When Do We Buy, Global M2, Does Crypto Need A Catalyst, & Owning Your L’s

This little bounce here is what I don't love. You had a pretty substantial bounce off the lows, almost 20%. That didn't really catalyze any upward momentum, which just tells me that, right now, people are sort of tapped out.

1. When Do We Buy?

Oh, what's up, Jonah? How are we doing?

Hey, man. We've been better.

How are we doing?

I'm doing okay.

Yeah. The market is not happy right now. I think that's for sure, which is a little unfortunate.

Yeah.

I've been worried about this. Just to recap what I've said a lot, I'm obviously long and hurting, so this isn't me trying to pretend that I'm net short crypto here. I've been scared of a volatile December for some time, and I still have capital to deploy. So there is the big question of when you step in and actually buy something.

Usually, in December, traders who had a bad year don't have bullets to invest, and that creates some volatility because you don't have people stepping in to buy dips. Traders who have had a good year have bullets to invest, but they're trying to protect the gains, right? They're not trying to lay it all on the line 2 weeks before their bonus gets locked.

100%. I mean, basically nobody's taking risks.

2. Ads (Kraken OTC, Peaq, Katana)

The issue right now that I see is basically what we identified in the last podcast. If you go back and go through the entire timeline of how my thoughts have evolved on this, 2 weeks ago, at the beginning of December, I was talking about tax-loss harvesting and the fact that crypto—and, at that point, Bitcoin—was about flat on the year. A lot of other altcoins were down, but Bitcoin was about flat on the year.

My thesis was, "Okay, we've sold off. We hit $80,000. We've sold off a substantial amount from the highs, and I think there's a reasonable risk-reward for people to buy here. We can probably get a rally through the next 2 weeks of December." Then it sort of remains to be seen.

But if Bitcoin isn't above where it was at the beginning of the year, then we're in a tough spot, because I think a lot of people will just end up doing the tax-loss harvesting—selling for tax reasons. Bitcoin started the year at about $94,000, so that $94,000 level was really important because that was the opener. If we were above that at some point, my mentality was, "Hey, I'm a little bit more technically constructive on Bitcoin because I think there's going to be less forward selling." If we're below $94,000, then there's probably going to be more selling.

I guess what happened is we got right up to that $94,000 level and sold off. That caused a decent amount of panic in the market, especially because you had Saylor buying $1 billion of Bitcoin without moving the price. You also have charts of OGs—the original gangsters of Bitcoin—still offloading a lot of their balance sheets here, even below $100,000. I think that sets up for a pretty bad next 2 weeks. If you just look at the chart, it's not a particularly inspiring thing, unfortunately.

It looks pretty dire, doesn't it?

You can see here that, on the weekly chart, we're in an upward trend for an extended period. Basically, for the last 2 years, you've been in an upward trend, sort of respecting this trend line. Every time we pulled back about 25% to 30% off the tops—you know, that was 32%—you would get some sort of bounce.

Unfortunately, on this one, we sold off about 36%. This little bounce here is what I don't love. You had a pretty substantial bounce off the lows, almost 20%, and that didn't really catalyze any upward momentum, which just tells me that, right now, people are sort of tapped out. The market doesn't have a lot of juice, and we've been in a down-only trend for 2 months.

You go look at ETH, and ETH looks even worse. ETH is down almost 50% off the highs, and it's been going down since August 18. That's a long time. I think the main reason that crypto is down is that all of this price action right here, from $2,600 all the way up to 48, is what you call the Tom Lee special.

That's the Tom Lee special, Jonah: "Oh my God, DATs are going to buy up all the Ethereum in the world." This is what I call the Tom Lee hangover right here. That's the Tom Lee hangover.

This part—

Tom Lee vomited.

Well, that's the "Oh my God, maybe Tom Lee won't buy every bit of Ethereum" part. It's a lot worse on Ethereum than it will be on BTC.

You go over to BTC, and this is the election run-up, Jonah, right here.

Yeah.

This is, "I'm really excited about Trump." Then this is profit-taking. You get some profit-taking lower, and then all of this price action—all of it—

I was very excited about that price action, by the way.

Yeah, I was very excited. I think I managed to pick the top. I think I managed to say, "Hey, Jonah, I think this rally has legs," right there.

Sorry about that, guys. That was my bad.

I mean, it looked like it had legs. You basically had the election hype followed by profit-taking. The profit-taking subsided, and then a wave of fresh new capital came in. It looked pretty real.

Let's look at it knowing what we know now, which is that this was probably just excitement around DATs and not long-term, sticky capital.

Hindsight—we know this now.

Hindsight, we know this. So let's talk about where we can sort of find real value in BTC, right? I'm just talking about this from first principles. If we take the approach that this price action, from, call it, $70,000 to $105,000, was the election and Trump doing good stuff for BTC—real, genuine price action—and then you get a little bit of profit-taking, this sell-off over here was just people going, "Okay, maybe we shouldn't get too excited if he's not going to do a strategic reserve. He's just going to hold Bitcoin."

If we take the view that this run-up over here—the thing that tricked us—was mostly DAT flows and people pulling forward DAT flows, then what we can say is that maybe everything above $105,000 is inorganic. The real demand zone is probably going to be somewhere between the top of the previous demand zone, where this profit-taking sell-off after real news sold off, and the lower end. It's probably somewhere from $88,000 to $74,000.

We're kind of right at the top of what you can make a case for as the demand zone, both from a technical-analysis perspective—but forget about the technical-analysis perspective. I'm just using it to illustrate what I'm trying to do, some level of logic on, which is—

I have a question for you.

Where did people buy prior to knowing that the DAT thing was going to pull it up, not knowing that it was going to be huge?

That was sort of in this area. So maybe, if you have dry powder, what you want to do is sell above that area and buy toward the lower end. Maybe that's starting at $80,000 all the way down to $74,000.

If we get tax selling into the end of the year, which I think we will now, especially because Bitcoin is down, you're going to see altcoins totally nuked in this area. You might see Solana at $75. You might see Ethereum all the way down at 22. If we get there, that's probably a buy for these 3. That's probably a buy for BTC.

I don't know. I'm not good at forecasting future, inevitable price action in Ethereum and Solana, the altcoins. I'm better at forecasting BTC price action because these things can really overextend one way and overextend the other, so it's hard to pinpoint. BTC is a little easier.

3. Bearish Crypto, Not Equities

Basically, this is where I'm looking at getting back in. As I said on the last podcast, just to finish the timeline, I was nervous that we would get chopped into the end of the year because every day that goes by in December that we're not going up is more likely that we go down because of this tax-selling issue. There's a general lack of risk tolerance in December.

Maybe we get another 12% to 16% down, and then that's 25% to 30% down in altcoins. Hopefully, HOOD hangs in there. I still own a decent amount. From my buys at $114, it got up 21%, and I didn't take any profits. That was sad. Now we're back to $117.

On the plus side, Tesla has done very well. Tesla's up, I think, 20% since I bought it at around $400.

What a crazy stock.

This is going to absolutely rip. Look at this thing. This is why I'm not bearish on the market. I'm bearish on crypto because the market is up from the start of the year.

You go to year to date. You go to 12 months. Look at that big green candle. Nobody's tax-loss harvesting Nasdaq.

No, nobody's tax-loss harvesting Tesla. Definitely nobody's tax-loss harvesting Robinhood or Google. The thing with crypto right now is that the flows are just not conducive to going up through the end of the year.

4. Ads (Kraken OTC, Peaq)

Which is why you always try to think about when a trade will really work out for you. I might be wrong that Bitcoin hits $74,000 or $80,000 or whatever, but if it does—let's say we're at $75,000 per Bitcoin on December 30—I'm buying that that's going to be good, because it's a confluence of a lot of different things coming together.

5. Don’t Forget About Bitcoin

Yeah, a lot in there to unpack. Okay, so we've got a couple of things. The first is that people have kind of forgotten about Bitcoin this year. It hasn't been the trade that's going to generate the outsized returns right now.

There have been other main characters. AI—Tesla is a humanoid robotics play. Robinhood is kind of stealing some of the decentralized finance thunder from crypto. There are centralized ways to play this theme.

Another thing: I think the reason why our space is so dejected is because Bitcoin—let me share my screen for a second here. This is the returns of Bitcoin, percentage returns by year, since 2011. Basically, you get bunches of 3-year positive returns and then a negative year.

In the 2011, 2012, 2013 piece of the cycle, it was up 1,500%, up 300%, up 5,500%, then down 60%. In 2015, 2016, 2017, it was up 35%, up 124%, up almost 1,400%. 2018 was down 75%. Pretty nukeage.

From 2019 to 2021, it was up 100%, up 300%, up 60%. 2022, the year of FTX and Luna, was down 65%. Then 2023 and 2024 were up 155% and 121%. 2025 year to date is down 4%. So we've broken a pattern.

Yep.

This is the end of the 4-year cycle. You called it a year and a half ago, unfortunately. Everybody was betting on a solid 2025, perhaps the third of 3 years of a bull run. You usually get the crazy returns, per this image. It didn't happen, right?

I think people are missing the forest for the trees here. I think there's a real problem with this mentality of the 4-year cycle. We've talked about it a lot on the pod. It's over. It's done, and we need to move on. We need to ask ourselves what's going to drive Bitcoin going forward.

I'd be more worried about investing in some of the other markets you just put up on the screen, Avi, than Bitcoin at these levels. The bottom of your demand zone, you said, is about $75,000 a token. We peaked out this year at $125,000 per Bitcoin.

That would be a 40% sell-off from the absolute peak top, the all-time high, to the bottom of your demand zone, which basically is pre-Trump, pre-DAT. It's basically where we were festering in 2024, which is still last year for another 2 weeks.

So if we get down there—and it's not very far away—I think you have the opportunity to buy into a story of de-dollarization, the trend toward profligate fiscal irresponsibility, at levels that predate when Bitcoin was legal. I think there's a strong case for people who think a little bit more critically about macro markets than many crypto natives do to buy there. I think they will.

6. Altcoins & the Venture Complex

Another thing that happens is that in January, people re-engage. Instead of being in this P&L-protection or “I'm about to get fired, I don't want to do anything stupid” mode, they have to go hunt food again. They have to go find trades and eat what they kill.

Bitcoin is one of the few defensible stories out there that hasn't just mooned in 2025. So I do think that there is a lot of precedent, Avi, for buying in January in our space. I fully expect that.

Part of what's weighing on Bitcoin is the altcoin carnage. I think a lot of people in the past would recycle their altcoin gains into ETH or Bitcoin, or both. I would encourage everybody on this podcast to contact their tax adviser and harvest any losses on alts before year-end.

Not tax advice, obviously, but it seems like there's an opportunity to sell alts here and roll your proceeds from those sales into Bitcoin. Basically, the altcoin story for the last—since the ICO bubble of 2017—has been: this is liquid venture. This is a way for you to bet on the future.

Now that it's clear that liquid venture does not equal handsome returns, because it's well understood that this is liquid venture, if there's nothing worth investing in, then the altcoins won't go up. In the past, it was like, “Oh, liquid venture, it's all just going to go up.” Now it's like, “Okay, what is underlying this liquid venture? Are you a better venture capitalist than the professionals?”

It turns out the answer to the first question is mostly shitty companies that will never pay a dime back to their investors. A lot of them don't even have economics linked to the token. Second, are you better than a venture investor? Seems like the answer is that most altcoin investors are no. They are not better than the average venture investor.

I mean, the whole reason the crypto complex made people so much money is because nobody knew what they were buying or what they were doing. They just knew the number went up.

Yeah. And the reality is that we're now going to be in a place where—it was crazy. The hit rate of starting a crypto company and being successful, of creating value, was like 90%. You launched a crypto project and it was up. You were able to extract some amount of money from it, and your investors were able to extract some money from it.

Basically, the hit rate of every crypto investment—if you made an early investment and it came out, and they didn't rug-pull and they didn't scam you for your money, which lowered, obviously, the hit rate—was like 90%. As long as they launched a product, you made money as an investor.

There was nowhere for that number to go other than down.

Yeah, there's basically—you could not have a sustainable future like that. It was just because people were, you know, it's like that famous scene in Silicon Valley. I actually haven't watched the show. I've just seen this clip, but it's like that famous scene in Silicon Valley where it's like, “No, no, no. You don't want to make revenue. Don't make revenue. You have to stay pre-revenue forever, because it's an idea, and ideas can have an infinite ceiling, but for a company there's a ceiling.”

That's kind of where we are right now. I also think that I will caution people moving over to trading equities. Equities are not easier to trade than crypto. Equities just tend to go up.

So if you're long something that makes money, it has tended to go up over the last 12 years, because the secular dynamic is increased monetary supply. Every company will then, with increased money supply, forever make more money as long as it's offering a good product and is managed effectively.

Basically, the idea is that the more money that exists in this world, the more money will be spent and the more money will be allocated to companies, and companies will grow over time. So basically, it all goes back to the liquidity of what the Federal Reserve wants to do, right?

Feow had actually had a really good point on this. It's now less about generally increased monetary supply and more about how the Fed is increasing the monetary supply. The quality of QE matters a lot more.

If you want to go deeper into that, go listen to his most recent podcast. But basically, that's what matters, and that's what gives people an edge in equities. As an investor, you just need to find a sector that you think will grow substantially in the next 3 to 5 years and make a bet on the top companies in those sectors now. It probably works out for you, as long as you haven't invested in complete scams.

You remember Aerotyne, the company from The Wolf of Wall Street? Those are shit.

Yeah, just don’t do that. Don’t invest in pink sheets. But as long as the flows make sense and the companies aren’t scammy—where they’re just going to dilute you, issue a bunch of new equity, and drive down the price to raise money for themselves—which is something you actually do have to be careful of in equities.

Yeah, there are two things in what you just said. One is the number-goes-up theme, which is based on global liquidity, and the other is picking the right horse. Let’s address the second one first: crypto retail has tapped out from the spray-and-pray methodology of horse-picking.

“Look at this token. It’s got some buzz. Let me pick it.” That doesn’t work anymore. Everybody’s just been rinsed. Anybody who spends more than a little bit of time trying to buy and sell altcoins is probably at wits’ end and has given up on horse-picking within crypto.

Let’s look back at this. What’s really worked? Hyperliquid. That’s kind of it, right? There’s been no other big altcoin trade. Hyperliquid is a product; it’s not just a dream.

The second thing is, okay, do you invest in stocks? Which sector do you pick just because you expect global liquidity to increase? I think Bitcoin conforms to that. I think Bitcoin will exhibit, over the long run, the same behavior as the stock market, but with better returns and a low correlation to the stock market.

I think Bitcoin is not trading like leveraged equities. The only silver lining to this down move is that it is its own animal, which you want, right? You don’t want Bitcoin to just be 2x leveraged Nasdaq. That’s a shitty investment. But it has its own story, and the megatrend—the long-term megatrend—is upward. I think that will remain the case.

7. Global M2 & Precious Metals

In terms of liquidity, I saw some really interesting tweets about this recently. There’s been some hand-wringing and consternation within crypto, among other reasons, about the disconnection between the price of Bitcoin and the continual upward trajectory of the M2 money supply, which is kind of a global metric for liquidity. It’s like, every time there’s been a bunch of government stimulus in the past, Bitcoin has pumped. Now M2 seems to be on the rise again, so why isn’t Bitcoin pumping? We have to address that.

I saw some really interesting tweets recently that I think we should talk about. I haven’t double-checked this, but they basically posit that the recent increase in the M2 money supply—the most recent leg up—is all because China’s having a rough patch. They’re printing a lot of money, and that currency debasement, that money printing, factors into the global M2 number.

Unlike when money is printed in the West, I think it’s a little harder for Chinese people to invest in Bitcoin than it is for us here in the West. So I think what we could say is that it’s a tale of two cities: there’s Eastern M2 and Western M2. Eastern M2 is rallying, while Western M2 is stagnant. That explains a lot to me. That explains why Bitcoin isn’t just ripping here, because the debasement is happening somewhere where Bitcoin doesn’t get bought as a debasement hedge.

Basically, you’re making the case that gold and silver can continue to rip depending on where the monetary supply is coming from.

Yes. Gold and silver—that is the core issue that I think is making people very nervous about the role of Bitcoin specifically in the world. How is it possible that we’re seeing gold recover and start to push all-time highs? We’re seeing silver rally like crazy.

An ounce of silver is worth as much as a barrel of oil. The last time that happened was 1982.

Yes, which is unbelievable. It makes me want to get long oil, but maybe we’re just supposed to be getting long silver instead.

Don’t just get long silver.

I really fumbled that trade. I made a big case for silver miners six months ago. Maybe it was 8 months ago. I was super long gold and silver miners, and then when gold hit that 4,400 level and sold off, it had that 10% candle down. I bought gold at around something like that, and gold miners—GDX—at like 45, I think 50.

Everything rallies like absolute insanity. Gold sells off 10%. It’s sort of a puke candle. Normally, when you get a liquidation candle like that, it ends the rally for a bit, which it did—but only for a bit. Silver has now reclaimed all-time highs. Gold is almost at all-time highs.

I’m sitting here on the sidelines thinking to myself, “I need to buy back in.” That’s always the hardest thing to do as a trader. You sell something and it goes down, so you’re right, and then it goes back up to where you sold it. You just want to shoot yourself in the face for selling it, and you’re like, “I can’t buy it. It’s a scam now.”

But things are trading very well, and gold and silver doing well is also, to me, an indication that the rest of the stock market is going to continue to do well because people have to put their money somewhere. Unless people are buying gold and silver because of the threat of war—which does happen sometimes—I don’t think that’s why it’s happening now. They’re effectively buying gold and silver because they’re worried about outpacing inflation, and equities will also outpace inflation.

And so will, because they make money. I don’t know if that’s the thing.

Bitcoin just has—we really need to work our way through the adverse flows, right? I think, over the long run, the adverse flows are not very concerning in contrast to the overall thesis. The timeline of the adverse flows is not concerning. The flows are short-term; it’s not like OG selling is going to weigh on this thing for years. I think we’ll get through it, and then Bitcoin can move again. I’m not worried about that.

Basically, it’s a tale of two cities. There’s Eastern M2, there’s—

You’re on mute, by the way.

There’s Eastern M2 and there’s Western M2. Eastern M2 is what’s rallying right now, and that’s translating into gold and silver pumping because it’s a debasement hedge.

This is, by the way, a recent paradigm shift for precious metals. Gold used to only perform when there was trouble in the world, and it would kind of do nothing otherwise. The Ukraine war is when the paradigm shifted, and I kind of missed this because of my old-man trad brain. That’s when gold pivoted from being a risk-off asset to a risk-on debasement hedge.

Gold and silver are just telegraphing that anything denominated in dollars should go up over the medium to long run. The other point I wanted to make is that just because we’re not getting Western M2 rallying right now, and just because there’s no stimulus in the West at the moment, doesn’t mean it will always be the case.

I really believe that stimulus is coming. I think AI is going to create big winners and big losers. From an average-wealth perspective, maybe that stays the same, but from a median-net-worth perspective, I think there are far more small losers minted than big winners.

In aggregate, you get the median financial situation of families deteriorating in the West over the course of the next 2 to 3 years, and that will be met with political repercussions. One of those is direct-to-consumer stimulus. It may not be checks, but it could be price controls. It could be limits on AI companies.

8. Where To Put Your Eggs

If I had to put all of my eggs in one basket, would I rather buy Google stock at the highs with all of my eggs in that basket, or would I rather buy Bitcoin in your demand zone? Frankly, I’d rather buy Bitcoin in the demand zone. I don’t think that just because equities have been going well, you should concentrate.

I do think SPY is a nice, diversified bet. I like that one. But I’m not going to concentrate in single-name stocks after the rally—single-name stocks that meet the AI narrative that’s propelled everything thus far. I’m not going to be buying gold or silver at the highs. I want to buy something that’s kind of underperformed because of a temporary, transient reason, like Bitcoin.

I think we will get stimulus in the West, and I think the things that have ripped a little bit too much will get punished or retrace. Having watched the crypto narrative for more than a decade now, I don’t see why the AI narrative would be any different. We’re going to get some retracements in that.

I think retail has finally gotten its head around the idea that we’re out of the 4-year cycle, that you don’t buy altcoins on a whim anymore. I think the market generally looks healthier. Finally, just to finish out this rant, I don’t think we’re in a very precarious position in Bitcoin because we’ve lost momentum, but we are trading down to the value level that you talk about often, Avi.

And we’re not quite there. I guess, if you came more recently to the pod, let me just reiterate something for you: we’re looking at the area between the bottom at 73–74 and the top zone at around 88. That’s sort of what we call a value zone, which is where Bitcoin really found demand prior to all of the DAT buying.

That’s where the sell-off post-Trump ended. To me, that says that people view that area as a good place to go in heavy and take a bet. We’re sort of at the top end of that range right now, at 85. So basically, between 85 and 74, I think, is a good place to set up a buy.

Yeah. And another thing I wanted to say is, this guy used to work for me at DRW. I fired him because he was a total jackass, and also really dumb, a liar, and just a bad performer in general.

9. Does Crypto Need A Catalyst?

But he did say one thing that resonated with me. He’d been in crypto for a long time, and he said crypto needs a catalyst to lift itself out of a slump. I want to debate that with you. I think at the time it was kind of true, way back when, when Bitcoin in particular was sort of this niche, hobbyist asset class. Fine, it’s not going to move higher unless some news comes out.

Now I think Bitcoin—forget the rest of the space—has graduated past that point. I don’t think we need a catalyst. I don’t think Trump needs to come out and say, “We’re doing a strategic Bitcoin reserve. It’s going to have $1 trillion worth of Bitcoin in it.” For the audience that’s looking for a catalyst, I think that’s an outdated mentality. There’s not going to be a catalyst anymore.

Crypto is legal now. Crypto is money—or Bitcoin is money. I think there’s a generational wealth transfer going on from no-coiners to coiners. Capital controls are getting erected in both the East and the West, and Bitcoin is a way to move money in challenging, dicey times. I also think DeFi is replacing the back office.

I think the capital inflows—if there’s one lesson to be learned from this bull market that started in 2023—it’s that the percentage returns are going to be smaller. They’re still going to outperform SPY, but they’re going to be smaller. The sell-offs are going to be less painful, and the rallies are going to be less parabolic. The percentage numbers in the screenshot that I showed you are going to be smaller.

But the second thing is, there was no catalyst in 2023 that kicked off this crazy 200% rally or 400% rally, or whatever it was, depending on your asset. It was just steady inflows, and everybody who bought a little bit here and a little bit there probably had a slightly different reason than the next guy. I think that’s how it’s going to go.

I think this is a game of patience, and people who are listening to this podcast today, on Monday, December 15, if you’re tuned in now, you will be rewarded. I think most of the people who hype-buy are dead, or they’re just focused on other things. They’re hype-buying Google and they’re hype-buying Tesla. They’re not hype-buying BTC.

They’ll all come back when we trade back up to the all-time highs, and that will happen. So I’m not concerned. I just think we’re in a really tricky time of year, in a really tricky price band. I fully expect the winds to change starting in a couple of weeks.

I think that’s fair. I want to respond to some of these points in a second because they’re really important.

10. Bitcoin Nerves & ETH Is Too High

While we were gone, I found a great tweet. I had to show it to you guys because I think it actually illustrates what we’re talking about. Maybe when this is over, we can start to go up a little bit more.

Anyway, welcome to the Twitter of Avi Felman. You can see me in the corner over there. That Twitter is actually me. This guy, CryptoCondom—great name, actually. I think he’s a great account.

It’s a girl.

It’s a girl.

Yeah.

Are you sure?

Did I just blow your mind?

CryptoCondom is a girl.

Yeah.

How do you know that? Do you know them IRL?

I’ve just seen some comments saying, “Good job, Queen.” Some people who would know. I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect that CryptoCondom is a lady.

I don’t know. I feel like we’ve interacted a substantial amount. I feel like I would know that, but maybe I don’t.

Maybe nobody’s a girl on the internet, first of all, Jonah. There’s a 95% chance that CryptoCondom is a boy. But I think CryptoCondom might be a lady.

Anyway, crazy name.

We love CryptoCondom.

We love CryptoCondom. They posted this great chart from Glassnode. It’s not sponsored by Glassnode, but I do love Glassnode. I actually pay for an account there.

This is old supply net position change. This is everything that is very old and hasn’t moved for a long time. What’s going on? Are we accumulating more old supply, which basically means people aren’t moving it, and then supply that hasn’t moved is becoming defined as old? Or is old supply coming online and moving around, very likely being sold?

If you look, it’s been selling slowly and then a lot heavier in the last few months. Basically, until this flips, I do think this will flip by the end of the year. What you’re seeing right now, starting really around Thanksgiving, is the capitulation moment.

You can see the amount of selling literally double, and triple in some cases. I think this is sort of a capitulatory moment, and what you’re probably going to see is this come in a little bit. But until then, I’m a little bit nervous about the market and what’s going on.

When I combine that with the tax-selling flows, when I combine that with the fact that only Michael Saylor is buying, and when I combine that with all these things, I start to get nervous about buying Bitcoin. What am I waiting for? Kind of what we were talking about—not waiting for a catalyst. I’m solely waiting for selling to slow down.

If you look at it post-FTX, what was the catalyst to go from 15K to 30K? Was there a catalyst when we went from 30K to 60K prior to the Trump election? The catalyst was very simple: There was nobody left selling.

There was no news article. There was no, “Oh my God, Bitcoin is going to become the world reserve currency because this guy did this thing in this section of the world.” Nothing to do with anything. It was simply that people decided, “Hey, I should probably stop selling this thing. This thing might go up in the future.” That’s it.

I also personally think that post-FTX is really where you see that. You can go from 15K to 30K, and then obviously, post that, you get some excitement around an ETF. But from 15K to 30K, there’s not really any catalyst.

Also, I think the guy who brought up this whole “you need a catalyst to have crypto rally”—in addition to being a terrible employee who was wrong a lot, he was also really ugly and stupid, too. So maybe—

You really hate this guy.

I don’t hate him. I’m just being objective. I’m sure he’s awesome to hang out with if you’re not me, but I didn’t like him anyway.

If you’re ugly and stupid. All right.

Yeah. So basically, I think the point I’m trying to make by bringing up this absolute milquetoast wet noodle and his idea that you need a catalyst is that maybe he’s wrong. Maybe you don’t.

I think that, as unappealing as this narrative is, you just have to buckle up for a 20-year grind higher in our space instead of just a get-rich-quick, moon-6,000%-in-a-month kind of move—a god candle, whatever people call it.

It’s real. It’s happening. And honestly, I think ETH is probably 60% too high. I don’t want to touch ETH with a 10-foot pole. To me, it’s this diseased, radioactive test-tube vial.

What if I told you it always has been? [laughter] [snorts]

I don’t know about always. Kyle Sani, a guy that I really respect and enjoy on Crypto Twitter, says that the team behind ETH has no urgency, which makes it uninvestable. I can’t vouch for or against that idea, but basically, I think that because ETH does have the first-mover advantage, despite its many flaws, after it gets pile-driven down another 50%, 60%, 70%, that may actually be the token that grinds back upward and offers a decent return profile as TradFi adopts ETH-based products.

For now, everything in the ETH ecosystem is overpriced. Solana, I have no idea. Bitcoin I like, and altcoins—you can’t invest in altcoins until Bitcoin enters a bull market, and it’s firmly in a bear market right now. So, just to answer, we’ve also gotten some criticism online that we should address. Basically, some guy says that we’re dishonest and we don’t own our Ls on the podcast. I refute that. That is not true. We do own our Ls on the podcast.

In the past, we brought up tokens like Aerodrome and Syrup as being interesting. I don’t think this is a time to give up on those tokens, or, if you are going to give up on them, you just, I think, want to bookmark them. You sell to rebuy. If anything, this would be a good time to tax-loss harvest. So, if you’re sitting on a big loss on Aerodrome or Syrup, you can just sell and rebuy it. You can sell it with a plan to rebuy it when Bitcoin starts to rally.

I mean, look, Syrup’s a great example of this. I’m down on Syrup now. I used to be up on Syrup; now I’m down on Syrup, and I’m not going to sit here and pretend to you that I sold everything and traded it perfectly. At the end of the day, this is part of the thesis that Jonah and I have: products in crypto over the next 2 to 3 years—products that make money, products that are growing, products that are useful, that exist in the world of financial applications—will do very well, and their token prices will do well, and things will work out.

Obviously, in a market like this, if you listened to us and bought Syrup at the highs, you’re down 50%. And that’s why we say it’s not financial advice, because we’re wrong all the time in terms of timing. Sometimes we’re wrong on trades, sometimes we’re wrong on investments. What I really hope is that this podcast is useful to you as the listener to help generate ideas.

I do think that I am right more than I’m wrong because I’ve made money trading and investing in this space, and I think that, directionally, has to be true in order for that to be the case. But that does not mean I’m right all the time. I think it was not Nadal; it was Federer. He gives this famous speech at a college commencement, and he says, “I’ve won 80% of my matches. 80% of all the matches that I’ve played, I’ve won. But how many points do you think I’ve won? What percentage of all the points have I won?” And the answer is 54%.

Which means that, basically, on average, he wins as much as he loses. It’s just that over time, if you’re consistently winning 54% versus 46%, you can become the greatest tennis player of all time. That’s kind of true with investing and trading. Investing too, but trading specifically, you just have to keep your wins big and your losses small. But that means that you can actually have a 50–50 hit rate. You just have to go big when it matters and cut your losses when it—

Yeah, that’s actually something I want to bring up. I love that Federer quote. I enjoyed it as well. I think the difference between tennis and trading is that every point is kind of worth the same in tennis, whereas in trading, every trade is not worth the same.

Making $10 is very different from making $10 million, right? And both of those are, you could say, 1 trade per outcome. So basically, what I wanted to add to your comment is that the goal for traders like you and me and the listeners is to learn from the market. You want to have your fingers in a lot of different pies, sniffing, smelling, and feeling the market in as many ways as you can. And lose small, win big is real, right?

The best trades I’ve ever done in crypto are buying a lot of ETH sub-$100 a token and buying a lot of Bitcoin during COVID. I had a recent one on Hyperliquid. I bought some Solana at $30 after I hate-tweeted it at $20. That was a big win. I’ve had some big wins, and I’ve ridden them from very low. GBTC—I put that into the Bitcoin bucket—that actually might be the best trade of my life. It was a huge, huge trade in late 2022, early 2023.

But, like, best P&L trade? Not even close. I had bigger ones in my career in oil, but I would say those big winners have funded dozens of terrible ideas. I’ve bought LaunchCoin, I’ve bought Syrup, I’ve bought Aerodrome. I’ve bought ETH. I’ve made all these mistakes recently and sold out at a loss. I’ve made so many mistakes.

The thing about those mistakes is I learned from them, and I stop making the same mistake. Just losing money on an altcoin doesn’t make you a bad trader. It gives you a signal, and the signal is, “Hey, something’s wrong—either with your thesis on this altcoin, or something’s wrong with altcoins.” After a few altcoin bets with different theses, you can be like, “All right, the altcoin market is toast,” and you’ll know that before a passive, sidelined observer does if you’re actually investing.

So I look at all my recent altcoin losses not as, “Oh, Jonah, you’re such a terrible trader.” I look at it more from the perspective of, “It helped me avoid even bigger problems because I stopped.”

Jonah, you’re coping. Are you kidding? You’re a terrible trader. Let me just tell you straight out. If you keep losing, Jonah, maybe stop coping about it.

No. If you keep losing, you stop doing the thing that’s costing you money. And I’m saying that being open about that: once I was like, “I’m not seeing the ball clearly,” I stopped and probably saved myself a lot of money. Whereas, if I just, I don’t know, jumped in front of the freight train and stayed long for too long, I would have lost a lot more.

So my point is, you want to—“mind like water” is the trading truism—you want to keep cycling through these positions, learning from them, trying not to make the same mistake twice. And if you lose money, you should analyze what you did wrong to incorporate it into your trading philosophy. But you can’t beat yourself over the head with it and tell yourself that you suck. You kind of want to roll it up into the win.

That’s true. I tweeted something out like this: emotional discipline is extremely important, in the sense that you have to take a loss, learn a lesson, move on, and then just not make the same mistake again. That doesn’t mean that you keep obsessing over the loss. That’s also another reason to keep losses small.

If you're sitting there thinking to yourself, “Oh man, I can't believe I did this. I can't believe this happened,” you're basically just not meant to be a trader. You make a decision, something bad happens, you cut and you move on, and you just find the next thing. And that's not, by the way, a bad thing. Some people are not emotionally stable enough to trade.

11. Goal Of The Pod

The other thing that I'll say is that we do this podcast once a week. Our goal is not necessarily to give you specific entries and exits, or to tell you exactly what you need to do in order to make money. Our goal is that you're tuning in to our weekly call where we discuss ideas, and then the real work happens after.

The real work is, okay, here are maybe 7 of the ideas that were brought up in some fun, whimsical way on this podcast. Which ones do I agree with? Which ones do I disagree with? That's really what it is.

Yeah, I agree. I learn a lot about that. Talking to you every week, Avi, is my favorite podcast because I learn more from these conversations than I do from any other podcast. I think that it's very common in markets for 2 traders to just get on the phone and shoot the shit and try to learn from each other.

Twitter is weird—it's helpful, but it's so bite-sized and asynchronous that no matter how good CryptoCon's tweet is, it's very hard for me to learn from their thinking via a tweet. Whereas, if they would just talk to me for an hour, more would come out.

One aspiration of mine would be, on the 1000x channel, to have other pods where other traders talk about other markets, maybe the equities market. Maybe we get a tech-stock trader to talk to a tech-stock market maker. We get commodities traders talking to each other. I think the markets call, which has been a staple of trading floors since the 1960s—

12. Final Thoughts

I would like to have more of these market calls—phone calls—publicized in podcast format, out in the open. My only problem is, normally, good traders—one thing that makes you unique, Avi, is that good traders tend to be cripplingly antisocial, uncomfortable to listen to, and weird. So, if the audience is aware of any normal—

Oh my God.

Normal people who are fun to listen to and who trade actively, that would be really awesome. It's weird, isn't it?

Yeah. No, I will say that's been a huge career detriment to me. If I was unable to have normal conversation and just locked myself in a basement for a few years, I'd probably be at least 10 times as rich as I am today.

Same. Yeah. I think the pinnacle of that ethos is Pharma Bro. I would love to talk to Pharma Bro about markets.

Dude, Pharma Bro is a weird dude.

Martin Shkreli is a weird dude. But that's why he's rich.

Yeah, he's rich, but also, he threatened to kill Hillary Clinton and spent some time in jail. A lot of traders are like that, just locked in a little differently than prison.

I heard his Wu-Tang album. It was pretty awesome.

It wasn't nearly as good as the hype, but it was great. Oh, well. Anyway, if we're talking about Wu-Tang, it's probably about time to wrap it, Jonah.

Yeah, it's been a good pod, Avi. A good hour.

Just stay alive. Stay alive.

Stay alive out there. Enjoy the next 2 weeks of terrible price action and sadness, and just make sure you have your shopping list available.

Yeah, make sure you're not too wounded to execute on it either.

Good talking to you, Avi.

All right, take care.

Until next week.