What's The Trade For 2026?

In the new year, if new buyers come in, which I think they will, and the tax selling abates and the end-of-year liquidity comes back, people are back at their desks, and gold has been ripping—and take out the Nasdaq. If the Nasdaq doesn't collapse in on itself, I think we see $100,000 Bitcoin by the end of January. I think it happens fast.

Oh man, Jonah, what's going on?

Avi, we are live again. Happy New Year, everybody. I hope everyone had a good—this is the liminal week between Christmas and New Year's when nothing real actually happens. That's been very true of the markets. Basically, nothing has happened. We're here to tell you today, dear listener, that nothing happening is a very good thing.

That nothing has happened.

It's a good week to make some predictions, isn't it? Good week to lay your nuts on the table.

1. Is The Metals Trade Over?

It is. Let's talk about what we think's going to happen in 2026. I say that nothing's happened, but nothing's happened in the Bitcoin world. A lot has happened outside of the Bitcoin world, including metals absolutely ripping to all-time highs. We've discovered that metals have discovered the technology Bitcoin had in 2017 called “up only,” and they're actively using it right now.

I've given a shout-out to 13D Research before, but I'll do it again. 13D Research absolutely crushed it this cycle. They made the argument—the very good argument, I think—that post-COVID, you were going to experience a higher baseline rate of inflation, and it was basically never going to come down. We weren't really going to get back to that 2% target. Maybe it'd be 2.5%, maybe it'd be 3%, you might even get up to 4%, but you were going to sit above it.

We weren't going to be in a zero-interest-rate environment for a while because I think inflation is endemic now to our economy, just based on what's going on. Geopolitically, the world is fracturing, so obviously that's been a huge driver of this metal run. In China, they were actually stopping—tamping down on—exports of silver. Commodities like palladium, gold, and silver are now being battled over on a country basis, and that doesn't really seem to be going away anytime soon.

I wanted to ask you, Jonah, the commodities trader: What do you make of this rally? Do you think that this is a multiyear rally? Is 2026 going to be the year of continued metals strength, or is this just a stupid end-of-year short-squeeze move?

I don't think 2026 is going to be the year of the crazy metals rally, Avi. I think that was 2025. I think we're in the eighth inning, maybe the top of the ninth, for this metals rally.

In terms of time, I was bullish on metals from—basically, I started trading precious metals professionally in late 2022, early 2023. I was bullish then, and then when I left the professional world and became a pajama trader, I didn't really do anything about my metals thesis. That would have been the time to get in, when gold was trading below $2,000. Now is not the time to get in.

And, I mean, put it this way: In the eighth or ninth inning, the price can still double. I have no idea where silver and gold top out. This is a parabolic rally. We've seen crypto full-send when it's doing stuff like this. You never really know where it's going to top out; nobody does, by definition.

Price-wise, I have no idea where silver and gold top out—possibly a lot higher, possibly not that much higher. I really don't have an opinion. Time-wise, I think the rally is almost over. The reason why is a couple of things. First of all, the people who are stockpiling gold right now—gold's a huge market. We'll get to silver in a second. Gold's a huge market. In order to move the needle on gold, you have to be a sovereign, right? Retail can't—

But isn't that kind of what's happening? That's why we're so bullish, right?

But, as I'm saying, it won't continue. It won't continue because sovereigns—I don't know, I've traded with dozens of sovereigns in my career—and sovereigns don't FOMO like retail does. China—when the price goes up, they slow down their commodities buying.

China has been the biggest buyer of gold. Why do they do that? Because they recognize institutionally that they're forcing the price higher into their own face, and if they stop buying, the price will go down so they can accumulate more. At least that's what they do in hydrocarbons. Maybe in gold, the gold department over in China just—

I think hydrocarbons are very different, and I'm actually very bearish on oil for a lot of reasons that I wrote down, which I want to get into with you.

Yeah.

But I disagree with you, and I want to make a dent in it.

I don't want to bet on this one. I don't know.

Come on. Put your money where your mouth is.

Fair enough. But I think our predictions will be interspersed throughout the episode. We're not going to walk you through all of it. Actually, maybe I'll bet with you. What's the bet?

The bet is that I think a 50/50 basket of gold and silver will outperform the S&P in 2026.

Silver. Yeah, I don't know. I think you're right. I think you're right.

Okay, that could happen.

It could happen, but I put it at an 80% chance. I think it's very likely that it happens because I think gold moves. I don't know about silver.

So you're going to give me 5-to-1 odds if I bet against you?

I'm not going to give you 5-to-1 odds. You kind of—that was, by the way, I think those were actually very fair odds that you got on that trade. I think those are very reasonable.

Mike Dudas's bitching aside, we'll get to that later in the episode. If you follow Jonah, you know that Jonah loves getting into Twitter fights. He just loves rage-baiting people. I have to come in and play good cop, moderate, and tell everyone to log off for the week.

No, let me just finish my thoughts for a second on this question.

Okay, go ahead.

I don't think—I think the sovereign buyers of gold will recognize that if they slow down, other than them, there isn't a lot of buying, or comparatively little buying. Retail can't move the needle in an asset as big as gold. It's 10 times bigger than Bitcoin. So I do think they'll probably slow down and wait for it to pull back so they can buy more.

The thing about gold is that we've talked about it on previous episodes. I think gold is catching up to where it should be as an inflation hedge. It used to be a risk-off trade, and then in Ukraine it became a sort of inflation hedge. It's a very different instrument from what it used to be. I kind of think this gold rally is it doing what it should have done during COVID. It's doing it post-COVID.

Silver is a much smaller asset with a lower market cap. I mean, not that much smaller, actually. I don't want to dispel this viral tweet that went around that said the ratio of the silver market cap to the gold market cap throughout history has been somewhere between 10 and 15, and now it's 60. This thing got 10 or 15 million views. It was going super-viral on Twitter, and it's just completely incorrect.

The ratio today is 1 to 10. Silver is a tenth the size of gold by market cap. Even historically, it was behind before this rally. It was maybe 1 to 20, so you can make an argument that before this, silver might outperform. My bet now is that gold outperforms and gold miners continue to outperform.

I want to read something to you from a research report that I was looking at: As of October 23, BRICS, when combined with members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, now hold more gold than the United States. That has never happened before, and it's happening very specifically because the world is moving into a multipolar, geopolitically fractured version of itself. There is no longer one hegemony.

This is an old, tired point, but the thing that you have to remember as a crypto trader is that, let's say, you're used to four-year cycles. Gold doesn't do four-year cycles. Gold does 15-year cycles. These megatrends tend to have a certain amount of inertia to them, and they tend to last.

The gold rally has only lasted for 5 or 6 years at this point, really post-COVID. There's still a lot of lag here, in my personal opinion. Even if you're right that it's the eighth inning, the eighth and ninth innings are always the craziest part. That's when you get the crazy blow-off tops. To me, the argument for allocating to gold is stronger than ever, to be completely honest.

When you have inflation, when you have this multipolar fracturing of the world, and when you have sovereigns continuing to buy—even as recently as October, they're buying, and there doesn't seem to be a tremendous amount of abatement. Now, this has nothing to do with oil, because I think I'm very, very bearish on oil.

The other thing that you have to remember is that, for the first time in a long time—not for the first time ever, because this happened in the 1980s—your average retail investor is allocating to gold in a larger capacity because they're seeing it go up. That makes gold and silver, I think, very reflexive assets. These 3 points for gold, combined with the fact that Bitcoin has gone nowhere in the last 6 months, make me very bullish on Bitcoin. We'll get to that point, but I do want to make the case for metals: palladium is also ripping, and copper and copper miners—I mean, basically, geopolitical assets.

One of my biggest bags right now is something called REMX, which is related to rare-earth and critical minerals. So I'm generally pretty bullish on just commodities in general, and I have a decent amount of my portfolio now reallocated after I sold those silver miners, which I try not to think about.

There are a lot of things I try not to think about when it comes to 2025. Avi, I don't have enough conviction to bet against you. I think you could be right; I just don't know. I'm not a very good gold trader. I missed the shift in dynamics—a huge paradigm shift in gold—from “This is a risk-off asset that people buy when they're scared,” like in 2008, to “This is an asset that retail buys on momentum.”

This is an asset that people buy as an inflation hedge. It was just never like that. I also don't necessarily agree that inflation's out of control right now.

It's not out of control. Just to clarify, I never said out of control. I just said it's a higher baseline than it was post-GFC.

Yeah. I mean, okay, post-GFC inflation was maybe 2%, on target. Maybe now we're at 2.7%, 2.8%, something. So basically, recently, inflation has been more in control than it's been at any point this decade.

I don't know if you're buying gold for that reason. I think you're buying gold because it's rallying. You're buying gold because you think the world is becoming multipolar, and you buy silver because there's still a lot of retail. Silver feels like a WallStreetBets, Reddit mafia driving it up. It looks squeezy to me.

I basically would be looking to buy these assets on a pullback. And I think that the sovereigns who are buying gold do check the price a little bit more than the retail degens who buy, you know, whatever, $PEPE, right? Sovereigns are a little bit smarter about buying on the highs than retail. So I'm just—I wouldn't put my eggs in one basket.

Agree. Now, I actually agree with this guy, New Type Trader: “Gold can sniff out wars. China being more aggressive with Taiwan. Gold is also sniffing out more rate cuts coming.” I actually think he's right on all points, but I would frame it in a slightly different way.

It's not gold that's sniffing it out. It's China knowing that they're going to be aggressive and stockpiling gold. It's like they're telling us what their plan is by accumulating all this gold. BRICS is telling us what the plan is by accumulating all this gold.

I think that this is the year—or the next 3 years, at least, while Trump is in charge—of listening to the big boys. That's what I call it: listen to what they do and what they're doing. Look at—Nvidia's buying Intel. Trump bought Intel. China's buying gold and commodities. Listen to the big boys.

And, by the way, to answer the question, we became a commodities podcast when commodities started being a lot more fun to trade. [laughter]

Yeah, I guess this data is public. The PBOC, the People's Bank of China, publishes its gold holdings, and it's not like they're going bananas. They went bananas in 2022, when they were going crazy buying a lot of gold. I'm trying to pull up the chart here. This one has data up to May 2025. I saw some other charts, so let me just present my screen here, Avi.

Yes.

Okay.

Well, I can't read it because I'm not Chinese, but yes.

Yeah. Basically, the website is Shanghai Metals Market. This is PBOC gold reserves. As you can see, when I started to get really bullish was when they were doing this. This is when I was an institutional trader. The rate of increase was pretty stark relative to this previous period, where they just weren't doing anything.

It's like, okay, the Ukraine war has happened. We've made a decision in our executive Communist Committee that the United States can no longer be trusted with our money, so we're going to start diversifying. Oh, this is crazy. Then it kind of leveled off again.

Gold didn't do much in 2024, which is still last year for another couple of days. And then this year, it's increasing gradually, but the trajectory isn't like that. I think maybe there's just less liquidity right now or something. Anyway, I'll stop sharing my screen here.

I think the point I'm trying to make is that they don't seem like they're panic-buying the way that, say, Europe panic-bought LNG when the Ukraine war broke out, or China panic-bought oil during some of the stockpiling-commodities-at-all-costs, shortage-type moments. So, with the big caveat that I'm not the world's best gold trader, I think it just would feel strange to buy this on momentum here. I think there are better assets like—

I think you can, but you can buy it on a pullback. For example, with palladium, I think that, like I said, they've adopted this beautiful technology now of “go up.” So I'm pretty bullish on the idea of them continuing to go up, just because of everything that we've already discussed.

2. Bitcoin Ripping In January

But that brings me to Bitcoin. I wrote this post about what a bottom looks like, and we're kind of filling it out. What I said at the beginning of December was, okay, basically, we have a very short period of time to go up in December; otherwise, we're going to get a lot of tax selling, and Bitcoin's not going to perform particularly well. I think that sort of played out.

Bitcoin has gone basically nowhere but down—mostly sideways, but down—over the last month. I think a lot of that is because people want to get out. But when do you bottom? You don't bottom when big buys come in. You bottom when sellers decide that the price they're selling at no longer makes a ton of sense to sell.

So my viewpoint on this is that we've sort of reached that point. I thought maybe we could get a capitulatory event to $74K to $80K. We touched $80K, but we haven't really been able to get back there because, even in a low-liquidity environment—which this has been post-October 10, and even more low-liquidity because it's the holidays—with not a ton of buying and tax selling, we haven't been able to hold below $85K.

To me, what that suggests is that sellers have run out of ammo, and that in the new year, if new buyers come in—which I think they will—the tax selling abates, the end-of-year liquidity comes back, people are back on the desks, gold has been ripping, and take out Nasdaq—if Nasdaq doesn't collapse in on itself—I think we see $100K Bitcoin by the end of January.

I think it happens fast because I think Bitcoin has been neglected for all of these structural reasons, and now we've run out of sellers. Nobody wants to sell at this price right now. Where are people going to sell? That's always the question. How do you think about this in the negative sense? How could you be wrong? It's if Bitcoin breaks lower.

If it does break past $85K and stays there for a bit, then maybe people panic and sell out. But in my opinion, that's still the last bit of selling that would occur. Either way, I'm very bullish. I'm ready to take a stab. I tweeted that I lifted a bunch of $100K January 30 calls because I think that we can actually squeeze up.

What did you pay for this per contract—$2,000? $5,000? Something?

Yeah. So I bought it on IBIT. I bought 55 $55 calls, and I paid $0.82 per call. So if we get back up—if we go up to 20%, where I think we go—if I could get to 60, I'm looking at a 5x effectively, a little bit more, 5–6x.

Okay. And I think—$55 calls?

Correct.

Okay. So that's the equivalent of buying $100,000 Bitcoin calls for $50.

A little bit less. Yeah, but yeah.

Okay. I just did the math. Yeah, it's basically like a $1,500 Bitcoin option.

It's technically a $97,000 call, but $100,000 sounded better in a tweet. So, yeah, you know, sue me. [laughter]

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

That's what I say: never let the truth get in the way of good tweets. [laughter]

Okay, so you're bullish. You're bullish, and you're not just bullish over the course of the year. You're bullish in the immediate term. You think we get a rip-roar in January? I think so, too. Also, I think IV has come so low that you're seeing some good deals out there, actually.

Yeah.

Right. So people don't like the idea of trading options. Why don't people like the idea of trading options? Because they don't understand what options really are.

Options are a way to—if you're not sophisticated, and we can get into what they are for sophisticated market participants—either hedge exposure or bet on something happening very quickly. You might want to get leverage on an outcome, and think your edge is that this price action will happen in a short period of time. Or what you're expressing is that you want to buy a crazy, crazy tail and get paid for it, right? You have super-high conviction that Bitcoin is going to $250,000, and you don't want to lay out a tremendous amount of capital because you think it might take a year to get there. You don't want to tie up all your capital immediately, so you're using it for capital efficiency. You're saying, “I want to express this bet, and I want to do it in a capital-efficient manner,” so you're going to buy a year-out, $250,000 call option on Bitcoin.

You really should not be selling options ever unless you really know what you're doing. That's how you end up bankrupt and in a bad spot. But I don't love the argument that you, the retail investor, the average person, should never touch an option. I think that's silly.

3. Ads (Kraken)

If you have a thesis that Bitcoin is going to rip in the next 15 days and you want to protect your downside, then an option based on the volatility can make sense, right? What you have to do to calculate whether you're making a good trade is go to Deribit and look at the IV of the option that you're buying. Let's say it's 50 IV. Divide that by the square root of 365, so that's about 20, and you're looking at a 2.5% move a day. Do you think Bitcoin is going to do more than a 2.5% move a day? That's really how you should think about it.

But outside of those things, I don't really—I don't think we should be trading options. But I don't think that should discourage you from trading them in the right scenarios. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes total sense.

Options are falling right now. IV right now is 40.

That's it. I was just looking it up. [snorts]

A 2% move a day. Are you kidding me?

39. Buy, buy, buy, buy. Yeah, I think it's going to get crazy in January. January is when people reengage and reallocate. And unless you believe that the only reason anybody buys Bitcoin is because it's going up, or they sell it because it's going down, I think Bitcoin has other stories now.

Unless you think that the only feature of this market is momentum—which I don't—then I think a lot of participants will come back to the desk in January and say, “All right, you know what? The DATs have blown up. Bitcoin has massively underperformed gold and other deflationary, debasement, or inflation-debasement hedges. Look at this. It's sort of festering around $88,000, almost at pre-Trump levels. Let's YOLO a little bit.”

I think a lot of people are going to sit down and buy Bitcoin in January, and I think we'll get some big moves. I like your trade, Avi. Even if we don't blast through $100,000 by January 30, I still think by January 31 you can probably hit a 2- or 3-bagger on those options if you sell them back when Bitcoin starts pumping again, which it probably will. I don't see it selling off in January. January—everything rips in January.

4. Ads (Kraken)

January should be a good month for us. I think you guys are probably going to have a good time as long as you're not too sidelined. It feels good being bullish when the price is down instead of being bullish when the price is up. I think I lost sight of what you're supposed to do.

You get bullish when everyone is scared.

5. Crypto Finally Turning Around

Buy low, sell high. I posted the Crypto Fear & Greed Index. I'll share my screen here, Avi. It's pretty striking. I read this thing called The Daily Shot. I recommend everybody subscribe to it. It's fantastic.

Let's see. They posted a chart of the Crypto Fear & Greed Index over time. Let me share my screen. Check this out. Pretty cool. You can see it evolve throughout the year. It went as high as 82 in February, when Trumpcoin launched, and it went as low as 10. This is volatile.

I don't know. I think it's just a sentiment indicator, but we're still basically at the “buy with both hands” level. It's sad I don't have a price chart overlaid on top of this, but anytime it's down here, it's usually a great buy. So, yeah, be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful, to quote our boy Warren Buffett. It definitely seems like the time, doesn't it?

I'm bullish here, too. There are a couple of other things that I think are making me more constructive on the market, I guess is the right word. Number 1, we're getting runners again on-chain. I don't know if you saw White Whale.

I did, dude. These memes are hilarious. How have you not seen White Whale?

I've been tuned out for the last week, other than just showing up on Christmas to rage-bait some people in the CryptoPunks community. I'm taking the end of the year off mentally. I've been pretty zoned out.

Oh, dude. You gotta look up White Whale on Twitter. It's hilarious. Look up White Whale V2. Dude's freaking hilarious.

It's this meme of this—I mean, basically, he was this huge Hyperliquid trader, right? He lost a ton of money on Hyperliquid, but he also made a ton of money at some point.

Was it James Wynn?

No, no, no. This is different. Now he's posting all of these hilarious memes about himself. Basically, he has this image of a whale in what looks like a Jedi Knight costume, and he also has swords and is battling people in Halo. He's honestly pretty hilarious, I'm not going to lie.

He launched this coin, this sort of memecoin, and it ran up from a $100,000 market cap to a $70 million market cap because people in crypto—the insiders—do have some money still to throw around. And this is a very deep-cut memecoin. I don't think this is trending on TikTok or anything like that. This is a very CT-type thing.

It seems like those people have managed to hold on to some of their money. Dude, it ran up in the last 10 days—absurdly, 4,000%. I mean, there's not a ton of liquidity, but what it tells you is that the gamblers, Jonah, are still here. [laughter]

I think this is obviously a microcosm. It's not a ton of money, but I love gambling. I love betting on random stuff. Am I the kind of person who's going to go and bet on a memecoin in 2026? Probably not. I think the last time I took a major stab at one—

Don't forget Boden. You can't just—

Boden.

But Boden—but that was an era when memecoins ran for at least a few weeks. Now they run for hours and then evaporate. This is basically gone from being a strategic, fun, interesting game like Settlers of Catan or Risk to—

Did you—sorry, I'm sorry. Did you say Settlers of Catan?

Yeah. You don't like Settlers of Catan?

It's Settlers of Catan.

Okay, Settlers of Catan. Who are you? It went from being Settlers of Catan to—what's a quick hit? Basically buying amphetamines from a teenager in the men's bathroom at a nightclub. Ten minutes up and down.

You do that. Is that a thing?

No, but I was young once too, Jonah. And basically, that's kind of how the memecoin thing has evolved from this fun, strategic, interesting “What’s going to have legs?” to “All right, I’m going to feel great for 5 minutes and then have a headache for 3 hours,” kind of up-and-down cycle.

6. 2026 Crypto Predictions

I just don’t know. It’s not as fun. It’s not as cool. That’s sort of how I view the memecoin space. So, I guess here’s a 2026 prediction laced into the episode: the memecoin space does not come back in 2026. There’s no resurgence of memecoins.

I do think that memecoins will have their moment in the sun. I do think that lottery will come back, but it’s not going to be for years. I also think that the 2026 altcoin bear market continues.

I think that people who get out of their four-year-cycle alt-season mindset and just buckle up and short these things—the bad ones, obviously; there will be a few good ones, but the bad ones, the previous-cycle vaporware, the beached whales—they will make a lot of money.

In fact, that is my contrarian trade prediction for 2026: shorting crypto will work for a lot of these bulge-bracket alts. [Snorts.] Everybody says shorting is a terrible idea and requires a lot of active management. I’m willing to bet that this year it won’t.

I’m willing to bet that this year you just flip your chart upside down on TradingView, pretend it’s going up, and you sell perps on positive funding on high-FDV, low-float tokens. There will be no squeezes. Every insider, every VC wants to get out. These tokens are worthless and have no uptake.

I don’t know.

So here’s a trade. Let’s mark this today. Create a basket and let’s call it a basket of just stupid shitcoins. Okay? You’re going to short Polkadot, you’re going to short WIF, you’re going to short Pepe, you’re going to short all these things after Bitcoin has a little bit of a rally.

Let’s say Bitcoin gets up to $100,000, $110,000—wherever those memecoins are, because they tend to bounce. Short Worldcoin, short that basket, and then—

Versus dollars. I’m talking about shorting them versus—

No, no, hold on. I’m getting there.

Yeah.

Buy Monero, Zcash, and Bitcoin, and let’s come check in at the end of 2026 and see how that trade has done.

Because I think that could be a kingmaker trade.

You’re going to have to rebalance it a bit. If the markets go down a ton—let’s say markets crash 30%—you’re probably up on that trade. If you’ve done it one-to-one, maybe you cover the shorts.

But I do think that’s a very good trade, because I was reading all these 2025 recaps that have come out. I want you to guess how much money was stolen in crypto hacks throughout 2025.

I’m going to guess $350 million.

$2.7 billion.

Whoa. Whoa. How’d that happen?

People—well, no. People are getting scammed left and right. There was no big single hack. I think that’s the thing that not a lot of people talk about: there’s a tremendous use case of crypto, and that use case is criminals can steal it from you easily, and then they have to wash it.

They have to put it into Monero or they have to put it into Zcash, and then they have to hide. I’m not going to get into everywhere that they hide it because it’s kind of scary and I don’t want people to come after me.

But let’s just put it like this: there’s a reason why, on a day last year, Monero went up 25%. And it wasn’t because a bunch of people decided Monero was a lot better that day, right?

[Laughter]

It’s because somebody needed to get their money out. And all of this is speculation. Let me just be clear: this is speculation. I don’t know any of these people, but it is kind of a key point that there’s a use case here.

And not only is there a use case for these privacy coins—because there’s been a use case for these privacy coins for years—so why now? It’s because now they have the narrative. Now they have a use case and a narrative.

And they have no cash flows, which is perfect for huge upside. That’s the way that I view it: 2026 is the perfect coalescing point for privacy coins.

Take into account the California wealth tax as well. likely Mamdani coming in to New York. People are going to be pressed to start hiding their assets, and there will be some people who do illegal things. You shouldn’t. Don’t do that. It’s bad. Don’t even think about it. But there will be people who will be tempted to do it.

And that’s why I’m bullish. Instead of doing it myself, because that would be bad and illegal—and I will never do that, I’m serious—I could profit off of it.

I like that. I like that thesis a lot, Avi. I think that’s okay. So basically, we like privacy coins. We don’t like shitcoins.

It’s like we’re giving each other permission to short the shitcoins. It’s been a little hard to do in previous cycles because they continue to pump for no reason, but I think now the bell has tolled for the shitcoins.

And I think the bell has tolled for a very specific reason. I think the bell has tolled because nobody wants to buy old—

Yes. Nobody—nobody cares about Dogwifhat when White Whale is out, and White Whale is way funnier now to this certain set of people.

Everybody’s chasing the new new thing. You know what I think?

So I do think, as people make money, there will be a lot to be made in monitoring new coins like that. That game, I don’t think, will ever really go away—the whole new-coin-flipping lottery system.

Yeah, you need a bot, though. You can’t do that unless you’re in the right Discord at the right time, awake for something new. You’re not going to click-trade this profitably and consistently. You need a bot.

7. Roasting NFTs

But, to your point about old stuff, people not liking old things, I got myself into trouble on NFT Twitter because now I’m kind of calling for NFTs to be an old thing. And I think it’s worth discussing because the market is probably still valued in the tens or maybe even hundreds of billions.

You got kind of lit up. But, you know, Jonah, I love that you do this because you just have no fear of being criticized. Something that everyone could aspire to, you know.

Well, yeah. I don’t care what people think, which is why I’m here podcasting with you and having fun in my life instead of sitting behind a desk worrying about other people’s opinions.

But I think in general—first of all, let me start with—[Laughter.] I guess it’s funny: the most fun thing to do is just roast people on NFT Twitter because they’re the least inspiring—

Group of crypto people. They really are. They deserve to be made fun of.

Do you not feel a little bad for them?

I mean—

On this, I asked my rabbi. I’m like, “Hey, you know, as Jews, we’re not supposed to talk smack about other people behind their backs and then do it at scale on Twitter and get millions of views out of it.” So I was like, “Hey, is this bad?”

And the rabbi’s response was, like, “Very bad.” So I basically deleted all the tweets. I didn’t realize that calling somebody a LARPer was the crypto Twitter equivalent of calling somebody the N-word in real life. You just can’t do it, right? If you’re me—

You talked to your rabbi about this. That is—I love you. I love you so much. That’s amazing, man.

You know, how do you say it? He goes, “Jono, what are you doing? What are you?” He’s like, “Uh, you know, it’s—”

Great.

He kind of hedged it, but he was like, you know, you’re going to the equivalent of Jew hell for this. So basically, I deleted them.

Good thing we don’t have any hell.

We don’t have hell, but we have other forms of retribution for doing wrongs at scale on the internet. Basically—

You end up stubbing your toe every time you walk outside. Go ahead.

In the spirit of making amends, I didn’t realize that calling somebody a LARPer was the crypto Twitter equivalent of calling somebody the N-word in real life. You just can’t do it, right? If you’re me, to Deeze, whoever you are, and to 6529, whoever you may be, I am sorry.

I regret calling you guys names. I should not—I think, in general, when you’re debating people on Twitter, it should not devolve into insults and name-calling. So I deleted those tweets. I regret them. I regret insulting these people.

What I will say is I vehemently disagree with them. I do not think that NFTs are taking over the world. I think that, just as insane as it was to spend $20,000 on a JPEG in 2019, it will once again become insane to spend $20,000 on a JPEG.

There will always be this community of bizarrely nondoxxed individuals on NFT Twitter who disagree with me about that. I may be wrong about my time frame. I said that the CryptoPunks floor would go below 8 ETH in 2026. It may take a little longer—maybe 2027 or 2028 for that to happen—but nobody wants this stuff anymore.

It’s not a trend. It’s not like Bitcoin that just keeps proliferating into modern society.

This was a fad. NFTs were a fad, and there will always be a niche that loves its fads. There will always be people who collect jukebox machines and stick them in their man caves or basements or whatever. But that’s what NFTs are: collectibles, and they will never be worth what they were worth in 2021.

Even if the Alien Punks, the Zombie Punks, and the gorilla or monkey Punks end up in museums and private collectors seek them out, I’d say somewhere between 1/3 and 2/3 of this 10,000-unit collection is floor—just ugly crap that no one will ever buy. I think the floor, like, the likely Bored Apes floor is 4 ETH right now. Why should the CryptoPunks floor go there? Why not? Eventually, there’s no reason for somebody to lock up capital holding one of them.

You can’t even hang it on your wall and talk about it. Yes, younger generations are more online, but unlike a Birkin bag, where the audience—the TAM—is like 4 billion women, for an NFT, the addressable audience is this really tiny little sliver niche of online male degens who happen to be active in crypto between 2017 and 2022. It’s still just a weird zeitgeisty thing. It’s not going to matter anymore.

8. Are Trends Accelerating?

I think, just as you were talking, I had a few thoughts running through my head, and one of them is that it’s kind of interesting what happened in 2021. It tells you how difficult it is to forecast the future. It’s actually pretty difficult, and that’s why you get to pay a lot of money to do it.

In 2021, it felt so obvious to everybody that the world had changed irreversibly, that everyone was going to spend more time online, and that digital items were going to become just as valuable as physical items because the digital world had become the real world. That’s why it was likely Zuck who changed the name of his company to Meta. That’s why everyone was talking about the Oculus, and everybody was trying to get into the metaverse, because people were 100% convinced that this was the way of the future and that we had just created an irreversible trend.

At the same time as this was going on, by the way, people were talking about how New York was going to die, how cities were going to die, and how everyone was going to move to Miami. Obviously, likely Decentraland, Avi—everybody was going to buy $MANA and move to Decentraland. That’s down 99.9%, by the way.

I think it’s a moment to be a little bit humble because I sort of believed it too, right? I was on Clubhouse. I was doing these things. It was like, yeah, it kind of makes sense. Then something weird happens, and there’s an immense backlash pretty quickly.

People under the age of 25 do live a tremendous amount of time online, but they’ve actually withdrawn from NFTs. They’ve withdrawn from the metaverse. They don’t like these ideas. They’re online texting their friends and being on social media, and that’s kind of it, right? People did start going outside again.

Tourism is up massively. People are visiting sites, right? People are going abroad. People thought that restaurants would collapse post-COVID because everyone was just going to start ordering in. You can’t get a seat anywhere in New York. There are all these trends.

One thing that I’ve been chewing on is whether we’re just in an accelerationist period of time, where instead of the pendulum taking a generation to swing, it takes 5 years to swing. It almost feels like we’re going through 5-year periods of trends. You have a 5-year trend of, you know, maybe a 7-year period of woke. Maybe we’ll have a 3-year trend of anti-woke, and then we’ll go back. It’s kind of just swinging back and forth.

Maybe at some point in the future, we’ll get a swing back to NFTs. But I view it kind of the same way that I view memecoins, which is probably new art. The reality is that the art contained within NFTs is not particularly good. It’s not something that I look at and see meaning in.

Actually, other than that, I like Ringers and Fidenzas. I actually do.

I like Ringers and Fidenzas too. From an aesthetic standpoint, I think that they are quite interesting. I think basically what I’m interested in is a physical print of a Fidenza. If you own the NFT, you can mint a physical print, and Tyler Hobbs will sign a version of it. It’s sized however you want, you pay him a few hundred bucks, and he sends it to you.

Can we—yeah, sorry, go ahead.

I’m almost done with this NFT thing. You can mint a physical one, and then Tyler Hobbs will sign it. That can only be done once per NFT, so he’s not going to do that every time the NFT changes hands.

9. Betting Strategies & Risks

I’m interested in buying a physical Fidenza. I don’t care about the NFT. I don’t want the NFT. I just want to hang a signed physical one on my wall. I think the physicals trade well below the NFT level because you could just buy the NFT, mint the physical, and then sell the NFT for a similar price, since most Fidenza buyers don’t seem to care about the physical.

But I think that’s an arb. I think the physical will matter. More importantly, when I made this bet on CryptoPunks, I think there’s something that people out there on the internet don’t understand, which is that the most likely outcome is that nothing happens.

If D's was like, “Hey, you just posted that CryptoPunks are going down 70%. You want to bet on it?” and I said, “Sure. What are your odds?” and he goes, “1,” the reason why that’s ridiculous is twofold. The first is that if it was just, “I’m betting that the CryptoPunks floor goes down,” and you’re betting that it goes up from where it is now, that would justify one-to-one odds.

But 70% is deeply out of the money. That’s like 8 ETH—I guess 19 ETH below the current price. So that does not justify even odds. A lot of people, including some really prominent ones like Mike Dudas—people with hundreds of thousands of followers—were saying something that I just didn’t understand: “Jonah, you’re a tool, you’re a loser. How could you be so confident about something and not bet on it one-to-one with Deeze?”

I went out and asked for 5:1 odds, and I got filled instantly. Half the internet wanted to bet against me. Then I did a follow-on small clip with Jez at 6:1. If the market gives you 5:1 or 6:1, you would be economically irrational to take 1:1 odds, just thinking from a cold, rational perspective, no matter how convicted you are.

It would be like me saying, “I think Bitcoin’s going to $1 million,” and you, Avi, say, “No, it’s not.” Then you say, “You want to bet on it, Jonah?” and I respond, “Hey, Avi, yeah, I do.” Then you offer me a Bitcoin for $500,000. Why would I buy it from you for $500,000 and get a two-bagger if I’m right if I could buy it on-screen at $88,000? That’s basically what Deeze offered me.

People these days require you to be a martyr for your views. That’s really what it is at the end of the day: if you say anything that they disagree with, you have to hold that position to the maximum amount of conviction.

Yeah.

I think that’s a very silly way of looking at the world, and it’s very tribalistic. As traders, we think of everything in probabilities. I’ll leave you with this because I know you’ve got to run.

I’ve got an extra 10 minutes. Actually, if you want to keep talking, I bought myself 10 minutes. I’ve got nothing to do today.

Okay, it’s a Tuesday.

No, let’s keep talking.

But what was I going to say? I lost my train of thought.

People expect—

I was going to say Mike Dudas was a piece of shit.

No, he’s actually a good guy.

But how could he suggest that?

I think you phrased it very aggressively, right? I think that the way that you said it made it sound as if you had 99% confidence in this thing happening, meaning that you would take whatever. You phrased it as very high conviction. But the reality is, if I were to ask you what you think the actual probability of the Punks going to 8 ETH is, I assume that you wouldn’t say 99%.

Here’s the key distinction.

I said the Punks floor should trade down 70%. I have very high conviction in that—9 out of 10.

Okay.

Now—

Really? Okay.

Yeah. They came back with a bet that was time-boxed to Christmas 2026. I do not have 9-out-of-10 conviction that the Punks floor will hit 8 ETH in the next 12 months. It may take 24–36 months or longer, but will it get there? 9 out of 10 conviction, yes.

So, when they came back and said, “All right,” even if they had said it was just an open-ended 20-year bet, I still would have taken market odds. You trade the market. Maybe it’s 2:1 odds for an open-ended bet, but for 12 months, no matter how convicted I am, I’m still going to trade what I can get.

And if I'd traded with D's at 1-to-1, I would be kicking myself knowing what I know now, which is that I can get 6-to-1. So I basically wagered a Ford to win a Ferrari on this bet. It would stink to wager a Ford to win a Ford if you don't have to do that.

Always, if you're a trader, no matter how convicted you are in something, maximize your payout. Always express your trade with the optimal outcome for you. So that's the lesson here. This I know for sure.

If you just emotionally start trading at off-market prices with people, you will lose all your money. You absolutely must not pay a guy named D's—whatever it is—a 4-to-1 commission on 5-to-1 odds to get yourself into a 1-to-1 bet, because that commission is a guaranteed loss. Transaction fees and commissions are certain losses. You cannot win those back.

I think people do it for clout. I genuinely think that's it. I see it happen sometimes on Twitter: they feel like they can't back down, and they just say it for clout.

I don't need clout.

I mean, but you don't need it. Look, at the end of the day—and I think this is probably a good place to end it—we're here because we're trying to make money, and we're trying to help you think about how to make money.

10. Final Thoughts

Not financial advice, but think about the right way to approach things. I really love talking to you, Jonah. I hope you have the best New Year ever, and I hope everyone listening has the best New Year ever.

Happy New Year to our community. We got big things in store for you in 2026. We are thrilled to be able to have you guys listening to us. Really appreciate you, Avi. Love these conversations every week.

These are awesome. And seriously, this year—not to get all sappy and lame, but I'm a sappy and lame guy, so I'll just say it—this year has been really awesome because we've grown the channel a ton. The listeners, I think you guys have engaged with us a ton. I think we've had a lot of fun answering your questions.

I've had so much fun talking to Jonah, and I'm just really excited to have you guys along for the ride for the next year. Hopefully, we grow even more. Hopefully, I get to know more of you on a more personal level, which has been great over the last year. And I'm just super excited to see where this channel goes in 2026. So let's take it to new heights.

Let's do it, guys. All right. Until then, see you next year, Avi. Happy New Year.

Happy New Year. Take care, everybody.