TraderMayne - What It Was Like Trading Crypto In 2013
TraderMayne’s answer to the “plumber era” debate is that crypto has not become categorically easier or harder; every cycle simply presents different landmines. In 2013 he bought Bitcoin between roughly $10 and $100, then spent it on dubious altcoins, gambling sites and exchanges that might never credit a deposit. Today’s traders inherit vastly better infrastructure, but also compete in a faster, more transparent game: “You guys have landmines we didn’t have to deal with. We had landmines you didn’t have to deal with.”
The easiest cycle is less a calendar year than “your second one, if you were paying attention,” though TraderMayne nominates 2021 for its stablecoins, liquid shorts and mature infrastructure. In 2017, Bitcoin itself could draw down 80-90%, spike 10-20% and crush altcoins merely by rallying; traders lacked a clean stablecoin escape hatch. His caveat is important: by 2021 he understood the cycle, expected a top and “wasn’t bought into the Kool-Aid.”
On-chain transparency has reduced one form of information asymmetry while creating new ways to manufacture performance. BitMEX’s
/positiononce let Flood end arguments by proving he was long thousands of Bitcoin; public wallets now expose whether influencers are rich, profitable or serially dumping. Yet tracked-wallet promoters can preload side wallets, buy publicly to trigger copy-traders and sell invisibly into their followers — “the method changes, tooling changes, people will find a way to do the same.”TraderMayne sees the strongest secular crypto use case in the “perpification of everything,” not in any single token narrative. Kraken, Coinbase, Robinhood, Polymarket and on-chain venues are converging toward 24/7 platforms for banking, perps, stocks, pre-IPO assets and prediction markets. If users bring capital on-chain to trade Tesla or oil over a weekend, that money may remain there and eventually flow into crypto assets; the obstacle is that AI has captured attention and capital that crypto expected to receive.
He remains constructive on on-chain activity but explicitly rejects a reward-first view of meme coins. A small stake can become life-changing money, yet survivorship bias conceals that “most of you are gonna get annihilated,” while top traders on the FOMO app showed roughly 48-hour holding periods, making sustained runners harder to produce. Old-cycle traders often held long enough to capture 1,000x moves but then roundtripped them; the current culture tends to sell before narratives can compound.
TraderMayne does not think Bitcoin’s bottom is confirmed, but he believes the remaining timing risk matters less than beginning to accumulate. His downside case reaches the $40Ks or $50Ks; he has bought a small amount below $60K and plans to deploy more lower or after a bullish weekly structure break. Thread Guy, a four-year-cycle believer, put a possible bottom around October 2026 to January 2027. If Bitcoin eventually reaches $200K, “do you give a shit if you bought at 60 or 50?”
Pump Fun illustrates his combined framework: price structure creates the trade, while revenue increasingly determines whether an altcoin deserves durable capital. Its weekly swing-failure pattern — a wick below an old low followed by a close back above — made it bullish before the unlock narrative, while continued revenue gave Thread Guy a fundamental reason to revisit the valuation. For a hypothetical entry around 1800, TraderMayne would already have taken some profit, watch 3500 as a breakout line and treat a break of the steep trend as evidence that the vertical move is “probably cooked.”
Selling Breakout to Kraken made TraderMayne more money than his entire trading career, yet the emotional peak lasted about 48 hours. Performance coaching helped him stop “half-assing two things,” sacrifice bull-market trading for the business and detach his wellbeing from daily P&L. The lasting lesson was not retirement but that “there is no end state for people like us”; wealth improved his trading primarily by removing the need to trade for rent, food or monthly survival.
1. Every generation mistakes hindsight for easy mode
Thread Guy’s framing is recursive: 2024 calls 2021 easy, 2021 says the same about 2017, and 2017 does it to 2013. His analogy was dropping today’s best Fortnite player into season one — mature techniques would dominate, but only because someone already endured the period when “the concepts were new” and nobody knew how the game would develop.
TraderMayne’s pushback — worth keeping: unlike basketball legends who cannot revisit another era, some crypto OGs are still competing successfully. He thinks talented traders would adapt in either direction: “If you’re good, you’re just good,” even if comparing eras remains impossible because the rules, liquidity and tools changed.
His own 2013 experience was hardly effortless alpha. He bought Bitcoin from roughly $10 to $100, sent it to shady exchanges while hoping deposits arrived, bought random altcoins, lost money on Mt. Gox and played Just Dice with what would now be hundreds of valuable Bitcoin. “Then it was like nothing. It didn’t mean anything.”
Modern traders stand “on the shoulders of giants,” but also “on the dead bodies of all the people who tried and failed.” OG traders built exchanges, tooling and products from the frustrations they personally experienced; surviving pioneers are visible, while many failed financially, disappeared from the industry or, in some cases, are literally no longer alive.
2. The easiest cycle is the one after your first
TraderMayne nominates 2021 because stablecoins were ubiquitous, shorts were accessible and traders could de-risk without leaving the ecosystem. He concedes that 2017 offered extraordinary upside and fewer assets, but holding the right thing still mattered: even Bitcoin suffered 80-90% drawdowns, while many apparent winners roundtripped everything.
The 2017 market ran on different math because Bitcoin was the base currency. It could print 10-20% candles or illiquid wicks in either direction, and a Bitcoin rally could crush an altcoin by 20-30%; without a stablecoin refuge, traders had to manage both the asset and the denomination risk.
His cleaner rule is personal rather than historical: “The easiest cycle is your second one.” A first-cycle participant lacks the pattern recognition to anticipate a top and usually believes the new world lasts forever — as Thread Guy admitted he did with NFTs in 2021. By cycle two, an attentive trader recognizes the Kool-Aid, takes profit and knows that coins, exchanges and promoters can all vanish.
3. Verifiable performance replaced reputation-by-assertion
Today’s analytics expose bundled supply, connected wallets and dumping histories that earlier traders could not inspect. That makes markets more competitive, but it also removes some blind information asymmetry: an influencer claiming skill can increasingly be checked against an address rather than trusted because he appears wealthy.
TraderMayne recalled Ian Balina as an early paid ICO promoter whose followers could buy a new launch and get “instantly annihilated on day one.” In the ensuing discussion of John McAfee, TraderMayne separated colorful lore from crypto promotion he described as “absolutely unbelievable, max-level grift.”
BitMEX offered an early primitive of proof through
/position. In its troll box, Flood could answer critics by revealing an unfakeable live position — sometimes around 5,000 Bitcoin and then worth five to eight figures — making it the period’s equivalent of “show me your wallet.”TraderMayne still resists reducing every social contribution to P&L. Evidence should matter when someone teaches trading, but public profit screenshots often lead into referral links or copy-trading products that reward exaggeration. “Trading’s like 1v1”; the person who ultimately needs to care about the result is the trader.
4. New tooling did not eliminate old incentive games
TraderMayne formed his view of Jack Duvall from a single screenshot and repeatedly disclosed that he lacked firsthand information. The alleged mechanism nevertheless bothered him: preload a token in side wallets, buy through a tracked main wallet so copy-traders follow, then sell the hidden inventory into their demand while publicly displaying the main wallet’s smaller profit.
Thread Guy agreed with the principle: buying publicly while selling secretly is economically equivalent to publishing an extremely bullish thread while unloading from an undisclosed wallet. TraderMayne considers that substantially worse than posting a casino promotion because followers become direct exit liquidity. “Everyone’s got a moral barometer.”
The same incentives existed in older forms. Paid ICO allocations let promoters acquire cheaply before selling onto followers; BitMEX could brick during volatile periods with “order submission error” while traders believed the venue knew their stops. Elsewhere, users sent Bitcoin to obscure exchanges on the strength of forum posts and hoped an eventual Bittrex listing would confer legitimacy.
5. Liquid majors became easier while memes became a separate sport
TraderMayne finds leveraged Bitcoin, Ether and Solana easier to trade now because they are liquid and efficient, with more capital, passive flows, calmer volatility and more predictable trends. That is a narrower claim than saying all of crypto is easier: the same traders who fail today probably would have failed in older cycles by refusing to take profit.
He openly lacks the skills for the modern meme-coin game. His analogy is an old basketball player suddenly discovering the three-point line: the familiar game still exists, but the scoring geometry changed. More tools do not automatically transfer expertise across market structures.
Meme coins offer one of crypto’s few authentic lottery-like payoffs, but TraderMayne thinks Ansem’s framing is “reward first, not risk first.” If majors and revenue-producing altcoins can fall 89%, a purely memetic derivative has even less fundamental protection. The visible fortunes are real; so is the survivorship bias hiding everyone who was destroyed.
Holding culture has inverted. Earlier traders found a coin, made it their personality and sometimes held through 1,000x appreciation — then roundtripped it. On the FOMO app, TraderMayne saw top traders averaging roughly 48-hour holds: “People can barely hold anything past a few days,” making enduring runners harder to create.
6. Perpetual markets could become crypto’s next capital funnel
Apps such as Pump Fun and FOMO remove the bridging friction that kept TraderMayne away from prior on-chain opportunities. He refused to maintain funds on every exchange and chain merely to participate; eliminating that operational burden could matter even more for retail users with less crypto knowledge.
His most exciting theme is “the perpification of everything.” Kraken, Coinbase, Robinhood, Polymarket and others are moving toward everything-apps where users can bank, trade perps and single-name stocks, access pre-IPO markets and wager on future events, with more activity becoming on-chain, verifiable and continuously open.
The counterforce is AI. TraderMayne feels capital crypto expected instead went “to Texas” for data centers; he cited what he believed was a Riot-Anthropic compute deal worth $9 billion over 15 years as evidence that even Bitcoin miners can find compute contracts more attractive than marginal mining economics.
Hyperliquid’s weekend oil market during the Iran war supplied his best example: traditional markets later snapped toward the on-chain price. If users hold funds on-chain to trade oil or Tesla when conventional venues are closed, they may keep the proceeds there instead of wiring them home, recreating some of 2017’s downstream capital flow through a new route.
7. Bitcoin may need another low, but the opportunity is already close
TraderMayne thinks much of Bitcoin’s downside may already be exhausted: even a move toward $50K leaves limited incremental pain relative to potential upside. His harder question is demand — “why would you buy it?” — though he cited Bitcoin’s separation from the AI-heavy equity trade, renewed TikTok interest in crypto and social trading, and Kimi as possible sources of future attention. Thread Guy agreed that large capital inflows would still be necessary.
TraderMayne does not think the bottom is in. The bear market has been shallow and lacks the meaningful blowup that marked prior endings; Saylor’s roughly 1,600-1,700 Bitcoin of selling against about 700,000 held looked like “a test transaction,” not capitulation. His worst case is broadly the $40Ks or $50Ks.
The practical convergence matters more than the disagreement. TraderMayne said Ansem was right that investors should pay attention now: prices are discounted, even if they might become more discounted. For a long-term buyer expecting a possible $200K Bitcoin next cycle, the difference between $60K and $50K is less consequential than missing the accumulation window while attempting to nail the exact bottom.
8. Breakout’s sale rewarded focus, then exposed hedonic adaptation
TraderMayne said selling Breakout to Kraken 11 months earlier made him more money than he had ever made trading. The company began when Bitcoin was around $20K and sold near $120K, prompting one ignored commenter to call the acquisition “the top” — a remark that looked remarkably timed in hindsight.
Before any acquisition conversation, TraderMayne was in one of his worst physical and mental periods. Breakout was growing quickly during a bull market, while his public role required constant Twitter activity and stimulated trading FOMO. He was “half-assing two things instead of whole-assing one thing.”
Performance coach Elliot Roe helped him identify psychological hang-ups through sessions that included hypnotherapy, then build processes around time and performance. The decisive trade-off was giving up much of his bull-market trading to focus on Breakout, where the potential outcome was larger but lacked trading’s instant gratification.
Roe predicted the acquisition high would last about 48 hours. The wire arrived during TraderMayne’s honeymoon in Italy; he repeatedly logged out, logged back in, refreshed and took screenshots. Soon, “life just goes on,” and retirement gave way to the next question: what could he build and win at now?
9. Financial security improves decisions more than it ends ambition
The sale taught TraderMayne that there may be “no end state” for people capable of exceptional outcomes. Trading had become mechanical and familiar; building and selling a company offered a novel form of winning. “Once you do it, you realize it’s possible,” which made him hungry to repeat it rather than satisfied enough to stop.
A few million dollars in T-bills, a job or any reliable side income can cover monthly expenses, leaving the trading account free to compound. TraderMayne traded better while employed because he was no longer withdrawing rent and food money from positions: “You’re no longer trading to survive.”
His risk advice changes with age. At 21 or 22, a single person with low expenses can spend a year pursuing an outsized crypto outcome because time absorbs failure; a trader in their 30s with a spouse, house and dependents cannot rationally take the same risks. “I would give all my money back to be 20 again.”
10. Crypto content improved as paid-placement incentives weakened
TraderMayne now streams twice weekly because speaking fits him better than writing: “I’m a yapper.” He begins with charts, plans little and values a media landscape where Thread Guy’s interviews, younger on-chain participants and his own skin-free technical analysis provide different products rather than one authoritative voice.
His comparison with earlier crypto YouTube is stark. In his account, creators such as BitBoy, Moon Carl and the Martini Guy built videos around paid placements masquerading as “top altcoins”; today their large subscriber counts produce weak views because many followers lost money and disappeared.
Thread Guy supplied a live lesson in self-generated exit signals: he told TraderMayne he would appear after making $1 million on Zcash, then closed a strong trade but roundtripped roughly half. TraderMayne’s response was that announcing the target should itself have been the take-profit moment.
TraderMayne’s Whiteboard Series packages the old tools into 30 planned lessons on market structure, risk, technical analysis and psychology. He had released weekly 30-to-60-minute episodes for 18 weeks and recorded episode 20; the premise is asset-agnostic: “Markets are markets,” and bankroll management matters even when trading meme coins.
11. Pump Fun became bullish before the promotional chorus
Thread Guy did not invest in Pump Fun’s round and acknowledged suspicious timing around the unlock. His bullishness instead began when Cash Cat reached about $150 million after deploying on Robinhood, Ansem’s coin reached roughly $450 million as a SOL pair, and Pump Fun was still generating about $1 million daily despite conditions after 10/10.
His valuation puzzle was Hyperliquid at roughly 25 times Pump Fun: perhaps perps have a larger market, leadership deserves a premium and memes will not persist for ten years. Renewed meme activity challenged the third assumption, while social-trading adoption gave Pump Fun another route beyond a temporary speculative revival.
TraderMayne’s chart supplied an independent explanation for coordinated enthusiasm. Pump Fun had sold off aggressively, begun moving sideways and printed a weekly swing-failure pattern: price wicked below an old low but closed back above it. He estimates that roughly 80% of Bitcoin’s weekly SFPs over five years produced at least a 10% move.
The mechanism is positioning, not narrative. Breakout longs are trapped when price reclaims below their level, or shorts are trapped when a breakdown immediately recovers; either way, invalidation sits close to entry. “The reason doesn’t matter. Just look at the chart.”
12. Revenue now matters alongside price structure
TraderMayne’s Pump Fun stance was bullish from the weekly reclaim, but not indifferent to risk after the rally. The token had risen roughly 150% while Bitcoin gained about 10%; for a hypothetical large entry around 1800, he would have taken some profit after the roughly 50% raw gain and watched the steep trend line for evidence of a corrective break.
He treated 3500 as a straightforward breakout threshold and the prior high as resistance. The symmetry was clean: an earlier bearish SFP preceded a 50% decline, while the later bullish SFP preceded a roughly 100% rally. Chart inversion helped expose whether current support would resemble prior resistance.
Fundamentals now refine that setup. Pump Fun continuing to print revenue and Hyperliquid generating substantial income are real data points, unlike 2017’s white papers and fake partnership announcements. His bar is increasingly blunt: outside deliberate meme speculation, “what does your business do? Does it make money?”
That does not guarantee appreciation — revenue-producing coins can still fall — but it makes unsupported altcoin valuations harder to justify. TraderMayne’s updated framework is therefore additive: use price to define entry and invalidation, then ask whether the protocol’s economics warrant holding beyond the trade.
13. HYPE and ETH remain watchlist ideas, not confirmed bottoms
TraderMayne wants to own more HYPE and described it as a potentially BNB-like trade. If Bitcoin makes another leg lower, he would buy as much Hyperliquid as he could near the lower level; if not, he would buy higher.
He was long Nasdaq and expected the AI-linked market to move choppily sideways into year-end. He viewed roughly 1,700 as the high-timeframe level SanDisk needed to reclaim before becoming bullish, with 1,400 acting as potential resistance; he said a failure of the broader Nasdaq extension could be bad for Bitcoin.
ETH/BTC was the most bullish it had looked in five years after a prolonged downtrend, but TraderMayne still thought ETH could trade below $1,000 if Bitcoin fell to $50K or $45K. His nearer-term view was more constructive: if Bitcoin moved into the $70Ks or $80Ks, ETH could continue outperforming.
14. Weekly structure governs the Bitcoin deployment plan
TraderMayne called Bitcoin “arguably the most annoying chart on the market”: since June 6 it had gained only about 7%, sat roughly 10% above its low and remained inside a range about 15% wide. Claims of having called the bottom overstated how little price had actually resolved.
Thread Guy’s preferred historical signal combines a weekly swing failure with a market-structure break. Around $19K-$22K, Bitcoin reclaimed a swept low and closed above the prior weekly lower high, changing a downtrend into higher highs and higher lows; Thread Guy deployed his remaining dry powder there. The reverse weekly break later marked the top.
The present dispute is whether Bitcoin is experiencing a summer rally before one more Q4 low or has already passed that stage. TraderMayne favors another leg down. Thread Guy said he was in the first camp, expecting another low, and cited a four-year-cycle window from October 2026 to January 2027; he also said a reclaim above roughly $67K would make the chart look materially better.
TraderMayne’s execution plan avoids requiring certainty. He bought a small amount below $60K, will add if price falls, and intends to deploy the remainder once the weekly chart confirms a bullish structure shift — the same approach he used when buying incrementally from below $30K through $25K and $20K. “Not financial advice, but that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
Full transcript
Yo, yo. Wow, Mr. Mayne. What's up, Unc? I'm good, man. How are you doing?
I beat you up on behalf of all the OGs, man—all the plumbers.
Dude, that was nuts.
Yeah.
How about it, huh?
That was a good fucking tweet, man. That was a good fucking tweet. I think the follow-on engagement—yeah, you got a lot of quote tweets, but just the conversation it started—it was like the entirety of CT for the last 24 hours.
Were you offended by that clip?
No. First of all, I know what you're doing, but I'm a basketball guy like you, bro. I'm a LeBron fan. I think Michael Jordan played against plumbers, dude. Michael Jordan fans think the guys before him—like Bill Russell, who's got 11 rings—it's like, yeah, but there were eight teams in the league. You know what I mean?
So I totally get it. But I am here to defend my fellow plumbers, and I'm happy to go into some war stories and talk about some of the things we had to deal with, because at the end of the day, it's just a different game. Really, that's what it is. And I think that's what your tweet, or your clip, was ultimately about. It's a circular argument. Everyone's always going to feel this way.
I think if you put Grayson Allen in the Bill Russell era, he would have 20 rings and he'd be the logo.
Yeah, Giannis is going for an 80-point triple-double every game—
Grayson Allen would be the logo if he played in the John Stockton era. But okay, here's my actual take. I do want to talk a little bit of lore, and we'll talk a little active crypto.
1. Every Era Thinks Its Easy
I think my actual take is that every era will think the prior era was super easy with hindsight and new tooling, right? We think 2024 was plumbers. 2024 thinks 2021 was plumbers, but 2024 thinks 2021 was, and 2021 thinks 2017 was, and 2017 thinks 2013 was. AI mania thinks the dot-com era was easy; the dot-com era thinks the mortgage boom of the '80s was easy, and so on and so forth.
My example was, if you threw Peterbot, who's the best Fortnite player in the world, into Fortnite Season 1 in 2016, he would probably go three years without losing a game, because building was brand new and he's been building for 20 years—or whatever, 10 years, however long the game's been out.
I think the same thing is generally true for markets, because it looks so easy now, but at the time nobody knew how it was going to play out. No one knew how to use the tooling. The concepts were new. The ideas were new relative to where you are in the cycle.
So I think this is my actual take that makes the most sense: we'll just do this forever. After the next one, I'll be a plumber to the next bull run, to the next bull run, to the next bull run. I think that's my take.
I think it's a fair take. The game changes, right? I think the biggest difference between this and the basketball argument is that LeBron can't go back to Jordan's era, and we'll never know, whereas there are still OG traders around today who were playing back in those prior eras and are still performing well.
I think ultimately, if you're good, you're just good. Michael Jordan would be a good player today. Would he be the greatest of all time? I personally don't think so, but Michael Jordan was good at basketball, and with the game, rules, and setup that he had at the time, he was the best of his era.
I think many of the good traders today would do well in prior cycles. Absolutely. If you're talented and good, you're going to figure it out, right? You can take a smart, talented person who's driven and put them into almost anything, and they're going to figure it out. If they're good, they're good. I think that's true with trading as well.
I just think it's different. It's so hard to compare these different eras. I was around back in 2013 and 2014, but I had no idea what I was doing. If I had the knowledge I had in 2017 in 2013, I think we'd be having this stream while I'm on a yacht in the south of France. It would be—
You were trading in 2013?
That's when I first bought Bitcoin. But I had no idea what I was doing, dude. I bought Bitcoin when Bitcoin was anywhere from $10 to $100. Then I was using that Bitcoin to buy random altcoins on very shady exchanges where you would just send your Bitcoin there and wait and pray that it showed up, and then you would buy some random altcoin.
The exchange would go bankrupt. I lost money on Mt. Gox. I gambled a lot on websites that you could use to play poker. I played a game called Just Dice with what, at the time, was hundreds of bitcoins, bro. But then it was nothing. It didn't mean anything.
2. The Tooling Changed Everything
I caught the very end of that bull run, but I had no idea what I was doing. The biggest change for me, outside of there being more coins now, is that everything is verifiable. The tooling and the on-chain stuff now is amazing.
Yeah.
That does, in a sense, make it more competitive, because you can see, okay, this coin's bundled. I'm not going to touch it, right? We didn't have that same information flow in prior cycles. There was much more information asymmetry going on in some of these old cycles, which inherently meant more risk.
Yes, there were fewer coins to pick from, and many of them went up a lot more. Shiba Inu was a $40 billion meme coin, dude.
God.
Axie Infinity—Frank pointed out yesterday, he's like, "Who's buying this?" But these things did go up for many months. There were opportunities to make money, but the same people that lose money today would probably lose money back then too, because they don't take profit; they round-trip.
I think the important thread here to placate everyone is that a lot of what's happening in the industry today is due to OGs paving the way, just like in sports. The exchanges, the tooling—some of the OGs run some of the most successful crypto companies or are involved in crypto projects today that make them so awesome.
They were traders back in the day, and they're like, "This is what I would want if I were a trader today," and then they go and build that. You have guys like Brian from LayerZero. This is an OG crypto trader who's now made an extremely successful business in crypto. You have Coby taking over Coinbase trading, hopefully to make it better.
You.
Sure. You can throw me in there if you want.
Hell yeah, I'm throwing you in there. What the fuck?
A lot of the new traders—you stand on the shoulders of giants, but you also stand on the dead bodies of all the people who tried and failed. There's a lot of them, man. I got a lot of friends—
Stop.
—who aren't around anymore. Some of them straight up are literally not around anymore.
I think it's just a different game. But, like you said, that's always how the OGs are going to feel. You're going to be Unc one day, and you're going to look back and say, "Dude, back in the Pumpfunistan trenches, you guys don't even know what you were missing, man."
Pumpfunistan. All right. What was the easiest cycle, objectively? I know the eras. What was the easiest cycle relative to the time, knowledge, and skill required—all of that?
For me, as a preface, just so I don't get lambasted, I think 2021. The reason being is that by 2021, stablecoins were prevalent everywhere. Obviously, you could short the market at this point, and you could de-risk into stablecoins.
2017 was easy in some ways just by being around, and prices were so cheap on some of this stuff, but you still had to hold the right stuff—Bitcoin—and not round-trip it. We had 80% to 90% drawdowns on Bitcoin. Not altcoins—on Bitcoin. Bitcoin used to go down 80% to 90%.
The thing about 2017 that people are downplaying is that you didn't really have an easy way to short until BitMEX came around, which was more like 2018, and you didn't have stablecoins to go into. The base currency was Bitcoin, so it was a completely different math.
So you were stuck in Bitcoin.
It was a completely different math, and Bitcoin was a lot less liquid and a lot less efficient. The entire market was less efficient. Bitcoin would trade like an altcoin sometimes does, with 10% to 20% candles in either direction and illiquid wicks.
If Bitcoin ripped and you were holding an altcoin, that altcoin could nuke 20% to 30% just on Bitcoin strength. That rotation game was a lot harder, whereas if you don't know what's going on, you can just sit in stables in 2021.
Interesting.
That would be my bet, but I was no longer what I would consider a rookie by 2021. I kind of knew what I was doing, so I think I look at it through rose-colored glasses. I was expecting the bull run. I knew the top was going to come in eventually. I wasn't bought into the Kool-Aid.
Let's put it this way: the easiest cycle is your second one.
That was 20—
Your first cycle, no matter what it is, is going to be hard as fuck because you have no idea what you're doing. You're going to get annihilated. The easiest one is your second one, if you were paying attention.
2024 is my second. In 2021, I thought this was just the way the world was going to run—on NFTs and—
Forever.
Yeah, it could never stop.
Dude, I was longing the worst coins in 2017 and stuff, bro. On the exchanges, they don't even exist anymore. The exchanges are gone. The coins are dead. The people who launched them are in jail. I learned my lesson in 2012 when I was like, “Oh, I want to stack Bitcoin.”
Damn, you were here in 2013. What was your Twitter account? Was it—
Bro. 2420team.
Is that your first name? Trader Joe was your OG name, or no?
No.
What was the OG name?
I was Crypto Main Only, bro.
Crypto Main.
I thought I was going to diversify. I was like, “You know, I can't be pigeonholed to only crypto.” Here I am 12 years later.
Is that your trader name? That's so good. I feel like, out of the cohort of people who have existed this long on CT, you are one of the more optimistic people about new stuff. I remember, not that long ago, we were doing streams, and you were in our F&F putting Fibonacci lines on memes—
Yeah, dude. We were having fun.
We were charting memes, bro. You're pretty open to the new stuff that comes around on Crypto Twitter. Why are you not giga-jaded?
3. Why OGs Stay Open
I have a lot of my life left to be a grumpy old man, you know? I always grew up with younger brothers and stuff, so I always wanted to help my younger brothers get into stuff. I thought it was fun.
I'm excited because I want to see the torch get passed naturally and a new guard come in. It's inevitable. Who wants to be that grumpy old guy who's like, “This person doesn't know what they're talking about,” commenting on your tweets and stuff? I'm like, bro, this was us one day.
I remember being on Twitter asking bigger accounts what the fuck was up, and I was very lucky that there were a few people who shared information, shared alpha, and started me on my journey. It was a lot harder to find information back then.
I've kind of tried to make it my goal. In the RPG, I'm the fucking guy you go to for your beginner quest. I'm like, “Yo, bro, go this way. Here's a little sword. Here's a little shield. Get after it, bro.” That's what got me on my journey, and if I can do that for other people, then, you know, it's like this. I'm here all day, dude.
You are.
I can never leave. Why am I going to be miserable about it?
Okay, you might fry me for this, but I guess I'm showing my age. Can you tell me who this is that you tweeted?
That's Ian Balina.
I don't really—I’ve never seen this guy in my life.
So this is—
I've never seen this guy in my life.
Does he look like a plumber to you, bro?
No.
That guy might have the same suit you got on, bro. Come on now.
I've never seen this guy in my life.
4. The Original KOL Grift
Ian Balina is an OG ICO guy, an original paid KOL shiller. Way back in the day, there wasn't even any paid shit, right?
Uh-huh.
Then in 2017—and we got this in 2021 too—we had ICOs and new coins, right? They would pay people like BitBoy. Think of him like a BitBoy, I guess. He was kind of an earlier BitBoy, not nearly as—
BitBoy had a legendary prime. New gen doesn't know.
Yeah, this guy was not nearly as legendary as BitBoy.
Okay.
But this guy had an audience, and he would tell you that this coin was the new coin. You'd buy into the ICO and get instantly annihilated on day one.
He's a legend, but he caught a case. A lot of our criminals went to jail. I think that's something the new guard has to be ready for. Criminal prosecution in crypto moves kind of slowly. I think he caught a case only in the last couple of years for crimes he committed several years before.
D-Nap, let's look him up after this. Okay, I mean this sincerely, but do you think if John McAfee were on CT right now doing the lists, people would be screaming that he's a scammer and all of this? I saw some posts where people were kind of shitting on him in reply to my plumber stuff.
Bro, I'm going to get roasted for this. I think people think Kobe Bryant was better at basketball than he was because he's passed away now. Is that a crazy take?
I think you're wrong because I'm a Kobe stan, but you do get legendary lore—
Kobe's amazing. Kobe is in my—
People in the chat are saying yes.
Kobe is in my top 10, but people have been telling me Kobe's number two, and I'm like, “Okay, come on.” Kobe's not better than LeBron. Kobe's not better than a lot of people.
He's not better than LeBron.
Kobe's arguably not better than Shaq. I love Kobe, but because he's passed away, people look at him through rose-colored glasses and say, “Hey, Kobe was the GOAT.”
You can't hurt the image anymore. It's like—
Of course. John McAfee is legendary in many ways. He hacked the U.S. government by selling them a bunch of computers with McAfee Antivirus installed, and he used it as a Trojan horse to get information on the U.S. government.
He may or may not have killed his neighbor. He was on a boat floating around in international waters so he couldn't get caught for crimes he was on trial for. He may or may not have killed himself. But the stuff he did in crypto was absolutely unbelievable, max-level grift.
This is like some big billionaire on CT today tweeting out their favorite altcoin every Friday, like their Jim Cramer on Mad Money.
Favorite altcoin. It's so funny.
Dude, you can't see through it. It was so much more opaque back then. You know what I mean? It's like, “Well, wait a minute. Maybe he knows what he's talking about. He's got a bunch of dough.” Whereas now it's like, “Okay, does this guy have it or not?” I can go check this guy's on-chain history. He rugs everything after it goes to $10 million. He's trash.
5. Proof Became Public
This is actually something really good about the copy-trading, public-wallet era, I think. You could verify if people were rich or not, if they were LARPing or not, if they really made money or not.
Yeah, the only way you could really verify back in the day if you were rich—I mean, some people would flash balances and whatnot, but that was easily fake.
Easily fake.
On BitMEX, you had /position. This was what got Flood a lot of notoriety back in the BitMEX trollbox. People would be talking shit. It was like, “Oh, I think Bitcoin's going to crash here.” Flood would be like, “It's going up, dude.” “Fuck you. You're a fucking bear, retarded bear.” And he'd be like, “/position,” which shows you your actual position on BitMEX right now. You can't fake it.
He would be long some ungodly amount of Bitcoin, and the other person would immediately shut the fuck up. There were some things where you could make it obvious, push around an altcoin, or do some things, but it's not the same now. Now it's like, “Dude, here's my address. It's verifiable. I've made all this money on-chain.” Nothing like that really existed back then.
/position.
A lot easier to LARP back then.
/position. The BitMEX trollbox.
Yes, bro. Flood was the legend in the BitMEX trollbox back in the day because this was before the $6K floor broke. You'd type /position and then type in XBT for Bitcoin, and Flood would be long 5,000 fucking Bitcoin.
At the time, this was like $5 million, or sometimes even more—eight-figure positions. When you think quantitatively about how much Bitcoin that is today, it was crazy. It was crazy.
Whoa.
That was the equivalent of what you guys have today when you're like, “Show me your wallet.” That was it in the BitMEX days.
Wow. Do you think the social dynamics putting ever-increasing weight on not how good of a poster you are or how funny you are, but what your P&L is, is good or bad for the future of Finance Twitter, if you will?
It depends on what the goal is. I obviously think if you don't have some verifiable proof that you actually make money doing the thing you're talking about all day and telling other people that you do, why should anyone listen to you? It is one of those games where it's like, if you're so good at it, okay, do you have any evidence?
I think there's a lot of...
Some people do it with ulterior motives. They’re flashing the P&L and saying, “Yeah, but you gotta come and trade on my Axiom link,” or, “You gotta come copy me.” There’s a financial incentive for them to inflate what they do.
Trading’s 1v1, dude. The only person who should really care about your P&L is you. If you want to share that online, do it. I think that’s why the proof’s in the pudding for a lot of this stuff. I know a lot of people give guys like Frank a lot of shit, but the numbers are the numbers. Try to tell an NBA player, “He wasn’t that good.” He scored 20,000 points. How many points do you think DeMar DeRozan has? Guess.
He averaged 20 for a lot of years. He’s got 15,000 or 20,000.
Yes.
Yeah, 17,500.
How high do you think that is on the list? Do you think he’s top 50?
Dude, I think he’s top 50 all time, which is disgusting. He’s definitely top 100. I think he’s top 100 for sure, which is disgusting. I think he’s top 100, maybe top 50. I don’t think he’s top 25.
What if I told you DeMar DeRozan has more points than Paul Pierce? Does that sound crazy to you?
That’s a tough comparison.
What if I told you DeMar DeRozan has 26,000 points, bro? He’s 16th all time, bro.
16th all time?
DeMar DeRozan is 16th all time. He’s above Steph Curry, Paul Pierce, Tim Duncan, and Kevin Garnett.
Oh, Tim Duncan?
Dude, he’s going to pass Hakeem Olajuwon this year. You’d never guess that, but at the end of the day, can you say DeMar DeRozan’s a bad basketball player? I guess not.
But he’s unsigned. He’s an unsigned free agent.
Yeah. The numbers are the numbers, bro.
Oh my God.
It’s pretty hard with the technology you have today. Obviously, this is where I’m not as knowledgeable: the side-wallet things. I made a comment about a guy named Jack Duvall on stream yesterday.
Oh, they were spamming, asking about Jack Duvall.
6. The Side Wallet Problem
My opinion of Jack Duvall is this: I saw an Inversebrah thread where he was going back and forth with one of Jing Tao’s 75 accounts. He was basically calling him out, saying, “Hey, you made $50,000, but we all know you just post on your main wallet, buy it on your side wallets, and then scam that way.”
I couldn’t really tell you exactly how that worked, and then he got a response from Fat Duvall, which apparently isn’t him, but I thought that was hilarious. So I read that thread and formed an entire opinion about this guy, even though I have no actual information on him. You can tell me about that. Is that not an easy way that people can market?
What was your opinion?
I think if you’re flexing that you made $50,000, but the way you do it is by having a tracked wallet buy a coin so people who track your wallet buy it, while you’ve already loaded up on side wallets and are selling into that buying, then your tracked wallet might make some money, but you really make a tiny amount on the side wallets. To me, that’s shady and immoral.
Agreed. Well, people—
And—
People were mad at your take?
I know he tweeted at me and stuff, and I’m like, “Bro, I just want you to know I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care.”
What was his tweet? What was his tweet?
It was something like, “I heard you’re saying some things that are not very nice about me. Come chat with me on voice chat or something.”
You said no?
I just said, “Dude, my entire opinion of you came from an Inversebrah screenshot, like I—”
“Hello, TraderMayne. It’s come to my attention that you have made some not-so-bullish comments about me, and I think you have the wrong idea about me. Come join VC. Let’s trench some new pairs.”
Yeah.
I think Jack Duvall’s pretty funny. I shit on him so much—
I mean—
Because I think he’s just like—
Listen—
Go ahead.
If you’re getting shit, you’re doing something. Again, I don’t know what the— I assume the new generation hates the bundle-side-wallet guys, the same way the old generation hated the guys who would just shill coins they were paid to shill and then talk about being rich and all that.
It’s like, dude, you’re paid to get this coin. You got it at a crazy discount. You’re selling it to your followers’ heads. It’s the same thing.
Yeah.
It’s just a different way to play the game. Everyone’s got a moral barometer. I know what I’m willing to— I think side-wallet bundle raping is way worse than posting a Rainbet slip.
Yeah, I agree. Great PTJ.
Some people treat casino shills like they’re the devil. I’m like, you don’t have to sign up and use the casino. You’re buying this guy’s coins, and he’s dumping on you. I don’t know.
The Duvall incident, but taken in a vacuum, I think buying on the main wallet and selling on the side wallets is absolutely no different from writing some super-bullish thread and then slamming sell from some wallet no one knows about. It’s the same thing. It’s garbage. It’s bad.
Totally.
The method changes, the tooling changes, but people will find a way to do the same thing.
Arthur Hayes does this today with his newsletter. Speaking of Arthur Hayes—
I know. The hype for 5,000—
Guys, BitMEX. You weren’t even there. Forget the slash position. This exchange was paying for Arthur’s lifestyle. They knew where your stops were. There were order-submission error windows. When the market got volatile and you thought, “Holy shit, I better put a stop loss on,” it just didn’t work anymore. The exchange was bricked.
You might have been trading on this exchange as a North American person while they were under investigation. The FBI might contact you. There was a lot of shit going on back in the day with these exchanges, where there was no on-chain activity. We had no choice but to have counterparty risk. Shout-out Counterparty TV.
We had no choice. I was sending my money to some shady Chinese exchange so I could long some bullshit altcoin because I saw some random thread on a forum—not even on Twitter, on a forum—and I was just hoping my Bitcoin showed up there. I’d buy the altcoin, and then I’d hope it got listed on Bittrex, because that was legitimacy. Bittrex also went bankrupt and closed. It was just a different world, whereas now with FOMO, I don’t even have to bridge.
Yeah, it’s crazy.
So, to go back to our original point, the game’s different.
The game’s different.
You guys have landmines we didn’t have to deal with. We had landmines you didn’t have to deal with. There was a smaller pool of assets and a smaller pool of people back then. Crypto was novel in 2014. 2017 was novel. Now the president has launched a memecoin, and we have the CLARITY Act attempting to get passed in the Senate or Congress, wherever it is at this point. It’s just different.
Mm-hmm.
I don’t think one is harder than the other, because the same people who lost money today would have lost money back then, and I think people who are really good today would have adapted to the game back in the day. The people who are still around now from the earlier days are already rich, so clearly they’re pretty good at what they’re doing, or they’re still able to make money now.
I personally think it’s easier to trade Bitcoin, Ether, and Solana hype with leverage than it ever was.
Just because they’re bigger and trade more normally?
They’re liquid and efficient now.
Yeah.
They’re unbelievably efficient. There’s so much money. There are passive flows and predictable trends. It’s less volatile. Bitcoin doesn’t go up as much or down as much.
As a day trader or swing trader with perps, I find it easier. But I do not have the skills for the memecoin game, straight up. That would be like telling me some player in the ’80s, or whenever it came in the late ’70s, “There’s this thing now. Shoot from behind here; it’s worth 3 points.” They’d be like, “What the fuck, dude? 3 points for shooting it from here? I only have the oopsy-daisy, 2-hand underhand shot. I can’t be shooting from here.”
I don’t know, man. It’s just a different game, dude.
7. Crypto Needs New Inflows
So what now? Where—what do you think happens now? What happens with crypto from here? We’re in such a weird spot where I—
You know, I’ll give you my view if you want. I think most of the downside risk at this point to Bitcoin is fairly negated. Okay, cool—
Agreed.
—maybe we get wiped to $50,000, but I don’t know how much worse it can really get. What does that even mean if we go to $50,000 from here? The risk-reward, especially for the last leg, is kind of whatever on the downside.
I think the problem with BTC is not who’s left to sell, but more why would you buy it? I think there are some interesting thought processes. On one hand, it’s completely uncorrelated to the AI trade, which has basically become the stock market. It’s kind of hard to get exposure to risk that isn’t betting on superintelligence, and so Bitcoin maybe has some upside there.
I also find myself getting excited about on-chain again. I think this whole social trading thing is really interesting. I’m seeing more people on TikTok talking about crypto than I am on Twitter, which is wild. I’m seeing Kimi get talked about. People, streamers, are talking about Kimi. I just sort of see it—
That’s my GOAT.
—the GOAT. I see it playing out, that this could be huge. It could be what people thought day trading would be or what people thought forex would be.
And so I get the on-chain thing, but at some point we’re going to need some massive capital inflows. I love to say that it doesn’t matter what Bitcoin does, but it does matter. What it’s going to take for those capital inflows to come to Bitcoin, to me, is such a massive question mark. So I don’t know. Is it the lost decade? Where are we?
I kind of almost consider myself retail-ish when it comes to the on-chain stuff, because I don’t do it that much.
Yep.
I think on-chain this cycle is way more attractive for someone like me. If I’m a proxy for retail, who has even less knowledge about crypto, the fact that we have the Pump.fun app, the FOMO app— I hated the idea of having to bridge last cycle.
That’s the worst.
It is the worst. I talked to some guys, like, “Dude, you have to have money on every exchange, on every chain. It’s the only way to capitalize on all of these opportunities.” I was like, “Well, I’m not doing that.”
So the fact alone that that barrier to entry is gone, I think, is huge, to your point. I think on-chain is not going anywhere. I don’t think meme coins are going anywhere. I don’t have the same view of memes as Ansem does, for example, only because I think that he’s reward-first, not risk-first.
Of course, meme coins are one of the very few places where it’s absolutely a lottery, dude. You can turn a little bit of money into a lot. We’ve seen it. We’ve seen it a ton of times, but there’s a little bit of survivorship bias.
Yeah, fair.
Most people get destroyed at memes. It just is what it is. Most of you are going to get annihilated. If crypto is worthless in general, meme coins, as a derivative of the majors, are even more worthless, right?
Yeah.
So if you’re going to get rugged on some altcoin that has actual stuff going on—not that many do, but some of these coins even make money and they go down 89%—what hopes does your meme coin specifically have of going up?
And then also, the culture of meme coins, I think, needs some work. If you want it to be more like the old days, where it was plumbers, guess what we used to do in the old days? We used to hold shit.
Yeah.
There was a lot of stuff that went up 1,000x, but most people round-tripped because they held too long, as opposed to now, where I feel people sell too early.
Yeah.
It’s the inverse. People can barely hold anything past a few days. I’m on the FOMO app, looking at the top traders’ hold times, and it’s 48 hours. I’m like, “What the fuck is this even?” Right?
Yeah, yeah.
I do think that if you want to have runners like we had back in the day, there were obviously fewer coins, but people held shit. People were more like Murad.
Yeah, yeah.
They found a coin, made it their personality, believed in everything they were saying, and held it. It might have gone up a lot, but the vast majority of these people completely round-tripped it.
The most exciting thing to me happening in crypto right now is the perpification of everything.
Yeah.
I think we’re seeing these major companies—Kraken, Coinbase, Robinhood, Polymarket—all heading toward this nexus of being the everything apps. You can do basically everything there.
Yep.
Right?
So good.
You’re going to be able to bank, trade perps, trade single-name stocks, trade pre-IPO markets, and trade what color shirt Thread Guy is going to wear on his stream in 2029, when he’s going to stream to millions. That’s just what it’s going to be.
I think that’s a really cool use case for crypto. Everything is becoming on-chain and verifiable, with trading 24/7/365. I’m optimistic about that stuff.
The thing that I think is the worst thing we’ve seen come from this is how much attention the AI trade took from us. I feel like a lot of money that we thought was coming our way went to Texas and is in AI data centers.
Yeah.
We’re even seeing Bitcoin miners—I think it was Riot—
Riot.
—do a deal with Anthropic for—
$9 billion.
—compute, and it’s like, damn, dude. It kind of makes sense. Why would you mine Bitcoin when, at these prices, it’s not even really profitable, or barely profitable, when you could do compute and get $9 billion going out over 15 years?
I think that attention has to come back to crypto one way or another. I think everything going on-chain is one of the ways that happens: more people trading. We’re seeing this already with Hyperliquid, early days, right? Remember at the start of the Iran war when Hyperliquid started trading oil?
Crazy.
The traditional market snapped to what Hyperliquid was trading at over the weekend. I think that’s a way that a lot of money comes back on-chain.
And then maybe we can go back in time. One of the best things about 2017 is that when Bitcoin went up, because there was nowhere to go with your money, that money naturally flowed downstream into Ethereum—
Yeah.
—into Litecoin, into all of these other altcoins. You remember that screenshot—I’m sure you’ve seen it—where the majors go, then the mid-caps—
Yeah, yeah.
—then the low-caps.
Yeah.
People have tried to replicate that now. It just doesn’t work. The money doesn’t flow like that anymore because the market structure has changed. You can take profit to stablecoin.
Maybe this is a kind of simile for that now, where this money is just going to be on-chain because people want to trade Tesla on the weekend. They’re like, “Oh, you know, what else can I do with this money? It’s already on-chain. Rather than wire it back to my bank, maybe I’ll just keep it on-chain.” You know? So maybe that’s a positive thread.
What do you think about—I think it’s a great point about perps, like low- to medium-timeframe Bitcoin price action on some technical-analysis shit. What—
I don’t think the bottom is in. I think I’m starting to be more and more of a minority on that, but exactly what you—
Yeah, you are a minority for sure.
—exactly what you said, I don’t think a new low is a bad thing, or it’s the end of the world, or it’s that damaging to crypto overall. I just think the bear market has been pretty shallow and nothing really bad has happened.
Maybe this is just me being around for prior cycles, but pretty much every bear market ended with something meaningful blowing up. I know Saylor sold some Bitcoin, but it was a de minimis amount relative to his holdings. Has he even sold 2,000 coins total?
I don’t think so.
Yeah, it’s like 1,600 or 1,700. He’s got 700,000, you know what I mean? To me, a bottom signal would be Saylor ripping a few billion, like a big fucking—
Yeah, really. Everyone’s doing this narrative and, as a local bull here—or at least an on-chain bull with no real opinion on Bitcoin—even I was kind of doing the “Saylor sold and we didn’t go down” thing. He didn’t really sell anything. He sold a couple hundred million dollars.
Yeah, it’s a test transaction, bro. He hasn’t really sold anything, and he saw how much the market reacted when he did sell initially, and it was bad.
So, yeah, I think worst-case scenario, we’re in the $40,000s and $50,000s. But if you’re thinking long term, which at this point in the market you should be, if Bitcoin goes to $200,000 next cycle, do you give a shit if you bought at $60,000 or $50,000? I don’t think so.
No.
I don’t think it really matters.
Zero.
And I think it’s just a matter of where Ansem is 100% correct: you should be paying attention now. These are discounted prices. I personally think they could get a little more discounted, but trying to catch the bottom is pointless, right? We’re pretty dang close.
I like that. Okay, I might have one more for you. Complete switch-up. A couple months ago, maybe 6 months ago, you had a pretty sick outcome. You sold Breakout to Kraken. I see the Kraken shirt on right now. It's getting cut off a little bit.
Bro, 11 months ago, dude.
That's 11 months ago?
Yeah.
Right before—
You know what's crazy before you get into this?
Go ahead.
I randomly was watching a video I had done about the sale, and I'd posted it on Twitter. Some guy commented, “This is the top. It will be so obvious in hindsight.” It was the top. I almost wanted to retweet it and say, “What does this motherfucker know?” We started the company when Bitcoin was around 20K.
Wow.
We sold it when Bitcoin was at 120K. We caught the bull run pretty damn well.
Wow. Okay, so you sold Breakout to Kraken 11 months ago. You sold a company you worked on for a long time, and I don't know how much money you have or how much you sold it for, but the assumption is that it's a very large economic outcome, even if you've done really well before.
I'm curious, 11 months removed from the sale, what is the psychology of selling the company? More importantly, how did it change your life? How did it affect your mental state, your happiness, or your ability to trade? What personally changed as a result?
8. The Psychology Of Selling
Totally. I'll preface this: I made more money selling this company than I ever made trading, and I consider myself to have done pretty well trading crypto over the years.
I started working with a performance coach named Elliot Roe—shout-out to him. I actually did an interview with him on my YouTube channel about 2 weeks ago—around a year before selling the company. This was before we were even talking about an acquisition or anything with anyone, because I was in one of the worst places mentally and physically that I'd been in a very long time.
Whoa.
I was running a business that was growing very fast, we were in the middle of a bull run, and I was trying to do both. I had FOMO because I was on Twitter every day. Part of my job was being on Twitter, posting charts, and getting engagement, because that drove people to Breakout. I also liked to trade. That's what I'd been doing for a living.
Yeah.
But the business had gotten to a point where I could not do both well. I was half-assing 2 things instead of whole-assing 1 thing. You know what I mean?
Yeah.
My business partner, Alex, told me, “I know about this guy. He works with a lot of poker pros, traders, high-net-worth individuals, high performers, athletes, and MMA fighters. He helps you basically max out and dial in your performance.”
That changed my life because we had a bunch of sessions together. He walks you through some of your hang-ups. You do hypnotherapy. You go back into your childhood, and he finds things that happened to you as a kid. I was bawling my eyes out after our first call, dude. I don't cry.
Whoa.
Unless it's the end of some sad movie with a dog in it. I'm pretty stone-faced, you know? He had me crying because you do hypnotherapy and go back to childhood. It's like, “You have a problem around this, and it's manifesting today in this way.” It was nuts.
He helped me create frameworks and processes to be more efficient with my time and perform better in my role. What I gave up in the last bull run was trading as much. I needed to focus on Breakout. We agreed that this was the thing where the potential outcome was higher. I just wasn't getting the instant gratification you get from trading, which is short-term.
Flood tweeted about this yesterday, but you have to disconnect your sense of well-being from the short-term fluctuations in the number on the screen. You're never going to grow. When you're in a bull market, it's hard because your net worth is like this, dude: good day, fucking horrible day.
Yeah.
Best day of my life, fucking terrible day. That was affecting my life in many ways—my business, how I was treating my body, not going to the gym, not eating well, partying, whatever.
We went hard. We ended up selling Breakout, and he told me right before—because we knew the deal was done before it was officially done—“You're probably going to have 48 hours where you're on cloud nine. That's it.”
I'm like, “That's it?”
He's like, “That's it.”
I'm like, “Bro, I'm on my honeymoon with my wife in Italy when I got the wire. How much better does it get? I'm on a boat that I chartered, and the wire hits. I look at my account. I show my wife. I sign out. I sign back in. I sign out again. I sign back in. I'm refreshing it. I'm screenshotting it.”
For 48 hours, dude, it was the highest of highs. I'm not even thinking about it anymore. That started pretty soon after.
Whoa.
Life just goes on, bro. I'm already trying to think about what's the next thing I want to do, what's the next thing I want to build, and how I get to the next level. It's exciting, but it's also kind of annoying because I thought this was it.
You can't—
I thought, “Okay, I'm good now. I'm just going to retire.” Bro, I know I'm unc, but I'm not going to—what am I going to do all day, dude?
So I went to Miami for about 4 months afterward. We partied it up. We lived it up. Then I'm like, “Yeah, I want to work again.” I started streaming. Why?
You're going harder now.
I'm doing more content now—
You're doing more stuff now.
I'm doing more content now than I think I ever was. For me, the biggest thing it made me realize is that there's another level out there. Once you do it, you realize it's possible. You just want to do it again and again and again.
I think winners love to win. When you find a new way to win, you're like, “Okay, I want to win more that way.” I don't think I won trading. I don't think you ever win trading. But I'd been winning at trading for a long time, to the point where it became mechanical. My trades are the same all the time. They're super basic. I make money doing it. I make a good living.
This was a new winning experience for me, and I'm like, “Oh, this is fucking sick.” You know what I mean? You're doing it right now. You're putting in the groundwork for something that, in a few years' time, could get acquired for some crazy sum, and you're going to be like, “Holy shit. It's possible.”
You never think it's possible until you do it. You never think you're going to make money trading until you start making money trading. It was motivating in many ways because I wanted more, and I'm still hungry, which was great.
But it's also frustrating in some ways because you learn that there is no end state for people like us. The people who have the ability to have exceptional outcomes, make a bunch of money, and be at the top of their field—there is no endgame. There's no winning.
There's a reason why the best people at what they do always end up being involved in some way, doing it a different way, because you can't quit, man. You can't quit, bro. The reason you can't quit is the reason you're able to do what you do today. You know what I mean?
Wow. On hour 49, were you miserable, or did you come back to life?
I was still in Italy, crushing gelato, pasta, and red wine, so I was able to extend it. I also went to Miami, so I was able to extend it for a little while. You know what I mean? Something in the Miami air, you know?
It's like a diet. You pull that—
You know that song they play—
—pull that liquidity forward.
They play that song when you open up your balcony in Miami—
Yeah.
—and look out, like, da, da, da, da, da, da.
Stays heated. Rick Ross.
That was my life for a good few weeks.
Sometimes I even forget that it's there. Then I'll be looking at something and be like, “Damn, this shit's kind of expensive.” I'm like, “What the fuck am I talking about, bro? We're taking the PJ. Why would I get a PJ to go on a 2-hour flight?” It's because I can now.
Oh.
You know what I mean? Certain things remind me, and I'm like, “Okay, that's pretty sweet.”
This came to me well before Breakout, bro, but once you have a baseline of money that's spitting off some income—say you get a couple of M's and put it into T-bills or something—you have a side gig, whatever it is, or you post Rainbet slips. Once you have money that's handling your monthly expenses, I actually believe trading becomes easier because you're no longer trading to survive.
I think this grindset culture around 24/7 trading to pay your bills—maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I started trading my best when I was still working. I went full-time, then got a job again and continued to trade, because then I knew I wasn't pulling money out of my trading account that I was trying to compound.
Yes. Yes.
...to pay my rent, buy food, and live. Having that financial stability underneath you, I do think, makes you a better trader.
Wow.
Bro, this can be me. This can be you soon. You're going to be talking to some Zoomer in virtual reality. You're both going to have Meta glasses on. You're going to be 32, having sold Counterparty for mid-nine figures, and some guy's going to be like, “What was it like, Unc, back in 2024?” And you're like, “Bro, do you even know what minting an NFT means?” He's going to be like, “What the fuck's an NFT?” And you're just going to look at him and shake your head. You have no idea.
Wow, bro. I'm getting—fuck, man, I'm getting old.
Bro, shut the fuck up.
That—
You want to know? You know GaryVee is going a little viral right now for—
The Gentle Giant thing?
Yeah, the Inquisitive Iguana.
Set a hike, uh—
Like, the fucking—
...hike, hike race to 100%, 100%.
Yeah, Retarded Rabbit, the Shitty Squirrel, all the other ones. I used to clown on GaryVee a lot. Now I like some of the stuff he says, but I used to always clown on him when he would tell people they're so young. You remember those clips?
Yeah.
He's like, “Dude, you're so young. Fuck you.” As I get older, bro, I agree so much. I would give all my money back to be 20 again, every single fucking dollar. And I'm not even that old, but I'm now looking at, like, legitimately, 50 is closer to me than 20. Do you know how fucked up that is?
Wow.
Because in my head, bro, when we hang out, I feel like when I'm hanging out with you and the boys, I'm like, “Oh, I'm still—I can hang.”
Yeah, you—
It's like, dude—
You're going hard, bro. Yeah, we see.
I can hang.
You can hang.
But when you're older, your mind doesn't change, dude. I'm just an older, still-retarded kid.
Yeah.
Yeah, I have more responsibility. I can act more grown-up.
More mature.
Maybe I have some more wisdom, but in my head, I'm still the same person I was 15 years ago. So I agree with GaryVee on that. Bro, when you're young, if you have youth and a little bit of money in this game, this is where, again, I think Ansem is super right. Some of you young guys do have an opportunity here where you can burn a year trying to chase this golden goose and change your life, because you have nothing to lose right now.
There's no difference between 21 and 22. There isn't one. So if you're going to spend a couple of years in the trenches trying to run it up on a memecoin, you're single, you have no expenses—bro, now's the time to be taking amazingly outsized risks because you have time on your side. As you get into your 30s, you get a wife, you have a house, you have to think about all these other things and take care of your people. You can't take the same risks you did before.
Hey, I don't know if you post your real life. Can I tell the chat where you took me when you came to New York?
Yeah, of course.
Okay. First, we had a little kickback at my house for the NBA Finals. Maine came over and he was kind of the star. Then the next night, he took me to The Box.
Bro, Rasmer bought my watch—
Yeah, Rasmer—
...which he then wore to win the Solana World Series of Poker, bro. The lore on this watch is going to be crazy—
Wait, I forgot about that, actually.
...by the time it's done.
Maine comes to the house with, I don't know, maybe 30 people there—35 people.
Yeah.
And Rasmer is obsessed with this watch. He's wearing this gold Rolex. He buys it off Maine's wrist that night, right? Nick's won the finals.
That night.
He bought it that night off his wrist, and then the next night Maine's like, “We're going out.” I meet up with him and a couple of other anonymous crypto guys. He takes me to The Box, which was kind of a movie. The Box was a movie. That was sick.
The Box was crazy.
The Bo—
The Box was crazy.
And I can confirm—
I didn't know what to expect.
...he can hang. He can hang. You could actually really hang.
Yeah.
Probably better than I can.
Yeah. It just gets harder the older you get. Hanging gets harder to do. The next day—
The morning is tough.
...the day after, ooh, ooh.
Yeah, that was a great session. How often are you streaming right now?
Twice a week: Tuesdays and Thursdays, bro.
How do you like it?
What the—well, I have to get you to come on.
You've done a lot of streams.
We have to get you to come on, bro. I want to see you in the guest chair. I'm going to prepare some questions for you, bro.
Hey, by the way, for the chat—they'll find this funny—you asked me to come on a couple of months ago, and I told you, “Let me close Zcash for $1,000,000, and then I'll come on.” I closed it. I round-tripped about half of it. It was still a sick close, a sick trade, but once I started texting you, “Let me make a million on it first,” I should've just—
That should've been your take-profit moment.
I should've snapped close right there. You—
Yeah.
...you always stream on YouTube, yeah?
I stream on YouTube and Twitter.
The chat's asking.
What I love about streaming is I suck at writing, bro.
Really?
I actually think you're a good writer.
Thanks.
I think Ansem's a good writer. There are lots of guys who can write and portray what they're trying to say, getting the point across in long-form written content. I've always been better at this. I'm a yapper.
Huh.
I don't do any planning on my streams, really. I just turn the camera on—
Really? You just go?
...and I just rip.
That's awesome.
A lot of what I do on my streams in the first hour is all charts. It's just a bit of a... That's what I love about where crypto content creation is right now: you have so many different shows you can watch where you're getting different information and different takes from different people.
My show and your show are different. You know what I mean? I think there's value in both of them. You talk to some of the most interesting people in the space.
Thanks, man.
You're a finger on the pulse of what's going on on CT. You're young, right? So you're in the trenches doing the things, trading on-chain, whereas I will chart your shitty altcoin and give you an objective view as someone who has no skin in the game but knows a little thing about TA. I'll give you my opinion, and then you can go watch Z and FaZe Banks and watch their show, see them interview great people, and hear Z's market takes, which are obviously very popular right now.
I think we're just going to see this continue to grow and expand. For the people hating on the new-age content creators, a lot of the content creators in crypto back in the day were all grifters, okay?
Yeah.
The only reason they created content—BitBoy, Moon Carl, all these guys, the Martini guy—was to make money. Go look at these guys' audience sizes and then look at the views they get. All their followers are dead, right? Because they lost all their money. These people would say, “Top 10 altcoins for this market cycle,” and every single one of those altcoins paid them to have an ad placement, to have a video spot.
That was the grift back then, whereas you're doing this because you like to do this. You're not doing this because you're trying to shill someone some ICO that you have a presale into. I actually think crypto content's in a way better space now than it ever was.
Unbelievable take. And as a wrap, I'll let you go in a second. Speaking of TA and speaking of shilling coins: Pump.fun.
Yes. I'll ask you this, because I personally did not get the DM from the big Yahoo—I mean, Elon—about the Pump.fun presale. I didn't get into the round. I know some people got in the round. Some of my friends got in the round. I didn't even get the offer. They messaged me later, being like, “Hey, we want to work together.” I was like, “You guys didn't even let me fucking—
You didn't even DM me.
You didn't even give me the DM, bro. I would've invested 100%—long degeneracy.
Yeah.
Do you think it's interesting how a bunch of people simultaneously, almost in unison, started getting really bullish on Pump.fun right before the unlock?
9. The Pump Fun Unlock Debate
Okay, here's what I'll say. I have a few takes. You want my takes? I have a few takes.
Yes, please.
First of all, I didn't invest. Second, there is some interesting timing, okay? But the one thing I will say is I started seeing these takes, and a lot of people were saying this because they were fired up—everyone was shilling Pump.fun. I felt like they were wrong because I felt as if I was one of the leading shillers of Pump.fun.
The reason I started shilling Pump.fun was kind of this, let's call it, coincidental timing. Basically, back to back in early July, Cash Cat deploys on Robinhood and goes to $150 million instantly. Ansem deploys or takes over his coin, and it goes to $450 million as a SOL pair. Then we're all kind of like, “Wait, meme coins?”
I started looking at Pump.fun's revenue, and I was like, “Wait, wait, wait. They're still doing this now? In these conditions, they're doing this now? And Hyperliquid is worth 25 times more? Why is Hyperliquid worth 25 times more?”
Hyperliquid is worth 25 times more because people think perps are a bigger market than meme coins, people think Jeff is the GOAT and Elon sucks, and people think perps are going to be here in 10 years while meme coins are not going to be here in 10 years. Maybe we'll equate 7 or 8 times to each of those three.
The 8 times assigned to the idea that meme coins won't be here in a couple of years seems like it's being invalidated right now, because how much worse could it get after 10/10? They're still making $1 million a day. There's 8 times out of the 25 right there. I like this.
I started talking about Pump.fun like, “Wait, what exactly is going on here?” Combine that with the social trading stuff, and I'm like, “Wait, what's going on here?” Then Kimchi goes viral at the same time, and there are these outer forces.
Now, was this orchestrated because of the unlock? Maybe. I'm not going to say the timing isn't a little bit interesting, but there were some ulterior things going on here. Honestly, I don't think the big duder has enough motion to send a $2 billion coin.
The big duder, bro. That's my GOAT, dude. No, I think that's a good take. Listen, from a pure TA perspective, Pump.fun put in a monthly low and a weekly sweep all the way back in the middle of June.
You want to do the screen share for once?
Yeah, yeah. Let me do that.
I'm on full cam, and no one can see you if you reveal the secret.
Sharing turned on. Request sent.
Allow. Let's do it for once.
Do it for the lads. All right, let's see here. Can you all see that?
I think so. Beautiful. Nice, got it.
Regardless of whether or not unlocks were happening, this is a bullish setup on any altcoin.
Whoa. This looks good.
On any altcoin, when you have this really aggressive sell-off, then a slightly less aggressive sell-off, it's straight down, basically, here. Then it starts to go sideways.
This is exactly when you want to pay attention, because it's either going to consolidate and then bounce, or it's going to just roll over. This is a good example of the same thing here on PENGU, right? Super-aggressive sell-off, slightly less aggressive, sideways, then it gets its rip.
Altcoins just kind of follow this bottoming path, and they either break out or they don't, right? Pump.fun seems to be attempting its breakout here. But what's most important, I think, is down here. This is right around the time everyone started shilling a little bit, actually earlier.
Any time we get a weekly SFP on any coin—Bitcoin, altcoins, et cetera—it's when that candle wicks below an old low but then closes above. You get that kind of doji-looking thing right there.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
That's a really high hit-rate signal for crypto. If you go to Bitcoin and look up every single time we've had a weekly SFP, I would say almost 90% of the time we get a big move.
Was that the 97K fake-pump one?
Yeah.
It's outside?
Almost every single time, we get a big move. Here's the top of the last 4 big moves. These are all weekly swing failure patterns.
Wow. What about that next one? Does that count, right there?
This is a weekly swing failure pattern.
That was a sell-off. That was brutal.
This is a weekly swing failure pattern. This is a weekly swing failure pattern. I did a YouTube video on this. Over the last 5 years, about 80% of the time, these have resulted in a minimum 10% move.
So what is it? A big wick on the weekly that doesn't close below?
The idea is this, right? You have a level here. This is the low timeframe. We're trading above it and then back below, and it ends up closing like this on the weekly chart.
Got it.
The concept here is very simple. If we're going to go down, my stop loss goes there. All these people are trapped. They were longing for a breakout, right? A bunch of people were shorting here, thinking it was going to go down, but they shorted too early.
They flipped long. They're trapped. Now you're in high odds for a short. If I zoom in on Bitcoin here, that's exactly what this price action looks like, right?
Oh.
We traded above the level and got instantly back below.
Instantly.
All these people are now conceivably trapped. You have an easy invalidation, and even if you're wrong, your stop loss is super close. This is one of my favorite setups in all of crypto, and it's exactly what Pump.fun put in.
I was half-joking when I said, “What do you think about all the coordinated shilling?”
It was a fair narrative.
When everyone starts shilling something in unison, rather than bitching and complaining on Twitter, I look at the chart. I say, “Is there a reason? Sure, there are unlocks, but does the chart look good?”
The same thing happened with Solana at the bottom. You remember—
Solana actually put one in recently, right?
Yeah, right down here. Everyone was shitting on Solana down here, saying, “Whoa, look, the Solana KOLs are out in full force.” I'm like, “Solana's not fucking paying anyone to shill Solana.” I was like, “Let's look at the chart.”
It just took out a huge low. If it can close above this low, it's objectively bullish regardless of what you think is going on. It took out the huge low, traded above it, reclaimed, and had a huge push.
Pump.fun put in the exact same setup. If you can learn to master this setup, you'll make a lot of money in trading. This thing is going down aggressively, takes out that low, and closes back above. This is your clue that buyers are potentially entering the market. The reason doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter.
Just look at the chart. It closed above there. I'm officially bullish unless we trade below that low again.
Oof.
That low.
God.
Not up here anymore. When you're taking your entry—
Oh, oh, oh, oh. Got it.
Once I see that close above—
Got it.
I'm looking for any sort of reason to long on a pullback here. We actually get the same setup playing out right here, just on a lower timeframe.
Yeah.
Okay.
Oh, you did.
Same setup.
Same setup. Yeah.
Where is this pulling back to? You want me to pull out my OG Fibonacci retracement?
Yes.
It all works the exact same, right? There's your OTE at 62%, sweeping right into it. This is a pullback into an order block. All the things I'd be looking for are here, and I have an entire video series, guys, on my YouTube—a trading boot camp I just released. You can learn all this shit. It's free.
Go watch that shit.
This was bullish regardless of what happened. That's my entire point. It was bullish regardless of the unlock. I agree with you. There may be something to the coordinated shilling.
What's great about crypto now is that we have fundamentals that matter. Back in 2017, we had a white paper and fake partnership announcements, but there was no real money. At least in DeFi, it's started. Curve makes money. Is Curve worth $400 million making what they make?
Yeah.
Of course not. But this cycle, I think we saw the beginnings of it over the last couple of cycles: the revenue meta.
Yes.
This matters now. Hyperliquid can no longer, in my opinion, be looked at just as a chart. The fact that this company makes so much money matters.
I get what you're saying.
Just like Pump.fun, to your point: noticing that they're still printing.
Mm-hmm.
That’s an actual data point now, where it used to be like, “I don’t really care what they do, just show me the chart.” Well, now, if these companies aren’t making money, who’s investing?
Yeah.
Other than a meme coin that you’re investing in purely to speculate on, it’s going to be very hard to justify selling any sort of altcoin that’s not a meme coin unless there is some sort of revenue attached to it. What does your business do? Does it make money? If not, why is anyone going to want to buy it? We have coins that make money that don’t even go up, so the market’s going to market.
Wow.
I mean—
So how do you read targets on something like this after you get your high timeframe?
I think you look at the high timeframe and just look left, right? This is a really nice place of symmetry here. We have a bearish SFP, right? We traded above that high and closed below. We nuked 50%. Now we traded below that low and closed above. We rallied 100%. This is the inverse move of this.
Ah, I see.
You see how that’s—
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If I were to put this chart—
I see what you’re saying.
Upside down, there’s the bottom and there’s the top.
Oh, it looks so top-heavy. It’s going so low.
Yeah.
It’s like, send that thing to zero.
So this, to me, looks like a test of support now on the inverted scale. This is definitely resistance, and this thing’s moved up 150% while Bitcoin’s up 10% off the bottom. If you longed anywhere near the low on Pump.fun, I think this is probably a decent area to de-risk some. Any sort of close above 3,500 here is probably a pretty easy breakout line.
What if you’re hypothetically long at 1,800?
Hypothetically speaking, if you’re long at 1,800?
Yeah. With a lot of money.
With a lot of money—
Yeah.
Hypothetically speaking, of course.
Yeah.
I don’t hate holding some. I would’ve probably taken profit a little.
Okay.
I would’ve de-risked a little at this point because you’re up 50% raw.
Raw.
That’s pretty good—
Yeah.
—in a short amount of time, in a relatively vertical move. Then you have 2 options. Option number 1, you draw a little trend line like this.
Ah.
The moment it breaks below this trend line—
You’re just gone.
—it’s probably cooked.
For at least for a while.
At least for a while. Some sort of pullback. This is exactly how I timed the top on these. We’re going to go from Pump.fun to AI trades.
I was going to say SpaceX kind of looks like this too. The chat’s saying that a bunch.
Yeah, but if you look at any of these AI moves, is this any different?
These are starting to look interesting too, aren’t they? Oh, yeah. Nice.
100%, but is this any different than a—
Yeah.
—parabolic meme coin?
Yeah.
Once you lose that really aggressive trend, I did the same thing on Micron here. Once you lose this really, really crazy trend—
Got to be cooked for a while.
—usually you get some sort of correction. Now, can this go up again? Absolutely. I agree with you. Micron looks decent here. SanDisk looks kind of decent here. Gun to my head, this stuff goes choppy sideways into the end of the year.
Do you think it has to break? Do you think 1,400 is bullish again, or has it got to go to 1,700?
For this?
Yeah.
I don’t think this is bullish again on the high timeframe until it’s above 1,700.
1,700. What is the 1,400? Is it kind of just a little new range established?
This is potential resistance here.
Got it.
If it’s going to put in a lower high, I think this is where it happens. I think this stuff kind of does something like this—
Got it.
—end of the year.
But if that chart gets to 1,500 on SanDisk, you’re not a bull yet?
I would maybe even look to short it.
It’s a little early, you think. It’s got to get above it.
Yeah, too early.
Yeah.
The other thing that I just have no fucking read on is the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq and stuff. I’m long Nasdaq here. This is my expectation. If this doesn’t happen—
Oh, God.
—I think that’s really bad and Bitcoin kind of dies. I want to see everything here just extend. I don’t want to see this pull back and chop. I just want to see an extension of the move, or I think we’re back in this range with a potentially larger correction coming.
What about Hyperliquid? It put in a weird chart, like a double-top kind of thing?
Listen, people might hate me. First of all, this is the inverse of that trend-line breakdown I’m showing you. This—
So it’s broken out of it, you think?
—should go up from here.
Yeah.
If we get one more leg below on Bitcoin, I’m buying as much Hyperliquid as I can down here.
Yeah, that seems reasonable.
Yeah. And if it doesn’t come down there, I’ll buy it higher. I want to own HYPE. I already own some HYPE, and I plan to buy more HYPE. This, to me, is kind of a BNB-esque trade.
Ah. Okay. One more thing. I find myself feeling a little bit interested in ETH as an idea.
Ooh.
As an idea.
You crazy boy.
Robinhood, like frickin’ coins—
My friend—
—frickin’ coins.
My friend Ponzi Trader calls this “based single-line analysis.”
Okay.
This is the most bullish that ETH/BTC has looked in 5 years.
What a brutal chart that is.
Yeah. Remember, ETH made a new all-time high here versus dollars, right?
Wow.
But relative to Bitcoin, there’s an argument to be made that this thing never makes an all-time high against Bitcoin again.
Probably not.
Right? We could see ETH go to $10,000 and this thing could do this.
Look at the pennant chart.
You know what I mean? That being said, this is the most bullish this thing has looked in legitimately 5 years, because it’s just been in a consistent, aggressive downtrend. Now we’ve got this kind of move up, and it’s attempting a higher low. I think that’s what’s most interesting. As long as this chart can actually start flipping some of these levels, this would be level 1—
So you’ve—
This is probably level 2.
I mean, it’s got to flip level 2, though, doesn’t it?
I think it’s interesting now because the first clue that it might flip level 1 is the trend-line breakout.
Okay.
Technically, this is still a downtrend. This could just do this.
Because versus your SanDisk, you wanted it to flip level 2 before you got bullish.
Yeah, yeah. But the difference here is I’m not trading this chart per se.
Yeah, fair, fair, fair.
I’m trading—
Fair, fair, fair.
—I’m trading this chart.
Fair.
And we’re talking about different things here. I think short-term bullishness on ETH makes sense here, but this is also the most optimal area for it to put in a new high.
Well, that one did a little sweep at—
I think ETH could very easily trade sub-$1,000 still this cycle.
Yeah, I don’t—
If Bitcoin goes to $50,000 or $45,000, I would not be surprised at all if ETH makes another low. But for the short term and medium term, it’s been stronger lately, and this is the chart I’d be watching. If this thing can continue going up and Bitcoin goes into the 70s, maybe the 80s, ETH is going to continue to outperform. So this is one to watch.
Wow. That was quick.
This is all the plumbers had, by the way, okay?
This is good shit.
There was no holding USD. When you were tired of trading Bitcoin, you would put it into ETH, because that was it.
Oh my God.
That was all you had.
I’m thinking about the TA. I’m sitting here thinking about the first time you showed me TA on fucking Shageth coin. I was like, “Oh my God.”
Bro, I have charts with lines going back to 2014. I really was plumbing with fucking wooden tools, man. You guys have pneumatic fucking drills and shit now. I was using a hammer and doing fucking hand calculations. It was brutal.
Wow. That’s awesome. Man, you’re the GOAT, dude. This was fucking lit.
Always a good time, bro.
Every Monday for the last 18 weeks, I've released a 30- to 60-minute educational video. I'm calling it The Whiteboard Series. It's meant to take you from having no idea what you're doing to being able to mark up the charts pretty proficiently.
It's not the be-all and end-all, but this is absolutely a very good starting point if you're like, "Hey, I want to learn the basics of trading." Market structure, risk management, technical analysis, a little bit of trading psychology in there, some do's and don'ts. There are going to be 30 videos once it's all said and done. I just finished recording Episode 20. That'll go out next Monday. So check it out. It's free.
Wow.
It doesn't cost you anything, and I think if I had this early on in my career, it would've expedited my journey a little bit. The stuff that I teach you in this course matters whether or not you're trading stocks, crypto, equities, or meme coins. TA still works. Markets are markets. Risk management is still important.
When you're trading meme coins, you gotta know how much soul you're potentially sending to the incinerator. Make sure you're doing bankroll management, so we cover all that kind of stuff. Definitely think it's worth watching.
Oh, last one. Do Bitcoin.
Oh, yeah, Bitcoin.
Also, is Elliot taking new clients?
That would make sense. Yeah, I'll intro you, bro.
All right. Hit me with an intro.
So, the claim he makes is you will earn 10x what he costs in future revenue, whatever—10x growth value.
Is he hella expensive?
He's expensive.
Okay.
But I think you can float it.
Tough, tough, tough. You think it'd be good for me?
And if you don't work with him directly, he's got a team, right, of other people. So I set my stepmom up with him, because she runs a business, but she can't afford him. So she's working with one of his guys who's great.
Dude, he changed my life. I swear to God. Watch my interview with him.
I will do that.
And it changed my life. He works with guys who win World Series of Poker tournaments, UFC champions, Olympic gold medalists—just high performers. He helps you bring out the best in yourself. Ten months after working with him, I sold my business, and I do think he was part of that because I became so much better at my job after working with him. It helped grow my company.
Say less.
So totally worth it. So Bitcoin, I think, is arguably the most annoying chart on the market.
So bad.
People have been telling me the bottom's in, and I called the peak or bottom. It's like, dude, we have not moved since June. From June 6 to today, we're up 7%. You know what I mean?
We're up 10% off the low. We're in a range that's 15% big. Not a lot is going on in Bitcoin. The biggest question I think everyone has on Bitcoin is: We are in one of two places. We are either here, or we're here already.
Oh.
That's the conversation people are having right now—whether this is kind of a summer rally and we got one more leg coming down into the end of the year.
But it was quick. This looks quick.
This is the camp I'm in. I think we're in circle one. Guys like Ansem, for example, think we're in circle two. The TL;DR: It doesn't matter. If you know that this is what's coming—
Hey, that looks scary. Wait, look at that dump right after circle two.
This is FTX, dude.
Wait, wait. So after circle two, you go up, make a high, make a newer high, then it gets flushed. That's scary.
Here?
Yeah.
So this actually was where I put all the remaining dry powder I had into spot.
Whoa. I would be scared as fuck on that.
Here's why, dude. You wanna know how to long every bottom and short every top? You just use the weekly chart alone. So I did a thread on this in October 2024 predicting the top.
Oh, it was a flush. A pretty flush.
Look, this is a weekly structure break, meaning we were in a downtrend here, right?
Wick below it. Close above.
So this is Episode 3 of the Market Structure Whiteboard Series, guys, just so you know.
Oh, yes.
So this is higher highs and higher lows, right? The market is going down here. It's making consistent—
Someone like that, someone like that, someone like that. Yeah, go ahead.
Higher highs and higher lows, very clearly, right? And then it closes through this low. That's a market structure break. So when it closes through this lower high, the market structure just went from this to this, on the weekly. That's important.
Coupled with that, we also got a weekly SFP right as that happened. That was all in. I literally tweeted, "All in the remainder of my stack here between, like, $19,000 and $22,000." This works at the top too. The moment the top was in, right? We're in an uptrend here, higher highs and higher lows.
Dude, that last—
The moment we got a weekly close through here, it was cooked. It's over, right?
Did it have to be this over? Could it not have been less over?
The moment we got a weekly close through here, it was done. The moment we got a weekly close through here, it was done. And the moment the bottom was in was when we got a bullish weekly structure shift.
From this bullish market structure shift to the very top of the market, there was not a single weekly bearish market structure break. Every single one of these moves is a higher high and higher low on the weekly, every single one, until literally right there.
So, two lines: bullish weekly market structure break there, bearish weekly market structure break there. That was the bottom and top.
Wow. Wow.
So if we wanna see that same thing happen on Bitcoin now, the argument is: Is this the weekly market structure level, or is this it?
Ah.
If we get above here, the bottom's in. If we get above here, it looks pretty good, still above $67,000, I think.
The reason I like one more low as well is, let's say we do get one more low. We do something like this.
Oof.
The moment we flip this, you know the bottom's in. And who cares if you miss this last little move? You have confirmation here.
But, yeah, I think we're getting close. And, again, I think we're in circle one here. Seasonality-wise, a rally in the summer and then a dump into Q4 is pretty consistent for Bitcoin. Four-year-cycle believers like myself would put the bottom anywhere from October to January—October 2026 to January 2027. It's not that far away.
No, it's not that bad.
We're talking two treatments away. So I think regardless, where Ansem and I agree, it's time to pay attention. I've already started accumulating some Bitcoin.
Have you? What percent of your dry powder is deployed?
Still very small. I bought a little bit on the move below $60,000. I have more that I’m hoping to deploy lower. This is how I did this cycle, other than the fact that I got annihilated on FTX.
The moment we broke below $30,000, I started to buy. So I figured we are far enough off the high. I started to buy from $30,000 to $25,000 to $20,000. I bought more down here.
Oof.
But I had dry powder at $10,000. If you were online back here, people thought we were going to $10,000.
People thought it was going to—yeah, $10,000.
So I had money available down here, but the moment we did this, all that money that was sitting here, I dumped it in here.
Got it.
So that's the same strategy here. I think that even at these prices, it's pretty cheap. And if it goes lower, buy more. Then, the moment we get a weekly structure break, buy the rest.
Wow.
Not financial advice, but that's exactly what I'm doing.
TraderMayne, you are a special, a special guy, man.
Let's do it, bro. I'm bringing you on the stream soon. I wanna put you in the hot seat, bro. We're gonna absolutely grill and lambaste you, and I think it'll be—
I'm into it.
Fantastic, man. Bro, I honestly, straight up, seeing where you've come from—from doing Spaces to this. I mean, your interview with—I mean, first of all, Flood's interview, if you guys haven't watched it, you want a breakdown of what happened with situational awareness. Very few people, I think, could have explained it better. Very high level. I learned something in that interview.
Wow.
I learned a lot of things. Chris Camillo, bro.
Wow.
Like, banger interview, dude. So you've been bringing on some crazy guests, and you ask great questions.
I think that's what makes the interview good. It's not just the guest. I've seen Chris Camillo be interviewed before. Yours was the best one because of the questions you asked. To see the growth you've had, bro, is unbelievable. Kudos to you. It's always fun to come on, dude.
You're the GOAT, man. You have a stream tomorrow?
I have a stream tomorrow, bro.
What time?
3:00 PM PST. I'll see you all there.
TraderMayne, we love you, man. You're the GOAT. Thanks again, brother.
Later, guys.
Talk soon. Peace. That's really the one, man. That's really the one right there, man.