Architect | Degen Momma | perma bagholding
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October and Q4 are finally here.
I took September as a transition period from having no time and running around with a kid full-time to having A LOT of time for myself, since said kid is now officially in school.
I find myself at a crossroads of sorts, and whatever I decide to do, or not do, over the course of the next year will determine our path as a family for many years to come.
I'd be lying if I said I am ready, or that I am not scared.
I am scared shitless.
But determined to give it one more try.
One last hurrah before hitting the desk or going back to academia.
Except this time, I ACTUALLY DO HAVE TIME to focus.
So what changed?
I entered crypto as a pregnant woman, with all the connotations that that entailed at the time.
I learned about the simplest things during the first year of my kid's life. Think MCAP vs FDV. Think LPs. Think an act as simple as bridging.
Then things spiraled from there. Airdrop farming. Design and art commissions. Some VERY unsuccessful perp trading adventures. Lots and lots of bagholding in spot - mainly because I was a delusional believer in many of those projects.
Also, risk taking is not exactly hardwired into my brain due to my upbringing and environment.
All of that was crammed in alongside being a mother, juggling a toddler's livelihood, safety, early learning, skills and basically everything else that came with being the primary parent, away from my immediate family.
So TIME - and focus - were my major complaints.
Being (almost) the only companion to a child is not an easy feat. I am not a person who settles. I've always been the studious, high-achiever type, so I spent a lot of time trying to get my kid to read, write, discuss, learn logic and reason by the time he was literally 4.
Very proud of what we achieved on that front so far.
But I've been noticing something this past month, now that I have more time.
"Brain atrophy" as @jords mentioned it in his podcast is a real thing.
Spending most of my time with a small child means limited vocabulary, limited ability to express deep or long thoughts properly, and diminished reading and writing time - which leads to diminished skills in general.
Combine that with the degeneracy of crypto that I have thrown myself into over the past few years and the scrolling culture we've all been sucked into as well...
And you get an overtired, exhausted mother who is SCARED shitless that she has lost the plot for herself.
And that's the last 5 years in a nutshell.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and @jordspodcast actually pushed some of these thoughts further for me. There's something about hearing other people articulate the specificity of this space and the lives we've built around it - that makes you stop and look at your own situation a little differently.
I am still learning.
Still trying to find an edge in an ever-changing market.
Still trying to figure out where I actually fit into all of this.
But the crossroads are real.
And, honestly, this feels like my last chance of "making it".
And by making it, I mean a million in the bank, a small farm somewhere over the Mediterranean, and lots and lots of time to travel with my child.
does it sound like a generic dream when I write it down?
But I would genuinely love to take him to every continent by the time he's 10 or so.
To that end, and to this dream, I will give it everything I have this time around.
There is no Plan B.
Plan B is just life happening.
I'd much rather spend my days learning about privacy onchain, understanding how these systems actually work, finding weird edges in markets and building things than sitting at a desk drawing plans to renovate someone else's kitchen.
Maybe that's naive.
Maybe I'm massively underestimating how difficult this is.
Maybe a year from now I'll be writing a very different post.
But for the first time in years, I actually have the time to find out.
So let's see what happens :)
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I can very much relate to this, zeroed out my Fomo account in record time!
Being able to “trail” the big names with just a click is not a good thing for me
Always need to dd and actually know what I am clicking first.
Will stick to manual swaps for the foreseeable future 😆
the timeline would have you believe everyone is making bank on fomo
reality is that almost nobody is
use data and information to turn your fomo into jomo and feel joy in not being a degen in the trenches 18hrs a day and almost certainly losing money
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Recommend this.
Most of my friends in gcs have an arbitrary number to retire on (5mill is it?)
but this makes you think why the number is more personal than that.
thanks Jords!
The @jordspodcast EP3
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Retirement
0:00 How much is enough to retire
1:32 Defining retirement as removing the need to work
3:34 How online debates make you roundtrip life-changing amounts
6:01 The Trinity study and the 4% rule
9:40 Withdraw more when the market is up, less when it's down
11:27 The bridge from crypto into traditional markets
15:24 Your number is personal, where you live, taxes and the life you want
16:27 My retirement strategy
19:26 The happiness research, and why control over your time matters most
22:26 The two obsessions, needing to work and doing nothing
24:22 Enough, a passage from The Psychology of Money
27:26 Choosing happiness over more money, and closing thoughts
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SamZ retweeted
a cool $15bn loss is nothing to these guys. first down month in ten years and they still beat last year's record by august. idk if others know a lot about jane street but they are such a interesting company.
thing is they play different to the rest. their whole thing is believing the people they hire are smart enough to be left alone. they take the most cracked maths and physics grads on earth, the ones who'd normally disappear into google or a hedge fund, sit them next to elite engineers and let them build algos to arbitrage markets.
their entire trading stack is written in ocaml (wtf?). now they've got ai and tens of thousands of gpus to play with as well.
even the compute is a competition. they run an internal currency for gpu time and teams bid against each other for it. if you reckon your algo is worth the cycles, outbid the team next to you. most companies would rather nobody got the gpus than let two teams fight over them.
and they pay like they mean it. interns on a $300k a year rate. 3,500 staff, $9.4bn pay pool last year, about £2m a head lol
and it seems to work for them. $39.6bn of trading revenue in 2025, more than jp morgan's entire markets business. a record $16.1bn quarter this year. past $40bn for 2026 with the $15bn hole included. when you let people take real swings you're going to eat one now and then.
there's even a rumour they're the ones moving bitcoin's price. they make the market on the etfs and were sat on nearly $1bn of blackrock's bitcoin etf at the end of june. idk if i believe it. but a firm people think might be moving bitcoin from a room in new york is exactly the kind of crazy stuff i like.
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