Cred

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My thoughts on $ANSEM (nobody asked) are that I’m too old and too washed for this shit I’m also not super sold that bringing back the trenches is a worthwhile objective given they were one of the most efficient retail slaughterhouses we’ve seen in a while Pic related GM https://t.co/ocwz5UgC39

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

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