TJR: Trading Advice, Motivation, Crypto/Memecoins and More | TG Podcast
TJR says his biggest edge is doing less: the months with the fewest trades make the most money, while trading roughly 15 days often leaves him flat or negative. He may sit through two weeks or a month of price action, then take a high-conviction trade; for index day trading, he confines himself to a two-hour New York-open window: “Either price is going to present my setup and I’m going to take a trade, or price doesn’t present my setup and I don’t take a trade.”
After turning bearish around $110K-$115K Bitcoin and remaining cautious around $120K-$125K, TJR deployed multiple six figures into spot at roughly $101K and explicitly rejected leverage. His bet is intentionally less heroic: buy a high-market-cap asset after a roughly 20% decline, hold it, and let a 20% recovery produce meaningful dollars. “I’m trying to play the small percentage gains” instead of risking $50K-$100K on individual leveraged trades.
The failed 2025 “alt season” changed TJR from an active crypto trader into a self-described Bitcoin maxi buying large dips. He says he “got smoked on everything,” while Thread Guy notes that Hyperliquid, Aster, and Zcash rewarded precise timing but a blind basket underperformed BTC. TJR now favors stocks, indexes, futures, private deals, and Bitcoin because “there’s no reason for me to be playing that crazy game of volatility.”
TJR’s standout trade was a $426K FOMC win on September 17, built by fading an overwhelmingly bullish consensus rather than predicting the headline in isolation. He combined Polymarket expectations for a 25-basis-point cut, five major technology earnings, and a potential US-China trade deal with liquidity levels; once news swept a key level, he waited for confirmation and targeted liquidity in the opposite direction. “You want to trade against retail because they are the dummies.”
His strongest risk lesson came from turning $10K into $112K in two days and losing everything the following day through maximum leverage. That loss stopped him trading for three months and forced him to fix risk management; today he publicly records entries and daily, weekly, and monthly P&L, including an October post showing a drawdown of about $350K. When Thread Guy estimated October’s final P&L near negative $300K, TJR corrected it to roughly negative $20K-$25K and separately said he made $400 and $1,000 on FOMC. More importantly, he disclosed past suicide attempts and warned that “there’s no amount of money that’s worth taking your life.”
TJR expects “TradeFi”—finance fused with entertainment—to make virtually everything tradeable, but he rejects forcing unwilling people into markets. Thread Guy admitted that recruiting family into crypto “doesn’t age well,” while TJR cited the claim that 98% of traders fail and tells people attracted only by his earnings, “If you’re getting into it for the money, don’t do it.” Thread Guy also predicted a shakeout in the course economy, where “there’s a course getting created every single second.”
TJR is building for the intersection of financial authority and mainstream influence, supported by more than 100 contractors, eight daily core operators, and thousands of clippers. Rather than remain another finance educator, he wants to sit between Iman Gadzhi/Alex Hormozi and Kai Cenat/Lacy, giving him leverage with both financial companies and mass-market brands. His advice to Thread Guy is the same playbook: preserve the crypto-native core, flood YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, then let personality widen the funnel.
1. A personal reset produced a more patient trader
Since the earlier appearance that Thread Guy dates to December 2024, TJR says he changed nearly every visible part of his life: he moved, bought a house, cut his long hair, lost about 40 pounds, improved his diet, and removed people and habits that no longer fit. “I just wanted to change everything.”
The reset carried into trading. TJR remembers approaching markets as a high-school junior like “a casino,” trying to spin the wheel as often as possible; experience taught him that “the less trades is better,” although living that rule requires more discipline than agreeing with it intellectually.
His journal supplies the evidence: the months with the fewest trades are generally his most profitable, while months spent trading about 15 days tend to be negative or surrender enough wins to damage his risk-reward. He would rather sit through two weeks—or a full month—of price action and commit accumulated cash only when a high-conviction setup arrives.
2. Bitcoin at $101K fit the new preference for unlevered exposure
TJR had been publicly bearish from roughly $110K-$115K, with Thread Guy remembering the caution extending into the $120K-$125K area. That did not stop him changing posture lower: he said he filled multiple six figures of spot Bitcoin around $101K while Bitcoin was below $100K.
Thread Guy’s immediate question was whether the purchase used leverage; TJR’s answer was unequivocal: “Spot. No, I don’t do leverage on Bitcoin.” The desired payoff is comparatively modest: a 20% rebound on a substantial cash position can create a large dollar gain without using leverage.
That is the transition TJR is still trying to complete—away from individual intraday trades capable of losing $50K or $100K at a stop, and toward stocks or high-market-cap crypto he already wants to own. “I’m trying to play the small percentage gains” by waiting for a level where he can commit heavily and hold.
Thread Guy framed a similar evolution from his own experience: as his portfolio grew, the daily hunt for low-cap runners became less attractive than fewer, longer-duration positions. Both described 2025 crypto as a market where indiscriminate activity was punished and higher-conviction selection mattered more than during the 2024 memecoin phase.
3. Publishing losses is part of the product, not an apology
When Thread Guy recalled an October loss near $300K, TJR corrected the ending: he said the month was only negative $20K-$25K and that he made $400 and $1,000 on FOMC. TJR had also publicly posted that he was down about $350K during October. He later identified September 17’s separate FOMC trade as a $426K gain.
TJR’s response to claims that he does not really trade is procedural: he records from the market open, announces entries and results in real time, posts daily, weekly, and monthly P&L, and shows the history through both his broker and TradeZella. “I’m open and honest,” although he no longer expects the documentation to persuade every critic.
That openness began as a reaction to trading YouTube’s highlight reels, where wins were visible and losses were rarely discussed. Learning that losses were unavoidable was one of his own breakthroughs, so he made full trade recaps and red days central to his content rather than presenting profitability as a smooth sequence.
4. Futures offer crypto-native traders a bounded game
TJR limits his active S&P 500 and Nasdaq trading to roughly two hours around the New York open. Within that window, his setup appears or it does not; by contrast, crypto trades continuously, can react to a tweet at any hour, and can damage a sleeping trader’s position.
His framework looks for manipulation during London, pre-market, or the New York open, then trades the reversal or continuation implied by one of three daily profiles: London manipulation followed by New York reversal and continuation; New York manipulation followed by reversal; or New York pre-market manipulation followed by a reversal at the open. The recurring technical unit is a liquidity sweep—price taking a prior high or low, stopping traders out, and then reversing toward the intended move.
Thread Guy asked whether successful 2024 onchain memecoin traders could transfer their skills after liquidity, volume, and potential market caps deteriorated in 2025. TJR’s answer was emphatic: their risk tolerance and psychological conditioning already exceed what futures require, and he believes some could become profitable within “three to four months, if not even less.”
The host’s pushback was that day trading is probably the hardest version of trading and remains disproportionately popular because people want immediate results. TJR distinguished undisciplined constant action from his bounded process: two scheduled hours, one repeatable setup, and no obligation to trade when the conditions are absent.
5. The missing alt season forced a broader portfolio
TJR’s assessment of the crypto cycle was blunt: “I got crushed this entire bull run,” as the expected broad alt season never materialized. Successful trading required arriving on time to specific narratives; his joking caveat was that anyone who escaped unhurt was either “a great trader” or had inside information.
Thread Guy preserved the exceptions: Hyperliquid holders, Aster traders, and current Zcash holders could reasonably disagree that there were no opportunities. His narrower claim was that buying a generic alt basket and waiting failed badly—BTC outperformed, and many such portfolios were significantly underwater.
Watching Nvidia, the S&P 500, and gold rise while crypto stagnated exposed Thread Guy’s crypto-only blind spot; he holds Bitcoin and stablecoins but no equities. TJR’s pushback—worth keeping—was that this realization was partly hindsight and that ordinary diversification “should have happened already,” before relative performance made the omission painful.
TJR has long-term stocks and indexes, private-equity plays, and a wealth manager who primarily supplies inaccessible seed rounds or funds. He gave one example with a $250K minimum buy-in. He still allocates public assets himself to avoid fees, and even friendship is not an automatic check: he recently rejected a friend’s new venture as “shiny object syndrome” and urged him to concentrate on the existing company.
6. His FOMC edge combines consensus, catalysts, and liquidity
TJR called the $426K September 17 FOMC trade his best trade of the year and said he had published the plan beforehand. He also said he had laid out his plan for an October 29 trade, but did not give a dollar result for it in this exchange.
The setup began with consensus. Polymarket showed traders heavily pricing a 25-basis-point Fed cut; the market also expected a Trump-China trade agreement and beats from five major technology companies, although Meta ultimately missed. Equities had already gapped higher from Sunday into Monday, telling TJR that bullish expectations were crowded before FOMC arrived.
He carried that retail bias into the chart rather than shorting blindly. After mapping “draws on liquidity,” he waited for the news to sweep a key level, demanded technical confirmation, and then targeted levels in the opposite direction. “You want to trade against retail because they are the dummies. They are the people that are going to get liquidated.”
The method grew out of repeated FX losses in GBP/JPY and GBP/USD during London opens: price would surge, hit his stop, then move exactly where he had expected. His first crude adaptation—short every opening spike—was incomplete, but the pattern led him toward liquidity sweeps and the current three London- and New York-session profiles.
7. A total wipeout became the risk-management turning point
During COVID-era index strength, TJR turned $10K into $112K over two days by max-longing the Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq. He lost the entire amount the next day through extreme leverage and stopped trading for roughly three months; six figures was life-changing money to him at the time.
His retrospective is not that the loss was secretly desirable, but that it made the flaw undeniable: “I need to get my risk management in check.” He believes that rock bottom redirected him from a likely conventional job and college path toward the trading and media career he ultimately built.
TJR then widened the warning beyond money. He disclosed lifelong mental-health struggles and multiple suicide attempts, explaining that trading can magnify conditions people may not recognize or discuss. Traders should avoid both the lowest lows and euphoric highs, reduce exposure when emotionally elevated, and seek “a stable mental condition” before trying to recover capital.
Thread Guy added that a ruined trader must erase the old portfolio all-time high: “That number was not real. It wasn’t yours. It was just your turn.” TJR agreed, comparing the lost peak to someone who has already left—unrealized gains were never secured, and “why are you sitting there thinking about what could have been?”
8. Trading is becoming entertainment, but recruitment has limits
Thread Guy opened by noting that mainstream acquaintances ignored appearances by figures such as CZ and Peter Schiff yet flooded his messages when he posted TJR. TJR’s own top-comment summary is “he’s just like us but he’s rich”: a recognizable young personality whose unusual hobby happens to generate money.
TJR deliberately made trading feel normal after learning from teachers he considered nerdy and being embarrassed to discuss markets in high school. He compared the shift to Fortnite, when Ninja, Travis Scott, Drake, and JuJu Smith-Schuster helped make gaming culturally desirable to a younger audience.
TJR is “a million percent” convinced that virtually every young person will eventually trade something. He calls the convergence “TradeFi,” while Thread Guy offered “entertainment finance”: prediction markets such as Polymarket are an early step toward companies making news, culture, and even ordinary decisions tradeable.
Both resisted turning that forecast into forced onboarding. Thread Guy regrets pressuring family to buy crypto; TJR cites the claim that 98% of traders fail and tells people attracted only by his visible wealth, “If you’re getting into it for the money, don’t do it.” His counterexample is genuine obsession—watching a six-hour lesson straight through while taking notes.
9. The information-business boom is nearing its shakeout
Thread Guy sees a bubble in online education: everyone now has something to sell, including people “coaching a coach how to coach.” His analogy is Pump.fun—“there’s a coin, there’s a creator getting created every single second; there’s a course getting created every single second”—until attention and economics dwindle.
Thread Guy first predicted that collapse roughly two years early, but now thinks the wipeout is underway. He expects people who lack expertise or spent their temporary revenue irresponsibly to lose cars and housing, while “the real ones are going to be left standing.”
When TJR pointed out that Thread Guy also sells a course, Thread Guy’s distinction was that more than 2,000 YouTube videos provide the underlying lessons free; paid value should come from live coaching that identifies a learner’s specific recurring mistakes, not a $5,000 library of prerecorded videos followed by abandonment.
TJR endorsed the coaching distinction and gave Jordan Welch as his example: he entered Welch’s coaching while already at about 250K YouTube subscribers, discovered he was “doing every single thing incorrectly,” and later reached one million. The broader advice is to choose an activity you genuinely love, find its unresolved problems, and monetize those—not whatever business currently appears richest.
10. TJR is scaling a finance-and-culture company, not just a channel
The operation now includes more than 100 contractors, excluding thousands of clippers; TJR speaks daily with about eight core people who each manage their own teams. Hiring and firing remain “one of the hardest things to do,” but a genuinely strong hire can “literally 5x your business,” which is why his current rule is to hire and fire faster.
A recent security and executive-assistant hire transformed his day by owning travel, bookings, and logistics. That capability also powered Lacy’s subathon segment: TJR says he arranged the jet, ground transport, hotel details, and Starlink setup—and bought the Balenciaga—because he wanted to create “the best segment” and watch it cause havoc online.
His ambition is to stand between finance educators such as Iman Gadzhi and Alex Hormozi and mass entertainers such as Kai Cenat and Lacy. With roughly one million YouTube subscribers, 1.5 million Instagram followers, and 1.6 million TikTok followers, he wants both a high-value finance audience and enough mainstream reach to negotiate beyond either group’s normal brand ceiling.
The expansion includes a clothing company whose name the participants would not formally state on-air, positioned as a standalone brand rather than “a T-shirt that says TJR.” His closing advice to Thread Guy followed the same architecture: keep crypto Twitter as the core, publish across YouTube, Instagram, and 25-30 daily TikToks, then let loyal followers carry the personality into adjacent audiences. Bad markets are merely “the smallest blip” if daily actions move the five-year picture 1% closer to the intended life.
Full transcript
A quick glaze to start: you know what’s crazy? In the last three months, I’ve had some pretty cool people on stream. I’ve had CZ come on. You helped me get Peter Schiff on—shout-out to you for that. There have been a bunch of cool people who come on stream, and I always post it on my Instagram story, and nobody cares.
Then I post TJR Trades on my Instagram story, and girls I haven’t talked to since high school are hitting me up. My homie group chats are firing. My parents are hitting me up. Everyone’s excited about it. It’s pretty insane how much you’ve proliferated mainstream culture. Quick glaze, but it’s honestly impressive.
Thanks, bro. I mean, yeah, I’m honestly surprised as well. I guess I don’t even know how it happened. I just make videos that people like, I guess.
Yeah, it’s fucking working. And thanks for throwing me a lob to slide into the DMs with.
But dude, welcome back. I met you IRL for the first time a couple of months ago, which was fire. But you first came on the stream, I want to say, in November or December.
Yeah, it was like December.
Of 2020.
Late November or December. Yeah.
And it was a very different time. It was peak. You were streaming microcap meme coins. It was TikTok memes. It was Rizzmas.
Yeah.
You look fire, by the way, since then. I was watching the old, old fat bros.
Fat. Fat.
I feel like your content has transitioned a lot, and I feel like you’ve come a long way in a positive direction since December 2024.
Yeah, I think so as well. There were a lot of things that I changed. Low-key, it was just my personal life—things that I changed in my personal life—and then, in turn, it subconsciously changed my work life as well. It helped me become who I am now, and hopefully we can keep that going.
What do you like doing differently now than you were a year ago?
It’s hard to say. It was more of one of those things where I don’t really want to get too deep into it because it was actually pretty personal. There were a lot of things that I needed to change in my life.
I moved out of my old house that I was living in. I bought this house. I cut off my long hair and decided to lose 40 pounds. I decided to get in shape, eat well, and change a lot of old habits that were still considered good because I was still fucking crushing it then. But I’m obviously crushing it way more now.
I just needed to change a lot of things in my life. A lot of them were personal things—people that I needed to cut out of my life—and I just wanted to fucking change everything. I changed the way I looked, changed where I lived, changed the people I was hanging out with, and in turn, it just rocketed my shit.
Damn, respect. Forty pounds is no joke, too.
You’re coming on the stream today in an interesting spot in the markets, which I want to talk about. Crypto is getting taken out back today. Bitcoin is below $100,000. We’ll talk about the market, your take on it, and where you think we’re at.
You had this tweet a couple of days ago that I liked. I’m going to paraphrase you horribly, but it was basically along the lines of how you’ve changed and evolved your trading style into more precise, focused, long-term investments, rather than scalping on lower time frames.
I think it’s something that I’ve done as well on this stream. In 2024, we were super focused on low caps, memes, on-chain plays, and daily runners—a new coin every week. In 2025, objectively, at least in crypto, it’s been a much tougher market where you really have to pick your spots.
I’ve transitioned, especially as my portfolio has gotten bigger, into higher-conviction, higher-time-frame, longer holds. I think it’s made me a lot better at trading in general and at the type of content I can put out. Can you talk about your trading style and its evolution, parlaying off that tweet?
Since I started trading a long time ago, as a junior in high school, it was like a casino. When you first start, you’re just trying to spin the wheel as many times as possible. As you evolve—and I’m still seeing this now—the fewer trades, the better.
You always hear people say that. You always hear, “Yeah, it sounds good in theory,” but it takes a lot of discipline to actually stay true to that. It’s the most rewarding thing when you can sit through two weeks or even a month’s worth of price action without doing anything, just sitting on your hands and waiting for price to get to the point you want.
Then you go all in with the cash you’ve set aside to take action on a very high-conviction trade, compared with trying to take these little scalps or intraday trades.
I trade the indexes, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq. Something I notice when I look back in my trade journal is that the months when I trade the least are the months when I make the most money. Every single time, that reminds me.
The months when I’m trading 15 days out of the month, I’m either negative or I end up losing more than I’m winning. My risk-reward gets shot because, realistically, there isn’t that much opportunity in the market for you to be taking 15 trades within a single month. Instead, you can wind it back down to seven or even eight trades.
Even for me, that’s intraday trading. What I want to scale into is finding stocks or just playing long-term Bitcoin. Today, I put multiple six figures into Bitcoin because, in my mind, below $100,000, we're 20% down from lows. If you put multiple six figures into Bitcoin and it goes up 20%, that’s a substantial amount of money.
I’m trying to play the small percentage gains instead of doing these intraday trades where I’m actually losing $100,000 or $50,000 per trade because I’m hitting my stop-loss. Whether we’re talking about perpetuals or futures, versus buying into a stock or crypto asset that has a high market cap, knowing I want to hold it long term, and waiting for a good opportunity to full-port it—that’s what I’m trying to transition into.
You bought spot or on leverage?
Spot. No, I don’t do leverage on Bitcoin.
Whoa.
One thing I’ll say is that I was going through some of your old tweets, and you were actually pretty cautious and a little bearish around $120,000 to $125,000 Bitcoin. You had a bunch of posts about how, structurally, it looked like the 2021 top. You were actually pretty bear-pilled around $125,000 Bitcoin.
Yeah. To be fair, I was bearish even earlier than that—around $115,000 or $110,000—but still, right around that area.
And you bought at around $100,000?
Yeah, I got filled at around $101,000.
Nice.
Not to bring up losses, but I think even in the comments right now, there are a bunch of people saying, “TJR doesn’t really trade. He’s lying. He’s capping.” One thing I respect about you is that you’re pretty open about your P&L, green or red.
Not to bring up losses, but I think October was a pretty brutal month for you. I think you posted that your final P&L was around negative $300,000, maybe somewhere along those lines.
It was only negative $20,000. It was only negative $25,000. I made $400 and $1,000 on FOMC.
Did you really?
Yeah, I can screen-share my trades on TradeZella. It’s connected to my broker. I’m not here to try to convince people what I do.
I go on YouTube, press record right when the market opens, tell you exactly when I enter, and show you my P&L for the day, week, and month. Then I show you that it’s connected to a third-party platform, TradeZella. In real time on those recordings, I’m telling you exactly how much I lost or made in the YouTube video.
It’s not backtesting or anything. You can literally see it, and it tracks to both TradeZella and my broker. That’s what I’m posting on my Instagram story every single day.
I’m open and honest. When I posted that I was down $350,000 in October, everyone said, “This dude is trying to bait you into feeling bad for him,” or, “He’s trying to show that he’s honest so you buy his course.”
I don’t give a fuck if you buy my course. You don’t need to buy my course. I have more than 2,000 videos on YouTube teaching you how to trade for free.
You can’t win in this game of being a social media influencer, especially in the finance niche. There’s always going to be people that come after you.
Damn, sick day. But I actually thought it was hella cool when you were posting your red days. I was going to ask you, just in general: it’s always a weird spot, right? You see it with a lot of the crypto guys who post directional bias and trade setups, and it’s kind of the highest-risk, highest-reward game, but the reward is your personal P&L. Socially, you can’t really win.
If you’re bearish and it hits, people are mad. If you’re bearish like Ansem at the top, you’re a week early, everything gets destroyed, and you get clowned on the whole time. I was going to ask: what is your rationale, and why do you continue to post green P&L and red P&L? Is it for you? Is it for the people who watch you? Who’s it for?
That’s what I’ve been doing since I started social media. Before, when I was learning how to trade, I wasn’t really on the Twitter side of things. I was more so watching these day-trading YouTubers, and it was just a straight highlight reel. Nobody ever talked about losses.
When I finally figured out how to trade, a big thing clicked in my head: losses are actually a part of this game, and nobody teaches you about that. When I got on social media, that was the thing I wanted to drill home. That’s initially what made me go from literally a no-name influencer to a super-micro-niche day-trading influencer: this dude is open and honest about the losses he takes, and he’s open and honest about literally every single trade he takes.
I’ve been posting my daily P&L, weekly P&L, and monthly P&L literally since I started social media, on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. I’ve been posting my trade recaps for the past 2 years on YouTube, every single day. That takes unreal discipline—to get on every single market open and press record or livestream it, and tell people exactly what I’m doing every single day.
I haven’t seen anybody else in the space really do that. I’m just giving myself flowers because I don’t know anybody else who’s done that—to stream every single day and be open about what’s going on.
I popped in today. I saw you posted on your Instagram story, and I popped in. You were doing it on Kick today, which was lit.
I didn’t trade. I haven’t traded during the month of October. On Kick, most of the time I’m either just [__] around, gambling, or talking about high-time-frame [__] in the market. But on YouTube and my Instagram story, if I take a trade, the whole market session of me trading is going to be recorded and uploaded, and then I’m going to post my P&L on Instagram.
Once you’ve gotten more comfortable with trading over the last couple of years, but also moved into higher tax brackets and increased your net worth, how has the way you evaluate setups, the amount of time you spend trading, and your general style evolved?
You just slow down. When people get into trading, they’re thinking about trading in the wrong way. They’re thinking, “How can I make the most amount of money right now?” When you get into the markets, you’re going to take subconscious action to hypothetically make the most amount of money right now. Realistically, what is that doing? That’s taking high leverage and a high amount of trades. But what is that going to lead to? That’s not going to lead to the result that you want, which is making money in the markets. Realistically, what is trading about? It’s about making highly probable decisions to be able to predict where price wants to go on a daily or a weekly basis. And when you go into the market with that headspace, instead of how can I make the most amount of money today, then there’s a lot less setups that you see. Versus if you go into the market with how can I make a shit ton of money, you’re going to be pressing buy or sell every single second with a bunch of leverage, but that’s not going to lead you to the result that you want. You’re going to want to take your time and then just take action when price gives you high probability, which is again whatever your edge or whatever your strategy is, you know?
I always wondered what the obsession is with day trading. I started trading options when I was 16 or 17, and it was a pretty bad experience. I was in study hall trading zero-day-to-expiration Friday contracts. I guess that’s how everybody starts: how do I hit it today on the lowest possible time frame with the biggest possible swing?
I don’t really make trading-focused content on YouTube, but the types of videos everybody wants are about day trading. No one wants to hear about a multi-month swing. People want the day-trading [__] only. What is the obsession with that? I feel like it’s the hardest way to trade, by the way—the low-time-frame price swings.
It is the hardest way to trade, but only if you’re going into it in the wrong way. The way I trade now, there’s a 2-hour window from the New York market open on both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq where either price presents my setup and I take a trade, or price doesn’t present my setup and I don’t take a trade. If it does present my setup, I have a high probability of winning.
I sit down for 2 hours a day. Versus crypto, it’s a lot harder because it’s a 24/7 market. Price could move at any point in time, and there could be a tweet that happens.
New York, you know, like—
The manipulation is going to happen either during premarket, during the London session, or during the New York market open. It’s just spotting the manipulation and then taking action following that.
I would love to give you a day-trading lesson, but that would take way too long. It would be cool to show, because I think a lot of people in crypto would benefit from moving to futures. A lot of them are chasing these little micro-cap memes, and you can seek the same results with much higher probability, without the [__] just tanking in front of your face or your position getting crushed while you’re asleep.
You know the market is only going to move during the New York session. If it doesn’t present you with a setup, you don’t have to trade. If it does, then boom—you execute, and you’re only on for 2 hours of the day.
Okay, so give me a take on this, then. Also, I like that. A lot of the crypto traders who crushed it trading on-chain in 2024 feel like the opportunity just hasn’t really presented itself in 2025. There are obviously spots—there are always spots in a 24/7 market—but volume is lower, liquidity is lower, and price targets and potential market caps are lower.
A lot of people are driving themselves crazy thinking, “What do I do? What do I trade?” A lot of them go over and trade perps on garbage or perps on really volatile crypto. I’m curious: for futures and equities, how do you think the skills of being an on-chain trader or memecoin trader carry over, and how do you think people should do it?
Man, I’ve been begging. I had all the crypto boys—I’m not going to dox any of them—but Orgy, he’s already doxxed, bring a group of really good crypto memecoin traders out here to Puerto Rico. I took them out to dinner and lunch, and I was trying to convince them: all of you guys watching this right now would [__] crush it in futures.
Not only is your risk tolerance way higher than it needs to be to beat the futures market, but you’ve already beaten the psychological game that is so difficult to overcome when it comes to trading. You’re already financially well off—or at least the majority of you are, just talking about the successful Solana memecoin traders.
If they took their talents over to the futures market, it would be consistent gains that are no longer dependent on these micro-market-cap fluctuations. They would be able to make way more money because they’ve already beaten the psychological game.
I think they could transform into profitable traders probably within 3–4 months, if not even less for some of them.
Well, you know what’s driving everyone crazy right now, TJR? Crypto—Bitcoin—has objectively been the best-performing asset of the decade, but 2025 has been brutal. I’m sitting here staring at it. I don’t trade stocks or futures. I don’t trade anything in equities at all—basically zero—but I pay attention, and obviously I follow.
You don’t have a long-term portfolio?
I have nothing, bro. I have Bitcoin and stables. I don’t have any equities, bro. I have none. If my dad was listening right now: Dad, I’m sorry, but I don’t. I don’t. It’s obviously a blind spot for me.
When crypto is up only, you don’t give a [__]. But now we’re sitting here, and I’m watching Nvidia, the S&P, and all these stocks leg up and leg up and leg up.
And I'm even watching gold leg up and leg up, and crypto is just completely flat. So now I think a lot of people who have been hyper-tunnel-visioned on crypto are sitting here like, “Why the fuck have I not been trading equities over the last year?” But then you look at these charts, and they're kind of terrifying. I feel like 2025 was the moment for a lot of people who had been super focused on crypto only. They're like, “Holy shit, myself included. I need to potentially diversify because we just haven't been playing the best game in town for the last 6 months.”
Yeah, but that's just hindsight, you know? But that's also—I mean, diversify your portfolio. That’s a tale as old as time. That should have happened already.
I know. I know.
I know, I know, I know.
But that's the nature of crypto, you know? Crypto has volatile swings up, and then it has volatile swings down. So, personally, I've always had that long-term portfolio in stocks and indexes, and private equity plays as well, like having a wealth manager. Personally, I want to not have to deal with those massive fluctuations. I'm a little bit more risk-averse, for sure, but because I'm young, I have the advantages of doing that. You just don't want to sit there and see your net worth fluctuate like crazy.
What does the wealth manager do?
He gives me access to seed rounds and funds that I personally wouldn't be able to get access to. It's through a private bank. He works with, like, spe—
Sorry, is it mostly deal flow, or does he also help you decide how to split up your portfolio and things like this?
I do that by myself when it comes to stocks and indexes because he takes a fee. But when it comes to other things, he brings me deal flow. So he'll say, “There's a $250,000 minimum buy-in for this thing,” and he'll send me the entire thing. I'm like, “Okay, cool, let's do it,” or whatever. Or I don't want to do that right now because there are opportunities elsewhere.
So right now, in 2025, how do you split your time between equities, crypto, private rounds, angel investing, and maybe other niche stuff? How much of your focus is where?
The futures stuff is mainly just that early-morning market open, just those 2 hours of the day. Crypto for me is purely high-time-frame, bro. I got crushed this entire bull run. That's what you and I were talking about. I think everybody got absolutely destroyed. If you didn't, congratulations. You're a great trader, or you have insider information.
That's just how I feel about it. I got destroyed. Everybody was expecting alt season. You just had to be on time with all the right narratives, and it wasn't the case. So I've decided to fully take myself out of the crypto space, just be a Bitcoin maxi, buy these big dips when they come, and now focus on the day-trading side of things.
So, futures, and then again, just safer bets—stocks. I invest in friends' companies, and when I get the opportunity to invest in seed rounds, when my wealth manager brings me things, or when I have the opportunity to work with companies that align with me and my content, then I'm obviously going to take advantage of it. But it's just getting into safer bets now because there's no reason for me to be playing that crazy game of volatility.
Are you, like, an auto-check into one of your friends' companies? I always feel like it's a little bit of a weird spot.
It's a weird spot. It's a weird spot.
Lately, I have been.
It's a weird spot, bro. It's a tough spot, man, because you feel weird about it, and then if it doesn't go well, you feel weird about it.
No, I mean, I'm okay. Lately, I have been. I'm invested in a couple of my friends' companies, but I wouldn't invest—I just recently turned down a friend who reached out to me. I think he's crushing it in the other business that I'm one of his top investors in, but he just came up with another business opportunity, and I was like, “This is shiny-object syndrome. Why are you even trying to split focus from the shit that you're already doing well with?”
I told him, “Bro, personally, I don't even want you to be working on this other business. I would much rather you just focus on this other business that I'm already super invested in.” So, yeah, I say no sometimes. But I don't know. Most of my friends are driven, and I like them—they're my friends for a reason. So, yeah, I'll cut them a check whenever.
That's honestly a good counterargument. It's selection bias. Your friends should have momentum, so you should be down to invest in what they're doing.
Yeah.
I also carry the sentiment on alts this season for 2025 in crypto. There's definitely been spots. There's been a lot of spots. There's been a lot of outperformance trades. But if you went into a traditional alt season, closed your eyes, bid a basket, and then just prayed, it really didn't happen.
There have been spots, right? The Hyperliquid people would beg to differ. People who had Aster would beg to differ. The Zcash people right now would beg to differ. But if you just closed your eyes and picked a basket, you really got cooked, got outperformed by BTC, and are probably down significantly right now.
You don't have to say P&L, but what was your trade of this year? Where did you perform the best? It could be one specific trade or one specific asset, but I'm curious: if you had a giga-outperformance trade this year, what was it?
Bro, I just got smoked on everything in crypto. The trade would have been a day trade, like that futures trade that I took—the last one, not this most recent FOMC. Let me pull it up. From September. Yeah, $426,000 on the last FOMC, on September 17th.
And what was your confirmation to take that trade? That's disgusting, by the way. My God.
Yeah, thanks. That's back-to-back FOMC.
That's disgusting. That's disgusting.
So that was actually, bro—I tweeted every single step of this, by the way. If you guys go back to September 17th, I told you my entire game plan. If you go to the last trade in October—October 29th—I told you exactly what I was going to do as well.
It's just looking at overall retail-market sentiment coming into these high-impact news events, combining that fundamental analysis, and actually, Polymarket has been a really great tool for that. I talked about it in both of the YouTube videos I did on the trade recaps.
You can see, okay, the vast majority of people are already pricing in the Fed cutting rates by 25 bps. Awesome. Then you can see on the chart that it's already getting priced in as the week is leading up to it, or the week prior.
On top of that, this FOMC wasn't just about the Fed cutting rates. We also had people anticipating Trump getting a trade deal done with the president of China. On top of that, we had 5 massive tech companies reporting their earnings. On Polymarket, all of those tech companies were projected to beat their earnings. Only 1 of them didn't, which was Meta.
But again, the retail sentiment was that 5 tech stocks were going to beat their earnings, the Fed was going to cut rates, and Trump was going to get a trade deal done with China. So that's why we had that huge gap-up in equities from Sunday going into Monday, whenever that was last week.
I see that and I'm like, okay, everybody is massively bullish going into FOMC. You have the initial retail-trader bias, and again, you want to trade against retail because they are the dummies. They are the people who are going to get liquidated.
You have that in the back of your mind, and then you use that with the technicals by setting up key areas of draw on liquidity. Then you wait for the news event to come out. Boom, you see whichever key levels get swept, and then you just wait for confirmation off of that and target the levels that are in the opposite direction.
That's how I went about this past FOMC. That's how I went about the last FOMC, and I crushed it.
That's a crazy day.
Yeah.
That's a gross day. I'm not going to lie. Who taught you your trading style? How did you develop it? Were you self-taught?
So, technically, it's smart-money concepts. Whoever you want to attribute that to. But I initially learned that the key to my trading is based on liquidity sweeps, which is just a sweep of a high or a sweep of a low—basically, manipulation.
I actually saw this when I was trading foreign exchange during the London session. I would trade the pound versus the yen or the pound versus the dollar. Pretty much every single London-session open, I would get burned. I was losing so much money because the market would open, price would boom upward, stop me out of the trade, and then just go in the direction of my trade.
I'm like, “Okay, what the fuck is going on? I just keep losing money, but it's going in the direction.” So it was just pattern recognition. I'm like, “Okay, I'm getting stopped out.”
So it was a slow and steady learning curve of me being like, “Okay, the second that London session opens, if we get a big move up, I’m just going to press short.” Obviously, that wasn’t the best strategy, but it was a step in the right direction. I realized, “Okay, London session opens, there’s manipulation to the upside. I’m going to want to short this because it’s eventually going to come down from here.”
That led me into trading futures and seeing manipulations during market open, pre-market, or the London session. Then I started seeing which of the 3 daily profiles that brought me into the New York market open: whether it’s London manipulation, New York reversal and continuation; New York manipulation reversal; or New York pre-market manipulation, where you’re trading the reversal once New York market opens.
What was the first time that you really zeroed out a portfolio of a size that was meaningful to you?
Oh, like lost everything.
Yeah. Yeah.
I turned $10,000 into $112,000 over the span of 2 days, and then lost all of it the very next day because I was overleveraged, trading with ridiculous size and maxing out leverage. I ended up stopping trading for about 3 months, and then crypto got me back into it.
I was trading the Dow Jones, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq, just max longing everything because this was during COVID, when everything was going up. I was just printing. All I was doing was pressing buy, buy, buy, and everything was going up. I literally 10x’d my money, and then, boom, the next day I lost everything. That 6 figures would have changed my life at the time.
That loss ended up changing my life for the better because it helped me realize, “Okay, I need to get my risk management in check.”
$100,000 to zero in a day is brutal.
Okay, so even people who watch the stream—it’s very pointed toward traders exclusively—on October 10, there were probably a lot of people who turned $100,000 into zero, or something close to it. What do you do to get out of fully zeroing your portfolio?
The first thing I would say is, dude, I’ve dealt with mental health issues my entire life. There are a lot of people who have mental health issues but aren’t vocal about them or don’t even know it themselves. Trading can make those things get a lot larger, especially if you’re emotional about the money that you’re trading.
There’s no amount of money worth taking your life over. Full transparency: I tried to take my life multiple times, not only because of trading, but also because of mental health issues in the past. You never want to get to that low. Prioritize getting your mental health right, whether it’s after you zero out or before.
If you’re riding off a high right now, know that you’re riding off a high. Maybe close out some positions, because it goes both ways. You can be at the lowest lows, and you can also be at the highest highs. You don’t want to be at either of those. You want to be in a stable mental condition.
When it comes to zeroing out your portfolio, these markets have opportunity every single day. There’s going to be opportunity tomorrow, next week, and next month. There’s always going to be a time for you to make it all back, but that’s not what your focus should be.
You should be like, “Okay, awesome. It sucks that you zeroed out your portfolio and lost a shit ton of money, but what did you learn from that? How can you get better from that?” Realistically, that’s a huge loss that you can take a huge step up from.
Losing that 6 figures was probably the lowest point in my life at that time, but that’s also where I turned my life around and was able to change my life forever. If I didn’t lose that 6 figures, I would probably be working a dead-end job right now. I probably would have finished college, and I wouldn’t have been able to create who I am from that rock-bottom position.
There’s always time for you to turn it around. Even if you don’t end up climbing back to whatever that initial massive portfolio size was, that’s not what life is all about. Life isn’t all about making a shit ton of money. Prioritizing your mental health is everything, especially for me, and I know there are a lot of other people in the space who need to hear this, too.
Find stability in your life. Find what you enjoy doing and pursue that relentlessly, then find a way to monetize it. Whether it’s trading, if you enjoy doing the charts—that’s my little autism tick, and I’m assuming that’s true for most people watching this, too—pursue it relentlessly. Don’t let your emotions get the best of you, and enjoy the process.
Thanks for sharing that. I also think one thing—I had to do this after peak January Trump coin turned into where we were in April—is that you have to wipe your mind clean of your portfolio ATH.
That number was not real. It wasn’t yours. It was just your turn. Your portfolio ATH has to be wiped instantly. That’s step number one.
Yeah, I completely agree with that. It’s like fumbling a bad bitch. You were there. Maybe you cracked once or twice, and then she ghosted you. It’s gone now, so on to the next. That’s the easiest way to put it.
It was your turn, bro. It was your moment, but it’s not anymore.
Yeah. And it was unrealized. You didn’t take profit. Why are you sitting there thinking about what could have been? It didn’t even happen, so why are you still dreaming about it?
Facts. That P&L is in someone else’s wallet now.
Exactly.
You made a comment and said that charts are your little autism tic. One of the reasons I think you’re an interesting character is that, in 2025, especially among the InfoFi scene and internet-money kind of scene, you’re the singular person—there are other people, but you’re the singular person—who is really making trading viral among the younger generation, especially on TikTok.
There’s this clip of you that’s my favorite clip of all time. It’s this really attractive girl holding her phone up and showing a monitor with a chart, maybe SPY or something, and saying, “Can anyone tell me what the fuck is going on?” It cuts to you with your eyes closed, saying, “All right, bullish divergence on the 4-hour. You’re going to wait for the liquidity sweep, let it test support, and—”
As much as you proliferate the brain-rot streaming culture—you were on Lacy’s stream the other day, and it was huge. You hang out with Nick, and you do all the viral stuff—you really bring trading into the mainstream for a younger generation that doesn’t have a lot of people to look to. They’re not watching Cramer or CNBC. They don’t know who Peter Schiff is and have no concept of who these people are.
I’m assuming that every Zoomer in the world will eventually trade some market somewhere. I think it’s just going to happen, and it’s not going to happen on its own. I think you’re really forcing it, and you’re doing a good job of taking it mainstream. Could you talk about trading going mainstream among the younger generation?
That wasn’t my initial goal, and it’s still not my goal. My top TikTok comment is, “He’s just like us, but he’s rich.” I’m just a regular dude who likes making jokes and is into the same shit everybody else my age is into, but I also have this fun little passion that makes me a bunch of money.
When I was learning how to trade, everybody teaching people how to trade was either a fucking nerd or just lame as fuck. I was embarrassed to tell people in high school that I was trading because it was nerdy.
When I got on social media, people saw a relatively normal person who wasn’t trying to suck himself off. Most people would think I’m a cool dude, and they saw me with an interest in a hobby that should be kind of nerdy. Most young males, for whatever reason, are attracted to the stock market, right? Initially, that was a super-nerdy thing, and it wasn’t normalized.
And I think I just made it normal. I made it cool and showed that, hey, you can still be a normal-ass person while having this hobby or this weird tic that you enjoy doing, because that was me when I was in high school. I didn't want to tell anybody about it besides my close friends. Even then, it was seen as weird.
The same is the case with crypto. I have a lot of takes on this. You go out in the mainstream and someone asks you what you do for a living, and you say, “I trade crypto,” and they're looking at you crazy.
Yeah. I 100% echo your sentiment. You're trying to learn how to trade, and you're on YouTube, and everyone teaching you how to trade is 45, lame, boomer-coded, millennial, nerdy, whatever. You don't really want to be what they're doing, but you don't really want to be that.
I feel like something similar happened in gaming. Early-2010s gaming was kind of lame. People wanted to game, but my friends were playing NBA 2K, and I'm like, “All right, 2K is cool, but the rest is whatever.” Then, really for the younger demo, I think peak Fortnite—Ninja, Travis Scott, having Drake on the game, JuJu Smith-Schuster on the game—and all of a sudden, all the cool kids are on Fortnite with the headsets, the PC, and the pro setup. I sort of feel like a similar evolution is happening with markets right now. I remember when I started streaming crypto in 2024.
There was a lot of pushback from the OG crowd in crypto, specifically. People were really against it, and I couldn't understand why. Part of it is that they're kind of averse to the memecoin stuff, but more broadly, crypto doesn't really like content. I'm like, “Why?” And then I finally sat down and thought about it. I'm like, “Oh, they don't like it because everyone here is 35 to 42, was in the ETH ICO, has like $50 million, and doesn't give a shit about the content.”
I just realized, damn, the people who think streaming and trading is lame also don't know who IShowSpeed and Kai Cenat are. You know what I mean? I think a little bit of a passing of the torch is happening in real time. Do you subscribe to this notion that every kid in the world is going to be trading markets at some point?
Oh, a million%. TradeFi is going to take over, and Polymarket is a step in that same direction. You're going to be able to place a trade on every single thing. Eventually, as shit gets bigger and bigger, realistically, as sad as it is, the big companies want to make everything the casino, you know? They want people to be able to place a trade on every single thing.
It's happening. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. They want people to be able to place a trade on every single thing. I think it's starting with trading right now, and it's eventually going to scale into just being able to place a trade on everyday actions or everyday decisions, to the point where you'll be able to place a bet amongst your friends that's already priced in on Polymarket on random everyday events. I think that would be cool.
You call it TradeFi? Would you call it that?
TradeFi. Yeah.
TradeFi. I like “entertainment finance” pretty good, too.
Entertainment.
There you go. I mean, yeah, it's pretty much the same thing.
It's the same thing. What do you—okay, so what do you think about the current state of the InfoFi, sort of internet-money community right now? You're way more tapped into the scene than I am. Is that getting bigger? Is it getting smaller? What do you think about it?
Everybody has something to sell now. I think this year, specifically, has seen the biggest growth in people selling courses, people wanting to coach, people teaching how to coach—just the InfoFi space. I think we're in a massive bubble right now. In fact, I was telling a couple of friends about this just a year and a half ago, or even 2 years ago. I was like, “Bro, this is a massive bubble that's going to pop very soon.” And I was wrong. I was 2 years early.
But I think it's happening right now. It's kind of like crypto, bro. Realistically, 2, 3, 4 years ago, you could say, “Hey, I'm really good at this,” and start posting content about it. People were too scared to post content back then. If you're hypothetically good at what you say you're doing, you're going to be making 6 figures a month from the course or whatever you're teaching people how to do.
Versus now, every single person is teaching some sort of skill set. Every single day, there are new people trying to get a piece of that pie. It's kind of like Pump.fun. There's a coin, there's a creator getting created every single second, and there's a course getting created every single second, to the point where it's just going to dwindle all the way down.
I think there's going to be a clear wipeout of a bunch of these people. We're already seeing it happen with people who don't know what they're talking about and aren't financially literate, who have been spending their money and making poor decisions. Their cars are going to get taken. Their houses—well, they don't even own their houses. That shit's going to be long gone.
I just think the entire space needs to be wiped out. We'll see who's left standing at the end of it. I'm sure you've seen it. It's already happening. It's been happening over the past couple of months, and whether you've seen it or not, it's just going to keep happening more and more. The real ones are going to be left standing.
Whoa. You sell a course, too. What separates the stuff that you put out from the field, if you will?
You don't have to buy my course. I post everything that I teach in my course for free online on YouTube. I never really try to push anybody to do that. I have 2,000 videos on my YouTube channel, and there's a bunch of people on a daily basis that say, “Oh, bro, you changed my life for free just from the YouTube videos. I didn't even have to buy your course.”
I think courses, personally—and I'm not trying to shill my shit at all—the way I do my stuff is through coaching calls. I'm not giving you prerecorded videos for $5,000 and then just saying, “Fuck off. Just go watch those videos.” You can find that all on YouTube. That's free.
Having somebody who's been in the space for several years, who's made mistakes that you're about to make or that you've been making over and over again without even knowing you're making them, is where somebody who's actually good at the skill set you're trying to learn can fix that issue. Being able to get on a call with one of those people and ask those specific questions is where I think courses are genuinely beneficial. I've benefited from doing that with other people.
Shout-out to Jordan Welch. I went and did his shit when I was at 250,000 subscribers on YouTube, and now I'm at 1,000,000 subscribers on YouTube. I started out thinking I was doing well on YouTube because I was at 250,000 subscribers. Then I went through his shit and did a bunch of coaching calls with him, and I was like, “Holy shit, I'm doing every single thing incorrectly.” Then my shit skyrocketed from there.
He's been crushing it in the YouTube game for way longer than me. That's not me shilling my shit; that's me shilling his shit. Having a mentor in the space who's been doing it for years, who's able to say, “You're doing this wrong, you're doing this wrong. You've been able to find some success; this is how we can amplify your shit,” is incredibly valuable.
I'm not watching his YouTube videos on how to grow a YouTube channel. He's talking directly to me about the mistakes I'm making. That's where I think coaching is actually beneficial.
Yeah, shit, I like how you're down to talk about it. I agree with you that it's super saturated, based on what I see from a farther-out, bird's-eye view than you. I don't know a lot of these people that you know personally. I met Berez. He was sick; he came on the stream before.
It does feel giga-saturated. I think one of the reasons it feels really saturated is that trading crypto markets and equities is something that sort of transcends. It's a skill, a repeatable skill. If you can trade, you can always make money in any market, anywhere. A lot of these other InfoFi topics are really niche, targeted toward one specific thing, maybe.
And how repeatable is it? I don't know—big question mark. It's not even remotely interesting to me, for the most part. If you were one of these really sharp, young hustler internet kids right now and you were starting over, what would you be doing? What vertical would you be focusing on?
Bro, I would just find what you enjoy doing and then find a way to monetize it. That's just the best way to make money. Find anybody who's massively successful in whatever they do, or at least happy with what they're doing, and they're doing what they love—or at least participating in or starting a business in the niche that they love—and they've found a way to monetize something in that niche.
By doing that, you're able to work forever and love what you're doing. That gives you the ultimate upside compared to just being like, "Oh my God, I don't want to sit here and work 8 hours on making this new AI software just because that's going to make me the most amount of money." You don't want to fucking do that. If you want to make the best surfboards ever because you love surfing, awesome. Go and do that, and you'll be able to make a fucking ton of money because it's your passion and you're going to know the problems that need to be solved within that niche.
It's the same thing with me in trading. Trading is personal: I get in there and I get fucked over by the markets every single day, and it's like, okay, I know I'm the one to blame. There's nobody else to blame but myself, and I can look at the mistakes that I'm making and solve them. That was addicting to me.
So again, being in the niche—whatever your weird, specific hobby is—find a way to monetize it and find problems within that space. Dude, make a business out of it. You're going to fall on your face over and over and over again, but eventually you'll be able to make a fucking ton of money because you're going to want to work forever because you love doing it.
You know, the one thing I've learned about the markets—and I made this mistake, I think, in 2024—is that it's really difficult, arguably impossible, to onboard or convince someone who doesn't want to trade that they should be trading. It's actually a very bad idea to do this.
In 2024, I was very much like, you know, we were going on tour a little bit. We were going around like, "Come trade. You should trade," approaching it as if everyone should do this. I think the reason your approach works, and I honestly take a little bit of inspiration from it, is you go on Lacy's stream and it's not, like, TJR teaching us how to day trade. It's just going out, firing, ripping with TJR.
And then if someone thinks you're lit and likes you, they come back through the funnel. You have the YouTube videos, the tweets, the content, and trading stuff if they do want to trade. I think niche-targeted, verticalized trading stuff will always be a little bit niche. It's not for everyone.
The mistake I've made was initially coming at it like I was even trying to onboard my family. The worst thing you could ever do, bro, is force your family to buy crypto if they don't want to buy it. I've done this with my brother. I did this with my cousins. It doesn't age well.
When we first had mainstream press in 2024, it was very much like bringing on Thread Guy to teach us how to trade crypto. It's just the biggest, most losing battle of all time to try to convince someone who doesn't want to do it that they should be doing it.
Yeah, no, I completely agree. Realistically, the stat is that 98% of traders fail. [laughter] I always say, bro, when people come to me—for example, I'm at LAX and I have diamonds on my neck, and some dude's like, "Oh, whatever. What do you do for a living?" I'm like, "Okay, I day-trade crypto." And he's like, "Oh, okay, that's lit. You make a lot of money doing that. I want to do it."
I will literally tell them to their face, "If you're getting into it for the money, don't do it." Every single person who's like, "Oh, you make a lot of money doing that. I want to do it, too," I'm like, "You're already not going to make it." That's just my opinion on it.
When I got into trading, I was able to watch a 6-hour-long YouTube video straight, just taking notes, because I actually enjoyed learning about it. So if you actually enjoy it, then awesome. But if you're just in it for the money, you're going to get fucking smoked every single time.
How big is the TJR team? We've kind of talked about this, but I kind of forget. Share as much as you want. How big is the TJR team? How many people do you have working for you? How many employees do you have? How big is the operation?
I have over 100 people working for me.
That's insane. Over 100. Does that count Clippers or no?
Oh, Clippers? It's thousands. Like, thousands. That's not counting Clippers.
You have over 100 non-Clipper employees. That's actually a lot higher than I thought.
Not technically employees, but contractors.
Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it.
Pretty much, yeah. Same thing.
And how big is the core team of TJR that you're talking to frequently?
I probably talk to 8 people consistently on a daily basis, and then they all have their own teams that they manage.
Whoa. This is something I'm kind of going through right now. Objectively, your operation is bigger than mine. How did you scale the TJR operation from the professional business and company-structure side?
Bro, it's one of the hardest things to do. Hiring is brutal. It's the best skill that you can get, but it's also one of the hardest skills to develop. Hiring and firing is the worst thing ever, and it's still something that I'm learning how to do. I just recently hired someone who has made my life—
Oh dude, just, like, a million times easier just this past month.
And, yeah, when you make a good hire, oh dude, it makes literally 100% of the difference. It will literally 5x your business when you're able to make a good hire, and you'll be able to notice it immediately. Without a doubt, immediately, you'll be able to notice it.
Bro, I'm in the same boat as you. As much as I would love to sit here and be like, "Bro, I do have the best team ever," I have a great, awesome team, but it's very difficult to hire the right people and find the right fit.
This e-commerce guy told me that you're not firing quickly enough and you're not hiring quickly enough. It's true. You need to hire faster and fire faster. You've got to be quick to it, and it's something that I still struggle with today. You just need more bodies. You need more hands on deck.
The person you just hired that you're hyped about—what do they do?
Security, but also an executive assistant who does everything. I can close my eyes and go through my entire day, and everything is booked out. Every single thing is taken care of. I just tell him what I have going on for the day.
When we were in New York, I told him what was happening, and boom, everything was taken care of from the time that we got there to when we got to an event. I don't have to take care of everything anymore, because that's how it was in the past. Now, everything is taken care of.
That was huge, and then also just peace of mind from having security. That's the smaller thing, but the executive assistant side of things is huge.
You've seen under the hood of a lot of these operations. You hang out with a lot of our mutuals—a lot of these big internet people and streamers. How intricate, relative to yours, are these operations? Some of these guys are really big, like Lacy. Some of these guys have 30,000 people watching them on stream. How do their operations compare to yours?
Bro, it's a lot smaller. I thought it was going to be way bigger, but I only met, like, 3 of his guys. I would estimate that there's probably only, like, 10 guys on top of that. Obviously, he's got the whole clipping team, but I think it's a lot smaller than what I have going on.
Damn, that's kind of surprising. I would think it was bigger than that as well.
That's what I thought too.
Because it's not easy to pull off the jet stream with no lag. It's not easy to pull that fucking thing off. You know what I mean?
Well, I mean, that's just Starlink.
Yeah. Okay, fair. Damn, you hate it.
And I set that one up.
Did you really? [laughter]
Yeah. I put that one into motion, but that was for the stream.
You booked the jet.
Yeah.
Oh, wow. Okay, so you just did the whole thing.
Yeah, I pretty much set up that entire stream. But they definitely have their stream manager who sets up the people to come in. That stream specifically, though, I set up the jet. I set up the trucks to get us from the house to the jet and from the jet to the hotel. I set everything up at the hotel to make sure everything was taken care of. I also bought the Balenciaga.
Dude, I'm lazy.
No, that was just me showing love. I wanted to do that. I wanted it to be the best segment on his subathon. That was the goal.
It was hot. I'm not going to lie. I was in there casually watching, like, “Damn, this is a movie.” Also, thanks for the shout-out. That was lit.
We clipped and posted that.
Tell me this: one thing I think you're really good at is that you're early to talent. I don't want to say he's not hot in his own right, but I definitely found Breads through you. I found a lot of these earlier-stage people through you, and I would assume you have some lit people in your operation. How do you spot killer talent on the internet?
I'm constantly online. I almost treat it like my full-time job. Because, bro, again, I'm kind of moving into this space of: How can I bridge the gap? We were talking about this before—how can I bridge the gap? I have, at least right now, a million subscribers on YouTube, 1.5 million on Instagram, and 1.6 million on TikTok. I pretty much have encapsulated the vast majority of finance and internet-money people.
How can I bridge the gap between internet money and just being an influencer? That's what I want to do: bridge that gap. There are the Iman Gadzhi types and the Alex Hormozis, where they won't be appealing to the average, normal person. I want to be able to bridge that gap and be the person standing in between the two. I'm internet money, but I'm also a 5-million-follower influencer.
For me, part of that vision is being super early to trends, being constantly online, and seeing these things that are happening on a daily basis. It's literally doomscrolling. It's my full-time job—doomscrolling, seeing these trends as they happen early on, and then making videos about them that appeal to the masses. That's kind of my goal as this year is wrapping up and going into next year.
I think you're well on the way. From where you're at, how do you get to the Iman and Alex Hormozi levels of wealth?
I don't want to be there—or, okay, levels of wealth, yes, I want to be there.
Okay, answer both, then. You said you don't want to get there in terms of influence.
I don't want to be on their level of internet money only. They don't appeal to normal people. I'm already appealing to normal people, so I'm in the middle. There are influencers like Kai Cenat, FaZe Lacy, and all those guys in this area. Then there are the Iman Gadzhi and Alex Hormozi types. I want to be smack dab in the middle, and I want to be at the same level as both of them.
And what about wealth, or even scale? How does the TJR entity make $100 million, $500 million, or $1 billion?
You look at Kai Cenat and you look at Adin Ross. Not that they—I mean, bro, low-key, Logan Paul and Jake Paul have more money than Alex Hormozi. They have more money than Iman. I think being on both sides of that spectrum gives me a crazy vertical.
Prime is like a billion-dollar company, isn't it?
Yeah.
The highest-net-worth demographic is also finance. It's OP.
So that's the game plan here. Again, the goal is to bridge that gap—to be mass-appealing to normal people, but also have that core audience of internet money. Then I can go to these companies and say, “Yo, I have 5 million followers on every single platform, but I also have mass appeal to the finance audience.”
That gives me way more leverage than someone like Iman or Alex Hormozi, who only has leverage over this audience. It gives me way more leverage than FaZe Clan, for example, who can only get a deal with Four Loko. No offense to them, but they can't necessarily get a deal with a big brokerage or a massive finance company. If I'm in the middle of those two, that's where I'm going to be able to scale and hopefully beat both sides.
This is honestly my thesis, too, but I'm way more focused on finance than I am on the mainstream side. Maybe that's the gap. Do you like doing the mainstream content? Do you like going on Lacy's stream and doing the viral stuff? How do you feel about that? How much of this is for the content versus just wanting to do it?
It's a mix. I have a super-small social battery. I find joy not during the content, but in thinking about what the content is going to do. For example, when I got the Koenigsegg, I wasn't even happy about getting the car. I was itching to make the YouTube video, the TikTok videos, the Instagram post, and the Instagram reels. I wanted to see the numbers and the havoc I could cause on the internet. That's what I enjoy doing.
When we did the Lacy stream, I wanted to make it the best segment of a subathon because I wanted to see the kind of havoc we could wreak on the internet. That's what I enjoy doing on the influencer side of things. I just like seeing the numbers on the board.
How many miles have you put on it?
Not many. I drove it from the Bay Area—Silicon Valley—to Monterey, so that was a decent amount. Probably only 500 miles at most.
Damn. That's awesome, though. That thing is fire. I'll let you go in a couple of minutes. I'm curious, though: what about Killtech? What do you think is fire? I have a couple of tees. They're all at my mom's house, so when I go back home, I'm rocking them. What's the vision and plan for that, and how do you feel about it right now?
Right now, I'm actually not allowed to say the name. There's some stuff going on, but we do have a clothing brand. I'm not allowed to say the name, but we do have a clothing brand.
That has been super fun to pursue with my best friend, business partner, and manager. It's another avenue that can appeal to my influencer audience. Maybe they don't want to trade, and that's awesome, but how can they support me in other ways? They want to wear dope clothes, and that's what we can bring to the table.
All of the clothes we make aren't merch. It's not TJR merch. I think it's actual cool clothing. Pretty much every single person I wear it around—or, bro, when I brought it to the FaZe house, everybody was like, “Damn, bro, that shit's sick.” I'm like, “Yeah, it's my brand.” It makes me feel really good in public.
The jean shorts.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's super cool to go out wearing your stuff and have people come up to you and say, “I've never seen that before. That shit's awesome,” and then be able to say, “Yeah, it's my brand.” That's been a super-fun thing to pursue, and hopefully we get an exit in a couple of years.
I feel like influencer merch is pretty fried, not going to lie. Merch is the word—merch is cooked.
Nobody wants to buy a T-shirt that says “TJR” across it. That's lame. It's nerdy.
I'd rock it. I'd rock it.
You have to get a Killtech collab on some hard-ass Satoshi Nakamoto flannels, bro.
That's got to be on the pedestal eventually.
That would instantly get you nerfed at the door.
Okay, I have two more questions for you, and I'll let you sign off. I had you on the stream the other day, which was fun. I have to ask you—not trying to put you on the spot, I'm genuinely curious—who's the most impressive person you've ever met?
Who asked me this? I was on a podcast, and somebody asked me this. I repeated the answer.
I said the owner of Jerkmate, or whatever, the CEO of Jerkmate. [laughter] Man, bro, I’m going to give the same answer. Shout-out to freaking Jordan Welch, dude. He’s obviously super successful, but in terms of mindset, it’s crazy.
He’s one of my best friends. I’ll bring ideas to him, and we work on a bunch of stuff together. I’ll bring him something that I get super excited about and that I know he would also get excited about, but that’s also low-key shiny-object syndrome. He always approaches it with such a level head.
Literally everything that I bring to him, and the way that he looks at things, is always approached with a super level head. He weighs out the pros and cons. That’s someone who is super impressive to me, because when you’re in this game of money and success, it’s easy to get knocked off course.
He’s someone who I consistently see maintain a level head and a very consistent way of thinking about things. It’s not necessarily who makes the most money in my circle or who’s the most famous. For me, it’s how people think about things, and he has consistently been one of those people who is always on point with how he approaches things, at least decision-wise.
I’ve got to hit him up. I’m mutuals with him on Twitter, but I don’t really know him that well. I’ve got to hit him up.
It’s ya boy.
W glaze. Okay, before I let you go, can I selfishly ask you for some advice as someone who sits in a similar circle and a similar vertical? I like the finance media and the crypto media, tying it into streaming. Where do you think all of this goes long term, and how do you think you basically win the field?
You need to appeal to a wider audience. Right now, every single person in crypto Twitter knows you. You have that covered. I’m not saying to slack off on that. Those are your ride-or-dies, but now you need to find a way to get into other branches that you haven’t even explored yet.
I’m not talking about trying to go mainstream. I’m talking about other areas in finance, just other areas on the internet and in finance within your specific niche. That means showing who you are on YouTube and showing who you are on TikTok.
I know I have very limited time in my day. If I’m able to cover streaming, make multiple YouTube videos every single week, and do 25 to 30 TikToks per day, I know anybody can do it. Having a whole clipping team helps, too. Anybody can do what I’ve done, or what you’re doing right now.
For you, it would be about appealing to people or showing them who you are. There are people on crypto Twitter who love you for who you are and love your content for what you do. They’re in other pockets of the internet, like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and they’re just waiting for Thread Guy to pop up on their feed. They’re waiting to build that cult following on those other platforms.
From there, when you have a cult following on every single platform, you can start bringing in people who aren’t necessarily in the finance or crypto niche, but who like you for you. That’s how I started. I started out just talking about day trading, then I started showing a little bit of my personality, then I started showing more of my personality, and then I turned into who I am now.
You start with what you’re really good at. You start by teaching people a valuable skill or entertaining them through streaming or whatever type of content you create, and then you can expand out of that. Your ride-or-dies are going to be your biggest advocates.
The reason why I blew up so quickly is that on every single one of my videos, people are like, “I can’t believe this dude’s my mentor.” Normies get on there and see a funny video of me dancing, and they’re like, “This dude’s a mentor? What is this?” That gets them in, and that’s how they become part of my loyal, strong cult following, like my strong core audience.
So again, it’s about keeping that core audience and not using them, but having them support you as you branch out into these other areas of the internet.
Honestly, a banger, bro. GG. W advice. To sign off, my favorite TikToks are the motivational TJR TikToks. They slap.
There are a bunch of people in the chat right now. The market looks like shit. I think a lot of people are tired, worn out, and a little bit depressed. Optimism is reasonably low. Nobody’s really sure what happens short term, and definitely nobody’s really sure what happens long term. There’s a lot of froth.
What’s something optimistic to do if you’re feeling lost in the market right now, but you’re in the chat, watching the stream, locked in, and trying? What do you do? Where do you go from here?
If you’re feeling bad about your life right now, or if you’re in a shitty situation, this is the smallest blip on your massive timeline of life. Five years from now, when you’re living the life of your dreams, you’re going to look back on this small moment and laugh at how sad, depressed, or shitty you were feeling.
You’re going to realize that it was just the tiniest blip on this massive timeline of life that you have. The more that you can realistically zoom out on this long life that we have to live, the better off you’re going to be. You have plenty of time to make it; you just have to take action every single day.
As long as more blips on your timeline are green than red, that’s all you’re trying to chase. Try to get 1% better every single day. There are always going to be bad days. There might be incredibly bad days where you think you’ve hit rock bottom.
But if you can think five years from now, look back, and think about your dream self five years from now—think about who that person is and what he’s looking back at you right now at rock bottom—then think about all the steps that person at rock bottom has to take to get to that dream version of you. Just take those steps every single day, and you’re going to wake up living the life of your dreams.
That’s literally what happened to me in my life, and it’s what can happen to every single one of you.
TJR, man, thanks for coming on, dude. Honestly, I don’t know. I guess you’re relatively controversial in some segments of the internet, but I’m not afraid to say it, bro: I’m a fan. I think you put out good shit, I think you put out important stuff, and I think that in the vertical I’m particularly interested in—the intersection of internet culture, finance, and trading—you’re a staple pillar.
Thanks for coming on, dude. I really enjoyed it. It was well overdue, and I think this is perfect timing in the market to do it right now. You’re the GOAT.
Thank you, bro. Thanks for having me.
Thanks, bro. Have a good one. We’ll talk offline. Peace.
Yeah.