Trading Crypto's Bull Market Breakout | 1000x Live

The risk-reward is so skewed to the upside right now. I think this is like the Bitcoin ETF. When it came out, we were debating this on the show. We were like, “Is it priced in or not? Is there enough capital to front-run this?” I think this is another ETF-like event where there literally isn’t enough crypto-native capital in the world right now to front-run that tsunami of flow.

Jonah, do you have your wine?

I decided to skip the wine this time. I got a bottle of water. Cold water. Refrigerated water.

What the hell? I literally got a bottle of wine just because you did last time.

Oh, I mean, I’ll go get one. This is awesome.

And you’re telling me that now I have to be the sober one? Or I have to be the drunk one and you get to be the sober one? Great.

You’re shit-faced already. Dude, this is—

I haven’t even had a single sip. I’m shit-faced off of price action. I’m shit-faced off of DOGE 2x-ing in 2 weeks.

Oh, my God.

I’m shit-faced off of XRP going up 14%. I’m so shit-faced off of all this euphoria that I’m starting to get a little bit nervous about price action.

I think we’re gonna trade 90K on air, live. This is crazy, Avi. It feels like vindication after a very long period of waiting for this. Why are you worried? I’m feeling more euphoric than ever. I’m not gonna sell a penny’s worth of crypto until after Inauguration Day.

1. The Rally Is Overheating

I’m nervous because we’ve come very far, very fast.

Who’s gonna sell into this, though?

What I’m thinking is, basically, what happens at any moment that Bitcoin goes up so far, so fast is you have people who, 3 months ago, bought Bitcoin at 50K, and they’re looking at a 2x in 3 months. Historically, how this has generally played out—I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again—is that once Bitcoin starts to rally, you look at how long that rally lasts and how much higher it goes up.

The answer is normally 3 to 4 weeks, and then there’s at least a pause with some pullbacks. You can make an argument that the 2023 rally started in October and lasted to November, and then you get a period of consolidation. Then you get a rally from the end of January to the beginning of March. So I guess, you know, 1 month, maybe 5 weeks, and then it’s down from there, right?

So the way that I’m thinking about this is, I think people are getting really, really excited, but Bitcoin is a pretty fucking massive asset, Jonah. It’s huge. So that time period shortens a bit. While I think we could see 100K in the next month, if we do see 100K, I’m probably thinking, “Okay, maybe it’s time to start selling.” Really, what’s the difference between 100K and 90K? I think a lot of people are starting to think like that. My best guess as to what happens is that we get a sell-off before we hit 100K, and then 100K doesn’t act as resistance.

You obviously have a different time horizon than I do. If you were to guess, where do you start selling? As a long-term investor, where do you say, “Okay, this is nuts. Let me sell, even if it’s just to buy other assets”?

Great question. I’m actually getting a little bit more short-term for the first time in a while because I wanna add more fiat into crypto. I wanna momentum-trade this. I think this rally has legs. So if we do get one of those pullbacks that you just described, I’m gonna be waiting to buy that dip if it happens. I think a lot of people are, frankly.

To your point about where you sell, in terms of where I would call this cycle top and start to really sell significant amounts of my portfolio, I’m waiting for MVRV to hit 6. I think that’s a good way to say, “Hey, how in the money is the space? How in the money are Bitcoin holders on their positions?” If they’re way in the money, you’re gonna see profit-taking, and we’re probably near the top.

Right now, MVRV is 2.5, and cycle bottoms are marked by 1.0 or less. So I’m not really gonna be selling until—it’s less about a price target. Obviously, if we hit 200K or 250K in some insane, parabolic bull rally, I’ll sell a bunch.

But even before that, it’s less about the price level and more about what’s going on in the news. Let’s say we’re steadily rallying past, just as a hypothetical scenario, 130K. It’s choppy and volatile, and it’s April of next year. All these pro-crypto candidates who just got elected to Congress are starting to sit down and draft legislation about a strategic Bitcoin reserve, and it’s looking like it might get passed. I don’t think I would sell into that.

Meanwhile, if we’re just gassing past 160K on pure froth in December, maybe you try to lighten up and rebuy on a dip. Does that answer your question? What do you think?

2. Trump Must Deliver Crypto

Heading into the inauguration, we’re gonna need to see some actual movement from Trump about crypto, and we’re gonna need to see some movement from the broader political sphere about crypto. Think about what this actual rally is. This rally is 2 things: 1, the general market going up because people are enthusiastic about Trump, his cutting of regulations, his ability to juice the economy, and his being very likely to inject a ton of money into the system and cause inflation; and 2, because Trump is very bullish on crypto—or at least, on the campaign trail, he was very bullish on crypto.

If time goes by and he doesn’t actually fulfill any of those promises, then this rally stops short of what it could be. Basically, he needs to actually say something about crypto, politicians need to actually do something about crypto, or a bill needs to get genuinely introduced and taken seriously, I think, for Bitcoin to hit 200K.

I think the stock market just ripping probably can take us to 120K. But in order for Bitcoin to break the stratosphere, in order for it to actually reach the next level of geopolitical asset, it needs to be taken seriously on a geopolitical level. We don’t have any strict evidence that that’s gonna happen just yet.

Trump doesn’t need to do anything before he gets inaugurated. So between now and January 20, I think there’s no friction, really. He can’t implement policy. He’s already talked his book. He’s said what he’s gonna do. The action doesn’t really start until next spring at the earliest.

But I think what happens is you always get 2 phases of this, and if you’re trading, you have to understand that and not get shaken out. The first phase is the excitement, and the second phase is the reality. There’s almost always a gap in crypto, because the excitement far outpaces what the reality is currently, and then you get a nasty snapback, right?

You get a move to 100K and then a rejection, and let’s say we trade back down to 80K—a 20% move lower. Let’s say we trade back down to 70K. Let’s say we trade back down to the breakout. How do you react in that situation? How does the world react in that situation? How do the owners of BTC react in that situation? I’ll tell you how you probably should react: buy.

Buy. Yeah.

But if you’re fully allocated at 100K and that’s when reality sets in, Trump hasn’t done anything, and we trade back down to 75K or 80K, then you can’t buy. You’re fully allocated.

But that’s probably gonna be a pretty phenomenal opportunity. Alts are probably gonna be down 70%, and then that’s when you get your next 5x, right? So let’s figure out what the right way to allocate your portfolio is here, so that in this particular environment, where you know that there are gonna be significant drawdowns, you can step in and buy.

Basically, this rally isn’t over unless it ends with something like a ruling that rules out the strategic reserve. That’s when this rally ends. It ends with that hope not materializing. It ends if the new SEC goes after a crypto project, right?

Oh, I mean, then we’re in—

Right?

Doo-doo.

I mean, the way that I’m looking at it is, zooming way out, if we get a strategic Bitcoin reserve, the price target is $500,000 to $1 million a token, because then a bunch of other countries will follow. The US is talking about buying 1 million units of BTC. That’s insane. That’s an insane amount of Bitcoin to buy.

Why would you establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve? You would do so for the same reason you would stash gold: just to hold an alternative reserve currency in case shit hits the fan. If the United States does it, then you can bet your boots that every other country will too. Then it will be the mother of all parabolic rallies, legitimizing the space.

Let's say that a strategic Bitcoin reserve isn't in the cards, but this is almost as good a scenario. A strategic Bitcoin reserve isn't—it’s not imminent. It seems like it's being discussed, but it probably won't pass or get enacted anytime soon. It's kind of in limbo. But Gensler gets fired on day one, Ross Ulbricht gets released from prison on day one, and the noises in Congress and in the White House are all friendly to crypto.

It seems like that gives investors confidence to buy. I think you could still easily trigger $250,000 a token in Bitcoin. Why? Morgan Stanley Wealth Management and J.P. Morgan Wealth Management control trillions upon trillions of dollars' worth of assets. If suddenly the regulatory landscape shifts and crypto gets a framework, or it's about to get a framework, all these lawsuits are getting dropped left and right, and crypto's suddenly legal, those RIAs are going to basically tell their high-net-worth clients, “It's okay for you to allocate 1% to 2% to Bitcoin now.”

From what I hear—I have my ear to the ground on this stuff, and I talked to some major asset managers in the crypto space—apparently, those phone calls have already begun, right? So that is a tsunami of buying. Even if you don't have the sovereign buying, you can still have that. The worst-case scenario is that Trump doesn't say anything about Bitcoin, gets into office, Ross Ulbricht is still sitting in prison, and he's just kind of like, “Gotcha.” You put another crypto hater in the SEC, and then I think we go straight back down to $60,000.

So the risk-reward is so skewed to the upside right now. I still think this is like the Bitcoin ETF. When it came out, we were debating this on the show. We were like, “Is it priced in or not? Is there enough capital to front-run this?” I think this is another ETF-like event where there just literally isn't enough crypto-native capital in the world right now to front-run that tsunami of flow.

Yeah. Look, just to frame this discussion, I don't think anyone, since basically the emergency episode about Trump getting elected—and even before that—Jonah and I have been pretty damn bullish. Originally, I wanted to fade Trump, decided last podcast that didn't really make a ton of sense, and voiced that to you guys. What we're doing right now is talking about, “Hey, what are the warning signs? When do you figure out when to sell?”

The worst thing that you can do as an investor in this type of market is lose sight of that, because that's how you end up riding things down. I think it's fine to say, “Hey, look, there are zero warning signs right now. Let's just ride this casino up to the moon.” But in the back of your head, you should always have a list of metrics and a list of things that you're looking at. It's like, okay, why is it going up? What are the indications, the indicators, that say what made it go up is no longer true, and therefore maybe I should start taking some profit off the table?

You're an investor, you're a trader; at some point, you have to sell. This isn't an up-only market for the rest of your life. This is an up-only market for now. I think it's important to talk about these things and list out, well, okay, what are you looking for to get out?

That's why I love podcasting with you, because we're talking through this in real time. Other than MVRV 6 or above, which is a cycle-top indicator, the great thing about that metric is that the RV stands for realized value, right? So if sovereigns start buying hundreds of thousands of units of Bitcoin at current prices, that RV will go up, right? The average transaction price of Bitcoin across the whole ecosystem will go up as sovereigns get their prints at these new, super-high levels.

But even if they don't, MVRV is still a good way to get out. It's a dynamic indicator that will adjust your exit price higher if there's sizable buying, and if there isn't, your exit price will be lower. So it's really, really good in that way. But MVRV aside, that's a cycle-top indicator. I think what you're referring to, Avi, is how you figure out where to peel off 10% to 20% of your long with a view to having some dry powder so that you can reload on a dip. How do you trade this oscillation?

3. Alt Season Signals A Top

I mean, as a short-term trader, one of the better ways to do it is: let's say Bitcoin's sideways or down over 3 or 4 days, and then altcoins have started really rallying. We've talked about alt season, and I've talked about how alt season tends to last 2 to 3 weeks, but I've never actually explained what I mean by an alt season.

What I mean by an alt season is not that altcoins go up. What I mean is that altcoins go up and Bitcoin doesn't do anything. It's like altcoins have euphoric mania, and Bitcoin is doing nothing. That's alt season. That's what lasts 2 to 3 weeks, and that is sort of the warning sign, in my opinion, to start getting out, because it's people divesting from Bitcoin and buying shit that's going down the risk curve.

Yes, this stuff will 5x, but it's a matter of looking and making sure that, once that starts happening, you clip some profits, right?

Bitcoin, yeah, that hasn't happened yet. Bitcoin dominance—

No, it hasn't.

—is cranking back up.

By all metrics, shit looks good. We keep dipping. People keep coming in. People keep buying. People keep slurping dips. Majors are trading well. On this latest move, the lack of movement from ETH and Solana is indicative that people are still just plowing money into BTC, right? The core driver of this market is still that everyone wants a piece of this thing.

Yeah, people are FOMOing in. Half of it is probably IBIT. Those inflows are massive. Avi, are you getting the phone calls? Are you getting normie friends calling you, like, “Hey, man, it's looking good. Should I buy?” Because I'm definitely getting that again from the real skeptics, the people who—

You know what's funny? I'm getting a lot of, “Hey, must be a good week for you. Must be a great day for you. How's that Bitcoin thing doing?” People haven't asked me what to buy yet, and I don't know why. A lot of it is that I meet a lot of people in my circles, and I've been talking about Bitcoin to them since 2017. They've just been out of it, and they haven't been in it, so maybe some of it is just embarrassment.

But I haven't had, “Okay, what should I buy? What should I buy?” I did get a lot of that in 2021. I got a lot of that in 2021: “What meme coin should I buy that's going to 100x?” And that seems to be happening less this year. To me, that's a really good sign.

What it means is that they're still there. They're going to come in, but they're a little scared right now. They're a little hesitant. They're like, “Ah, shit. I remember what happened in ’21. Maybe the same thing's going to happen again this year.” I'll look out for that. Maybe I'll just livestream my iMessages.

You kind of do when it's from your mom. I talk to a different crew than you do, I guess. The people you talk to are probably in their late 20s, right? They probably don't want to take a bunch of it and gamble it on stuff that has no product-market fit yet. Even if it's about to be legal, the 2022 hangover is just too extreme.

For me, I'm pushing 40. I'm still on the right side of it, but not far away. My community is kind of made up of mid-career people, some of whom have done extraordinarily well in trading and have a lot of savings. But they're not allocated to Bitcoin, and there's nothing in commodities right now that's just going to go bananas. Or even the stock market—they're probably overallocated.

So they're like, “Hey, is it too late to buy Bitcoin? I've only got a couple hundred grand worth, and it's not moving the needle for me. Should I really, really lay into this thing, or have I missed the rally?” One guy asked me, “Is this like buying oil at $120 a barrel?” For those of you who aren't paying attention, the recent top was about $138–$140 a barrel.

4. Crypto's Macro Tailwinds Align

Given my view that even without a strategic Bitcoin reserve, the cycle top is going to be about $250,000, I can't think of a better investment personally. Not financial advice, of course. I tell people my price target, and I tell them that I'm crazy and not to listen to me.

But I just don't see how—what the market is finally starting to realize, and by the market I don't mean you and me, Jonah. I mean people with money are starting to realize just how bad this Biden administration has been for global crypto prices. Getting rid of it, even if Trump weren't bullish at all—even if he were neutral—that alone is probably worth six-figure Bitcoin prices.

This Biden administration wasn't just bad for crypto; it was bad for markets in general. I think the reintroduction of a lot of regulation is just not good for markets, not good for markets generally relative to what a Trump administration would have been, or what a Republican administration would have been.

We're getting this at a really good time. What do I mean by that? This is a perfectly timed injection of hope into investors all around the world, where you're not staring down the face of a recession. You're looking at strong growth, the market seems pretty stable, and the economy seems reasonably strong.

This is all coming off COVID, right? Coming off the Fed cutting rates and managing that landing effectively. At this moment in time, when everything looks okay, you get a turbo boost from Trump coming in and actually getting elected. To me, that's really beautiful because it came at just such a good time, even from a cycle standpoint.

It's also really funny to me how it's like clockwork. October, November, and December of every halving year are just so bullish.

Oh, the halving.

It's just—

We forgot about this. Yeah, like clockwork.

It's just like clockwork every time. I think this is why people get superstitious about BTC. People will say things like, "It's preordained. It's the product of a simulation. It's alien technology that has been delivered to us and is 100% going to go to $1 million a Bitcoin. It was created by God." People say all this crazy stuff.

What? They do?

And it becomes—

Who are you talking to?

You've never been down the crazy circles? You have to understand, I started off in the crazy circles. Back in 2017, the 2013 OG people were a lot more prevalent than they are today. A lot of these people just had this unbelievable conviction in BTC.

Bitcoin will work, and Bitcoin will work because the world is designed for Bitcoin to work, and things will happen that will seem serendipitous but are actually just predetermined. It's stuff like this that makes me question myself. Everything that's happened—all of these crazy events that have happened—are really good for Bitcoin, right?

COVID and the whole digitization of the world were perfectly designed to make Bitcoin go up. COVID was perfectly designed to make Bitcoin go up.

It's insane, isn't it? I was involved in Bitcoin back in 2011, 2012, and 2013. I held a bunch of coins and then sold them all in disgust at $300 a token. I think that was 2013 or maybe 2014; I forget which.

Back then, the people I knew who were buying it—there were some who were maniacally accumulating it, going on Craigslist, scanning QR codes, and doing all that sort of stuff to buy Bitcoin. But most of the people I knew who were doing it were just using it to buy mushrooms on Silk Road, then eating them and wandering around the Catskills in upstate New York.

It wasn't this "Bitcoin came from God and is preordained to go up" kind of community. So maybe you hung out with a different slice of the Bitcoin pie.

For me, what's so interesting about Bitcoin's narrative right now is that it seems inevitable, given how the US is withdrawing from the world, that Bitcoin is going to become a global reserve currency. Since our last podcast, Tether put out a blog post saying that an oil supermajor bought a cargo of crude oil from a major oil trading house denominated in Tether. The whole transaction was financed by Tether, and it probably settled about 2 weeks faster than it would have otherwise.

That sort of transaction is only the beginning of this. A lot of it will be stablecoin flow, and some of that value will accrue to ETH, Tron, or whatever network it's occurring on. But a lot of it is going to happen in Bitcoin too, especially with the sanctioned-complex world that we live in and how banking lines are getting ripped up and reorganized.

I really think it does seem, to use your word, ordained that Bitcoin was going on this trajectory in the wake of the financial crisis. But to be a little bit fair, there's reflexivity to it as well. As Bitcoin goes up, crypto people get richer, and rich crypto people invest their money to try and make crypto more pervasive in society, right?

People like you and me are sitting here pumping our bags, metaphorically, of course, and so are others on a much bigger scale.

Just to be clear, I don't actually believe that Bitcoin was created by aliens. But I do think it was created by somebody who saw where the world was heading and made an asset that fits into that future very neatly, and that's a beautiful thing.

I also have noticed that normally, when you talk about how beautiful and amazing Bitcoin is, you're close to the top. But maybe not this time.

5. Altcoins Demand Selective Bets

I do think that right now, if you pay attention to the markets, there actually is still a nontrivial amount of dispersion here. There are certain things that are doing extremely well, and there are certain things that aren't doing particularly well.

For example, your hated sector of DePIN is not doing well. DePIN's not doing well. Memes are what's doing well. DOGE is 2Xing.

Did you see GOAT? The GOAT?

Yeah. Even L1s are doing okay, right? L1s are doing okay. Solana's doing okay. I mean, Solana's not up that much more than BTC, right? It's like, okay, you would expect from these leaders that people would be allocating to them, and they're not.

What's doing well are the new coins, like Sei and Sui. Sorry, Sui is doing really well. What's also doing well, for some odd reason, are some of the older coins. Cardano is doing extremely well.

Well, we know why that's happening. It's because the Trump administration appears to be consulting with Charles Hoskinson on crypto policy, which is just one of those inexplicable decisions. I hope somebody corrects that.

I'll give you a little insight into this: they're talking to a lot of people. There are a lot of people who are actually talking to the Trump administration. I personally know a few of them, and they cast a wide net.

I do believe that that's probably overreported. Charles is not going to be setting crypto policy anytime soon. I'll put egg on my face if it does turn out to be true.

I mean, better him than Gensler, but yeah, not the best choice. I agree.

NEIRO is doing very well. Some of the other Bitcoin-adjacent names, which you would have thought might do well, have not. For example, ORDI has not done well, and STX has not done well.

I guess in 2021, we had fewer options, I guess is a way to phrase it. There were just fewer coins to buy, and so it was easier for everything to go up in a straight line.

Now it seems like you really have to be paying attention to where the money flow is going, and some of it seems reasonably random. What do I mean by reasonably random? BONK is up 27% today and WIF is down 1%. Normally those things move together.

I do think there is an opportunity to make a lot of money here if you're picking your spots.

Speaking of picking your spots, I was recommending that people put 40% to 80% of their crypto portfolio into Bitcoin and reserve the rest for active trading, basically altcoining. But to your point, personally, I'm going to put it out there: right now I only have 20% of my portfolio as an active trading book because I lack confidence in what to buy.

We're not in a market where everything just goes up in a straight line and it's just a question of how much beta and risk you want to take. NEAR, one of my favorite tokens from the previous cycle, has barely moved. Solana has ripped, but it's still $50 off the highs. GOAT just got listed by Binance—the first Pump.fun token to hit $1 billion. Do you buy that? What about WIF and DOGE, which have decorrelated even though they're both dog coins? I thought BONK was dead; now it's alive.

I don't feel like I have a good understanding of this, so I don't want to invest cycles and pay bid-ask spreads and fees to rotate things in and out when I lack the confidence. I'm just not seeing the ball clearly outside of Bitcoin and Solana. For Solana and ETH, I have a pretty good plan, but...

I think there are some good trades that you can take out there. For example, after the Trump victory, you're like, "Okay, what do I buy?" I think memes—DOGE, sorry—DOGE was reasonably obvious. I don't know if memes are reasonably obvious, but at least DOGE was. If you wanted to put on a huge position against BTC, you still made really good money doing that.

Yeah.

That was a reasonably risk-adjusted position that you could put on.

I feel so dumb. I fumbled that one.

Right? I fumbled it in the sense that I didn't have a massive position, but I had a good-enough-sized position, I guess.

Good for you.

To be—

I had nothing.

That was enough not to be upset. Because we had talked about that, and I had a big enough position not to kill myself, but it was nowhere near big enough, I think, given the conviction I had expressed earlier. That was obviously a little sad.

Another is that you have these NVIDIA earnings coming up, and I think AI tends to do well into those earnings. This is the type of environment when you have really obvious trades work out. Yes, some things have gone up a ton already—Render is almost 2x—but you have Arweave, NEAR, TAO, and all these things. Check back 2 days before NVIDIA earnings on the 20th, and I think they'll be outperformers.

One thing that's kind of interesting to me is that now you have XRP performing really well, and that was actually a delayed reaction. XRP was one of the things I was really bullish on out of the gate because of all the stuff we'd talked about: anything related to the SEC is going to be bid up really hard. XRP is the asset that has been burdened by the SEC the most—getting delisted from exchanges and restricted across the board. And only today does it outperform. That was a bit of a weird one, but that's one of the assets that I would think to buy right after a Trump victory.

There's no rhyme or reason to this. It just feels like a bunch of people randomly have ideas, and then the price moves when it moves. It's not like equities or FX or commodities, where complexes of related assets all move in a relatively logical, sensible way versus each other.

Which is why this is the environment when you see all the threaders come out. Why? Because it's so easy to create narratives now. People have money. People are willing to buy into things. You put out a 15-tweet thread about a specific asset, tell everyone why it's going to go up, buy right before you put out that thing, and then sell into it. I mean, you're basically—

People actually do that?

Oh, dude. Basically every thread that you see, somebody is probably selling into it.

The threaders.

If you look at my feed, that's why I don't do that. I don't do it because it's not like—

I write threads, but it's more about process—

It's—

Because I like to write.

Yeah. That's like 1 out of 15: "This is why TRON is going absolutely to the moon." Then it goes up 25%, and somebody put on a 10x leveraged position beforehand and then sells out of it. I'm not saying every thread and every person who writes like this is doing that, but I'm saying it's a lot more common than you might think. That's why, if you look at my feed, you're never going to see that.

Yeah.

Because it's just not how I roll. Even the appearance of impropriety isn't necessarily a good thing. So even if I don't sell into it, I don't want people coming after me. So I just don't do it.

Yeah.

No, it's true. You can't torch your reputation. The timeline is getting weird, though. Now that you mention it, I do see a lot of pump-your-bags threads. I see an odd number of paid shills going on—people who should have way too much money to be getting paid for tweets are doing paid tweets for random projects. This means this is the beginning of the bull cycle, the alt bull cycle, where the biz dev people at various projects have full marketing budgets and start paying people to do stuff, right? So you're starting to see the paid shills.

Then there are people like us getting all excited, talking about how happy we are that crypto is finally rallying. All of the FOMO, shame, and regret of the crypto haters out there is kind of filtering through. I think this feels like inning 2 or 3 of a real bull run. I think you know you're in inning 8 when you start to see the scams—when 1 out of every 3 tweets is somebody getting their wallet fucking emptied. That was a hallmark of late November 2021.

I recommend everybody read Jason Yanowitz's thesis on the 4 stages of the bull market. We're in stage 3 right now, which is the fun one, not the blow-off top. So I feel like we're safe. Unlike you, Avi, I don't feel comfortable selling any crypto into fiat for a while. I don't want to miss the next rally. I don't want to be sidelined when there's one of these ludicrous candles.

That actually reminds me: did you buy any PNUT?

A little bit, yeah.

That was a great trade.

Yeah.

It was a good one.

I love PNUT. That one resonated with me. Never enough, right? Never enough. But basically, the reason why I didn't buy more—and this is a mistake that everybody can learn from—is that ahead of the election, I moved a lot of crypto to centralized exchanges so that I could be nimble, do what I wanted to do, and momentum-trade it. I made some money by doing that, and then I had some capital I could use to trade with leverage. It was all fun and games.

I kind of ignored my Phantom wallet when Trump was getting elected. I'd moved a lot of value out of there, so I wasn't in meme-coining mode during the election. I was in benchmarking mode, you know? What were you doing?

I think that's fair, Jonah. But come on, man. PNUT—

Yeah, it's stupid.

PNUT was a fucking home run. That was a great one.

I bought some, yeah.

That was a political, cute-squirrel narrative.

That's why I bought it. I understand the political memes.

I mean, it's just amazing. You can't fight the peanut, man.

PNUT's a meme. It's a perfect meme. Okay, BODEN's dead. Now we have a new one: PNUT the squirrel, for government overreach. I think PNUT's probably going to nuke back down. I don't think squirrel coins—I don't think there's enough. I think it's going to trade like BODEN did, where people could be calling for it to go to $50 billion, and then it's like, "He's dead. The squirrel's dead." No one's going to remember Peanut the Squirrel in a couple of years.

Ah, look, I don't know about that. The thing about it is, sometimes after death, things actually get better. When Biden dies, BODEN might pump. You know, this is the way that the crypto market works. Jonah, I can't... I'm not going to justify it to you. I'm not going to explain it to you. You just have to understand this: when Biden passes away, BODEN's probably going to pump.

This is how it works. Yeah. People talking about a dead squirrel as alpha—yes.

Putting that up on the board. I mean, in—

Yeah.

—in any other market, this would be the pico top, where you sell everything, run for the hills, and bury cash in your backyard. But in crypto—

Guys—

Yeah.

—we’re not done yet.

We’re not done yet.

We’re not done. I don’t know how much stronger I can be about that point, but we’re not done yet. We might have a pullback. You might want to trade it, which I will. But we’re not done.

We’re not even getting started. Most people don’t have this asset.

Wait until it—just, you’ll see. December is going to be a great month. December is going to be a great month. This is what happens when you don’t even have real retail mania or FOMO yet.

This time, when the squirrel meme starts, we’re just getting started, right? Yeah, Peanut is not a top signal. Also, half of the miners out there have pivoted to AI. I wonder if that means less selling. It probably doesn’t, but—

6. Miner Selling Changes The Cycle

Well, miners are a better business now. I think that’s been pointed out to us before. It was pointed out to us by Will. Miners are a better business, and they sell forward a lot of their BTC.

Miner selling, how it used to work in 2017, even up until 2021, is these guys were kind of just degenerate gamblers. They would either sell everything at the lows or everything at the high—just dump a bunch of stuff whenever they were either panicking or thinking, “All right, this is crazy. Let me sell.”

I think miner movements were more predictive previously than they are today. I just don’t think that there’s a ton of supply coming from these guys to hit the markets.

This is like a double halving, right? There was the halving, so that halves the amount of selling from miners. And then another halving because the miners found another business line, so they can hold on for dear life for longer, right?

They all want to be long Bitcoin. They don’t want to be selling to fund operations. But now their GPUs pay more of the bills. They don’t have to sell as much Bitcoin.

To me, this setup is crazy. I think people have been saying we’ve been in a bull market for 2 years. The recovery was basically recovery. Now we’re in a bull market. We’re breaking new highs, and there are so many different factors proving to the market that Bitcoin and the rest of crypto have real fundamentals. Those real fundamentals can lead this thing into another price ballpark.

I’m so bullish. I’m so bullish I can’t see straight, Avi. I love it.

I love it when you say that.

I feel that way. I can’t sleep right now.

I’ll drink to that.

Oh.

Right out of the bottle. What are you drinking there?

I don’t know. It’s not good.

It doesn’t have to be. It’s just about celebrating.

Patagonia Argentinian red wine. It’s fine. My girlfriend’s using it to cook short ribs right now, and that’s why there’s not much left in the bottle. I didn’t drink all that. Most of it was used for short ribs.

Nothing like steak and a glass of red when the thing that you bet everything on is suddenly just—

Yeah, just going up. I mean—

Singing—

7. Crypto Wealth Fuels Spillover Trades

How many times a day are you opening Zillow? If the answer is over 3, I’m going to add that to my list of top signals.

I’m not—I think I’m good on real estate. I’ve got to stop. For me, it’s more that when you get to my age, it’s other stuff. It’s what you put inside of your house, and less the idea of moving. Moving makes me sick, you know?

Yeah. I get—

Are you Zillow-ing?

I guess that’s fair. No, I’m not Zillow-ing. I’m—

Good.

I’m stuffed on real estate. I’ve got enough on that.

Thank God.

I have 2 houses in Puerto Rico and an apartment in New York. I’m good.

Yeah.

It’s enough.

You don’t need anything.

Don’t need any more. And then I have a hotel investment. I invested a lot in a hotel that they’re redeveloping here. I think Puerto Rico real estate is an underrated asset class because there’s actually a floor.

People have been saying that for 20 years, and then—

And it’s straight up, Jonah. It’s straight up. I bought—

Are you in, um, the Mighty Ducks guy?

The first house that I—

Are you investing in the same hotel as the Mighty Ducks guy, Brock Pierce?

Yep. I think so. Normandie?

I don’t know anything about Puerto Rico.

Anyway, I don’t know if he’s investing in that hotel, but I bought my first house here for $1.2 million in 2021, and I could sell it now for $2.2 to $2.5 million.

Is that just a crypto trade, or is that a pandemic trade?

Yeah, it’s kind of—

Or is it—

It’s a pandemic and crypto trade. It’s a markets-go-up, everyone-starts-to-look-at-Puerto-Rico-real-estate trade. There’s a small—

Well, okay, a lot of people don’t know this—not that this is a Puerto Rico shill podcast—but there’s $2.5 billion of development coming into Puerto Rico to redo the whole thing in the west, in the north, kind of everywhere.

A lot of big hedge fund managers are moving in and buying up real estate because Puerto Rico, until 2035, is the only place in the entire world where an American citizen can pay zero taxes. Zero. Not zero and then you also pay your federal taxes—zero. You just pay zero capital gains taxes.

You don’t pay income taxes there?

Done. You pay 4% income taxes if you write it through a business. 4%.

Okay.

So what ends up happening is, obviously, whenever the market goes up and people are expecting a good year, a lot of people move down to Puerto Rico to establish residency.

What’s happening right now is that a lot of people are coming in and looking at Puerto Rico because Trump has won, and they’re saying, “Okay, well, if the markets are going to 2X in the next 3 years, I’m going to save 50%.” It’s called Act 60.

Puerto Rican real estate, specifically houses, has somewhat of a floor because building takes a long time in Puerto Rico. And in order to get the benefit of Act 60, you have to own your primary residence.

Okay.

So anyone who’s moving down here to save millions of dollars has to buy their primary residence, and there are only a small subset of houses that are livable for somebody if you make millions of dollars. That’s why. People are—

Okay. No, it’s basically crypto beta, these Puerto Rico apartments.

Yeah, it’s crypto beta. Somebody will make $10 million in crypto and say, “Yeah, this house might be worth $1.5 million, but I’ll pay $2.5 million because I’m going to save $5 million.”

Yeah. Watch Trump rug—whatever that is—Act 60. Watch him just—

Actually, I don’t care. I’m not even on Act 60.

Yeah, you don’t live in Puerto Rico anymore. You’re good. No, that’s interesting. There are all these weird little derivative crypto trades.

Yeah. It is a crypto trade.

Every time crypto rips, my favorite place, the Hollywood Hills, rips. The first thing that every crypto-rich person does is try to do the Selling Sunset thing.

COIN or BTC miners is a good one, as a question. Can I throw in Hood as well? As a stock that I’d like to own? I really like Hood.

Okay.

Good stock.

I think—

Um—

I mean, Coinbase is getting close to the all-time highs. It’s trading at $320 a share. It’s pretty crazy.

I think a lot of these crypto businesses are going to have a euphoric cycle, but they’re equities, right? You can’t expect the same kind of asymmetric returns from Coinbase or Robinhood that you could from Dogecoin or even Bitcoin. They’re not going to triple, you know?

Mm-hmm.

Maybe Coinbase could triple over 2 to 3 years, but it just seems so unlikely. I think that if I were going to put big leverage on anything, I would put it on crypto equities, because it’s going to be a smooth ride.

I think so too, because I think especially with Hood, what people don’t necessarily realize is that as markets go up, people are going to start using it a lot more. It’s actually a really good platform for buying and selling crypto.

I use it and enjoy it.

They still charge 35 bps?

Yes, they still charge 35 bps, but it’s still cheaper than Coinbase.

Yeah.

It’s baked into the spread a bit. When I bought some ETH on there a while back, I looked at it in aggregate and thought, “Okay, well, mid to here is like 40 bps.”

Yeah, I used to quote Robinhood in my old job, and basically you would earn 1 to 2 basis points of edge on Bitcoin and ETH, and 2 to 4 basis points of edge on DOGE or SHIB, on top of the 35 bps. Robinhood would take 35, and then you would quote 36 bps away from mid for Bitcoin. Robinhood would take 35, you would keep 1, and you would have all the risk.

Yeah, that sounds about right for what I paid.

But anyway, I interrupted you. I’m sorry about that. You were saying, “You know what I’m doing on Robinhood right now.”

Maybe I should drop my referral link. No, I’m not going to do that. They actually offer a 1% bonus, paid out over 2 years, for any cash that you deposit right now, which is kind of nuts, right? You deposit $5 million, you get paid $50,000 just for depositing your $5 million, you’re earning 4.5% on cash, and you get to invest it. Okay.

Sure.

That is pretty—Is that Robinhood Gold?

Yeah, but you pay $5 a month for that. It seems pretty good, as long as Robinhood doesn’t go under, which I don’t think it will.

No.

If it didn’t go under last year, it’s probably not going to go under this year.

They’re not exactly too big to fail, but I think they’re pretty foolproof at this point. That’s my take. So, yeah, I like that.

It’s up to $2.5 million FDIC-insured, so if you’re really scared, then you might as well put in $2.5 million. But I actually think Robinhood’s going to do extremely well over the next little bit.

I haven’t looked at my board. I haven’t been paying any attention to it.

The 2 other tickers that I’ve been paying attention to that aren’t necessarily directly crypto-related are VRT and GEO. Netgear is doing really well. The thesis there is that, and don’t quote me on this because I’m not the most technical person in the world, what’s underappreciated about Netgear is its ability to install communication systems in AI data centers and basically maintain uptime. Apparently, they’re getting installed pretty heavily. GEO is also obviously doing very well, which I’ve talked about before.

My favorite single-name stock that has nothing to do with crypto is Meta. I just think you never bet against the Zuck. I also think they’re super well positioned for AI because they’re building all these amazing models, and they have all the best training data. They basically have everybody’s information and can train their models on it, and ultimately that’s going to provide value in terms of personal assistants, agents, and all sorts of other crap that’s on the horizon. They execute better than anybody, and their market cap is way lower than your NVIDIAs, Apples, or Microsofts of the world.

I think that’s my favorite Mag 7 single-name stock and my favorite stock that has nothing to do with crypto. But back to crypto for a second: Am I crazy for continuing to put more dough into crypto? Am I buying the top? Should I be waiting for a pullback?

8. Portfolio Risk Changes With Age

Given how much of your net worth you told me was allocated to crypto, no. But I probably wouldn’t go over 100%.

You’d like to buy over 100%?

Like, buy over 100% of your net worth.

Oh, yeah. No, I wouldn’t do that either.

Yeah, that seems like a recipe for disaster, personally. But, you know—

Yeah, no, I wouldn’t do that. I’m not crazy. I’m just older than you. It’s funny how it works: when you’re young and your entire portfolio is just funny money, you can gamble it and do what you want with it. If you lose 20%, 30%, or 50%, not much changes for you. You’re still in wealth-accumulation mode, especially if you’re a trader.

When you get to my age, the prospect of getting a trade wrong and then having to explain to your family why everybody’s moving into a smaller house just feels stupid. So when I talk on Crypto Twitter about portfolio allocation, I inherently come off as way more risk-averse than young Thundercats who are 150% long crypto. I just can’t do that anymore. Life changes.

I think we need a new Thundercat because I’m no longer a Thundercat.

I mean, we had a Thundercat on the show.

Yeah. I think the issue I realized in this bull run is that, in the most humble way possible, I’ve got too much to lose, right? I just don’t have the balls to be 100% long my net worth anymore. I can be 50% long, and that’s okay. Sixty percent, maybe. But 100% of my net worth? I don’t love the idea of betting that much, because if I’m wrong, then I’m wrong.

Every now and then, when the opportunity presents itself—when there’s a slam, a home run, and I’m super confident in it—I’m like, “Yeah, okay, I’ll bet huge.” But the way I used to operate was that I would literally have 100% of my net worth in crypto forever until it got to a point where I thought it was nuts, and then I would sell out of it and take some cash.

But I was always going to buy back in. From 2017 to the peak in 2021, I basically never dipped below 100% net long crypto for more than a week. I would short to try to balance things out, but I just didn’t.

You know, that’s a good lesson for all the people in their early to mid-20s out there who are just getting started with crypto. If you want to be like Avi, in terms of crypto trading becoming a path to freedom for yourself, you have to play with big conviction when you’re really convicted.

Mm.

You also have to be early, and you also have to not FOMO into that level of investment at the top of anything. That’s just what you have to do. When you get more into preserving what you have, the entire calculus of trading changes.

Well, I’m still playing to win. Don’t get me wrong.

Yeah.

I’m still playing to make an absolutely crazy amount of money, but I can do that with 50% of my net worth.

Yeah.

If I 10X—

Same, so can I.

If I 10X 50% of my net worth, I’m going to be buying a lot of cars.

Also, we’re getting de-risked right now. I love drunk Avi, by the way. Keep drinking that wine. I feel like we’re getting de-risked a little bit.

As time goes on, the odds improve. Let’s say that you had 50% of your net worth in Bitcoin. Is Bitcoin really going to zero ever? No. What’s the worst-case scenario for Bitcoin? What price would you say—

It goes down 70%.

Yeah. So if you have 50% of your net worth in Bitcoin—I’m not talking about random shit alts—and it goes down 70%, you’ve lost a third of your net worth. You’re fine, right? Is that really that much?

The issue, Jonah, is—how do I put this? When you’re a trader, Bitcoin can go up 100% and you can lose money, and Bitcoin can go down 50% and you can make money. What happens to a lot of people that I’ve unfortunately seen in action is that Bitcoin will be down 70%, and they might have only touched Bitcoin, but they’re down 90%. That’s not great.

You know, I do think that’s also why, as a trader, just being cognizant of that is important. You end up playing with smaller numbers because you can win more to the upside, but you can also lose more to the downside.

If I’m confident in something, I’m setting it and forgetting it, and I think that this thing is going to go up—let’s say 50% of my net worth is allocated to crypto. Maybe I have 35% in stuff that I just don’t touch, confident that for years this stuff’s going up, and then 15% trading. But I’m not trading with 50%.

No, no. I mean, that’s why we were talking about this on Twitter: you cannot trade 100% of your crypto portfolio.

It's just too much. You're more dialed in than 99% of the traders out there, and you're not trading 100% of your crypto portfolio.

Dude, my philosophy, from the beginning, has always been that the best way to make money in crypto, if you're a good trader, is to take 50% of your portfolio and just stick it in stuff that you're gonna hold forever and you're never gonna touch, and then trade with 50%. And then every time you make a certain amount of profit, just buy the stuff that you're gonna hold forever, right?

Yeah. De-risk it into—

And then—

Bitcoin or ETH or whatever. Whatever, Solana.

And then you just don't touch it again.

It's crazy that Solana—

Right?

—is now in the category of forever bags.

Yeah, it's crazy.

Wow.

Anyway, Jonah, I gotta roll.

Well, the audience—

I gotta—

—says, “Guys, please sleep,” so now's good timing.

Guys, this is pigmentation. I don't know how many times I need to explain this to you. I sleep like 7 to 8 hours a day now.

It was preordained, to use the word from earlier in the podcast.

This is purely pigmentation. There's nothing I can do about that.

It's just—

It's just how I look.

It's your war face. You were just born with a Bitcoin trading—

This is just my war face. I am a raccoon. I am 2% raccoon, and that is just... I'm sorry, guys. This is just—like, see?

Well, I don't have the pigmentation, but I'm actually tired because I stay up all night looking at Bitcoin and then my daughter starts a rave at 4:45 a.m. sometimes. So, yeah, feeling the squeeze. Dude, great talking to you.

I can't believe I just gave a long lecture about how I'm basically just a raccoon and that this is pigmentation that's not going away, and the first comment is, “Avi never sleeps. 100% confirmed.” Brother.

Avi is a cute panda. That's what somebody else said.

Oh, well, that's nicer than raccoon. I'll take it. Thanks, guys.

Inverse panda. Great—

Inverse panda.

Great talking to you, man. How about this? Rather than just one of us drinking, if we breach 100K, let's just both drink on the podcast, okay? We haven't had one of those yet.

Yeah. Let's do it.

All right. At 100K, we're breaking out something.

Let's do it.

Drinking.

I'll—you know what? At 100K, I'll Deliveroo a bottle to you, and you can DoorDash a bottle to me.

Okay. Perfect.

Of our favorite stuff.

Love it. Done. You're done.

All right. Adios.

Great seeing you, Avi. Not financial advice, everybody. Please don't listen to us. Don't buy Puerto Rican hotels.

Absolutely not.

Don't do anything.

Yeah.

All right. Good talking to you.