Toying around with a peanut sized portfolio on deribit. Mainly to show my normie friends that making the first $1m can be done with any starting stack. Your brain is the product. 10k -> 1m challenge completed in 7 months. +534k usd august 2024 +592k usd feb 2025

a whole country index went 4x in 1 year intel, a boomer stock that my dad bought and held since 1993 went 4x in the span of 2 months gold, a 30t monolith went nearly 4x since the 2022 lows and your assumption is that btc and eth, some of the most reflexive and volatile underlyings since the inception of modern finance, cannot go 4x from here?

get out of the way

playing long vol in a high EV spot but in a slow winter market - as it was all of August (low IV, huge build-up of short options by greedier and greedier takers) - is more a mental game where you see your portfolio lose 8-12k daily (in my case) but you know that the position has edge. You get paid when the realized happens (kind of like set mining where you call a 4bb raise in poker with a low pair) in a bull or faster market its different, everyone is playing long vol by default and at some point it becomes a little too expensive to call. we are not close to that point yet. i think the default bias that participants have today is still to find ways to fade the upside or find good entries for when bitcoin "eventually goes lower"

I think the eth 8k calls are very cheap here

There's a structural reason on why we are getting today's move in the shape it is going. Higher btw

Higher. Also eth lisbon was so bearish that it has to be the bottom

Eth 90day+ upside is more interesting to me versus btc 90day+ upside for the simple reason vol is higher and many mms are running long btc vs short eth type of spreads for efficiency

This is still live, and ive added to some shorter dated (30-60 day calls/cs) on both btc and eth From a delta perspective I think we trend higher slowly with pullbacks that make short-term traders think we have topped multiple times through the second half of the year. If the trend turns sour i think it will be very obvious and I will call it out but the bad news has played out. I personally expected the feb downturn. Didnt play may well (personally thought mstr fud was overblown), but played july so far quite well. The vol is easier, I think there is very limited r/r going short, especially the upside (5-30delta) here. Vol of vol in crypto is traditionally very high and if we ever unpin to the upside (driven heavily by call covering) atm IV can easily double WHILE the call wings start to get elevated as a ratio to the atm vol. Selling calls have done well for the past year (although buying puts were a far better trade); but the more crowded a trade is the bigger the reaction if it reverses out. Especially if realized comes back

bid on

the main thing that keeps me awake at night to this day is if i could have done anything different in 2021 many of my trading colleagues and ct anons completely retired starting from negligible stacks. 1000x+ starting from ~100k i remember trying to trade this period like a traditional market maker scalping in and out and did well but nothing generational i wont make the same mistake if we get the same conditions. it is indeed what keeps me awake at night

My real education in market mechanics wasn't a textbook or my 5 years working for an options HFT shop. It was from participating in the Runescape "real world secondary markets" from 2003 to 2012. In this game, the "Partyhat" was a useless, discontinued cosmetic from 2001. It was released once and never again through the history of the game. I didn't just watch the Partyhat go from worthless to billions in-game. I watched it go from $0 to hundreds, and then tens of thousands of real-world US dollars. It eventually became the game's ultimate store of value not for its utility, but for two reasons: provable scarcity and a collective consensus that this scarcity was the value. In hindsight, it was a preview of the Bitcoin model. A market, free from regulation, spontaneously creating a "hard asset" from a "useless" digital artifact. While the Partyhat was mooning, I also watched the "CPI trap" play out. The money supply hyper-inflated as players and bots "farmed" (printed) billions of in-game currency. But the price of "utility" goods, the game's "CPI basket" of armor, raw fish, and logs was deflationary. Bots flooded the market, crashing prices. Runescape's "Central Bank" (Jagex) could have reported "-2% inflation" based on the basket of goods. This completely missed the real story. The real inflation was in the scarcity assets. The "Party Hat Index" wasn't up 5%, it was up 50,000%. This is our world. The CPI measures the "armor" (TVs, electronics). It misses the hyperinflation in the "Party Hats" (prime real estate, fine art, BTC). Life is a game, you are sitting on the hardest asset in existence.

Gex only tells you part of the picture

watch the tape, watch it very closely

I just have a simple checklist I go through daily as a (mostly) long vol trader to make sure I don't pay too much unnecessary theta Usually early mornings are reserved to make sure nothing in the market blindsides me + algos are running smoothly Big break in between while waiting for US open Then afternoons are reserved for lower level projects and thinking about markets at a higher level while keeping to tight risk limits

remember the market exists to prey on your positions the biggest edge in any market is not "macro" but knowing which positions are the most vulnerable to be attacked option sellers are usually the easiest to attack because they don't even realise the risk of what they've sold

Strc buy pressure (saylors final stand) vs macro/rates headwinds On quarter opex

Took a small hit on the retrace The funny thing is that the downtick is slow enough on index that it's actually hard to choose the right instrument to really capture the opportunity to the downside - part of me thinks some of the moves are because of weekend illiquidity and we might actually see a fairly quiet week, both in trad and non-trad Main positions are still long-dated call-spreads which are more vega than delta here

things can get real interesting i dont recommend that you just "monitor the situation" here