June 14, 2024 • 42 mins
A few lucky people have made generational wealth trading the ups and downs of the crypto market. And some finance professionals have shifted gears to focus primarily on the space. But what is it like to actually trade these coins day-to-day? How do people pick which ones to buy? How do they analyze the coins themselves? How do they get reliable information? And what is it like, emotionally, to trade such an infamously volatile asset? On this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak with Julian Malinak. In his day job, Julian works in healthcare tech. But the rest of the time, he's looking on message boards for the next 100-bagger. At one point he had made enough to retire on. And then it all went poof. But he keeps grinding and trying to improve his craft. Julian — who we found on the Odd Lots Discord server — explains what he does all day, and how the market really works from a trading perspective.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Tracy, there's been this big crypto run up. It's pulled
back over the last couple of weeks bitcoin got above
seventy thousand. We haven't really done crypto this cycle.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I know we did.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Meant, I have a theory for why we haven't done
on But what were you going to say?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
You just don't want to talk about your theory. No,
there's a separate theory, Okay, I was gonna say. It
feels like a lot of stuff that's happening in this
cycle has happened before, and I know part of it
is the launch of the Bitcoin ETFs, But I mean,
we have episodes on bitcoin ETFs from like years and
years ago. So if we do an episode, which we're
(00:59):
doing now, I think it should be about what the
difference is in the cycle. If anything, I think it's
just been boring.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
And what I mean by that is like it's always
exciting when lines go up and down really fast, which
is why I am a market's journalist in the first place.
But I actually think there's almost nothing particularly interesting about
this cryptocycle, and in past one's like you know, there
released some narratives like web three and gaming to earn
and some of that stuff we did in the past,
(01:26):
or like how like uniswap works, like kind of some
interesting things about people, like redesigning markets or whatever. This one,
there's no thing there other than price and basically meme coins,
which vcs love to write thought pieces about but are
not really that interesting.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Joe, I think you are ignoring technological breakthrough that is
dogwth hat. Okay, that was not around no last cycle.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
You're right, So we had doge coin and ship last cycle,
but neither of them had a hat in the last cycle,
so there have been some breakthroughs in putting cute hats
on the cute puppies for the coins. You're right, that
is progress.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
But yeah, exactly, Okay, but we are doing a crypto
episode right now for the avoidance of doubt, and I
think the way we are coming at it is talking
to someone who has seen multiple crypto cycles at this point, and.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Also that if you accept the premise that basically the
only interesting thing is price and why things move around.
I don't want to hear from a VC. I don't
want to hear from someone who's doing some layer three
solution or some made up tokenization of a building in
New York City. I just want to hear from someone
(02:38):
who rides the ups and downs and what's that right? Like,
because if that's actually the only thing going on, which
I believe, then the only like true expert is not
the VC or the investor of the founder, but the
person who day to day is helping move that price
one direction or another.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
No, I think that's absolutely true. The other thing that
I sometimes think about is what are crypto traders doing
on a day to day basis, Like, how do you
actually spend your time if you are trading crypto? What
does research look like?
Speaker 4 (03:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (03:08):
And then the other thing that kind of blows my
mind is just the amount of man hours and labor
power that is spent on thinking about whether or not
line goes up on chart.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
Totally.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
You know, on some level that's all finance is. But
I guess, like in traditional finance, I have some there's
a veneer of respect to there's a veneer, and I
have some intuitions about how the professionals in the space
make educated beds on whether the line is going up
or going to go down. And there's fundamentals and earnings
and momentum factors and all that stuff, and people different
(03:40):
try and I sort of understand what they try to do,
but I don't really know what the equivalent is in crypto.
So I think we got to learn and I think
we should talk to We got to talk to someone
who is in the space of like determining whether the
price is going up or down.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Let's do it.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
So I'm really excited.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
We have the perfect guest because not only has he
been a degenerate crypt trader for several years, it's the
first guest that we've had on on Lots who has
been sourced from our own Odd Lots discord, a active
participant in there. And I'm like, oh, this guy is
a smart guy. So why don't we like talk to
one of our own community members, a listener, someone who
(04:15):
chats with us from time to time, someone who's not
a VC writing big thought pieces about how the industry
works and the importance of memes.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
Someone who's just trading the coins.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Let's do it. Yeah, I'm excited, all right, I am
very excited.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
We are welcoming to the show. Julian Malinak. In his
professional life he does healthcare tech and data stuff, and
then in the other half of his life he's been
trading crypto for a long time. Julian, thank you so
much for coming on.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Odd lots my pleasure.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Why don't you just start off you're a crypto trader?
Speaker 4 (04:44):
How did that happen?
Speaker 5 (04:45):
Yes, So, I think that my journey was somewhat typical. Right. So,
for most of my career, I've worked in healthcare policy
and technology. I was in my early thirties working in
tech in San Francisco. If you think of crypto, it's like, Okay,
I in his early thirties in San Francisco working in tech.
That's kind of what you think of, right, you're the
architect exactly. And so I had heard about it and
(05:08):
had seen some lines going up and had some extra
money at that time. This was twenty twenty one, early
twenty twenty one, and from an early point it was
about the prices, right. I was curious about the technology,
but it really was about, Okay, these lines are going up.
It seems like people are making a lot of money.
Why not me? Right? And I think fairly quickly kind
of in that first year of trading, went through the
(05:30):
tour of opportunities available to I think the typical retail participant, right,
So started with Bitcoin and ethereum, went down the list
to like kind of the mid cap coins, right so
the top one hundred coins that are traded on exchanges,
but where there's just bigger ups and downs. Went to
kind of the world of microcaps, so coins that maybe
the market cap is one hundred thousand dollars and it
(05:52):
only trades on some on chained decks, it's probably going
to go to zero, but it might one hundred x.
So I had a few of those. A lot of
them went to zero. I had a few that did
go up a ton and made some money. And then
I also did during those first few years some yield
farming rights, so basically finding some obscure D five protocols
were they're typically rewarding users with kind of a native
(06:14):
token to a trash co liquidity and kind of like
a mercenary. I would just judge the yield verse risk
and go where it was best. And then as the
market went on. Oddly, my best week in crypto was
actually the lunar crash, whether through luck or insight, I
shorted a bunch of stuff and made a ton, and
then I think, unsurprisingly to a lot of veteran traders,
I just gave up most of that money in the
(06:35):
following months, right, And I think that often those kind
of euphoric periods you have and being your downfall, and
so I took some breaks after that. Luckily I didn't
have a lot of money in FTX, so I was
kind of taking a break from the market after that
huge you know, making a ton in Luna and losing it.
And then the past year I've gotten back into it,
focused mainly on short to mid term trades. You know,
(06:56):
I'll be honest that the strength of this rally, I
think if you had asked me a year ago, I
wouldn't have seen it going as high as it did.
But it turns out that the bitcoin ETF, as you said,
was a pretty big deal.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (07:07):
So yeah, I've continued to trade and have been watching
the markets for a while now.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
So you mentioned making money and losing money. Can you
talk to us a little bit more about what kind
of numbers we're talking about here, and beyond the Luna position,
what was the split like between money you made from
yield farming versus money just going long or short certain coins.
Speaker 5 (07:30):
You know, I started with low six figures in crypto,
made I think on my best kind of small cap
position seven figures, and then Luna was my all time high,
and I could have kind of retired not with a
ton of money, but enough to live on for a
very long time, and then gave up most of that.
I didn't lose everything, but gave up what was seven
(07:51):
figure gains essentially, yea, okay, what's that like?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Going from having money where you're like actually could think
about retirement or maybe a modest retirement, to losing seven
It was then in that position.
Speaker 5 (08:04):
Yeah, it was funny because this is so fitting. So
I live in New York, right, and I remember in
twenty twenty two, it was like the week that I
started looking at these nice apartments to buy with cash
was the week where I wiped out forty percent of
my network. And I think that what happens in crypto
is basically it happens on both sides, right, So you're
(08:27):
early to some trend. So in my case in twenty
twenty two, I was early to the shorting or maybe
you were early to the bull market, right, And you
keep writing that and you grow more confident, right, and
you're betting bigger and bigger, and people you know who
are being conservative are making less money than the people
who are being really aggressive, right, and so you get
more and more aggressive, and then it violently shifts. Two
(08:47):
weeks ago, I heard a ton of stories from traders
I know who wiped out months and months of gains
in literally minutes, right. And I remember when this happened
to me the first time. You know, it was literally
months of I would like to say hard work, maybe
some luck wiped out in you know, an hour or two.
I had at the time been I think, going on
(09:09):
very little sleep. It was nauseating. It's hard to feel
sorry for someone who's just like gambling, right, But it
was kind of traumatic in the sense that it was
just so sudden and so fast, and I think it
really was pretty hard to recover from that from a
trading perspective, right, because you think about, oh man, I
really want to get back to that all time high,
and you're chasing that.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
I would be upset if I lost that amount of money.
Everyone would be upset.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
I think, Yeah, I can't even fathom it. It does seem
like it's like a meme. Right. People even joke like
when the coins are going up, they're like, Oh, I'm
gonna load zillow dot com right now, so you should
probably start shorting. And so it's very funny that you
were literally looking at apartments to buy in all cash.
Speaker 5 (09:49):
I'm kind of disturbed by my mindset in those times,
and I've had two or three times like that. I
think the worst was in twenty twenty two, but since then,
I've had a few blow ups like that. You know,
I've had some huge wins too, but it's just it's
really hard after you've had a series of wins to
step back, right, because you just want to keep going
and keep going.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
So you said something interesting when you got into the
crypto space about you were mostly interested in just making money,
so gambling on the price of a particular token. But
there are a lot of people out there who assign
particular values, let's say, to something like bitcoin or particular narratives,
(10:48):
maybe is a softer way of saying it. How come
you didn't get interested in that aspect of crypto.
Speaker 5 (10:54):
I think when I got in, I was actually not
that cynical, and I thought you could do both. And
I remember the really cool thing about that bull run,
as Joe said in the intro, was like it was
like using uniswap for the first time. It was like,
this is, yeah, I'm just speculating on tokens and this
kind of feels disconnected from the real world. But man,
this is so fun. It's really cool to be a participant.
(11:15):
I thought the technology was interesting and fun, if maybe
there was kind of a lack of real world relevance.
I think since then, I've gone through cycles of being
more or less cynical, and I think that when it
comes to narratives, I kind of think of four central
ideas that people talk about with crypto, right, So, the
first one is basically the casino, which is it's about
(11:40):
the tokens. People trade the tokens. Exchanges make a lot
of money off people trading the tokens, and that's what
the space is about, and everything else is kind of
narrative fluff. The second narrative idea is kind of the
store of value. This mainly applies to bitcoin. This is
digital gold, and people even take it further to talk
about bitcoin as kind of a reserve current andcy or
(12:00):
a monetary standard. And then the third kind of category
of kind of fundamental idea for lack of a better term,
i'd call future of finance. And there's a few sub
ideas here, right, So one is around being your own bank,
which is essentially the idea of interacting with financial products
without the need to trust a big bank. Right, I
can use ave and I'm just trusting the code. The
(12:21):
second sub idea is effectively kind of modernizing the financial system. Right,
so it takes what is it a day for stocks
to settle When I do a trade and on you know, Solana,
it's nearly instantaneous. And then the third thing is this
idea of tokenizing marketplaces. So I think Helium is kind
of the poster child of this. Right, I can essentially
bootstrap a marketplace using a token that I just create
(12:44):
out of thin air. I actually find that really interesting
because for my money, it's like the thing that crypto's
really good at is people can create tokens out of
thin air and people really like to speculate on them.
And if you can use that to do something in
the real world, that seems pretty interesting. And then the
four category I think of as Web three, and this
is the be your own bank idea applied to the
(13:04):
consumer Internet, you know, whether it's a social network or
a game, and in control of my own content. And
I think the odd thing about it to me is
it feels like people are either entirely skeptical, like it's
just a casino, or they're entirely on board, and it's
like we're creating the future of finance in the Internet.
And to me, I kind of have come around to
like it's mainly a casino, and I'm kind of interested
(13:25):
in some of these other ideas, Like I believe in
store of value, and I think that the idea of
token iszed marketplaces make a lot of sense. I think
Web three I'm fairly skeptical of, but I think the
ideas are quite a bit different. And sometimes it feels
like crypto's kind of just like searching for a narrative
that catches on among this kind of laundry list.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
Yeah, and some of them are contradictory too, store of
value versus casino lottery ticket right go up.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
But yeah, so in the process of identifying the next trade,
people turn this around on the stock market and I
get there's plenty of just pure gambling in the stock market,
but also in the stock market, like there is such
a thing as people who make money by looking at fundamentals,
like deeply looking at how this company is getting real
(14:11):
user traction they're really selling a product. Like in the
process of identifying the next one hundred bagg er microcap winner,
is there alpha to be found in actually identifying a
connection between what the so called project is and actual
attraction or is it mostly sort of the reflexive war
(14:33):
trading of I am going to be long this because
I have reason to think that tomorrow someone else will
belong this.
Speaker 5 (14:39):
I think that it depends on the type of trading
you're doing and the type of thesis. In my experience
with kind of the microcap on chain coins, you really
want to have a thesis that is kind of orthogonal
to price. Right. There's this marketplace called pump dot fund,
which is like anyone can create a coin there and
it just gets liquidity without any cost. And there were
(15:00):
it was like a meme coin that was like the
first one there, right, and I don't own it anymore,
but it was kind of like, well, I think people
will get on board with this because pump dot fun
is getting a ton of volume, and this is like
a proxy to be bullish on pump dot fund. By
the way, I'm not chilling this coin because I don't
own it anymore. But that's an example of a thesis
that is not directly related to price. One of the
(15:21):
best trades I ever had actually was poo coin back
in twenty twenty one, really, and that was actually a
very thesis driven trade, right because it was an application
that people used to track their kind of low cap
coins and it had this meme coin attached to it.
I think if you're just trading technicals on small caps,
it's a tough journey because it kind of is a
(15:42):
zero sum game and the insiders and developers have an
edge against you as a retail investor. So I think
you have to have some idea that is, you know,
somewhat original and is not reflected yet in price. Tracy.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Yeah, one thing I noticed is like I've seen projects
that'll say things like we're the first dog coin that
launched on Avalanche, and it's like there's no real thing
there except people are talking about this new layer one chain.
So obviously you want to buy the first dog coin
associated with that chain.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
It's like a newspeg, right, So you need a thing
to hang interest off of. But Julian, so you mentioned
some thesis driven trades, But talk to us a little
bit more about what the day to day actually looks like.
If you are in the crypto market, it doesn't sound
like it's researching the underlying technology necessarily, But are you
(16:36):
in the message boards? Are you trying to gauge upcoming
interest in a particular token or coin.
Speaker 5 (16:41):
So I'll answer that by just going through the routine
I follow when it comes to trading. So generally I
try not to trade for the first half hour or
so after getting up, just because I don't really know
what's happening in the market until I've had a bit
of a time to digest it. I'll go in some
disco groups, I'll go on Twitter, I'll look at the charts,
and I'll often have a hypothesis about how bo the
week and the day will unfold. And that just helps
(17:03):
because I want to have a hypothesis that's falsifiable. So
I might look at the markets and say I think
it's sideways bullish today, right, So I kind of want
to look for longs and maybe some countertrend shorts, and
so I'll maybe have a few trade ideas, and often
for me, it's like I'm looking at maybe Bitcoin Ethereum,
maybe like a few at coins that are particularly volatile
that day, and basically I'll just kind of, you know,
(17:25):
look at the charts and some of the technical tools
that we can talk about, and I'll have a hypothesis
that's like, Okay, I'm I'm kind of bullish on the day,
so I want to get into a long position to
this coin, but I kind of bet it goes back
to this zone. So maybe I'll set up price alert
right for a few coins where it's like I'm I
don't want to just ape in immediately to this up proNT,
I want to wait a bit. So maybe I've spent
the first hour or two kind of getting a handle
(17:46):
on what's going on in the market, is there any
major news, setting some kind of price alerts for areas
of interest for different coins, And then honestly it's kind
of waiting around just observing, right, And often I'll kind
of have a feeling of like, okay, am I understanding
what's happening? Right? If I think that it's a sideways
bullish day. Is is it playing.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
Out like that?
Speaker 5 (18:06):
And maybe one of my alerts goes off right, and
it's kind of like, Okay, this coin is kind of
in an area where I thought it might be interesting
too long, and so I'll kind of enter a position.
And once I've entered a position, then at least for
like short to midterm training, it becomes a matter of
actively managing it. And if the thesis is I think
it's going to bounce around here, I want to see
a pretty quick reaction or I'm out of the trade.
(18:28):
Once I'm in a position, I'm kind of watching closely
and I don't want to necessarily overmanage. But if the
thesis is one about how it reacts, you know, in
a kind of minute to minute basis, if I'm not
seeing what I want to see, then I want to
get out of the trade immediately. So that's kind of
one type of way I deal with short to mid
turn trades. Another way I might spend a day as
kind of looking at different narratives. Right, So, like recently
(18:50):
some of these real world asset coins have done well,
So like onto Finance is one that's they're like taking
treasury bonds and putting them on chain, and it's kind
of like I was looking into that a while. It
was like, I just think people are going to get
really excited about anything that relates to the real world
because so much of this space is so abstract, and
so you know, Onto's one, but are there other coins
(19:10):
that are in this real world asset space? So I'll
kind of look on Twitter and maybe Massari, which is
kind of a good research service that puts together different articles,
and I'll kind of get us and say, Okay, here's
like five coins in this rural asset space that maybe
I want to get into long positions on. And then
I'll look at the chart and say, okay, maybe I'll
enter now, maybe I'll wait a bit. But really a
lot of it is just about I have a hypothesis
(19:32):
about how price will react, or I'm looking to get
into a position, and then I'm just waiting until that happens.
For me, when I think about the times I've made
money and the times i haven't, some of it is luxure,
but there's this emotional state when I'm doing well of
almost a kind of bored curiosity. It's like the opposite
of fomo, right, So I just want to be sitting
around I maybe watching the price action, and it's really
(19:56):
boring because I'm just waiting to see something clear, and
you know, most of the time of the market you
just don't want to be entering. So that's kind of
a typical day, and it's it's not that exciting. I
think if it's done well.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
I find it actually very interesting.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
They say, like professional poker players, which seems like it
be fun. If you're doing it well, it should be boring,
and that actually it's this miserable existence of spending twelve
hours in the day and mostly folding your hands and
mostly letting cards go by, and then waiting for opportunities.
Poker well played in a cash game in a casino
is not fun. Something I'm curious about. You know, with
(20:32):
the launch of the Bitcoin ETF for the first time,
there is a segment of traders that is on New
York time, specifically bitcoin and crypto has always been twenty
four to seven, but now there is this segment of
trading that happens between nine thirty am Eastern and four
pm Eastern, maybe some after hour stuff.
Speaker 4 (20:50):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Can you talk a little bit about time zones and
the different flavors of the market between when New York
is up versus Asian hours versus maybe I don't know
if European Hour is inflected so much.
Speaker 5 (21:02):
Yeah, that's a good question. And it's funny because some
of the better short term traders I know, we'll talk
in great detail about the different zones, and it's like,
this is the London kill zone from these two hours.
I'm just like, can we just knock get so feis?
But I do think the markets offer some differences, right, So,
I think the New York hours tend to be, at
(21:24):
least for what I do, a little bit better. There's
a little bit more liquidity that the wics tend to
be a little bit less involved overnight for me as
someone who lives in New York, like the Asian hours
there just tends to be a little bit more scammingists
by scamming us something like weird kind of wis and stuff,
and it feels like liquidity is often lower. It's funny
(21:46):
because I sometimes like to trade these kind of long
tail alt coins and sometimes you just see like really
wacky things happen at strange hours, right, So it's like
here's a project that is like founded by you know,
an American team and backed by American investors, but for
some reason, there's just a ton of interest in this
project at three am on a Friday night, and it's like,
(22:06):
I wonder what that is. You know, it's manipulation, right,
but I think sometimes you see some really interesting manipulations
in the Asian hours, right where there's not the big
kind of New York liquidity, and that can be fun
to trade. I think that as someone who you know
sometimes likes to short things, I've definitely been tapped out
a few times because I've gone a bit too early
(22:26):
on some of those scamming up trends in.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Terms of being tapped out. This is the other thing
I was wondering, But what sort of risk management goes
into positions here? And how are you keeping track of them?
Because I imagine you're probably using a wallet, maybe multiple wallets,
maybe different platforms. How are you sort of netting out
those positions and managing that risk.
Speaker 5 (22:49):
I think now I try not to do many trades
at once, and again, it's very easy to sound wise
about risk management, and it's much harder to follow my
own advice. But what I try to do is especially
with these kind of either a short term trade or
a counter trend trade. Typically I want to see reaction immediately.
As a rule for myself, I have to have a
(23:09):
stop loss. Right. In other words, if I'm longing a
coin that just dropped thirty percent, I'm gonna have a
stop where if it goes below a certain price, I
exit the trade. But really I want to exit the
trade immediately if it's not reacting the way I want
it to before it hits my stop loss. So I
think for me, the best risk management is, yeah, you
have a stop loss. I don't want my account to
(23:30):
be liquidated like used to happen to me, But I
really just want to cut immediately if it's not going
in my direction, and particularly on a trade that's like
I'm shorting a coin that just went up fifty percent
or I'm long end coin that went down a lot, Right,
you just have to be really decisive in terms of
trade management. There's various tools out there. I just crack
(23:50):
it in an Excel sheet that steers, you know, the trade,
here's the idea behind it, Here's how much I made
or lost. I think it's a little bit different for
longer term positions where it's I'm just gonna buy some
of this spot coin and try to hold it for
a few months and see what happens. I still treat
that as a trade, but it's a little bit less.
Maybe I don't have a stop loss because it's just
a spot position.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
So you mentioned as part of your research or news
consumption gathering, like going into various discords, and one of
the things that strikes me about crypto is like a
everyone is highly aware of the existence of manipulation. B
You sometimes hear people talk very overtly about being part
of a pump, and sometimes I'll get, you know, it's
(24:29):
like this is a group and like, you know, sort
of work together to like build hype for the coin,
and I get the impression, though maybe I'm wrong, that
people are searching for the inner sanctum, finding that one
telegram group where there really is like people can move
a market, or the one discord whether there's real alpha.
Can you talk about like the process of identifying where
(24:51):
good chat happens.
Speaker 5 (24:53):
I've been in a lot of different discord groups, and
some of them are like people giving trade setups, and
it's always that's interesting how you can have two traders
trading the same trade setup with dramatically different results because
of how they execute and manage their trades. The best
groups I'm in, I'm not in that many now are
just a relatively small amount of people basically talking. It's
(25:16):
people sharing ideas. Maybe there's someone who's quite good and
they're giving some setups. It's not just like here's a
trader giving a trade setup, right. I think those rarely work.
And there's even kind of memes like the Kramer etf
the reverse. There's even things of like, here's this crypto
influencer who's always wrong and we should fade them. Right.
(25:37):
I think you're right that there is this notion of Okay,
a lot of these pump and dump groups you don't
want to be in because by the time they're shilling
it to their followers, the pump has already happened and
they're going to dump on the followers. Right. I have
not found a lot of people that have successfully found
the inner groups, right. I think the better move is
to just try to identify the pumps somewhat early. And
(25:59):
I think the bull market, like a few months ago,
this was particularly good at this right, So like there
was this coin Tia, which is like a modular blockchain token.
You know, maybe it's you know, revolutionary technology, but the
important thing is like it was kind of a hot
narrative and a new token, and it was just going up,
and I knew a lot of people who got in early,
and it was kind of just like, I just think
(26:21):
that through manipulation and through a lot of fomo, this
thing is going to go a lot higher. And it did.
And so I don't think you need to be part
of a pump and dumb group. I think if you
are an alert trader, you kind of identify some of
these opportunities. I do think it's becoming a bit harder
kind of the past week or two since the market
has been a little more choppy and a bit down.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Obviously, you've been trading crypto, and we've been very focused
on that in this conversation, but have you ever been
tempted by more well, I don't even want to say
traditional assets, but something like zero day or one day
options on equities, because you could potentially get the same
satisfaction of seeing the line go up up in a
(27:00):
relatively short amount of time.
Speaker 5 (27:02):
I've thought about it. I think that I would like
to think that I'm not just purely gambling, even though
I think that a lot of what we're doing in
crypto is effectively gambling when I think about crypto, and
I think that's a fair question, like why trade crypto
versus another market?
Speaker 4 (27:17):
Right?
Speaker 5 (27:17):
I think one answer is because you think it's an
important technology and you want to invest in the future.
And I would love to believe that more than I do,
And I do believe that for a few things like
bitcoin and maybe a few specific coins. But I think
the reasons are more of like the trader reasons, right,
So I think that the manipulations in crypto are just
more apparent than in other markets. So one thing you
(27:40):
often see is like stop punts. For example, right, say
there's a coin that's like gone down, it's gone between
twelve and fifteen dollars, You'll often see this quick wick
below twelve dollars, and then it'll pump to like twenty dollars, right,
And what's happening there, And again, it's not that simple
to trade this, But what's happening is like there's a
bunch of long positions with their stops below that kind
(28:02):
of recent low of twelve dollars. So what the kind
of market is going to do is it's gonna manipulate
the price below that. It's gonna tap all those people
out and maybe liquidate some positions, and then often it'll reverse.
And I remember when I started trading futures, I kept
losing money because I would place these obvious stop losses
and they would get hunted. And so one thing that
(28:22):
I think I'm doing when I'm trading well is I'm
almost countertrading myself, right, I'm countertrading who I was when
I started trading futures, which was like, I'm just going
to place this obvious stop because if it goes there,
it's probably gonna go a lot lower. And so I
just think those opportunities are not quite as good in
traditional markets. That said, they're not easy in crypto, it's
(28:43):
just that I think that it's a little bit less efficient.
And by the way, I'm not sure how long crypto
will stay that way, right, I could see a world
where in five ten years it's just been captured a
bit more.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Yeah, it does seem what you say makes total sense
that various sort of quasi manipulations are more obvious it's
clearly a less liquid, even Bitcoin a less liquid, less efficient,
wider spreads than legacy markets.
Speaker 5 (29:13):
Yeah, and I think they're all double edged swords, right, So, like, yes,
they're manipulated and inefficient, but I've been on the wrong
side of predatory manipulation before, and like, I don't blame
anyone but myself, I kind of wish that I had
of you that it was really bad, right, because I
feel like for the stock market, I think that kind
of blatant manipulation and pump and dumping is kind of
a bad thing. And I wish that my view of
(29:35):
crypto was like, this is a really serious space where
we're creating really important stuff. And I would love to
think that in a few years, right, And I'd love
to kind of see more projects where I take it
seriously and think that manipulation is bad. But I think
for now it's like that's more of a feature than
a bug as a trader, right, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Can I ask a slightly personal question going back to
this idea of you being in some ways the archetypal
crypto trader, Why is it all guys? That's obviously a
massive generalization. I'm sure there are some women out there
trading crypto, but it does overwhelmingly seem to be men.
Because the other thing I would say is when we
(30:14):
go back to the narratives and this idea of like
we're building a fairer financial system, it always struck me
as crazy that we're going to build a fairer financial
system with bitcoin or whatever and half the population is
basically being left out of it.
Speaker 5 (30:28):
Yeah, so it's definitely overwhelmingly young men. I meet people
who are in their teams up to like early forties. Right.
It's fairly global, and as you said, there are some women,
but very few particularly, I think in the kind of
trading world, you know. And I'd kind of be curious
on how to compare to other forms of speculation, like
(30:48):
among the population of people who are doing zero day options.
I bet that skews male as well, although probably not
nearly as much as crypto. I think that part of
it is the culture, right, So there's definitely this vibe
among a lot of traders, mostly young men. And I
don't really believe this, but it's kind of like this
is your last chance to get rich before the fall
(31:11):
of Western civilization, rightting, And I don't believe that, but
like that's kind of the feeling and like it kind
of is adjacent to kind of the hustle culture, right,
and the kind of like be a man and you know,
hustle and make your own way. And I think that's
definitely part of the culture of crypto. I think that
there is kind of this human capital component that like
(31:31):
when I think of my career, like not to toot
my own horn, but I feel like I've been pretty
good at the jobs I've done, and you know, I've
spent a fair amount of time trading now, and I'm
kind of like, is it Is it a great thing
that a lot of guys like me are spending all
this time gambling. I don't know if it's awesome for society, right.
I feel like I can say that because it's being
hard on myself more than anyone else, right. But I
think that's a kind of another thing about crypto, which
(31:54):
is I think one way to think about it is
like there's a supply and demand for gambling and speculation, right,
and so when I walk around New York and see
the sports betting ads, right, it's kind of like, oh,
this is kind of meaningful competition, right, where we're talking
about kind of the demand among mostly young men for
you know, speculation, and yeah, what are the options we
have crypto, you have sports betting, you have things like
(32:16):
zero day options and meme stocks. With that said, I
really hope that I'm not super optimistic, but I would
love for in five years to be like, Wow, this
market created all this useful stuff and it's more like
the stock market. And yeah there's speculation, but it relates
to these things in the real world in a more
tangible way. But right now it does feel like it's
mostly guys, you know, speculating.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah, it feels like that to your point, like that's
sort of like and probably the fight club philosophy of
if you don't make a fortune now before you're like
twenty five, you're gonna be doing a nine to five
off his job until you're sixty five and then they'll
give you a watch and then. And it feels like
that message just gets hammered home over and over again
(33:15):
that if you don't score the big bag soon, you're
going to live a life of basically working for the
man in some miserable existence under terrible fluorescent lighting for
the rest of your life.
Speaker 4 (33:26):
It seems like.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
That, so I want to you know, I like talking
to you because you're frank about the fact that you
like trading it, but that may be your aspirations for
the technology may not materialize.
Speaker 4 (33:38):
I feel like.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
One of my frustrations when I talk to people who
are professionals in the space, particularly operators or vcs, not
necessarily traders, like I feel like I'm frequently being gas
lit in the sense that they'll tell me something about
some extraordinary thing that they're doing that's important technologically. In
my sense is that it roots their you and that
it really they're like, they're just in it for the gamble,
(34:02):
And I'm curious in your interactions with various people parts
of the ecosystem. Is this just me being like sort
of like super cynical and I should be more open,
or do you also observe this gap between like you,
we're like building this really important thing for tokenizing real
world assets and bridging them across chains.
Speaker 4 (34:20):
Et cetera, but that at heart it's about the line.
Speaker 5 (34:24):
So I think that in my experience, I've talked with
a lot of both venture investors and founders, and over
the past year I've kind of was curious about whether
there was something useful I could do with crypto, and
was kind of have been working on and off on
this idea of like, you know, I've worked in health
data and it's like, okay, I like the idea of
tokenized marketplaces. Is there a way to kind of incent
(34:47):
people to contribute their health data using a token, right,
And it's kind of just like, well, you can create
a token out of thin air, and that's a better
cost of capital. So there are some interesting ideas here.
And I've talked with a lot of vcs and founders
and kind of try to suss out this question, as
you mentioned, of like do people really believe in this
stuff or are they just like me, Like maybe they
believe in a few things, but mostly they're just trading
(35:08):
the narratives. And I've come around to the fact that
I think most people actually, yeah, maybe they're trading and
pumping and dumping a little bit, but they do believe
in the technology. And I say that just because it's
just hard to work on this stuff. And I think
it's hard to raise funds from like LPs if you
don't have some conviction that we're actually changing the world.
(35:30):
And I don't want to say that everyone's just you know,
it's all motivated reasoning, right, But I think that for
better or for worse, that's what a lot of folks believe.
That the stuff really is going to be revolutionary and
that the infrastructure we're creating will really have an impact.
I'm skeptical of most of it, but I hope I'm wrong, right,
And maybe I am, but I think that your instinct
(35:51):
to be skeptical is correct. But I would just say
I kind of want to take people out their word,
you know, and if people are really saying that they
think this is going to be this revolutionary technology, like,
I think it's worth arguing kind of on the merits
of that.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
I have just one more question, which is, if you
made seven figures again, would you stop trading crypto and retire?
Speaker 5 (36:14):
So I've done fine recently, I've you know, made some money.
I think that what I would do if I were
to get back to kind of I don't even want
to say my prior all time high, which was quite
a bit. I've tried to just let go of that
line of thinking altogether, actually, because I think a lot
of the problem I ran into was basically having this
(36:34):
notion of making it back, and so for me, I've
tried to get rid of any notion of making a
certain amount and just more focusing on the discipline of trading.
I do think that, you know, and it goes back
to the human capital part of this. I don't want
to look back and be like, oh, I just traded
for years and years on end, because when I look
at my career, I think the other stuff I've done
is probably you know, more valuable, and I think maybe
(36:56):
there's like some way I can bring crypto into the
other part of my career. Yeah, I don't want to
be trading for like decades and decades, but the notion
of getting back to a certain number and then quitting,
I don't even want to think about that because that
that got me into a lot of trouble.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Just get back there, then sell half. Julian Melanach, so
great to have you on. Great to have our first
discord derived guest. People should come into the discord and
chat with Julian, and great to have a sort of
very fresh, honest, nuanced take on crypto, which is sort
of rare.
Speaker 4 (37:27):
So really appreciate you coming on off on. Thanks so much, Tracy.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
I really enjoyed that conversation. It was super interesting. I
appreciated that he was like kind of cynical, like I
am totally cynical, and seemed fairly honest about like where
his own like sort of marking to market his sort
of thoughts in real time.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Yeah, it was also interesting to hear. I'm not sure
I want to say due diligence, but the trading process
on a day to day basis, and I think, like
many things, it's not one extreme or the other. It's
not just throwing darts at a board of tokens, but
it's also not developing fundamental theories of technology and the
future all the time. It's sort of somewhere in the middle.
(38:22):
And then again the importance of narratives, which I think
we got into it, but especially when it comes to bitcoin.
One of the strengths of bitcoin at this point has
to be its ability to contain multitudes of narratives, often
conflicting ones as I mentioned, and just jumping from thing
to thing, like disintermediating the entire financial system, but also
(38:45):
boosting profit margins for Black Rock.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
I don't know, I'm going to say something that I'm
purposely leaving to the end. So hopefully maybe some people
are already too.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
No one we'll actually hear it.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Yeah, So I'm going to say something, which is I've
developed a theory of crypto trying to think about how
I can say this in the least insulting way.
Speaker 4 (39:02):
I'm not going to use it. I'm not going to
use any name calling.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
But what I think is that trading is fun in
the sense that it's exciting to bet onlines. And I've
done that in past lives, or twenty years ago when
I was in college, I had a good time.
Speaker 4 (39:15):
Made and lost some money.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
I think that it's very hard, and most people intuitively
know that it's very difficult in the stock market because
there are armies of professionals looking at every piece of data,
every piece of fundamental data, every piece of factor data,
every piece.
Speaker 4 (39:32):
Of flow data.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
There are one hundred there are multi billion dollar institutions
that have been doing this for decades. There are thousands
of books that have been done on how to do this.
I think most people intuitively know that it's difficult to
find some sort of edge in security selection. And I
think that one of the attractions of crypto is basically
(39:53):
a stock market for.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
Oh, here you go, yeah, who.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
It's an easier stock market. Yes, that it's like kind
of like stocks, except it seems a little easier because
you could say, yeah, I think that the first dog
coin on pump DoD fund will do well. I think
that people are going to be into tokenization regardless of
whether tokenization is happening.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
I think that's a nice way of saying it would be.
It's a more level playing field in some way.
Speaker 2 (40:21):
In some ways, I believe, and even hearing Julian described
that one nice thing potentially if you're a little bit
savvy and crypto, is understanding manipulation patterns, the ease of
identifying stop hunts. I like the way he put it
where he says, I'm trading against the twenty twenty one
version of me that left very obvious tells in the
nature of the way I traded. It feels like a
(40:42):
stock market where you don't need to be a super
pro sa fata win.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
Here's what I think. It's all about the narratives picking
up on the next big thing that's going to drive
the price either higher or lower. And in that respect,
if you're just a person that spends a lot of
time on the internet, you might have a better handle.
Speaker 4 (41:03):
That's a great point.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
On those narratives, that's a great.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
Point, Like if it's all about the narratives, then you know,
maybe really just being on Twitter and the discords is
actually alpha.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
Yeah. And if it's all about the narratives and the stories,
you either trade crypto or you become a VC.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
I guess yeah, right, it's the same thing.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
All right, shall we leave it there.
Speaker 4 (41:21):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
This has been another episode of the All Loots podcast.
I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Follow our guest Julian Malinak. He's at Julian Malinac and
you should come into the discord and chat with Julian
because he hangs out there. Follow our producers Kerman Rodriguez
at Carman ermann dash O Bennett at Dashbot, Keil Brooks
at kel Brooks. Thank you to our producer Moses on
them From more Odd Loots content, go to bloomberg dot
com slash odd Lots, where we have transcripts the blog
(41:51):
in a newsletter and check out that Discord, Discord, dot gg, slash, odlts.
Speaker 3 (41:55):
And if you enjoy odd Lots. If you like this conversation,
then please leave us a positive review on your favorite
podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber,
you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free.
All you need to do is connect your Bloomberg subscription
with Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Tracy, there's been this big crypto run up. It's pulled
back over the last couple of weeks bitcoin got above
seventy thousand. We haven't really done crypto this cycle.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I know we did.
Speaker 4 (00:35):
Meant, I have a theory for why we haven't done
on But what were you going to say?
Speaker 3 (00:39):
You just don't want to talk about your theory. No,
there's a separate theory, Okay, I was gonna say. It
feels like a lot of stuff that's happening in this
cycle has happened before, and I know part of it
is the launch of the Bitcoin ETFs, But I mean,
we have episodes on bitcoin ETFs from like years and
years ago. So if we do an episode, which we're
(00:59):
doing now, I think it should be about what the
difference is in the cycle. If anything, I think it's
just been boring.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
And what I mean by that is like it's always
exciting when lines go up and down really fast, which
is why I am a market's journalist in the first place.
But I actually think there's almost nothing particularly interesting about
this cryptocycle, and in past one's like you know, there
released some narratives like web three and gaming to earn
and some of that stuff we did in the past,
(01:26):
or like how like uniswap works, like kind of some
interesting things about people, like redesigning markets or whatever. This one,
there's no thing there other than price and basically meme coins,
which vcs love to write thought pieces about but are
not really that interesting.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Joe, I think you are ignoring technological breakthrough that is
dogwth hat. Okay, that was not around no last cycle.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
You're right, So we had doge coin and ship last cycle,
but neither of them had a hat in the last cycle,
so there have been some breakthroughs in putting cute hats
on the cute puppies for the coins. You're right, that
is progress.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
But yeah, exactly, Okay, but we are doing a crypto
episode right now for the avoidance of doubt, and I
think the way we are coming at it is talking
to someone who has seen multiple crypto cycles at this point, and.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Also that if you accept the premise that basically the
only interesting thing is price and why things move around.
I don't want to hear from a VC. I don't
want to hear from someone who's doing some layer three
solution or some made up tokenization of a building in
New York City. I just want to hear from someone
(02:38):
who rides the ups and downs and what's that right? Like,
because if that's actually the only thing going on, which
I believe, then the only like true expert is not
the VC or the investor of the founder, but the
person who day to day is helping move that price
one direction or another.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
No, I think that's absolutely true. The other thing that
I sometimes think about is what are crypto traders doing
on a day to day basis, Like, how do you
actually spend your time if you are trading crypto? What
does research look like?
Speaker 4 (03:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (03:08):
And then the other thing that kind of blows my
mind is just the amount of man hours and labor
power that is spent on thinking about whether or not
line goes up on chart.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
Totally.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
You know, on some level that's all finance is. But
I guess, like in traditional finance, I have some there's
a veneer of respect to there's a veneer, and I
have some intuitions about how the professionals in the space
make educated beds on whether the line is going up
or going to go down. And there's fundamentals and earnings
and momentum factors and all that stuff, and people different
(03:40):
try and I sort of understand what they try to do,
but I don't really know what the equivalent is in crypto.
So I think we got to learn and I think
we should talk to We got to talk to someone
who is in the space of like determining whether the
price is going up or down.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Let's do it.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
So I'm really excited.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
We have the perfect guest because not only has he
been a degenerate crypt trader for several years, it's the
first guest that we've had on on Lots who has
been sourced from our own Odd Lots discord, a active
participant in there. And I'm like, oh, this guy is
a smart guy. So why don't we like talk to
one of our own community members, a listener, someone who
(04:15):
chats with us from time to time, someone who's not
a VC writing big thought pieces about how the industry
works and the importance of memes.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
Someone who's just trading the coins.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Let's do it. Yeah, I'm excited, all right, I am
very excited.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
We are welcoming to the show. Julian Malinak. In his
professional life he does healthcare tech and data stuff, and
then in the other half of his life he's been
trading crypto for a long time. Julian, thank you so
much for coming on.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Odd lots my pleasure.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Why don't you just start off you're a crypto trader?
Speaker 4 (04:44):
How did that happen?
Speaker 5 (04:45):
Yes, So, I think that my journey was somewhat typical. Right. So,
for most of my career, I've worked in healthcare policy
and technology. I was in my early thirties working in
tech in San Francisco. If you think of crypto, it's like, Okay,
I in his early thirties in San Francisco working in tech.
That's kind of what you think of, right, you're the
architect exactly. And so I had heard about it and
(05:08):
had seen some lines going up and had some extra
money at that time. This was twenty twenty one, early
twenty twenty one, and from an early point it was
about the prices, right. I was curious about the technology,
but it really was about, Okay, these lines are going up.
It seems like people are making a lot of money.
Why not me? Right? And I think fairly quickly kind
of in that first year of trading, went through the
(05:30):
tour of opportunities available to I think the typical retail participant, right,
So started with Bitcoin and ethereum, went down the list
to like kind of the mid cap coins, right so
the top one hundred coins that are traded on exchanges,
but where there's just bigger ups and downs. Went to
kind of the world of microcaps, so coins that maybe
the market cap is one hundred thousand dollars and it
(05:52):
only trades on some on chained decks, it's probably going
to go to zero, but it might one hundred x.
So I had a few of those. A lot of
them went to zero. I had a few that did
go up a ton and made some money. And then
I also did during those first few years some yield
farming rights, so basically finding some obscure D five protocols
were they're typically rewarding users with kind of a native
(06:14):
token to a trash co liquidity and kind of like
a mercenary. I would just judge the yield verse risk
and go where it was best. And then as the
market went on. Oddly, my best week in crypto was
actually the lunar crash, whether through luck or insight, I
shorted a bunch of stuff and made a ton, and
then I think, unsurprisingly to a lot of veteran traders,
I just gave up most of that money in the
(06:35):
following months, right, And I think that often those kind
of euphoric periods you have and being your downfall, and
so I took some breaks after that. Luckily I didn't
have a lot of money in FTX, so I was
kind of taking a break from the market after that
huge you know, making a ton in Luna and losing it.
And then the past year I've gotten back into it,
focused mainly on short to mid term trades. You know,
(06:56):
I'll be honest that the strength of this rally, I
think if you had asked me a year ago, I
wouldn't have seen it going as high as it did.
But it turns out that the bitcoin ETF, as you said,
was a pretty big deal.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (07:07):
So yeah, I've continued to trade and have been watching
the markets for a while now.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
So you mentioned making money and losing money. Can you
talk to us a little bit more about what kind
of numbers we're talking about here, and beyond the Luna position,
what was the split like between money you made from
yield farming versus money just going long or short certain coins.
Speaker 5 (07:30):
You know, I started with low six figures in crypto,
made I think on my best kind of small cap
position seven figures, and then Luna was my all time high,
and I could have kind of retired not with a
ton of money, but enough to live on for a
very long time, and then gave up most of that.
I didn't lose everything, but gave up what was seven
(07:51):
figure gains essentially, yea, okay, what's that like?
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Going from having money where you're like actually could think
about retirement or maybe a modest retirement, to losing seven
It was then in that position.
Speaker 5 (08:04):
Yeah, it was funny because this is so fitting. So
I live in New York, right, and I remember in
twenty twenty two, it was like the week that I
started looking at these nice apartments to buy with cash
was the week where I wiped out forty percent of
my network. And I think that what happens in crypto
is basically it happens on both sides, right, So you're
(08:27):
early to some trend. So in my case in twenty
twenty two, I was early to the shorting or maybe
you were early to the bull market, right, And you
keep writing that and you grow more confident, right, and
you're betting bigger and bigger, and people you know who
are being conservative are making less money than the people
who are being really aggressive, right, and so you get
more and more aggressive, and then it violently shifts. Two
(08:47):
weeks ago, I heard a ton of stories from traders
I know who wiped out months and months of gains
in literally minutes, right. And I remember when this happened
to me the first time. You know, it was literally
months of I would like to say hard work, maybe
some luck wiped out in you know, an hour or two.
I had at the time been I think, going on
(09:09):
very little sleep. It was nauseating. It's hard to feel
sorry for someone who's just like gambling, right, But it
was kind of traumatic in the sense that it was
just so sudden and so fast, and I think it
really was pretty hard to recover from that from a
trading perspective, right, because you think about, oh man, I
really want to get back to that all time high,
and you're chasing that.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
I would be upset if I lost that amount of money.
Everyone would be upset.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
I think, Yeah, I can't even fathom it. It does seem
like it's like a meme. Right. People even joke like
when the coins are going up, they're like, Oh, I'm
gonna load zillow dot com right now, so you should
probably start shorting. And so it's very funny that you
were literally looking at apartments to buy in all cash.
Speaker 5 (09:49):
I'm kind of disturbed by my mindset in those times,
and I've had two or three times like that. I
think the worst was in twenty twenty two, but since then,
I've had a few blow ups like that. You know,
I've had some huge wins too, but it's just it's
really hard after you've had a series of wins to
step back, right, because you just want to keep going
and keep going.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
So you said something interesting when you got into the
crypto space about you were mostly interested in just making money,
so gambling on the price of a particular token. But
there are a lot of people out there who assign
particular values, let's say, to something like bitcoin or particular narratives,
(10:48):
maybe is a softer way of saying it. How come
you didn't get interested in that aspect of crypto.
Speaker 5 (10:54):
I think when I got in, I was actually not
that cynical, and I thought you could do both. And
I remember the really cool thing about that bull run,
as Joe said in the intro, was like it was
like using uniswap for the first time. It was like,
this is, yeah, I'm just speculating on tokens and this
kind of feels disconnected from the real world. But man,
this is so fun. It's really cool to be a participant.
(11:15):
I thought the technology was interesting and fun, if maybe
there was kind of a lack of real world relevance.
I think since then, I've gone through cycles of being
more or less cynical, and I think that when it
comes to narratives, I kind of think of four central
ideas that people talk about with crypto, right, So, the
first one is basically the casino, which is it's about
(11:40):
the tokens. People trade the tokens. Exchanges make a lot
of money off people trading the tokens, and that's what
the space is about, and everything else is kind of
narrative fluff. The second narrative idea is kind of the
store of value. This mainly applies to bitcoin. This is
digital gold, and people even take it further to talk
about bitcoin as kind of a reserve current andcy or
(12:00):
a monetary standard. And then the third kind of category
of kind of fundamental idea for lack of a better term,
i'd call future of finance. And there's a few sub
ideas here, right, So one is around being your own bank,
which is essentially the idea of interacting with financial products
without the need to trust a big bank. Right, I
can use ave and I'm just trusting the code. The
(12:21):
second sub idea is effectively kind of modernizing the financial system. Right,
so it takes what is it a day for stocks
to settle When I do a trade and on you know, Solana,
it's nearly instantaneous. And then the third thing is this
idea of tokenizing marketplaces. So I think Helium is kind
of the poster child of this. Right, I can essentially
bootstrap a marketplace using a token that I just create
(12:44):
out of thin air. I actually find that really interesting
because for my money, it's like the thing that crypto's
really good at is people can create tokens out of
thin air and people really like to speculate on them.
And if you can use that to do something in
the real world, that seems pretty interesting. And then the
four category I think of as Web three, and this
is the be your own bank idea applied to the
(13:04):
consumer Internet, you know, whether it's a social network or
a game, and in control of my own content. And
I think the odd thing about it to me is
it feels like people are either entirely skeptical, like it's
just a casino, or they're entirely on board, and it's
like we're creating the future of finance in the Internet.
And to me, I kind of have come around to
like it's mainly a casino, and I'm kind of interested
(13:25):
in some of these other ideas, Like I believe in
store of value, and I think that the idea of
token iszed marketplaces make a lot of sense. I think
Web three I'm fairly skeptical of, but I think the
ideas are quite a bit different. And sometimes it feels
like crypto's kind of just like searching for a narrative
that catches on among this kind of laundry list.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
Yeah, and some of them are contradictory too, store of
value versus casino lottery ticket right go up.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
But yeah, so in the process of identifying the next trade,
people turn this around on the stock market and I
get there's plenty of just pure gambling in the stock market,
but also in the stock market, like there is such
a thing as people who make money by looking at fundamentals,
like deeply looking at how this company is getting real
(14:11):
user traction they're really selling a product. Like in the
process of identifying the next one hundred bagg er microcap winner,
is there alpha to be found in actually identifying a
connection between what the so called project is and actual
attraction or is it mostly sort of the reflexive war
(14:33):
trading of I am going to be long this because
I have reason to think that tomorrow someone else will
belong this.
Speaker 5 (14:39):
I think that it depends on the type of trading
you're doing and the type of thesis. In my experience
with kind of the microcap on chain coins, you really
want to have a thesis that is kind of orthogonal
to price. Right. There's this marketplace called pump dot fund,
which is like anyone can create a coin there and
it just gets liquidity without any cost. And there were
(15:00):
it was like a meme coin that was like the
first one there, right, and I don't own it anymore,
but it was kind of like, well, I think people
will get on board with this because pump dot fun
is getting a ton of volume, and this is like
a proxy to be bullish on pump dot fund. By
the way, I'm not chilling this coin because I don't
own it anymore. But that's an example of a thesis
that is not directly related to price. One of the
(15:21):
best trades I ever had actually was poo coin back
in twenty twenty one, really, and that was actually a
very thesis driven trade, right because it was an application
that people used to track their kind of low cap
coins and it had this meme coin attached to it.
I think if you're just trading technicals on small caps,
it's a tough journey because it kind of is a
(15:42):
zero sum game and the insiders and developers have an
edge against you as a retail investor. So I think
you have to have some idea that is, you know,
somewhat original and is not reflected yet in price. Tracy.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Yeah, one thing I noticed is like I've seen projects
that'll say things like we're the first dog coin that
launched on Avalanche, and it's like there's no real thing
there except people are talking about this new layer one chain.
So obviously you want to buy the first dog coin
associated with that chain.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
It's like a newspeg, right, So you need a thing
to hang interest off of. But Julian, so you mentioned
some thesis driven trades, But talk to us a little
bit more about what the day to day actually looks like.
If you are in the crypto market, it doesn't sound
like it's researching the underlying technology necessarily, But are you
(16:36):
in the message boards? Are you trying to gauge upcoming
interest in a particular token or coin.
Speaker 5 (16:41):
So I'll answer that by just going through the routine
I follow when it comes to trading. So generally I
try not to trade for the first half hour or
so after getting up, just because I don't really know
what's happening in the market until I've had a bit
of a time to digest it. I'll go in some
disco groups, I'll go on Twitter, I'll look at the charts,
and I'll often have a hypothesis about how bo the
week and the day will unfold. And that just helps
(17:03):
because I want to have a hypothesis that's falsifiable. So
I might look at the markets and say I think
it's sideways bullish today, right, So I kind of want
to look for longs and maybe some countertrend shorts, and
so I'll maybe have a few trade ideas, and often
for me, it's like I'm looking at maybe Bitcoin Ethereum,
maybe like a few at coins that are particularly volatile
that day, and basically I'll just kind of, you know,
(17:25):
look at the charts and some of the technical tools
that we can talk about, and I'll have a hypothesis
that's like, Okay, I'm I'm kind of bullish on the day,
so I want to get into a long position to
this coin, but I kind of bet it goes back
to this zone. So maybe I'll set up price alert
right for a few coins where it's like I'm I
don't want to just ape in immediately to this up proNT,
I want to wait a bit. So maybe I've spent
the first hour or two kind of getting a handle
(17:46):
on what's going on in the market, is there any
major news, setting some kind of price alerts for areas
of interest for different coins, And then honestly it's kind
of waiting around just observing, right, And often I'll kind
of have a feeling of like, okay, am I understanding
what's happening? Right? If I think that it's a sideways
bullish day. Is is it playing.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
Out like that?
Speaker 5 (18:06):
And maybe one of my alerts goes off right, and
it's kind of like, Okay, this coin is kind of
in an area where I thought it might be interesting
too long, and so I'll kind of enter a position.
And once I've entered a position, then at least for
like short to midterm training, it becomes a matter of
actively managing it. And if the thesis is I think
it's going to bounce around here, I want to see
a pretty quick reaction or I'm out of the trade.
(18:28):
Once I'm in a position, I'm kind of watching closely
and I don't want to necessarily overmanage. But if the
thesis is one about how it reacts, you know, in
a kind of minute to minute basis, if I'm not
seeing what I want to see, then I want to
get out of the trade immediately. So that's kind of
one type of way I deal with short to mid
turn trades. Another way I might spend a day as
kind of looking at different narratives. Right, So, like recently
(18:50):
some of these real world asset coins have done well,
So like onto Finance is one that's they're like taking
treasury bonds and putting them on chain, and it's kind
of like I was looking into that a while. It
was like, I just think people are going to get
really excited about anything that relates to the real world
because so much of this space is so abstract, and
so you know, Onto's one, but are there other coins
(19:10):
that are in this real world asset space? So I'll
kind of look on Twitter and maybe Massari, which is
kind of a good research service that puts together different articles,
and I'll kind of get us and say, Okay, here's
like five coins in this rural asset space that maybe
I want to get into long positions on. And then
I'll look at the chart and say, okay, maybe I'll
enter now, maybe I'll wait a bit. But really a
lot of it is just about I have a hypothesis
(19:32):
about how price will react, or I'm looking to get
into a position, and then I'm just waiting until that happens.
For me, when I think about the times I've made
money and the times i haven't, some of it is luxure,
but there's this emotional state when I'm doing well of
almost a kind of bored curiosity. It's like the opposite
of fomo, right, So I just want to be sitting
around I maybe watching the price action, and it's really
(19:56):
boring because I'm just waiting to see something clear, and
you know, most of the time of the market you
just don't want to be entering. So that's kind of
a typical day, and it's it's not that exciting. I
think if it's done well.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
I find it actually very interesting.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
They say, like professional poker players, which seems like it
be fun. If you're doing it well, it should be boring,
and that actually it's this miserable existence of spending twelve
hours in the day and mostly folding your hands and
mostly letting cards go by, and then waiting for opportunities.
Poker well played in a cash game in a casino
is not fun. Something I'm curious about. You know, with
(20:32):
the launch of the Bitcoin ETF for the first time,
there is a segment of traders that is on New
York time, specifically bitcoin and crypto has always been twenty
four to seven, but now there is this segment of
trading that happens between nine thirty am Eastern and four
pm Eastern, maybe some after hour stuff.
Speaker 4 (20:50):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Can you talk a little bit about time zones and
the different flavors of the market between when New York
is up versus Asian hours versus maybe I don't know
if European Hour is inflected so much.
Speaker 5 (21:02):
Yeah, that's a good question. And it's funny because some
of the better short term traders I know, we'll talk
in great detail about the different zones, and it's like,
this is the London kill zone from these two hours.
I'm just like, can we just knock get so feis?
But I do think the markets offer some differences, right, So,
I think the New York hours tend to be, at
(21:24):
least for what I do, a little bit better. There's
a little bit more liquidity that the wics tend to
be a little bit less involved overnight for me as
someone who lives in New York, like the Asian hours
there just tends to be a little bit more scammingists
by scamming us something like weird kind of wis and stuff,
and it feels like liquidity is often lower. It's funny
(21:46):
because I sometimes like to trade these kind of long
tail alt coins and sometimes you just see like really
wacky things happen at strange hours, right, So it's like
here's a project that is like founded by you know,
an American team and backed by American investors, but for
some reason, there's just a ton of interest in this
project at three am on a Friday night, and it's like,
(22:06):
I wonder what that is. You know, it's manipulation, right,
but I think sometimes you see some really interesting manipulations
in the Asian hours, right where there's not the big
kind of New York liquidity, and that can be fun
to trade. I think that as someone who you know
sometimes likes to short things, I've definitely been tapped out
a few times because I've gone a bit too early
(22:26):
on some of those scamming up trends in.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Terms of being tapped out. This is the other thing
I was wondering, But what sort of risk management goes
into positions here? And how are you keeping track of them?
Because I imagine you're probably using a wallet, maybe multiple wallets,
maybe different platforms. How are you sort of netting out
those positions and managing that risk.
Speaker 5 (22:49):
I think now I try not to do many trades
at once, and again, it's very easy to sound wise
about risk management, and it's much harder to follow my
own advice. But what I try to do is especially
with these kind of either a short term trade or
a counter trend trade. Typically I want to see reaction immediately.
As a rule for myself, I have to have a
(23:09):
stop loss. Right. In other words, if I'm longing a
coin that just dropped thirty percent, I'm gonna have a
stop where if it goes below a certain price, I
exit the trade. But really I want to exit the
trade immediately if it's not reacting the way I want
it to before it hits my stop loss. So I
think for me, the best risk management is, yeah, you
have a stop loss. I don't want my account to
(23:30):
be liquidated like used to happen to me, But I
really just want to cut immediately if it's not going
in my direction, and particularly on a trade that's like
I'm shorting a coin that just went up fifty percent
or I'm long end coin that went down a lot, Right,
you just have to be really decisive in terms of
trade management. There's various tools out there. I just crack
(23:50):
it in an Excel sheet that steers, you know, the trade,
here's the idea behind it, Here's how much I made
or lost. I think it's a little bit different for
longer term positions where it's I'm just gonna buy some
of this spot coin and try to hold it for
a few months and see what happens. I still treat
that as a trade, but it's a little bit less.
Maybe I don't have a stop loss because it's just
a spot position.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
So you mentioned as part of your research or news
consumption gathering, like going into various discords, and one of
the things that strikes me about crypto is like a
everyone is highly aware of the existence of manipulation. B
You sometimes hear people talk very overtly about being part
of a pump, and sometimes I'll get, you know, it's
(24:29):
like this is a group and like, you know, sort
of work together to like build hype for the coin,
and I get the impression, though maybe I'm wrong, that
people are searching for the inner sanctum, finding that one
telegram group where there really is like people can move
a market, or the one discord whether there's real alpha.
Can you talk about like the process of identifying where
(24:51):
good chat happens.
Speaker 5 (24:53):
I've been in a lot of different discord groups, and
some of them are like people giving trade setups, and
it's always that's interesting how you can have two traders
trading the same trade setup with dramatically different results because
of how they execute and manage their trades. The best
groups I'm in, I'm not in that many now are
just a relatively small amount of people basically talking. It's
(25:16):
people sharing ideas. Maybe there's someone who's quite good and
they're giving some setups. It's not just like here's a
trader giving a trade setup, right. I think those rarely work.
And there's even kind of memes like the Kramer etf
the reverse. There's even things of like, here's this crypto
influencer who's always wrong and we should fade them. Right.
(25:37):
I think you're right that there is this notion of Okay,
a lot of these pump and dump groups you don't
want to be in because by the time they're shilling
it to their followers, the pump has already happened and
they're going to dump on the followers. Right. I have
not found a lot of people that have successfully found
the inner groups, right. I think the better move is
to just try to identify the pumps somewhat early. And
(25:59):
I think the bull market, like a few months ago,
this was particularly good at this right, So like there
was this coin Tia, which is like a modular blockchain token.
You know, maybe it's you know, revolutionary technology, but the
important thing is like it was kind of a hot
narrative and a new token, and it was just going up,
and I knew a lot of people who got in early,
and it was kind of just like, I just think
(26:21):
that through manipulation and through a lot of fomo, this
thing is going to go a lot higher. And it did.
And so I don't think you need to be part
of a pump and dumb group. I think if you
are an alert trader, you kind of identify some of
these opportunities. I do think it's becoming a bit harder
kind of the past week or two since the market
has been a little more choppy and a bit down.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
Obviously, you've been trading crypto, and we've been very focused
on that in this conversation, but have you ever been
tempted by more well, I don't even want to say
traditional assets, but something like zero day or one day
options on equities, because you could potentially get the same
satisfaction of seeing the line go up up in a
(27:00):
relatively short amount of time.
Speaker 5 (27:02):
I've thought about it. I think that I would like
to think that I'm not just purely gambling, even though
I think that a lot of what we're doing in
crypto is effectively gambling when I think about crypto, and
I think that's a fair question, like why trade crypto
versus another market?
Speaker 4 (27:17):
Right?
Speaker 5 (27:17):
I think one answer is because you think it's an
important technology and you want to invest in the future.
And I would love to believe that more than I do,
And I do believe that for a few things like
bitcoin and maybe a few specific coins. But I think
the reasons are more of like the trader reasons, right,
So I think that the manipulations in crypto are just
more apparent than in other markets. So one thing you
(27:40):
often see is like stop punts. For example, right, say
there's a coin that's like gone down, it's gone between
twelve and fifteen dollars, You'll often see this quick wick
below twelve dollars, and then it'll pump to like twenty dollars, right,
And what's happening there, And again, it's not that simple
to trade this, But what's happening is like there's a
bunch of long positions with their stops below that kind
(28:02):
of recent low of twelve dollars. So what the kind
of market is going to do is it's gonna manipulate
the price below that. It's gonna tap all those people
out and maybe liquidate some positions, and then often it'll reverse.
And I remember when I started trading futures, I kept
losing money because I would place these obvious stop losses
and they would get hunted. And so one thing that
(28:22):
I think I'm doing when I'm trading well is I'm
almost countertrading myself, right, I'm countertrading who I was when
I started trading futures, which was like, I'm just going
to place this obvious stop because if it goes there,
it's probably gonna go a lot lower. And so I
just think those opportunities are not quite as good in
traditional markets. That said, they're not easy in crypto, it's
(28:43):
just that I think that it's a little bit less efficient.
And by the way, I'm not sure how long crypto
will stay that way, right, I could see a world
where in five ten years it's just been captured a
bit more.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Yeah, it does seem what you say makes total sense
that various sort of quasi manipulations are more obvious it's
clearly a less liquid, even Bitcoin a less liquid, less efficient,
wider spreads than legacy markets.
Speaker 5 (29:13):
Yeah, and I think they're all double edged swords, right, So, like, yes,
they're manipulated and inefficient, but I've been on the wrong
side of predatory manipulation before, and like, I don't blame
anyone but myself, I kind of wish that I had
of you that it was really bad, right, because I
feel like for the stock market, I think that kind
of blatant manipulation and pump and dumping is kind of
a bad thing. And I wish that my view of
(29:35):
crypto was like, this is a really serious space where
we're creating really important stuff. And I would love to
think that in a few years, right, And I'd love
to kind of see more projects where I take it
seriously and think that manipulation is bad. But I think
for now it's like that's more of a feature than
a bug as a trader, right, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (29:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Can I ask a slightly personal question going back to
this idea of you being in some ways the archetypal
crypto trader, Why is it all guys? That's obviously a
massive generalization. I'm sure there are some women out there
trading crypto, but it does overwhelmingly seem to be men.
Because the other thing I would say is when we
(30:14):
go back to the narratives and this idea of like
we're building a fairer financial system, it always struck me
as crazy that we're going to build a fairer financial
system with bitcoin or whatever and half the population is
basically being left out of it.
Speaker 5 (30:28):
Yeah, so it's definitely overwhelmingly young men. I meet people
who are in their teams up to like early forties. Right.
It's fairly global, and as you said, there are some women,
but very few particularly, I think in the kind of
trading world, you know. And I'd kind of be curious
on how to compare to other forms of speculation, like
(30:48):
among the population of people who are doing zero day options.
I bet that skews male as well, although probably not
nearly as much as crypto. I think that part of
it is the culture, right, So there's definitely this vibe
among a lot of traders, mostly young men. And I
don't really believe this, but it's kind of like this
is your last chance to get rich before the fall
(31:11):
of Western civilization, rightting, And I don't believe that, but
like that's kind of the feeling and like it kind
of is adjacent to kind of the hustle culture, right,
and the kind of like be a man and you know,
hustle and make your own way. And I think that's
definitely part of the culture of crypto. I think that
there is kind of this human capital component that like
(31:31):
when I think of my career, like not to toot
my own horn, but I feel like I've been pretty
good at the jobs I've done, and you know, I've
spent a fair amount of time trading now, and I'm
kind of like, is it Is it a great thing
that a lot of guys like me are spending all
this time gambling. I don't know if it's awesome for society, right.
I feel like I can say that because it's being
hard on myself more than anyone else, right. But I
think that's a kind of another thing about crypto, which
(31:54):
is I think one way to think about it is
like there's a supply and demand for gambling and speculation, right,
and so when I walk around New York and see
the sports betting ads, right, it's kind of like, oh,
this is kind of meaningful competition, right, where we're talking
about kind of the demand among mostly young men for
you know, speculation, and yeah, what are the options we
have crypto, you have sports betting, you have things like
(32:16):
zero day options and meme stocks. With that said, I
really hope that I'm not super optimistic, but I would
love for in five years to be like, Wow, this
market created all this useful stuff and it's more like
the stock market. And yeah there's speculation, but it relates
to these things in the real world in a more
tangible way. But right now it does feel like it's
mostly guys, you know, speculating.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah, it feels like that to your point, like that's
sort of like and probably the fight club philosophy of
if you don't make a fortune now before you're like
twenty five, you're gonna be doing a nine to five
off his job until you're sixty five and then they'll
give you a watch and then. And it feels like
that message just gets hammered home over and over again
(33:15):
that if you don't score the big bag soon, you're
going to live a life of basically working for the
man in some miserable existence under terrible fluorescent lighting for
the rest of your life.
Speaker 4 (33:26):
It seems like.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
That, so I want to you know, I like talking
to you because you're frank about the fact that you
like trading it, but that may be your aspirations for
the technology may not materialize.
Speaker 4 (33:38):
I feel like.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
One of my frustrations when I talk to people who
are professionals in the space, particularly operators or vcs, not
necessarily traders, like I feel like I'm frequently being gas
lit in the sense that they'll tell me something about
some extraordinary thing that they're doing that's important technologically. In
my sense is that it roots their you and that
it really they're like, they're just in it for the gamble,
(34:02):
And I'm curious in your interactions with various people parts
of the ecosystem. Is this just me being like sort
of like super cynical and I should be more open,
or do you also observe this gap between like you,
we're like building this really important thing for tokenizing real
world assets and bridging them across chains.
Speaker 4 (34:20):
Et cetera, but that at heart it's about the line.
Speaker 5 (34:24):
So I think that in my experience, I've talked with
a lot of both venture investors and founders, and over
the past year I've kind of was curious about whether
there was something useful I could do with crypto, and
was kind of have been working on and off on
this idea of like, you know, I've worked in health
data and it's like, okay, I like the idea of
tokenized marketplaces. Is there a way to kind of incent
(34:47):
people to contribute their health data using a token, right,
And it's kind of just like, well, you can create
a token out of thin air, and that's a better
cost of capital. So there are some interesting ideas here.
And I've talked with a lot of vcs and founders
and kind of try to suss out this question, as
you mentioned, of like do people really believe in this
stuff or are they just like me, Like maybe they
believe in a few things, but mostly they're just trading
(35:08):
the narratives. And I've come around to the fact that
I think most people actually, yeah, maybe they're trading and
pumping and dumping a little bit, but they do believe
in the technology. And I say that just because it's
just hard to work on this stuff. And I think
it's hard to raise funds from like LPs if you
don't have some conviction that we're actually changing the world.
(35:30):
And I don't want to say that everyone's just you know,
it's all motivated reasoning, right, But I think that for
better or for worse, that's what a lot of folks believe.
That the stuff really is going to be revolutionary and
that the infrastructure we're creating will really have an impact.
I'm skeptical of most of it, but I hope I'm wrong, right,
And maybe I am, but I think that your instinct
(35:51):
to be skeptical is correct. But I would just say
I kind of want to take people out their word,
you know, and if people are really saying that they
think this is going to be this revolutionary technology, like,
I think it's worth arguing kind of on the merits
of that.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
I have just one more question, which is, if you
made seven figures again, would you stop trading crypto and retire?
Speaker 5 (36:14):
So I've done fine recently, I've you know, made some money.
I think that what I would do if I were
to get back to kind of I don't even want
to say my prior all time high, which was quite
a bit. I've tried to just let go of that
line of thinking altogether, actually, because I think a lot
of the problem I ran into was basically having this
(36:34):
notion of making it back, and so for me, I've
tried to get rid of any notion of making a
certain amount and just more focusing on the discipline of trading.
I do think that, you know, and it goes back
to the human capital part of this. I don't want
to look back and be like, oh, I just traded
for years and years on end, because when I look
at my career, I think the other stuff I've done
is probably you know, more valuable, and I think maybe
(36:56):
there's like some way I can bring crypto into the
other part of my career. Yeah, I don't want to
be trading for like decades and decades, but the notion
of getting back to a certain number and then quitting,
I don't even want to think about that because that
that got me into a lot of trouble.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Just get back there, then sell half. Julian Melanach, so
great to have you on. Great to have our first
discord derived guest. People should come into the discord and
chat with Julian, and great to have a sort of
very fresh, honest, nuanced take on crypto, which is sort
of rare.
Speaker 4 (37:27):
So really appreciate you coming on off on. Thanks so much, Tracy.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
I really enjoyed that conversation. It was super interesting. I
appreciated that he was like kind of cynical, like I
am totally cynical, and seemed fairly honest about like where
his own like sort of marking to market his sort
of thoughts in real time.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Yeah, it was also interesting to hear. I'm not sure
I want to say due diligence, but the trading process
on a day to day basis, and I think, like
many things, it's not one extreme or the other. It's
not just throwing darts at a board of tokens, but
it's also not developing fundamental theories of technology and the
future all the time. It's sort of somewhere in the middle.
(38:22):
And then again the importance of narratives, which I think
we got into it, but especially when it comes to bitcoin.
One of the strengths of bitcoin at this point has
to be its ability to contain multitudes of narratives, often
conflicting ones as I mentioned, and just jumping from thing
to thing, like disintermediating the entire financial system, but also
(38:45):
boosting profit margins for Black Rock.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
I don't know, I'm going to say something that I'm
purposely leaving to the end. So hopefully maybe some people
are already too.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
No one we'll actually hear it.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Yeah, So I'm going to say something, which is I've
developed a theory of crypto trying to think about how
I can say this in the least insulting way.
Speaker 4 (39:02):
I'm not going to use it. I'm not going to
use any name calling.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
But what I think is that trading is fun in
the sense that it's exciting to bet onlines. And I've
done that in past lives, or twenty years ago when
I was in college, I had a good time.
Speaker 4 (39:15):
Made and lost some money.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
I think that it's very hard, and most people intuitively
know that it's very difficult in the stock market because
there are armies of professionals looking at every piece of data,
every piece of fundamental data, every piece of factor data,
every piece.
Speaker 4 (39:32):
Of flow data.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
There are one hundred there are multi billion dollar institutions
that have been doing this for decades. There are thousands
of books that have been done on how to do this.
I think most people intuitively know that it's difficult to
find some sort of edge in security selection. And I
think that one of the attractions of crypto is basically
(39:53):
a stock market for.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
Oh, here you go, yeah, who.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
It's an easier stock market. Yes, that it's like kind
of like stocks, except it seems a little easier because
you could say, yeah, I think that the first dog
coin on pump DoD fund will do well. I think
that people are going to be into tokenization regardless of
whether tokenization is happening.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
I think that's a nice way of saying it would be.
It's a more level playing field in some way.
Speaker 2 (40:21):
In some ways, I believe, and even hearing Julian described
that one nice thing potentially if you're a little bit
savvy and crypto, is understanding manipulation patterns, the ease of
identifying stop hunts. I like the way he put it
where he says, I'm trading against the twenty twenty one
version of me that left very obvious tells in the
nature of the way I traded. It feels like a
(40:42):
stock market where you don't need to be a super
pro sa fata win.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
Here's what I think. It's all about the narratives picking
up on the next big thing that's going to drive
the price either higher or lower. And in that respect,
if you're just a person that spends a lot of
time on the internet, you might have a better handle.
Speaker 4 (41:03):
That's a great point.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
On those narratives, that's a great.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
Point, Like if it's all about the narratives, then you know,
maybe really just being on Twitter and the discords is
actually alpha.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
Yeah. And if it's all about the narratives and the stories,
you either trade crypto or you become a VC.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
I guess yeah, right, it's the same thing.
Speaker 3 (41:20):
All right, shall we leave it there.
Speaker 4 (41:21):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
This has been another episode of the All Loots podcast.
I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (41:28):
And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Follow our guest Julian Malinak. He's at Julian Malinac and
you should come into the discord and chat with Julian
because he hangs out there. Follow our producers Kerman Rodriguez
at Carman ermann dash O Bennett at Dashbot, Keil Brooks
at kel Brooks. Thank you to our producer Moses on
them From more Odd Loots content, go to bloomberg dot
com slash odd Lots, where we have transcripts the blog
(41:51):
in a newsletter and check out that Discord, Discord, dot gg, slash, odlts.
Speaker 3 (41:55):
And if you enjoy odd Lots. If you like this conversation,
then please leave us a positive review on your favorite
podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber,
you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free.
All you need to do is connect your Bloomberg subscription
with Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening.
Hosts And Creators
Joe Weisenthal
Tracy Alloway
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