逢跌买入还是冲高卖出?| Felix Jauvin
- 本期由 Jonah 提出、Avi 呼应的核心短期判断是:「看空情绪存在 theta 衰减。」 所有看空理由都已公开 2-3周,许多卖出者正等着回补;价格每天不跌,当前价位看起来就更划算——那个挂着7万美元限价单的人眼看 Bitcoin 从75涨到80,最终撤单直接买入。Jonah 表示“完全同意”,Avi 则每天“再加一点仓”。
- Jonah 的 Trump 路线图是:政府盯着一块“缓冲垫”——股市最多还能从当前位置下跌20%、大概率10%,才会触发恐慌、降息,随后开启 QE。 路径是:现在先加关税、放狠话;乌克兰停火打压大宗商品,通胀回落,利率下调;随后再次升级强硬姿态,最后启动财政与货币双重刺激。从这里再跌一轮后,可以放心买入风险资产。
- Felix 的反驳是:这块缓冲垫比预期更薄。 年收入超过25万美元的人群消费占比处于30年最高水平,使股市对美国经济增长的重要性达到过去30年最高;一轮下跌可能带来25%-30%的跌幅,即使政策掉头,也要数月才能消化。VIX 已持续高于20,并连续4周上升,这是除 COVID 之外约15年来首次。
- 资金分化交易正在形成:机构资金从0升至10、再到20个基点,只买 BTC。 “他们不会去买你的 shitcoins。”山寨币今年面临约320亿美元解锁,规模大致等于山寨币资本总量;Felix 认为市场已经“饱和”,Trump coin 是顶峰,“赌博时代结束了”。自大选以来下跌20%的 ETH,是“一项真正注定失败的资产”。
- 谈到欧洲轮动,Felix 看到的是一场巨大的轮动性清洗。 德国约5000亿美元财政转向,Rheinmetall 自 Trump 当选以来可能上涨+200%;一名丹麦议员警告,“一旦经历过波动,就不能再把所有鸡蛋放进同一个篮子”。Avi 则认为防务只是行业交易,“DAX、CAC、Footsie,我会买吗?绝对不会”——他判断 EU 将在10-20年内解体,而在多极世界里,Bitcoin 是“另类储备货币的黑马候选”。
- 按 Felix 的判断,真正驱动 BTC 的是中国、日本和美国。 欧洲时段流动性最低,也没有持续的方向性资金流。中国股市走强对 Bitcoin 偏空,日元走弱偏多;目前信号相互冲突,“我完全没有头绪”,但如果中国股市转跌、美国股市走稳、日元维持平盘,“我会大举做多 BTC”。
- Jonah 借 Lehman 导师的话给出的无主之地仓位法则是:「有时最好的交易就是不做交易。」 用60%-80%的组合表达中期观点,剩余部分留作现金弹药;上涨10%就减仓,下跌10%就“用双手买入”。Felix 提供了一个战术观察:Trump 在比特币相关活动上开始讲话时做空 Bitcoin,命中率一直是“100%”。
1. 机构仍然看多
- 节目在 Digital Asset Summit 现场录制。开场时,Felix 借 Blockworks 联合创始人 Mikeo(听起来是“Mikeo”)的一条爆款推文点出一个悖论:“我从未见过机构比原生玩家更看多。”他们在现场问观众,自大选后上涨以来是否卖出过核心仓位,举手的“大概有5个人”——基本等于没人卖。
- Felix 的解释是投资组合构成:现场参与者持有50%-80%的 Bitcoin,基于5年投资逻辑,仓位目前仍然盈利;Twitter 上那些陷入绝望的人,持有的却是“80%的随机山寨币,只是营销做得非常好”。ETH 自大选以来下跌20%,“那就是一项真正注定失败的资产”。
- Felix 的判断是,散户崩盘“完全是自我纠偏……一次自我清洗”,Trump coin 标志着这个叙事的顶部;银行获得合规托管加密资产的能力,则会吸引更长期的配置资金。“感觉这个行业正在长大——这可能会让很多加密 OG 有点难过,但这样也没什么不好。”
2. 山寨币市场已经饱和
- Jonah 的资金流模型认为,未来6-24个月,机构把配置从0提高到10个基点、再从10提高到20个基点时,买的是 Bitcoin,而不是“你的 shitcoins”。他举的供给侧例子很可能是 DePIN,“这是我讨厌的一个赛道”:运营商以代币获得报酬,但必须在已经耗尽的散户买盘中卖出,因此“所有这些其他代币的资金流出似乎没有尽头”。
- Felix 选出的年度关键词是“饱和”:山寨币曾经是彩票,Trump coin 的发行则是“饱和的顶峰”——所有愿意赌博的人都已经入场;与此同时,新的发行项目,包括可能随 Monad 到来的 Berachain L1 发布,仍在不断稀释资金。“在我个人看来,赌博时代结束了。”山寨币2.0的结构必须依赖可以基于5年逻辑持有的代币,因为它们“能产生大量现金,并把现金返还给持有者”。
- Avi 算了一笔账:今年约有320亿美元解锁资金进入山寨币市场,规模大致等于山寨币资本总量。即使是流动性基金,也“不想站到这列火车前面”;大多数现有山寨币都将继续出血,因为持有者试图退出。
3. Jonah 的 Trump 路线图:强硬表态、盯住缓冲垫,然后掉头
- 首要前提是:“如果你不想要关税,就不会选一个关税派。”Trump 正把税收从收入转向消费,同时把 GDP 中政府的贡献转向私营部门——这两个“改变游戏规则”的变量,市场迟早会被迫面对。在很可能成为财长的 Scott Bessent——“真正的市场天才”——影响下,政府会盯住一块缓冲垫:股市最多还能从当前位置下跌20%、大概率10%,才会触发恐慌并降息,随后 QE 跟上。
- 路径是:趁缓冲垫充足,现在先强行推进关税;乌克兰停火压低大宗商品和通胀,使利率得以下调、缓冲垫重新建立;随后对 Iran 采取“更具攻击性的姿态”,进一步加码关税、裁撤政府雇员;之后软化立场,用财政和货币政策“踩下油门”。结论是:“我认为,从这里再跌一轮后,你可以放心买入风险资产。”
- 政治上的安全垫是:“没有哪个政治人物,尤其不是 Trump,会在经济下行的授权下当选。”2025年衰退会把一个统一议题和2026年的蓝色浪潮送给民主党——而民主党目前像“一只无头苍蝇”,什么都没有。Jonah 的补充是,每位总统大约都有1年时间把问题归咎于前任,所以现在就是痛苦窗口——“Trump 总统任期才过了2个月。”
4. 缓冲垫比想象中更薄
- 2022年后的通胀让年收入超过25万美元人群的消费占比达到30年来最高,因此“股市对今天美国经济增长的重要性,实际上超过过去30年来任何时候”。如果 Trump 认为自己仍有空间,而股市继续下跌,消费也会随之崩塌;即便政策立即掉头,也需要“1-2个月,而且可能要先下跌25%-30%”才能消化。
- 波动率市场已经表现异常:VIX 高于20,并连续4周上升——除 COVID 之外,这是约15年来首次。“通常 VIX 会剧烈飙升后回落,但这一次它实际上在持续走高,有点奇怪。”
- Jonah 指着展区里的机构重新定义这件事:“熊市只有在你打算卖出时才糟糕。”如果你的目标是把配置从0个基点提高到10个基点,那么熊市反而很棒。
5. 欧洲:魔瓶已经打开,还是注定失败指数里的行业交易?
- Felix 把美国股市约10%的调整解读为“一场巨大的轮动性清洗,同时也带有明显的宏观驱动”:所有人进入2025年时都做多 Mag 7,随后德国宣布约5000亿美元财政方案——“数十年来首次释放赤字”——收益率飙升,欧元走强。一个未对冲的欧洲投资者可能下跌17%(纳斯达克下跌10%加上汇率损失7%),而 DAX 却跑赢 QQQ。资本正在回流本土。
- 他认为这一趋势还在延续,因为行情由防务股领涨:Rheinmetall 自 Trump 当选以来可能上涨约200%,BAE Systems 也“涨了很多”。一名曾推动购买 F-35 的丹麦保守派议员如今表示,这种做法“已经无法继续”,因为“一旦经历过波动,就不能再把所有鸡蛋放进同一个篮子”,即便民主党在2028年获胜、共和党在2032年重新执政也一样。“魔瓶已经打开。”
- Avi 的反驳是“毫无意义的观点”:欧洲防务确实是不错的行业交易,“但 DAX、CAC、Footsie,我会买吗?绝对不会。”过高的税负、“只想少工作”的文化,以及已经越过“事件视界”的移民政治,都意味着这个作为“和平项目”的 EU 将在10-20年内解体。把投资组合停在那里,等于“在雨滴之间跳舞”。
- 双方都接受的结论是:Trump 驱动的波动正在为美国、中国、俄罗斯和欧洲各自成圈的多极世界铺路;“唯一真正能够穿透这些半球的资产就是 Bitcoin”,它是“另类储备货币的黑马候选”。现实已经是:“任何不属于 G20 的货币,Bitcoin 都已经比持有该货币更好。没有争议。”
6. 究竟是什么决定 Bitcoin 的价格——现在“完全没有头绪”
- Jonah 提出最尖锐的问题:如果欧洲和中国启动大规模财政刺激,而美国收缩,究竟是全球流动性还是 QQQ 相关性主导 Bitcoin?Felix 先把欧洲完全排除在外:从各个交易时段看,EU 时区“几乎一贯拥有最少的流动性”,也从未显示出持续的方向性资金流。“真正的驱动因素是中国、日本和美国。”
- 关键变量是:中国股市走强对 BTC“中性偏空”,因为中国买家过去常把资金投入 Bitcoin,以跑赢停滞的本地市场;日元走强偏空,走弱偏多。眼下信号相互冲突——“我现在给你的答案是,我完全没有头绪”——但触发条件很明确:“如果中国股市开始下跌,美国股市小幅上涨,而日元保持平盘,我会大举做多 BTC。”
7. 交易手册:无主之地、theta 衰减与 Castanza 法则
- Jonah 想起自己的 Lehman 导师 Jeff Saki——这位信用交易员如今在 Citadel——曾说:“你不必总是10/10地下注。有时最好的交易就是不做交易。”他的判断是,当前处于无主之地:上涨10%就减仓,下跌10%“就该用双手买入”;因此,用60%-80%的投资组合表达中期观点,剩余部分留作现金弹药。波动率高时,“每一步行情的意义都更小”:FOMC 当天的上涨随后全部回吐就是例子。
- Felix 提到一个战术观察:Bitcoin 每次在 Trump 出席加密活动前上涨,等到他开始讲话后做空,命中率一直是“100%”。Jonah 作为2018-20年的石油交易员也见过同样的情形:OPEC 发推后,25美元油价上演10美元的撕裂式暴涨。“我从未见过哪个公众人物能像 Donald Trump 一样推动市场。”
- Avi 的核心判断得到 Jonah 呼应:“看空情绪存在 theta 衰减。”每个看空理由都已经公开2-3周,所有卖出者都在等回调;那个挂着7万美元限价单的人,眼看价格从75涨回80,最终往往会撤掉限价单直接买入。“我每天都再加一点仓。”
- 他执行这一策略的纪律叫“Castanza 法则”:“Bitcoin 上涨的日子卖出,下跌的日子买入。”这是对抗自身情绪的纯粹战争——“如果我醒来后想的是,我会不会错过这轮上涨?我就立刻卖出。”Jonah 的忏悔则相反:他把自己折腾到放弃所有短于1周的交易周期。“这不是你可以浅尝辄止的东西。”
There’s a theta decay to the bearishness here. Every reason that we’re bearish has been talked about now for at least 2–3 weeks.
Totally agree. All of it’s already out in the open. Yes, it could get worse, but basically every day that goes by without it getting worse, if there’s not a new catalyst to send us lower, it’s more likely that Bitcoin goes higher in the short term. The reason is because people have de-risked.
We’re at the Digital Asset Summit on day 3, and we had to run it up again like we did at Permissionless. We have the 1000x guys, and we’re live on the floor in the expo hall. Things are going off. It’s been a wicked few days, and it’s really great to catch up with you guys. What’s going on?
Yeah, thanks for having us here. This has been an awesome conference. I do have to say, there are so many people— a lot more optimism than I expected, given the fact that at ETHDenver it was just absolute tragedy and despair everywhere. If you go on Twitter, you think that everyone’s on the verge of suicide. It’s great. People are talking. People are doing real things. It’s been awesome here.
First of all, thank you for working with us on this podcast. You’re the hostess with the mostest. We love you. It was fun to talk to you in Utah last year. I echo what Avi said. I think it’s interesting: Mikeo, the co-founder of Blockworks, tweeted out this thing that went viral. He said, “I’ve never seen the institutions more bullish than the natives,” which is food for thought, right?
The people here are psyched about crypto, and the people on Twitter are in a state of despair because they’re either ETH maxis who have basically seen their net worth deplete over the course of what should be a bull cycle. A lot of altcoins are down 80–90% from the highs, so I think the real degens online are depressed. But these are not the degens.
At our panel on Tuesday, we did an audience Q&A where we said, “Raise your hand if you’ve sold core holdings over the course of this sell-off from the post-election pop,” and it was like 5 people in an audience. Basically nobody raised their hand. That’s when it clicked in my head what’s going on and where the optimism comes from.
Everyone here has a portfolio, and they’re allocated for the long term. Basically 80% of the people you talk to here are institutions or people who bought into Bitcoin thinking, “This is going to become a massive asset over the next 5 years.” They’re probably pretty happy because they allocated to the crypto space. Maybe they bought 50–80% of their portfolio in Bitcoin and the rest in ETH and likely Solana.
They’re still up, and they’re still pretty happy. Whereas all the people who are depressed are the ones on the cutting edge of crypto, whose portfolios probably look a lot more like 80% random altcoins that have marketed themselves very well, and then a tiny bit of Bitcoin. Obviously, they’re depressed because ETH is down 20% since the election. That is pretty nuts. That is a truly doomed asset right there.
Yeah. I think this theme is so key, and it’s interesting on so many different facets. One of the most interesting things for me is that the retail implosion we’ve seen has been entirely self-correcting. There hasn’t necessarily been a catalyst; it’s just this maturation moment.
It feels a lot like where the pump.fun thing was. Yes, there was the Trump coin that marked the top of that idea, but overall, it was just a self-cleansing moment. At the same time, you look at what’s going on on the regulatory front: finally, banks can custody crypto in a proper manner, with the “SAP” thing and all of that.
Suddenly, these asset allocators that have a much longer time horizon are getting excited about these prices and starting to come in. It feels like our industry is growing up, and that’s going to make a lot of crypto OGs a bit sad, probably. That’s okay. It feels like this continued bifurcation between the suit version of crypto and the retail, cutting-edge version, like you said.
Well, it’s the world’s smallest violin playing for the OGs who are sad. They can cry all they want in their villas in Monaco and the like. Leave some for the rest of us OGs.
To me, Avi and I like to talk a lot about whether Bitcoin is rich or cheap, and whether a certain crypto asset X is rich or cheap. Avi has a great model for basically determining where participants are going to get excited. My model is a little bit different, so I appreciate Avi’s take and overlay it with my own, which is flows-based. Where are the flows going to come from over the next 6 to—let’s call it—24 months?
If what we’re talking about here remains the case, which I think it will, institutional flows are really going into Bitcoin. People are going to say, “All right, there are trillions of dollars of wealth out there in portfolios. Maybe we start upping the basis points allocated to Bitcoin from 0 to 10 basis points and from 10 to 20.” That’s where the inflows are going to come from.
You can feel good about Bitcoin, but those people aren’t going to be buying your shitcoins. They’re not going to be buying your bags, and they’re certainly not going to be reaching into risky altcoin world if Bitcoin is a stretch for them.
Meanwhile, in risky altcoin world—likely DePIN, a sector I hate—in order to run physical hardware and share it with people, you get rewarded with shitcoins. You need to sell those shitcoins. Somebody has to buy them, and it’s not going to be retail. Retail is tapped out. They’re on Twitter talking about how suicidal they are.
The institutions aren’t going to buy those coins. It’s the same story for, name your vaporware project out there, or even some of the good projects. It’s going to be a real tough time, given that inflows into Bitcoin are going to buoy that asset. Outflows from all these other tokens seem kind of limitless at the moment without an excited retail base to absorb them. So I think the playbook has to change.
I think it totally does. I’ll just say that, even speaking to some of the liquid funds here, they’re not even interested in getting in front of that. Back in January, we saw that there were $32 billion of unlocks hitting alts this year. We have the same amount of alt capital, which is this much, and then there’s the institutional version of Bitcoin out here. That’s where all the money is going, to your point.
They don’t want to get in front of that train either. It feels like most of the alts that exist today are just going to continue bleeding as people try to get out. I’m starting to think about what the next 2.0 structure of these alts is and what that structure starts to look like, where the dynamics are a bit more positive for the space. I don’t know if I’ve figured it out. I’m curious if you guys have thought of it.
I’ve got—I just want to go back to the flows comment for a second. I think the word of the year is “saturated.” The market for alts is just saturated. Why were people buying these things? They were buying them because they would go up. It was like a lottery ticket, right?
There was this massive dream that you could buy a memecoin and it would 100x or 1,000x, and you’d put in $10 and walk away a millionaire. That extended not just to memecoins, but to a lot of altcoins in general, even L1s: “Oh my God, maybe Solana is going to take over the world and everything is going to run on likely Solana.”
Then what you get is hundreds of different types of L1s launching and hundreds of different kinds of memecoins launching. When Trump launched, that drew everyone’s eyeballs to crypto. That was, in my opinion, peak saturation. At that point, there was nobody else who was going to come in who wasn’t already convinced about crypto and gamble on this thing.
So that’s where we are now. We have the maximum number of people who are willing to gamble on an asset that doesn’t have real value in the market, but we have billions and billions and billions of dollars of not just old issuance of unlocked tokens, but new issuance of new coins.
Every month, a new coin is going to launch that claims it’s going to take over the world. A project likely called Berachain is launching its L1, and Monad is going to launch. It’s just a diffusion of capital. Bitcoin is not saturated because Bitcoin has new flows from institutions that are slowly coming in because they have a 5- to 10-year thesis on the Bitcoin market: that it’s going to grow because it’s genuinely valuable.
That’s where we’re headed. We need people to be able to look at an altcoin or a specific coin in crypto and say, “I have a 5-year thesis on this.”
1. Ads (Kraken OTC and CryptoTax)
I'm willing to allocate because I think this thing can generate a lot of cash, pass it back to its holders, and operate as a real, successful company in the context of crypto, right? The gambling era is over, in my personal opinion.
2. The Trump Impact On Markets
Let's talk macro for a few minutes here because, Jonah, I actually really love the sequence that you outlined on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. I'm thinking about it quite similarly: it feels like we have a lot of these fiscal policies that are being front-loaded in terms of the painful points, and the sequence of how that tracks into risk assets. I'd love to hear an update on how you're thinking about that sequence and where we're at in it.
Yeah, thank you. I might have to remind myself of the exact ordering of bullet points 5, 6, and 7, but I put out a really detailed road map for what I think the Trump administration is going to do. I think Trump has surrounded himself with a much better team this time than last time, and I think that they're acutely aware of what they have to do. So first, let's lay out what they have to do. Then let's lay out how they think about doing it and what that means for macro.
What do they have to do? Trump got elected on a mandate to shift taxation. He talked about tariffs a lot—you don't elect a tariff man if you don't want tariffs, right? He's got the mandate. So he's trying to shift some taxation from income to consumption. That's a big deal.
On the other side of the equation, he also got elected on this mandate to shift some GDP contribution from the government spending tons of money to maybe the government spending a little bit less and having those people produce money in the private markets—privatization. So some of the GDP contribution goes from government to private industry. Those 2 things that he got elected on are big, big game changers, right? Markets don't like game changers—uncertainty.
I'm sure they knew there was going to be a little bit of indigestion when you try to force those 2 parallel agendas through at the same time. Now, how do you get there? I think the person likely named Scott Bessent is a real markets genius. I've followed him for years, and he's got Trump's ear. I think Trump and Bessent together are aware that they have a certain amount of cushion to mess with before things really head south as they pursue these dual agendas.
They're constantly monitoring that cushion. Some of it is the stock market, and some of it is related to interest rates. Basically, I think the stock market could sell off another 20% from here—maximum, maximum probably 10%—before these guys start to panic and cushion things.
Let's remember, all of the volatility that we're seeing in macro—and Bitcoin is trading one-for-one with macro right now. BTC/SPX is stable, stable as ever, right? All the volatility we're seeing in macro has been created by talking heads. It's not like an asteroid hit a demand center. It's just Trump talking about what he's going to do, so he can walk it back, right?
I think they're watching the stock market. If we're down another 10%, they're going to start cutting interest rates, and after they cut interest rates, they can do quantitative easing. So they've got plenty of cushion. I think you should feel safe buying risk assets on another dip from here.
Finally, to wrap it up, as they watch that cushion, here's how I think it's going to play out. The first thing is that you have a lot of cushion, so you can talk tough, shove your tariffs through, shove your agenda through, and to hell with the people who are upset about a 10% pullback.
Next, I think the ceasefire in Ukraine drops. Commodities tank, inflation gets lowered, and then they can really cut rates. That stabilizes things. They suddenly have more cushion because stock markets will go back up. From there, after they cut rates, I think they can start getting a little bit more bellicose with Iran. They can start pushing through their tariff agenda more aggressively, screwing with NATO, and firing more government workers.
Then unemployment goes up, the cushion comes down, and after that, I think they can soften up a little bit and pump the gas a little bit more with fiscal and monetary policy.
When you say “push tariffs more aggressively,” how is that possible? I don't know if I agree with that one. I think they're being pretty darn aggressive with tariffs.
But he hasn't implemented a lot of tariffs yet. What I mean is that he can actually really put them through.
The one thing that I want to focus on is your use of the word “cushion.” I think that there's actually much less of a cushion than we all expect. Let me just take you back to how we ended up here.
Inflation gets out of control, and that really hits people who don't own assets the most. So you go forward 3 years from 2022, and we're now in a situation where, if you actually look at the data, the consumption from people earning more than $250,000 a year is at its highest in 30 years as a percentage of consumption in the economy.
That means that the stock market is actually more important today than it has been at any point in the last 30 years for the continued growth of the American economy. Because if the stock market crashes, a huge percentage of consumption starts to decrease because these people start to feel like they're hit. The people earning more than $250,000 a year are the ones that have the most asset exposure.
What I get a little bit nervous about is if he has this view—“I have a lot of room to maneuver on the stock market”—and it comes down, consumption crashes, and growth really slows, that's going to be a very painful few months. Even if he starts to reverse course at that moment, it still takes a month or 2 and potentially 25% to 30% down in the stock market before that washes itself out.
I know I ramble a lot, but can I just make one comment there before we pass it back to you guys? While I agree with you, I think that Trump also has good political intuition. No politician, especially not Trump, is elected with a mandate to tank the economy, cause unemployment, and cause chaos. There would be a big blue wave in 2026 if the economy and the stock market were in trouble in 2025, right?
So he has a time window to maneuver, and that time is now. Then he's got to really U-turn out of it. I think you will see even Donald Trump panic.
I agree with you on the time because I think every president has some amount of time where they can blame the current issues on the predecessor. I forget who was saying this or who we were discussing it with, but every president has some amount of time where they can blame the current issues on the predecessor.
I think that's probably the first year of the presidency. So he has a year to get through this and get to the other side, then 3 years and another year prior to the midterms to show immense growth and actually show that we're in a better spot because of what's happened, and that he fixed his predecessor's mistakes.
So I do think we're only 2 months into the Trump presidency. We can't sit here and say, “Okay, we're done now,” because Trump is governing in a very unpredictable manner—predictable in his mind, but unpredictable from the minds of investors.
You see that with the VIX trading above 20 consistently. For the first time in about 15 years—except for COVID—we had the VIX go up for 4 weeks straight. Normally, what happens is the VIX spikes really hard. It's a reverting asset, and it's actually been trending, which is kind of weird, right?
This is a dream setup for these institutional Bitcoin investors behind us, though, because they're going to get the dips that they want to buy. Bear markets are only bad if you're planning on selling. If you're looking to go from 0 basis points to 10, bear markets are awesome.
It also sucks when you have a large expense coming up, but, you know—
Yeah. I will add a couple of points to that framework that you articulated, which is like a wedding—maybe like the wedding I'm planning right now.
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I'm like, oh my God, please go a lot.
4. Why Have Markets Sold Off?
I agree with a lot of the points that you mentioned. First off, I don't think we're going into a recession. It's this interesting dynamic, like you say: a lot of this uncertainty and volatility is people talking. It's likely Howard Lutnick and likely Scott Bessent going on the news every day and saying different things, which is also difficult because now it's hard for us to piece apart what the actual true goal is here. But the economic data is weakening, and it's still nothing recessionary.
When I think about equities for a second, we're down 10% or so so far. We're into a correction, and I think a lot of that has been driven by positioning. Everybody was long Mag 7 going into 2025; that was the place to be. Positioning got super, super stretched in terms of valuations, and then you just have a little prick of a catalyst. I think a lot of it is a rotational wave that also looks macro-driven.
Interesting. So, okay, rotation from Mag 7 to what?
Just stocks to everything ex-U.S., back home. Capital is going back to Europe. It's going back to China. I think a lot of it's being pulled out, because think about this: I've been saying it a few times lately, but I don't think it was fully anticipated what was going on in terms of Germany announcing a $500 billion fiscal investment. They're unleashing deficits for the first time in decades and spending more on their own defense.
Yeah.
Boom, yields started soaring, and as that occurs, the euro goes higher. You have that at the same time that all these European asset allocators are long Mag 7. If they're long Mag 7 and they're not currency-hedged, they're down 10% on the Nasdaq, and then they're down another 7% on the currency. So you're down 17%. If you're getting the tap on your shoulder and it's, “Why the hell are we doing this when the DAX is outperforming the Qs this year?” I think a lot of that capital is selling Mag 7 and going back home. I think it's a huge rotation, with some macro headwinds as well.
And one thing that worries me about that—actually, I listened to a Forward Guidance episode, either 2 or 3 episodes ago, that was really good, where you guys talked about the trade going from the U.S. stock market to the European stock market. Is this sustainable? Is this what's going to continue to happen in the future, or is the trade played out and it's going to mean-revert and we're coming back?
If you look, a lot of the move has actually been driven by European defense stocks. If you look at likely Rheinmetall out of Germany, it's up 200% since Trump got elected. You look at BAE Systems, which is headquartered in London, and it's up a ton. My question heading into the last month was, is this going to continue or not?
That's my question as well.
So I kept trying to find statements from German politicians or other politicians that would give me some indication of whether it was happening. I came across one guy. He's a conservative MP in Denmark, and he came out on Twitter and said, “I was instrumental in pushing through the F-35 purchases from the United States. This can no longer continue. We have to start reinvesting in our own domestic production.”
Somebody follows up and says, “What if Trump decides to start playing nice? You can't massively shift production, then have Trump start to be nice, and then you guys are allies again and you've wasted all this money.” His response was, “It doesn't matter, because once you experience volatility for the first time, you can't put all of your eggs in that basket again. You can't say, ‘Okay, he was crazy for 3 months, but now he's pivoted and he's going to be my friend again.’ You have no idea.”
5. The Bull Case For Bitcoin
Even if the Democrats get a president elected in 2028, and then in 2032 it goes back to the Republicans, I think the politicians in Europe and around the world are now coming to the conclusion that we can't put all of our eggs in a volatile political system. If anything, we're seeing the volatility of our political system go up over the last 15 years, not down. That's a megatrend. The genie's out of the bottle.
So I'm a little bit more nervous about that. I have a more nothing-burger take on this. Having lived in the U.K. for 10 years of my life, which I guess is on the continent of Europe, and watching the U.K. divorce itself from Europe, I have a very bearish view on Europe and on the U.K.
I think that, yes, there will be more domestic defense spending, and so the European defense industry is probably a good sector play. But would I buy the DAX, the CAC, or the Footsie? Hell no. I think Europe has a massive problem. One is overtaxation and general socialist vibes over there. That's more of the culture, especially in southern Europe, where people just work less. It's a fact. It's a good climate, whatever.
The other thing is that I think the European Union is going to break up in 10 to 20 years. In the short term, maybe you could still get a pop in European indices, but the long-term impact is already showing up. You're seeing far-right politicians getting elected all over the place because of the intractable problem of borderlessness in the EU. Immigration isn't working for their culture. Basically, they've passed the event horizon of what that does to societies.
I think this massive long-term headwind is created when you know that the European Union, as a union, is a peace project. It's going to go. It might not happen this cycle or the next, but how can you feel good about stashing your portfolio in those entire markets when that might be coming? You feel like you're dancing between the raindrops.
The one thing, just to finish the point, is that I agree with Avi: all of this Trump-based volatility is creating what the other long-term table that's getting set here is—a multipolar world. People aren't just going to hope that the United States pivots back to being nice. We're heading toward a world where there are going to be European countries, a China sphere of influence, a United States sphere of influence, and a Russia sphere of influence. The only asset that can really perforate those hemispheres, especially as they start to become more combative with each other, is Bitcoin.
From a long-term perspective, you can feel good about Bitcoin becoming a dark-horse candidate for an alternative reserve currency. As the EU breaks up and currencies get messed with, I think Bitcoin is going to become a better store of value than even some of the G20 currencies. Any currency that's not in the G20, Bitcoin is already better than holding that currency. There's no debate.
6. Global Liquidity
Just to finish out the thought here, going back to the U.S., I really do think that Trump isn't stupid. The Democrats have nothing right now. They're a headless chicken running around. Trump could just hand them a really unifying issue if he tanks the economy and sends it into a recession. I don't think he's stupid enough to do that.
Yeah, totally. I agree with so many of those points, and I think the key tension here is whether this is a mean-reversion trade in Europe or a continuation. I'm somewhere in between, but I do think that, short term, you're right: there's a lot of exuberance. There's been this rotational flow.
Tying it back to Bitcoin, like you mentioned, I want to ask you guys as traders. Here's what I'm thinking about: Bitcoin's trading one-to-one with U.S. risk assets for the most part, and that's been tried and true for a long time now. But it's also a global asset, and it's driven by liquidity.
7. BTC vs Alt Inflows
Let's assume Europe does this fiscal stimulus, and aside from that, you've got Japan—or, sorry, China—going pretty big too. If you have these huge fiscal impulses coming from other countries at the same time that the U.S. is trying to do the opposite right now, and then that gets reflected in Nasdaq correlations, you're finding this lever between global liquidity from the rest of the world versus QQQ correlation.
Which one wins out in terms of setting the price action for Bitcoin?
It's a really good and difficult question to answer. There are a few parts here. The biggest drivers of Bitcoin's price, in my opinion, are China, Japan, and the US. Europe is kind of a non-player, not really a big player in terms of direct directional flow.
If you look at time zones, this is a trade that I've put on basically every few months when there's a huge discrepancy in time zones since 2019. You look at the EU time zone, the US time zone, and then the APAC time zone. Almost categorically, the EU time zone has the least amount of liquidity and the least amount of consistent direction in terms of flows.
You don't see, for example, every US session going up, followed by a sell-off in the EU session and another sell-off in the APAC session. You don't really see that in the EU session very often. There's never consistent flow, so I'm not so worried about what happens there.
Let me talk about China and Japan. From that perspective, the Chinese stock market is doing very well right now, and that's actually bearish for Bitcoin because a lot of the people who buy and allocate to Bitcoin do it in hopes that they're going to outperform their own stock market. For a long time, the Chinese stock market was stagnant, so a lot of Chinese individuals were pushing money into BTC in the hopes of outperforming a strong Chinese market. I think a strong Chinese market is neutral to bad for BTC.
Then, if you look at the Japanese stock market, you have to look at the yen. If the yen is getting stronger, that's bad for BTC; if it's getting weaker, that's good for BTC. Those are the levers that I would look at to figure out what actually matters.
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My answer to you right now is that I have absolutely no clue exactly what is happening, because it's not clear. The yen was getting a bit weaker, the Chinese stock market is strong, and the US stock market is weak, and that may shift. But that's what I'm looking at. If, in a week, the Chinese stock market starts going down, the US stock market goes up a little bit, and the yen is flat, I'm getting balls-long BTC.
You have 3 guys here who live and breathe markets. It's all we mostly think about, and none of us really knows which one is going to win out from that. What do you do here? Do you just derisk and wait it out?
Here's what I think. When I was basically a young trader at Lehman Brothers, I worked for a real superstar, a mentor of mine who I still respect to this day. His name is Jeff Saki. He's a big credit trader who works at Citadel now. He gave me one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten as a trader when I was just starting out, and I was very fortunate to have that mentor.
He said, “Jonah, you don't always have to be 10 out of 10. Sometimes the right trade is just to do nothing,” because sometimes there's no trade. Obviously, in some markets there's a trade, but we're focused on a couple of things here.
Within our little slice of macro indices and Bitcoin, which is what this conversation has been focused on, we're in no man's land. At 10% higher, you're probably supposed to lighten up. At 10% lower, you're supposed to be buying with both hands. Right now, whatever your core medium- to long-term views are, you should have those expressed with 60% to 80% of your portfolio, and the rest should be dry powder, I think.
What are you guys doing?
When vol is high, every move means less, right? A 5% move in Bitcoin when vol is low means a lot more than a 5% move in Bitcoin when vol is high. Right now, it's very hard to read into the minutiae of direction here.
Just look at yesterday at the FOMC. We surged pretty high and have given it all back. It's just high variance—super-high variance. A portion of that was the FOMC, and a portion of that was front-running the Trump video here at DAS. It's incredible how much of that moves markets.
Yeah. Every time Trump has some event that's related to Bitcoin, Bitcoin will go up in the face of it, and it's been a 100% hit rate to short. The minute after he starts speaking, it's like—
It's not just Bitcoin, dude. It's every market. I remember being an oil trader from 2018 to 2020, when Trump was tweeting about oil all the time. There were face-ripping rallies—a $10 rally when oil was $25 a barrel, from $25 to $35, because Trump tweeted something about OPEC.
I have never seen a public figure move markets like Donald Trump. This is why my underlying thesis, and I'm just going to repeat it again, is: No, he is not going to hand the Democrats a golden-goose issue of, “Look at Donald Trump and the Republicans causing the stupid recession again. It happened last time. Told you so.”
He's not that dumb. He's not going to do it. So if we dip, you can bet your boots that he's going to U-turn it.
Here's what I'll say about how I'm approaching this: There's a theta decay to the bearishness here. Every reason that we're bearish has been talked about now for at least 2 to 3 weeks. It's all already out in the open.
Yes, it could get worse, but basically every day that goes by without it getting worse—without a new catalyst to send us lower—makes it more likely that Bitcoin goes higher in the short term. The reason is that people have derisked. Nobody here is sitting around going, “I've sold my Bitcoin, and I'm not going to look at it.” They're going, “I've sold my Bitcoin, and I'm going to wait for the dip to buy back in.”
Every day that you don't get the dip, the current price of Bitcoin looks more attractive to you. You might have a limit set at 70K, but what if it trades to 75K and then goes back to 80K? What happens to that limit? Historically, what happens is that the guy pulls his limit and starts buying BTC because it didn't get there, time has passed, and he didn't get the dip he was hoping for.
Basically, every day I'm chipping in a little bit more. What I do is—I call this the Castanza rule—on days when Bitcoin is up, you sell it; on days when Bitcoin is down, you buy it.
You just do the opposite of the obvious. You're the only surviving successful range trader in crypto—the only guy mean-reversion trading. It's so uncommon.
You just have to battle your own emotions. It's so funny how that works. If I wake up and see that Bitcoin is up and think to myself, “Fuck, am I going to miss the rally? Is this over for me? Do I have to buy back in?” I immediately sell.
It's actually insane how well that mentality works.
Yeah, I'm so bad at that that I do the opposite. I've chopped myself up enough in my career that I just stopped trading short-term. Avi trades short-term like a pro; I just stopped.
I will not trade with a time horizon of less than a week unless I have information that I strongly think will impact markets, or I have a bot with a signal that's short-term trading on my behalf. I just threw in the towel on that because you can't just do it sometimes.
For anybody listening who wants to dabble in short-term Bitcoin trading, it's not something you can dabble in. You have to be like Avi—you're at your screen.
Let me just preface this by saying I'm not always right. I do get chopped up.
I told you, you have to always be right if you say directional calls, though.
Yeah, that's true. According to CT, if you ever say anything wrong, your reputation should be ruined forever. You should actually be thrown in jail. I think being wrong is a jailable offense in Trump's America.
If you're a builder, if you love the tech, you have to come to that. And then we're doing the Digital Asset Summit again in London this fall, so don't miss that as well. It was a ton of fun. It was good to catch up with you guys. Good to see you. That was always great. That was fun. Thank you, Felix. Really appreciate it.
Thank you so much. I always learn from these conversations. Appreciate you having us.