[Pinned] I've updated my list of trading resources. It's now organised into different categories with additional content. All free, built over the last 7+ years: docs.google.com/document/d/1…

This was one of the highest volatility days in recent crypto history. Was I long the BTC breakout? No. Did I catch the HYPE news? No. But do I have a tactical pool of capital that’s ready to deploy with a clear plan if a new trend forms? Also no.

Real talk If you’re on the wrong side during a big move like this, most of your immediate impulses are gonna suck Greatest hits: 1. Revenge short - Can’t believe I missed this piece of shit scam pumping; it’s up so much it HAS to come down 2. Oversized buy - I will use leverage as a time travel machine to make up for being late 3. TA cope - It has to retest the exact level it broke out from immediately because I watched two whole Babypips videos on 1.5x speed 4. All-or-nothing - My only options are 0%. exposure or 100%, nothing in between exists 5. Deer in headlights - oh geez I guess I should wait for a pullback but no what if the consolidation is the pullback hmm maybe I’ll wait for a range to form but what if that range breaks down do I buy the retest of the breakout or the range reclaim oh man fuck shit what’s Ansem saying 6. Overtrader - I will cement my bloodline on the 5 minute chart; if this next candle is the wrong colour I will either be rich or poor Just chill out, delete your levels, pretend you haven’t looked at the chart in weeks - fresh eyes Then it’s the usual list of simple questions: 1. What signals are firing / what do I think is gonna happen 2. What kind of bet am I making (mean reversion/volatility expansion/new trend/momentum/Blackrock scam etc.) and on what time horizon 3. Where am I wrong 4. Does my position size match the current volatility and align with the shape of my trade idea i.e. points 1-3 FWIW I’m washed but gonna try to jam some spot sub 70k. If it gets accepted below 66-67k (retraces the breakout) then I’ll lose money “Wow it’s up so much what you buy the top?” Then I’ll lose money and look silly on social media. That’s the cost of doing business (at least the first one). Just start LARPing like everyone else and instead of saying “I bought the top” say “I aggressively rebalanced when an ensemble of carefully weighed momentum factor signals fired contemporaneously.”

This is a huge inflection point for BTC after one of the largest short liquidation events in recent history I've spent the last 4 hours studying ETF flows, Microstrategy credit facilities, cross-exchange liquidity and funding rates, as well as prime OTC desk inventory They all point to the same inevitable conclusion: If it keeps going up, then the market is bullish If it stops going up and goes down, then the market is bearish

What reading the timeline feels like nowadays

Been trading crypto for 9ish years. Recorded an episode with @DonAlt covering our biggest flaws, cycle fumbles, lessons, and what we'd tell ourselves about trading if time travel were real. 2:03 the BitMEX era, where we learned everything wrong 23:06 buying the bottom comes with a cost 35:00 volatility-based position sizing 40:28 after 9 years only a handful of trades ever mattered 45:04 DonAlt closes every winner too early 52:55 the thing that makes you money is the thing that loses it 1:04:28 anyone selling "the way" is a grifter Thanks @krakenpro for facilitating this therapy session

“A bunch of bad stuff happened and BTC didn’t go down 👀” I generally like these relative strength arguments But can stuff go up please? Been hearing this for months It’s turning into “I ate 10 punches but didn’t get knocked out”

If you trade trend, you'll get a bunch of false starts If you trade momentum, you'll often buy the top/sell the bottom If you trade mean reversion, you'll periodically get carried out by an outsized move And so on for basically every trading system This is the cost of doing business that's embedded into every market effect you're monetising Your job is to understand it and manage it If you try to avoid it entirely you simply won't get paid There's no perfect system, it's all about managing trade-offs Go take a look at your setups/playbook or wherever your trading system lives and map its assumptions and failure cases The stuff you wanna avoid: 1. Mutating your system because the risk feels uncomfy so you get the worst of both worlds e.g. not holding for long trends/outsized moves but still eating the false starts when you're wrong (all the downside, no balls for the upside) 2. Not knowing what the trade-offs are and sizing like a dickhead so when you're wrong it wipes out all your gains e.g. penny collecting on mean reversion with increasing size and then getting fully wiped on the outsized move

Explaining to my children that they'll never see their friends again because a candlestick closed below a box I made up and we can't afford the fancy school district anymore

You missed Cash Cat? You're literally never going to make it. You had a chance to materially, meaningfully change your life and the lives of those around you. Instead, your hubris, laziness, and idealistic moral pearl-clutching towards the trenches blinded you to the opportunity. "There'll be another," you tell yourself. No, there won't. There will literally never be another opportunity to make money in financial markets or any type of speculation. It's over. They'll use your name to tell horror stories to misbehaving children in the slums of the permanent underclass. Good luck.

My thoughts on $ANSEM (nobody asked) are that I’m too old and too washed for this shit I’m also not super sold that bringing back the trenches is a worthwhile objective given they were one of the most efficient retail slaughterhouses we’ve seen in a while Pic related GM

Thanks for all the feedback on the last post. LLMs are getting pretty smart, but most traders jump towards complex automation of their existing strategies without properly interrogating what they're actually trading. Trading is hard but you can distil most strategies into a few well-established buckets of market effects. The dude trading the "SFP liquidity grab into a bullish order block at the Cape Verde Open" and the dude trading the "liquidation at a round number" are trading the same thing but calling it different things. The valuable part is in the mechanism, not in the label. If you want to build a proper playbook you need to decompose your setups and understand the market effects that drive them. I mentioned that you can do this with an LLM but didn't specify how. Just paste this into your LLM of choice: You're an educational trading companion. Your job is to lift the fog on what I actually trade. Interview me one question at a time. If I can name a setup I trade, start there. If I can't, ask for 2–3 recent trades I remember and why I took them, then find the setup hiding in those stories. Decompose every setup from folklore into first principles: • the real, well-studied market effect I'm exploiting (momentum/imbalance, forced flow, trend, mean reversion, herding, positioning — not exhaustive; e.g. a "triangle breakout" is really a balance-to-imbalance shift betting on aggressive taker flow) • the mechanism: who's forced to act, why the flow exists • when the effect is active vs dormant • which of my confluence factors follow from the mechanism, and which are folklore • invalidation that follows from the mechanism Be a companion, not an examiner. Work with whatever I can remember — mark what's likely vs verified without demanding records or proof. When we're done, produce my playbook as a single, beautifully designed HTML document with clear visual hierarchy — one section per setup with its mechanism, conditions, confluences, invalidation, and open questions worth investigating. If I paste in an existing playbook, refine it — don't start over.

Casual Friday is one of the longest-running crypto trading podcasts. You should listen to it because the hosts are extremely qualified: DonAlt got liquidated buying the top of XRP memecoins and ran away to New Zealand. I last took a trade in the Great Corn Depegging of 1912 and haven't touched an orderbook since. Enjoy. 0:00 BTC sub-60k 2:31 MicroStrategy overhang 21:10 Schizo deep dive on trading levels 37:18 ETH, HYPE, SOL 1:07:00 Why you need to gamble when you're young 1:16:31 SpaceX is trading like a shitcoin

As someone who loves trading technicals I think learning about markets via technicals (like I did) is one of the worst ways to start It’s a rigid framework where grown men argue with each other about the exact Japanese name for a specific candlestick or a box they’ve drawn on an arbitrary time frame It doesn’t teach you the foundations - why markets move, different types of participants, microstructure, order types and their impact, perps vs spot, and all that stuff - market ‘plumbing’ as a category One of the biggest issues with being hyperfocused on technicals is that they don’t teach you principles and market effects Most technical setups can be decomposed into broad buckets which are well-established (trend, mean reversion, momentum, order flow / price impact, vol clustering etc.) A lot of technical analysis is an often unknowing attempt to map those broad market effects into a recognisable pattern But even a technical-first view is better served by understanding the underlying market effect first and then decomposing it, as opposed to focusing on the specific pattern without ever looking at what’s happening under the hood “This type of triangle tends to go up” is a lot less useful than “this type of flow tends to resolve higher over N time frame”, even if you use the same triangle to identify it Another example: if you’re drawing a support level and buying it, you’re assuming some version of buyers being more aggressive than sellers in that area over a given time frame and predicting a higher price as a result - but what does that mean? Shorts closing / taking profit, allowing for mean reversion? Aggressive sellers being absorbed by passive buyers? Some price insensitive buyer predictably stepping in at a value area? Sellers getting margin called and forcibly trading at bad prices/causing a dislocation? Clustering of orders creating some sort of imbalance? And so on. There’s definitely a risk of overthinking this stuff, and you can make money from charts alone But if you haven’t thought about the underlying market effects and ‘plumbing’ for your setups you’ll likely be stuck in rigid pattern matching that doesn’t generalise and isn’t subject to deeper investigation and more nuanced application Even if your main lens remains TA-focused, there is no harm in understanding the stuff you’re trading on a product level (eg perp contract specs, OI, funding, mark/last/index etc) and on a foundational level (why and how markets move) Especially now that you can jam this stuff into an LLM and keep saying “dumb it down” until you get it, no excuse not to do your homework This is something I really wish I did much earlier in my trading life, so hopefully it resonates with a fellow trader stuck in TA psychosis spending his mum’s credit card on a fourth Udemy candlestick course Anyway GM

As a lifetime retarded crypto investor I feel duty-bound to top blast and act as exit liquidity for all these upcoming tradfi IPOs The expected value is quite reasonable: If I’m right, I make money If I’m wrong, then I just need to wait a year or two - I’ll get UBI and a personal robot giving me reacharounds and snacks while some dude in a San Francisco broom cupboard has to remotely view my disgusting body in 12-hour shifts for training data Pretty good deal

Good morning, fellow Web3 digital asset investors Which highly correlated cryptocurrencies with unsustainable emissions, no structural bid, and a black hole of passive drift to the downside are we buying today?

Video popped up on my feed: “You’re not profitable because of what you do outside of trading.” Lads, the psychology slop genre has gone too far. I can put a Buddhist monk in front of a terminal - he’s generally not gonna make any money. You need some sort of edge, strategy that’s +EV, or even a broad idea of a market effect that you’re trying to monetise. There has to be a sensible foundation for the actual trades you take, and then ‘psychology’ can help with reducing unforced errors. Most of the trading psychology stuff is cope; it allows you to focus on breathing exercises instead of confronting that your clicking is completely random.

There have been a few key changes in crypto market structure. I've written about this topic before but I found myself carrying some stale epistemological baggage about how the market used to be versus what it is at the moment, so thought I'd share. 1. More coins than ever before and the barrier to creating new coins has never been lower. 2. More competition for the hot ball of money (AI, semis, tech, even commodities) and instruments like 0DTE options - all of which are very attractive to normies. 3. Change in participant type and sophistication - ETFs, more tradfi shops, suits etc. 4. Normie flows that used to concentrate around a few CEXes and a limited token set have been fragmented by the infinite listings and existence of the trenches. There are fewer normie flows, they're spread too thin, and it's difficult to come back to the casino if you get dumped on for holding longer than 15 seconds. The main attractor to crypto used to be outsized, long-lasting, and well-distributed trend and momentum effects that were easy to access because there weren't that many venues or coins. That's basically up only/alt season i.e. multi-month periods that were responsible for a disproportionate amount of a crypto trader's lifetime P&L. A rising tide lifting all boats is an overused but appropriate analogy - it didn't really matter what coins you bought. If you got the broader market conditions right, you'd enjoy significant uplift and basically get bailed out even if you made bad picks. In the current paradigm you can't afford to make bad picks. To be precise: in previous cycles if you got the conditions right but the assets wrong, you'd still make money but underperform. In the current cycle (even from the most recent BTC run) if you got conditions right but the assets wrong, you got shafted. So asset selection went from a nice-to-have enhancer to one of the main drivers of returns, even if BTC is going up. That's a pretty significant departure from what we've dealt with in the past This type of dispersion is a symptom of the market maturing. I think that's a net good thing and is likely to incentivise more intelligent token design, less ghost chain VC slop etc. But that's a forward-looking view, and at the moment we're trapped in this awkward transition phase where the old rules don't really apply but we haven't figured out a new framework yet e.g. top N coins by market cap are still mostly shit vs quality. Maybe I'm wrong and everything changes and we go back to the market-wide altseason paradigm when conditions are right. This could all be cyclical, but I think that's less compelling than before given the dispersion we saw on the way up too vs just to the downside. I think it's a good time (especially with other markets and asset classes going crazy) to revisit where crypto sits in the speculative stack and how to approach it as the market is changing. Cheers.

I spent three weeks using frontier LLMs and swarms of agents to build a full stack, autonomous, agentic trading companion. It synthesised cross-exchange pricing dislocations, anomalous derivatives footprints, funding rate arbitrage opportunities, news feeds with impact and directional signals, a trade screener that ranks trend, momentum, and mean reversion factors into actionable setups, and a dynamic rebalancing agentic risk manager to monitor and adjust my exposure. Did it work? No - Claude hallucinated the entire thing and I still don't know how to connect to exchange APIs. But it was glorious.

If you trade when you shouldn't you'll generally lose money. In most cases identifying when you shouldn't trade is simple. But that judgment gets clouded if you're tilted, feeling FOMO, bored, and a bunch of other external factors. It's a bit like post nut clarity: as soon as you're out of it you can't believe you thought it was a good fill. Traders try to mitigate this behaviour via detailed entry checklists but they're often too long or too vague to be useful. So here's an extremely simple checklist: should-i-punt. Run through it in your head before any trade, or install it as a skill if your LLM psychosis is advanced enough and you've already built 14 broken dashboards. Trading is hard enough as it is; don't make it harder by dragging down your PnL with unforced errors.