growth are overblown because I think it will continue to grow.

When you combine those 2 things, I have no fear for the equity market. I have no fear. I’m still 95% invested. Now it’s just about figuring out: Do I get levered into this? I’m very bullish on the overall equity markets.

I was nervous about crypto because it had decoupled so hard from the rest of the market, but I think now I see why it did that. I think it was just the late sellers getting out. Until today, I wasn’t necessarily sure whether it was just continuing spot selling or profit takers, or whether we had hit a demand zone.

I think once we rebounded to $88,000, it became very clear. Even here, you can wait a little bit. Maybe you want to wait to buy at $91,000. Maybe you want to wait to buy at $90,000. Maybe there’s a little bit of a pullback here, but I think that this is a great trade here personally.

Yeah, I think so too. Just talking about OpenAI versus Gemini for a second: Gemini is better. Nano Banana Pro is incredible. I uploaded 3 pictures of my kids and told it to age them into their 20s. I got back a hilarious and incredible photorealistic family photo of my kids in their 20s, which is just insane levels of output coming out of this thing.

The answers are better than ChatGPT. ChatGPT is worth about $1 trillion. Imagine if that—but that company’s privately held, right? It’s basically Thrive Capital and a few other VCs, and a collective of angels that hold that stock. Imagine if that $1 trillion market cap goes to 0 and Google gets that $1 trillion of market cap.

That would be absolutely phenomenal.

That’s basically a wealth transfer from Thrive Capital to Jonah and Avi because we hold SPY and Google, right? And all of you listeners, I think. Another thing: Google uses its own infrastructure. It uses TPUs. It doesn’t use NVIDIA GPUs.

There is a little bit of concern that I have with the self-licking ice cream cone of OpenAI committing to spend some ridiculous number on NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA committing to supply Microsoft. I forget how the love triangle works there, but it’s all a bit recursive. It’s a bit reminiscent of the DATs in crypto.

That could certainly take some market cap out of NVIDIA, but that market cap would get transferred over to Google because it’s their product—the TPU—that’s driving all of this. So basically, I think this is a war between Google, NVIDIA, and OpenAI. If Google absorbs all of this, their search business is going to multiply as well.

I still think Meta has the most room to run and the most value to extract from AI out of everybody, but I don’t think the stock market realizes it yet. So for now, basically, what I think is that there’s a huge technological revolution going on here, and it’s akin to what shale was for oil or what the internet was for some internet stocks in the late 1990s.

There’s no reason to be bearish on the macroeconomy right now on the basis of a TradFi crisis. You’re not going to have a credit crisis. You’re not going to have crazy unemployment as a result of some collapse, unless Kim Jong-un nukes Tokyo. That’s not going to happen, so we have to underwrite a war not happening.

I’ve never been to Tokyo. I really want to go.

It’s freaking awesome. Great sushi, wonderful people, very polite. You could eat your breakfast off a toilet in the subway. It’s that clean. But basically—

I don’t think I will, but I will.

No, you shouldn’t, but you could. That’s how clean it is. Not like New York City, where you live, Avi. Basically, I think the—

Stop doxing my location, Jonah. Why are you telling everyone where I live?

Yeah, sorry. You lived in New York City. I actually have no idea where you are now.

I thought, by the way, just as a total tangent side note, it was really funny when the entire internet exploded over X adding location data to people. There were a lot of crypto people who were like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe they doxed me. I lived in the United States of America. Now I’m definitely going to get attacked by a wrench.” You’re not that important.

No, that’s just not how that works.

It’s not.

Oh man, the amount of people from India, huh? Crazy.

Lot of Indians. Funny how many Indians there are. We learned a—

A lot of Indians out there. I’m proud of my other half. Let’s go, India.

Go, India. Anyway, where I was going with this whole rant was I’m underwriting the probability of a TradFi crisis. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I do think we could get a mini crisis as this technology boom reallocates wealth and creates new winners and losers.

That’s what scares me. The only risk I see to Bitcoin and stocks is that AI basically destroys value for some subsector of the economy fast enough that those people create either a social revolution or some sort of broader contagion. In either case, I don’t think any of this is short-term risk. I think we’re in the clear until late 2026 or early 2027 at the absolute earliest.

Just to keep an eye out for: Obviously, we’ve talked a hundred times on the pod about social redistributionists being bearish on markets, so let’s not beat that dead horse. That’s obviously something everybody understands if they listen to this.

The thing that I would look out for that could create a problem is—I have 2 analogies. Let’s look at tech stocks in 1999 and 2000, and crude oil prices in 2013 through 2015. In each case, there was a technological revolution: the internet in the late 1990s and horizontal drilling, also known as shale drilling, in the 2010s.

Leading up to those, when the internet was created, you had this euphoria—kind of a crypto 2021 moment—where Pets.com and everything else was going up on pure speculation. Then reality set in, and that crashed the stock market, the tech stock market, for a little while.

In 2000, basically, you had the equivalent phenomenon, which was peak supply in the crude oil market. Everybody thought you could only get a certain amount of oil out of the earth, the human race would keep growing, and we would exhaust the supply. Then you’d have crazy-high prices and Mad Max-style gasoline wars.

Oil prices went to the moon, especially after the Arab Spring, when it looked like the whole Middle East and North Africa were about to get disrupted and all of the supply was about to go out. Then technological reality set in. For the internet, it was, “Okay, this is a game changer, but it’s going to take a lot longer than expected.” For oil, it was, “Whoa, shale is real, and it’s here now, and it’s going to crush OPEC.”

In both cases, there was a market crash in the subsector where the technology was creating the disruption. I think we’re entering a similar phase for AI, where infrastructure plays—basically the L1s of AI, which are NVIDIA, OpenAI, some hyperscalers, and tech darlings—are all mooning.

Then we’re going to get reality setting in, which I think is going to create a precipitous collapse in some part of the economy. I don’t know what part. It’s hard to say, but I feel like we’re going to get a mini-collapse somewhere, and that’s what you’re supposed to keep your eye out for in 2026 and 2027.

That dip is probably a buy after it’s cratered enough and bottomed out, but you don’t want to stand in front of that freight train when it’s coming. I’m not sure if it’s going to hit crypto or not, but there are too many analogies to ignore this. What do you think?

I can’t think that far ahead to make a good prognostication on what would happen there, to be completely honest. But I do think that in any bubble, you’ll always get ahead of yourself, right? As a general principle, I can’t tell you exactly what will happen, exactly what will collapse, or exactly who will be affected by it. But in any bubble, you’re going to get a pop.

The thing is, I just don't believe that we're close to a bubble yet. Growth is still going nuts right now. Bubbles pop when there's no more gasoline to pour on the fire.

In a normal market, like a non-government-controlled or government-pushed market, that means everyone has invested all the money they possibly can. There's no more real money being generated. There's no more real value being generated. People just can't push more money into the market. The government is pushing money into the market, right?

Okay.

That's why I think that until that ends, until that stops, I think we're good.

Okay. So basically, at the societal scale, Trump and his new Fed-chair pick are going to inflate things—just pour more gasoline onto the fire—until they disappear, or until Trump disappears.

Let me ask you a question, because I think AI is the main character of technology markets, and crypto is basically a technology market. Let me put you into Sam Altman's seat for a moment here, Avi. You're the CEO of OpenAI. Google has now gone from being a total-joke laggard—black George Washington, black female George Washington—to utterly crushing you, right?

Your company's unprofitable as fuck, and you're about to get your market share taken away in a big way. Do you continue to spend like the world is about to end, in a race to beat Google and Grok to achieve AGI, or do you capitulate in that race and try to become profitable somehow?

Never. No, you never capitulate in that race, because that's the whole thing, right? It's like a video game where you're running along a path and trying to collect as many coins as you possibly can, but the reality is that you only win when you get to the end and beat Bowser. That's when you win.

You can collect as many coins as you want along the way, but you're only winning when you tackle AGI. That's it.

I don't think that they will ever give up on that, because OpenAI was started as a research nonprofit, right? I think some of that ethos is probably still there. They didn't set out to build consumer applications. They ended up building consumer applications because they thought that they would become extremely profitable for them, or that it would be a good way to disseminate, raise value, and get attention—whatever reason they built this consumer app for themselves.

The end goal is, “Hey, we want to build AGI.” By all accounts, they might still be closest to it. I don't know. I don't know if they're far behind Google, or if they ever end up far behind Google. I know they're far behind Google from a consumer-application standpoint, but, yeah.

Okay. So, given your response to that question, I draw the following conclusion: gasoline is going to get poured on the macro fire by Trump and company. Gasoline is going to get poured on the AI fire because of the incentive structure that you just elucidated with Sam.

If you're Dario at Anthropic, if you're Sam at OpenAI, if you're Sundar, Jensen, whoever, you're going to find all the gasoline. You're going to locate every last drop of gasoline and—

And you're going to pour it on the fire. That's just how it's going to go, Jonah. We're about to—

How could you be bearish in this environment in the short to medium term?

I think the only reason to be bearish is that people are really skittish, so you can get these sell-offs because the market has low conviction about whether this is a bubble or not. When things start to look shaky, everyone takes the mentality that it's better to—what's the quote? You can be smarter than everybody else, or you can be first. Everyone wants to be first, right?

Yeah. Basically, that's our edge in this market: conviction. I try to analyze what edge I have when I trade, and where I'm at right now is that I'm not going to beat Citadel, Renaissance Technologies, D. E. Shaw, and Two Sigma at picking short-term tops or bottoms, although that volume signal you brought up is really exciting.

I'm going to win because I have more conviction. I have more commodities experience than people in these other markets, and I can ride a megatrend more efficiently than somebody who has to report daily P&L to a risk manager.

100%. The daily reporting is really where your biggest edge is. Basically, if you're watching this podcast and you're not a professional money manager, your biggest edge is your time preference. Your ability to win over long periods of time makes it so much easier for you to make money than a professional money manager who's dealing with the stress of their monthly, quarterly, and yearly results.

As a money manager, you have to sit there and, unfortunately, I went through this as I was managing billions of dollars at some point in my career. Now I sit on podcasts and talk to Jonah because it's a lot more fun and less stressful.

It sucks because, from a business standpoint, it makes sense to try to find things that are going to win in the next 3 to 6 months and keep doing that, even if you end up underperforming over time, because you can justify to your investors that you're doing something they couldn't do.

I think that's a lot of the business. To be fair, when we were running capital, we were doing things they couldn't do. We were finding things, and we made a ton of money and beat Bitcoin for 8 quarters straight. I'm very proud of that, but I'm also very cognizant of the pressure. I think that's the biggest disadvantage.

You were forged in the foundry at extreme temperatures, Avi. Look at you now. And look at me now. I'm debating, “Hey, if this is the bottom, are we supposed to be buying memecoins again?”

Are memecoins going to be the fastest off the bottom? Is a Fartcoin going to double from here before it dies, just because people are—

There is a mentality here that happens after large sell-offs, and I'll leave you with this thought. People have lost a lot of money. Obviously, people are down a ton, and you have this mental block. You're like, “Well, I want to get back to my high-water mark as fast as possible.”

9. The 1000x Terminal

Therefore, I'm going to shove my money into what I view as the highest-risk shit. I think this is a bottom, and the best way to make money in a bottom is to buy the highest-risk shit. The highest-risk shit is your likely Fartcoin and your SPX900 and all this other absolute dogshit that probably isn't going to exist in 3 years, but in the next 10 days might be the best performer because of that specific mentality.

Yeah, I like that.