[BidClub_]
1000x · · 45 min

Will We Bottom Soon?

Avi FelmanJonah Van Bourg

YouTube
TL;DR
  • Regime call: still high-vol, chop-and-recover mode — the 75K Bitcoin level held twice after the "buy with both hands" episode with Felix, and the market now sits 10–15% above it, but Avi insists "we have not left the high-vol market environment." His advice: trim 20–50% of anything bought lower, because odds of trading 78K again in the next month are "30–40%" — and roughly the same for 92K. "Cash again is extremely valuable."
  • The episode's operating principle, from Avi: "you only ever play at the extremes. Just don't touch the market when it's in the middle of a range." Be ready to be aggressive when the market gives you the chance — "you just can't be aggressive if you're already fully deployed." Jonah respectfully disagrees on selling here, feeling "we're in the middle of the new range."
  • Revenue + buybacks is the only alt thesis left: Jonah's portfolio is now three line items — Bitcoin, Solana, Hyperliquid — and he's debating rotating all his Solana into Hyperliquid because "if it makes money, it's a better project than the projects that don't," and it actually dividends revenue to holders. His broader dictum: "if their token is not getting actively bought back with project revenues, it's just a memecoin — and the memecoin cycle ended mid last year."
  • Avi's structured trade: long an RWA/revenue basket, short ETH against it for a 3–6 month horizon — accumulating Plume, Pendle, Curve, AO, and Maker on the bet tokenomics flip toward payouts; Jonah separately added Grass, whose founder "accidentally disclosed" mid-eight-figure revenues. Avi concedes "for all I know, ETH trades a thousand this year."
  • Macro fork resolves within six months: Jonah argues Trump "doesn't have a lifetime to figure this out" — fail by the midterms and a blue wave makes him "more like Herbert Hoover than Abraham Lincoln," so he'll keep tweeting the market back up ("we literally saw him flinch"). Avi's counter: he blinked on the rest of the world, but "I don't know if he's going to blink with China" — a revisit of the lows is live.
  • Bitcoin passed its stress test: NASDAQ fell 25% peak-to-trough vs Bitcoin's 30–32% — and stripping out the false SPR-speculation spike to 109, the "real" drawdown from 96 to 74 was only ~23%. Without long-term allocators treating it like gold, Avi "would have expected Bitcoin to be back in the 60s." Jonah's breakout tell: IBIT/SPY at ~0.09 vs cycle-high 0.1 — a break signals Bitcoin decorrelating to the upside and mania flows returning.
  • Gold vs Bitcoin as the multipolarity trade: the PBoC has bought gold five straight months as China sells Treasuries through the "ugly divorce"; Avi is "very bullish gold and gold miners" for 6–12 months, seeing gold up in ~80% of next-year scenarios vs ~60% for Bitcoin. Jonah's asymmetry: both bottom around −60%, but gold's upside is a two-bagger over 5–10 years vs 5–10x for Bitcoin — and multipolarity "warrants a decade-long bull run."
Digest · the substance, structured for research

1. Still in the high-vol regime — trim what you bought lower, hoard cash

  • Market read: after 75K held twice and the market rallied 10–15% above the "buy with both hands" Felix episode, "we have not left the high-vol market environment." If you added lower, be 20–50% lighter on that capital — the probability of trading 78K again in the next month is "30–40%," but so is trading 92. "This is where we go into chop and recover mode."
  • The craft rule Avi returns to twice: "you only ever play at the extremes. Just don't touch the market when it's in the middle of a range." Not calling 90, not calling 75 — "there will be vol. Be ready for it... you just can't be aggressive if you're already fully deployed."
  • Jonah's pushback — worth keeping: "I feel like we're in the middle of the new range," so it's a weird time to lighten up; he won't sell his Hyperliquid. His one addendum: tax-loss harvest anything bought higher — "that's free money right there."

2. If the token doesn't get bought back, it's a memecoin

  • Jonah's portfolio is now three lines — Bitcoin, Solana, Hyperliquid — and he's debating dumping all the Solana for more Hyperliquid: "if it makes money, it's a better project than the projects that don't," and unlike Curve's "voting rights or some useless crap," Hyperliquid "actually dividends the money to the token holders in a legal way."
  • His structural claim: any founder can now see that "if their token is not getting actively bought back with project revenues, it's just a memecoin — and the memecoin cycle ended mid last year." Yet "deep-seated lizard brain" greed keeps founders clutching revenue even as Aerodrome destroys Uniswap on Base and Hyperliquid destroys its onchain competitors — precisely because they do buybacks.
  • Avi's structured trade: accumulate revenue-generating names with a 3–6 month trend — Plume, Pendle, Curve, AO, and Maker — and short ETH against the basket, since "for all I know, ETH trades a thousand this year." Jonah separately added Grass, whose founder "accidentally disclosed" mid-eight-figure revenues. Expect two-week manias in RWA, AI, and L1s "at some point in the next six to eight months"; until trend resumes, "there's kind of no reason to do anything other than pair trade."

3. Trump has six months — he flinched once, but China is different

  • Why 3–6 months? Avi admits "candidly, I just pulled it out of my ass" — but it's the time needed to learn whether tariff uncertainty actually degrades consumption: "either we'll be in the middle of a spiral or we'll say okay, nothing really bad is happening. Time to go up now."
  • Jonah is "so bullish risk assets" over six months because "Trump's not Xi Jinping — he doesn't have a lifetime to figure this out." Fail by the midterms and a blue wave leaves him a lame duck, "more like Herbert Hoover than Abraham Lincoln." He started the chaos with a Rose Garden speech, "he could end it with a tweet — and we literally saw him flinch. He just tweeted the market back up."
  • Avi's counter: he blinked on the rest of the world, "but I don't know if he's going to blink with China... this guy does have a pretty big ego." Jonah adds that there's no bilateral trade between China and the United States and 300% tariffs — "it's not improbable that things crash again" and the lows get revisited. Jonah accepts the "third-grade playground tit-for-tat" scenario but reads it as the start of an east-vs-west split: "volatility but not necessarily bearish" over the medium-to-long run.

4. The world's choice: contract law or Xi's brain

  • Avi, channeling a note from someone likely named Peter Zeihan ("sometimes a bit of a quack"): this ends "when everybody makes their decision" on whether to gang up on China. Jonah adds that many now weigh "do you want to join the rocket ship or get on the sinking ship" — and says "every single Chinese person I know" sees the US as the sinking ship.
  • Jonah's rebuttal from his physical-oil career: business cultures differ everywhere — getting a barrel out of the Nigerian creeks means bribing "every single person along the way" — but "certain types of capitalism enjoy Cambrian explosions of success and others wither and die." Marrying China means "subjecting yourself to a style of capitalism for which there's no precedent of success."
  • Avi extends the IP point to crypto itself: with everything open source, "your job is to invent something and then extract as much money as possible as quickly as possible, because in six months you're going to have 300 billion copycats" — weak IP protection disincentivizes invention everywhere it appears.
  • Avi's close: America is the world's biggest customer and should become the Walmart kind — haggling suppliers "down to the bone" rather than giving up "$10 a barrel by being idiots on every single trade" like his former customers in an unnamed region. Meantime, "a tremendous amount of volatility"; medium-term, markets "go up quite a lot."

5. Every price is unstable — trade the dislocations, know your blind spot

  • Jonah: "$84,000 on Bitcoin is a horribly unstable price — basically every price on the market right now is." At-the-money Bitcoin vol at 48 — about the same as crude oil — "doesn't really make a ton of sense to me." Avi says to watch for dislocations: when M (likely Mantra's OM) started liquidating over the weekend, understanding why meant catching a short that fell 50% in 15 minutes. "You need a bullish market to prop up a scam."
  • Jonah's confession: great at the immediate term and the two-decade macro call, "but I kind of suck at the medium term... Bitcoin's trading 83 — is 78 next or is 90 next? I'm so blind there." His leading indicators are ugly: NY Fed consumer-expectation surveys on unemployment and inflation "rocketed over the last week," credit-card balances rocketing, buy-now-pay-later Coachella tickets. His plan: wait for lower lows to buy.
  • Also the S&P math from Avi, citing a Quinn tweet: the index carries the same earnings expectations and multiple as at the start of Trump's presidency — if tariffs stick, margins shrink and multiples must come in. Once that rerate happens, "then I can start to be ridiculously bullish — hopefully that's in the next month or two."

6. Bitcoin passed the crash test; gold is the nearer-term bet

  • The resilience case: NASDAQ fell 25% peak-to-trough vs Bitcoin's 30–32% — and Avi argues the top was inflated by "rampant speculation on the SPR which turned out to be false," so the real move from 96 to 74 was only 23%. Absent long-horizon allocators treating Bitcoin like gold, "I would have expected Bitcoin to be back in the 60s."
  • Jonah's flow tell: IBIT/SPY, now ~0.09 vs a 0.1 cycle high — same NY open and close, cleaner than BTC/SPX. A break through signals "Bitcoin is decorrelating to the upside" and "when capital really starts to flow into crypto."
  • On gold: the PBoC has added to reserves five consecutive months, parking proceeds from Treasury sales amid the "ugly divorce" — China alone can push gold up a lot. Avi is "very bullish gold and gold miners" for 6–12 months, seeing gold up in ~80% of next-year scenarios vs ~60% for Bitcoin; a 15–16-year-old asset replacing a 5,000-year one "might take 20" years, though Jonah hopes for five.
  • Jonah's asymmetry to end on: both assets bottom around −60% (gold ≈ $2,000/oz; Bitcoin there is "the best trade of a lifetime"), but upside is a two-bagger for gold vs 5–10x for Bitcoin over 5–10 years. He concedes the portfolio-construction point — gold's higher Sharpe funds bigger Bitcoin drawdowns — and stakes the thesis: multipolarity is "a generational shift... I think that warrants a decade-long bull run."
Avi Felman

I'll just go back to the basics here. When it comes to trading a market like this and investing in a market like this, you only ever play at the extreme. Just don't touch the market when it's in the middle of a range.

Jonah Van Bourg

Slow market day, but busy market in general if you zoom out a little bit.

Avi Felman

Yeah. Today was a little bit of up and a little bit of down. If you look at a 12-hour chart, nothing's really happened since Saturday. We've just been chopping in a tiny little range. But before that was absolute pandemonium.

Jonah Van Bourg

Yeah. We retested that $75K level twice and held it. We recorded that absolute banger of a podcast with Felix where we said, "Buy with both hands," and then the market proceeded to rally. Now we're sitting 10% to 15% above where we talked about that.

So I guess the question on everybody's mind is, what do you do now? What are you supposed to be doing with these gains?

Avi Felman

My answer is that we have not left the high-volatility market environment yet. We are still in the craziness, even though we've taken a little bit of a break. I think that cash is extremely valuable when you're in this type of market, and you should be—if you bought anything lower, if you added to your stack lower, or if you made a trade and this is your trading capital—at least, in my opinion, 20% to 50% lighter with that capital that you bought earlier.

If you bought anything, just because there's a ton of vol right now and the probability that we trade $78K again is reasonably high. It's not zero, right? It's probably 30% to 40% in the next month. But it's also probably 30% to 40% that we trade $92K in the next month or so.

I just think that there's a lot of vol to be had. This is where we go into chop-and-recover mode. But Jonah, what do you think?

Jonah Van Bourg

It's hard to disagree that we're going to be in a range for a while. It does seem like a good idea to start trading around the range.

Just one little addendum to your point about maybe taking some profits if you bought lower: Don't forget to tax-loss harvest if you bought higher. None of this is tax advice or financial advice, but check with your tax adviser and see if you can harvest some losses here. That's always a good thing to do when markets pull back, because that's free money. That's free money right there.

Short-term capital losses can be harvested against ordinary income, to the best of my knowledge, from your W-2 job if you've got one. So all of that's just extra ways to add to your stack.

1. Surviving The Chop

I'm sad to say that I think you're right. I think we are heading into a choppy range. I think we're in the middle of it, so I think it's kind of a weird time to lighten up. But maybe you're right. Maybe we're headed straight back down to the lows.

You talked me into buying some Hyperliquid, by the way. I really like that one. Now my portfolio consists of 3 line items: Bitcoin, Solana, and Hyperliquid. I'm debating whether to liquidate all of my Solana and move that capital over into Hyperliquid.

That project seems like it's got real legs, mainly because of the revenue element. It's as simple as this: If it makes money, it's a better project than the projects that don't make money. It's a reasonably straightforward thesis. This thing is making money hand over fist, and there are just not that many other things that do.

Avi Felman

Not only does it make money, it accrues that value back to token holders. There are plenty of projects out there that make lots of money, like Curve, where if you hold the token, you just get some voting rights or some useless crap. Why should anybody hold that?

Hyperliquid actually divvies the money to the token holders in a legal way. I do think that's going to change over the next year or so, which is why one of the things that you can do when the market pulls back like this, if you're still interested in trading crypto, is start to accumulate some of the things that you think will have a good 3-to-6-month trend.

If you want, you can short the things that you don't like against it. For example, one of the things I'm doing right now is slowly accumulating everything in the RWA world and shorting ETH against it. I'm trying to focus on the things that are actually making money, like Curve, with the idea that at some point in the future they're going to pay back their token holders. They're going to take that revenue that they're generating and pay back their token holders.

I'm slowly accumulating some Plume, Pendle, Curve, AO again, and Maker, and basically just shorting ETH against that. Or [unclear]. You could borrow ETH to go buy those things. There are a bunch of different ways you can structure it. Just make sure not to get too overlevered when you're doing that. You don't want to get into too much trouble there.

I think that trade plays out very nicely in 3 to 6 months. I like the way that trade is structured. I would hate to own those assets versus U.S. dollars because you could take a ton of pain before the tokenomics change. But versus ETH, based on my limited clicking around during your dissertation, it does seem like a lot of those assets trade in lockstep with ETH, probably because they keep them in line.

Jonah Van Bourg

They've been outperforming. Grass has underperformed. That's another one that I added because it's actually making real revenues. The founder accidentally disclosed that they were making mid-eight figures in revenue. We have to figure out how to get that back to the token, of course, but all these things that are revenue-generating and have some sort of thesis will crop back up again in the next 6 months.

That's just how crypto goes. At some point in the next 6 to 8 months, there's going to be a 2-week mania of RWA assets, probably a 2-week mania of AI assets, and probably a 2-week mania of L1s again. I think that's going to happen at some point in the next 6 to 8 months, so now is actually a reasonably good time to start accumulating them.

Avi Felman

The reason I'm shorting ETH is because I don't know if the market is done going down yet. For all I know, ETH trades at $1,000 this year. I'd probably buy it back there and then start riding these things outright. But until we're in the trend-up market mode, and while we're in the chop zone, there's no reason to do anything other than a pair trade.

You basically buy when things are at the lows of the year, which a lot of these things are not. Other than that, you're not going to ride these things outright, in my personal opinion. It just doesn't make a ton of sense.

Jonah Van Bourg

I agree. You can't ride them outright. Alt season is never coming, and these alts are too dangerous.

Also, if you're waiting for the tokenomics to change, you're playing a game of chicken with the founders of the project. Who's going to swerve first: the token holders or the founders?

By now, it should be crystal clear to any crypto founder that if their token is not getting actively bought back with project revenues, it's just a memecoin. The memecoin cycle ended in the middle of last year, so their token is going straight to zero.

And yet there's still this human greed element where a founder is looking at $0 per token in the face and thinking to himself, "Wow, my token is going to get deep-donged by the market if I don't change something." It's still this deep-seated, lizard-brain human instinct that says, "No. Clutch as many pearls as possible. Don't let anybody else get the revenue. I want to keep it all for myself."

By now, watching Aerodrome just destroy Uniswap on Base or watching Hyperliquid just destroy its on-chain competitors, why? Because they do buybacks. They accrue value to token holders. The playbook is so obvious, and yet what are these other projects doing? I'm talking about viable projects here that generate real revenue. Why aren't they doing more buybacks?

Why do you say 3 to 6 months? Is there something behind that, Avi, or is that just your gut feeling?

Avi Felman

It's been—I candidly just pulled it out of my ass. But I do think that's what gives the market enough time to digest what's really happening, because basically the thesis right now is that, because of these tariffs and because of the way that Trump governs, it is much harder to do business now in a volatile environment.

We're not really sure how the tariffs are going to affect consumption yet. All of that uncertainty and degradation of consumption is going to lead to the economy turning out poorly, or starting to see data come in badly. In 6 months, we're going to know if that's played out.

2. Ads (Kraken OTC, WalletConnect)

Basically, either we'll be in the middle of a spiral, or we'll say, “Okay, looks like actually nothing really bad is happening. Time to go up now.” At some point in the next 6 months, we're going to figure that out. I think we're going straight back up. I'm so bullish on risk assets over that time period.

3. What's Next For Markets?

Jonah Van Bourg

Even in the next month, you think that there's a much higher chance that risk assets go up than go down?

Avi Felman

No, next month I'm with you. I think we get wild, volatile chop. But in 6 months, Trump's not Xi Jinping. He doesn't have a lifetime to figure this out. He's got 6 months.

If he doesn't have it figured out by 6 months, he's going to lose the midterms in a big blue wave. The Democrats are a headless chicken right now, but if this continues, they'll be able to credibly come into the midterm election and say, “Look at what happens when you elect Republicans. They just do random things that screw the entire economy and send us into tailspin chaos.”

Jonah Van Bourg

Like what?

Avi Felman

Correct. Why would you vote Republican? That's a very good stump speech to give. The Democrats will win in droves, and then Trump will be a lame duck for 2 years.

Jonah Van Bourg

And, you know, your quote is, “Trump is pro-Trump,” right?

Avi Felman

If his goal is to be on Mount Rushmore, he's going to be more like Herbert Hoover. His legacy is going to be more like Herbert Hoover than Abraham Lincoln if he sends the economy into a tailspin and then gets his executive authority basically blocked by a Democratic Congress for the final 2 years of his presidency. That doesn't make any sense.

Jonah Van Bourg

So obviously, he started this whole chaotic spat of volatility with a Rose Garden speech. He could end it with a tweet, and we already saw him back down. This was my thesis, Avi. My thesis was that even Donald Trump doesn't have the balls or the mandate to send the economy into a proper depression in order to do what he wants to do. And we literally saw him flinch. He just flinched. He just tweeted the market back up.

Avi Felman

Oh, Truth did.

Jonah Van Bourg

He literally posted it back up. And he's just going to keep doing that.

Avi Felman

Here's the thing. He's just really going hard after China. And while I agree with your statement, Jonah, that he blinked when it came to the rest of the world, he blinked, but I don't know if he's going to blink with China. He really wants to stick it to them. And this guy does have a pretty big ego.

So I think it's not improbable that things crash again. You can see—I mean, let's put it like this—you can see a revisit of the lows in the market because he's decided to really stick it to China.

Jonah Van Bourg

Yeah. Because there's no more bilateral trade between China and the United States. There are 300% tariffs. I could totally agree with you, Avi. This could totally devolve into a third-grade-playground-style tit-for-tat with zero adults in the room, with Xi Jinping and Donald Trump just hiking tariffs on each other. Yes, that could happen. Yes, that would be bad for the economy.

But that can't happen simultaneously with Trump shutting off America from the rest of the world, too. So basically, what this could be is the beginning of the creation of an East-versus-West hemisphere. Countries are going to have to pick: Are you trading with China? Are you trading with the United States? Are you kind of sleeping with both women, or what do you want to do?

This could be the beginning of the big separation. I don't necessarily believe that it will send markets lower for a variety of reasons over the long run. Over the short run, we could get wild chop and some crazy, V-shaped plunges into bear-market territory that quickly reverse.

Over the medium to long run, I don't think markets go down on this. I think it's just volatility, but not necessarily bearish.

4. Gold & Bitcoin In A Multipolar World

Avi Felman

Yeah, I think so. I was reading a note put out by someone likely named Peter Zeihan, who's sometimes a bit of a quack, but I think he makes really good points here, which is that this basically goes until the rest of the world chooses whether they're going to gang up on China or not. What Trump's trying to do is force people to make that decision, and this game comes to an end when everybody makes their decision.

If it's a no-brainer decision, well, I mean, that's what I hope too as an American. It's a no-brainer decision. I think China's been abusing the world. I don't disagree with Trump that China has been taking advantage of the World Trade Organization and taking advantage of global trade for a very long time, basically playing dirty versus all other countries.

Now, what I'll say is that, from our standards, they play dirty. It's just that we choose not to play the games that they do, right? That's really it at the end of the day. It's also a system thing: it's much harder for liberal democracies to play that game.

But if we wanted to overthrow our republic and install a fascist dictatorship, we could do it. We probably don't want to do that.

Jonah Van Bourg

No, we don't. I mean, you have a good point, right? From that perspective, I do think it makes sense for the rest of the world to team up with the U.S. But I think there's also this idea that the U.S. is a dying power relative to China, and whether you want to join the rocket ship or get on the sinking ship is something that people are weighing right now.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of people do view the U.S. as the sinking ship and China as the rocket ship. I know a few people who feel that way for sure. Every single Chinese person I know feels that way.

Avi Felman

Yeah, but they read state-controlled media. I mean, even the Chinese Americans that I know, they all think that.

Jonah Van Bourg

Oh, I know a bunch. But those are the ones who fled the People's Republic of China for repressive reasons.

Avi Felman

Right.

Jonah Van Bourg

Put it this way, Avi: you're right. The United States could certainly play the same games that China plays, but we don't. I actually have experience doing business in developing countries, some of which involved the physical oil business. Some of these countries would be considered warlord-run tinpot republics.

My experience trading physical oil in those countries was, “Wow, look at what you have to do to get a barrel of oil out of the creeks in Nigeria.” You have to basically bribe every single person along the way. What a horrendous system, just enriching and lining the pockets of people who touch that oil.

But then, after a while, I thought, well, who am I, as a Western businessperson, to comment on the Nigerian style of doing business? That's just how things work in that part of the world. It's not unique to Nigeria. There are lots of parts of the world where “bribe” is a dirty word, but we could come up with a synonym for it. You could call it spreading the wealth or socializing the income of the crude oil, the physical assets.

Call it what you want. There are differing business cultures around the world. Doing business with Chinese people in China is very different from doing business with Russian people, which has its own challenges. Similarly, there are challenges dealing in Iraqi Kurdistan or Nigeria or anywhere else.

So, who are we to comment as Westerners on how China chooses to do business? However, there is a reason why certain types of capitalism enjoy Cambrian explosions of success and others just wither and die. I think it's probably easier to collaborate with actors who adhere to the letter of the contract that is signed rather than those who don't. I would put China into the category of those who don't. I would put the United States into the category of people who do.

Obviously, under Trump, U.S. trade policy is more unpredictable and volatile than it used to be, but I don't think there's IP theft going on or any of the dirty tricks that the Chinese have used. State-sponsored industries are flooding the world with goods, along with currency manipulation to basically stomp out manufacturers in other countries and centralize it all in China. I don't think any of that's going on in America. And so I think if you do basically decide to get in bed for the long run and get married with China as a trading partner, you are effectively subjecting yourself to a style of capitalism for which there's no precedent of success. Right. So to me, that's why it's an obvious, obvious decision.

You're on mute.

Avi Felman

I'm not going to disagree with that. I mean, that makes sense. That's 100% true. And I actually want to take it even a step further and say the disrespect for intellectual property is a tremendous issue in any industry that has this problem. I mean, just a tremendous issue. You can actually even see it in crypto.

I think part of the reason that people are so extractive in this industry is because it doesn't matter what you invent. Somebody else—because it's all open source—can copy it immediately. So unless you have the strongest morals and you're in the top 5% in terms of ethical fiber, your job is to invent something and then extract as much money as possible from it as quickly as possible, because in 6 months you're going to have 300 billion different copycats using your technology and trying to steal your clients. The idea of inventing something and then getting wealthy, that's what makes capitalism work.

I actually think capitalism is much harder to make work in a world where you don't have strong intellectual property laws, because then you just incentivize—again, you incentivize—well, 1, you disincentivize actual invention; 2, you incentivize waiting around for somebody to invent something and then ripping it off, having large distribution systems, and pushing it out there as fast as possible. Basically, what I think in a nutshell is that if the rest of the world is going to have a pretty easy choice, it's to choose the country with a strong legal system over the country with an arbitrary, Xi Jinping's-brain-determined set of rules.

Against that backdrop, the United States has a choice. We are the world's biggest customer, so what kind of customer do we want to be? Do we want to be the type of customer like my former customers in a region that shall go unnamed? Basically, we would buy $60 oil from them for $50 a barrel. They would give up $10 a barrel—they'd give up almost 20% of the value of every barrel just by being idiots on every single trade.

5. Ads (Kraken OTC, WalletConnect)

Or do we want to be a customer like Walmart that just haggles its suppliers down to the bone, to the point where if you sell goods via Walmart, if you put your stuff on Walmart's shelves, you're making the thinnest possible margins that you will tolerate because they have haggled you down until you're ready to walk away, right? And I think where all of this is going is the latter category, right? We keep to strong laws and we become a slightly tighter customer that gives away less edge. In the meantime, there's going to be a tremendous amount of volatility. Over the medium to long term, I think it'll probably make markets go up quite a lot.

6. Trading This Market

I think Quinn had a tweet today about how the S&P still has basically the same earnings expectations and multiple as it did at the beginning of the Trump presidency. If you think the tariffs are going to stick around for a while, you have to revise that lower. The multiples have to come in because the margins are going to shrink for these guys, because I don't think that they can pass the entire cost on. I think that some of it will come out of the margin. I mean, even if it doesn't, they're going to sell fewer goods. But I do think at least some percentage of that's going to come out of the margin, and so that's going to rerate. Maybe once that happens and the data comes in, then I can start to be ridiculously bullish, and hopefully that's in the next month or 2.

I mean, I'll just go back to the basics here. When it comes to trading a market like this and investing in a market like this, you only ever play at the extremes. Just don't touch the market when it's in the middle of a range.

Jonah Van Bourg

Touché. Yeah, that's why I don't want to sell anything. I don't want to sell any of my Hyperliquid right now. I kind of respectfully disagree with what you were suggesting earlier. I feel like we're in the middle of the new range.

Avi Felman

Yeah, I was thinking more from the buy side. From the sell side, if you're up 50% on a position in this type of range, maybe sell a little bit. If you're up 10% or 15% on Bitcoin, okay, maybe sell a little bit of what you bought. Get that cash in your account and redeploy it when something absolutely nuts happens.

Jonah Van Bourg

That's fair, because I guarantee you it will. I actually think that right now, this $84,000 on Bitcoin is a horribly unstable price. I actually think basically every price on the market right now is a horribly unstable price and that, for whatever reason, at-the-money IV is 48 on Bitcoin. That doesn't really make a ton of sense to me. Either way, that's about the same as crude oil IV.

I mean, look, let me be a little vulnerable with you, Avi. We're friends. I think I'm really good at knowing what to do in the immediate term, like just what to click on. If something's about to get absolutely bodied, I can get out of it. If something's about to rip, I usually have a sense for that. And over the long run, my macro thesis has buoyed a nice, healthy 2-decade-long career, so I'm pretty confident in myself there.

I kind of suck at the medium term. I don't really know: Bitcoin's trading at $83,000—is $78,000 next, or is $90,000 next? I'm so blind there, and that is your strength in that category. This is why I really enjoy these conversations. As much as I am long-term bullish, and that leads me to want to just try to find entry points in this market, there's tons of volatility and cause for concern.

For example, the New York Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations—the percentage of people expecting higher unemployment in a year—rocketed over the course of the last week. The New York Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations asking, “Hey, are you somewhat or much worse off in the next 12 months than you were before?” That one rocketed over the last week. People's inflation expectations are rocketing. Credit card balances are rocketing.

You read stuff on Twitter about people using buy now, pay later to buy their Coachella tickets. It's getting—there are some leading indicators that are predicting some really savage, uncomfortable near-term volatility. I personally don't know how to navigate that. I'm just kind of waiting for lower lows to try and buy more. If the market really rips, maybe I'll take some stuff off, but right now I'm kind of in my blind spot here.

Avi Felman

I respect what you’re saying. People who have your strengths, I would recommend they lean into them, but recognizing your weaknesses is an important part of trading as well.

Thank you. Thank you for your vulnerability, Jonah. It is very, very touching to tell me that you are less good at a somewhat useless skill that doesn’t matter that much. What? Range trading? Are you kidding me? I’ve made the vast majority of my money on longer-term trades.

To be completely honest, this is just one of those things where you kind of have to wait and see. I’m not calling for 90, and I’m not calling for 75. I’m just saying there will be volatility. Be ready for it, but be ready to be aggressive when the market gives you the opportunity to be. You just can’t be aggressive if you’re already fully deployed.

The other thing that you have to pay attention to is dislocations in a market like this. There was an interesting trade once M started to get liquidated over the weekend. If you understood why that was happening, you could have caught the trade. You could have shorted something that was down 50% in 15 minutes, which wasn’t so bad.

This is the type of market where dislocations like that will happen, where things that are weak will kind of blow up, because you need a bullish market to prop up a scam. A lot of things break when there’s not enough capital in the system as well. These are just things to look out for, I would say.

7. Ads (Ledger)

It’s definitely a reasonable market to trade day to day right now. My focus right now is just on accumulating those pairs, and then every now and then, if you see something, you can really attack it.

Jonah Van Bourg

So, are you looking at any indicators? I know that you’re buying call options on projects shifting their tokenomics, and you’re doing that via pairs trades against ETH, which I think is very intelligent portfolio construction.

I’ll tell you what I’m looking at as a breakout indicator for the whole market: when big capital inflows come in and support the valuable projects, the Bitcoins of the world and the scams alike. I know I’ve talked your ear off about the BTC/SPY ratio, but I think it’s smarter to look at IBIT versus SPY, the ETF, because they have the same open and close. They’re both New York-hour products.

We’re in a solid uptrend. I think if that IBIT/SPY ratio, which is currently trading at 0.09, approaches or breaks through the cycle highs, which would be 0.1, that will be a signal to the participant base that Bitcoin is decorrelating to the upside. I think that’s when capital really starts to flow into crypto and we can start to see some mania-like moves again. What do you think?

Avi Felman

Yeah. I think, as you always say, it’s good to watch the SPX/BTC ratio. Are there any others we should be looking at?

Jonah Van Bourg

The one that really baffles me right now is the Bitcoin/gold ratio. Gold has been on an absolute tear, and I think a lot of it is people searching for a new reserve currency. A lot of it is, in a multipolar world where you can’t rely on the hegemon to keep a stable currency, what do you do? You buy gold.

If you look at Bitcoin, Bitcoin has done reasonably well relative to equity markets. You see a massive equity-market collapse, and Bitcoin holds up okay. From peak to trough on NASDAQ, NASDAQ went down 25%. It’s pretty nuts, huh?

Avi Felman

Yeah.

Jonah Van Bourg

From peak to trough on BTC, we went down 30–32%. That’s a pretty damn good ratio for an asset like this. I do think a lot of that was also because a ton of people were in the market trying to buy and pushing it up to that $109,000 level because there was rampant speculation on the SBR, which turned out to be false.

I would really think about it this way: without that, how much did Bitcoin go down because equities started collapsing? That probably started at $96,000 down to $74,000, which is only 23%. If you really think about this, Bitcoin has performed extremely well.

NASDAQ is down to January 24 prices. It got to April 19, when Bitcoin was substantially lower than it was today. This is telling you that this is part of the extremely bullish long-term story for Bitcoin.

Just back to gold for a second. There’s one big actor buying a lot of gold right now: the People’s Bank of China. They publish their reserves, and they’ve been adding to their gold reserves for 5 consecutive months now. I think part of this is that they own a lot of U.S. Treasuries. As the U.S. and China go through this ugly divorce, China is selling off its U.S. Treasuries and they have to put the money somewhere, right? There aren’t a lot of alternatives right now.

So, they’re really stashing physical and financial gold on their balance sheet. That’s going to continue. China alone can push the price of gold up quite a lot.

Avi Felman

I’m not a particularly good gold trader. I did call this trend, but I’m not heavily invested in it personally because it’s not a market that I follow the way that I like to in order to invest heavily in something. But ultimately, yes, gold will continue to go up.

I think Bitcoin is ultimately a much better alternative reserve currency than gold. Gold had its heyday. Also, gold can literally trade sideways or down for decades. Maybe Bitcoin can too, but it hasn’t yet. So, I have a lot more confidence in Bitcoin catching up with gold than I do in gold.

I’ll just leave you with this and ask you to think about it. We are in the midst of a generational shift in economic policy and general approach to geopolitics. We are genuinely entering into a time of multipolarity. I think that warrants a decade-long bull run. That’s just my take.

Jonah Van Bourg

Yeah, but what does that look like? Gold might double in a decade, but Bitcoin could 10x.

Avi Felman

I’m not saying that gold is going to outperform BTC, but it has been doing extremely well relative to BTC. Why? It’s the first place that people go.

Bitcoin is going to take longer. It’s been around for 15 or 16 years now, and it’s going to take a lot longer for Bitcoin to replace something that has been traded for 5,000 years. It’s going to take a lot longer than 15 or 16 years. It might take 20.

Jonah Van Bourg

I’m kind of hoping it takes 5, but that’s good. Maybe I should go and buy a little more gold. I don’t have enough to move the needle.

Avi Felman

I still think, though—make sure some of it is physical—if gold sells off 60%, it’s going to be at around $2,000 an ounce, which 3 years ago would have been considered screamingly expensive, all-time highs in nominal terms.

If Bitcoin sells off 60%, I think that’s kind of a level where you look at it and say, “This is the best trade of a lifetime.” So, that’s kind of your downside, I think, for both assets. The upside for gold is a 2-bagger over 5 to 10 years. The upside for Bitcoin is a 5- to 10-bagger over that same time period.

To me, the risk-reward looks better in Bitcoin, but I will concede that gold has more of a track record.

Jonah Van Bourg

It’s also portfolio construction, right?

Avi Felman

Yeah, they’re decorrelated for sure. Gold is up 10%, and Bitcoin is down 25%. Wow, you can buy a lot more Bitcoin now if you rebalance your portfolio. Some of that has to be taken into account, which is what I personally did.

I regret this, but I sold gold to buy BTC because my gold position had just absolutely run up. This is one of those times, by the way, when I wish there were a better way for me to tax-loss harvest, because I sold gold for a profit and bought BTC and I’m down. I might have to get in and out of that thing to take some losses. You can move to the U.S. version because, on paper, I made money this year.

Anyway, what I was trying to say is that at some point I think that trend is going to reverse. But at least for the next 6 to 12 months, I’m very bullish on gold and gold miners as well.

Don’t forget, you can buy options if you really want to be crazy and get juiced returns on gold. The other thing is, I just think there’s also a higher probability of gold going up than Bitcoin.

Jonah Van Bourg

Gold over what time frame?

Avi Felman

In the next year or so, I think gold is probably up from this point.

I think gold is up in probably 80% of the scenarios, and Bitcoin's up in probably 60% of the scenarios.

Jonah Van Bourg

I see what you mean now, right? So that's why I like it as part of the portfolio.

Avi Felman

I agree. Touché on portfolio construction. I totally concede that. I think your expected value of percentage returns is higher for a dollar in Bitcoin than gold. But I will concede that it's going to be a much more volatile journey in Bitcoin than gold.

It makes sense to add gold to the portfolio to diversify and give your book a higher Sharpe, so that you can take bigger drawdowns in Bitcoin, which has the bigger upside potential.

Jonah Van Bourg

That's very smart, and then reallocate.

Avi Felman

Oh, can we end the podcast there, or do you want to call me smart, everybody?

Jonah Van Bourg

You are smart. We all love you, Avi. That's why we keep you on here. You know, the committee of people that is we.

Avi Felman

This is my podcast, Jonah. It's my podcast.

Jonah Van Bourg

Love you, man. This is a good one. Let's definitely wrap it there before we start saying dumb shit. I'll see you soon.

Avi Felman

See you soon. Later.

Will We Bottom Soon? | BidClub