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1000x · · 55 min

Trading Crypto Bull Markets | Alex Kruger

Avi FelmanJonah Van BourgAlex Kruger

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TL;DR
  • Spot Bitcoin ETF adoption is Alex Krüger’s reason to stay bullish even as the tape reaches euphoria. The institutional sales apparatus is only about 20% enabled and, according to estimates he heard, could reach 80% by year-end. Jonah adds that long-term holders are transferring coins to less reactive retirement-account buyers while miner rewards are about to halve: “This is a year many years in the making.”
  • The same setup is primed for violent deleveraging: BTC was near $73,000, ETH near $4,000, and three-month annualized futures basis around 25% gross, or 20–21% above a 5% risk-free rate. Avi flags $6 billion of Binance open interest and $4 billion on Bybit; Alex expects an eventual decline of at least 20%, with 35% plausible once ETF inflows slow. “Things are crazy, but things can get crazier.”
  • Alex is expressing the bull thesis without leverage and managing corrections through partial hedges. He typically hedges 20–30% of the book, watches basis rather than slower-resetting funding, and redeploys into weakness; when his bids or correction thesis fail, he accepts the cost of re-entering higher. “Sometimes I buy the top.”
  • The 2022 lesson was that surviving a black swan matters more than predicting it. Alex called the post-Luna bottom three weeks early, missed the impending 3AC failure, and heard from Alameda and FTX employees who thought everything was fine—but once ETH panicked through the upper $1,500s, traders still had time to hedge or short. The goal is a system that reacts “just like a tennis player reacts to a tough ball.”
  • Bitcoin should remain the cycle’s leader, with wealth spilling into altcoins and memecoins rather than replacing BTC leadership. Alex notes that warning signs can persist for a year, as they did in 2021, so red flags alone are poor exit signals. His base case is continued adoption and recurring speculative waves: “Like it or not, this is the way of the market.”
  • Euphoria is not an invitation for late buyers to add indiscriminately. Alex rode the move fully long from the bottom and is now redeploying existing risk among coins, not putting in new money; anyone who missed the move should wait for a pullback. He expects memecoins to cool and another AI cycle to follow within his broader adoption and supercycle thesis.
  • There is no reliable terminal price target, so Alex trades the cycle like an accordion. He considered selling 40% at $75,000, later contemplated $85,000, and revised upward as every flush was bought; Avi instead plans substantial scaling between $90,000 and $100,000. Alex’s answer is to keep some “air” in the position, trimming and reinflating rather than pretending to know whether any peak is local or global.
Digest · the substance, structured for research

1. Surviving a blowup matters more than predicting it

  • Alex’s book contained 100 line items, versus roughly 70 in 2021—not the bear market—but breadth is not permanence: when frenzy becomes threatening, he consolidates into liquid, hedgeable assets he can manage quickly. “When things start getting frenzied and I start getting concerned, I start consolidating.”

  • His most memorable error came after Luna in May 2022. Alex assumed the scale of the damage usually marked a bottom, called it three weeks early, and entered CPI Friday “long to the tits” in ETH—only for the unrecognized 3AC domino to make the initial mistake extremely expensive.

  • Jonah’s parallel lesson is that even broad information gathering can fail. Alex spoke with Alameda and FTX employees who genuinely believed everything was fine; Jonah likewise assumed that even an Alameda failure would never be allowed to endanger FTX. With 3AC, the sharper warning was its oddly aggressive attempt to raise capital for another GBTC trade: supposed strong hands were behaving weakly.

  • Alex’s durable lesson is reactive rather than predictive. FTX became panicky while ETH was still in the upper $1,500s, leaving substantial time to exit, hedge or short before the full decline. A black swan need not be forecast if the trading system can respond instinctively, “just like a tennis player reacts to a tough ball.”

2. ETF demand supports the melt-up, but leverage promises a flush

  • At roughly $73,000 BTC and $4,000 ETH, Alex called the market extremely frothy: three-month annualized futures basis was about 25%, though only 20–21% after subtracting a 5% risk-free rate. ETF flows are what “sustain and enable this level of absolute insane degeneracy,” and he favored continuing to run risk at least into the halving.

  • Avi’s restraint comes from $6 billion of Binance open interest plus $4 billion on Bybit—short-term capital that will leave when momentum breaks. He considered the market overdue for a 10–15% pullback, possibly more, and held spot rather than explicit leverage. Alex was even blunter: a small push might cause at least a 20% flush, while 35% “makes sense.”

  • Alex hedges only 20–30% because a full exit is too costly when the melt-up resumes. He placed bids around the $58,000s during one decline, manually redeployed when they missed, and another time hedged 25% before buying back near the top. His trigger is fast-moving basis, not funding: “Funding is too slow.”

3. The wealth-sales machine has barely switched on

  • Jonah’s supply argument begins with Coin Days Destroyed and ETF-flow data: older holders are taking profit around all-time highs, but their coins are passing into BlackRock ETF accounts whose retirement-oriented buyers may not sell after another $10,000 or $20,000 rally. Roughly $11 billion of ETF buying accompanied a $30,000 BTC advance; the next $11 billion could have greater impact as that supply clears and miner rewards halve.

  • Alex clarified that the cited 20% figure measures enabled distribution machinery, not assets already allocated. Wirehouses and RIAs need technology, sales materials, track records and risk approval before advisers can promote an ETF. Merrill Lynch and UBS had just said they would start offering the ETF to clients, while ETF firms expected roughly 80% of their sales force to be enabled by year-end; the discussion referenced roughly $30 trillion in wealth-platform assets.

  • This supports Alex’s BTC-led “supercycle” lean: adoption demand enters Bitcoin first, then spills into altcoins and memes. Red flags had already appeared by January, but exiting on them would have missed the move; 2021 likewise carried warning signs for most of the year before its remembered finale. Jonah noted that speculation historically gets crazier after the all-time-high break, not while approaching it.

  • Jonah’s market-structure puzzle was why a roughly 20% return from buying the ETF and shorting CME futures had not been arbitraged away. Alex’s honest non-answer: “I don’t have the answer,” but funds need capital, legal structures and approvals. Few prepared while expecting basis to collapse; now that the trade persists, institutional capacity should eventually be built to put it on at scale.

4. Meme coins turn missed upside into a market-wide free-for-all

  • Jonah described funding Phantom with ETH from Friend.tech and some Stellar, cleaning up those holdings, and putting them into Jeo Boden at roughly a $15 million market cap after the Trump token had reached about $400 million. He viewed Jeo Boden as the political counterpoint meme and said he was getting deliberately degenerate.

  • Avi described receiving 15,000 Jensen Huang tokens as an airdrop after buying Jeo Boden; he later found that position had gone up 100x in a week. He also mentioned a $1,000 Zin position that had ripped and people sending him tokens such as Monkey Getting a Haircut on Solana. He called it the craziest market he had seen.

  • Jonah said this differed from prior cycles, when speculation concentrated by ecosystem: an Avalanche fund would lift Avalanche coins, then attention would move to Solana or another chain. Now it is more of a free-for-all where a coin with a funny name can go up. He called the period a “Cambrian explosion” in the golden era of memecoins, while warning that all of it could go to zero.

  • Alex expects memecoins to cool and then another AI cycle to emerge. He is more open to the supercycle idea—that the market keeps going—because Bitcoin has finally been enabled for adoption, pent-up demand is large, and wealth spills into altcoins and memecoins. “Like it or not, this is the way of the market,” especially when launching altcoins is so easy.

5. Position sizing works like an accordion, not a top call

  • Alex drew a hard distinction between managing an existing winner and chasing one: “I’m not buying new shit—I’m redeploying from some shit to other shit.” Having remained fully long from the bottom, he could rotate at euphoria levels; someone arriving unpositioned should wait patiently for the correction or risk getting “fucked.”

  • His levels are revisable. Alex once planned to sell 40% at $75,000, then reconsidered because each flush was immediately bought and considered $85,000 instead. Avi uses levels to enforce discipline and expects substantial selling between $90,000 and $100,000, but recognizes that repeatedly revising a target upward is itself “a danger zone.”

  • Jonah prefers external signals to BTC price: on-chain measures such as MVRV Z-Score or a qualitative excess marker like the return of the Matt Damon “Fortune Favors the Brave” commercial. That mirrors his crude-oil process, where refinery margins or OPEC behavior determine exits. Alex’s rebuttal is that oil ranges, while crypto’s exponential right tail can punish a fundamentals-only exit with a missed 400% move.

  • Alex’s resolution is an accordion that always retains some air: regularly sell or hedge a little, then reinflate on corrections. That preserves psychological room to decide whether to buy, deleverage or exit without identifying a global top. Truly exceptional regime changes—a dramatic Fed reversal, major war such as Russia and Ukraine, or an FTX-style failure—justify abandoning the local-versus-global distinction and getting out.

6. FOMO is rotating into majors while ETH waits for a catalyst

  • Exchange volume was reportedly only about 25% of 2021 levels, suggesting much of retail had not returned. Avi expects those buyers to prefer WIF, BONK or DOGE over BTC; meanwhile crypto natives who missed both Bitcoin and memes may rotate into familiar laggards. Avi liked that structure in MATIC, while Alex wanted to buy NEAR only after a pullback because its AI-chain relabeling had already produced the run.

  • SOL was Alex’s catalyst thesis: he understood FTX’s locked-SOL sale to have begun roughly three weeks earlier and to be about 50% complete—“I may be wrong”—with removal of that pressure potentially sending SOL straight toward its prior high. Avi admitted being underpositioned despite liking the user experience, while saying that a conventional P/E valuation would put SOL’s multiple “in the thousands.”

  • ETH remained the conspicuous laggard. Alex did not expect an ETF until next year, but believed ETH could “outperform massively” once it exists; he did not know when the market would front-run it. Market-implied odds had fallen from roughly 60% or slightly higher early in the year to roughly 40%, possibly 30%, yet he distrusted tiny Polymarket pricing and suggested options might reveal more credible implied probabilities. He had not done that analysis himself.

Alex Kruger

We're in the adoption phase, and we finally enabled Bitcoin to be adopted. It's just getting started. This is a year many years in the making, with so much pent-up demand, which also means so much of that wealth spills over into altcoins and memecoins. So, like it or not, this is the way of the market. This is euphoria levels.

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Jonah Van Bourg

All right guys, welcome to another episode of THX. Today we have a special guest that a lot of you probably already know, but we're super excited to chat with because he's always got spicy, interesting takes. For those of you who aren't watching us on YouTube and are just listening, Alex Kruger is literally joining us from inside the Matrix.

Jonah Van Bourg

You've got one hell of a setup back there. That's a lot of screens.

Alex Kruger

To be honest, I have 10 screens. The whole thing is plastered, and I'm feeling that I need more screens because, to trade something, or if I have something on my book that isn't dust, I need to see the chart. I'm just that kind of person. I need to see the chart all the time, and there isn't much room anymore.

Jonah Van Bourg

How many things do you have in your book at any moment that you're trading and need that many charts for?

Alex Kruger

I have 100 right now.

Jonah Van Bourg

A lot. You had 70 line items during the bear market, and now you have 100?

Alex Kruger

No, in 2021—not the bear market. The bear market had almost entirely played out.

Jonah Van Bourg

How do you think about expanding risk in bull markets and consolidating it, cleaning things up, or getting out in bear markets? Just give us the broad framework, and then we can drill into this particular moment.

Alex Kruger

When things start getting frenzied and I start getting concerned, I start consolidating. It's simple: I start consolidating into things that are liquid and hedgeable, that I can manage more quickly without having to scramble around. I don't think the time is here yet.

Jonah Van Bourg

In the 2022 bear market, were you trading other macro assets as well? Were you hedging crypto long with oil long? Did you think cross-asset, or was it all crypto?

Alex Kruger

I haven't traded oil since 2020. It's been mostly crypto since then. It was mostly Bitcoin and ETH, basically trading, trading, trading. That was more short-term trading in 2021 and 2022.

To be honest, I called the bottom a little bit too early, basically at the end of May. I was off by 3 weeks. That was a very memorable trading experience because I did manage to turn around and trade the dump, but it was very hectic and difficult, and at the beginning it cost me a lot of money.

I remember going into the big dump that started on a Friday, on CPI Friday, long to the tits on ETH. I spent the rest of the year trying to get the bottom and, when failing, getting out. I was literally saying, “This is it. This is it. We're here.” Eventually it worked and paid off, but it was very, very difficult.

Jonah Van Bourg

What were your metrics for determining that? Why did you think that was the bottom? We're talking, I assume, about May 2022, post-Luna crash?

Alex Kruger

Exactly, post-Luna crash. People died. Usually, when people die at such a large magnitude, that's the bottom. It's almost always the way it happens.

What we didn't know, or what I didn't know, was that 3AC was about to blow up. Some people predicted it, and I think it was a big mistake on my side not to be well informed, because you could have known that it was likely to happen. It was the same thing when people were talking about Alameda and FTX. People were talking about it.

Jonah Van Bourg

I remember those rumors, but thinking back to then, it was so hard to verify them. You'd have some people saying, “There are rumors that they're bust,” but there was no way that could happen. There was no way.

It was like being in the fog of war at the time. It was very hard to see, understand, and get the information you wanted. What were you doing at that time to try to assess the market when you were in that type of situation?

Alex Kruger

What I was doing was talking to people. What I always do is talk to as many people as possible.

The Alameda and FTX insiders I talked to—insiders in the good sense, people who worked for them—didn't know. They didn't think it was going to happen. They thought everything was fine. Clearly, my sources were not right. I failed to get to the right sources, which would have been worth quite a few millions if I had gotten that right.

But we know how it went. What about you guys?

Jonah Van Bourg

For me, it was very similar. You try to talk to people, but nobody will ever give you information straight up unless they really, really like you and you have a very good relationship with them.

When I talk to as many people as possible, I try to cross-reference as many stories as possible. Are the people I think are going to say the same thing saying similar things, or are they saying different things? Normally, in crypto, where there's smoke, there's fire. If there are too many occurrences where the stories don't match up, or people are saying slightly different things, or there seems to be some nervousness in the air, then you start to step away.

I remember that I did not, in any way, shape, or form, predict or get the FTX blowup. My thought process at the time was, “Even if Alameda blows up, there's no way that Sam would have put FTX at risk. It just wouldn't have happened.” I was completely caught blind-sided by that.

The 3AC issue was different. The moment they started going around trying to raise money for the GBTC trade again, that was a huge red flag. Why are you doing this? Who are you raising it from? What the hell is going on? Do you just need capital? Why are you being so pushy? That was a weird one for sure.

Avi Felman

Alex, after the Luna crash, I thought I navigated it quite well. I sold Luna near the highs. It looked Ponzi-like, so I got out and reduced risk. I didn't really get hurt on that dump, or only got hurt a little bit.

I thought, “Okay, there's so much blood on the street now. It's over. It's time to buy.” Like you, I had to get out of the way of yet another freight train in order to stay alive. That sell-off was crazy.

Normally, in these things, when the dominoes start to fall, they fall pretty quickly, one after another. In this case, Luna blew up, then 3AC, and everything puked. Funding went insane. Then everything calmed down—we flatlined—and bizarrely, out of nowhere, 3AC blew up. After that, there was another month or two of nothingness and calm, when you could have said, “All right, this is it. This is the bottom.” Then FTX immolated itself. That was tough.

Jonah Van Bourg

So, if I could paraphrase what you're saying, your process is to consolidate risk from many line items into a few or zero when things get shaky and volatile. That's when you start picking up the phone. That's probably good for our listeners to know.

Avi Felman

When things get bad, I just get the fuck out. I started scribbling about this on the podcast a little bit: it's just a toxic risk framework. When you look at your book and think, “I'm not going to try to wait for 10% higher levels. I'm just going to get out of this bad risk,” it's toxic right now.

Jonah Van Bourg

A good example is FTX. We didn't need to predict it. Predicting it would have been worth a lot of money, but once it started, we had so much time to react. It started getting panicky with ETH at $1,500. That's when it started—actually, I think it started with ETH in the upper $1,500s—but it got bad with panic at $1,500 and just kept going down.

There was so much time to react, short, or hedge. That's the thing with black swans: we don't need to actually predict them. As traders, our system has to be wired in a way that we're instinctive and can react very, very fast in a good way, just like a tennis player reacts to a tough ball in a certain place.

Alex Kruger

That objective comes with a lot of time and practice. It's hard to predict what will happen a month, 2 months, or 3 months in advance. But once you see the direction something is heading, understanding that switch in the market is important.

Jonah Van Bourg

Speaking of switches in the markets, we've got Bitcoin at $73,000, ETH at $4,000, and memecoins ripping all over the place. You have 100 positions in your book, and I probably have more positions than I've had in a year.

How are you thinking about this in terms of froth? Because, honestly, it seems like we're getting to the point where I probably want to start thinking about taking off risk.

Alex Kruger

We are at the same levels, I think. There's a caveat that makes it a little bit less insane. If we're looking at funding rates, the 3-month annualized futures basis is at 25%. That's flashing red levels, but risk-free rates are at 5%, so it's actually 20%, or 21%. It's not as frothy as we might think, but it's still really crazy.

Memes are going insane. The thing is, the ETF flows are so large, and in my opinion they're just beginning. That sustains and enables this level of absolute, insane degeneracy.

If you're concerned, this is actually a good place to hedge your spot holdings using futures or perps. Unhedge once it flashes, but hedge only a small percentage—not the entire book. That being said, I think it makes a lot of sense to keep running into the halving, at least.

Things are crazy, but things can get crazier. We make the most money in the part where it gets really, really crazy. If we're just getting out to protect profits, that works, but you leave most of the money on the table.

Jonah Van Bourg

What do you guys think?

I normally run a very clean crypto book. I don't like to have a lot of line items. Like you, I like to keep it super concentrated and tidy. I have started diversifying, though.

Just talking about Bitcoin for a second, I am so bullish I can't see straight. I think these ETF flows have just begun. If you look at metrics on Glassnode, like Coin Days Destroyed, or the Farside Investors ETF dashboard, what you're seeing right now is long-term holders taking some profit at all-time highs and effectively passing their tokens to the BlackRock ETF.

Those are new long-term holders—people in their retirement accounts who aren't going to turn around and sell if we rally another $10,000 or $20,000 in Bitcoin. Ultimately, I think that once you work your way through that holder selling on the offer—which, from the Coin Days Destroyed metric I described, is already happening—the only seller left is miners, and their block rewards are about to get cut in half next month.

We've had $11 billion worth of ETF buying so far. We rallied $30,000 per token on that inflow. The next $11 billion worth of ETF buying could send us up much more than $30,000 per token.

Specifically to your point about how, when markets get crazy and parabolic, you make most of your money toward the end of that quadratic-looking move, I've decided that while the music is playing—before it stops—and while these ETF inflows continue, I'm going to be a degenerate.

I lit up my Phantom wallet, which I hadn't touched in a while, and funded it with some random things. I had some ETH flying around from Friend.tech and some Stellar. I cleaned all that shit up and put it into Jeo Boden a couple of days ago because I thought that was the political counterpoint meme to the Trump token, which had gone up to a market cap of whatever, $400 million. Jeo Boden was trading at a $15 million market cap, and I thought, “All right, I'm just going to go as big as I can on this little shitcoin.”

I'm just playing around with those things. This is the first time I've actively traded crypto in over a year. I'm getting degenerate, which is a sign of how ripe the opportunity set is. I'm a terrible crypto trader compared to you guys, and even I see opportunity at this point.

Avi Felman

I tend to agree with you, but the 2 simple numbers are that there's $6 billion of open interest on Binance and $4 billion of open interest on Bybit. That's short-term capital, and it will leave at some point.

Once we stop seeing momentum, you'll get some level of closing, and you'll get this to reverse. While I do agree with you that I'm very bullish, I think we're overdue for a 10% to 15% pullback at this point—maybe more. You get these pretty frequently in bull markets.

I think it's important not to get too overlevered. At this point, I'm just playing in spot bags. I wouldn't have any leverage on my book other than what I think of as synthetic leverage through coins, because I am nervous. We have a tremendous amount of buildup.

That being said, I'm conflicted because normally, when you break through all-time highs, it's a rip fest. After the halving, though, it normally takes 1 to 2 months.

Jonah Van Bourg

How do you trade peak bull markets, where everything is hitting the fan and we're getting crazy volatility, with 30% pullbacks followed by 100% rallies?

Alex Kruger

I have no leverage at the moment. Leverage is gone. It's too expensive to keep leverage on the book, and I'm very worried that a little push could drive a very large crash.

I'm surprised we didn't push further yesterday. We had Bitcoin down 13.3% intraday and ETH down 18%, exactly as it was 8 days ago. It was insane.

I fully agree that we're going to see a major pullback at some point. The thing is, it's impossible to predict when it's going to happen. At some point, inflows are going to slow down. They may reverse a little bit, and with this buildup we could get a very large flush—at least 20%. I think 35% makes sense because things are really insane.

Jonah Van Bourg

My way of playing that is like you guys: I'm not levered right now, so I'm just going to sit there and take it and hopefully buy a little bit more on a crash. I'm not going to sell and try to rebuy and dance between the raindrops.

How are you going to play it?

Alex Kruger

I've done it on 2 occasions in the last month. I hedge a percentage of my book—basically 20% to 30%, not more—because if I'm wrong, it's too costly to get completely out. Then I rebuy on the dip.

It happened twice in the last month. One was right before the 18% flash crash 8 days ago. I was waiting specifically to reload at $58,000, or the equivalent on other coins, and it didn't hit my bids. I manually redeployed everything. I actually levered up and then got the leverage out over the next couple of days.

Jonah Van Bourg

What's your signal to rebuy? Is it just when funding collapses back to something flat?

Alex Kruger

I'm looking at quite a few funding metrics. Funding is too slow. I'm not looking at funding because it resets every hour or every 8 hours. I'm looking at basis, which reacts faster.

I'm looking at the CME basis. That's the main one because there's more liquidity there. I'm also looking at spot, but the main one is basis.

Another example was Monday night, when I took off 25%. I hedged 25% and reloaded at the top because it didn't get to where I wanted. I was expecting continuation, but it didn't happen. I reloaded at the top. Sometimes I buy the top. I bought the top of Solana as well.

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Jonah Van Bourg

What's your view on the cycle now? We've had Bitcoin lead everything for a while, but on a day like today, when Bitcoin is up 2%, we're seeing Solana up 6%, and MATIC is finally doing something. Do you have a view on whether this stops being a Bitcoin-led rally at some point in the future?

Alex Kruger

No, I don't think that's going to happen. I think it's going to continue being Bitcoin-led and spill over into the other shit.

I also think that if we're looking for red flags, we would have already been out of the market by the end of January or early February, because the red flags started long ago. If you want an analogy, look at 2021. The red flags also started in January, so we had a full year of red flags.

All people remember is Matt Damon saying, “Fortune favors the brave,” and that crap at the end of the cycle. They remember the insane Dogecoin run in May 2021, but that wasn't the first one. There was a Dogecoin run before that.

It's tough going in and out based on metrics and flags. I think it's better to spread it out.

One thing I wanted to talk about, because it's very related, is the ETF side and why we're early. The reason we're early is that the institutional sales machine is not yet fully deployed. According to some estimates, it's deployed only up to 20%, and they're looking to ramp it up big time into year-end.

What does that mean? Let's think about how the plumbing works on the ETF side. You have ETF buyers, basically retail and discount platforms; you have institutional guys; and you have wealth advisors.

The wealth advisors are divided into 2 or 3 tranches, depending on how you look at it. You have what are called the wirehouses—Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and those guys—and then you have the RIAs, which are split into independent and non-independent firms. The non-independent ones include Edward Jones and Wells Fargo Advisors.

These firms are very slow to start promoting an ETF to their clients. They need to see a track record. They need time. The product needs to get approved.

We've seen headlines in the last 2 weeks that Merrill Lynch and UBS will start offering the ETF to their clients. This is just starting. We're very far from having the entire institutional sales machine in place and pushing ETFs to the people who actually want them.

They're not shoving it down people's throats. People actually want it. People are calling Merrill and saying, “Do you have the Bitcoin ETF? I want Bitcoin. What do you think about Bitcoin? Is it a good investment?” That's the kind of thing that's happening.

Jonah Van Bourg

You said there are $30 trillion of client assets under management across all the different wealth-manager verticals you mentioned—the wirehouses, the semi-independent shops, and the smaller boutique places. Do you think we're 20% of the way through that?

Alex Kruger

No, that's not on an assets-under-management basis. It's on the machinery. What percentage of the sales force that pushes ETFs is already enabled? Who has the technology and materials, and approval from risk, to actually push it?

It's not my estimate. It's an estimate I recently heard, and I had it from a couple of sources. We're 20% there, and the ETF guys think we'll be at 80% by year-end.

If that's true—and I believe it to be true—that means when we get the leverage flush that's going to happen at some point, perhaps a 20% to 35% decline, you go balls in. Hopefully, if you're a trader, you manage to hedge some of it so you can deploy additional risk.

The risk for those of us who are already in the market is that it happens too fast and we can't hedge. If you're really bullish beyond the immediate term, you could wake up to a Bitcoin candle that's down 15%. You're not going to say, “Let me sell now and rebuy 10% lower.”

Jonah Van Bourg

As markets melt up, like the Nasdaq in 1999 or Bitcoin in 2024, things get very volatile. It becomes both easier and harder to spot trading opportunities.

How are you positioning in the memecoins right now? I think that's the summer we're going to have. It's going to be a meme summer. There's going to be a hat on the Sphere in Las Vegas. Maybe that's a red flag for you, or maybe it's a bullish signal. I'm curious to hear what you think about that.

Alex Kruger

I have a large Dogecoin position, which I wish were WIF, to be honest, but it's Dogecoin. I also have a few shitcoins. I'm on Puff [?], MEW, and Jensen Huang. I just tweeted about replying to one of your tweets. I'm thinking of Jensen as a Boden play, right?

Jonah Van Bourg

You mean Jensen Huang?

Alex Kruger

Yes, Jensen Huang.

Avi Felman

This happened to me. I bought a slug of Jeo Boden a day after it came out, and as a result of me buying it, the creator of the Jensen Huang coin airdropped some Jensen Huang to me. He gave me 15,000 units. It was worth maybe $0.10 or $0.15 per coin.

I thought, “Wow, this is funny. It's Jensen Huang's face on that giant well-hung COVID meme.” I forgot about it, and I checked my Phantom wallet a couple of days ago. It was worth $15, so it literally went up 100x in a week.

This is just happening left and right. This is the craziest market I've ever seen. It's wild.

The Zin position that I bought 2 months ago on the recommendation of a friend—I put in $1,000, checked my wallet, and it had just ripped. Now people are sending me things like Monkey Getting a Haircut on Solana.

Honestly, it's kind of funny. This is called the 1000x podcast, and Bitcoin isn't going to do 1000x. Some of these things are going to do 1000x, so we're in that kind of market.

Jonah Van Bourg

I just put Monkey Getting a Haircut in the chat. Do you guys want to take a look at it? It has potential.

We're all dumbing ourselves down, but that's where the money is. It's also reacting to the coin. It just reacted since we started recording, and it's not live. Otherwise, I would think the listeners were pumping it.

Not financial advice. All this shit is probably going to zero. But I honestly can't remember a time when memecoins have done this across the board.

Normally, you have specific concentrations. The memecoins pop off for each ecosystem, then the DEXs pop off for each ecosystem. For example, when Avalanche said it was going to raise an ecosystem fund, its coins would pop off, and then it would be the Solana coins or the Avalanche coins.

Now it's more of a free-for-all. You just launch a coin with a funny name, and it goes up. The concept of Jeo Boden wasn't really there in 2020 or 2021 as much as it is today.

In the grand scheme of the golden era of memecoins, we're going to look back on this time as the Cambrian explosion. Historically, things tend to get crazier after the all-time-high break, not into the all-time-high break. In theory, we have a lot more to go.

Will this cycle be a meme summer, or will we be over memecoins soon and move on to something like a narrative summer—AI coins, for example?

Alex Kruger

I think we already had an AI summer, winter, whatever you want to call it. I think we're going to have another one. Memecoins will cool down, and then we'll have another AI cycle.

I'm more in on the supercycle idea—that this just keeps going. We're in the adoption phase, and we finally enabled Bitcoin to be adopted. It's just getting started. This is a year many years in the making, with so much pent-up demand.

That also means so much of that wealth spills over into altcoins and memecoins. Like it or not, this is the way of the market. Launching altcoins is so easy.

Jonah Van Bourg

Do you consider alternative Layer 1s like NEAR, Solana, or ETH to be the next things that perform best from a risk-reward perspective?

Alex Kruger

For me, it's not NEAR. I missed NEAR. NEAR has already run. It kind of relabeled itself as the AI chain, so it has already run. I want to buy a pullback, not here.

I'm not buying new shit. I'm redeploying from some shit to other shit. The market is too hot to be putting new money in. I got here all the way from the bottom to the top, fully long. If you didn't, if that's not you, you don't put money here. I think here you wait for that pullback and eat it up. Be patient, otherwise you're going to get fucked.

It's a matter of having a framework. This is euphoria levels.

Avi Felman

I would agree with that pretty wholeheartedly. The interesting thing, though, is that for a lot of coins, we're not at euphoria levels yet. It's sort of just Bitcoin.

I think there's a reasonable scenario where Bitcoin can sail up to $65,000 and Dogecoin can double in that time as people rotate. The risk-reward for Bitcoin is tough, but the risk-reward for everything else is okay. Dogecoin is up less than ETH since October, which is pretty nuts. I wouldn't have expected that.

Jonah Van Bourg

It makes sense when retail comes back. I just read that volume on crypto exchanges is 25% of 2021 levels.

Avi Felman

There's a lot of leverage coming in. A lot of people in crypto are levered to the tits, but there are still so many people who haven't come back. When they come back, they're not going to buy Bitcoin. They're going to buy WIF, BONK, and Dogecoin on Coinbase.

Alex, is there a price level where you look at it and say, “After this, I'm out. I'm selling half”?

Alex Kruger

I was thinking of selling 40% at $75,000. We got pretty close, but the price action made me change my mind because every time we flash, we just buy back up. That tells me that we continue.

Right now, I'm thinking possibly $85,000.

Jonah Van Bourg

I don't operate with levels like that. Generally, I do, for the simple reason that it helps enforce discipline, but I always have the right to change my mind.

What I try to do is check my bias from when I set the level. If I've revised it upward 2 or 3 times, that's generally a danger zone. Right now, basically anywhere from $90,000 to $100,000, I'm scaling out substantial amounts. Other than that, I'm just going to ride it for the fucking ride.

In crude oil, when I'm super bullish or super bearish, I usually don't set price levels to get in or out. I set levels associated with fundamental data that drives crude oil. I'll say, “I'm going to exit my crude oil long when refinery margins drop below a certain level,” or, “I'm going to buy as much oil as I can when I see X, Y, or Z happening at OPEC.”

I'm attempting to monitor that in crypto. This is my first crazy bull swing in crypto, and I'm trying to apply the commodities framework. I'm not going to look at Bitcoin's price as a signal for when to get out. I'm going to look at metrics, on-chain metrics like the MVRV Z-Score, or perhaps something more qualitative, like the Matt Damon “Fortune Favors the Brave” commercial. When that shit starts coming back, maybe it's time to get out.

I'm not going to try to set price levels because that feels arbitrary.

Alex Kruger

Two things. First, crude oil doesn't have that right tail because it doesn't move enough for returns to become truly exponential. It makes more sense to use fundamentals.

Second, under normal circumstances, crude oil just ranges. It's a wide range, but it's been ranging for 15 or 20 years. If we leave aside the 2014 dump and 2020, it's a ranging asset. Getting out when fundamental metrics tell you to get out is okay because you're not going to miss a 400% move.

Another way to tackle the uncertainty around where to get out is to use funding rates and feel the market. Regularly, you take a little bit off the table, either by selling or hedging. When that correction comes, you're psychologically in a very good place to manage risk and decide whether to sell more, buy back, or buy back and put leverage on.

That takes away the need to pick the top. We don't know if it's going to be a local top or a global top. We have no fucking idea.

There can be exceptions when extraordinary things happen, such as the Fed dramatically changing its view on the market or a major war, like Russia and Ukraine. Those things are extreme, and you say, “Fuck it, I'm out of this.” With FTX, when you start hearing about it, you don't care whether it's a local top or a global top. You're out.

Given that uncertainty, the way I think about it is like playing an accordion. The accordion always has air inside. You're just inflating and deflating, inflating and deflating. In a bull market, you always keep a certain amount of air in there. You take it out, put it back in, and keep playing.

Jonah Van Bourg

So you're trading around your positions?

Alex Kruger

Yes, very constantly.

Jonah Van Bourg

That requires a lot of energy and focus, which we know you have.

From a market-structure perspective, why are basis and funding so extreme right now? You would think that, now that the ETF exists, any pool of capital in the world would view 20% annualized as an amazing return. If you're a fund manager, why wouldn't you buy the BlackRock ETF, sell the CME future in infinite size, and collect that basis?

Why does that opportunity exist now that there are no barriers to entry and the ETFs have unbottlenecked access to the long Bitcoin leg of the basis trade?

Alex Kruger

We have to be getting levered, except none of us are running leverage. It must not be us, but people like us—people in our circles, the crypto natives, people who've been around for a long time.

Most of them missed the bottom. They missed the beginning and the middle, and they're getting in now. There's a lot of people getting in with size, levered up, starting in the $50,000s, out of FOMO.

As to why, I don't have the definitive answer. I think it's a matter of the time it takes to put those trades on in infinite size. You need to raise funds, set up the legal structure, get the approvals, and eventually start putting it on.

If everybody thought the basis was going to compress to zero, what would you do? You wouldn't set up a legal structure or prepare to put the trade on because you don't expect the trade to be available. Now that the trade is available, there are people working behind the scenes to put it on in infinite size. It's going to happen eventually.

Jonah Van Bourg

That makes sense. I agree with your point. A lot of people missed this run-up, and a lot of people weren't allocated as fully as they should have been.

That stems from the fear during the bear market. In 2021, people would be 100% to 150% exposed and feel normal. After the bear market, I think a lot of crypto natives, given the wealth they had, wanted to preserve it. They were 30% to 50% allocated to the market, maybe 60%, and only recently has that shift in their mindset happened again: “I need to be 150% exposed. I need to go back in.”

That is why I get a little worried.

Alex Kruger

And why is all this meme activity happening? It's not only because it's easy now—Solana makes it so easy. At the same time, you missed most of the move but still have significant wealth sitting in crypto. Sadly, you feel rich and have FOMO at the same time. You're thinking, “Fuck, I missed both of them. What the fuck do I do?” So you long Avalanche.

Avi Felman

I think we're seeing that now. This is when the majors catch up. When people really have that FOMO, they think, “Why didn't I buy that?” Then they start rotating into the things they know they missed.

They missed the memes, they missed Bitcoin, and now it's time for the majors. That's why MATIC actually looks pretty nice from a trade and structure perspective. It's barely up off the bottom, and everybody is going to pile in. Then they'll start rotating to the next thing.

Alex Kruger

Solana is also interesting. As soon as the FTX locked-SOL deal gets closer to being done, SOL could fly all the way up to its all-time highs in a straight line.

Jonah Van Bourg

When do you think that selling is finished?

Alex Kruger

My understanding is that it started about 3 weeks ago and that they're 50% done. I may be wrong, but that's my understanding.

Jonah Van Bourg

So a few more weeks?

Avi Felman

If you take away the selling pressure on Solana right now, there's some explosive upside potential there. That's something I've been underpositioned in for this entire rally, and it's where I feel FOMO. I feel stupid, especially now that I'm using it and realizing how good the experience is.

What I still can't wrap my head around is how zero or near-zero gas fees translate economically into market cap and value. I think I'm mid-curve on that mental pathway because, if we're valuing Solana on a P/E basis, it's insanely overvalued. I stopped checking, but it must be trading at a P/E in the thousands right now.

Jonah Van Bourg

Meanwhile, Jeo Boden has solid fundamentals and a solid P/E.

I'm joking.

Do you think there's been one notable underperformer during this entire rally? It's Ethereum—the Ethereum ecosystem, the high gas fees, the absence of memecoin activity there, and the NFTs happening inside Ethereum.

Do you think an ETH ETF will be a big catapult event for that ecosystem and its token price, or do you think it's going to lag throughout this rally?

Alex Kruger

I don't expect that ETF until next year.

Jonah Van Bourg

When that happens, do you think the market will front-run it?

Alex Kruger

I don't know when that will happen. Once it does, though, ETH should outperform massively.

The market has changed its odds from roughly 60%—or a little higher—of an ETF by the end of the year at the beginning of the year, to more like 40% right now, maybe even 30%. It's tough to look at those metrics because the implied odds come from Polymarket, which is a tiny market.

Determining the odds of a massive, multibillion-dollar market based on the odds of a tiny market is questionable. It may be better to use options to determine the true implied odds of the ETF. I haven't done that, but if somebody is doing it, I would love to see the analysis.

Trading Crypto Bull Markets | Alex Kruger | BidClub