Finding Edge as a Trader, The Hyperliquid Thesis & Trades For 2026 | Capital Flows

Jonah Van Bourg

Today we have a very special guest—somebody I've followed on Twitter for quite some time, who continuously puts out very long and informative videos. I also think you have some of the most insightful views on the markets.

Hey, thanks for having me on. It's really good to be here.

Jonah Van Bourg

I want to start with the fact that you've built a pretty strong reputation in the space as a pretty insightful global macro trader. You talk about rates a lot, you talk about FX, you talk about equities, and you also produce these pretty in-depth educational primers and dynamic models on capital flows, which is where your name comes from. I'm curious: where did you get started? How did you get started in this space? What's your background?

My approach has always started with interest rates. I guess my start was looking at and trying to figure out the macro landscape, and really getting a read on how exactly I could have a view on the largest drivers in markets and things like that. Over the years, I've spent a lot of time focusing on and trading interest rates, and that's been a place where I've spent a lot of time building models.

There's a lot of newer stuff these days that I never thought I would end up spending time on, with all of the machine learning and agentic models that are hitting the market right now, or have been for the last year. I've always approached the entire system by asking how exactly I can have some type of read on whatever is going to push things around the most.

Part of it was out of necessity because of previous roles that I was in, but understanding changes in interest rates, how they impact different asset classes, and where we're at in the pricing of rates across the curve have always been important. When I go through any other assets or themes, I connect rates to those and FX to those, and begin to break down every major economic data point and start building a framework for that.

A lot of it really stemmed from just trying to be better at taking risk and having more informed views around that. I think that's a lot of the starting point that I had: I was trying to understand what exactly was moving rates around, what exactly the largest drivers in the cycle were, and things like that.

Even though a lot of the stuff that I build and trade is around rates, I don't really have an issue going wherever I think there is going to be edge and alpha. I have no issue going into single-name stocks or other things, whatever it might be. I think I started the Substack and all the research that I put out at the beginning of 2023, and that was all just an outflow of a lot of the models and work that I was already doing. I started sharing a lot of that, got to meet a bunch of cool people, and it's been a cool journey so far. I've definitely enjoyed it.

Jonah Van Bourg

Were you working on a trading floor at any point in your career? Were you always interested in finance, or was this something that you were doing in your spare time and then became your full-time focus?

I haven't worked on an investment bank desk, at Goldman Sachs, or anything like that. I've been at a couple of different firms that had a focus on rates and a lot of trading, but my main focus, at least now, is primarily managing the capital that I have and running the strategies that I have, and then doing some work with family offices and things like that.

The majority of the strategies that I run now, and a lot of the work that I do now, have been things that I've built individually, because I just haven't found a lot of the strategies—especially in the active space that I run now—to be easy to derive from the sell side in the way that they were in the past. I think it's a lot more challenging to get that experience in the same way that it was maybe 20 years ago.

1. How’s Trading Changed Over Time?

Now that's my entire focus, just kind of on my own.

Jonah Van Bourg

Yeah, for sure. That makes a ton of sense. I'm curious: when you first got started in this, when do you think you first really started thinking about it? The reason I'm asking is because the follow-up question is, how much do you think the world has changed in that time? I think I know the answer to that, but I'm curious for your take.

I think so much has changed in terms of the ability that you have as an individual to trade, run risk, and develop edge. You need to know your lane a little bit and where exactly you're sitting with things, but I think the microstructure of the market, along with the changes we've seen in the macro regime with global trade and global liquidity, has changed a lot of those aspects.

All the money that has flown into the quant space has changed a lot. The correlations and the hedging pressure that we see through catalysts are very different from what they were even 3 or 4 years ago. I think it's had a pretty dramatic effect.

My bet right now in life, besides some investments that I've been making, but for all the trading strategies that I run, has really been focused on the idea that over the last 5 years there has been this entire man-versus-machine debate: how do you merge systematic with discretionary and all that stuff? I think that's been a topic for a lot of people.

In my view, there is so much potential that is still not really unlocked in agentic trading and machine learning, or in using agentic models and machine learning models to map some of the changes that take place, especially in real time, and use them as a discretionary trader. I've shifted basically all my capital. I don't really have any of it in systematic strategies anymore. I just don't find them as interesting or competitive as they were maybe 5 or 6 years ago.

Jonah Van Bourg

That's a really interesting point to dig down on. Do you think this has become a market for discretionary traders more than systematic traders? Or are you saying that, as an individual, you can utilize a lot of these tools now to create your own strategies that are more effective than they would have been before?

Can we dive into that a little bit? I think that's really useful for the audience to understand, especially because we're talking mostly to people who are probably managing their own book in a discretionary fashion.

I'll be honest with you: I'm not 100% sure what people are doing in the discretionary space these days, or how exactly they're making decisions. I'm kind of in a bubble now, in my own little world.

I think you need to do 2 things. Number 1 is, you need to clearly delineate the type of returns you can extract on a systematic basis and extract on a discretionary basis, and why exactly those returns occur.

Broadly speaking, at the end of the day, if you're going to have systematic strategies, those strategies are primarily going to function around price. They're going to be models that are all about how exactly we're modeling price, and they may have some fundamentals or quant models and things like that in there. I would say, broadly speaking, there's a lot less of that being input into those models, but so much of it is just around price.

Whether it's multivariate trend following, outright cross-sectional momentum, or all the lead-lag correlation guys, all these different systematic funds are primarily based around price. I think if you're a discretionary trader, it's kind of a fool's errand to say, “Let me just use technicals,” or, “Let me use technical analysis,” or stuff like that.

I think those can work if you have a different time horizon or risk tolerance in the market. As long as you have a different time horizon in the market, it'll be fine. But in terms of developing real edge, I think it's about identifying which elements are very challenging to quantify simply in price alone. That's where you can get some type of discretionary insight into how exactly you're doing that, and I think there are a lot of quantitative tools, if you know how to use them, that you can merge into that.

That's a lot of the stuff that I've been working on over the last year and have been trying to integrate more. I think if you can get a view into something where you can't derive a signal from price alone, and then match that with how exactly your price strategy is working.

So, for example, if you have a—typically, if you have a momentum or mean-reversion strategy in the quantitative space, you're going to have a certain hit ratio, risk-reward, and frequency of that trade. What I would try to look at—and one of the things that I try to do, and this is maybe a little bit of a simplification—is: What are the risk-reward, hit ratio, and frequency of those systematic insights, and their statistical significance? How exactly can I have a discretionary insight that could not simply be derived from price alone, in the same way that you can merge together several low-Sharpe strategies? How can I combine that with some of these insights so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts? And so, I think that—

Jonah Van Bourg

Could you maybe point to that? I think it's sometimes a little hard for people to wrap their heads around, because I think I understand where you're going with this, but what type of non-price insight are you putting into this? I think there are a lot of people out there who also get confused between the idea of a systematic strategy and a quantitative strategy.

You can have a systematic strategy that isn't necessarily very heavily quantitative, and you can have a quantitative strategy that isn't necessarily systematic. These are 2 separate things. And I think, diving into that, what people often find the hardest part of trading to be is figuring out what inputs you put into a trade. What are you looking at?

Obviously, price and derivatives of price, indicators, levels, and technical analysis are 1 area that I think people have covered really well. There are so many different people out there who are ready to teach you about analyzing price. But I think the entire other section—what inputs from a discretionary, non-price standpoint you put into that discussion—isn't talked about enough. I'd be really curious to hear what specifically you were looking at in terms of non-price inputs going into your trades.

Sure. On a broad basis, if you're going to say non-price inputs, I think the easiest low-hanging fruit that you can use to get a little bit of a signal is fundamental data, economic data, or things like that. If you know how to connect a time series—a monthly time series—and understand how that connects to different agents in the market who are going to be forced to take action based on that data itself, I think the economic data and the fundamental data are 2 basic things that you can look at.

2. Discretionary Trading In 2026

I think a lot of it is going to be around how exactly, if you have these periods where information is getting released into markets, that works. The quants would say, “Information is always priced. I don't care about information. It's irrelevant.” But if you have information in markets and it moves the price, there is likely some type of connection.

If you can take information in a manner where you can quantify it and say, “How does this move across the spectrum from uncertainty to certainty?” For example, I know we have derivative contracts for these, but if you think about the actions of the Fed, the actions of the Fed 5 years out have more uncertainty than they do 2 years out or 2 meetings out. Or think about what they might do on the balance sheet, or things like that.

I think that if you have some type of way to understand those types of things, as well as how they net out on a back-tested basis, that's useful. If you're able to net out economic flows, whether that's balance of payments, economic growth and inflation, liquidity, and things like that, you can start to build a view. I think liquidity is probably the most misunderstood thing right now. If you can have a view on those things and how exactly constraints in the distribution exist for momentum and mean reversion, you can begin to know how and why you bet with or against momentum at a certain point in the cycle.

Jonah Van Bourg

Yeah, I think that makes sense. What's kind of interesting is that you talk a lot about liquidity. Recently, you were talking about liquidity and cross-border flows as key drivers when it comes to the equity valuations we're seeing today. Is that right?

Yeah, I think that's part of it. Let me actually add 1 thing about the previous note to conceptualize it for people a little bit more. If I have some type of dip that I'm trying to buy in an asset, I will try to back-test that and say, “Okay, how many times do I need to run this trade to make money?” Do I need to run it 5 times, 10 times, 20 times? How much of a risk-reward do I need? How many times do I need to run this trade to get positive expectancy?

Whereas, I think most people put all their eggs in 1 basket for a single trade or for a single moment in time. Even if you are putting all your money into 1 trade, they're not incrementally getting on sides to get their cost basis up. If you're making a bottom in stocks, let's say, and you're going to say, “We're going to chop 4 or 5 times before we begin to rally out of this dip,” whatever the time frame is, if you can know with some type of signal how many times or how long that might take place, that can help you with your hit ratio and maybe the losing trades you have on that.

I feel like that's where information comes in exactly, as opposed to there being some secret thing where, at this 1 level, everyone's going to buy and no one knows this or something like that. That's how I think about it.

Jonah Van Bourg

Yeah, I think that's a useful way of thinking about it. It is important to think about these outside inputs, especially for people who are coming from crypto. For a long time, they tended to just use technical analysis, and then some of the more sophisticated traders would take it a very slight step forward and start using flows from open interest and derivatives data, and start using funding.

Even now, I think what we're seeing is that a lot of the very simple trading that you could do 3 to 4 years ago in the crypto markets has dissipated pretty aggressively. At the same time that the crypto markets have dissipated in terms of opportunity, I actually feel like the equity markets and general global macro markets have opened up in terms of accessibility to your average person, solely because of the level of volatility in the markets.

This is something that I've been talking about on previous podcasts. It almost seems like now is the golden age of the discretionary trader because there are so many encumbered asset managers in the space who have to move substantial amounts of money, have to do it slowly, and, candidly, the world is moving far too fast for those people to trade effectively.

I know plenty of oil traders who had positions that were just too large—they couldn't effectively hedge their positions on this recent rally. I'm curious: Do you find that sentiment or statement to be true? Do you agree that it's now a better market for discretionary traders?

Totally.

Jonah Van Bourg

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, I mean, I'd be curious to get your thoughts on this as well, but I think that you have 2 things that have taken place. I think 1 is, to your point, things are changing a lot faster, but the players are a lot bigger because all of the asset-management space has been concentrated into the top 10 hedge funds and passive vehicles. I think that's a lot of the space now, and these guys are moving a lot of money.

In terms of how fast things are changing and how slow people have to move, I think that's why you're having implied vol blow out more than realized vol these days. Now you have vol shoot up so much more, and realized vol will have wider ranges on an intraday and intraweek basis, but not intramonth. We always come back to the mean on a monthly basis, or even on a weekly basis a lot of times, especially as you hit some of these catalysts that carry outsized significance.

That is 1 of the things, by the way: If you could know whether a certain catalyst is going to have a higher probability of moving the market than not, I think that's something that has some interesting edge. In the past, you would have basic catalysts move the market or do a certain thing 2 or 3 times, maybe. Whether it's VIX expiration, which set a lot of bottoms in 2021 and 2020, or CPI and NFP events and other things, if you could have views about that, you can actually know how to enter positions and get on size a lot easier.

In terms of the changes, I think that if you know how to have a different time preference, on an intraday basis you have so many more moves and mean reversion, especially because the order book is not the same as it was in the past.

Right now, mean reversion is used as a liquidity-provision mechanism in a much larger way, right? All the order books on the CME, Eurex, or whatever it might be—everyone's going to market; no one's doing limit orders in the same way, right? People are still running algos, but the way that people are executing is very different than it was in the past. If you know the difference between a fundamental move and an execution-liquidity move that's going to have a high probability of mean-reverting, then you're able to have a clear signal-to-noise ratio.

3. How To Find Edge as a Trader

A lot of the things that I've done over the last year, especially, that I've adapted to is knowing when something is likely a mean-reversion event, using that to put on a trade and get onside, and then holding that risk on a larger view that I have. I think I've always tried to stack these time frames because I think everyone in the industry right now—no one wants to take risk. No one. Everyone wants to, as soon as they're up on their basis, control their drawdowns, even if they're up on their cost basis, right? No one wants to take volatility. And so I think that is the biggest opportunity for a discretionary trader, especially if you're a technical trader. If you can just take more volatility while you're onside with your trade and maybe run a lower hit ratio with a higher risk-reward, the entire industry is set up to do the opposite, right? I'd be curious about how you think about that. But I think, especially from a technical perspective, if that's all you're doing, that's the best way to make money.

Jonah Van Bourg

Yeah, no, I actually 100% agree with that. I think when you take a step back and try to think about what was making people money back in 2022, 2023, and even 2024 to some extent, and what's making money in the post-Trump presidency, the game has radically shifted from the big fish to the small fish. I can tell you this from the fact that I was working inside one of the biggest fish on Wall Street—a large hedge fund, not an asset manager. These were big guys, and a lot of the trades—basically, every trade that made a ton of money in 2022, 2023, and 2024—the repeatable ones were all ingesting exactly what you said. They were all ingesting economic data.

These guys not only have better systems to get that data faster than you do; they have better information. For example, the current Fed chairman was an advisor we would get on a call with once a month and talk to about what the Fed might do given a range of economic data. He knows these guys. He gets lunch with Jerome Powell once a month. So they're getting Fed-direct data.

What would happen is they would set up a matrix based on all the information that they had. They'd say, "If the number comes in at X, then we short this much. If the number comes in at Y, then we go long this much. If it comes in at Z, then we don't do anything. Then we double down on current positions. If it comes in at A, then we do this," right? Then, immediately when the data would come out, the trade would be put on. You're not competing with that.

The difference is that today, because I think people are a lot more skittish than they were, implied volatility is higher, even if realized volatility isn't necessarily following. That indicates a lot of skittishness in the risk-taking markets. The reason for that is that there's a tremendous amount of headline risk. Basically, every single month, something comes out that moves the market, and you have to be onside for it because if you're a hedge fund, if you're trading and you have a down month—a bad month—guess what? Your investors the next month are going to say, "Actually, you know what? Let's just wait. Let's see how you do over the next 3 months." They start getting cold feet.

And so that, I think, explains a lot of the pressure that you are articulating: people don't want to take risk anymore. It's because you could take a lot of risk 2 or 3 years ago, but it was actually safer. These trades were much safer because you weren't just waking up one day and getting bombed out by a headline.

Today, a headline comes out that Iran is potentially placing mines in the Strait of Hormuz, and oil jumps $10. Well, guess what? Hedge funds are getting that headline at the same time you are, basically. And so you can actually put on that trade more easily than the hedge funds can because they've got billions of dollars to move. So that's what I'm seeing: this shift from a sort of walled garden of information that's driving markets to—we are effectively in a more unpredictable world today. I think that's great for people like me and you.

What I think would be very helpful for our listeners—and I'm happy to share mine, but I share it on the podcast all the time, so they might be bored of it—is figuring out an information diet. In a world like this, it's really hard. I think that's actually one of the hardest things to do: where do you spend your time? What are you looking at? What are you reading every day? What does your day-to-day information diet look like, and how have you refined that? Because that, I think, is probably the most actionable thing that could be talked about. So how do you solve that problem for you? How have you thought about differentiating yourself in your information diet?

Well, me specifically, I curate a lot of information on Twitter, but I try to keep it to basically just breaking headlines on Twitter. I try not to do too much in terms of actual research on Twitter because I find it a little bit difficult. I actually subscribe to quite a few research services because I view them as important for me. The way I view my trading right now is that I need to figure out what the megatrends are at any given moment, really just shove my capital into them, and stick with them.

But I also need to be informed enough about what's going on in the world so that when I see a headline, I'm able to instantly interpret what that headline might mean for what assets are out there. And that's actually kind of difficult. So for me specifically, it's really about reading a lot—spending most of my day reading long-form research and taking notes, and then monitoring the headlines as they come in through X. That's how I do my trading.

Sometimes long-form is through a podcast or through—you know, there are 2 research services that I sign up for. Actually, 13D Research is phenomenal.

Jonah Van Bourg

13D's really good. I use them a lot. And then obviously, you got to sign up for Capital Flows research. He actually didn't pay me to say that. I just said it.

I appreciate it, man. It's fascinating to me because there are these shocks that happen—the oil moves, the geopolitical risk premium, all this stuff—but the news cycle is going so much faster as well, and it's so easy to get bogged down with noise.

Going back to one of the things that you said, I've tried to be really intentional. I'll be honest with you: I find it hard to explain sometimes, the tangibility of it. Maybe I need to do a better job of that, but I've tried to be intentional and say, "Okay, if I'm trying to curate the different avenues of how I'm thinking with this information and these different things, how am I doing that?"

Even on the institutional side, or with anyone who's at a fund running money, when I talk to them and we're sharing color, we're going back and forth, I think it's very hard to have the intellectual freedom to think and come up with high-quality ideas beyond just taking the other side of a positioning move when you're always forced not to take a ton of risk, and when you have all these carry trades blowing out in different directions. And I mean carry anywhere, right? Carry because everyone is trying to collect premium in this world. I just think that if you're able to be an individual, solo, and be able to think—or just be in a smaller group and not around all those people—it's so valuable.

I don't think I would have had the intellectual ability to iterate, and even iterate at the speed I am right now, which I feel like has increased 10× over the last 6 months. It's honestly surprised me. I would never have that ability if I were always going around listening to these guys on some type of sell-side research, or these guys going around with their meetings at all these different places and hearing them talk about the different things they're doing on their desk, or something like that, that everyone else is talking about. I've just never really been interested in hearing what those guys have to say.

Just because I think if you come up with a differentiated edge, it just becomes like everyone is fading each other.

4. The Impact of The War in Iran

Jonah Van Bourg

I'll tell you my secret when it comes to reading sell-side research reports. You read it and you just think, “Why are they wrong?” And that's actually your exercise.

Totally.

Jonah Van Bourg

You pull these reports and go through them, and you're like, “I know they're wrong. I know that this isn't correct, but it's up to me to figure out why it's incorrect and whether I can prove that it's incorrect?”

No, that's fair. That's fair.

Jonah Van Bourg

I think that is even a good exercise to do, even with people that you really respect. Whenever you're confronted with information, you take the other side, saying, “Okay, well, what falsifies this thesis? What makes it incorrect? Why do I disagree with it?”

I think, actually, the way that my brain works is I really enjoy that aspect of it, so it makes it quite fun for me to pick things apart. But then sometimes, after you pick it apart, you go back and you say, “Actually, there were some good points here.”

What it does is—really, what you're trying to do, in my personal opinion as a trader and investor—is you're supposed to train your brain to pick up patterns and recurring circumstances. So even if you don't make a move this time, you'll see something that rhymes with it in 6 months, and then you'll be able to take that trade again.

It's funny because I actually just employed this method twice in the last 3 months with a war. I remembered exactly what happened when Iran retaliated against Israel in 2024, after Israel dropped some bombs over Iran. Iran shot some missiles back, the markets dipped 2% to 3%, and then they immediately rebounded.

This is kind of the same thing that happened with the 12-day war. I didn't view the 12-day war as escalatory, so I said, “Okay, I'm going to fade this as well.” And then we have this war. You have to think to yourself, “Well, is it different? Is this war truly going to escalate into a regional war? Can I figure out what's going to happen?”

Basically, through all my research, I came to the conclusion: “No, this is actually not going to escalate, in my personal opinion.” While we might see some short-term dislocations in the market, ultimately everything is still a buy here. In fact, it might be an even more incredible buy if we're able to take down Iran.

What might actually end up happening—and this is a thesis that I've been kicking around, not a steadfast 100% conviction that I'm in, because I'm still working on it—is that post-Iran war, if we're able to implement regime change, we have so severely handicapped the apparatus that China has built for itself that the US has extended its hegemony.

That's bad for the multipolar-world trade. That's bad for the emerging-markets trade, and that's actually bad for gold as well. This is something that I've been kicking around that I haven't heard a lot of people talk about.

Jonah Van Bourg

Yeah, that's interesting. I think that on your point about, “Okay, if the US has this, then they're just increasing hegemony as opposed to a multipolar world,” there are all of these factors about where there is a power mismatch or an asset-liability mismatch, right?

Especially on the trade side, I think that, in my view, the move in gold that's happened, or in emerging markets, has been connected to this combination of dollar liquidity in the system and now yen liquidity in the system, at the same time that global trade has accelerated.

I don't think that it's going to have— I think the only way that we have some crash in gold and silver, or in some of these emerging markets, in my view, is that you're going to have to have this shift not only in control but also in trade back to the US. I actually think that that's very possible if you have this shift in prices.

I don't think the entire AI-and-robotics thing had much validity a couple of years ago, when everyone was talking about it. But I think the biggest risk to global trade right now, and to its rebalancing, is if you have a lot of these—I mean, one of the things that I've been researching and looking into is this entire autonomous-manufacturing trend, and how much that can change purchasing-power parity, or PPP, between different countries, and how that eventually plays out.

If that actually happened, that's what would put even more pressure on China. It would speak to what you're saying, where the US is putting a bunch of pressure against them. I think the reason why the quote-unquote “AI race” is so significant, and why compute is so significant, is because if you can get that, it sets the stage for them to push back in this arena of trade.

That shifts how many dollars go into China and how they could prop up their real-estate market and things like that. I think they know that that's 3 or 4 years away, right? And if that shifted, then the US has all the cards, right?

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the US definitely has it all when it comes to investing in innovative companies. If AI and robotics are going to provide the vast majority of growth—which AI has already been doing in the markets for the last 3 years—the question then becomes, among European countries and basically the rest of the world, where else do I put my money? Why wouldn't I put it in the United States?

The reason that there's been money pulled out is because a lot of these countries now view the US as an unstable partner. They're saber-rattling against us. They're threatening us over Greenland. We have to build up our own independent reserves. We can't just rely on US Treasuries.

In a world where they could potentially cozy up to China, or move away from the US and basically sit in this liminal zone between the US and China, play both sides, and exist happily, that makes a little bit more sense. But in a world where America is so clearly the leading country and China has really no recourse to push back—which they haven't yet at all, despite their multidecade-long plans to prop up Venezuela and Iran currently falling apart—they haven't really done anything.

Maybe they move on Taiwan and the US lets them have it, and maybe that's the trade. Maybe that's what people are talking about. But even if that happens, I think the US reestablishes itself as the number one.

Obviously, this is entirely dependent on how the Iran war plays out, so it's not necessarily something that I'm currently betting a tremendous amount of money on. But if it looks like it resolves very clearly, I might have to. That's probably just diversifying out of my gold positions into US equities again, which has not been my position for quite some time.

Jonah Van Bourg

So is your kind of mindset that the best way to play that, for now, in these multipolar changes, is metals? Is it mainly gold and silver?

It's mainly gold because gold is the purest expression of this, whereas copper is actually going up for industrial purposes. Rare-earth minerals, I think, continue to go up because the US doesn't trust China and needs to establish its own supply line. So specifically US-based rare-earth minerals continue to do well.

But gold is specifically being stockpiled by central banks as part of this divestment from US Treasuries, in my personal opinion. If that stops, then I think the gold run and the silver run stop. But I'm not necessarily super keen on fading the rest of the metals.

Jonah Van Bourg

So are you still interested in any of the rare-earth materials, uranium, or copper? What's kind of been your view on those?

100%. I've been a uranium bull for quite some time because I think that we're going to need to lean back into nuclear energy in order to power these data centers. Basically, every single grid is tapped out. You can't build any more data centers in Washington State because there's no more electricity.

So I think it's going to be time for uranium miners to do well. The key to remember with commodities, at least in my personal opinion—and we can debate this, if there's a debate—is that you want to buy the miners. I have no idea if massive uranium deposits are going to be found, and I don't really care to play that.

What I care to play is that these uranium miners are going to get much larger contracts to produce more uranium. With larger contracts, regardless of the price of uranium, they're going to make money.

Jonah Van Bourg

Mhm. So what has kind of been your thought process on how that will play out with any of the geopolitics around that?

So, if you have that industrial demand, or if you have that demand for the innovation to have the energy demand, how have you thought through the geopolitical or supply chain fracturing side—for those benefiting or getting hurt, the ones that you pick, or things like that?

Yeah, the way that I think about it is that the US is very focused on self-reliance right now. So, I'm focused on US-based companies that can produce these and secure the stockpiles. And the same in Europe, right? I think Europe is going to need to be a lot more self-sufficient.

Basically, any companies whose model rests on importing rare earth minerals or doing intensive work in China and importing that into the US, I think are much less likely to be successful than the ones that are based in Western allied countries.

That's really where—because I do think that even if—let's put it like this—even if there is a return to America as the now number-one leading country, both from a militaristic perspective and from a geopolitical perspective, there's still going to be fractures that grow between the US and China.

The only question is: will Europe continue to diversify heavily out of US investments? Will they continue to accumulate gold? Will Africa—will African countries side more with the US or side more with China? My bet is that if this is pulled off with Iran, then the question is: will Asian countries side more with the US or with China? Where will they park their money? Will they park it in China, or will they park it in the US?

Post-Iran, if Iran topples and it is clean, that money that has been pulled out of America to those countries is going to come rushing back, but China will remain isolated. Specifically relative to China, I'm still negative, but with regards to where Europe is going to go, 3 months ago, I think my answer would have been that they're sitting in the middle. Post-Iran, I think that they're probably going to come back to the US.

Do you think the Iran thing escalates or begins to put more pressure on the yuan or the capital account from China? How do you view that playing out?

Jonah Van Bourg

That's actually a good question to ask you.

Ask me.

Jonah Van Bourg

I want to hear what you have to say.

What?

Jonah Van Bourg

I'm sorry. Do you have an explicit view on that, or how do you view that?

I don't actually have an explicit view on that, particularly. I think capital accounts are more up your alley.

Jonah Van Bourg

Yeah, I don't know the exact answer about when it will take place or things like that. I think it's very interesting to see China being net short energy.

Mhm. And having to import at a little bit higher prices—all things considered, it's a decent amount of money, but not their entire current account or anything like that.

In my view, the significance of it is that the US is at a point where they're trying to do everything. I think Scott Bessent, and especially Kevin Warsh when he comes in, are going to do this, but I think they recognize that they have 2 years left to do everything. By the way, it's so wild that Trump is just doing this entire thing into the midterms. It's insane. He genuinely just does not care.

Jonah Van Bourg

Yeah, I love it. I love it.

One other thing I would say is that I think, because China has not been interested in trying to thread the needle with how they're exporting different goods, they've moved up the value chain, but they haven't let the low-value goods go to other countries so that those countries can industrialize more, right?

I think that's the idea for a lot of countries: they start out with low-quality goods or low-skill goods, or whatever you want to call them, and then they industrialize around that by producing those. Then they can move up the skill and value chain, right? You couldn't do that until you have automation that is efficient.

But I think the fact that they haven't means they export a lot more at pennies on the dollar, in a sense. And because it doesn't seem like they've been able to cut a deal with them or have a very clear one, I think that now they're going to try to push the dollar down against the yuan and against all these other currencies, because that's kind of the only way to do it.

I think it's a massive issue. I know we just had the dollar rally and all this other stuff—just a couple percent, nothing too crazy. But I think that this period of time that we're in, especially post-midterms, is going to be very consequential.

If they decide to really push down the dollar and put in more cuts in the forward curve than are priced, it could—in my view, on net, that increases liquidity if you cut rates into positive growth. But the entire question is: at what point do foreigners have to begin to reduce their exposure because the weaker dollar is putting pressure on them and their equity exposure?

That's what the entire move of 2025 was in the tariff drawdown, right? The dollar sells off and equities sell off. That was kind of new to everyone, right? The primary reason was foreigner selling.

I think if Trump really wants to put pressure on global trade and rebalance it, that would fix a lot of the problems in the United States. If he wants to fix the entire populism thing, you can't fix technology concentrating wealth, but you can fix how corporate profits versus compensation of employees are distributed.

I think that if you rebalance global trade, that will help a ton. And if you import and export similar amounts with different pricing across currencies, that will help a lot.

I actually think that if he did that, there's a very possible scenario that in the latter half of this year—I'm not betting on it happening; it's just a scenario I'm thinking about—if they try to really push down the dollar, it might cause equities to go up and pump 5% or 10% or something.

But there's a very significant downside scenario similar to 2025 because foreigners aren't hedged in their dollar risk. Brad Setser has a great article on this. If you Google Brad Setser, he talks about where we're at relative to the asset-liability mismatch in the financial crisis.

We don't have a domestic asset-liability mismatch, but we have a positioning mismatch, which is why every major equity index in the world is at all-time-high valuations, right? It's not an AI thing; it's a global liquidity thing.

I think that's the tail event that's actually a lot bigger than people have assumed, rather than, "Well, we're just at higher valuations because we're at higher valuations," right? All the value-investing bros who have been calling for a crash for 5 years just look stupid, and they can't really—it's the boy who cried wolf, right? So, you can't really listen to them anymore.

Jonah Van Bourg

Value investors, man. They just never win.

You know what they're talking about? They're talking about Nvidia having a massive P/E ratio, and then they just closed the gap. They're talking about all these AI companies being super overvalued, and they just closed the gap. I mean, it's going to be tough for them. Good luck.

Jonah Van Bourg

I agree, man. I've never—I just think this goes back to the fact that we are moving down this path. This goes back to the speed thing that you talked about, and I think this connects to the structure of the economy and how individuals listening to this can take a bet.

It used to be, "Oh, if you bet in venture capital, you make more money because you have all these companies," and everyone was like, "Oh, let me go into venture capital," and all this money flows into venture capital, right?

Now people are still raising money, but there's always going to be that market. It's because there's a lot more money in venture capital now and illiquid investments and things like that.

But what you're seeing is that all of these teams are getting smaller, right? Now we're concentrating more and more leverage from code and media and capital and all this stuff in very small teams or single individuals, right?

I think it's going to be more common to see single individuals be able to run massive things and move around massive size just on their own, right? I think sometime next year we'll see someone run a $100 million Hyperliquid vault just by themselves.

They'll make a fee on it. They'll probably make $10 million or $20 million a year if they're good at trading, and you'll have them just do that on their own because they have some social media stuff like that.

Then they'll do that with illiquid assets or whatever else it might be in a bunch of different other stuff, where you could never do that in the past, right? I think there's going to be a lot of different ways that those things are going to play out that people are still thinking, "No, that can't really happen," because you're going to have so much concentrated in, I think, individuals.

5. Trades For 2026 & The Hyperliquid Thesis

Yeah, I think that's just true across basically every industry now. You're seeing companies get spun up with 1 or 2 people now just because of what's happening with AI. But I want to ask you, based on everything that you've said so far, heading into 2026—and you mentioned Hyperliquid—what are your big trades this year? Do you have trades that you're super-convicted in for this year based on your model of what you think is going to happen over the next 12 months?

Yeah, I would say my whole goal is twofold. One is to quantify the macro regime so I stay on the right side of it, because if you have a recession or some type of blowout, it just sucks, and you want to be on the right side of it. That's why I care about rates and FX. The other thing is just to take massive macro bets, and massive bets within that.

I'm agnostic to what those are. I think the 2 largest bets that I have, and the 2 most aggressive views that I have, are, 1, Hyperliquid Strategies. The stock ticker is PURR, and I've been long that since the low 3s. I've kind of laid it out for subscribers. We're now at around $5.50.

The thesis behind that is very simple. When I came into this year—and actually, it was the end of last year—I'm always running the trades that I have. I think there are a lot of interesting things on a macro basis, but it's very rare for me to say, "Let me put a massive amount of my portfolio into 1 stock." It's something I don't have a problem doing, but it's very rare to find an opportunity where that's such a clear bet that I want to be so aggressively long in my portfolio.

Coming into this year, that was my view. That's what I laid out for subscribers on Substack. I talked about it, and I think the reason why I had so much conviction in the view is because of what happened with the entire crypto industry. You could probably speak to this more than I can, but there was a lot of focus on innovation on the front end. Then it really shifted from creating value to, "Let's just get these tokens listed so we can dump our bags, so we can have someone pump our bags. Let's get them listed on TradFi so we can have more money flow in, and quote-unquote institutional flows will buy," and stuff like that.

I think all of the people who got into the industry—whether it was the media companies that were built, the Twitter accounts, or whatever—got long, were aggressive, and were one-sided. The entire industry shifted to basically becoming the establishment, because it's basically, "Oh, you should buy Bitcoin. If you don't, you're stupid and poor. Why didn't you buy it 10 years ago like I did? Okay, I can't help you." Everything has shifted a lot more toward people who are just part of the establishment.

What I think no one really thought about—because everyone in the industry has thought about how we get these coins listed, not how we create value—is that Hyperliquid comes along and says, "How can we create something where we're not just trying to get listed?" They say, "How do we allow or create financial products and perps on here that are so valuable and give you almost the level of leverage that anyone can get access to? How do you get that? And how do you get traditional products onto crypto, as opposed to the other way around: How do we get crypto into TradFi?"

When I saw that, and then also saw the entire setup for cash flow and leverage, and the amount of money that was going to flow onto Hyperliquid—especially with the amount of leverage that exists—I thought that as soon as Hyperliquid becomes available in the United States within a regulatory framework, and some of these other exchanges do 24/7 trading, that's going to allow more capital to come in and basically arbitrage between the 2. It will lower funding rates even more between the 2 and allow more capital to flow into Hyperliquid.

I think that's been the view that I've had over the last couple of months, and I think it's going to persist this year. I did an interview with the CEO of the treasury company and talked to him. So that's my view on Hyperliquid. There are a lot of other points there, but Hyperliquid isn't available in the United States within a regulatory framework yet.

There is no way to buy Hyperliquid in a brokerage account. It got listed on Coinbase, and there is some exposure through Robinhood, but broadly speaking, there is no way to get significant exposure. Again, Hyperliquid Strategies, or PURR, just got listed on the Nasdaq, and there was very clear buying pressure because of that.

I think there's no way to really get exposure at size, especially if you're an institution and you want to get long Hyperliquid. Because of the regulatory limitations, it would be very challenging to buy it right now. Basically, for anyone operating within a regulatory framework—from a hedge fund or something like that—it's very challenging to get exposure right now.

PURR has been the way to get exposure because they are the largest treasury. The thing that I love about it even more is that everyone got burned on treasuries last year because they weren't really providing any value besides just levering up Bitcoin. Everyone is saying, "Oh, Bitcoin treasuries are a scam now," because they got burned on them.

I think most people have thought about Hyperliquid Strategies, the stock, and the treasury company the same way, even though this is like front-running the Bitcoin ETF. That's very different from saying, "Let me start a treasury company after the ETF." So that's been my view. I would say HYPD is 1 of the largest bets that I have right now.

The other one is Oracle. I did a whole report on it because I think that, in the entire AI space, Oracle is the only company that is levering up really aggressively, pulling all negative returns into the present, and pushing all exponential returns into the future. They've leveraged their entire balance sheet, their entire stock, their entire income statement, and all their capex. Every single part of a company that you could leverage to take a bet, Larry Ellison has taken a bet.

As a result, he's pulled all those negative returns into the present and caused a 50% or 60% drawdown in the stock. Now, in my view, we're in the process of making a bottom. We have our earnings out now, and the stock is up a little bit.

Jonah Van Bourg

Yeah, it looks significant. Well, I mean, it looks like there was a nice pop after hours.

Yeah, so I think my view is that Larry Ellison—he's 82, and he's 1 of the absolute savages who actually takes risk, because he's not like all these other tech bros who don't even know what they're doing. It's ridiculous to me these days.

I think Larry Ellison is compressing the entire balance sheet of the company, the stock, and everything. He's trying to get the stock—and his net worth, I mean—I think he's trying to get the stock to $800. He owns 40% of the company, so there is no float, in a sense. The float is so small because all they've done is share buybacks, and he owns 40% of it.

He was richer than Elon Musk—I mean, it depends on how you calculate this stuff—but he was richer than Elon Musk back in September of last year, when the stock gapped up so much. I think he's taken a swing for the fences, and he might—depending on how the whole SpaceX and xAI thing goes, which I think Elon will eventually win—have taken a swing.

Those are the 2 highest-conviction bets that I have. Oracle is nice because you can actually buy calls on it. Those are the 2 biggest bets that I have, and in the interim, I'm just trying to play defense, run rate trades, or do other things that I can use to hedge out some of the risk that I have.

Jonah Van Bourg

Well, you heard it here first, guys. If you buy HYPD and Oracle, you can retire as a billionaire at the end of this year. Capital Flows has said it.

Dude, this was an awesome podcast. I really appreciate you coming on and giving us all of your insights. I know this is going to be an enjoyable one for the audience, so we really appreciate it.

Totally, man. I'm glad we were able to chat, and I appreciate you having me on. This was great.

Jonah Van Bourg

All right, take care.