市场狂飙、比特币创历史新高，以及该怎么交易？
- 核心判断是：尊重突破。 比特币用1周收复了2个月的去风险跌幅（8月中旬124K高点回落至108K），Avi认为，快速修复会迫使近期减仓者重新入场——“这说明行情可能会强劲上行”。这与两位嘉宾此前在3,700–3,800讨论ETH时的走势如出一辙，ETH随后涨至5,000，也为比特币“15万至16万美元”行情搭好了台阶。
- Jonah用黄金计价的BTC做了去美元贬值检验。 自2023年1月的范式转变以来（FTX之后的比特币、俄乌冲突后作为去美元化对冲工具的黄金），这一比率位于趋势通道低位附近的32。若均值回归至通道中部约40、黄金价格持平，年底比特币可到约15.6万美元；若黄金继续上涨，“我们看到的可能是16万、17万美元以上”。
- 这轮上涨更健康，因为推动者是同类投机者，而不是DAT公司。 MicroStrategy只买了约200 BTC（“MicroStrategy从沙发垫后面都能找出200 BTC”），所以“是你的同类投机者在推动市场”。佐证是：Robinhood 1个月上涨30%，而比特币横盘，这“不合常理”——背后是同一批投机买家；此外，黄金2个月上涨20%，NASDAQ年初至今上涨18%。
- 山寨季开始闪烁。 Zcash 1周翻倍；Avi认为上涨后的解释都是自我安慰，Jonah则认为这些叙事本身没错（叙事“总是在上涨之后出现”，可能只是一次大额私人转账），但真正重要的是市场情绪——“感觉山寨季来了，老兄”。Avi的交易框架是寻找卖压已被出清的受限供给资产——BNB“沿着抛物线漂移”、Mantle（亚洲版BNB）、Aster回到2美元——明确回避VC币：“像ENA这类资产大概率不会猛烈上涨”。Avi引用Paul Tudor Jones的话：“这种市场最终会以泡沫式冲顶结束。”
- Galaxy是Jonah眼中的压缩估值交易。 Galaxy市值148.5亿美元，而Coinbase为986.5亿美元；1个月上涨74%，“如果它变成一只梗股，或许还能涨6倍”，数据中心业务则是额外催化剂，而且该股上涨日的涨幅超过BTC，下跌日的跌幅却小于BTC。Galaxy One是由BlockFi创始人Zach Prince运营的新一体化股票加密经纪商（“BlockFi创始人的救赎之路”），也是核心催化剂；唯一需要停下来想想的是，它基于11亿美元贷款账本向现金提供8%收益。
- 可交易的表达方式是买入比特币看涨期权。 因为“大幅波动之后，看涨期权最容易被错价”——突破行情中波动率不会同步重估，所以如果你认为BTC 1个月内涨到15万的概率有80%，那么“gamma被严重低估”。12月26日15万看涨期权的价格约为2900美元、隐含波动率约40%；如果BTC年底结算在18万，该期权将上涨10倍。Jonah提出1x2结构（以350美元卖出200K看涨期权），Avi拒绝道：“按市值计价时，你会被撕得体无完肤。”最终两人倾向于直接买入看涨期权，或做1x1价差，标的优先考虑IBIT而非可能的Deribit。
- 仓位管理遵循凯利风格：对2倍收益有60–70%把握，至少配置组合的5%；把握达到75%，配置10%；即使10倍收益的把握只有50%，也配置5%。 Avi对Robinhood的5年10倍判断有50–60%的信心，因此仓位也是5%。资产规模低于约10万美元时，应该集中持仓，而不是分散投资——Jonah在FTX之后曾将100%资金投入比特币；Jonah的推论是，最好的分散方式是拥有非加密收入，因为“你能做的最糟糕的事……就是被迫卖出流动性差的资产”，自己的职业也一样。
快速修复为15万至16万美元行情铺路
- Avi拆解这轮走势：比特币从8月中旬124K的历史高点回落，连续下跌2周后反弹，再次回撤；在114K时，两位嘉宾都曾战术性地看105K。实际最低到了108K，而真正的信号在于速度：9月25日周四单日下跌4%，“一根K线就修复了”。他的经验法则是，重度去风险叠加快速买回下跌行情，会迫使近期卖家迅速回补仓位（“等等，我真的做错了吗？”）——“这正是暴力拉升行情的起点。”
- Jonah坦言自己也感到意外，但保留了必要的限定：“125,000，也就是在1周内基本回到历史高点，我的宾果卡上可没有这一格。”他的判断是，这次抛售“只是一些清算、一次小幅冲刷”；仓位出清后，市场会稳定下来，暂时没有动作，“然后继续往上推，因为大趋势仍然存在”。FTX之后就是典型案例。
- 拉长周期看，8月至9月持续2个月的去风险，在周线图上用1周完成修复。Avi判断：“这为15万至16万美元的行情搭好了台阶。”模板就是他们此前交易ETH的方式：在3,700突破时买入，因为“这个市场尊重突破”，随后从3,800一路涨到接近5,000。“我们已经重新冲上来了。老兄，尊重突破。”
黄金均值回归指向15.6万美元
- Jonah的框架是：做多比特币时，“你并不能100%确定，价格上涨有多少只是美元贬值……又有多少来自真实的加密采用”。2021年初的行情主要是“Joe Biden和他的团队印了数万亿美元”，是美元下跌，而不是比特币上涨。BTC/黄金比率可以剥离噪音，观察比特币作为数字黄金的真实表现。
- 他把2023年1月视为范式转折点：比特币经历FTX、Terra Luna和2021年的泡沫后，进入“稳定采用、缓步上行阶段”；黄金则在俄乌冲突后从避险资产转为去美元化对冲工具——“美国拿走了俄罗斯的美元”，因此任何考虑对抗华盛顿的人都会配置黄金进行分散。
- 计算很直接：这一比率目前约为32，接近2023年以来趋势通道的低位；通道中部约为40。“40除以32，再乘以每枚125,000美元，这会把我带到每枚约15.6万美元”，前提是黄金不动（“这是个相当大的前提——看起来它还会继续上涨”）。如果黄金再走出一轮上涨，“年底我们看到的可能是16万、17万美元以上”。
- Jonah补充了资金流因素：黄金2个月上涨20%，意味着市场可能正在再平衡——他自己的白银仓位上涨40%，“显然我会把它再平衡到比特币里”。黄金的体量是比特币的10倍；“如果黄金2个月能涨20%，那就看看比特币能做什么。”
同类投机者推动上涨
- 在Jonah看来，这轮上涨更健康的地方在于，驱动者不是资产负债表买币的公司。“MicroStrategy买了多少来着，200 BTC？”Jonah说：“MicroStrategy从沙发垫后面都能找出200 BTC。”Avi则表示：“是你的同类投机者在推动市场……和同类投机者一起交易，显然比和MicroStrategy一起交易舒服得多。”
- 跨资产表现也支持这一判断：Robinhood在比特币横盘时1个月上涨30%，“这说不通”——背后是同一批投机买家，而Robinhood的收入又高度依赖加密交易。“Robinhood上涨30%，而加密资产下跌，这是不合常理的。”再加上NASDAQ年初至今上涨18%、Tesla和Robinhood持续飙升，以及ETF资金流入尚可，“仍有大量投机资金愿意押注加密行业的未来”。
Zcash发出山寨季信号
- Jonah谈到这波行情时说：“老兄，Zcash 1周翻倍。”Avi认为市场给出的理由“全都是自我安慰”；它上涨，是因为几位买家碰上了一个“交易并不活跃”、已经“洗掉所有卖家”的资产。他也保留了一个限定：Zcash历史上往往在周期接近尾声时猛烈上涨，“可能是顶部指标之一，只是没有足够的回测数据可以信任”。
- Jonah认为那些叙事本身并非错误：Zcash是最好的隐私币，背后有“真正突破性的技术”，而比特币“在任何意义上都完全不具备隐私性”。但这次上涨很可能只是“有人把一大笔钱转进Zcash，再转移到某个可疑的地方”，事前无法拥有这一信息；因此，“大家完全可以为错过Zcash而感到释然”。但无论Avi如何评价背后的叙事，信号依然存在：“感觉山寨季来了，老兄。”
- Avi对市场情绪的判断是：这“可能只是疯狂的开始”。按照Paul Tudor Jones的说法，“这种市场最终会以泡沫式冲顶结束”。他不知道具体何时、以何种方式、在哪里发生，但相信这一幕会出现。
- 可执行的筛选标准是受限供给：那些存在时间足够长、市场上已经没有卖家的资产——BNB“沿着抛物线漂移”、Mantle（亚洲版BNB）、Aster回到2美元。相反，“我不会在这里买VC币……像ENA这类资产大概率不会猛烈上涨”。
比特币的机会成本占主导
- Jonah坦率承认自己在山寨币上“很挣扎……不想假装自己什么都看得准”。排名前10,000的山寨币里，“感觉有9,000个什么都没做”；等某个币在叙事形成后才追进去，意味着“你已经落后于曲线”。他的问题是：“现在还有什么交易比用3倍杠杆持有比特币更好？”他仍在考虑加仓Aerodrome，可能也会“买一些正在拉升的币”。
- Avi的反驳则调用了播客标题：BTC涨到15万、再加3倍杠杆，就是60%的收益——“如果Zcash 1周能涨100%，这还有意思吗？Jonah，这是一个叫1000x的播客。”Jonah的折中方案是，用一小部分仓位参与山寨币，“保持对市场脉搏的感知”，但将加密组合的90%放在比特币上。一个更长期的高确信度标的是暴跌后的XPL/Plasma，它“可能接管全球金融生态中相当大的一部分……中长期可能成为10倍股”，但前提是能承受极端波动。
Galaxy是压缩估值交易
- 催化剂是Galaxy One——“第一家真正实现全面整合的经纪商”，同时覆盖股票和加密资产；相比之下，Robinhood的加密交易费相对Coinbase“多数时候超过1%”。但这里有个变数：公司由Zach Prince运营，他因创建BlockFi、再利用GBTC交易杠杆将其搞垮而闻名——这是“BlockFi创始人的救赎之路”，“他这次大概已经学会了如何避免重蹈覆辙”。唯一让人停顿的是，Galaxy基于11亿美元贷款账本向现金提供8%收益——“听起来不错……不行”。Avi则反驳称，他们有“优秀的风控团队，是真正的成年人”，不像2022年那些四处挥舞风险的年轻人。
- Jonah的估值框架是：“Galaxy只是向Coinbase或Robinhood市值靠拢的压缩交易。”Galaxy市值148.5亿美元，Coinbase为986.5亿美元；“如果它变成一只梗股，或许还能从这里涨6倍”。此外，考虑到AI估值倍数，也不要忽视其数据中心业务。该股较9月初低点已经翻倍，1个月上涨74%；上涨日的涨幅超过BTC，下跌日的跌幅小于BTC，Avi仍不认为交易拥挤。Jonah对节目的投资逻辑是：“我们就是不断从一只2倍股跳到下一只2倍股。”
仓位决定组合结果
- Avi用最直白的方式解释凯利：对2倍收益有60–70%的把握，至少配置“组合的5%”；把握达到75%，配置10%；对10倍收益只有50%的把握，也配置5%（“信心更低，但收益目标更高”）。Robinhood占他组合的5%，对应的是一个有50–60%把握、期限5年的10倍判断。“如果我只投1%，即使它涨2倍，也没什么意义。仓位决定一切。”
- Jonah强调下行纪律：如果你10%的主动交易仓位在6个月内归零，“这可能说明你确实不太行，应该停下来重新评估”；如果继续让亏损从10%扩大到20%、40%，那就是在情绪失控下交易。
- Jonah的集中投资原则，同时明确了自身情况的变化：FTX之后，“我把手上的每一美元都投进了比特币”。资产规模低于约10万美元时，“你需要靠集中持仓创造财富”，并承受回撤；分散投资适用于100万至200万美元以上的组合。其对数财富逻辑是：从1万美元增长到100万美元时，每增加一美元的边际价值都非常大，而从1000万美元增长到5000万美元，“并不会真正改变你的生活”。他现在更谨慎，只是因为自己靠交易收入生活、没有固定工作；在对冲基金工作时，他是100%全仓。
- Jonah给出了结构化版本：FTX之后他没有立即全仓，是因为当时工作中已经“极度做多”——他的公司在提现暂停前几小时就把资产从FTX撤了出来，之后“我们有点像那场大风暴后的Bubba Gump Shrimp Company”。离职后，他反推出税后等值金额，再把更多资金投入个人账户。原则是：“最好的分散方式，是拥有非加密收入，再把收入投入加密资产”，因为“在任何商业互动中，最糟糕的事就是被迫卖出或被迫买入流动性差的资产”——而你的职业本身就是一种流动性极差的资产。
比特币看涨期权提供廉价杠杆
- Jonah解释其机制：比特币“具有很强的反身性”，而突破之后，“看涨期权在大幅波动刚发生后最容易被错价”。隐含波动率不会立即跳升10–30个百分点，因为突破行情并不一定剧烈；按60的隐含波动率计算，市场定价的是约3%的日波动，看起来高于实际1.5%的日波动，但如果每天都是沿同一方向波动1.5%，gamma就会产生收益。若你认为比特币1个月内涨到15万的概率为80%，那么“波动率被严重错价”——你获得的是非常便宜的杠杆。经验法则是：“如果预期市场会快速波动，就买期权。”而Jonah预期这次会很快。
- 直播中的实时报价是：12月26日15万看涨期权报价约2000美元，主动买入需要约2900美元；附近报价显示隐含波动率约40%，而20万看涨期权的隐含波动率为50%，价格为350美元。Jonah平时“不喜欢鼓励别人交易期权”，但这次提出1x2结构：买入15万看涨期权、卖出2张20万看涨期权。Avi拒绝了：“如果比特币冲到17.5万，那张20万看涨期权会涨到5000左右，按市值计价时你会被撕得体无完肤。”Jonah说：“我真的不认为今年会超过20万。”Avi回答：“我也不认为，但你得承受极端的盯市损益。”最终两人选择1x1看涨期权价差，或直接买入看涨期权。
- 收益情景很简单：“如果你现在买入15万看涨期权，而比特币结算在18万，你的资金就涨了10倍。”如果黄金再涨10%，而比特币只是均值回归至通道中部，那么根据黄金图表，18万并非没有可能。交易场所大概率选择IBIT，而不是可能的Deribit。节目的收尾情绪是：“所有这些都在把加密市场推向月球男孩模式。”原本没有预期到这一幕，但既然行情来了，就按这个剧本交易。
We had the de-risking for 2 months. We've shot back up. Respect the breakout, man.
I think that's what it is: you just have to respect it.
Have some respect.
And the rest of the market looks so good.
All of this is pointing toward—
Moonboy mode in crypto, which has that tingly feeling. I wasn't expecting it, but now let's play for it.
What's going on, Jonah? Hope you had a good week.
Yeah, same to you.
I hope you repented for all of your sins, of which there are many.
I did. I repented.
One thing you realize when repenting is that you're piling up sins even when you don't realize it.
I know, right?
Intentional ones, unintentional ones. That's what we do: every year, we go in and repent for our sins to hopefully have a good year. And, man, is this year off to a good start.
Welcome to October, Avi.
Welcome to October. The whole "sell on Rosh Hashanah, buy on Yom Kippur" trade worked ridiculously well once again. We're at all-time highs for Bitcoin, things are ripping left and right, and the market's just looking good. Even when you hear all this gloom and doom out there—people asking, "What if data comes in bad? What if the Fed doesn't cut rates fast enough? Does the government shutdown matter?"—the market's looking good, man. The market's looking good.
I'm loving it. I wasn't expecting it. That's the thing. I was medium- to long-term bullish, but I didn't have a good feel for what was going to happen in the short term. We talked about it, right? You buy with both hands if it goes below $100,000, but why would it do that? Where is it going to go—$105,000, $102,000? Does it stabilize there for a couple of months?
$125,000—basically all-time highs within a week of local lows—was not on my bingo card. I think what's driving this, if I really try to pick it apart, is that the sell-off was exactly what it looked like: just a little liquidation, a little flush. When positioning gets clean, like it did after FTX—that's the canonical example—things stabilize for a bit and do nothing, and then they just keep pumping again because the mega-trend is alive.
The world is moving toward crypto for all sorts of reasons. I think there was just nothing that bad happening that could have kept crypto down, and the rally picked up faster than you or I would have imagined with a pretty clean positioning base. I think what's so cool about this is that we get to say, "October shit's real."
Yeah, I mean, it's looking really fantastic because of all that de-risking you were talking about. We'll just start with Bitcoin. I want to point something out: if you guys are watching and you're able to go to the chart, basically, we sold off from the last time that we punched all-time highs at $124,000 in mid-August. We had 2 weeks of selling off, then a little bounce, and then we retraced that bounce. I think that's when people started to get really nervous, including me and Jonah.
1. Respect the Breakout
When we were trading at $114,000, we were thinking, "Okay, look, just tactically, maybe we get down to $105,000." We got down to $108,000 from there. There was a small move, and this is key when it comes to trading BTC: whenever you get a substantial amount of de-risking and you get people calling for sideways or a down move, or for the market not to do well, and then Bitcoin rebounds a down move very quickly, that's a pretty good sign that you're going to rocket up.
A lot of those people that just de-risked—if you de-risked recently, you're a lot more likely to buy back in quickly because you're thinking, "Oh, shit. Did I really make a mistake?" You had that one day, Thursday, September 25, where you got that 4% move down in 1 day, which is a reasonable move for BTC, and then you basically recover it in 1 candle.
When that happens, I think—I mean, this is what we were talking about last week—that move happened very quickly. Maybe it's time to get back in. I think that's what forced a lot of people back into the market, and that is what sets up for all-time highs. That's what sets up for a really face-ripping rally: when you get this period of consolidation, but then you resolve upward.
If you go back to the weekly time frame and look at it, it's kind of the same pattern that occurred on the daily time frame over the last month. You had effectively a 2-month period of de-risking from the beginning of August up until the end of September, and then in 1 week you recovered all of that de-risking. That sets up for $150,000 to $160,000.
It reminds me a lot of the ETH rally. If you remember, ETH had shot up a decent amount. It went to $3,700, and then we were both like, "Okay, we're tapping on $3,700 again. Now is a good time to go buy it on the breakout because this market is respecting breakouts." Then it went from $3,800 all the way up to basically $5,000.
That's a good trade. That's the way that I view this Bitcoin chart right now: we had the de-risking for 2 months, we've shot back up, and it's time to respect the breakout, man.
Have some respect.
And the rest of the market looks so good. Gold has been an absolute ripper over the last 2 months, up 20%. As you know, a lot of people compare Bitcoin to gold, and the more gold goes up, the more ceiling there is for BTC to go up. It looks better on a relative basis.
I have a lot of thoughts on that, by the way.
And we should get into it. But basically, I don't see a threat to the market right now. I was in the camp of maybe we don't do it immediately, so it happened a lot faster than we were originally talking about on last week's stream. We were both very bullish, but maybe it takes a week, or maybe 2 weeks, 3 weeks, whatever, to work through the supply.
Just sit there and be patient.
That's always my favorite thing: when I get into a trade and I'm like, "Okay, got to wait this out. Got to sit here and be patient," and then you don't have to be patient at all.
Yeah. I mean, this is amazing. This is like break out the champagne amazing. I was not expecting this, but I'm positioned for it. Like you said, just like, "Oh, wow. Thank you."
And by the way, look at that BNB chart. It's drifting on a parabola.
Great, straight parabola.
Looks like the Asians are awake. Aster is back at $2.
Mantle is doing very well. It's the Biden equivalent of BNB. As you know, we put on that BNB trade a while back. I think you can probably just sit in it for an extended period of time. I'm sitting on my hands. My portfolio has not changed a huge amount over the last month or so, I'd say.
2. Bitcoin vs Gold
That's good. Yeah, let's talk about Bitcoin and gold for a second. I'm going to share my screen here and show some TradingView fun. This is BTC versus gold, a very important chart right now. I'm going to extend it back to, let's say, 2020.
The reason why this is an important chart is because when you're long Bitcoin, you're not really 100% sure how much of your price appreciation is just dollar debasement and de-dollarization versus how much is actual crypto adoption. It's an important distinction because we can sit here and pat ourselves on the back, feeling smart about crypto taking over the world, when realistically, maybe if you look back in 2020, like early 2021, crypto wasn't taking anything over.
It was just Joe Biden and company printing trillions of dollars, and Bitcoin kind of protecting you. But it was really the dollar going down, not Bitcoin going up. Maybe Bitcoin was going up on some hype too, with some momentum and some FOMO.
But if you take out the hype and the FOMO, and you're denominating Bitcoin in gold, you get a much clearer picture of what Bitcoin's actually doing relative to gold. It's a digital version of gold. You went from 5 or 6 on the chart in 2020 to, post-crash, 12. Pretty decent, right? It more than doubled in price, but a lot of it—this big explosion in the 2021 era—was hype, and the real de-dollarization thing. Maybe the dollar depreciated by 50% or something.
That's what Bitcoin kind of tells you on the Bitcoin-to-gold chart, going from 6 to 12 or 5 to 12. Where I'm going with this rant is, let's zoom in more. Let's start in 2023, when assets had kind of stabilized and the Ukraine war had become kind of a permanent part of the picture. I think January 2023 onward represents the paradigm that we're in now in both Bitcoin and gold, right? I'll explain what I mean here.
Bitcoin is in the post-FTX era. We've worked through the concerns of Terra Luna. We've worked through the hype of that 2021 froth. We're in kind of a stable-adoption, grind-higher phase for Bitcoin. Gold is also in a new paradigm. Ever since the Ukraine war broke out in 2022, gold flipped. It used to be a risk-off asset that people would buy when they were panicking about risk assets.
Now gold has transitioned to a new steady state where it's basically a diversification hedge, a dedollarization hedge, something that China will feel comfortable putting a big balance sheet into because they don't want to hold as many U.S.-denominated securities. Again, we've talked ad nauseam about this, because the U.S. stole Russia's dollars as punishment for the aggression in Ukraine. Now, anybody else who's thinking of doing something that the United States might not like, they're going to try to diversify out of dollars into what? Into gold.
So gold's a dedollarization hedge. Bitcoin's in its kind of enlightenment phase. This is the new trend, right? Both assets have stabilized. This is the paradigm. So let me draw a trend channel on it.
If I just sort of mark the lows of this channel here on the Bitcoin-to-gold chart, and I mark maybe some of the highs, realistically, where we're at now, we haven't even really bounced off the lows that much. Let me do a regression trend just to extend this line a little forward. Basically, where we're at now is sort of the lows of the channel, trading around 32. If it were to go back to the middle of the channel by year-end, that kind of looks like 40 on the chart, right—the middle of this trend channel. So BTC-to-gold should go from 32 to 40.
If I just do the back-of-the-envelope math real quick, 40 divided by 32 times the current price—it's currently trading at about $125,000 a token—that gets me to like $156,000 a token. If we just revert to the middle of this trend by year-end, gold doesn't move, which is a pretty big if. It looks like it's going to keep sending.
I think just denominating Bitcoin in something other than USD is important to abstract away all the noise around dollar debasement, rate cuts, et cetera. To me, if gold continues rallying, we're looking at $160,000 to $170,000-plus by year-end. If gold were to just flatline here, I mean, mean reversion alone, I think, brings Bitcoin to $150,000 to $160,000. So that's kind of how I'm looking at it, just from another perspective, to sanity-check all of the thesis. So far, everything looks good.
I think that's great, and I also think that wherever you chart Bitcoin—chart it against gold, chart it against NASDAQ—try to understand basically where flows have been going and what flows could revert back into BTC. I think that, especially with gold ripping so much, there are a reasonable amount of people, including myself, including you, that probably own both, and there has to be some level of rebalancing.
I know myself, I've been chipping away at gold to rebalance into the rest of my portfolio, including BTC, because gold has just run. My gold and silver positions—I think my silver position is up 40% in the last few months. Obviously, I'm going to rebalance that into Bitcoin, right?
3. This Rally Has Legs
Yeah. So basically, what I think is happening right now is—look at NASDAQ. NASDAQ's up 18% year to date. Equities are ripping. If you actually go look at Tesla, go look at Robinhood, a lot of money has been made this year. Robinhood continues to rip, which I think signals that there's still a tremendous amount of speculative money basically willing to make bets on the future of crypto.
For Robinhood to go up 30% in the last month and Bitcoin to stay stable, I don't think makes sense, because it's kind of the same type of buyer. It's the people that are willing to bet on inflows into crypto, because Robinhood generates so much of its revenue from trading crypto. It's implausible, I think, for Robinhood to be up 30% and for crypto to be down. Robinhood should come down if that's the case.
And so what it's telling you is that there's still a lot of these buyers. Flows into the Bitcoin ETF have been pretty good. What makes this better, in my personal opinion, is that it doesn't seem to be the DATs driving this rally in a meaningful way. I mean, MicroStrategy bought, like, what, 200 BTC—
MicroStrategy loses 200 BTC behind its couch cushions. A couple of hours.
They're not jamming the market here, which means your fellow apes are jamming the market.
Yeah.
4. Ads (Kraken, Peaq, Katana)
Much nicer to be in a trade with fellow apes than it is to be in a trade with MicroStrategy.
5. Is it Finally Alt Season?
Wait, wait, Avi, talk about this. It looks like Bitcoin's outperforming everything right now. Is that going to trickle through to ETH and then alts like it usually does? Is ETH the catch-up trade?
See, I don't know if I would agree with that, because ETH is up 4% today. Bitcoin's up 1.5%.
It still hasn't broken all-time highs, though. Bitcoin was up, you know, but I think today, because Bitcoin has managed to get above all-time highs and people are itching, you can get some alt outperformance. I mean, there's been a lot. You're asking again—we get this question a lot: When's alt season? Dude, Zcash doubled in a week. That was crazy, by the way.
Why? I saw that.
I did not see that necessarily coming.
Because Zcash has always sucked, and then it will rally super hard close to the end of a cycle, which is not a great sign. If you look at every other time Zcash has rallied extremely hard, you're kind of close to the end, basically.
No.
Yeah. That's probably one of those top indicators that you don't have enough backtested data to trust, though. Normally, it'll run for a few weeks, and then that'll top it out. But what's interesting about that move is that the quote-unquote reason that it's moving is all just cope. It's probably moving because a couple of people decided to buy it, and it doesn't take that much to move this thing because it doesn't trade that much, and then it just kind of spiraled out. A lot of people have been posting these super-long theses on Zcash.
What, after the rally or before? I would guess after.
Always after.
It is. And this, by the way, is true.
So I'm not here to knock the theories. The theories are actually very accurate. It is the best privacy coin out there, and privacy is extremely valuable. Bitcoin is not private at all, in any way, shape, or form, which is one of the reasons why I always liked Zcash, in the abstract. I've never owned it, but I've always liked it in the abstract because it is the most meaningfully private coin out there.
It does have genuine, groundbreaking technology, and it is the only way to hide what you're actually doing. If you choose to hide what you're doing financially, you can do that with Zcash. I don't see why the world would just suddenly wake up to this and start going, "Oh my God, we really need some Zcash right now." But what it tells you and me and the audience is that it seems like it's alt season, man.
Yeah, I agree.
And these things give you an idea about the zeitgeist of the moment, which is, wow, maybe things are about to get insane. Remember when, 4 or 5 weeks ago, I was talking about how things, in the final leg, get insane? It’s stuff like this, and this is probably the beginning of the insanity. There will be an end to the insanity, but I tend to agree with Paul Tudor Jones: this type of market ends in a blowoff. I don’t know exactly when or how or where, but I do think we get that.
This is exciting. As for Zcash, it’s probably just like somebody made some money and wants to move it privately. It’s like a one-off. Somebody probably moved a lot of money into Zcash to transfer it somewhere suspicious, right? And you could never have profited from that trade because, in order for you to do so, you would have had to have been basically sitting in this terrible investment for years in order to profit from this one pop.
So if everybody’s coming out with a thesis now, post-rally, it’s a bit of a joke. It’s not a good way to trade. You can all feel very good about missing Zcash because this wasn’t predictable. But like you said, Avi, it definitely telegraphs some froth in a way that the DATs don’t. The DATs were kind of like financial structuring that helps certain types of participants access crypto who couldn’t otherwise, with regulatory or institutional loopholes getting threaded that way. Whatever. This is different. This is like, okay, maybe we start to get an alt season here again.
I personally find it very difficult to invest in alts. I’ve had some big winners and some big losers this year. I’m not really confident investing in alts right now because, with Bitcoin sending like this and with my confidence so high in Bitcoin, it’s not like I’m just starting with a clean slate here. The opportunity cost of investing in something other than Bitcoin is extreme right now, given that Bitcoin is just looking so good.
So I think you want to dabble with alts with a small percentage of your portfolio, which is what I’ve been doing, just to keep your finger on the pulse of the market and get these signals from various things. But of the 10,000 top alts, it feels like 9,000 of them are just doing nothing. And maybe on a given day—
Mhm.
—maybe 500 are rallying slower than Bitcoin, 400 are rallying a bit faster than Bitcoin. Maybe just a couple of them are doing something meaningful enough relative to BTC that they actually make airwaves and news and get mindshare.
But the problem with that is, when you invest in an alt that’s just popped because everybody’s talking about it and putting out their thesis, you’re already behind the curve. These cycles don’t run in these altcoins right now, and that’s a bit concerning for altcoin investors. What’s a better trade right now than just holding Bitcoin with 3x leverage? That’s what I’m struggling with. I don’t know.
Well, look, if I’m going to make the case, I think that during this—if Bitcoin goes to—okay, if Bitcoin goes to $150,000, what’s that? That’s a 20% move from here.
That’s not crazy.
6. Is Bitcoin Vol the Trade?
So if you do it on 3x leverage, maybe you can make 60% on your capital. It’s like, okay, fine. Is that interesting if Zcash can go 100% in a week? I mean, look, it’s a podcast called 1000x, Jonah. How are we going to get that 1000x right now?
I don’t think Zcash is going to go 2x in a week again. I don’t think it’s going to double from here.
I do think that there are assets that will, though. That’s the thing.
Of course.
Zcash is more likely to go back down after whoever put money in takes out. This is the environment when I think you can sort of press your advantage.
With BNB and with Mantle, somebody put out, I think, a very reasonable thesis that we’ve talked about tangentially before, which is, look, at the end of the day, it’s about flows. It’s about where’s the money coming from? Who’s buying, and who’s selling?
When there’s a lot of money chasing after speculative assets, and if you’re a trader and you want to try to make money, you’ve got to think about what’s going to benefit the most from this type of market environment. It’s the things with restricted supply right now. So things like BNB, things like Mantle—things that have been around for a while that don’t have a ton of sellers to offset the buyers.
I think that’s another reason why Zcash can move 100% in a week: you don’t have people sitting in that thing looking for 20% moves. I mean, the thing was just washed of every seller. Anyone that held that thing is a true believer—not true now, obviously, because there are a lot of people who have bought into it.
But I think if you’re going to be actively trading right now, which I think a huge proportion of people watching this want to do and are, now is a good time to start looking at maybe some alts that haven’t moved, that have more restricted supply. I wouldn’t buy VC coins here. Your ENAs of the world are probably not going to rip hard, but the assets that I mentioned, I do think there’s a good shot that we get a significant movement.
And not only that, looking outside of crypto, Robinhood has outperformed massively. Robinhood is up a huge amount. Uranium, since we talked about it, is up 22% or 23%, and I think it will continue to do extremely well.
Check out Galaxy.
7. Don’t Sleep on Galaxy
Galaxy did—I think they launched a really cool product today with GalaxyOne. Basically, they’re launching their own version of Robinhood. They’re launching a brokerage. It looks like it’s the first truly fully integrated brokerage where you can buy stocks and crypto and move assets around, because on Robinhood you can do it, but the fees are ridiculously high.
If you want to go buy crypto, for example, you’re paying up the ass to do that on Robinhood. You’re paying a lot of money. It’s over 1% most of the time relative to what you can get on Coinbase. So I’m hopeful about this GalaxyOne product. It turns Galaxy into even more of a meme stock.
Yeah. Galaxy has the potential to just completely disconnect from fundamentals and go berserk, if it hasn’t already.
Well, it’s basically doubled off of the recent lows in early September. So in a month, it’s up 74%. I mean, that’s pretty damn good, Jonah.
That’s amazing.
What more can you ask for? And I still don’t think it’s a particularly crowded trade. So when we’re talking about stuff outside of BTC, I think there are clearly good investments out there still.
Oh, I agree. I wasn’t saying there weren’t. I love Galaxy, and I’ve been talking about that one for a while.
One of the users in the chat, Newtype, writes, “Who is Galaxy partnering with for that brokerage, or did they build it from scratch?” It’s a good question. Why would it be that Galaxy is the only one that can build this and not Robinhood or Coinbase? Why can’t Coinbase add zero-fee stocks? Why can’t Robinhood add basically almost-zero-fee crypto? What is it about Galaxy that’s so special? I don’t know. That may or may not even be worth looking into because it may just become a meme, like you said.
Well, you know what GalaxyOne really is. It’s kind of funny because maybe some people don’t know this because they’re newer to crypto, but the guy running the GalaxyOne product is this guy named Zac Prince. Zac Prince is famous for one thing: building BlockFi and then having it blow up in a massive way because they offered a ton of leverage to people running the GBTC trade. It completely nuked the company.
Before that, BlockFi was a really good company. They were amassing huge amounts of deposits and a huge amount of traction. Zac is a really good operator. I think he took way too much risk his first time around, and he’s probably learned how not to do that this time. That would be my guess.
When I look at GalaxyOne, I see a redemption for BlockFi. It’s like the BlockFi founder’s redemption arc. And I think the only thing that gives me pause is that, in the announcement, they say Galaxy can offer 8% on cash because of their $1.1 billion lending book.
I’m just like, yo, love to hear that. No—
But knowing people at Galaxy, I do think they have a good risk team. They’re much, much, much better at risk than any firm was in 2022, when everything blew up. I mean, there are actual real people there, as opposed to a bunch of young guns just slinging risk left and right.
So I have more faith in them, and I think that they can bridge over TradFi and crypto. On the crypto side, at least, Galaxy has its own desk, right? They’re able to go buy and sell crypto for you.
Galaxy is a—
Sorry, go ahead.
On the TradFi side, I’m not sure, but I’m sure they have some good banking partner that’s allowing them to buy and sell stocks.
To me, Galaxy is just a compression trade to the market cap of Coinbase or Robinhood. Galaxy trades at a $14.85 billion market cap, and Coinbase trades at—let’s see—the market cap. Coinbase trades—what the heck? It’s Coinbase’s market cap. I’m struggling here. Coin—oh, I see what I did wrong. Coinbase: $98.65 billion.
So, yeah, I don’t know. Maybe it’s a 6x-er from here if it becomes a meme stock. And don’t sleep on the data center biz either. AI can continue to become a silly, silly space with multiples that make no sense relative to revenues. Galaxy has a data center. It’s got crypto.
It trades up more than Bitcoin on days when Bitcoin is up, and it trades down less than Bitcoin on days when Bitcoin is down. So this one is just like—you probably want to continue riding it if you hopefully got some size on. Maybe that’s how we earn the name 1000x in our podcast, Avi. We just jump from one 2-bagger to the next 2-bagger over and over.
8. Sizing is Everything
And over time, I mean, that’s the key. And don’t forget: sizing matters a lot when it comes to this stuff. For example, when I look at my portfolio, I want to make sure that if I think something has a good chance of 2x-ing, then I make meaningful money from that. It doesn’t really matter if I put 1% of my portfolio into something and it 2x-es. It matters if I put 10% of my portfolio into it. Sizing is everything on this.
And the way that I would think about it—I mean, there have been a lot of studies on this. The Kelly criterion, obviously, is sort of the gold standard, but to put it in easy-to-understand English terms for you guys, at minimum, if something is going to 2x and I have 60% to 70% confidence of a 2x, I’m putting in at least 5% of my portfolio to this thing—at least 5%. And if I’m 75% confident, I’m probably putting in 10% of my portfolio to this thing, because you aren’t commonly coming across things like that.
What’s interesting is, if I think something is a 10x but I’m 50% confident, I’m also probably putting in 5% because the confidence level is lower but the return target is higher. One thing that’s interesting also: Robinhood in my book is 5% of my overall book because I think that there’s a reasonable chance that in 5 years it 10x-es from where I am, but I’m 50% to 60% confident that it does that.
Yeah. I mean, one thing that I like about that framework and the way of thinking about it is that you’re never really putting 50% of your portfolio into one of these flyers, right? You’re putting 5% or 10% of it into it, and then if you lose that 5% or 10%, or you lose most of it, you can stop out and survive. Whereas, if you make a lot of money on it—let’s say you double or triple that—you put 10% of your portfolio into something and you triple it, you’re probably not just hanging on to that for dear life. You’re like, “All right, let me just roll this back into BTC and keep going.”
On the flip side, let’s say that you allocate 10% of your portfolio for active trading on riskier bets, and then you just lose all your money after 6 months or a year. It probably is a signal that you kind of suck and you should stop and just reevaluate or rethink things for a while. You shouldn’t just allow the total portfolio size to continue dwindling from wherever it started: okay, then there’s a 10% hole, then a 20% hole, then a 40% hole. That kind of playing on tilt is what a lot of bad traders do. And I think we talk about winning and rolling gains back into the sure thing, which is Bitcoin, but we should also address that if you’re losing, you’ve got to respect that you’re not seeing the ball clearly and do something about that too. Otherwise, you risk ruin.
Although, look, I do subscribe to the idea because, at the end of the day, this is how I made my money: if you’re highly confident in something, you’ve got to take the risk and bet big.
Highly confident for me was when, post-FTX, I went 100% in. I just put every dollar I had into Bitcoin. I just went all in on Bitcoin, right? I was super convicted in this thing. I was putting my money where my mouth is. If I’m going to tell everyone that I really think Bitcoin is going to change the world, I might as well buy a ton.
9. Diversification vs Concentration
I don’t think right now is necessarily the time to go super heavily concentrated in anything. I think you can do it in Bitcoin still because I think Bitcoin is still a surefire bet. I think you can probably even do it in Bitcoin and ETH. If you have a $10,000 portfolio, you should not be diversifying, in my personal opinion.
Diversification, the 5% to 10% positions, and managing them—that’s for people who want to grow their wealth but don’t want to see massive P&L drawdowns. You want to grow and you want to keep making money, but you don’t need to crush it, right? If you have $1 million or $2 million, that’s when you can think about diversification. If you have a small portfolio—basically below $100,000—you need to create wealth by concentrating your portfolio in the stuff that you really think is going to do well, and you just need to weather those drawdowns because it really shouldn’t impact your day-to-day life.
For me, for example, I don’t really do that anymore because I run off of my trading income. I don’t have a job. I worked at hedge funds. While I was working at hedge funds, I would be 100% all in because I had another source of income. Now that I don’t have any other source of income, you have to be a little bit more careful with it. If you have income and you’re bringing it in, and you have a portfolio that, if it goes down by 50%, your life’s not going to drastically change, that’s a different position. If my portfolio goes down 50%, I’m kind of like, “I don’t know—it’s not going to be good for me.”
Right, right now.
If you’re not in that position and you’re making money—let’s say you make $80,000 a year and you’ve got $10,000 in savings—this is a moment. Be concentrated in something that you believe in. Try to make some money. That’s at least my take because I do think that there’s a concept of log wealth.
I think once you hit $10 million, anything past that—like $10 million to $50 million, in my opinion—doesn’t really change your life that much. Your life changes again once you get to like $100 million or $200 million, and I know we’re talking nonsense here, but the marginal value of every dollar from $10,000 all the way up to $1 million is massive. Then it starts going down, and then it starts going down even more. The marginal dollar after $5 million to $10 million is like whatever. If you’re a humble, normal guy, it’s not going to change that much.
10. How & When to Take Risk
Yeah, I think you made a really good point there about how to balance your work and your portfolio. One of the biggest trades I’ve ever done in my life was—I did not go in immediately post-FTX. I did not go all in on crypto because I was working in crypto, and I was pretty much balls long at work after FTX. We took our assets off FTX a couple of hours before they halted withdrawals. We were kind of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company after that huge storm hit, because everybody else had been totally annihilated and we were still going strong. So I was balls long at work, and I had a lot of exposure to that.
But then when I ended up leaving institutional crypto trading, like you did, because you don't really need an institution to make money in crypto, that's when I went all in. I basically sold my position at work, monetized that just contractually, and then replaced it with risk in my PA. I did the calculation and posted it on Twitter, and basically the way that you do it is you just look at what your after-tax returns are going to be for X dollars of institutional investment versus Y dollars of PA investment, because there's different taxation. You're going to have a bonus payout at work or whatever.
I basically reverse-engineered how much principal I would have to invest personally to achieve the same returns as work. Then I put more in because I didn't have that wrong-way risk where, if Bitcoin goes to zero, then I lose both my job and all of my money at the same time, which is a pretty bad situation to be in.
So basically, what I would recommend for a lot of crypto traders out there is: you don't need to be a full-time crypto employee to make money trading crypto. You can just do whatever you want and then plow that money into a portfolio that actually gives you a lot more risk-taking opportunity, because you have income that's not correlated with crypto. The worst possible thing you can ever do in any business interaction is be a forced seller or a forced buyer of something illiquid.
Your career is basically a very illiquid asset. It takes months or years to ink a good deal or interview, or build your way into a position of power, influence, and wealth. Basically, if you're running out of money at the same time as you're getting fired, you're a forced seller. You're in this desperation mode in an illiquid space—your career—where you have to really try as hard as you can to force your way in, force a square peg into a circular hole, and it doesn't work.
So, yeah, I think the best diversification is having non-crypto income to plow into crypto. And, yeah, like you, I took some profits on the way up, but not after a good long while. I basically ran it up. So I think from here the question is: what do you do? You and I are talking about putting 10% of our portfolio into this or that alt, but if you're 24 and you have good income and you've got a nice stash, you could definitely go bigger on high-conviction bets.
I think one bet that I like over the long run—I think now that XPL has puked this much, it's starting to look good again. I think Plasma could potentially take over a significant chunk of the financial ecosystem globally, and I think that might be a 10-bagger over the medium to long term. But you have to stomach some insane volatility to capture that. What do you think?
Yeah, look, I'm with you. I think we're in for a pretty incredible ride for the next 2–3 months, and you kind of just need to eat the volatility and get through it, you know.
Yeah. You know, gold is 10 times bigger than Bitcoin. If gold can move 20% in 2 months, let's see what Bitcoin can do. That's basically where I'm at, and I think I'm reasonably convicted in this. One way to play it is to just start buying upside calls on Bitcoin, because what tends to happen is that calls are, I think, the most mispriced right after a big move, because Bitcoin is very, very reflexive as an asset.
And so when it breaks out, calls don't immediately reprice. The vol does not immediately jump 10, 20, or 30 points.
It should, though. I bet it does on IBIT.
Because the breakouts are not massively violent. No, I mean, the vol—we can take a look—but Bitcoin's up 1.4% today. Now, the thing is, the way that people think about this is: if the implied vol is 60, what is that talking about? That's a 3% implied move a day, right?
Yeah, yeah, because you take the square root of 365 and divide the implied vol by the square root of the number of trading days in the year. So, 365—252 in the case of a stock, whatever.
Yeah. So that implies a 3% move a day. Now, that seemingly might be too high of a price to pay if Bitcoin's moving 1.5%. But if Bitcoin moves 1.5% a day in the same direction, which is up, then options—you take advantage of the gamma. Basically, you could get a massive leverage position. So it's not always about the vol, right?
But even then, the vol stays lower. If you think that Bitcoin has an 80% chance of going to $150K in the next month, then vol is massively mispriced. The gamma is massively mispriced. The whole structure—you’re getting very cheap leverage.
Yeah, I agree with that. And so what I'm saying is, when you get a breakout like this, Bitcoin does tend to move aggressively, and options are a great way to voice that opinion, actually, because you tend to get there reasonably quickly. Bitcoin is probably not going to grind up over the next 3 months to $150K. It'll probably get there in the next month if it gets there at this point.
I mean, it just rallied almost $20,000 a token. This is insane. I'm foaming at the mouth here. I'm so excited. I agree with you: if you expect markets to move fast, buy options. If you don't, sell options. And I expect this market to move fast.
No, the breakout, the move, the gold move, the equity markets, the random little things like Galaxy stock doubling and Zcash doubling—all of this is pointing toward moonboy mode in crypto, which has that tingly feeling. I wasn't expecting it, but now let's play for it.
I still struggle with alts. We own our Ls on this podcast. I want to be transparent about what I'm not getting right. I don't want to just sit out here and pretend that I'm nailing everything. I'm really nailing 90% of my crypto portfolio being in Bitcoin. That's awesome. But I have a lot of internal dialogue over whether I should be ramping my Aerodrome positions or buying some PUMP.
11. Anything Better Than BTC?
All of these things—I'm still actively debating. So ultimately, maybe Bitcoin calls are the way to do it, or maybe just Bitcoin with leverage. What's a December expiry? I think that's actually a pretty reasonable way of doing it. If you have a smaller portfolio, you could buy some longer-dated Bitcoin calls, like maybe buy some March of next year.
What's a December $150K call in Bitcoin?
Hold on. It expires December 26, the day after Christmas: a $150K call. Which one is okay, on the left?
Yeah, dude. I mean, vol's 40%.
Okay, so you're paying 50 vol for a $200K call at the end of December. I think you probably maybe want the $150K.
I think you want the $150K. And that's trading at 2,000. Basically, if you lift it, you're paying $2,900. Maybe that's what you do if you have a tiny portfolio: you just buy some December $150K calls and try to 3-to-10x your money there.
What I would probably do is, if you were to get—I mean, look, I don't like advocating trading options because I think they do take complicated structures. I think outright, you can reallocate some of your portfolio, but if I was actively trading options, I might actually do this trade. I might buy a 1-by-2, so buy some of these $150K calls and sell the $200K calls, because there's a 10-point difference involved there. I think that's a pretty reasonable trade.
I would not sell an option on Bitcoin for $350. That's the dollar value of the $200K call. I think if Bitcoin rips to $175K, that $200K call isn't going to be trading at $350 anymore. It's going to be trading at something like $5,000, and you're going to get your eyes ripped out on mark-to-market.
I've had, as an oil trader, I've had—I really don't—
Yeah, I just really don't think you're getting above $200K this year.
I don't either, but you'd have to stomach some insane mark-to-market being short the $200K, right?
So maybe just a call spread if you—
I think, yeah, I think a 1-by-1 call spread. You could definitely bet on Bitcoin hitting $180K by year-end. So if you buy the $150K call right now and it settles at $180K, you've 10x'ed your money. That's a good outcome for some asset that—
That is a very good outcome.
And it's on the table, per the gold chart that I just showed. Let's say gold rallies another 10%. Bitcoin just mean-reverts to the middle of its range, its trend channel versus gold. You're there. You're at $180K. You've 10x'ed your money with an options strategy. That's what I think.
12. Final Thoughts
Anyway, I gotta run. Avi, I know we're in the middle of a good session here. This was an hour. It always flies by talking to you.
Yeah, likewise. Maybe go buy some options later today.
Would you use Deribit, or would you go IBIT options?
Probably IBIT options.
Yeah. Just have to work out the 150 equivalent.
Anyway, guys, this was a pleasure, as always. Next time, we'll do more questions. I think we were just rolling, so this is fun.
This is awesome. Sorry, I have to jump. Really appreciate everybody who tuned in, and we'll get this episode out as quickly as possible. Great talking to you, Jonah. You're the man.
Adios. Take care. Later.