Rhino - How to Trade the News Without Getting Faked Out
Rhino’s governing principle is that longevity—not a spectacular P&L—is the only durable proof of trading skill. He made money in the 2016-17 uptrend, lost everything through altcoins and options in 2018, repeatedly rebuilt and blew up BitMEX accounts, then stopped blowing up near the end of 2019. Only after navigating both 2020-21 and the 2022 bear market did he feel competent: “You can do really well for five years and ruin five years of good work in…two months of being stupid.”
His favorite setup is fading a dominant narrative once both rhetoric and sentiment reach an extreme. During the tariff scare, he waited until disbelief became Great Depression panic; during the Iran war, a threat to “nuke Iran off the face of the earth” marked the point where rhetoric could scarcely worsen. The trade is effectively “a nothing ever happens position,” because either catastrophe occurs and there are bigger problems, or it does not and risk rebounds.
Contrarianism only pays near turning points; practicing it continuously is “intellectual masturbation.” Rhino uses social sentiment perhaps once or twice a year, such as after Bitcoin printed roughly 10 or 11 consecutive red weekly candles and traders began craving more downside. In ordinary bull trends, the crowd is bullish because prices are rising, and fighting it merely converts a personality trait into losses.
Event-driven wicks can create unusually asymmetric invalidations when feared news produces little additional selling. The CLARITY Act’s odds were already around 18% before its denial, yet the resulting BTC wick was shallow; the subsequent FOMC rate hike did not breach that candle, strengthening the level. That offered downside of only a few percent against moves of roughly 20-30% in assets such as Hyperliquid: “The immediate reaction to the news” is not necessarily the market’s natural state.
Rhino remains willing to trade crypto, but no longer sees an obvious structural marginal buyer for a large long-term allocation. The ETF leg, anticipated Trump regulatory support, Trump coin, and DATs had already played out or failed, while 12- or 13-year dormant wallets reportedly sold billions of dollars of BTC. With ETH and SOL only barely clearing their 2021 highs before being “destroyed,” roughly 95% of his liquid net worth now sits in TradFi; crypto is primarily a venue for tactical perp trades.
A precisely articulated “edge” is overrated when the real advantage is discretionary judgment accumulated over years. Rhino cannot reduce his process to a formula, but points to regime recognition, emotional neutrality about direction, patience, execution, and reading how informed buying or selling manifests in price. “At a certain point after you’ve been profitable for a certain number of years, it’s clear that you do have one—you might not just be able to define it.”
His disappointing 2026 is a failure of opportunity capture, not a blowup. He is approximately matching the Nasdaq—meaning passive exposure could have produced the same result—after mismanaging the metals, energy, and memory trades while spending less time at his desk. He does not think markets are becoming harder: volatility raises ruin risk, but also supplies more life-changing “at-bats,” and his response is renewed screen time rather than a wholesale reinvention.
1. Longevity turned early luck into an actual trading career
Rhino began in TradFi around late 2015 or 2016 with almost no financial background. A smooth equity uptrend rewarded straightforward longs in Nvidia, AMD, Canadian marijuana stocks, and a uranium thesis he then considered fundamental but now calls luck. His durable lesson was that he kept underestimating parabolic trends—selling a 2X that subsequently became a 20X.
The easy money taught him he was good before he was. He carried altcoins toward zero and traded options into the 2018 collapse, losing essentially everything; through 2018 and 2019, he repeatedly funded BitMEX accounts, ran them up, and blew them up. Near the end of 2019, the blowups finally stopped, and that was also when he left his last conventional job.
A well-timed de-risking and re-risking around the 2020 COVID crash, supplemented by Nvidia calls, moved Rhino from immaterial capital into “playing a real game.” Yet he withheld his own verdict until completing a cycle: strong results through 2020-21, followed by a successful bearish turn in 2022, finally made the performance feel repeatable rather than regime-dependent.
His standard is survival under stresses that cannot be backtested. A death in the family, a relationship crisis, or two undisciplined months can erase five productive years; 3AC’s rise to extraordinary scale and collapse is the extreme specimen. “Longevity is really the only thing that matters in this game.”
2. The best fades begin when one narrative consumes the market
Rhino describes himself as a “very, very pure discretionary trader”: accumulated pattern recognition, news experience, sentiment shifts, and impulse rather than a fixed system. His public positioning is less mysterious than readers assume—he considers explicit “I’m buying here” or “selling here” posts real, while much of the surrounding vague posting is simply entertainment.
His favorite setup begins with an overarching story that dictates every price move. During the tariff scare, increasingly extreme Trump proposals drove declines until previously dismissive traders flipped toward Great Depression and trade-war-collapse forecasts. Once price had fallen far enough to justify risk, that conversion from disbelief to panic became his cue to look for longs.
Iran produced the cleaner terminal-rhetoric example: escalating threats culminated in talk of wiping out a country of roughly 90 million people. Rhino’s framing was binary—either an event of that magnitude occurred and traders had bigger problems, or the rhetoric had exhausted its capacity to create incremental downside. He calls the resulting fade “essentially a nothing ever happens position.”
Pessimism helps him take profit and avoid “drinking the Kool-Aid,” though it also makes new ideas easy to dismiss prematurely. He is not a permanent bear: after the brutality of 2022, including major companies gapping down roughly 30% after earnings, he concluded that much of the short-side juice was gone and became predominantly long.
3. Sentiment matters at extremes, not as a permanent contrarian signal
Rhino rejects the rule that traders must originate every idea. If he lacks a view and a trusted, demonstrably profitable friend feels strongly, he may copy the trade blindly; friends skilled in on-chain markets similarly cover an area he does not follow. What he will not do is abandon an existing bullish thesis merely because another trader is bearish.
Twitter sentiment becomes useful perhaps once or twice a year. After BTC printed approximately 10 or 11 consecutive red weekly candles in 2022, traders who had resisted the decline finally seemed “addicted to these red candles” and hostile to anyone longing support. That combination of price location and vitriol—not bearish posting alone—helped identify the turn.
Constant contrarianism fails because “being contrarian only pays at turning points.” During 2020-21, widespread bullishness correctly reflected an advancing market, and retail made real money in its middle and later stages. Rhino’s harsher diagnosis is that perpetual bears prefer the intellectual status of winning against the crowd: “It’s just intellectual masturbation at the end of the day.”
4. A shallow news wick can define the whole trade
Rhino looks for events that have absorbed the entire market’s attention during an otherwise quiet period. If the anticipated shock finally arrives and price reacts only shallowly, the market has supplied both information and a clean invalidation; importance is judged through attention and intuition, not a formal news-ranking system.
Before the CLARITY Act decision, the probability was already around 18%, so denial was largely expected but still carried uncertainty. Its shallow BTC wick gave a long-biased Rhino a nearby exit level; when an FOMC rate hike later failed to breach that candle, the same zone became a “doubly strong invalidation.” Hyperliquid and other assets could then rally roughly 20-30% against only a few percent of defined downside.
The Trump coin episode supplied the bearish mirror. SOL briefly reached approximately $300-$310, then fell back below roughly $260—the prior cycle high—after the sitting US president launched a meme coin. Rhino treated that surreal euphoria and failed breakout as a straightforward opportunity to short SOL and reduce spot exposure.
He resisted Thread Guy’s attempt to group the Zcash event and Lighter’s Robinhood-perp announcement with the same setup. Those events altered perceived fundamentals, while the Zcash move wicked to roughly $250 and closed around $360, leaving an invalidation too wide for sensible leverage. A level is useful only when its distance preserves the asymmetry.
5. Charts reveal what better-informed participants cannot conceal
Rhino is unabashedly a “chart looks good” trader, but not in the sense of mechanically drawing head-and-shoulders patterns. His logic is informational: smarter analysts and insiders may know more than he does, yet acting on that knowledge requires buying or selling. Their concealed information therefore becomes visible through price.
That is why bad headlines alongside resilient price can matter more than a trader’s own narrative. On several occasions, Rhino noticed unexplained strength, bought, and watched the relevant news emerge one or two days later. As older traders would put it, the information was “shown in the tape,” even if he shares Thread Guy’s distaste for the phrase.
Pump.fun in fall 2025 was the clean chart-only specimen. Rhino avoided the launch, watched the heavy decline form a constructive base, and noticed that almost everyone remained adamant they would never buy it. With only a handful of visible bulls—including Thread Guy—the combination became simply: “All these people are refusing to long this, and now the chart looks good.”
Macro enters through the same discretionary synthesis. Rhino absorbs Fed policy, politics, economics, and price until they “meld in your subconscious” into bullish, bearish, or uncertain; he studies specific releases only when markets care. In 2022 that meant CPI and the June crude-oil top, when oil and risk traded in a near-direct inverse relationship.
6. Wealth preservation changes the objective function
Once net worth becomes meaningful, Rhino believes downside management must dominate. Volatile markets should produce “at least three or four pretty generational opportunities” each year, so upside can take care of itself; the harder task is avoiding a bear-market hole, psychological tilt, and the long crawl back from a large drawdown.
His closest recent warning came around an AMD earnings trade in 2023, when he was excessively levered through calls because equities and the chart looked bullish. AMD initially gapped sharply lower after hours, threatening a major loss, then retraced fully and pointed toward roughly a positive 10% session. He escaped, but took profit far too early and recognized that survival had depended on an oversized position recovering.
Sizing remains contextual rather than formulaic: conviction, total-book risk, and distance to invalidation matter more than quoted leverage. A tight level permits greater size; knife-catching means incremental spot purchases rather than leverage. In 2023, he withdrew each month’s perp profits instead of compounding them and used the proceeds to rebuild spot after the 2022 bear market.
Instrument choice is equally blunt. Rhino trades TradFi options but has never traded crypto options, prefers perps, and told Thread Guy, “Do not trade options.” For most people, he sees options as “kind of a money incinerator”; apparent leverage also means little without knowing how small the crypto sleeve is relative to the trader’s complete portfolio.
7. Crypto has trades, but its next structural buyer is unclear
On the recent move from roughly $67,000 to $83,000 BTC, Rhino missed the absolute bottom, traded HYPE beforehand, then participated around the CLARITY Act and FOMC setup. Subsequently, Ethena, Zcash, HYPE, and LIT appeared to lose their strongest structures, while BTC, SOL, and nearly ETH were being stiff-armed around the yearly-open level. Flipping those levels would invite risk; breaking below roughly $81,000 would make him “start sweating.”
His longer-term hesitation is the missing marginal buyer. Crypto already received the ETF speculation-and-approval leg, expectations of a pro-crypto Trump presidency, Trump coin, and the DATs phase; several of those narratives visibly disappointed. Meanwhile, wallets dormant for 12 or 13 years sold billions of dollars of BTC, which Rhino read as potentially smart holders unloading.
Diminishing cycle returns deepen the problem: SOL and ETH only barely exceeded their 2021 highs before being “destroyed.” Unless one consistently “pico snipes” bottoms, Rhino sees little reason to hold half of net worth in spot ETH for years. Roughly 95% of his liquid net worth is in TradFi, with capital on perp exchanges reserved for the crypto instrument he believes he trades best.
His current long-term spot includes a decent amount of Google and Amazon, plus smaller positions such as PS and FIX. He prefers discussing individual leverage trades because they have defined starts, ends, and invalidations, whereas spot positions can last for months without requiring him to sweat every move.
8. Markets are not harder, but this year exposed his weaker regime
Rhino’s current TradFi bias is bullish, without a fixed target. Many traders expected rising 10-year yields to break risk assets, yet markets barely reacted even as the yield moved parabolically; he thinks the 10-year might simply be catching up with growth potential. The non-reaction matters more to him than detailed bond analysis.
He does not believe markets have become progressively harder. Greater volatility raises the risk of ruin, but the period since 2020 has also produced repeated absurd narratives, bull cycles, and bear cycles—more chances to change one’s life in any given year. Geopolitical unrest, an interventionist Fed, rapid technology, social media, and presidential communication suggest that volatility may be the new norm.
Still, 2026 is his weakest year of the decade by his own opportunity-adjusted standard. He is approximately up with the Nasdaq, meaning he could have bought the index and left, while failing to capture enough of the metals, energy, and memory trades. Spending less time at home and at his desk likely contributed; his remedy is more attention and activity, not a new philosophy.
The costliest recent miss was Korea’s memory trade. Rhino bought EWY calls with implied volatility around 30% despite thinking the index had doubled over the prior year and seeing regular 2-5% intraday moves; after Nvidia earnings reversed and the Iran war began, he sold shorter-dated calls, longer-dated options, and spot. EWY later approached roughly $200, teaching him that “sacrificing a really good entry is just not worth it” merely to nail a local top.
9. Edge is lived experience, not necessarily a sentence
Rhino rejects the claim that an edge must be definable and quantifiable. Years of profitability are themselves evidence; recognizing a stimulative 2020-21 regime, caring little whether markets rise or fall, waiting patiently, and executing above the average participant all qualify. Discretionary edge can be real before its owner has language precise enough to package it.
Public P&Ls do not solve the proof problem. A spectacular screenshot may come from scamming, an offsetting hedge elsewhere, or longing one account while shorting another and displaying only the winner. Rhino instead looks at language, reasoning, trade presentation, trusted referrals, and eventually personal proximity before deciding someone is genuinely sharp.
He finds it revealing that analytically strong accounts such as Jez or Loliit may have roughly 40,000-60,000 followers while entertainers attract multiples of that. His question for CT is direct: “Are you here for entertainment, or are you here to actually…follow the sharpest people and make money?”
10. Professionalism, reflection, and hunger are the remaining compounding loop
Twitter still helps Rhino clarify theses and functions as a searchable trading journal: he can revisit November 2021, reconstruct his mental state, and inspect what went right or wrong. It also delivered reputation, access, close friendships, and messages from people who say his work changed their lives, though he now posts less and is uncertain how long the account will continue.
His risk advice contains an uncomfortable transition. Turning a tiny account into life-changing capital may at some point require going “balls to the walls” on a trade; surviving afterward requires abandoning that mentality for responsibility. Many traders can perform one mode but cannot switch between them.
He recommends treating trading like law, engineering, or medicine rather than asking for a shortcut. Books cannot teach execution, but reading alongside active trading, chart time, and the required hours accelerates recognition: conceptual warnings become real after one makes the mistake. Rhino cites Market Wizards, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, and John Murphy’s technical-analysis book, having read more than 100 books and accumulated folders of notes.
His goals progressed from avoiding employment, to buying a house, to securing his family, and finally to improving every year. Although 2026 breaks that annual streak, his enthusiasm has returned: trading joins psychology, politics, statistics, and economics in the job he felt was “made for me.” After roughly 10-12 years, the motivating question is what another 20-30 years of committed improvement might produce.
Full transcript
Yo, yo, yo.
Hello, hello.
Wow.
Yo, how’s it going?
Mr. Rhino, welcome to the stream, dude. It’s good to have you here.
Yeah. Thank you for having me. It’s been a little while in the making, man, but we finally got it done.
I know. I wasn’t sure. You told me you were going to come on, and I was like, “All right. See you in a couple years.” But you’re here, you’re on, and I’m excited.
Look, I think it’d be good to start with—do you want to just rip a quick little intro of your trading lore? The time period, when you got started, and why you got started? Honestly, I think you came onto my radar pretty late—2023, I want to say.
Probably from Ansem. But I’ll give you some quick flowers too, because I said at the beginning of the stream that my first six-figure altcoin trade was spot pump in fall 2025, and you were the one other person who was extremely long. You were my confluence on that.
Oh, yeah.
So, shout-out to you. But yeah, I’ll let you flow a little bit on your start in trading.
1. From Stocks to Crypto
Sure, sure. I’ll give a brief history. It’s not terribly interesting, but essentially, I started trading toward the tail end of 2015, going into 2016. I started in TradFi, and I really had no background in TradFi or finance at all. I wasn’t fucking retarded—I knew what a stock was—but beyond that, I had no real understanding of how markets worked or anything.
I found crypto shortly after, probably in early 2017.
Yeah.
Yeah. I started in 2016.
Just make s—
Yeah, yeah, no worries. I won’t say that. Yeah, I started in 2016, found stocks, and then I got into it at a very favorable time. The 2016 and 2017 market for equities was a very smooth uptrend, so I was basically longing like any retail trader would and making a lot of money.
I thought I was a genius, and then, heading into 2018, I ended up over-rotating, holding a bunch of altcoins down to zero. I was also trading options in TradFi, so I essentially lost everything at that point. That’s where my actual learning of how to trade began, I would say.
At what point do you think you got good?
I mean, there are various phases of it. I was definitely never good at the start, even though I was making money, which is a dangerous thing that happens in trading pretty often. That was two years of me thinking I was good until I lost everything.
And everything was just up only? You were just perpetually long?
Yeah. In 2016, I found NVIDIA and AMD pretty early, and I would buy those. There was also the whole Canada-legalizing-marijuana thing at the time, so that trade was super parabolic.
I also had a fundamental uranium thesis. I got in on the fundamental side of things—or what I thought was fundamental—but really, I was just being lucky. The only thing I really learned from the first two years was that I was always underestimating how far a parabolic trend could really go.
I would buy some marijuana stock, it would go up 2X in a month, and I would sell it feeling like a genius. Then it would 20X over the course of the year. So that was always interesting.
And—
As far as when I got good, it was toward the end of 2019. In 2018 and 2019, I was essentially working a bunch of jobs. I would spin up a new balance, go on BitMEX, load it up, run it up to a certain number, and then blow up over and over.
Toward the end of 2019, I stopped blowing up. But I wouldn’t really consider myself good until I completed a full market cycle. I did really well in 2020 and 2021, and then I managed to flip bearish into 2022 and do really well that year. That was when I really felt I was doing well.
Do you think you did well in 2021 as a core ideal, like a crypto believer, or was it just a parabolic market that you were riding?
I’m not really much for core beliefs. I think in my real life I’m super optimistic, but as far as trading goes, I’m pretty pessimistic and cynical.
Oh.
So it was definitely never this belief in the mission. Maybe Bitcoin I could kind of believe in at the time, but I wasn’t like, “Oh, NFTs are going to change the world,” or any of the other stuff people were talking about at the time.
Are you a nihilist across all markets?
I wouldn’t say I’m a nihilist. I’m just pessimistic, I suppose, which is sometimes good. It helps you take profits on things and not really drink the Kool-Aid, as they say.
But it also means it takes a lot of effort for me to find new things and not immediately go, “Oh, that’s retarded.”
Makes sense. At what point did you become a full-time trader? You mentioned you were working jobs and running up accounts on BitMEX to get there.
Pretty much the end of 2019 is when I had my last job.
2019. And you’ve been full-time trading since then?
Yeah.
Whoa. That’s wild. What was your breakout trade? Did you have a specific, “I can quit my job” type of trade, or an “I’m really good” type of trade?
I imagine I’m different from most people you’ve interviewed. From what I’ve seen of a lot of the people you interview, it’ll be like, “Oh, I went all in on Trump,” or, “I went all in on HYPE,” or something like that.
I just had a series of good decisions over the course of the period from the start of 2020 through 2025. Obviously, there were some big trades littered throughout that, but it wasn’t really one specific trade.
Besides that, I guess at the start of 2020, when the COVID crash was happening, I happened to de-risk and re-risk really well. I also hit some calls on NVIDIA, and that took me from trading with money that wasn’t really going to change my life to at least playing a real game.
Why do you think you have to complete a full market cycle before you can know if you’re actually built for it?
I mean, how many people have we seen do really well in bull markets, which are a relatively short amount of time, and even run it up to 9 or 10 figures? You see all these people, and then in 2022 they all blow up.
Longevity is really the only thing that matters in this game. Even if you do well for 3, 4, or 5 years, you really don’t know how you’re going to respond to stressful situations, or even real-life stuff.
If your family member dies or your girlfriend cheats on you, are you going to have the discipline to step away and not trade, or are you going to blow up your account? You can do really well for 5 years and ruin 5 years of good work in 2 months of being stupid.
Did you say 10 figures?
Yeah. There was the whole 3AC thing, where Kobe was talking about how they spun it up to insane numbers much quicker than he ever did, but then everything went the way it went.
It’s like that book—and this is the scene in Fooled by Randomness at the beginning. I hate that book, but it’s a pretty good intro segment.
Okay, when I was giving you an intro, I called you the face of vague-posting on Twitter. Sometimes it can be hard to tell how you’re positioned. You actually mix it up, though. You do get serious. You post positions, charts, entries, and exits. We’ll talk about some of your recent ones.
But you do swing on it. How would you describe your trading style? When you’re in flow, you’re hot, and you’re executing the way you want to execute, what is your style? What is your system, if you have one?
2. Trading Without A Fixed System
For one thing, I think that’s a huge misconception. What happens is that a lot of people only see part of your tweet. So if I’m shitposting sometimes, people will take that as serious.
Mm-hmm.
But I’ve made it pretty clear over the years that the only times I’m actually taking positions are when I say, “Hey, I’m buying this here, selling this here.” All the other stuff is just me fucking around.
As far as my actual style, I don’t really know. I’d say I’m a very, very pure discretionary trader, and I just act on impulse. That’s built up through—I've been trading for 11 or 12 years now—so there are various patterns I’ve seen before, whether it’s a certain type of news trade, sentiment shifts, or things like that.
But I wouldn’t say I have a discernible, “This is what I do” sort of trade.
Are there any patterns across a lot of your big wins that are similar setups?
Yeah, there are a few. My favorite type of trade, which has probably made me most of my money, is when the market has an overarching narrative that everyone is focused on.
For example, when there was the tariff scare going on—
Of course.
—the entire market was focused on what Trump was saying, and he was just saying more and more ludicrous numbers in terms of the tariffs he was going to put on China or various countries.
Obviously, the price started reacting to that. Once it declined by a significant enough percentage that it made sense to start looking for longs, you saw the sentiment shift from people who didn’t really believe the tariff stuff was going to be anything to take seriously. They started flipping and saying we were going to go into a Great Depression, that this whole trade war was going to collapse, and stuff. That would be when I would get into longs and whatnot.
It was similar with the Iran war, where it was escalation after escalation, and then Trump was starting to talk about how he was actually going to nuke Iran off the face of the earth. People were somewhat taking that seriously, which is like, okay, either he’s going to nuke a country with 90 million people off the face of the earth, in which case we have bigger problems, or he has no more rhetoric that can be more extreme than this, so the market’s not going to really react further to the downside. But people were taking it very seriously.
I like when there’s one narrative that the market’s focusing on and you can take the other side of that.
Essentially, a “nothing ever happens” position.
You actually had a tweet about that exact thing. I was going to bring this up. I actually forgot this happened, but I took this to heart about the Kharg Island thing because that was the moment where—I was getting microwaved covering geopolitics for the first time in my life. We were talking about the Iran war every day. We were talking about oil. I still have the—I guess you can’t see my camera, but I have the fucking oil barrel in the background—and I was getting completely microwaved covering geopolitics.
The whole time, I’m like, “I’m holding out, I’m holding out, I’m holding out.” Then that Kharg Island announcement came out, and I was like, “Okay, now I’m bearish.” You really sit down and think about it, and it’s like, dude, now you’re bearish? There’s a sub-1% chance that this is going to happen.
You always long the nuke threat because either it happens, in which case it doesn’t matter—you have bigger problems, like you said—or it doesn’t, and you’re long. I’m bearish now at, you know, a 6% yield on the 30-year, or whatever it is. I actually remember you had the seminal tweet about this that made me rethink some of my trading approach.
I’m curious about your use of Twitter for trade positioning. This is something that’s been tilting me, and I’ve just made a declaration that I’m going to stop paying attention. Reading people’s tweets about how they’re positioned drives me nuts, and it also feels like it’s a really small sample size that you over-index for.
Everybody is bearish, or everybody is bullish. Everybody is long, everybody is short, because nine people that I follow on Twitter—Chamba and Crypto Ethan said something. How much attention do you pay to how other people are positioned and to the narrative that you gather on social media and things like this? You are pretty active on Twitter.
3. Reading Twitter Sentiment
I think the optimal way to use Twitter—and this is something you’ll get used to—is following sharp people. I’ve been on Crypto Twitter since January 2018 on this account.
Jesus.
Taking it seriously. Yeah, dude, I’m fucking old.
I think following sharp people—which obviously most of Crypto Twitter does a very poor job of actually identifying—and copying them, especially when you don’t have your own ideas, is useful. I even have some friends whom I would consider sharp and whom I talk to on a regular basis, not on Twitter, where if I don’t have a trade idea and they feel strongly about something, sometimes I’ll just blindly copy them because I know this person is a profitable trader over the long run.
I don’t really believe in that whole “you can’t copy people to aid your trading” idea. I certainly wouldn’t change a trade that I’m making. If I’m bullish and someone else is bearish, I’m not going to change my thesis and take on their position. That’ll never happen.
As far as reading comments and stuff, I think I would just take everything with a grain of salt, only follow the sharp people, and understand that sentiment is only useful at these really extreme turning points that I was talking about. For instance, when the tariff stuff was happening, or even in 2022, I had this tweet where BTC had put in, I think, 10 or 11 consecutive red weekly candles. Obviously, that whole time down, people were being pretty bullish, and they just didn’t accept what was going on.
At the bottom, I started saying, “Yeah, you guys seem like you’re super addicted to these red candles now, and now you’re craving more because of how down you are.” Then you pair that with crashing into support levels or whatever, and you can say, “Oh, I’m longing now,” and you just get vitriol and counter-sentiment toward it, with people saying, “Dude, you can’t long. We’re going to go so much lower,” and this and that. I find it useful in those moments, but that’s maybe once or twice a year.
At extremes, up or down.
Exactly, because there’s this whole addiction people have to being contrarian at all times. But being contrarian only pays at turning points. Are you going to be contrarian during 2020 and 2021, when everyone’s bullish? No, everyone’s bullish because everything’s going up.
Retail does make a lot of money in the mid- to late stages of bull markets, so you can’t just be contrarian because you find it attractive.
People are addicted to being contrarian. I like that. Why do you think that is?
It’s a certain subtype of person, and actually one of my least favorite types of traders to talk to. I feel like in trading, if you’re 110 or 120 IQ, you’re slightly above-average intellect or whatever. It’s more in your interest to go to the left curve than to go to the right curve, because the right curve is filled with people who are actually extremely, extremely intelligent.
I think the people who enjoy being contrarian just have something against making money with the crowd. They also feel like if they’re shorting, it’s a more fun win intellectually. It’s just intellectual masturbation at the end of the day.
I shorted some coins recently and made some money, so I actually enjoyed it. I understood it for the first time. I’m long-only, and I understood for the first time that when you’re short and coins are going down, there’s this elitist feeling. It’s almost dangerous.
You’re right, though. There’s this crowd that tilts me so much on Twitter: the contrarian bears, always. Being a bear as a personality trait is inherently a little bit miserable, I think.
Yeah. You should just be able to flip. If you’re perma-dooming equity indices, I could just pull up a chart of equity indices and be like, “Okay, you’re just kind of retarded.”
What do you lean toward? Are you mostly long or mostly short?
After 2022, I went mostly long. I just didn’t have much interest in shorting because 2022 was such a brutal bear market. There were earnings calls from major companies, and they would just gap down 30% after hours, like Facebook and stuff. It was truly insane.
After that, I was like, “Okay, I don’t think there’s much juice left to short things.” I just have less interest in doing it now. One of the last times I was really pretty heavily short crypto as a whole was just after the whole Trump coin thing, where Solana deviated from all-time highs. That was such an obvious euphoria signal.
But yeah, I don’t really do it too much anymore.
How did you play that? How well did you play that?
I played it really well in terms of shorting Solana and de-risking spot and all that, but I didn’t really touch Trump coin too much.
Yeah, I meant the short side.
Yeah, I just held shorts, and it was a pretty simple play. Solana had been flirting with all-time highs, spiked to, I think, 310 or 300 or something, and then deviated back below 260, which were previous cycle highs.
You can just short that and be like, okay, dude, the president of the United States just launched a meme coin. That is not a sentence that I thought I would ever say in my life, especially being in crypto since 2017.
It’s crazy.
It’s just such a fucking weird trajectory that everything’s gone on. You can just short that, and then—that’s actually one of my favorite news trades, which also just recently happened. We had the CLARITY Act and then the denial, and the wick from that was really shallow.
Using those sorts of wicks or price points as invalidations for trades lets you set up super-favorable long or short setups.
Oh, like if the CLARITY Act red candle closes, you’re long. If it goes below that, you’re out, kind of thing?
Yeah, because a lot of people will misuse or misapply news trading. They think the immediate reaction to the news is the natural state of the market.
But essentially, the CLARITY Act was already at, I think, 18% going into it, so we kind of knew it was going to be denied.
100%.
But there was also this uncertainty and stuff. Then it gets denied. The wick is super shallow, so you're like, “Okay, I was long-biased before, and now I can use this as an invalidation.” Then there was also the FOMC rate hike, which didn't even breach that BTC down candle. It just went kind of close to it, so now you have a doubly strong invalidation.
Sorry.
Your upside is just so high because, you know, I think Hyperliquid and stuff ripped 20% to 30%. Obviously, Bitcoin went up a lot, but your downside was a few percent.
How do you identify a news event significant enough to act as an invalidation in either direction?
It's generally somewhat sentiment-wise, and then you can see a lot of this is, I guess, where the bull signaling stuff comes in. But it's just intuition: you can see that the entire market is focused and waiting for this event. There's not really much going on, and then the event happens and the reaction's fairly shallow.
Are you always trading these big news moments? Are you never letting one of these go to waste?
That's a hard question to answer because it really depends on what you qualify as a big news event. I would say I definitely miss stuff. Sometimes I'll just be gone for a month.
You were gone for a while.
I won't even open a chart. The last year, I don't think I've been home too much. Coincidentally, this is the worst year of trading I've had this entire decade.
Really? Of the decade?
Of the 2020s, yeah.
Why do you think that is, and what has gone wrong?
4. Trading Through Market Regimes
I've talked about this. I made a pretty long post about it. Essentially, I think the COVID market was just so easy and so telegraphed. We had ZIRP and all this super-accommodative and stimulative fiscal and monetary policy, so it was obvious we were going to go up while we were all locked inside just gambling.
Heading into the end of 2021, they kind of just reversed all the stances of what had happened, so that became a really easy one on the short side, which is when I actually started tweeting. Coming out of 2022, it was easy to be bearish just because of how fucking disgusting everything was, as far as the extent of the downturns, and then the FTX collapse and stuff.
After that, it got a lot more nuanced. I even tweeted in 2023 or 2024, “I just think it's going to be a lot harder for me to time these market cycle tops and bottoms as effectively as I did the last 3 or 4 years.” That kind of played out, where I sold a lot of stuff and talked about how I was getting bearish in the fall of last year after the whole pump and Tesla trade stuff.
Even though equity indices didn't really decline too much, they went sideways a lot, and it became much more of a stock picker's market. I don't think I'm super good at picking individual stocks. I'm not going to hit a SanDisk and hit it for a 10X and change my portfolio too much.
I generally do better at timing macro swings, as far as tops and bottoms in bull markets and bear markets. So there was a lot of sector rotation going on in equity indices that I didn't really take advantage of too well.
Do you think markets are progressively getting harder? I guess our anchor being COVID is not the best anchor, but is this a trend that's going to continue?
I don't think it's getting harder. I don't think the market really changes much at all. If anything, it's almost easier from a certain perspective. There's a higher risk of ruin because of how volatile things are, but because of how volatile things are, I think the chance to change your life in any given year is higher. There are just more at-bats.
If you look at what markets have done from 2020 until now, there have been so many absurd narratives, absurd moves, and bull and bear cycles all throughout that. So I don't really think it's more difficult.
Do you think this period of increased volatility is the new norm, or is it just a result of a decade-long bull market that will weather out as time goes on?
I think it's probably the new norm. There's more geopolitical unrest than we've ever seen—or not ever seen, but I'm not that old. So there's a lot of geopolitical unrest and uncertainty.
I feel like the Fed is more interventionist and more participatory in terms of how actively they're changing the economy, changing rates, and trying to manipulate the market. The market doesn't really affect the economy as much as it used to.
Then there's just the rate of technological innovation and change, the fact that so many things are on social media, and the president is doing what he's doing. It all points toward things continuing to be very volatile going forward.
By the way, I'm obsessed with your invalidation-candle thing, because I'm sitting here thinking about even the Zcash hack. It wicked to 250, which I guess was kind of an aggressive wick, and then it closed at 360. So that's a pretty big spread there, but there's a very clear invalidation if you were to go long after a 60% wipeout: if it goes back below that, it's like, yeah, we're done here.
Even with Lighter and the Robinhood announcement, where they're building their own perp DEX, it's very clearly a pretty significant news event that just happened, and it sort of gives you a line. It pumps over the bounce, and you're short. All right, we're probably going to keep going up here.
I wouldn't really qualify those as the same type of trade, just because it's not necessarily a news event. As far as Lighter, the actual fundamentals of the coin did change in that moment.
That's true.
A lot of the bullish speculation on it was that it was going to have this Robinhood integration, and they were very close to the line there. The Zcash thing, too—a lot of that was old FUD, but it obviously had a material impact. The invalidation is just so wide that it doesn't really become a trade you can take on leverage.
It is really wide, you're right. It's too much.
Yeah.
You hate Zcash, don't you?
Pass.
Earlier, you made a comment about the base contrarian being the worst—the type of trader you like to talk to the least. What is the type of trader you like to talk to the most?
I'm honestly not super collaborative with trades. I like having friends who I can talk to about aspects of the market that I'm not good at and don't pay attention to.
For instance, I have a few friends who are pretty good at on-chain, which I don't really pay any attention to. I just don't care. But if they send me a coin and they're like, “Yo, you should buy this. It's probably good,” I can just throw some money at it, and over the long run it's been profitable.
People who shore up your weaknesses are really good. Then, obviously, I just like talking to people who I consider super sharp. But yeah, I don't really talk trading with too many people.
I don't know what your net worth or P&L is, but as someone who has—
Zero.
—seemingly done very well, or at least is in a position to trade full time—
Mm-hmm.
—how conscious are you at all times of managing downside and not blowing up? How much of an effort are you putting into this consciously as you continue to trade?
5. Managing Downside First
I think once you pass a certain net worth, that has to be your main focus because if you've been in markets long enough, you know—especially with how we're talking about it—there's just a more volatile regime going forward. You just know every year there's going to be at least 3 or 4 pretty generational opportunities to make a lot of money, and sprinkled all throughout that, you can trade really well and make a good amount as well.
The downside is what you have to manage; the upside takes care of itself, right? You can just long things and they'll kind of go up if you're in that regime. But if you're getting caught in a bear market, crawling out of that, and not getting mentally tilted, those are the things that will destroy people.
So I definitely spend a lot more time trying not to draw down, and maybe that limits my upside more than it should, but it's a constant refinement process.
Do you have a circuit-breaker level where, if you draw down 15%, 20%, or 50%, you're done for a certain time period? Have you ever hit that?
Not in a long time, no.
What was your biggest drawdown?
I guess blowing up in 2018 and 2019 a few times was my biggest drawdown. But ever since then, the closest I really came to a material drawdown was, I think, Q4 of 2023. It was around AMD earnings, and I was super, super overlevered into call options.
Why?
It was early 2023, and shout-out Chumba—the chart looked bullish, so I was just fucking bullish. I was super bullish on equities in general, and AMD looked really good. They reported earnings, and it gapped down really hard after hours, so I was like, “Oh, I’m kind of fucked. I’m going to take a huge drawdown here.”
But then it retraced the full move after hours, and I knew I was going to wake up to probably a 10% gain. I ended up TPing way too early, because obviously AMD did what it did. But yeah, I was way too oversized, to be honest.
How do you think about position sizing and position horizon? What is your general time horizon? I know it depends on the position, but how do you think about time horizons when you enter a trade?
And how do you think about percentage sizing relative to your trading portfolio? How big are you going on some of these trades that you post?
6. Sizing The Trading Book
It depends. It definitely changed after 2023, when I was more focused on shoring up my spot portfolio than being like, “I’m going to leverage-trade my entire net worth.” Even in 2023, I was tweeting about how, at the end of every month, I withdrew all of my perp-trading profits instead of trying to compound them, and I would just use them to buy more spot crypto.
I think it’s a more responsible and easier way to compound, especially if you’re coming out of such a brutal bear market like 2022. That strategy obviously isn’t really valid at this point.
In terms of sizing and all that type of stuff, honestly, a lot of it is just gut feeling. If I feel like an idea is really good and has what I perceive to be a pretty tight invalidation, I’ll size harder. Whereas if I’m knife-catching something, I’m obviously not going to be levered going into it. I’ll just buy some, buy some more, and eventually hope it works out.
What do you have right now as long-term spot—long-term compounding spot, if anything?
I feel like that changes, and the weightings of that stuff change, so often that I’ve pretty much only been talking about leverage trades for the past few years. Right now, I have a decent bit of Google and Amazon and stuff.
I saw that post, yeah.
And then I have some random stuff like PS and FIX. It’s just too much to talk about, honestly. That’s why I like posting individual trades, because they have a defined start, a defined end, and a defined invalidation.
With the majority of my portfolio, if I’m spot-long, I’m not going to be overly sweating a move this way or that way, and it might last months and stuff. So, yeah.
How have you played this recent crypto pop from 67 or whatever to—what are we right now?—83? Scary. How have you played it over the last 3 months or so in crypto?
7. Crypto Positioning Now
I definitely missed the absolute bottom. I posted some HYPE trades that I was making before, which I was doing well on, and then missed out on the bottom and longed the whole CLARITY Act and FOMC rate-hike stuff.
Now it seems like a lot of the coins have broken the market structure that was making them super bullish, whether it’s Ethena, Zcash, HYPE, and all these things, even LIT. Then BTC, Solana, and almost ETH are being stiff-armed at this yearly-open level.
I think it’s a pretty good spot where, if we can flip those levels, you can look to risk back on. But if we break below 81, you’re going to start sweating. I’ve just been patient the last 2 weeks.
Interesting. What’s your general outlook for crypto from this stage—a 6-month, 1-year-plus, or 2-year time horizon? Are you generally bullish, or are you just trading the charts with no real bias in either direction? How do you feel about the direction things have gone?
I don’t really feel like I’m the best person to answer where I think it’s heading in 2 years, because I don’t understand or care for the tech side very much. I will say that I felt like coming out of 2022 was a lot easier to be bullish than coming out of 2025 or 2026, whatever you want to classify this bear market as.
Last year in the fall, I posted this long bearish manifesto, and it relates to something Jez talked about: Who’s the next marginal buyer?
Yeah. Like after the dumps.
Yeah. Essentially, we had the ETF speculation-and-approval leg, and then we had the whole presidential bullish-bias leg, where we were like, “Oh, Trump is going to really push forward on regulations and make crypto a priority.”
Then he launched his coin before his inauguration, and that went how it went. There was the whole DATs thing and all that, and you could see those fail in real time. At the same time, some sharp people like CL were saying, “Oh, this is the most toppish Bitcoin has looked.”
I started feeling similarly, and then all these dormant wallets that hadn’t really moved for 12 or 13 years started selling billions of dollars’ worth of BTC, so it seemed like smart players were unloading. I just didn’t see who the next marginal buyer was. It also seemed like a lot of the vision of what crypto was going to be had changed.
I don’t really see how that’s changed for me personally. I don’t know what’s going to happen going forward to make me allocate a large percentage of my portfolio to spot ETH or spot Bitcoin or something.
Even last cycle, if you look at it in terms of diminishing returns and stuff, Solana and Ethereum only barely breached their 2021 cycle highs, and then—
Yeah, they did.
They got destroyed. So unless you’re, you know, pico-sniping bottom entries—which I know everyone on Twitter is, but I’m not all the time—it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to be like, “I’m going to hold half my net worth in spot ETH for the coming years,” at least from my perspective.
Got it. So you don’t have a substantial percentage of your liquid net worth allocated to spot Bitcoin at this stage. You’re just trading long and short leverage positions depending on key levels.
Yeah. About 95% of my liquid net worth would be in TradFi, and then I just keep some on various perp exchanges, because I do feel like the thing I’m best at with crypto is always going to be perps, not necessarily on-chain or any of that.
So, yeah, I just abuse some perp moves whenever I see them and focus more on TradFi.
Why do you think you’ll continue to be good as a trader? How do you not lose your edge, erode your skill, or just get washed?
8. The Unquantifiable Trading Edge
I’ve been doing it for a really long time, and I think most of the challenges with trading—I’m not overly focused on saying, “I need to have a definable, quantifiable edge,” like a lot of people are. “Oh, if you can’t define your edge, you don’t have one.” I don’t really believe in that.
Can you give me a take on that? I’m so sick of hearing it. It drives me crazy, because I feel like I don’t have one.
If you don’t have one that’s definable, that’s fine. But at a certain point, after you’ve been profitable for a certain number of years, it’s clear that you do have one. You might not just be able to define it.
But does it really take edge to participate in the market in 2020 and 2021, recognize that there’s all this stimulative fiscal and monetary policy, and understand that things are going to go up? On a certain level, fundamentals do matter, so if you can quickly identify that we’re in a bullish regime, I don’t know if you would call that edge.
I guess a nonquantifiable edge is that I truly don’t care if markets are going to go up or down, and I have the emotional discipline to wait for good setups and execute well generally. Not all the time, obviously, but above what other people have. So I guess that’s edge in a way.
I think that definable-edge thing is funny when you look at the monthly SPX chart and it’s like, all right, what was your definable edge? It’s like, you’re just—
Yeah, it’s a very sticky situation and typically tends to be something I think quant traders focus on more. Discretionary traders—I know a lot of people who are pretty retarded, myself included probably, who have done fairly well over the years.
What do you think about this trend? I would say it’s a market trend, but maybe it’s just a CT echo-bubble trend of posting P&Ls.
What do I think about posting P&Ls?
Yeah. And just the direction this is going, where everyone is just public-trading accounts and posting P&Ls.
If you don't have much of a take on it, we can skip it, but I thought you'd be an interesting person to ask.
I don't really have too many thoughts on it, I guess. It's not really something I spend time thinking about. It has been something in the past that sometimes unethical people will use. If you see a big P&L, you immediately think someone's a really good trader, but there are people who've made it through scamming.
There are people who are just hedging their book on another thing, or they're longing one account, shorting the other account, posting the big P&L, and being like, “Look, dude, I'm fucking sick.” So it's not something I pay super close attention to.
Okay. For something like crypto lore, can you give me a… We could do it by eras, but can you give me a crypto trading Mount Rushmore, a top 5? It doesn't have to be top P&L, but it could be flashiest, your favorite, highest skill, whatever. Can you give me a top 5 CT trader Mount Rushmore?
Yeah, let me check my following list one sec.
You don't follow that many people either. Let me see how many people you follow. You follow 185.
Yeah, sometimes that makes people upset. I have no idea why.
You also follow the same person 3 times, like their alts and shit.
Kobe’s definitely up there. For me personally, Lomo was pretty important, especially in 2018 and 2019, following him. I just saw him crushing the market at a time when it was very difficult, and I didn't really understand what was possible trading-wise at the time, so that was interesting to see.
I mean, you could probably put GCR up there, even though I didn't follow him super early on.
GCR, Loma, Cobie. That's a hot bunch of hot takes in there.
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty standard, right? I think CL probably deserves to be up there. I just really respect him as a trader, even though our trading styles are generally completely different. He hit a lot of really big swings, even this last top in 2025, and I just know for a fact he's sharp. This is not the most deep-dived list. I'm just scrolling my following.
I didn't prep you for it, to be fair. It's kind of a tough one to spot.
Dude, a fifth one? I don't know. Mount Rushmore's 4 people, so there you go.
There you go. Not bad. You said historically you've been pretty good at calling cycle tops and bottoms.
Yeah.
What do you think about TradFi markets right now? The AI trade in particular. I know you have, I think, Amazon, Google, or definitely Google. Maybe I made up the Amazon one. How are you positioned—
Yeah, Amazon too.
Okay. How are you positioned, and how much higher do you think we can go? I think Michael Burry has been on Twitter calling for 9 more months of a bull market recently. What do you think?
I mean, yeah, he probably said that 3 years ago as well. You just can't take too seriously what that guy's talking about. I'm pretty sure he's been shorting Nvidia for 2 years or something. I have no idea, dude. I don't know. I'm not really one for targets or anything. You just react to what's happening in real time.
It seems like a lot of people were screaming for markets to go lower right now with the whole 10-year thing, but it's probably likely that the 10-year is just trying to be competitive and catch up with growth potential. The fact that risk markets didn't really react to that at all, even though that shit was going parabolic, has me skewed to the upside right now. I don't know how long that'll last, but my current take is bullish.
How much attention do you pay to macro stuff? I feel like so many of my favorite traders have been completely laser-beam-pointed-at-their-head macro-pilled. How focused are you on Fed words, the Treasury, and bond yields? How much attention do you pay to that versus the charts, versus your own fundamental belief in assets or coins or whatever it is?
It all kind of plays together in terms of digesting all the information that's out there, and then it kind of melds in your subconscious to spit out a market view, whether that's up, down, or I don't know. I don't really pay attention to macro in super-specific detail like someone like Fa Zhao might, even though I think he's really good at it. I'm just not going to be looking into NFP data and all this.
The most I looked at was CPI in 2022, but that's because most of 2022 was just this worry about inflation leading to more rate hikes and stuff, and that was their whole goal, to get that down. For instance, in 2022, when crude oil topped in June, we had a really big rally in risk. They were pretty much directly inversely correlated.
I'm not really paying attention super-specifically. It's just broader-level: seeing what the Fed's talking about, seeing what the market is caring about or not caring about. So I haven't really been paying attention to this 10-year stuff for bonds, because I just don't really care.
Do you have any ability to quantify the intensity of the bull tingle? I don't even know how to ask that. Do you have any metrics to quantify if it's a real hard bull tingle or a soft bull tingle? Does the bull tingle have metrics?
As far as hard data, no. It's pretty much just gut feeling. Again, I kind of meme about how I don't think about markets at all, and it's all just intuition and stuff. But, like I said, the bigger trades I've taken at mega turning points definitely have some thought behind them and biases.
But then there will be a bunch of trades where I'll just look at the price action and be like, “Oh, this looks like it's going to go up a long way.” It might not be sized as hard as something that I'm super convicted in, but yeah.
Are you a chart-looks-good guy?
Yeah, for sure.
I hate the “chart looks good” shit right now because it's my favorite bit. Chumba had this tweet where someone tweeted at him a chart of Micron—
Yeah.
—and he was bearish, and it was like, “Chart looks good.” He was like, “Chart looked bad yesterday.” How is this possible? It's just like—
Yeah.
—the “chart looks good” thing is a funny bit, you know?
Yeah. Me and Chumba have definitely gone back and forth on it over the years a couple times, because he's always ragging on TA, and I'm just like, “Yeah, just because other people misapply this tool doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.” It's not like drawing head-and-shoulders and all this retarded shit. It's not that.
The easiest way I can talk about why looking at price is useful is that there are going to be people smarter than you analyzing the market. There are going to be people who have insider information, especially in today's regime politically.
No matter what all these intelligent and more informed people are going to think and know, all of that is going to manifest itself in the chart by people either buying or selling whatever they know. So there's no way for them to hide that sort of bias without impacting the chart.
If you know what you're looking for, then you can be like, “Okay, sure, there's a lot of quote-unquote ‘bad news’ coming out right now, but you can see that a lot of more intelligent people are buying.” There have been a few times in my career where I'll notice there's something developing, and I have no idea what, and then I'll buy something, and the news release comes out a day or 2 later.
This I like. It's the “it was written in the charts” concept.
Yeah. As the old heads say in the proverb, it was shown in the tape.
I hate when people say “tape.” I hate that. So, to that—
I don't know the rest of the proverb.
—I guess, from that perspective, how much attention do you pay to TA? Will you ever enter a strictly chart-looks-good type of trade?
Yeah, those definitely happen a lot in between the macro or event-driven theses that I'll put out. Even the Pump.fun trade was essentially just chart-looks-good, in fall 2025. It was literally just, “Okay, this is coming out. I'm not interested in playing new launches too much.” It dumped super heavily, and then it started making a constructive base.
At the same time, everyone was adamant that they weren't going to buy this thing. As far as I remember, it was you, me, and a couple of other people who were bullish at that time on Pump.fun. A lot of that trade for me was just, “Oh, all these people are refusing to long this, and now the chart looks good.” Pretty simple idea.
Do you have any sizing-math alpha you can give us? When you're entering a chart-looks-good Pump.fun trade?
Yeah.
How much size, how much leverage? Do you have any system that you come back to, or is it just like, “I don’t know, size it a little bit, this seems about right”?
It’s difficult to say because everyone’s financial position is going to be different. Sure, I might be using a good amount of “leverage,” but as a whole, crypto as a percentage of my book is just not going to be super high. So it kind of doesn’t really mean anything as far as leverage.
It’s just about sizing, how much I’m risking of my total book, how good I feel about this idea, and how far away the invalidation level is. It’s too context-dependent.
Do you ever trade options, or is it perps or perps and spot?
I trade quite a lot of options.
What do you think about this crypto options stuff? Do you just trade in these things?
I’ve never traded crypto options.
Got it.
I like perps a lot.
What do you think about options versus perps as a vehicle to trade? I never trade options. I’ve been trading a lot of perps. Do I need to learn how to trade options to—
No, definitely not.
—is that a leak?
No, do not trade options.
Really?
If I could give most people advice, most people should not be trading options. I think Jez laid it out pretty well in a longer post. Shout-out Jez. I think he writes about a lot of fundamental market-dynamic stuff really well, so he laid it out pretty well.
I think perps are just a superior instrument. Options are kind of a money incinerator for the majority of people.
Do you have a trade that you look back on and still think about, that you royally fucked up and wish you could have back?
Yeah, a lot.
Is there any one that really stands out?
In terms of recency bias, there was the whole memory trade that was going on. At the start of the year, I tweeted, “I’m super bullish on Korea because of SK Hynix and Samsung and stuff.” Then I was buying calls on EWY, and this is one of the times I’ll actually use options, because for some reason the implied vol on calls for EWY was 30-something percent, even though the index had moved—I think it had doubled the prior year.
It just didn’t make sense to me. It was having 2%, 3%, 4%, 5% intraday moves, and implied vol was super cheap. I was super bullish on this whole thing, so I bought calls. They repriced both directionally and through vol expansion.
Then the Iran war was getting more and more telegraphed. Nvidia reported earnings, and they were really, really stellar. They crushed earnings, went up a bunch after hours, and then retraced that move. I was already looking for a point to take profit on my shorter-dated stuff.
Uh-huh.
So I took profit on some of the shorter-dated stuff, the Iran war started, and the market started nuking. I was like, “Okay, great.” But then I kind of over-extrapolated. Sometimes you’ll mismanage execution by applying your local-top intuition to your longer-term stuff.
I ended up selling my longer-term options and my spot EWY, which for a little bit of time was actually a good play, but I just never reentered it after the Iran war settled. Then, obviously, EWY went to around 200, and there was a crazy bull market in memory.
I just kind of overmanaged that position even though I was fundamentally really bullish on it. Sometimes sacrificing a really good entry is just not worth it, even if you’re going to nail a local top.
That’s a tough one. That Iran war was fucked. Oh my God. Navigating that has been tough.
Yeah, I haven’t paid attention to that in 2 or 3 months.
Well, the market—it’s just, I don’t know if this is how it normally goes. I don’t think so. The market just stopped caring.
Yeah. I’m not really sure. It definitely seems like the market stops caring, and once the market stops caring, I kind of stop paying attention to it.
Well, I can’t just watch Fox News every day. I have to—You know what I mean? At a certain point, it’s like, how much? I can only watch so much Tucker Carlson before it’s like, “All right, guys, wrap it up.”
Yeah, yeah, enter a fucking psychosis.
Yeah, it’s like with everybody else. Why do you still post on Twitter?
Why do I still post on Twitter? That is definitely a good question that I’ve asked myself more recently.
You just love it, at heart.
No.
I think you do, dude.
I do enjoy posting trades, and I feel like it actually kind of makes you sharper when you’re laying out your thesis. It’s also really useful as a private journal. The fact that I can go back 5 years, to November 2021, and see what my mental state was, what my thinking was, where I went right, where I went wrong—it’s this huge journal. That’s super useful.
But I started out posting for the same reason everyone does: You want to gain a following, you want to get a reputation, you want to get access to intelligent people, news, deal flow, whatever—all those benefits that come with being a publicly known account.
Recently, I post a lot less. I’m less at my desk, even though I’m trying to be at my desk a little more for the next few months. Also, a lot of the unintended consequences were why I kept posting. I ended up making some really great friends in early 2022 and 2023—
Nice.
—who I’ve gotten very close with. I’ve also had a lot of messages from people over the years saying, “You know, you’ve helped me learn, you’ve kind of changed my life,” and this and that. So that was pretty gratifying.
But yeah, I’m not really sure what the future of my account is going to be or how long I’m going to be around.
I know you’re not a huge advice guy, but are there any mistakes a lot of new traders make that you think they should stop making, or something a lot of new traders don’t do that they should start doing—something you recommend?
9. Advice For New Traders
It’s pretty vague advice, but you actually have to pay attention to your risk management. That’s valid advice a little later in your career, but I think going from a small portfolio to something that actually matters to your life is such a difficult task that you kind of have to throw risk management out the window at some point and just go balls to the walls on a trade.
But shifting between that mindset and then being more responsible is something that a lot of people don’t have the ability to do. Advice—I don’t know. I don’t think advice is terribly useful. You wouldn’t really ask a lawyer, “Do you have any tips on being a lawyer?”
Facts.
You would just consume as much material as you can, treat this like it’s a real job because it is, treat it professionally, put in a lot of time, and then, if your emotional disposition is going to be beneficial or suited toward this job, you’ll find out pretty quickly.
What’s that Jerry Seinfeld thing about comedy? I would never ask somebody how to be a comedian. I would just fucking go do it.
Yeah, it’s like any job. But the reason that people view it differently is because, to be a lawyer, an engineer, or a doctor, you have to go through all this schooling. But to be a “trader,” you can just sign up at a brokerage and deposit some money.
The degree of difficulty is definitely similar to a lot of these professions.
What do you think about on-chain? Do you ever trade on-chain?
I do, but like I said, it’s mostly me tailing people.
You just gamble and punt, like punt it for fun?
Yeah, it’s kind of gambling, but I have a few friends who are pretty sharp on it and have made a lot of money on-chain. I’ll just ask them, or they’ll tell me, “Hey, you should buy this,” and I’ll just do it.
But it’s definitely not a huge size of my portfolio.
What do you think about the future of it?
The future of on-chain?
Yeah.
I don’t know. I’m probably not a great person to ask about that. I just don’t pay much attention to it.
The chat wants me to ask you about the worst traders and counter-signals on CT, but—
Nah, dude. No. I’m trying not to be negative. This is going to go down a rabbit hole of me just saying obscene shit. Nice try, guys.
I told you I’d let you go for 30 minutes. It’s been 52, so I—
I will say one thing, though. As far as on-chain trading and stuff, it is interesting to me that people don’t really follow the accounts that are the sharpest. A lot of people on CT seem to be more interested in the entertainment side of things than actually following someone who’s smart and focusing on making money.
You can just look at someone like Jez or even Loliit.
Like, these guys who are very sharp and have made a lot of money.
Oh.
They’ll have 40, 50, 60K followers, and then you look at person XYZ, who chat kind of wants me to make fun of right now, and they’ll have multiples of their followers. I truly don’t understand what people are really on Twitter for. Are you here for entertainment, or are you here to actually follow the sharpest people and make money?
How do you identify sharps? I actually think I’m pretty good at this, but I think you’re good at it. I’m sure you’re good at it. How do you identify sharp traders on CT that you should follow?
You definitely need to be somewhat skeptical until you have, quote-unquote, “proof,” or a proofing system. You’ll have sharp friends and people you can actually trust very deeply, and they’ll be like, “No, this person’s legit.”
There’s no real way to know until you get close to someone. The language people use, the way they speak, the way they post their trades, and the way they post their ideas—you can kind of weed through it. I think if you have a certain degree of critical thinking yourself, you can weed through it and be reasonably accurate.
Do you, I guess, as sort of a wind-down, have goals as a trader? What are you trying to accomplish from here? Is it a P&L number you’re trying to hit? Is it general entertainment? Why? Do you have trading goals at this stage?
Yeah. It’s something that changes year to year, obviously. At first it was, “I want to make enough to not have a job,” and then it was, “I want to make enough to have a house,” and then it was, “I want to have enough that my family doesn’t have to worry about anything.” It keeps moving toward the right.
Eventually, it just became that I wanted to do better every year than the year before, and this is the first year of the 2020s, like I said, that I’m failing at that goal. I’m not doing better in 2026 compared to 2025.
But this job really was my dream job when I got into it. I actually love trading. I loved the whole experience of learning this. It combines a lot of my natural interests in psychology, politics, statistics, economics, and all this stuff. I was already interested in a lot of it, and this seemed to combine it in a way that almost felt made for me. I also just hated corporate politics and didn’t want to get a real job, as I’m sure a lot of traders feel.
Mm-hmm.
So I kind of burned out temporarily, and now the hunger is back. I just want to keep doing better and better because, relatively speaking, I’m still very young. It becomes a question of what you can accomplish in 20 or 30 years if you stick to this job, when I’ve only been doing it for 10 or 12. So, yeah, just constant improvement.
How do you recover from a bad year, like your worst year ever? Because I’ll say it from this context as well: I think there are a lot of relatively sharp people on CT right now who have driven themselves fucking crazy or torched a lot of money trading on-chain or trading purely memes, when macro crypto looks pretty good and things are trending in a good direction.
I think a lot of people have actually had a pretty brutal year in 2026. From that lens, and then from your personal lens, how do you come back from the worst year of your life trading?
It’s definitely not the worst year of my life. When I say bad—
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
When I say bad year, I mean I’m just not performing up to the opportunities the market is giving me. For instance, for the year, I’m basically up what the Nasdaq is up. Essentially, I could have done nothing, been all in the Nasdaq, and walked away for the entire year. That’s a shit feeling that I didn’t want to really sit with.
Yeah, yeah.
Especially when there was the metals trade into the energy trade, into the whole memory trade. I just mismanaged a lot of these things when there was so much opportunity to make so much money.
I’m not mentally tilted or down a ton or anything like that. Going forward, I’m going to try to put in a little more effort, more screen time, and be more active, because I’m sure part of it is just that I had my focus elsewhere.
What’s the lore on your PFP and Twitter handle?
Just random.
Really?
Yeah. Truly nothing.
Is that an AI PFP?
No.
Is it just some shit you stole or got pirated?
Probably.
Did you buy the rights to it, man?
Dude, I don’t even know where I found it. It’s been so long.
You drew it. Sick.
Dude, okay. As a sign-off, I really appreciate you coming on. I know you don’t—
Yeah, thank you for having me.
You don’t do a lot of these, do you? Once every 3 years or something?
This is pretty much the only one I’ve done. I think Z and I did some in a Discord about 3 years ago. We also streamed some League of Legends in 2022, but no one was around then, so…
Why did you want to do it? Just curious.
I don’t know. It’s kind of like anything. I just impulsively decided, “Hey, I feel like yapping.” I don’t really put too much thought into stuff like this.
What rank are you in League?
I don’t really play ranked anymore, but I’ve been playing League for a long time. Back when I used to play, I was Diamond 3, Diamond 2. Nothing crazy at all.
I don’t even know what that means, but chat wanted me to ask. It sounds good to me, man. This—
Not a very good chat.
The high ranks scare me, you know? I like the small ones.
Yeah. Yeah.
I’m happy you did it, man, and I appreciate you coming on. As a sign-off, is there any advice you would give yourself in your first year or two of trading? Or maybe, cross-referencing that, any advice you would give to another trader who’s in their first or second year and trying to figure out how this works?
As far as trading advice, not really. I think you can expedite your learning by reading and stuff. Obviously, you can’t learn to trade from books or from YouTube series and stuff. But if you’re consuming a lot of material while simultaneously trading a lot, staring at the charts, and putting in the required hours, you can at least accelerate your learning.
That’s what happened to me. I would read all these stories of traders making all these mistakes: “Don’t do this. Don’t do that.” You conceptually understand it, but until you make the mistakes, you don’t recognize, “Oh, that’s what that person was talking about.” But you can recognize those mistakes a little quicker than if you were just navigating the market yourself. Beyond that, you just have to put the hours in.
Do you have a book recommendation?
Market Wizards is good, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, and John Murphy’s Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets.
Okay.
I’ve probably read—
Really? A TA book?
Yeah, just how to fucking draw support and resistance if you don’t know any of that. It doesn’t really matter, but I’ve probably read over 100 books on trading and statistics and all that type of stuff over the years. I have folders and folders full of notes that I wrote. So, yeah, just consume any and all material and commit to learning.
Are you a poker player?
Not anywhere near professionally or any good. I do enjoy it, and I had a stint of playing, but no, not really.
Are you a gambler? Do you go to the casino and fucking rip baccarat and shit?
Yeah, definitely.
Really?
Yeah, I like going to the casino. I like online casinos and all that type of stuff. I probably—
Online casinos, really?
Yeah, I probably should have taken some sort of fucking Rainbet sponsorship or some shit, but I don’t know. I just can’t sit up there and be like, “Yo, this casino is way better than this casino,” when they’re all the same.
What do you play on online casinos?
Dude, everything. Slots, fucking—
Do you really?
Chicken Crossing, everything.
Chicken Cross?
Yeah, not super often. I’ll just go through stints where I’ll load up a balance and gamble for fun.
What about sports betting?
I try not to, because the only sports I really watch are MMA and boxing, and I was like, “Okay.”
You’re a huge UFC guy, aren’t you?
Yeah, I love UFC. I try not to gamble too much unless the odds are super mispriced, because I just want some hobbies in my life that aren’t related to gambling.
What about Pokémon gacha?
I've been in TCG for a decent while, but I have this weird aversion to owning things, so I never really invested. I just like ripping packs and essentially gambling with really terrible Eevee.
So no physical art or anything?
No, no.
Really?
No, I don't really spend too much money except on flights and hotels and stuff.
Wait, can you give me one? When you first made some real bread, what was a dumb purchase that you made? Like, the first expensive thing you bought?
I mean, mine's kind of boring. It was just housing and land and stuff.
Okay. You can't really ask much further on land. No car?
Yeah, I mean, I don't really blow money, except I'll take a vacation that costs an obscene amount of money and not really care.
An occasional jet?
Sure.
Okay, moving on. Awesome. Dude, Rhino, you're a movie, man. I appreciate you coming on and dropping some lore. It is an absolute pleasure. I'm hoping that Bitcoin's most recent tweet turns into your tits long, and we can all win together forever, man. Thanks again for coming on.
All right, man. Appreciate it. Take care.
All right, much love. Have a good one. Peace.
Peace.
Dude, online casinos? I was not expecting that. I was not expecting that. Shout out to Rhino, man.