Surveillor：小市场交易、零杠杆与判断山寨币底部

What’s up?

What’s up, dude?

Not much. Just chilling.

How are you, man? It’s been a while.

Yeah, yeah. It has.

It has. Dude, I’m not gonna lie, you’re on a run right now. Where does this rank among your runs? I feel like you’re on a legitimate, God-handed, universe-gifted sun run.

Definitely up there. It’s maybe—yeah, definitely one of my top 2 weeks, I would say.

Of your life?

Yeah, for sure. In terms of trading P&L over a few days, for sure.

What was it? Pump, Lighter, CARTS?

Yeah. I also hedged a decent amount at the top, but it was other coins I shorted—not enough, though. That was still kind of a local top.

Are you solo? Do you trade your own book by yourself?

Yeah. I was at—

No analysts work for you?

A few funds.

You’re just a solo guy?

Yeah. I was interning at a few funds right after I dropped out of college. This was last year and this year, and then I just quit. Now I’m by myself.

Damn. It’s impressive. Okay, my first question for you, Mr. Surveillor: to my knowledge, you only really trade crypto, and you trade it well. Is that true?

Yeah, mostly.

You mostly only trade crypto. You trade it in size, you trade it well, and you catch these rotations pretty—

I can explain why I only trade crypto, because I think this is a pretty important point.

Okay.

My general view on markets is that you should typically stick to the lowest-liquidity market that can accommodate your size, because that’s where the median participant is least skilled. This is pretty obvious. If you look at meme coins, I started with meme coins, and I’d recommend them to anyone who wants to get into trading with smaller amounts of capital. They’re the easiest.

Then you move to altcoins and whatever. When you think about markets, obviously all the big sharks are in the bigger markets. That’s why I personally avoid majors in most cases and focus on altcoins until I get to a size where I’m forced to trade majors a lot. That’s my general view.

By majors, do you mean Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, or stocks?

Bitcoin mostly.

Got it. So you think you graduate from meme coins, maybe some bigger on-chain stuff, and then altcoins—that’s what you mostly trade right now.

Right.

And then you’d graduate to Bitcoin before stocks?

Well, it’s just because I don’t think crypto trading converts completely to stocks.

Why not?

I don’t know. I just feel like there are more sharks in stocks. It’s a bigger game.

Do you worry that— I guess the only way this thesis would work—by the way, that was a sick take. I like that: the smallest market that can accommodate your size. I thought that was a sick take. Do you worry, though, that in order to take that view, you have to have this fundamental belief that crypto is going to continue to get bigger and grow, and not have smaller cycles? I guess you could believe it has smaller cycles, but then you’re sort of picking at scraps, relatively. Are you fundamentally bullish on crypto, and do you think these alts are going to get substantially bigger from here? Or do you realize you’re playing a game that’s maybe dying?

Yeah, for sure. There are 2 things that make me really bullish on certain alts. One is obviously the regulatory progress, which will continue at least until the end of the Trump term. Then we’ll see what happens after that.

The other thing is the misallocation of capital in crypto and all these flows out of the majors. It’s pretty obvious where the Zcash flows, and to some extent the Hyperliquid flows, are coming from: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. I think things are fundamentally bullish with perps, buyback tokens, tokenization, and stuff like that. Then you have an intra-crypto rotation.

That’s why I’m focusing on these alts. I’m really focusing on the good alts right now because I think they can still be priced at 5x or whatever from here.

Before I ask you about a couple of individual coins, when these headlines come out saying AI has cracked the internet, broken PHP, and every website is at risk, and that there’s going to be hacking stuff forever, do you get worked up and panic about this stuff?

Not really.

No?

I just don’t really care.

Do you just assume it’s not that big of a deal every time?

Yeah.

What about Justin Drake cracking Bitcoin encryption? Does that worry you? What do you think when you hear that?

No. When I hear that, I just want to buy the dip when it dips.

Do you spend any time trying to figure out whether maybe it’s real this time, or do you just completely ignore it?

I just completely ignore it.

Wow. Should I start doing this more?

I mean, no. I feel like it’s good content for your stream, but buying the FUD has always worked.

It does work. I’ll tell you this: we can start here. I sold CARTS because Justin Drake wrote an article about AI Claude cracking Satoshi’s coins. I sold CARTS at the bottom. I didn’t lose any money, but I fucking sold it. How convicted are you in that trade right now, and what do you think about it? On-chain’s a disaster. I feel like that’s the only coin that’s in a good spot.

Yeah, for sure. That’s probably my highest-conviction trade. It’s not my biggest allocation because there isn’t enough liquidity for me to add more.

What percentage of your portfolio?

It’s probably, I think—let me check—but I think it’s 20% to 25%.

That’s pretty fucking significant. Jesus.

Right.

Jesus.

Yeah.

That’s not a small number at all.

I would put a lot more in, but right now I have a huge amount of the liquidity pool, so I don’t think it’s wise. When I was heavy in Lighter and Pump at their respective bottoms, I sized those at 50% to 70% of my portfolio.

Whoa. How much of it do you still— I was getting voice notes from you at the Pump bottom, and I didn’t really get it, I’m not gonna lie. I’d been a huge Pump bull previously. You were sending me voice notes saying, “Buy Pump, buy Pump, buy Pump.” I didn’t really get it a couple of weeks ago.

Right. Yeah, I tend to sell these things slightly early, so I mostly exited those. Well, better.

Do you buy it on leverage?

No, I never use leverage.

How come?

I just don’t feel like you need leverage with altcoins. They can easily move 10% or more in a day, right?

Yeah, fair.

And I have a strict max drawdown to prevent any crazy drawdown.

What is it?

It’s 20% to 25%.

Full book?

Yeah. If I draw down that much, I don’t remember the last time I hit that, but probably sometime last year, I’d zero everything in my portfolio.

And what are you supposed to do after you hit the max drawdown, like the breaker? Do you just log off for a little bit? What do you do?

Yeah, I’d probably just log off for a month and work on trading tooling.

Trading tooling. What do you use for trading tooling?

A lot. There’s a lot you can do with these agentic things. They’re really useful. I have monitors on everything. I have my custom HyperDash.

You use HyperDash?

No, I have my own HyperDash with some more data. I call it Surveillor Dash.

Do you sell that?

What did you say?

Do you sell it?

I’ll give you a private trial. I also have my own catalyst dashboard and portfolio tracking system. Then I have a lot of on-chain and perps monitors for major news about my coins, as well as some trackers for on-chain activity.

Most of your trading is in crypto alts, so there’s data for sure, but how much of your entry and exit is just feel? I feel like you flip fast, and you’re DMing me, like, “Yo, I’m in Lighter now,” and I’m like, “Fuck, what just happened?” How much of it is just tingle versus having some catalyst for entering these positions?

It’s 50% tingle, and the rest is technicals. Technicals help a lot with precise entries and exits.

And then typically, the best things happen when news and sentiment align with technicals. Lighter was a good example of that. When Lighter dumped to—I think it dumped to $2.80—that was caused by, basically, when Lighter announced perps and—no, no, when Robinhood announced perps—

Robinhood—

—and they had their own—

That was crazy. Were you holding it during that?

No, I wasn't. I bought the bottom. I started buying at around $3.10, but I scaled in super heavily between $2.80 and $2.90. Around $2.90, the Robinhood Crypto head had an interview and said, “Yeah, we're actually still planning to offer Lighter to our U.S. customers.”

I thought, “This is pretty obvious. The public isn't really aware of this.” Robinhood was still going to integrate them into its U.S. app. That was the fundamental misunderstanding that made me long the bottom, but it was also just technicals.

Do you think there's a lot of informational arbitrage on altcoins in a trade like that? I feel like information comes out and stuff just doesn't move very fast.

Yeah.

I almost think I'm wrong a lot of the time. I'm like, “Fuck, why is this not moving?” Then it moves 20% in either direction the next day. Do you think this is the type of trade that makes you a lot of money, where the news is out, it's obvious, but no one is really aware it's happening?

Yeah, for sure. Things take quite a long time to—

Why do you think that is?

I have no idea.

There's not that many people trading it?

I have no—yeah, I think that's definitely part of it, which is why I think this is why I mostly focus on crypto, because I'm pretty sure I'm right. If you were trading the oil market or whatever, you're literally trading against the biggest sharks in the world, with the most advanced systems, right?

Is that your goal? Do you want to run a fund at some point?

No, I don't think so. I probably want to start a company.

Oh, not trading?

No.

So this is a means to an end. You want to be done with this?

No, it's really fun for me, and I think I'll do it forever, but on the side, on higher and higher timeframes.

Why do you think you're good?

I'm not sure. I've always been pretty objective and cold about things, so it's not hard for me to cut something off. I think being contrarian is most of the time pretty stupid, because your trading style is really early consensus, and that objectively catches the meat of the move. Most of the time, being contrarian is pretty stupid. I'm just not affected by the emotions that a lot of other market participants are going through.

By the way, I agree with your contrarian take. I hate it. They're also the most insufferable. I get that it's probably the highest high to be contrarian and right, but—

It's very dangerous to try to be a contrarian because it's mostly an ego thing, like calling the bottom or calling the top.

Because the field is right most of the time.

For sure.

Your odds are not in your favor to be contrarian ever.

Right.

But you do get paid more if you're right. You definitely fucking get paid more if you're right. What do you like right now? What do you hold right now, other than CARDS? You hit PUMP really hard. Are you still in it?

Yeah, definitely. I'm still in all my positions at full size, but I did have to add some hedges because the market was a bit suspect.

When you're adding a hedge, what does that look like? What percentage size, how do you size it, and what are you buying?

For altcoin shorts, it's typically whenever a narrative runs out of steam. The biggest outperformers tend to be the biggest losers after the narrative or fundamentals can't keep gaining traction. Those are the coins I look for when hedging.

Fundamentally, I like CARDS. I've been talking about this coin since the bottom. I first bought it at $0.035, so exactly 10 times lower than here.

Jesus.

I've been sitting in this coin for, I think, about 6 months or something.

Six months?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously—

Have you been struggling while you're in this? I've been clowning this coin for months, dude.

Yeah, for sure. Of course. It trades like complete dog shit, but I feel like that's pretty typical for these low-liquidity on-chain coins. They all have really fucked-up price action.

I also just don't think CARDS has entered its true impulsive trend yet. That makes a lot of sense because all of the whales and funds I've talked to can't actually allocate size to it yet. There's no spot market on CEXs, there isn't a perp on a big exchange, and liquidity is just too low, right?

It could happen any second.

Yeah. But this will be fixed when it's higher, so I'm going to enjoy selling my CARDS to those people at $2—

Okay, you're sitting in CARDS for 6 months. It's doing nothing. You have a lot of size in it relative to your position, and it's just getting clowned. It's not getting adopted. There's no one who gives a fuck about CARDS. Are you emotional? Are you volatile? Are you flipping conviction? How are you not tweaking about it? They're saying dumbass shit about the token. The founder doesn't care about the coin. They're laughing at it. A lot had to go right from 6 months ago to get to where we are now. Are you not tweaking about that? I would be tweaking, Jack.

No, I have been tweaking about it—

Okay, okay, okay.

—on a daily basis. Like, why is this not—

Dude, you sent me some fucking borderline schizophrenic bull posts about CARDS. I'm like, “Holy fuck.”

Of course. It goes up 30% in a day—

Borderline schizophrenic.

—30% in a day on some news, then dumps 25% the next day for no reason. Of course that's a bit frustrating, but no, it's fine. I didn't just hold from the bottom. I traded in and out for a long time, and only in the past couple of months, since the last retest of, I think, $0.10 or $0.12, did I buy most of my current tokens.

I sent all the tokens to a Ledger. I'm not going to sell; those are going to be held for a long time. I think either until next year or until it hits at least $1.50. That's roughly where I'm looking to de-risk a bit. I'm so bullish because, first of all, I talked about it not having the liquidity for whales and fund allocators. That will change as it goes higher. And for systematic buybacks, the SEC said tokens can buy back. I know the team is working through it, and I trust them to deliver because they're fully incentivized to make it happen.

For sure.

Their tokens are unlocking, right? From a game theory perspective, some people might say, “Yeah, what if they want to prioritize the equity side?” Publicly, they've stated many times that the Collector Crypt employees' equity grant is entirely in tokens. There is no equity part, just some Delaware thing to pay the company's maintenance expenses.

But even if they want to, they can do a 1-year buyback commitment. That's what Pump.fun did, and you don't even have to commit to a forever buyback. So I think—

Forever is stupid, by the way.

Right, yeah, I agree. Buybacks—especially for a company like Collector Crypt—the reason crypto protocols can buy back 100% is basically that once you've pushed out the first product, that's pretty much 90% of the work, I feel like, and the rest is just maintenance and updates. Smaller updates. But when you're running a real-world business, there are a lot of actual expenses and investments you should continue to make from the cash you generate.

Yeah.

So—

100% is stupid.

Yeah.

But in crypto, unlike stocks, I understand buybacks as a feel—a show of token alignment.

For sure.

Some percentage of it, I agree with. 50% is maybe a little aggressive, but better than 100%.

Right.

Maybe somewhere in the 25% to 50% range, I think, is pretty good.

It’s just what you have to sacrifice for having a crypto protocol.

Yeah, for sure. I’m looking for that to happen. And then Pump.fun and Coinbase—that’s really big, because when you think about their backend providers, the only other ones with this kind of mindshare and relevance are basically Hyperliquid, Kraken, and all these other centralized exchanges using Hyperliquid. So CARDS is literally 100x—

Dude, their fee chart looks disgusting.

Yeah, it is, for sure.

Can you tell me about this? I’m into your whole “I only trade spot” thing. Do you think I should start doing this? Should I get off leverage? I don’t even have a leveraged strategy, bro. I just slide that thing and play.

I trade a lot of coins. Most of my PUMP and Lighter position right now is in my perp account. On PUMP’s unlock day, I had spot bids on the swap market at 0.0014, and they didn’t get fully filled. The price never revisited that level because spot has lower liquidity than perps. I never run net leverage, but I still use perps because that’s how I get filled and how I can exit normally.

How much cash do you have on hand at all times? You’re really convicted in CARDS, PUMP, and Lighter. How much cash do you keep, or do you go full port?

Yeah, full-port, 1x long, but I do have hedges.

I like the style, bro. I’m into it. Do you hold ZEC or Monero, or any of the private-money stuff?

No. I think the monetary argument for a lot of coins is interesting. I shorted some Pearl recently. We’ll see about that; it’s a low-conviction short. I just don’t think it’s easy to become money, and I don’t have too many thoughts about those coins. Zcash has a good case, and Monero does too, because they’ve been around so long and their supply is really distributed. But you can’t just make a coin and call it AI money, you know? That’s not how it works.

Valid. Chat wants to know your daily routine.

Daily routine. It’s interesting, because most of my trades play out over a couple of weeks, typically. I don’t need to be super active every day unless things are very volatile. Then I have to look for hedges, entries, or exits. There’s not much that goes on; it’s pretty simple. I have my monitors and my Grok bot.

You use a Grok bot?

My Surveillor dashboard, yeah.

Surveillor dashboard. Give me a key.

Grok bot—I will. It’s very helpful. It pings me whenever there’s relevant news about any of my coins. That’s pretty much it.

Do you have a final shill for us? You like Lighter and PUMP, and you’re obsessed with CARDS. Is there a fourth one you’re working on?

I’ll explain why I’m bullish on PUMP and Lighter right now.

Okay, give us that.

For Pump.fun, first of all, their Pump app has really picked up. It’s nearing $300K a day in fees.

It has.

Which is basically on par with FOMO App. That’s really bullish, because I think this revenue is worth a lot more than their launchpad revenue. Different revenue streams aren’t worth the same amount. The on-chain social trading platform narrative is one of the best novel narratives of the cycle. I like how they’ve started integrating with partners—

I agree.

—like Hyperliquid for perps and Collector Crypt for the sports card stuff. I think this is a change in their approach. Instead of trying to do a lot of random stuff, like creator content coins, they’ve started becoming pretty practical, which I like a lot. You can also tell they’re investing more in their engineering team, because the website and app have improved substantially. They’ve added their own native bridge, shipped limit orders, and done a lot of things before FOMO. They’ve also started investing in marketing by signing traders like Kimchi. I think this is all really bullish.

When you think about it from a game theory perspective, the founders already have $1.5 billion or whatever in cash. They’re not exactly desperate for liquidity from their team token unlocks. If I were them—and I’m sure this is what they’re doing—I’d invest some money, let’s say a low nine figures, into the app and partnerships, and really pump this thing to unimaginable heights before taking anything off the table. This is pretty obvious. It’s a pretty unique situation, because the founders have already made so much. They’re definitely going for the big swing now. That’s my perspective on Pump. I also like Pump because there’s no ceiling.

I agree with this. There’s no ceiling.

It’s an interesting place, because there will always be a justification for whatever valuation it reaches, since it already has insane revenue. So that’s good. And then for Lighter—

That was a good Pump thesis, by the way.

Yeah, it’s definitely mostly about incentives and reflexivity toward pricing up.

Every price makes sense.

And then for Lighter, my bull case is that it’s going to get into Robinhood in the US. That’s pretty much it. Hyperliquid is going through all these other integration partners, like Kraken, that have the legal stack to serve perps. I think once Lighter has its legal stack in place—I think they’re applying for a DCM and DCO, and maybe some separate US perps licenses, maybe equity perps—that’s a really good narrative. They could be the first perp DEX to get fully regulated in the US. I’m looking for that to happen. Those are my theses.

How much lower is your entry on Lighter and Pump than where we are right now?

You know my Pump entry. It was literally the bottom tick. It was funny enough: I think I longed a bit because I saw the TJR liquidation on FOMO. I think he got liquidated at the same price it got filled at. It was 0.0039. A lot of the time, technicals help with my entries and exits.

Why don’t you trade it in a doxxed wallet?

I’m already annoyed enough by my IRL friends asking me about my positions every day. It’s hard enough already. For example, since I sent you a P&L screenshot, that’s gone down, I don’t know, like $600K or something.

Has it?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, that was realized.

No, no, no. It’s the—

Wait, what’s it down on?

Pump’s down a little bit, and Lighter’s down a little bit, and it’s mostly—

Oh, you have a lot of size, then, if it’s a 1x full-port long.

Yeah.

Jesus.

It’s gone down a little bit. If I have a doxxed wallet and people on Twitter are tagging me, it’s going to be even harder to regulate my emotions, which is the most important thing for my trading.

Fair. Do you meditate?

No.

You sound like you might.

Definitely not. Definitely not.

You sound like a calm presence.

Yeah.

How much have you spent on gacha?

Like $0.

Dude, seriously? You’ve never pulled a gacha pack?

No, I have.

Dude, you’re a brat. You just gave me a 30-minute dissertation about cards, and you’ve never even pulled a pack?

I’ve opened about 5 of these packs in my lifetime. But, you know—

In your lifetime? What?

You know, I showed you my Pikachu that I pulled. This is a crazy story. I pulled this Pikachu—

This is such a bullshit story, by the way. I fucking hate this story.

—on either Collector Crypt or Courtyard. I don’t remember. This was last summer, in 2025. It was from a $500 pack or a $250 pack, I’m pretty sure. It’s the 1996 PM Japanese Bandai Pikachu PSA 10. At the time, when I saw “1996,” I had to get it shipped because I don’t even like these cards. I thought that was before any of the other Pokémon, so I searched it, and I was right.

Its buyback value was around $2.5K at the time, which was the fair market price. The reason it was priced so low is that it’s not an official Pokémon trading card. It’s a collaboration with a company called either Banzai or Cardass that basically licensed Pokémon IP.

Back then, people weren’t really into this. I guess Logan Paul had pumped some random cards that people didn’t like either before. Appreciation grew for this set, and that $3,000 card is now worth like $150 or something. That’s pretty crazy. Gosh is pretty—yeah, that’s why it’s pretty interesting. Gosh is negative EV because of the buyback rate, right? But it’s also a pretty decent way to acquire some cards if you want to.

Oh, yeah. A guy who’s up $150K on Gosh thinks it’s good for the world, huh?

Yeah.

Do you still have it? Are you selling it?

Yeah, never selling it.

Oof. I said that about my Mutant Ape, and that thing was worth 150 bands, I’ll tell you that.

Yeah.

You sold Ansem. Someone said, “Ask him why he sold Ansem.”

I just don’t like holding coins that go down too much. It’s annoying, you know? It’s a mental drain, especially when that position was pretty insignificant. I just wanted to cut it because it’s very annoying waking up every day, checking coins, and seeing this thing down another 10%. It’s like, yeah—

Was that a big loss for you?

No, it was really small. It was fine.

Same with AI?

Yeah. I’m just going to quit on-chain, I think. It’s not worth it at this point.

Did you trade Kimchi Coin?

Yeah. I was actually a top holder of that. I didn’t realize the liquidity was like $350K or $400K, so I think I bought like $200K of it randomly. No thesis, but I sold most of it already, near the top.

Did you buy it on FOMO, or what did you buy it on?

Pump and FOMO.

On a public wallet?

Two, yeah. Surveillor FOMO’d into that a little bit, and then I have another Surveillor account on the Pump app, and a third undoxed wallet. On the Pump app, that wallet was the number-one holder, which I thought was pretty crazy. It was just—

Jesus, you have a lot of money on this. Oh, a lot of it’s in cards.

Yeah, that’s probably less than 10% of my cards. It has to be. Way less.

Jesus, dude.

Cards is gonna cook.

All right. Bet. GG. There’s something else I wanted to ask you before I kicked you off. You’re pretty active talking to other traders, yeah? I’m not—

Yeah.

—but you’re one of the only people I actually talk to. I don’t even talk to you that much. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think you’re better because you talk to people, or do you just do it because you’re bored, or what?

No, I don’t think so. I’m very much a solo trader. I don’t remember the last trade I took because of someone else. I need to build heavy conviction in my trades, and typically other people are doing much shorter-term stuff than the things I look at. But I do like talking to people mostly to get a gauge of positioning, and also posting on Twitter. I prefer talking to other traders in group chats.

Damn. Impressive. What’s the PFP?

Oh, so this is like—

Why’d you get it?

Yeah, it’s pretty random.

To match all that.

I think this was a coin on BSC back in the day called Tabibi. It’s super random. It was like a 2-million topper.

Are you still rocking it?

Yeah.

Dude, that’s fucking dark, man.

It’s pretty funny.

That’s dark, bro. Surveillor, you’re the GOAT. You got a final show for us? You did a pretty good job—

Nah, that’s about it.

—shilling. That’s about it?

Yeah. Cards, Publit, it’s gonna go up a lot.

Bro, you’re the GOAT. I gotta link you soon. You’re the GOAT, man. Thanks for coming on.

All right. Peace.

All right, homie. Have a good one. Peace.