Mando: How To Win Trading, Bear Market, Advice and More | TG Podcast
Thread Guy’s Zcash trade exemplified buying strength, letting an exceptional trend run, and reducing when the evidence changed. He entered around $130, added below $200, rebought after sharp reversals, and sold roughly 70% after the move from about $780 to $660 broke his one-hour trend signal. Mando had sold heavily near $720 and retained roughly 15–20%, while saying this could be a trade he sells for 5x before it goes 200x.
Extreme negative funding made Zcash unusually forgiving to hold. Thread Guy said he was earning roughly 500% annualized to remain long; Mando said his perpetual position had been paid to stay long while traders rage-shorted the market’s lone green coin. The trade became less attractive when funding approached flat and fresh longs arrived. Thread Guy argued that RSI above 90 could remain bullish during such moves—until the shorter-term trend broke.
Bitcoin’s roughly $103K 50-week moving average was Thread Guy’s decisive bull-versus-bear marker. Bitcoin had repeatedly defended that average since $25K, and he viewed two weekly closes below it as the historically serious bear-market signal; a wick toward $95K required leeway, but sustained loss did not. Their advice was to avoid indiscriminate altcoin FOMO until Bitcoin clears roughly $108K–$110K, preferably $110K–$115K.
The investable altcoin list had become extraordinarily narrow, making leadership more valuable than conviction in laggards. Thread Guy estimated that 60–70% of apparent breakouts had subsequently collapsed through support. HYPE, Aster, BNB and Zcash showed relative strength, and Thread Guy’s response was: “Why fuck around? Just own Bitcoin,” then buy only the rare alt that proves itself by breaking a multi-month range.
Mando’s repeatable edge is “buy high, sell higher,” paired with tight invalidation—not predicting bottoms or becoming a project believer. He uses Renko candles, moving-average trend signals and sometimes futures-grid bots, with stops commonly 10–20% below entry where the breakout would objectively fail. “You don’t want to be catching falling knives. You don’t want to be buying bottoms. You want to be buying breakouts.”
The hardest and most neglected part of trading is the exit, because arbitrary profit targets mutate with the narrative. Mando urged Thread Guy to log the entry thesis, size, upside, downside and invalidation, then scale out when price or fundamentals negate that thesis. Thread Guy’s “balls tingle” instinct can discover narratives, but Pump showed why intuition alone does not “land the ship.”
Mando remained structurally bullish on risk assets despite distrusting circular AI spending and any taxpayer backstop for private AI companies. He expected continued competition for GPUs, did not foresee Nvidia falling 50%, preferred Tesla among the discussed exposures, and argued indebted nation-states would ultimately print money—leaving Bitcoin with “an infinite bid basically for the next few years.” Equities merit attention, but the same rule applies: buy new highs in leaders, not cheap-looking stagnation such as Western Union.
1. Zcash rewarded the breakout buyer, then finally flashed an exit
Thread Guy first noticed Zcash below $100 through Mr., Anson and other early advocates. After it gapped toward $160, he bought the retracement around $120–$130, added again below $200, and concluded that the post-10/10 recovery showed unusual strength.
He initially reduced around $350 when the chart appeared to break down, then repurchased near $340 and more aggressively around $380–$390 after a roughly 25% one-hour collapse. What followed was approximately seven consecutive up days—the sort of move where normal overbought signals cease being useful.
When Zcash later fell from roughly $780 to $660, Thread Guy’s one-hour trend signal broke and he sold about 70%. Mando had sold heavily near $720 and retained roughly 15–20%; his synthetic-competition short against a Bitcoin long was separate from his remaining real exposure.
Asked whether $500 or $640 would be a re-entry, Mando refused to name a catching-the-knife level: “I’m not interested until it starts breaking back out again.” He still regarded Zcash as one of the strongest potential 12-month narratives, but wanted price to revalidate it.
2. Negative funding made the parabolic move unusually easy to hold
The defining mechanical advantage was that traders were “rage shorting this with infinite size” while spot demand pushed Zcash higher. Thread Guy said he was earning roughly 500% annualized to remain long; Mando said his perpetual position had been paid to stay long, materially improving the trade’s carry and making drawdowns easier to tolerate.
That asymmetry began disappearing as funding moved toward flat on some venues. To Mando, the shift showed that the perpetual market had become more two-sided and removed one of his written reasons for holding maximum exposure. The 10% annualized figure mentioned separately referred to Mando’s HYPE position, not Zcash.
Zcash also became self-reinforcing: when the broader market fell, traders treated it as the one asset that could still rise. Thread Guy warned that a Bitcoin recovery toward $106K–$107K might redirect FOMO into other coins, weakening that relative-strength loop.
3. The privacy thesis was deeper than a coordinated influencer pump
Thread Guy’s explanation for the flows centered on Bitcoin veterans: Zcash was old, proof-of-work, and legible to people who reject most altcoins but recognize privacy as an unresolved problem in transparent blockchains. “Crypto is meant to be fundamentally cryptographic,” he argued.
He acknowledged that influential accounts helped him discover the trade, but rejected the idea that a unified cabal could simply full-port an established asset. Crypto personalities are more often “frenemies”—publicly supportive while privately hoping to outperform—and privacy had been proposed repeatedly without previously sustaining a cycle.
Mando added that Zoron winning New York, UK digital-ID debates and the broader political moment made the narrative unusually timely. With Zcash’s FDV around $10–$11 billion, Mando entertained a potential $50 billion outcome while acknowledging the uncertainty.
4. Bitcoin’s 50-week average remained the market’s regime test
Thread Guy focused on the 50-week moving average near $103K, which Bitcoin had defended since roughly $25K. Intrawweek breaches had previously recovered by the close; across prior four-year cycles, he said, spending two weeks below the average had been the consequential bear-market signal.
He bought around $100K expecting an effort to defend $103K. His invalidation allowed for a wick toward approximately $95K, but one weekly loss would matter and two would be “not a great sign”; that framed downside around 7–8% against comparable near-term upside.
If equities corrected 5–10%, Mando expected Bitcoin initially to fall but then potentially bounce and outperform under the “digital gold” framing. The alternative to crypto catching stocks, Thread Guy noted, was that stocks and gold could simply come down toward crypto.
Thread Guy still expected a Santa Claus rally and suspected most four-year-cycle selling would be exhausted by late November. He did not believe a government reopening caused the preceding selloff, but thought an end to the shutdown around Thanksgiving could supply a useful narrative; Mando likewise thought it could become the thing that turns the market.
5. Altcoin leadership had narrowed to a handful of proven winners
Aster, HYPE and BNB looked better than most peers, but Thread Guy estimated that 60–70% of the year’s altcoin breakouts had eventually been smashed below support. BTC and ETH moved first, followed by BNB and Solana; numerous subsequent runners rose sharply, lost momentum and printed fresh lows.
Mando’s TAO trade illustrated the discipline: he entered around $425, watched it reach $500, exited near $460 when the breakout failed, and saw approximately $370 the next day. Believing it was “the next Zcash” would have converted a profitable trade into a severe loss.
Mando’s review of the prior frenzy included WIF near a $5 billion valuation, GOAT and the AI season, Chill Guy, the Trump coin and Bitcoin around $125K. In hindsight, those were meaningful top signals even without the glorious blow-off investors expected; current altcoins were broadly down 70–80%.
6. Buying breakouts beat waiting indefinitely for cheap coins to recover
Mando generally holds Bitcoin and buys altcoins only as they escape long ranges or approach new highs. Bottom-fishing can produce a 10–20% rebound, but often leaves the trader attached to an asset that then drifts sideways or lower for a year.
His charts use Renko candles to suppress incidental movement, plus moving averages and an indicator he called “Bollinger Alert by JustUncleL.” The tools merely identify that a trend exists; they do not replace deciding whether the narrative, risk and potential payoff justify the signal.
Futures-grid bots complemented the directional trade by harvesting volatility “almost like an LP.” Because breakout assets can swing 10% within hourly candles, grid income may cushion a failed move while allowing participation in the few trends that continue.
Stops sit where the breakout itself would fail, often roughly 10–20% below entry rather than at a standardized R-multiple. “The discipline bit” is obeying that level: a broken altcoin can fall another 20%, 30% or 40% after the trader starts rationalizing.
7. A written exit plan matters more than a clever entry
Mando challenged Thread Guy’s predetermined sell levels: “No one cares about your levels.” Rather than selling simply because the profit looks enormous, he prefers scaling out when shorter-time-frame trends break, while retaining enough exposure to re-enter if strength returns.
Pump was Thread Guy’s counterexample. Once it broke its all-time high, projections about becoming a top-10 coin and matching Hyperliquid changed his plan; he retained roughly 30% of the original bag too long and capitulated on 10/10 partly to fund taxes.
Every material trade, Mando argued, should record entry, size, thesis, expected upside, downside and invalidation. Zcash’s privacy demand, negative funding and roughly 500% annualized carry were explicit reasons Thread Guy cited; when funding and trend changed, reducing was faithful to the plan rather than inconsistent conviction.
Size does not remove emotion. After the election, Mando recorded perhaps his best week and then lost the vast majority of those gains back. He said traders become desensitized to wins and feel losses more sharply.
8. AI and equities broaden the opportunity set without replacing crypto
Mando found Sam Altman and circular AI capex “unnerving,” particularly a possibly misquoted CFO suggestion of a U.S. backstop after the organization’s nonprofit-to-for-profit shift. His objection was asymmetry: taxpayers would absorb downside without sharing private institutions’ potentially enormous profits.
Yet he remained bullish on the underlying race. He expected continuing demand for GPUs, did not foresee Nvidia falling 50%, and believed Elon Musk’s infrastructure execution gave him an advantage; among the discussed exposures, Mando would buy Tesla over the competing AI plays.
Some capex-heavy companies, including Meta, might underperform hardware suppliers if their spending produces little visible return. Still, Mando expected governments and companies to pursue AGI “tooth and nail,” even through euphoric waves, skeptical research and temporary 10% equity drawdowns.
9. The immediate playbook was Bitcoin first, HYPE later, and no falling knives
Mando’s closing position was deliberately boring: own Bitcoin and do not dive into altcoins merely because of one green day. He wanted Bitcoin above approximately $108K–$110K—and preferably $110K–$115K—before treating altcoin breakouts as durable.
HYPE was his best non-Zcash candidate. After ranging since May, it could approach $50 if Bitcoin returned to $110K; a subsequent Bitcoin move toward all-time highs could give HYPE a credible attempt at its own breakout.
He typically used only two-to-three-times leverage, though grid bots could accumulate substantial exposure near the bottom of their ranges. His preferred venues were centralized exchanges including Binance and Bybit, where he found liquidity and grid tooling better.
The cross-market rule stayed identical: ignore Western Union, Rivian or bank stocks simply because they look cheap; focus on assets already making new highs, such as leading technology stocks or gold. Crypto’s volatility remained “a feature, not a bug,” but only when paired with an exit.
Full transcript
Yo, brother. How are you doing?
Probably about as good as you today. [laughter] How are you?
How many people have you got working for you at the moment?
It's a B.
I feel like it's a new producer every time I come into the show.
How was he? Was he good?
He was great. He was great. But I was like, “I don't know if I've spoken to you before.” I don't think it was the same as the last guy.
We have an army, man.
We have an army. It's that Zcash rotation into new hires. How are you, man?
It's great. Yeah, life is good, man. It's been a long week, and it's late here, but it's been a good week.
It's been an incredible week, dude.
What about you?
I mean, I'm awesome. What was the P&L you just posted? What was the time frame on that?
You tweeted the one I just posted.
You tweeted a P&L? No. Yeah, yesterday I tweeted a P&L on the perp account.
It was gross.
That's since May.
Wow.
It's been a good last couple of days, too, so it's been a bit harder than that now.
Impressive.
Yeah, I don't know. It's just been a run. I came on this show before and said I was on a good run, but this is really something else now.
So you came on, I think, for Aster and BNB. I think that was the last time you came on. It was like BNB, and you were really long on BNB.
Zcash.
Did you come on?
No, I came on and—
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, you did.
Dude, Zcash is the trade.
Yeah, I guess you did, dude. You're on a generational run right now.
Yeah, that was three weeks ago, when it was trading at around $15,200. I said it was the trade, and then you kept selling out of it, dude.
I mean—
You've done well to keep the trade, but it does feel a little bit toppy here, I have to say. On the Synthetix trading competition thing, I've gone max short Zcash and max long Bitcoin. We'll see how that one goes for the rest of the day.
My last sales were around $720. I sold it pretty hard. I have about 15% to 20% of my bag left. We're at the stage of “Newton's friends get rich,” which is a little bit of a weird feeling.
But first of all, tell me your trade on Zcash. Where did you enter? How much have you sold? What do you have left? Then we can get into the specifics.
I got in at $130. I picked up on this when Mr. was shilling it. I think Anson was shilling it as well.
Yeah, early.
Early doors, when it was trading just below $100. Then it gapped to $160 one day, and I was like, “Whenever it dips, you have to buy it. You just have to buy it.”
It dipped down to the $120–$130 area one day, and I went big. I thought this one could keep running. To be honest, I do a lot of shows a day, so I was asking people I do the shows with about it, and they were like, “I'm not interested. Who the fuck cares about privacy?”
I thought it had more room to keep going. Then, when we had 10/10—the big nuke—it rallied, and I thought, “Wow, this thing's going to keep going.”
So I added to it again when it dipped back below $200. Then I got out of a decent amount at $350. If you bring up the daily chart of Zcash, it looked around $350 like it was going to break down, and then it didn't. It just had 7 straight up days.
Luckily, I bought back a little bit around $340, and then a bigger amount around $380–$390, when it nuked 25% in an hour. I think it may have been during European hours. I got back in then, and I've just been holding on. Although today, I sold about 70%. It feels like a pretty good day to sell some.
First of all, congratulations on the trade. My main question is: where are these flows on Zcash coming from? Who is buying, and why? Where is it coming from?
I don't know. Honestly, I think it must be Bitcoin OGs because it has that Bitcoin element around it. Satoshi was talking about how we could fix the privacy issue, and there are a few people who look at it and think, “Right, this is going to be a Bitcoin-like trade.”
Bitcoiners look at this like they look at no other altcoin. It's not that they're necessarily into altcoins, but they see Zcash and think, “Okay, it's kind of like Bitcoin, but it has a privacy element to it.” So I think there's been some rotation there.
I also think it's been a bit self-perpetuating. This is the reason I did the trade on Synthetix today: the rest of the market dumps, and everyone's like, “Well, Zcash is the one thing that's going to go higher.”
If the market turns here—let's say Bitcoin goes back up to $106K or $107K—there's going to be some FOMO back into other coins. I feel like it's because Zcash has held up so well. Everyone knows it's the thing to own when everything else is dumping.
I don't know. I was listening to what you were saying to me before you went live, and I think it's fair. You've done a really good trade on this. You sold a little bit too early, probably, but trades like this don't happen that often.
I think the last one was HYPE. I remember when Flood[?] came on your show and said it was a 100x. It was trading at around $8, and he was like, “I'm selling everything I own to buy more HYPE.” Then it went up and up and up until it reached $25 or $30, and you just couldn't get in. There was no way you could buy it on the way up, because if you missed it, you felt like you were buying in just to get wrecked at any point.
It has felt like that with this one as well. It only happens a few times a year, where you ignore what would normally be a sell signal. You ignore the RSI. RSI being above 90 is bullish at these moments. Everyone just can't pile into this thing enough, and it felt like that for a while on the way up.
I was listening to what you were saying to me yesterday, and you put it perfectly: you just have a trend-following indicator on the 1-hour chart, and if that starts to break down a little bit, you sell some.
It did that today when it dumped from around $780 to $660, or wherever it was. It broke down a little bit there. Funding has also started to go more positive. I don't know if you're following Zcash funding, but it's been pretty obvious.
I don't trade perps. Everything I've done has been in spot. After I missed Aster, I thought, “All right, I need to get some coverage.”
I started trading perps, just dabbling. I traded Plasma a little bit and traded 0G, unfortunately. This whole Zcash trade was in perps. Up until this morning, I've been getting paid to stay long.
The only green coin in the whole market is insane to me. Everyone has just been rage-shorting this with infinite size the whole way up. Is that normal on these parabolic moves?
No. That was the reason it was such an easy hold. I spoke about this two days ago when I was talking about writing down a trade journal, and that was one of the reasons I was in the trade.
I was earning 500% a year—literally 500% a year—to be long this thing. Even if it dipped, if the funding stayed like that, I could chill. Particularly in size, I could just enjoy the theta of a trade like that.
It was an easy hold. Then that also started to turn today, which tells me that on this dip, people have been going more long. Funding is almost flat on some exchanges now.
On HYPE, it's 10% annualized for me.
Only 10%?
Yeah.
Right. That says a lot. It tells you the trade is becoming more two-sided on the perp side. I just don't need to be in it as much, so I'm mostly out of it.
Synthetix is just fake money, but I thought it would be fun to see whether that one—
The thing I'm really trying to understand with this trade is how there was a liquid 20x on infinite size sitting in front of everyone's face, just waiting to be slammed. No one had any idea. No one was talking about it.
You weren't in the cabal, I guess.
You went into the cabal, though.
I know, right? I didn't get the KOL deal for Zashi.
I know.
Let me ask: how much of this pump is purely KOL-driven? Mert, Ansem, Naval, SLT—the rest? Over 50%?
Yeah, I guess so. I picked up on it because Mert was talking about it, right? So, I'm not going to say it wasn't that, but I think people often talk about this like there's some sort of—maybe there are for certain coins. Maybe there are for Pump.fun coins, but for something like this, I don't know.
I've tended to find that most KOLs are kind of frenemies. You know what I mean? They're like, “Oh, you're the best, but I hope I do better than you.” And it's a bit like that with a lot of people, particularly in the trading community. So the idea that everyone would get together and just full-port a coin like Zcash, which is a proof-of-work coin that's been out for years, is not really realistic.
If this were obviously a new shitcoin, then yeah, you can obviously cabal that, but this wasn't really a cabal. I just think people came together on it. And to be clear, this is a narrative that's happened before. So many people have said, “Privacy is a narrative,” and it just never really stuck.
But a lot of people believed in it. There are a lot of people who've owned Zcash and been mining it for years and years and years. I think it's also just respected. It's one of these things where everyone kind of gets that about crypto. I mean, you're in crypto, dude. Crypto is meant to be fundamentally cryptographic, right?
You're meant to have some level of privacy about what you're doing. And that's been one of the main issues of public blockchains. So I think there is just this very deep, core understanding from a lot of people who've been in crypto for a long time that this could be a big narrative.
I think it can keep going. Everyone looks at the chart, but when you look at the FDV, at $10 billion, $11 billion, like—
That could go to 50. I mean, I keep saying it. There's a reasonable chance this is one of those trades that I sell for 5x and it goes like 200x.
Like, this could be one of those. I don't understand how these OG Bitcoin people held from $1,000 to $100,000. I don't get it, because there's no way I could be in that spot, you know?
Yeah. Yeah. This is the thing: don't buy it back in. Do you know what I mean? If this does dip and it goes to 500, you're not going to find a better coin, I don't think, in terms of a narrative here.
This feels like a medium-term narrative to me. It doesn't feel like a narrative that's just going to die down because of the people buying it. So, I think it's a buy on anything significant, but I just think it's got a bit frothy, right? You can just read that from the technicals of what's going on right now.
So, it's a great trade. I would hold this one as one of the best coins for the next 12 months. But I also think the market's sneakily coming back a bit, dude.
Dude. Dude, okay, before we—I wanted to get your take on this real quick, too. I also think there were just some timing things that worked out, like Zoron winning New York right in the middle of this Zcash pump, the privacy—everything that's happening in the UK with digital IDs and shit. It's kind of just lining up for this to be a prominent narrative.
Okay, I agree with you, by the way, on the market. I think there was a Stoic Savage tweet and it was like, “Man, if the bears are unable to really push Bitcoin under $100K now—worst price sentiment, narrative in a long time, equities are red, NVIDIA was getting killed—when is it going to happen if it's not right now?”
And if this is that trader-made local bottom, there are some spots, man. ORE is up to like $250 million. Zcash is going crazy. There are some things that look decent. What's your read on the $100K Bitcoin pricing right now, first?
My opinion is that you're right in that I think the market looks okay here, but I'd be very wary of just FOMOing into altcoins when that happens. I actually just think Bitcoin looks okay here.
And if we do see a breakdown in equities, which I think is a little bit more likely now, then—last time this happened, what happens is crypto sells off first, then equities start to sell off, and then Bitcoin is the thing that has the digital-gold narrative and people go, “Oh, okay. That's actually okay.”
The fact that the market is still sitting above the 50-week moving average is a very big deal. Everyone should be looking for that on Sunday. It's $103K. If we're above that, I kind of agree with what Stoic Savage is saying.
This has been pretty horrific and Bitcoin's still held on to this very key level. We've held that 50-week moving average since $25K, right? We've touched it a number of times, never gone below it. We've gone below it, and then by the end of the week it's gone back above.
People will generally say that if we spend 2 weeks below that, it's often the sign of the bear market. That has been the sign of the bear market for the last 4-year cycles—for all of them, basically. And it's held it so far.
Today, when it was at $100K, I was buying. I was doing this Bitcoin trade because I was like, well, they're going to defend this. I feel like whatever happens, they're going to try and defend this $103K level. We're now there, but I think I would still prefer Bitcoin.
There are a couple of altcoins that still look relatively strong. The perps DEXs look quite strong at the moment, like Aster, and HYPE bounced. They look good, and BNB actually looks better than a lot of the other L1s.
But other than that, to be honest, why fuck around? Just own Bitcoin. If you want to have more risk, just own levered Bitcoin. I don't think it's really—because I've had this trade, and this is one of the good things from how I've traded this year: I've done this breakout trade.
So, when an alt breaks out, I get into it. I normally have been using a futures grid. So, you make some money from it—basically, it's like an LP. You make some money from the yield around there.
But 60% to 70% of the time they just get smashed lower. We had BTC, we had ETH originally, right? Ether was the first one to start moving. Then BNB, then Solana moved.
We had, in that time, PUMP moved, HYPE moved, AAVE moved, TAO moved, Ethena moved, and they all just go up and then one day you look at it and it's just down 20%. You're like, “Oh, okay.” And then it just hits a new low. It just takes out whatever support level it was.
The only one that hasn't happened with is Zcash. So, I'm still really wary of buying altcoins right now because I think Bitcoin needs to be above $110K to $115K for those sorts of moves actually to be sustained.
For now, I'm just going to be very big in Bitcoin, and you have a very clear invalidation, which is that the 50-week moving average basically gets lost for 1 week. If it gets lost for 2 weeks, it's not a great sign.
But you probably need to leave yourself some leeway on a wick—down to like $95K, that sort of level. So, it's not that bad: a 7% to 8% move versus probably a similar sort of upside in the short term, right? It could go to something like that.
So, the upside-downside isn't that terrible. It's not the best trade I've ever seen, but it's not that bad.
What's your signal for getting to $130K, $140K? What do we need to hold to get to $140K?
$140K? I feel like we're way far away from there right now. I think I've been of the view that we're going to have a Santa Claus rally, and I'm still sticking to that.
I didn't think we were going to have a 4-year cycle, but a lot of people in crypto think it's going to be a 4-year cycle. I think a lot of newer people that have come in since maybe 2020 onwards are kind of like, well, it doesn't necessarily have to be a 4-year cycle.
But a lot of the OG Bitcoiners that own a ton of Bitcoin are just like, “It's the 4-year cycle. It's the halving. It happens every single time. Don't fuck with this.”
Isn't that kind of fucked, though? It's like, okay, we're just going to do this 4-year-cycle thing forever. It's that easy. Just turn your brain off and follow it.
I know. And maybe we're the retards, you know, because they just smashed us in Q4, and I didn't think they'd be able to. I thought we'd be okay during this period. Stocks hit an all-time high, gold hit an all-time high, and they called us out for being the retards.
So now we're at this crucial moment of, yeah, was this a 4-year cycle or not? I'm fully prepared to also be wrong, but in my gut, I think maybe most of the selling, in my opinion, if you're selling for the 4-year cycle, will be done by—it's probably already done—but by the end of November.
I think if you're selling for that, you're probably a bit late. So, I think the flows around that will slow, and then stuff that I don't think is important now, but I think could be important to rally around as a narrative, would be stuff like the government shutdown ending around Thanksgiving.
Yeah. So, I was going to ask you about that. What happens if it reopens?
I don't really think that's the reason we've been selling off because—
You know, other assets haven't really—
Other assets haven't really cared about that.
There’s a loose correlation to liquidity, you could argue, but I think it’s just one of these things where crypto price narrative follows price. We were just like, “Oh, well, it must be that.” There are the ETFs, but it’s not like the L1s with ETFs have been doing that well, so I don’t know if the ETFs are going to come save us.
I don’t think that’s the reason why we’ve been selling off, but I think it’s enough of a narrative headline to be like, “Okay, this is the stuff that could stop selling. Guys, you know?” So, I think it’s going to be maybe the thing that turns it, and I still think we’ll have a bullish end of the year.
Then, if we’re still rallying going into Q1 of next year, there are going to be serious questions about the four-year cycle, because then it’ll be like, “Right, we’re going to be in an extended cycle. Can this continue? Are we more like stocks now?” I think we do have some catching up to do with the other correlations that we’ve just lost recently: stocks, gold, global M2. All this other sort of stuff has broken down horrifically in the last few months.
Well, it feels like, just from a left-brain perspective, the longer we can stay above 100–103, every day that goes by that we’re still above it, you’ve got to start to question it a little bit harder. Like, all right, maybe we just front-ran an equities bottom and we’re just having to play catch-up here. The longer it stays above it, the more questions you’ve got to start asking.
Yeah. Or they come down to us, you know.
Either one. I don’t necessarily think that would be as bad as people say it would be for crypto right now. It feels like people have been wrecked enough. Like I said, I think the Bitcoin-is-gold narrative may mean that we probably would go lower, but then I think we bounce and probably outperform slightly more, even in a 5–10% move in stocks or something like that.
You know, the thing about alts—
Oh, go ahead.
No, no, you go.
I was just going to say, bring it to the alt convo a little bit. One thing that’s a little bit jarring is when you talk about, “Yeah, probably don’t just slam into alts.” There’s really nothing to buy. It’s alarming how there’s nothing to buy.
There are a couple of coins that are interesting. I wish I held HYPE. I’m not really interested in Pump.fun anymore. I think the launchpad trade is pretty fried. There’s not much. I mean, Aster makes the list of alts. Zcash makes the list of alts. These things didn’t even exist on my radar 3 months ago. It’s crazy how small and thin the list is.
I think that’s probably something that you and I could have learned from some of the other trades that we’ve both been involved in: my faith in altcoins over a medium-term cycle just isn’t there. I’ll let the chart decide when the time comes that I should get out of this, rather than have belief in some of them. I think you just have to go through the cycles.
That’s one thing I think I’ve done well this year: not be a full believer in these breakouts. Know that they can hurt you, but play them until they start to peter out, and then just have a stop in profit so you make sure you’re banking these good trades.
Pump would be a good example for you, right? You had the right trade on, but you didn’t actually master the exit of that trade. This is the number-one thing I see with everyone in crypto.
This is why I’m selling right now. I was in Pump, I had a plan, and then once you break ATH, everyone starts filing in. They’re like, “Pump is a top-10 coin. CMC, they’re going to bring CEXs and KOLs,” and all of a sudden the narrative changes. Then my plan changes with the narrative, and that’s why I kind of got chopped.
One thing I want to ask you, too—not to hijack your take—is something I feel like I’m getting better at, and that I think you are one of the best at: you’re just always in the best coin. You’re always in the best coin. No matter what it is or when it is, you’re just in the best coin. Whether it was BNB, whether it was Pump early, the AI days when it was GOAT, or now when it’s Zcash—you’re just in the best coin. How are you always in the best coin?
I think I follow breakouts. That’s generally what I do. I’ll buy winners, you know. I’m not often there to buy blood. Let me put it that way, because I think in crypto that can be a very long game, even with good trades. You can be sitting there being like, “This is the trade, this is the trade,” and you can be sitting there for 6 months while it just goes sideways or gradually goes lower.
I’ll generally keep more Bitcoin, and then I’ll buy breakouts of alts. What I’ve been doing recently is doing that alongside these futures grids, which is something that I’ve added and it’s been quite good. Often, when an altcoin breaks out, it becomes very volatile. In 1-hour candles, it can be going up and down 10%.
If you can earn some yield on that breakout, you can also protect yourself if it just rugs. If it’s like this year, where so many have broken out and then just got smashed back down lower, you can still make money in the trade.
I think it’s actually the best tactic I’ve found—or at least it’s the tactic that I like the most: buy breakouts rather than buying, “Oh, this looks like it’s found a bottom.” If it’s found a bottom, it will often bounce, but then it’s really difficult not to think, “Oh, it’s going to keep on going and we’re going to keep on recovering back to the all-time high.” Often, you hold it a bit too long and get screwed in it.
I like coins where they’re breaking out and it’s like, “Oh, it could be new highs, new highs,” and then you’re never really going to end up—
That was that tweet by Su Zhu, right? The most money’s ever been made by breakouts, right?
Yeah. Buying highs, whatever.
I think you should look for that, honestly.
So, you’re doing a lot of buying high, selling higher. You’re not sniping lows of charts.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that’s just the trade in crypto, because so many coins just never come back, right? They’re just done.
You literally said the tweet from GCR before it came live, right? Prize fighters, you have to long your longs.
I just think those are the rules: keep your winners, cut the losers. I just think that is the way not to get that wrecked. You have to have very strong risk discipline about longing stuff on a breakout.
Like I just said, you can’t be like, “Oh, I’m going to long it and this thing is going to go 10x.” You have to be like, “If it then breaks down, I have a stop,” because if you’re wrong, it can go down and then down another 20%, 30%, 40%.
Stop.
Yeah, you need stops to do it. But I do think it’s got the best upside.
This is so left-brain, but it’s just more fun to hold good coins. Imagine you’re playing range breakouts on Plasma right now. It’s like, bro, you’re having the worst time ever. Buying that lower and lower, you’re having the worst time ever with that shitcoin.
A lot of people are in that because they have bag bias, and sometimes it’s seen as a good risk-reward trade. Sometimes it can be, right? If something has formed a clear bottom, it can bounce 10–20%, but that’s kind of it. Do you know what I mean? There’s no 2x with this thing. Normally, it’s just found a bottom, and now you’re in this thing for a year.
Can’t get worse.
Yeah, and I think that’s sometimes how people think about their coins. They get attached to them, and then they think, “It can’t get worse. I want to protect it. If I sell this alongside my original bag, it’s going to get even worse for it.”
That’s just not as fun. I would suggest that as a long-term strategy in crypto: always look for things that are breaking out of a much longer trend or are hitting all-time highs.
Zcash obviously hasn’t hit an all-time high, but once it broke 200, I think it was like, “This thing hasn’t been there since 2021. This was going to be a big move.”
There’s a question: “Thread Guy, if you’re asking Mando if you’re supposed to keep your winners, why did Mando sell Zcash and is now shorting? Can you please ask?”
So, to be clear, I’m not short Zcash. I’m just doing that for the synthetics trade, because I was like, “I’ve got to beat fucking Fang,” who had about $400,000 at the top of this thing. Wow, he’s at $800,000 now.
I like Zcash long-term. My view was that it was more of a short-term trade. I actually haven’t sold it all the way up. It just broke down from that. I just said the way to get out of these trades is if it starts to break down on a shorter time frame.
I normally follow trend-following indicators, and once it broke from 780 down to 660 in that breakdown, it gave me a sell signal on the 1-hour. I was like, “Right, I’m going to sell a decent amount of this right now.”
Uh, and then I was just following the funding. So—
Yeah.
I've held that actually throughout some pretty close calls on those breakdowns. This is the first time I've sold. I sold some at 350 because, again, it broke down then, but it went back up and I made sure I got back into the trade.
So I don't think I broke any of my rules that way. When it's doing 8x and 16x in a month, like you said, are you selling on red candles, when trends have broken, or when whatever your indicators are have signaled a sell? You're not selling like a green printer on the way up, but more so 10% lower when it starts to flip and break some trend.
Yeah. I just tend to find that I'm not very good at that. Just like you said, you had some levels right in your head that you would sell at. Is that what that means?
It's arbitrary. No one cares about your levels, right? So let the indicators govern what those levels should be, and then sell. I don't think what you said is actually a system. It's just like, “Oh, I made enough money, so I wanted to take some money out.”
Well, this is how I feel about the selling, by the way. I don't really have a plan. It just happened to work out, kind of, but it's not a proper strategy at all. It's just like, “Balls tingle. Sell 5% or 10% here.” I'm just like, “Fuck, ripping,” you know?
So maybe for the audience, it's probably good to show that against Pump, right? They were probably quite similar, but Pump never reached the level that you thought it was. When people were talking about Pump, they were like, “This thing is going to go to $20 billion. This thing should be level with Hyperliquid.”
You probably didn't have the Zcash moment where it's, “I'm up so much that I need to get out,” right? But if you've been following the trend-indicator sort of view, and it broke down through a certain number of moving averages on a 1-hour or 4-hour time frame, you would have sold it. You wouldn't have bag-held it all the way down because you had those arbitrary levels in your head. They just don't mean anything.
It's the same with this: You did a good trade. You held on to the right trade. But if you don't have a systematic way of getting out of trades, it is the number-one thing that people fuck up on. I tend to find that traders are really good at getting into a trade. Everyone can get into a trade, right? “Oh, I just full-ported this fucking thing,” or, “I'll DCA,” and they'll try to be smart.
A few are very good at picking winners. They'll be like, “Oh, this guy's good at picking the coin that does 3x, 5x, 10x.” A lot of people, even those who are good at picking winners, are very bad at the exit. They'll either sell way too early because they'll think, “I'm up too much. I don't like being in trades like this. I don't like round-tripping,” all this sort of stuff. They have no plan for getting out of a trade, so just get yourself a plan for getting out of a trade.
I do think what you did right was slowly getting out of it. Don't just be, “I'm all in, I'm all out.” But you need to have a plan to get out of a trade, and also for when you're wrong. I'm talking about good scenarios here where you're in profit. You also have to have levels where you're out of the trade because you're out of it via a stop-loss, normally.
For every trade I've done, I'll write down the reasons I'm in it. Why did I get long Zcash? I was like, “This is going to be a strong privacy narrative. Funding is negative. On the futures grid stuff, it was making like 500% APY.” I was like, “This is just an insane trade to hold.”
Once those things start to break down, again, I looked at it today and was like, “Well, the funding has actually turned.” That bit of the trade has shifted slightly, and it's broken down some of my short-term reasons. One of the fundamental reasons I got into the trade has also shifted.
Similarly, for a stop-loss, you could be like, “Well, I thought it was going to break out,” or, “I thought it looked good because the ETF came for, let's say, one of these L1s.” That didn't happen. They didn't have strong inflows. I'm out of the trade. Then you go back to why you got into the trade. You're like, “Oh, I did get in for that reason, and that's not really true anymore, so now I'm out.”
Can you break down—
I think you're actually completely right. This is the hardest part. I actually make a lot of good trades, but I don't land the ship that often. I've landed the ship on this one. I think if it went to zero, I've landed it still, but maybe not as cleanly, not as repeatably, as in, “I have a system I can rinse and repeat.”
Could you break down a little bit deeper, on a winning trade, what is your strategy? What indicator are you looking at when it breaks or shows sell? What percentage are you selling? What's your strategy? Just use Zcash—what was your specific plan, as much as you're willing to share?
Yeah, yeah. I don't think it's really been some super-insane way of looking at stuff. Maybe I can share my screen.
Can I do that?
I have to do it on Discord, right?
Yeah, yeah. I won't show it to you. Feel good about what's on the screen.
Oh, no. It's not going to allow me to.
Really?
This may work. This may work. I had to change my computer settings to be able to do it. I was going to have to quit and reopen. It's not going to be possible. But I use Renko candles, which are candles you can find very quickly on TradingView. They break; they don't show all the price movements. They just—
Renko candles.
Hyperliquid too. Maybe on Hyperliquid, but definitely on TradingView. You may have seen charts like this. A couple of traders do charts like this, but they basically show you trends much more easily than candles. I use those, and then I use trend followers. When those break through certain moving averages, it will send me a buy signal on TradingView, and then I'll look at it and decide if that's a buy.
So it's a very systematic way of getting in and out of trades. But I don't think that's the thing. Everyone has some sort of way of saying, “Oh yeah, this is what I look at to get into a trade or get out of a trade.” It's actually the discipline about what I just said before: following the signal, setting your stop-losses in the right place, and all that sort of stuff. That's the discipline bit that I think is important. Again, writing down while you're in—
How are you writing a stop-loss? Do you just enter at 20%, 25%? Do you look at a trend, maybe below a break of support, that kind of thing?
Yeah, normally it's linked back to that breakout. Where would it then break back down? It's normally some sort of level, like 10% to 20% below where you're getting into it.
I don't look at it in the same way. I know Trader Mayne is a 1R-versus-5R sort of trader. I look at it like I have a very defined stop-loss. My stop-loss, again, is defined by where it would then break down on that chart.
Got it.
The trade would not work.
Interesting. What are you using for an on-chart indicator? Just moving averages?
The one that I use the most, honestly, is called Bollinger Alert by JustUncleL. That's the one I use the most, but there are a ton of different ones.
Yeah, but honestly, you can find thousands. I guess focusing on this isn't the thing that will really change stuff. It's more about getting yourself a system and having the discipline around it, which is the key.
You can get into a trade that shows you, “Hey, this trend is forming,” and then, if you have no plan to get out of it, it will often just break down and you'll lose more than you even put in. You'll just fuck it up. So you have to have both at the same time.
I've just always wondered about the—
System for—
Yeah. I was going to say, I've always wondered what it is. It seems like the 50-week moving average is what everybody has overlaid on their chart—
For Bitcoin. Yeah, for Bitcoin—
That is the big thing. I don't even know what the 50-week moving average is for ETH, but those are very long-term indicators that have been with everyone throughout the bull cycle. The 50-week is very important for Bitcoin. I don't know if people are looking at the 50-week on ETH or Solana or anything else, really, even total—
TOTAL. I'm not even sure they're looking at crypto total market cap.
Okay. So it's just a Bitcoin thing.
It's just a Bitcoin thing. But I think moving averages, again, just show you that a trend has happened. They don't tell you that you're going to make a ton of money. They just tell you that a trend has happened, and now you can potentially set up a trade whereby you can define your downside and know when you're going to get out of it if it continues to do well.
Yeah. I think the thing that—
I think a simple model that you can use is just the discipline of doing it. That's where everyone falls down, particularly on the exit.
Yeah. I think what I have a lot of room to grow in is getting the narrative right, entering the coin, and understanding why I’m in it. But then I need to figure out what that system is, even if it’s really simple, that I should be following rather than just balls tingle, because I feel like balls tingle can get you a long way, but it doesn’t land the bag for you. Especially when things like balls tingle don’t really help you on 10/10 that well, because the balls are scared on 10/10.
I think Balls Tingle actually—I quite like it, if I’m honest. As an investment mandate, particularly for someone like you, because you speak to so many people each day, you will pick up on these narratives as they break in crypto. There’s no doubt about it. When was Zcash first mentioned? Was it mentioned before I came on your show?
Early October.
I feel like it must have been.
Early October. I think the first of October—maybe the 7th or 8th.
Yeah. So it was probably just before I came on, because that’s when it was starting to move. You will pick up on every narrative as it breaks in crypto. You don’t necessarily have to follow trend-following as much, because they’ll come on your show and say, “Hey, this is going to be the next big thing.”
But I do think that balls tingle can make you a lot of money. Just have a defined way of getting out of the trades too.
Sorry, finish.
You can learn a lot more from PUMP than I think you can from Zcash, basically, is what I’m trying to say. Zcash was like—
You got in at the right time and just held on, and then it was literally just holding on.
The easiest, actually.
Yeah.
Even when it breaks back down, you’ve got negative funding. Like you said, it was one of the easiest trades to hold during this period. Holding something like PUMP or ASTER, where funding is really positive and it feels frothy but it keeps on going, is a more difficult trade. PUMP was a bit more like that, right? ASTER was the same. ASTER funding was completely the other way; it was like 200%. So, did you hold?
I traded it a little bit, but not when it went from 4-ish to 6 or 7, I think. It went higher, right? It went to 8 or 9. But I have to go back to what happened during that period. There were other trades that I had on at the time.
I got into it, basically. It broke down at some point, and I didn’t have it as big. I didn’t get into it as big at the start of the trade, basically. So I made some money from it, but not a lot.
I guess I should do more of a postmortem on this PUMP trade, because I kept probably 30% of my OG bag for too long and ended up just capitulating on 10/10 because I wanted to pay taxes. I should do more of a postmortem on where I should have sold and how much I should have sold. Obviously, you’re not going to be perfect, but I didn’t really do much of that at all.
I just said 67, and the chat’s going wild.
Yeah, I know.
They’re fried.
Yeah, I just think that Zcash is a trade where you can look good, but it doesn’t necessarily help you, because I think it was a bit of a layup. You can learn from all of these trades, right? You should 100% have some sort of trading log. You don’t do that many trades, right? How many trades do you actually do? It feels like you’re kind of—
PUMP. I traded CAKE, which I got stopped on, and then I traded Zcash.
So why not have a trading log? Why would you not do that if you’re doing it in such big size? Literally write down why you got in, when you got in, the size, what you think the upside is, and what you think your downside would be. Set your loss around your downside, and then just refer back to it when you eventually get out. Be like, “Okay, I was right about this. I had my plan to exit around there.”
It will really help you and your audience as well, because instead of having to come on here and justify yourself at these times—“I sold a little bit here, I sold a little bit there”—you can say, “This is where I’m going to sell.”
Okay, tell me this. This might sound stupid, and it’s not this easy, but why can’t we just sit here in spot BTC and cash, wait for the god narrative, and hit it every time? Why can’t you just rinse and repeat Zcash, PUMP, ASTER? Can you just do that every time and only trade god narratives?
That’s what I’ve been doing all year.
Can I just do this every time? I just do nothing now until the next one, and then it’s just boom—hit it again. Did it again.
Easily. It’s actually the best thing to do in crypto, particularly if you’re making some money from the yield. If you’re using futures grids or spot grids around these sorts of things, you can actually earn a decent amount, almost like a yield, when you’re holding a futures position or holding a spot position like an LP.
I think they’re pretty easy holds because they’re often super volatile. This is why you ask me why I’m always in the trades that break out: you don’t have to be in the other trades, right? But you have to be pretty ruthless about getting out of the ones that aren’t the trade.
Did you trade Plasma?
Because a lot of these look like the trade when they start, and then they don’t. I didn’t trade Plasma, actually. It broke down pretty soon. I think it broke down after 48 hours, right? It was just like—
It didn’t even look like it.
So we could just do this over and over again. I can avoid the crap. We could just hit size 3–4x on repeat every time.
Well, yeah. This was a particularly easy one, I think.
This one was—
Because of the funding.
Pump wasn’t easy, though. I don’t think it was super easy. It wasn’t the hardest.
No, no. If you’re going to give difficulty ratings to these sorts of trades, Pump was a much more difficult trade. Pump was like a 7 out of 10 to hold, because a lot of people also had very high price targets for Pump at that time, right? It was like, “Pump is going to—why does Pump trade at a third of where Hyperliquid trades, or half of where Hyperliquid trades?”
To think that you should get out at 8 or 7, or whatever it was, would not necessarily be as obvious. It was only like a 2x.
Yeah, so great.
My tax bracket has changed in the last couple of years, and I’m trading with amounts of money that are significantly bigger than what they used to be. How are you not jaded by, “Wow, the number on my screen is so big. I have to start selling”? Does that affect your trading? You see many seven figures on the screen and start selling even though the chart looks great and the trend hasn’t broken?
I don’t think I am, but then I am. Do you know what I mean? I told you that when the election happened, I was up a lot—probably the most I’ve ever been up in a single week—and I didn’t feel much. I thought, “Okay, this is probably a good sign. I don’t feel much. I think everything could go a lot higher.”
Then when I lost the vast majority of that back, I was like, “Oh God, you’re a fucking idiot. Why did you not do that?” I think most traders will feel this. I don’t know if it’s just me, but you get desensitized to the wins after a while and you only feel the losses.
When you lose money, you’re like, “You’re a fucking idiot.” When you make money, you’re like, “Okay, good.” The thrill of winning is not the same as the pain of losing.
Damn.
And I don’t know why that is.
So that kind of just keeps you going, though.
That’s crazy. Yeah, guys like me and Mando are just numb to wins, you know?
Your mind just does stupid shit when you’re up money. You suddenly start thinking that this should be normal to you, and it’s not.
Okay. So if you’re always in the best coin, how are you identifying Zcash, Pump, and Aster versus Plasma? Would it have just been your stop loss, and you would have gotten out of Plasma at minus 20% and moved onto the next one? How are you identifying a dud or fake narrative versus the best one?
I don’t know.
It’s not that I have a big belief in any of that. I also thought Zcash was going to break down. I didn’t have some massive belief that it would keep on going.
The good thing about it is you don’t have to be a diehard believer that this is going to be 100x. You just kind of let it happen. If it happens, [__] incredible. I think I’ve been in more trades this year that looked like they were going to break out but then broke down than ones that kept going.
The only one that kept going for a little bit was BNB. BNB had a strong run and kept on going, but all the others have just broken down and hit new lows. Aave was pretty horrific. Even recently, I was in TAO, and I thought, “All right, this was trading at 425. It looks like it’s going to break out again.”
It had been trending all year, started to break out, and went up to 500. The next thing I knew, it broke down. I got out at around 460, having got in at 425, and it was already at 500. I was kind of pissed. I thought, “Oh, I should have got out higher.” Then it was at 370 the next day.
These things are just brutal when they break down. They’re just brutal.
Percentage?
I didn’t. That’s the thing. I got out in profit on that trade. But if you had held and actually believed that this was going to be the Zcash—
You would have lost a lot.
I think the market right now is why I don’t have that much faith in altcoins. The moment you believe, they just [__] you over.
Yeah. You can’t have that much belief in some of these. I don’t think you can—not until Bitcoin hits an all-time high. Then you can start to be like, “Okay, now we can really start moving again.”
This has been such a disappointing year. I had subscribed to this notion that, because I’ve been doing this for a while, the cycle can’t be over because we didn’t have a glorious blow-off top.
2024 was crazy, though. When I really think back to it, I went through a top-signal list yesterday on stream. There were a lot of signals everywhere: WIF at 5 billion, GOAT, AI season, Cerebro, Chill Guy, Trump launched a coin, Bitcoin at 125,000. There were a lot of signals. It just wasn’t the glorious blow-off that I think people were expecting or wanted.
But [__] is down pretty badly right now. Altcoins are down 70% to 80%, which is a little bit alarming. Is that alarming to you?
Yeah, it’s pretty rose-tinted, isn’t it? I remember looking back at 2024 and thinking, “That was the wildest year. Take me back to 2024.” I remember 2024. People were also just [__] scammers, everyone trying to get into the daily runner. It was like, “Oh, kill me.”
It was brutal.
Yeah. It’s difficult, right? You never know when the good old days are the good old days. There was money to be made being a culture carrier, I think, or being a bit closer to the memecoin streets last year.
This year, you kind of had to be in DeFi, bro. The things that have really moved have been DeFi coins, and all the memes have just gotten smoked. It’s definitely been a more boring cycle.
There have been a few takes on your show that maybe crypto isn’t going to be the number-one place for trading in general for the next few years. Do you believe that?
I’m not—
I can see how that can be true. Let me put it that way. There have been some crazy trades this year. Obviously, we’ve just been in Zcash, and it’s been in a move like that.
Sometimes when people talk about stocks, it’s kind of funny when you go into FinTwit and this sort of stuff. People will be bragging, and you bring up the chart and it’s moved 30% or 40% in 7 months, and you’re like—
Okay, bro. I do not give a [__] about that.
I think it would be kind of annoying to get back into that because the volatility of this space is also a feature. It’s not a bug. It’s cool to be part of a market that’s super volatile and where people get huge liquidation wicks.
Zcash is currently—
Are you watching this? Are you selling here or no?
No, no. I’m happy with my bag now. This is kind of what— But this is me in the trading competition. I’m up to sixth. I’m coming for you, Donald. I’m coming for you.
Wow. I can see why AI can be more interesting here. If it’s just going to be DeFi and memes, and the culture stuff isn’t really going to move, if it’s still going to be a little bit slow, then I can imagine people going to the really cutting-edge tech stuff happening in AI or biotech.
My last topic for you is: how afraid are you of Sam Altman and the circular AI hype, with all the money that is just eating itself?
Oh yeah, the [__] spend—the capex spend. I don’t like Sam Altman, dude. I think—
He does. He fails at philosophy. There’s [__] in his basement, bro. I’m just telling you, I don’t know.
He fails it badly. He’s welcome on the show, by the way, but—
He fails it.
There’s just something about that whole thing which seems unnerving. Everything about it, you know? How the [__] CFO is coming out—maybe she was misquoted or whatever—but essentially saying that we need a U.S. backstop for AI after they literally just went from a nonprofit to a for-profit and are spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year. It’s just like, come on, guys.
I’m not a fan of him. I am a big fan of Elon. I do think that he’s going to destroy the competition when it comes to all this AI stuff. What’s happened with a lot of those AI companies is that they’ve progressed into almost infrastructure-engineering plays, right?
They’ve had to get an insane amount of energy and GPUs, and they’re building Colossus out in the American South. I forget which city it is—maybe Memphis or Nashville, I think. They’re building these huge data centers, and he’s just destroying them. I think he’s going to do very well by being able to set up big infrastructure projects around AI.
Sam Altman just unsettles me on all of this, but I’d still be a buyer of Tesla over them all.
Is there an angle here where, twofold, one, it’s sort of a national-security risk that the government just pours money into AI because we have to win the race against China? And twofold, do you probably have to stay bullish on risk until Nvidia drops 50%?
Yeah, I just don’t ever see Nvidia dropping 50%. I still think there will be infinite demand for GPUs for a long time. No one’s just going to let off the gas in this period because the prize is so big.
There are obviously massive ramifications for things like defense and a lot of very strategic things that the U.S. is involved in related to AI. I do think they probably need to work with the government, but to backstop them, I think, is a ridiculous way to look at it because the upside would only be for the private institutions.
It’s not like if you started backstopping these AI companies that they’re going to share their profits with the U.S. taxpayer. They’ll have insane profits. So, I think there is something to be said about that, but it won’t happen in the U.S. It just won’t happen in the U.S.
The U.S. is just going to be fine, man. So it kind of feels like, if Nvidia isn’t going to drop 50% and you don’t think equities are going to get wrecked that badly, at least the Mag 7 and whatnot, don’t you kind of just stay bullish on risk at all times until you’re forced out of it?
I’m for sure a big bull. Obviously, AI can go through waves where everyone gets too euphoric and everyone’s in a bit of a circle jerk with the capex spend and the valuations. You can get that. Somebody can start writing one research paper saying that this is all bullshit, and all the stocks drop 10%.
But at the end of the day, they’re still going to be going tooth and nail for AGI over the next few years, and they’re just going to buy as many GPUs as humanly possible. I don’t see how this unravels—not for a long time, in my opinion—because there’s so much belief that this is world-changing technology.
I do think that some of the Mag 7 companies on the capex side, rather than the hardware side, maybe don’t go up as much. Why should Apple really go up that much in this sort of world when they haven’t really been doing anything? Maybe Apple’s not a good example. Maybe Meta or some of these other companies that have been spending the vast majority of their capex on AI-related stuff and still haven’t really got that much to show for it—that may be a bit of a worry.
But the whole AI thing isn’t going to break down. No, I don’t see it. Not at all. So yeah, I’m a big bull.
And I’m a fucking big bull because I also think that the vast majority of nation-states are essentially bankrupt and will have to print money to get out of all of this. So you need to own risk assets, and I think Bitcoin will just have an infinite bid, basically, for the next few years.
Damn. That’s awesome. Okay, my actual last topic, and I’ll let you go, is: at what point, especially on a show like this, where you talk about this all the time, do we have to start being like, “All right, I should be paying at least more attention than I am to equities. I should be paying attention to other stuff”? Should we be trading stocks? Would I be able to trade stocks if we’re able to hit this stuff in crypto? Is it easier or harder? At what point do we feel like we should pay attention?
You can trade them in Hyperliquid. I think you should. This year has kind of shown that it’s going to be a bit more even between AI and crypto for a bit here, so pay attention for sure.
Can I be good at stocks? Is it the same game? Same skill set?
It’s more boring, for sure. What I just told you—“Oh, hey, it’s up 40% in 7 months”—you will get bored by the lack of volatility. But there’s definitely going to be easy upside in some of these things. I can’t see you moving away from crypto, though, man. This show is going to still be crypto-focused.
Dude, I’m a freak for the volatility, though. My brain is fried from this shit. I need the swings; otherwise, I’d rather just hold cash than DeFi farm for 5% APY, you know? Right, so let’s just lean into it. Just do more.
They had me looking at bank stocks the other day. I’m looking at Western Union earnings, and I’m like, “Dude, what the fuck am I going to do with Western Union, Mando?”
Who’s getting you on that? I had this whole rant where I’m freaking out about the barbell in crypto right now: trading platforms like Hyperliquid, perps, all this, and then payments. But I don’t know how to go long payments, stablecoins, all this. I’m freaking out about it, and someone’s like, “Dude…” I’m looking at the 20-year chart of Western Union, and I’m like, “Fuck, this is awful. This looks like the bottom, though.”
No, this is the other thing about your investment strategy. Don’t go trying to buy bottoms in assets that have done fuck-all for years and years and years. Buy new highs. What’s making new highs right now? Tech stocks and gold, right?
Don’t get caught being like, “The valuation on bank stocks looks good here.” Fuck that. You will not see upside in that. You will see a bounce from a support level. Just focus on the thing that is breaking out and hitting new highs in all markets at all times.
I want Robinhood. That’s what I want to buy. Fuck that. I can’t buy Western Union. I’m looking at charting Rivian, and I’m like, “Dude, we’re studying Rivian earnings.” This is awful. I hate this.
You know the other problem with stocks? There are too many stocks, bro. Just focus on the ones breaking out to new highs. That’s the point. You really don’t have to focus on half of this stuff. Just focus on the stuff that’s like, “Wow, this is…”
It’s so much easier that way.
I wish someone told me this when I first got into crypto. You could just hold the best coins and do nothing else.
I wish I knew that.
Yeah, but you do have a very tight risk system about them, for sure. You can, but that will also get you wrecked unless you have—
Right. Well, if it starts to break down, then I know I’m getting out. You can’t just keep holding the best coins and think they’re going to go up forever. Sometimes they rug you pretty hard—
Unless you have Zcash.
As a sign-off, tell us: what’s the next trade? If you’re relatively flat right now, what should you be doing, and what should we be looking at?
I just think Bitcoin. I know this is really fucking boring, but don’t go diving into altcoins on a good day until Bitcoin goes above $110,000. There’s nothing breaking out over a multi-month cycle right now that looks amazing. They kind of look like they might rug you at any one moment.
Wait until Bitcoin is at least above $108,000, probably above $110,000, and then you can start to look at what’s breaking out. I think Hyperliquid probably looks like one of the best to me right now. If Bitcoin goes back to $110,000, I would be very unsurprised if HYPE isn’t knocking at the door at $50. If Bitcoin goes to all-time highs, HYPE would go up again.
That’s the one that, to me, if you zoom out, looks interesting. HYPE has been in this range since May. Arguably, it was around this level even last year—it was at $33—so it’s not far from where it was. That’s the sort of thing where you could be like, “Right, it’s been in this range for, let’s say, we get to December, 7 months. It’s got a shot of breaking out toward new highs if Bitcoin starts to break above $110,000 or $115,000.” So that’s probably the one out of the altcoins, other than Zcash, which right now looks okay.
Funding is negative again.
Always good. Write it down. Last, how much leverage are you trading with?
Zcash is not spot.
Pretty low. Um, mainly it was leverage. I tried to do the more intense stuff, but I never got enough size on it. It’s low. It’s low. I use trading bots.
Two or three normally, yeah. But they get very long in quite big size. If they get to the bottom of the range, they get quite long. So, yeah, about 2 or 3—I’ve tended to find that’s the best way to do it.
It’s a different way of trading. Some people don’t even know what the fuck I’m talking about when I talk about grid bots, right? But every single major exchange allows you to do futures grid bots. Instead of just doing—I don’t know if Hyperliquid does. I don’t think it does—but at least on centralized exchanges, they do.
You trade on Hyperliquid? What do you trade on?
I mainly trade on centralized exchanges.
You’re on Binance, Bybit? I guess you don’t have to say.
Binance, Bybit, and a couple of others as well. I’ve just found liquidity better. Not necessarily just around Hyperliquid, but I’ve always preferred it. So mainly it’s been Binance, and then you can do all the bells and whistles around trading there.
I don’t know. I’m a believer in decentralization, but I also want to sleep at night. Sometimes I just feel like I don’t want to wake up one day and find that somebody’s drained something or something like that. I know Bybit got hacked for billions of dollars, but I just feel more comfortable having decent money sometimes in centralized exchanges. Maybe I’m wrong for that, but I think there are risks to DeFi just as much as, in my opinion, there are risks to centralized exchanges with the right centralized exchange.
Yeah. At what price are you buying Zcash again? $500?
I’m looking at this thing as well. It looks decent. I’m ready.
Where am I now in this fucking thing? I should have sold it more. I’m sixth. I’m sixth.
$640.
Fifth. Fifth.
Fifth. That can go down. I’m not going to catch a falling knife in that thing. Actually, this is not the time.
In this sort of model, you don’t need to be like, “This is my level, my line in the sand to buy.” I’d actually wait for it to rally back and break out of a shorter-term time-frame indicator. I’m never catching falling knives with this model. Never. I’m only ever buying a coin as it’s breaking out.
Right now, I’m not really interested in buying Zcash until it starts to show that it’s breaking out again on a shorter-term time frame. Whenever I’m buying a coin, it’s never at the lows or near the lows. That’s the mindset that gets you wrecked in crypto. You don’t want to be catching falling knives. You don’t want to be buying bottoms. You want to be buying breakouts.
Zcash looks like it’s now breaking back down. I’m not interested until it starts breaking back out again.
Tell me if you buy again. Tell me when. I just want to follow your strategy. Your chart is unreal, dude. You’ve got to make that one public.
Mando, you’re the GOAT, bro. Thanks, dude. You’re on, man. It’s time to have some fucking conversations about where you sit on the throne of Crypto Twitter, but thanks for coming on. Do you have anything to show before you leave?
Not really. I think people know what I’m involved in. Eat uh Rex [?]. I do loads of shows. So, come check those all out.
You just love doing streams? Like, what? You just love doing it?
I mean, I do a fucking lot of them.
I do a lot of them, but, like—
I—you know, I do like it. It’s easy. You just get your head straight sometimes doing them, right? You really do, particularly with daily shows. You keep up with stuff much easier if you’re doing a daily show.
You’re not going to miss news doing your show. You’re never going to miss a runner. No, if you’re doing your show, right? I just find it much easier than having to scroll X for ages. You’re just getting on a show, particularly with a co-host who knows what’s going on in the market. You pick stuff up and you’re never going to miss anything. So, I found it the easiest way just to keep up with the market.
Well, you’re one of the best, man. It was a pleasure. I’ll come back on at Zcash 2K or zero. We’ll see what happens.
Yeah. All right. Do you see me?