Why Is Everyone So Bearish?

We are super excited to talk today because it seems like we have a contrarian opinion for the first time in a while, which is always fun.

Contrarian opinion alert.

Namely, we're pretty bullish, and the rest of the market is pretty bearish. We're recording this right now just as the market is bouncing a bit, but yesterday I put out a tweet when Bitcoin was trading at around $108K, ETH was trading at around $4,280, and SOL was trading at $194, saying that I think people are way too bearish right now.

So far, so good. Bitcoin just tagged $110K, and ETH is trending up again. I think people just got in their own way about this. What do you think, Jonah? First of all, why did people get so bearish?

I don't know. That's what I'm struggling with. I would love to hear somebody cleanly articulate a bearish take, but when I go on Crypto Twitter, it's all just despair. It's like, “Oh, this cycle sucks. Last time we got a 10x, and this time it's only up 2x—or less than 2x—from the previous cycle highs in 2021.” It seems very childish.

I haven't seen anybody articulate an intelligent bear thesis. No one's saying, “Well, actually, what you all don't know is that rates are going to go up for this reason.” Or, “Hey, there's this security risk to Bitcoin that's not being discussed, and it's about to get highlighted and send the thing to zero.” No one has an intelligent thesis. I'm just hypothesizing here—none of that's real—but nobody has an intelligent thesis.

It's more just frustration that the market hasn't fully sent to levels that make getting rich quick and easy. As crypto Twitter participants in the podcast sphere, this is our little world. My conclusion is that we're becoming increasingly removed from the actual flows of capital that drive Bitcoin.

Whereas maybe 4 or especially 8 years ago, Twitter was probably the place to go for intelligence, now it's a depressed community of degenerate online gamblers, of which you and I are a part. Then there's a more institutional sphere with tens of trillions of dollars—basically infinite money—that's 0% allocated to Bitcoin, and every basis point of allocation should send our market higher.

We're just not talking to the right people, basically. When we say everybody is bearish, maybe we're only looking at a tiny slice of the participant base.

Yeah, no, I think that's actually a very fair point. We are looking at a very small slice of that. But I find it to be a good fade, even today, when the peasants of the crypto world are all on one side or the other. I say “peasants” because Jonah and I are actually peasants now, too.

Our size is peasant-sized compared with the people who are buying hundreds of millions. Joe Lubin buying $177 million of ETH dwarfs both my and Jonah's ability to buy ETH in a week. Neither of us are buying anywhere close to that in a week, so we're included with you guys in the peasant class.

I think the market has just shifted, but it is still a good fade generally when all of us are bent to one side or the other. If literally everybody on Twitter has cashed out, or they're saying they're cashing out, or they're saying that it's cycle top, they're probably actually underexposed. These are the kinds of people who chase trends.

If I'm underexposed and the market starts going up against me and my thesis isn't validated, I just buy back in, right? I think that happens at scale with a lot of people. That's why I'm pretty bullish.

One thing that I've also noticed is that when people get bearish on macro, they tend to stick that right onto crypto as well. That can be a very dangerous trade. I've talked about this before: trading crypto based on what you think macro will do. Even if you're right, there are a lot of idiosyncratic flows in crypto.

Yeah.

I'm not super confident. You see, you're actually seeing it today. One thing that's giving me a little—that's making me happy with price action today specifically—is that equities are down a lot and crypto held basically firm over the weekend. For equities, a 1.5% down day is a lot, and Bitcoin basically didn't budge.

Yeah, I mean, we should definitely talk about macro, but before we do that, this morning's coffee mug—I chose it—says “One day at a time.” The reason why I selected this coffee mug this morning is because crypto's been a bit of a slog lately.

I bought this mug back in 2017 when I was an oil trader, and the market literally didn't move for a year. There was nothing I could do other than explain to my boss once every month, which was about the cadence at which he'd lose patience with me not making any money. I'd be like, “Hey, there was no money to squeeze out of the rock. Look at the chart. It looks like the EKG of a dead guy.”

Mhm.

I could make money. I could sell lots of options with volatility at all-time lows and blow up your company if the market moved even a tiny little bit, but that didn't seem very prudent. I'm just saving dry powder for when the market starts moving again.

In the meantime, I had to find something to do every day. I would read the news, do analysis, and teach myself to code. Basically, when these markets are chopping sideways or grinding against you a little bit, and you're still convicted in the long run but don't have short-term confirmation of your long-term idea, you have to take it one day at a time.

Every day is a new learning opportunity. Every day is a chance to dive into a new protocol. Every day is a chance to go out and touch grass or think about something else. The last thing you should do, in my opinion, is throw in the towel because you're not getting short-term confirmation of a long-term thesis.

I think it's a really good time to zoom out and refocus a little bit. Now, in terms of macro, why is the long-term thesis intact? Interest rates are unfrontable. The amount of capital available today to reprice Bitcoin higher because of rate cuts is not enough to front-run the actual amount of capital that will reprice Bitcoin when the rate cuts come.

The second thing is Trump's midterms. I think he wants a rip-roaring market. The third thing—and this is really underdiscussed in crypto—is that the Supreme Court is about to review an appeal on the tariffs. I forget what's just below the Supreme Court, but some federal district court basically just struck down Trump's tariffs as illegal because Congress is supposed to do that. You can't unilaterally invent an emergency and start tariffing everybody.

I would say the tariffs have been a success for America. I'm kind of a Trump realist, but Ryan Petersen, who runs Flexport and is an old connection of mine from the physical logistics days, tweeted out something really interesting: If the Supreme Court agrees with the Federal Circuit and strikes down the tariffs as illegal, there's going to be the mother of all tariff refunds going back to basically anybody who imported anything.

That means any company that imported anything, any distributor, or any manufacturer that's selling goods in America and paying tariffs for goods made offshore. That entire April wobble in markets could get unwound, and we're sitting at all-time highs now. That would just be this massive $100 billion stimulus check being sent out.

Nobody's talking about that. The final thing is just the broad drumbeat of crypto adoption, which is not stopping. The deregulation has only just begun, and the deregulation that's happened so far has been massive.

It's not like markets work in such a way where deregulation happens, or the GENIUS Act gets passed, or whatever—the CLARITY Act—and then the next day crypto sends. That kicks off the 6- to 18-month process for corporates to get involved in Bitcoin and stablecoins, and then the market sends.

I think we've still got that delayed bull run on deck. What do you think?

I think you're 100% right. One thing that I'll say is that, with regard to the first point, we've basically gone sideways—or started trading down—for 2 weeks. That happens in a bull market.

I don't think anybody is going to be fazed by what you faced, which was a full year of nothing.

This is simply: stop calling the top every time it goes down a little bit. The top, in my perspective, is not going to be a slow, meandering top. It's going to be an explosive top. It's going to be something where this rally gets out of control, and then we top, because other than that, crypto—specifically Bitcoin—is on a march higher. And it's on a march higher for basically everything that you just outlined.

I think that, all else equal, through the Trump administration, Bitcoin will march higher, and it will top and go down 30–40% when it gets overextended for a period of time. Then it has to correct for a period of time, and right now I do not think we are overextended. If you really think about it, the way that I think about it is: how much higher up have we gone post-Trump election? What do I view as a reasonable price, given that the president of the United States loves this asset and is pumping this asset?

At current prices, we are 50% higher than the peak Bitcoin reached pre-Trump election. That doesn't seem like enough. It doesn't seem like Bitcoin should only be 50% higher from the point where the president of the United States started pumping Bitcoin, became personally invested in crypto, made billions of dollars off of it, and probably continues to make billions of dollars off of it.

So sketchy. That part is extremely sketchy, and I don't really like it. We should talk about World Liberty Financial in a bit here, but at least in terms of Bitcoin, I don't think 50% is enough.

My trade right now, which I posted on Twitter, is that I'm heavy on Solana. I think Solana will be the fastest horse, for sure. I'm bullish. I think we can hit—my trade here is effectively: hey guys, stop out below 184, target 260 or something like that.

I was asked, and so I want to talk about this for about half a second: How do I think about trading these days? This is really how I try to find these one-off periods of time where I think that the market is completely offsides and incorrect. We both agree that the market got far too bearish relative to the actual price action. So then I say, “Okay, well, what do I think the best assets to buy are?”

The best assets that I've identified are Solana and Ethereum, based on the market structure that they have right now, which is that there's fresh capital coming in. Then I think to myself, “Okay, well, when do I become wrong?” I become wrong if we continue trending lower. I was wrong about this bounce, right? If we make a new low on Solana, then I think that I was probably just wrong about the trend-higher thesis. So I capitulate at that point.

So that's how I think about structuring this trade.

Before we get deep into alt trades, I wanted to get your take on one thing before we totally close the book on macro. Avi, I'm going to share my screen. Hold on. And there we go.

I tweeted something recently that I'd love to get your take on. Our friend of the pod, Will Clemente—great dude—posted an interesting chart with these 4 bubbles on it. There's sort of 4 phases of broader macro environments—4 macro environments. One is falling growth, falling inflation; you're supposed to be invested in bonds. One is falling growth, rising inflation, and you're supposed to be invested in safe havens like Swiss franc. Rising growth, rising inflation; you're supposed to be invested in commodities. And then rising growth, falling inflation. That's the best scenario. You're supposed to be in equities, credit, and what this chart leaves off is crypto.

So where do you think we are on this? I think we've just gone from an era of rising growth and rising inflation in 2021–2022 to rising growth and falling inflation, mainly because, for a variety of reasons, commodities were drastically overproduced during the shortage in 2021 and 2022, and now we're in a glut for commodities. I think the Ukraine war will eventually end. Supply chain stuff will clear up. I think inflation will continue to fall; that's been a trend.

And I think AI will drive deflation as well, because I see AI, like ChatGPT, as sort of the same as the invention of Google Search or email, where just every single person at every single company becomes 20% more productive. In the past, it was by just networking them together. This time, it's by making everybody a little bit smarter or less stupid, depending on the person.

I also think that that'll be deflationary and it'll be growth-stimulative. I also think that the governments of the world are done trying to pump the brakes on economies, and they're going to try to stimulate here. So I think we're entering a regime that should be very friendly for crypto. But before I ramble on this, I just wanted to get your take, because I feel like I'm just talking to myself about this.

Yeah, I think that rising growth, falling inflation is kind of a dream scenario. That's what we all want to happen. That's what kind of everybody wants to happen right now. I don't know how—it's very possible that we get that for a short period of time. GDP growth looks very solid. Inflation isn't really budging. And it's very possible we get that for a short period of time, but I wouldn't classify it as the new regime. I wouldn't classify it as an era. Maybe a 6-month period of time or a 12-month period of time, but not a macro trend.

I think that rising growth, rising inflation is probably the macro trend here. I think that the cat's been let out of the bag that populist policies will continue to print money for the foreseeable future. We will continue to increase the money supply beyond—basically, whatever. You've heard of the concept of demand grows to meet supply. So if you widen the roads on a highway, more cars will just take the highway.

That's the way that I view AI and money supply. No matter what the deflationary forces in this world are, the printing of money by our populist elites will grow to fill that gap. They'll just print as much money as they possibly can without, in their minds, causing an issue. And that just means if AI causes crazy deflation, they just offset that, right? There's no putting that genie back in the bottle, in my personal opinion.

Which is why, if you look at my portfolio, I have a sizable amount in commodities. I have silver miners, I have gold miners, I have gold, I have silver, I have copper miners. I just have these things. In addition—

Not commodities—

Precious metals miners. Interesting.

I was like, dude, if you're invested in silver or uranium right now, I would be very confused. But okay, mining.

No, I am.

Well, do you have something interesting?

I do have—well, I have silver miners, right? Because I think that they're just a better expression of outright silver. If silver goes up too much and they start increasing the supply of what they're mining, they just make more money, and silver prices can come down, but at least the miners will make more money.

Yeah. So, bullish on that. I mean, silver is—like, I have 25% silver, 75% miners. Gold is actually the opposite. I have 75% outright gold, 25% miners, because I think that there's less issue with a massive increase in gold supply than there is with a massive increase in silver supply.

But—

So I wouldn't call that commodities. I'd call that precious metals, which are interesting. I also own copper.

Okay—

That's a real commodity.

Well, copper miners again, for the same reason. And I also own uranium miners.

The only commodity trade I have on right now—I have no exposure to commodities. The only commodity trade I have on is MLPX, which is the pipeline ETF, because that was a deregulation trade that I put on before the election, and it's been awesome. It also pays big dividends. But other than that, I'm not bullish.

Can you tell me about MLPX?

Yeah, it’s basically just an ETF index whose constituents are pipeline companies, like Enterprise. What these companies do is ship molecules from point A to point B. They’re usually hydrocarbon molecules, like oil and gas.

During the Biden administration, you’ll remember he put the kibosh on Keystone XL from Canada down to Cushing. He was basically anti-pipeline because there was an environmentalist agenda against pipelines. Why? Because sometimes they would cross a Native American reservation, and that was considered a blight.

The big one was that Greenpeace would lie down in front of the bulldozers because they were afraid that, once the pipeline was built, it would spring a leak and pollute some local water. But in terms of commodities infrastructure, pipelines would be number 50 or lower among the things that are most dangerous to the environment. They wouldn’t be number 1, number 2, or number 3. It seemed like a very irrational thing to be afraid of.

Then Trump came in, basically promising during the campaign that he would deregulate and not use the federal government to block these leases to build pipelines. Those companies are now in the middle of a bonanza, printing cash, because it doesn’t matter how much demand there is at point B.

We saw oil go negative in 2020 for this reason. If your commodities are stuck at point A and there’s no pipeline, the price at point A can go pretty freaking low, right?

Basically, I saw it as a deregulation trade, and you guys should look for those types of trades out there for the listeners. There are trades that don't give you—you know, a pipeline is not inherently a long oil trade or a long commodities trade. The pipeline is basically long oil at the exit end of the pipeline and short oil at the entry end, so it's net flat the commodity, but it's a play on a regulatory environment. It's a more niche expression of the idea, so that's why I like MLPX. I think that trend will continue, and it also speaks to my earlier point on the pod that we've been talking about how when deregulation happens, the rip doesn't occur immediately, right? Some of it does. I'm just looking at the MLPX chart. Some of it happened right away, but—oh, no. Actually, it all happened right away. My bad. I guess I don't have my dividend-adjusted chart here. I forget. I'll do that in Trading View later. Anyway—

But I do think that generally things take time.

Yeah, big things take time for sure.

Yes.

And especially when there’s a regime shift involved, things take time to get implemented. There’s always a level of uncertainty about whether things will actually go through, so you do need to give yourself some time for these theses to play out.

A great example of this is the gold and silver thesis. We basically went sideways for three—it felt like three years, but I think it was 3 or 4 months. Gold went sideways. I’m holding this asset, everything else is going up, and I’m thinking, “Did I make a mistake? Should I just wait it out?”

I’m thinking, “Look, I have a multi-year thesis on this. I’m just going to hold it.” Rebalancing is really key, especially when you have multiple parts in your portfolio. When you get massive outperformance from one side, rebalance toward your other theses that take some time to play out.

Taking down the S&P and NASDAQ after their massive performance relative to gold and then rotating into gold improved my portfolio performance a lot. I plan on doing that with gold. If gold hits my target of 4,000, I’ll take some off and roll it back over. Hopefully, it has outperformed by a significant amount by then.

All-time highs. Wow, look at that: 3,500.

Yeah, no, gold is ripping. Still very bullish. I don’t want to rehash all of the same tired arguments that everyone else has, because I think they’re right and you’ve probably heard them. But for the listener who hasn’t heard them, I’ll go through them quickly.

First, I do think that as rates get cut, gold becomes a much more attractive investment. By definition, gold competes with other investments, and if rates are high, those other investments have higher interest rates or dividend yields attached to them, or whatever it is, to compete in that environment.

Gold has a zero interest rate. As interest rates come down, gold becomes more attractive and more “on par” with other investments. You can’t just stick your money in a very safe Treasury and earn 4%. If you’re earning 0.5% or 1%, investing in something that has a 0% yield is less painful for you. I think interest rates are going down, which is good for gold.

Second, from a geopolitical perspective, we’re becoming increasingly isolated. There are more pockets of power, and de-dollarization is happening step by step. I’m sure you just saw India meeting with Russia and China. For the longest time, oil was settled in dollars. The dollar was the unit of account for most international trade.

Still is.

And still is, but it’s decaying.

Yeah. And I think it will continue to decay. Countries like Russia, China, and India see this. If you look at their central bank balance sheets, they continue to accumulate gold.

The central bank gold balance sheets, which you can just look up on Bloomberg if you have Bloomberg, are all up and to the right. The PBOC’s is up and to the right. They’re just accumulating gold.

Countries around the world, I think, will see this. Basically, anyone holding US Treasuries will continue to diversify out a little bit and buy more gold. They’re not doing this with Bitcoin yet. I think at some point in the future they will, but—

I think they are. That’s what I like about gold rallying: I feel like I’m long by proxy, even though I have no gold position, because Bitcoin is viewed as baby gold, or digital gold.

If the ratio of Bitcoin to gold falls too low, people will accumulate a little Bitcoin, because gold is ultimately—Bitcoin flipping gold is kind of the blue-sky target for our space. I remember when gold was a $10 trillion asset and Bitcoin was a $1 trillion asset. It was like 10%. And now here we are, right? Gold is what, like $25 trillion now?

Yeah, it wasn’t that long ago that it was $10 trillion. It was like a couple of years ago. We were podcasting back then. So, yeah, basically—

No, it’s $23–24 trillion.

Okay.

Which, you know, and it was—we were podcasting at the time that it was $10 trillion, which is kind of crazy. You could have gotten 2x in gold, huh?

Yeah. Insane.

And gold is what bothers me: you can go decades with zero performance. I’ve never been a very good gold trader. I suck at it.

I think it’s just a matter of perspective, right? You buy gold when gold is going up. You just do that when it—

It is a momentum trade, and gold trades like Bitcoin, right? It literally had 12 years of effectively going up only, from 2000 to 2011. Then it had 7 years of going down only and moving sideways. Starting in November 2018, it’s basically been going up only.

There’s a period of 3 years, I guess, where it didn’t really do much, but this is as good a time as any to buy gold, basically. You’re buying it on the way up.

Yeah.

And that’s at least when you should be. If you look at the yearly chart, we’ve had 3 years of gains. Gold tends to have at least 4, looking at the chart.

I guess—

This thing trends like Bitcoin does, just over longer periods of time.

I guess the reason why I missed this trade is that I came of age during the 2010s as a financial professional, and during that entire decade gold did absolutely nothing for 10 years. It just wasn’t something that was on my radar.

You have to break what I call childhood curses.

It’s the things that you grew up with and took as self-evident truths that are no longer self-evident truths.

Yeah, it’s true.

I think a lot of people have a lot of these, and not just in trading—in life.

Yeah, I mean, it’s happened to me multiple times. Another one was during the 2000s, which is when I came of age as a guy who was aware of what stock prices were. The stock market did nothing during the entire George W. Bush presidency, right?

I remember thinking, “I don’t trust the stock market. This is insane volatility for no return.” But I think what’s going—

You hear that a lot, by the way.

I’ve heard this a tremendous amount: “Why would I put my money in the stock market when I could just buy another house?” Real estate is the most important thing, or you could buy a hard asset.

I know a very wealthy immigrant family.

That family has literally never put their money into the stock market. They just don’t trust it. They think it’s all a scam because of where they came from. They own a bunch of restaurants and real estate, and anytime they make a sale, they won’t park that cash anywhere but in opening a new restaurant or buying a new one—

That’s it. That’s all they’ll do because they don’t trust it.

They would have been much wealthier, very likely, if they had just stuck their money in the S&P, because the S&P outperformed.

Are you sure about that? Because here’s my question. This is a great debate: real estate versus stocks. Basically, it depends where you invest in real estate, right? You can go wildly wrong in places like Vegas or Miami, but here in Beverly Hills, I know a lot of families like the kind you described. They tend to be Persian. They came here fleeing the Iranian Revolution. They put all their money not into the S&P 500; they put it into—

Residential and commercial real estate. These people have, just by doing nothing other than managing their real estate, become tycoons. The reason for that is, if you invest in the right real estate market and you’re concentrated, real estate does, on average, tend to perform with the S&P.

But you’re literally talking about an isolated, potentially best market in the history of real estate. You don’t think that real estate performs with the S&P? I thought the price of real estate—

In the last 30 years, the Beverly Hills real estate market has probably been, if not the best-performing market in the entire world, in the top 10.

Yeah. All right, fine. It performs like Bitcoin.

These guys are buying acres of land for $30,000. Okay, fine.

That would be my guess. I think if you look anywhere else, the market probably hasn’t done what the Beverly Hills market did in the last 30 years, but that’s just a guess.

I don’t know.

I thought real estate performed with the S&P, except that it’s more tax-advantaged. So after tax, you probably end up better on real estate because of that stupid depreciation loophole that everybody—

It’s after tax and also leverage, right? It’s like you can get—

You can make money quickly. So basically, my point is, your after-tax return on equity—not on total capital, but on equity—for a dollar in the S&P and a dollar in, let’s call it, just median American real estate, may be similar. I have to double-check, but it’s not a stupid impulse to invest in real estate. Restaurants, that’s pretty stupid unless you’re really good at it or lucky. But apartment buildings, I don’t know.

I think a return on after-tax equity may be pretty comparable, and some people just can’t comprehend it. Even my wife, who’s from France, cannot comprehend that we have money in Bitcoin, SPY, and MLP. Actually, the S&P’s long-term average annual return is approximately 10%; the U.S. housing market’s average annual return is 5.5%.

Yeah. So after tax is probably comparable—

And that’s before leverage.

That’s absolutely not comparable at all if you’re talking about long-term compounding, though. We should probably end this conversation here because—

Sorry, we’re getting really nerdy—

Or, like, what the—

I think you’re right. I’m kind of playing devil’s advocate, but I still think they’re comparable.

No, it’s massively different, unfortunately, but we’ll come back to this. So let’s say you out there, the listener, are deciding between real estate and the stock market. Just know that Jonah is completely incorrect and I am completely correct, as always: buy the stock market.

It’s easier to buy Bitcoin. Somebody—I actually got a message from somebody that I need to reply to. Good on him for reminding me. He goes, “Assume you have $20 million. How would you allocate? Would you think of 50% SPY, 20% BTC, or whatever? I’m trying to figure out what to sit in, and I have no idea.”

The way that my wealth is structured is I have, at this point, about 40% of my wealth sitting in a brokerage account, just in SPY and equities. I have 40% of my wealth invested in crypto across a variety of different funds and stuff, and 20% of my wealth in real estate.

I’m similar. I’m more like 30% crypto, though.

Mhm.

Not 40%. It’s actually very similar—

Of that 40%, 30% is invested in funds, and about 10%, although growing, is actively traded.

Do you believe in crypto funds?

I believed in them when I made the investments. Most of these investments have not turned out particularly well for me, except for staying invested in the one fund that I used to run with Joe Naggar, who’s been an amazing manager. It returned some capital, but most of the funds that I’ve invested in have not turned out particularly well. It was not the right decision. I would have dramatically outperformed myself.

Yeah, yeah. I don’t understand the whole notion of, “Oh, we’re starting a hedge fund; our benchmark is the S&P, but we’re not going to outperform it,” or, “We’re starting a crypto fund; our benchmark is Bitcoin, but we’re unlikely to outperform it, and we’re going to provide decorrelated, lower-volatility returns.” I don’t believe in that.

I think the whole point of having money in your PA is not that you’re trying to smooth over volatility; it’s that you’re trying to weather volatility because that is your edge, right? The only way that you can outperform institutions as a personal investor is by having something that they don’t, and being able to stomach a drawdown is a big, big, big advantage.

Look, there are funds that have performed extremely well—

Always.

And so I think that’s what people are chasing. By investing in funds, you’re effectively—I mean, it’s like a memecoin: you’re trying to pick the winner—

Right? Yeah, you get a variety of people who kind of all say the same things, to varying degrees. There’s not a lot of differentiation between fund managers, and you kind of just have to look them in the eye and be like, “Are you good at your job?” You have to get hit with the stare back: “Yes, I’m good at my job.” These guys are intense. Like—

I’m all in.

I mean, look—

I used to manage funds for 8 years of my life, and by all accounts, I think my investors are very happy with me. They followed me from fund to fund when I left BlockTower to go to GoldenTree. I have good relationships with all of them. I made them money. By all accounts, I made them a lot of money.

My feedback—and what I learned through the pitches—is you basically just have to genuinely be obsessed with this stuff and be in it thoughtfully for 10 to 12 hours a day, not just posting on Twitter. And you have to find the people who are not really interested in building a brand or building a public audience.

The best people—and this was kind of true when I was at GoldenTree—we didn’t really—

Go out there and beat our chests. We were just like, “Let’s just make money. We have the money; let’s just make money. The investors will come. We’ll sit down with them. People come to us.”

We raised our initial capital, but we’re not out there trying to be thought leaders in the space. GoldenTree was not a thought leader in the space. We were not putting out articles like, “Oh, this is what we think on this, and this is what we think on that.” We were just trying to work our asses off.

I think that most people who try to run funds and build brands are covering up some sort of deficiency, or they're trying to become asset gatherers and not actual alpha funds.

That's interesting because alpha does decay, right? The best trader that I know was this guy, Hawal Press, who was on Twitter for a while. The guy's a genius. He was an exceptionally good trader, as much as he got on there. I don't know; I think he got on there because he wasn't a dumb believer in the space, but he barely had a presence at a certain point. He just nuked his Twitter.

Yeah, Twitter nukeage. I took a very different career path than you. I was never a fund manager. I didn't take external LP capital and try to grow it; I always took internal capital and tried to grow it. My edge as sort of an internal hedge fund manager for Goldman, Vitol, and DRW was that I would try to attach myself to a business that generated revenue.

By doing so, I basically felt that I could weather bigger drawdowns. I went into my career with the thesis that bigger VaR equals a better outcome for me over the long run: The more VaR you can stomach, the more money you can make. Basically, there are some huge home-run trades that don't have the highest Sharpe, and you need to find a way to stay in them.

So what I did was get my risk limits, drawdown limits, VaR limits, and all this stuff, and when I was having a bad time, I would be able to paper over my losses with gains from the sustainable business. If you attach yourself to a business, your risk limits are actually much larger than they look on paper when the risk manager hands them to you. That was how I navigated 20 years of that and ended up doing quite well.

I have a lot of respect for fund managers because they don't have that benefit. There's no business that you had at GoldenTree. You couldn't take the 2% management fee and plow it into the book to try and paper over a bad day or a bad week. Certainly, at BlockTower, you didn't have that benefit in an early-era crypto fund.

So you guys, in order to do that, would have to spend, like you said, 10 to 12 hours a day just living markets, breathing markets, and not missing anything. I would too, but usually when you have a business—at Vitol, for example, I had a physical optionality business that I co-created with a business partner—you would have to be just as locked in, but you would spend a lot of that time being locked in on the business.

Then that business would give you intelligence about the market. I think that the same applies to crypto. I think that crypto looks like commodities in that sense because there are ways to do it.

It's kind of like getting invited into a Discord room with a curated group of people who are important to a certain project. Let's say that I just bull-posted Aerodrome long enough to be involved in a conversation about Aerodrome's roadmap. That might give me more confidence as an investor, but there would be no material public or non-public information in there.

So there are ways to do it in crypto too; you just have to be creative about it. I think that's a good way for people who are just getting started to try to make a little more money: Pick a few winners, try to get deeply involved in the ecosystems, and then you probably have an edge on token price.

I think that's what a lot of people miss: Get deeply involved in something. Maybe that's where we can leave it as a piece of advice to the listeners: If you can get deeply involved in something, whether it's a specific token, a project, or just specific domain expertise, you'll eventually end up meeting the right people and doing the right things. That is the wealth hack.

If you just sit back and buy Bitcoin, you might 10x your bags over the next 5 to 10 years. But if you want to move faster and hit those big, 2020–2021-style gains, I think that's why Crypto Twitter is depressed. It takes a lot more work now.

You have to be more like the Avi Felman of 2017: a fund manager who's locked in, doing the work, trying to get into the Discords and the Telegrams, understand tokenomics, and really get into the weeds. It's not just, “Everything's mooning right now. Let me buy a basket of poorly selected altcoins that are hyped on Twitter right now and expect to compound gains into the thousands or tens of thousands of percent.” So, yeah, now it's harder, and that's why people are frustrated.

It reminds me of a time early in my career when I just started out. It was 2006, and one of the bond traders was like, “Ugh, TRACE—such a shitty system.” TRACE is basically just a ticker tape that prints bond prices for corporate bonds.

Before TRACE, the banks had all the information about bond pricing and nobody else did. They would just buy a bond for 90 cents on the dollar, sell it for 97 cents on the dollar, make 8%, and feel really smart about themselves. Then TRACE came up, and instead of that bond being 90 bid at 97, it was like 94 bid at 94.01. All their edge went away, and they were just bitching and moaning and complaining.

I guess that's how markets go. They get harder, right? Instead of sitting there doing monkey business and making a fortune, we all have to level up our game to try to earn those excess returns over Bitcoin. But Bitcoin is still going to be good enough for most, I think.

I would like to agree with that. I think it's going to be good for most. Anyway, Jonah, I appreciate the rant. I appreciate you taking the time this morning—

To talk. Hopefully this has been a useful conversation for people. Go out there and don't be afraid of the stupid bears yelling at you.

Stay long. Stay strong.

Stay long. Stay strong. We'll let you know when we're bearish.

Tune in next week.

Great seeing you, Avi. Thanks for making time as always.

Awesome. Later, bro.