ctoshii

Do you want to be right, or do you want to make money?

-Class of 2021-

[ctoshii @cuantoshi]

Good thread on trading. Using the example of $ZEC in the last 1 year

[Tulip King 🌷 @tulipking]

Now that I’m finally ready to walk away from the Zcash chart, let me walk you through my nearly year long trade. Hopefully you learn something about how to manage conviction and risk.

Mid Jul 2025: @kelxyz_ invited me to a pitch dinner where everybody was supposed to share a fun trade idea and all debate them. I wanted to do a good job so I spent a lot of time researching the market, specifically assets over $1B because it would’ve felt sus to suggest something smaller. That’s when I noticed Monero was actually the top large asset YTD. This piqued my interest in privacy as an emerging narrative and I tweeted about it July 11th without taking a position personally.

> I think this teaches the value of always looking for new trends and ideas. I had been ruminating and monitoring the privacy thesis for 3 months before ever even buying Zcash. Research and work you do in a bear market converts to profits in a bull market.

October 1 2025: I saw @mert bull posting Zcash and meme’d that I wasn’t gonna copy trade him. Later that night I realized I was being stupid. Zcash overlapped with my growing conviction in privacy and I shouldn’t fade a good chart just because Mert was tweeting about it. As @IvanOnTech says, “respect all pumps”. I bought zec and went on a rampage to build as much conviction in the coin as I could

> I think this teaches the importance of avoiding “right thesis, wrong coin”. The best traders I know respect the charts. You should have a healthy reverence for the market. when it moves in unexpected ways, your first duty is to give it the benefit of the doubt and re-evaluate your initial assumptions. This applies on the way up and on the way down.

I then spent all of October bull posting & arguing with as many accounts as possible. This is an essential part of my personal approach to building conviction. CT has the brightest minds in my opinion, the fact we can all debate in public and you have reach beyond the size of your own account is awesome.

> I think this shows the importance of engaging on this platform. I love 100k follower accounts as much as I love 100 follower accounts. I try my best to reply to as many good-faith non-bot comments as humanly possible because I want everybody to know I’m an account inclined to reply to you and engage in discourse.

October 30, 2025: I called Zcash would flip Hyperliquid, despite everybody coming out of the woodwork to clown me, this happened Nov 7-8ish for a brief moment.

> I think this shows the importance of remembering your duty as a trader is to yourself. At that moment in time it was wrong to be married to hyperliquid bags. In other moments it’s wrong to be married to zcash bags. I guess there’s even times where it’s bad to be married to Bitcoin. DO NOT become a community member ever. *if you’re a trader, if you’re an investor it’s different.

Nov 7, 2025: Zcash had just flipped Hyperliquid and I was up ~6x. The position was reaching a point where I couldn’t focus on anything else, I could feel my own euphoria. I forget who, but somebody shared @blknoiz06 's beautiful Feb 17, 2021 thread about how to sell parabolic moves. I overlayed his parabola indicator on the zec chart and it was a perfect fit, time to sell. I sold roughly half the position to lock in profits and cold stored the other half as a zero-cost basis moon bag given I still believed in the fundamentals of Zcash and was willing to ride a potential downturn. This turned out to be a perfect sale at the top

> I think this shows the importance of managing your own emotions and using the sell button maturely. You don’t have to full stack buy and full stack sell. When a position runs up like crazy, you can sell a portion of the position that brings some sanity back to your life. I find realizing PnL almost always clears my head. Am I so happy with these dollars that I want to sell more? Am I having fomo such that I should buy back in? Am I happy with this new size?

> In my opinion having a mature relationship with the buy/sell button - don’t buy or sell all at once, learn to scale in and out with rising and falling conviction - is the single greatest way to improve your trading ability.

Through the end of 2025 and into 2026 I would talk about Zcash a little but mostly to affirm I like the coin & thesis but am being patient.

> Obviously this shows the importance of being patient when you have real belief

April 4th 2026: I noticed a bunch more concerning government regulation; conscriptions, wealth taxes, and ai surveillance. Bitcoin looked like it was starting an uptrend, everybody was buying the Hyperliquid dip, and the Zcash chart had a beautiful rounded bottom. So I longed more on perps. The best thing I did in this window of trading was consistently taking profits into spot positions (mostly HYPE but some additional ZEC too). I did not capture the full move from $250 to $700 on leverage but I was able to acquire a bunch of HYPE (that I still hold now) and modestly grow my ZEC bag.

> Candidly I’m less inclined to recommend people trade as actively as I was during this time period but I felt there was edge in my ability to get bullish for the mini-alt cycle before everybody else, and I had confidence in my own ability to consistently lock in profits to avoid getting over my skis. Perhaps it’s worth noting that my trading Style in this April - June 2026 cycle was much more active than my trading patterns October - November 2025. I think there’s something to be said about knowing when to buy & hold vs actively trade in and out of a position. There’s a time and place for both.

June 3 2026: ZODL posted a post mortem of the Orchard Vulnerability. Two things immediately stuck out to me
1. within 48 hours they had censored orchard transactions with a softfork and pushed a hardfork through the network. No matter what anybody says, I interpret that as a high level of centralization. That’s bad with respect to the “Zcash is a viable alternative to Bitcoin” thesis
2. the blog was being cheeky with their language around the vulnerability. “shielded pool soundness vulnerability” and “In this case, successful exploitation could have allowed the Orchard pool to accept invalid state transitions, potentially affecting the pool's accounting guarantees.” both struck me as ways to avoid saying, we found a double-spend vulnerability (worst case scenario).

I got to work with ChatGPT trying to make sense of what I was reading, seeing if I could validate my level of concern. Between my own technical experience and an assessment from ChatGPT, I felt comfortable posting and raising my concern. Much of the Zcash community and even ZODL leadership went to war in my replies. Despite everything they said, I remained unconvinced this wasn’t a big problem so I went on stream to lay out what I still believe to be a fair assessment of the situation.

^ Let me address another thing here. [centralization concerns aside] It doesn’t matter to the perspective of the market that the inability to audit these pools has always been there (vulnerability or not). What matters is that most people buying zec didn’t understand this dynamic, myself included. Fwiw I consider myself in the top 99.9% of crypto and technical knowledge, if I don’t understand it, nobody else does either. The market was going to have to price in this new risk.

These compounding factors gave me confidence to completely flip a large long position to a large short position. I had edge because I understood something better than most participants in the market.

> I’m so proud of this trade. It represents so many traits of what I think make me a good trader
1. It relies on real technical understanding to build an opinion quicker than others
2. It relies on an accurate vibes based read on my fellow market participants
3. It relies on trading discipline to be able to so rapidly invert a position I had been loud and public about in the past
**Btw all of these traits are things you can develop.

June 4 2026: Zooko posted his blog, I collected flowers from my clip, and I closed the short. From my perspective Zooko’s blog was incredible. He addressed the reality of the situation with honesty, candor, and a forward looking plan. He did not invalidate the concerns of anybody or try to sugarcoat the situation, all while keeping a cool head. I have an incredible amount of respect for Zooko personally and the Zcash project in general.

That said, the blog was my signal to close the trade. I believed I had unique edge in my understanding of the situation and Zooko’s blog addressed the situation with such honesty, it seemed like the market had caught up to me and my edge had eroded. My trade was officially over from my perspective.

> In retrospect I could have held the short longer but it’s so hard to trade when you’re the center of attention on ct. there’s nothing like it. You get completely trapped in a bubble where your entire timeline is engaging with you, it makes it seem like your trade is much more consensus than it is in reality. My respect for big accounts like @notthreadguy and many others who trade in public has gone up tremendously.

Looking forward I do see a path where ZCash can come back stronger than ever. They’re developing new cryptographic primitives and working on formal verification to give provable assurances of solvency, I hope they win. Privacy is a fundamental human right and we’re lucky so many people are passionately working on it. Remember that Solana had to suffer years of crashes & instability to finally be ready for its time in the sun during the memecoin mania. That’s not to say ZCash is a guaranteed winner anymore (it never was) but it is to say I don’t think it’s worth zero.

However I will be stepping away from the Zcash chart and watching from the sidelines for a while. My emotions are so high on this asset that I don’t feel I can trade it effectively without some time to cool off. Instead there’s other coins and narratives inside of crypto I find interesting now +plus stuff in TradFi like AI Pharma! I’m going to hang this chart on my wall and move on to new trades.

- Tulip King 🌷👑❤️

[ctoshii @cuantoshi]

I'm still here, trying to survive

[jez (equity perps era) @izebel_eth]

jokes aside, going to sign off on this note before going to bed:

im one of the bigger crypto believers i know, and these past six months have tested me like no other bear has, mainly for the fact that i don't see any easy way out/reason it'd turn around quickly

people are leaving who wont come back right away, capital continues to choose better opportunities with more certainty, dat overhangs will cast a long shadow

and thats coming from a position of strength, spot/cash - those who believed on leverage or picked the wrong coins are going through worse trials

its going to get worse before it gets better

but it will get better, it always does, theres a finite supply of btc in an infinite money printing world, and some day in the next year after leaving and not paying attn those people will realize btc is 80k again, and if it can survive saylor it can survive anything

[ctoshii @cuantoshi]

Reversal incoming?

[Alpha_Ex_LLC @Alpha_Ex_LLC]

There's so much to say about this chart. it shows to very related measures: the ratio of the single stock VIX (VIXEQ) to the $VIX versus SPX 1m implied correlation.
The higher the ratio the lower the implied correl and you can see we are an absolute extreme.
You might say the market is "complacent" by way of the record low IC. Agree the sense that there is a disregard for the potential for a macro shock that hits all assets at once. Said shock would move the current level down and to the right in the chart.
But what's really driving the ratio up and IC down is the level of single stock implied volatility. The number of stocks enveloped in a "spot up, vol up" dynamic is significant. Thus, the VIXEQ is higher now than at the peak of the market shock in late March!
When a stock surges, investors who want to stay long but are worried the rug may be pulled out start looking at call options. They allow you to walk away if things reverse. That demand forces implied vol higher. From the option seller's standpoint, stocks are exhibiting huge one-day "up shocks" that are both difficult and costly to hedge. That gets priced in.
I am reposting my Tweet here on "SK Hijinks" because it' may be the strongest example of the feedback loop between price, implied vol and the overlay of short gamma products.
I think we are getting closer to a tipping point and there's a sharp, tradable reversal forthcoming.
https://t.co/jOrMKeNG13

[Coin Bureau @coinbureau]

ANYONE with a laptop can now access spy-grade surveillance tools for FREE.

It's called OSIRIS, an open-source clone of Palantir $PLTR, the $324 BILLION intelligence company.

It lets anyone WATCH every commercial flight, spy satellite, and CCTV cameras.

It tracks military jets, detects GPS jamming, and maps active war zones.

All updating LIVE, in ONE browser tab, free FOREVER.

Governments paid Palantir MILLIONS per year for tools like this.

The CIA's playbook is now public domain.

[ctoshii @cuantoshi]

@TheStalwart Sorry it's unreadable

[ctoshii @cuantoshi]

Papertrade xyz

[Sam @0xCryptoSam]

This is the most unique perps exchange design I've seen in a while. Particularly because of the $PAPER mechanism.

Here's how it works:

> @papertrade_xyz is a synthetic perps protocol on HyperEVM without fees, funding, or slippage.

> If you lose a trade, your full margin goes to the LP. If you win, you get paid but the protocol takes a fee on your gain - the fee is smaller for big moves, bigger for tiny moves. That haircut is the protocol's only revenue.

> The LP starts at $0. It fills purely from trader losses. If the LP can't pay a winner immediately, the payout enters an onchain FIFO debt queue and gets paid as the LP refills.

> Losing traders receive PAPER tokens. The lower the LP balance, the more PAPER you mint per dollar lost.

> PAPER can be staked to earn USDC dividends - a continuous cut of LP revenue. Once the LP exceeds $5M, all surplus gains go entirely to stakers.

> When the LP is low, emissions are high, so this is theoretically the time to accumulate PAPER cheap (also the riskiest period - if volume dries up, the LP doesn't earn any revenue and the whole flywheel breaks).

> When the LP is high ($5M), dividends are high, so this is theoretically best time to be staking.

> With sufficient volume, both states create buying/holding pressure on the token.

-----

Holding/staking $PAPER is essentially betting that traders will lose against the house, which is arguably one of the most reliable bets you can make (and a good hedge if you're a degen perps trader).

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

I stopped buying $200+ online courses.
I canceled 3 “premium” learning subscriptions.

No more swiping my card for classes I never finish.

Claude turned YouTube, podcasts, and free PDFs into my own structured degree.

Here are 12 prompts that build a personal “Netflix of learning” for $0/month (Save this).

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

https://t.co/eKMtyDCcJv

[ctoshii @cuantoshi]

Best explanation on KelpDAO issue

[Zach Rynes | CLG @ChainLinkGod]

Look guys, it's actually really straightforward, a bunch of people staked their ETH on the Ethereum blockchain to earn yield, except they didn't want their capital to be locked up, so they actually staked with a liquid staking protocol called Lido who provided them a liquid staking receipt token called stETH, except they decided to juice their yield further by depositing their stETH receipt tokens into a restaking protocol called Eigenlayer, except they didn't want to lock up their capital, so they actually restaked with a liquid restaking protocol called KelpDAO who provided them with a liquid restaking receipt token called rsETH, except they decided to juice their yield further by depositing their rsETH tokens into a lending protocol called Aave so that they could open a leveraged looping position that borrows ETH against the rsETH collateral and restakes the ETH into rsETH which is then deposited as collateral, except it turns out rsETH used a cross-chain bridge called LayerZero that was hacked by north koreans causing rsETH to become undercollateralized and now these looping positions are stuck and unprofitable, and everyone is pointing fingers at each other, and also DeFi is a very serious industry

[Adam @abetrade]

https://t.co/u3GZ1hkRQS

[Ray Dalio @RayDalio]

Most people look at wars as isolated events.

I look at them as part of a Big Cycle that has repeated many times, so for me watching what is happening is like watching a movie I've seen many times before.

What we’re seeing now with Iran and the battle of the Strait of Hormuz is part of that cycle and is connected to and will have big implications for what happens all over the world. 

I explore these issues with those who run governments, geopolitical experts, and people around the world, and almost all agree that it will have big consequences for the monetary order, the domestic political order, and the international geopolitical order.

That is why I believe it is important to see the war with Iran as part of a greater world war and see to how it is evolving as a big cycle. 

I created this condensed five-minute animation to provide an overview of these patterns and the cause-and-effect relationships behind them. For a deeper understanding, I have linked the full 45-minute video, “Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order,” in the comments.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

🚨 Someone built an AI that reads candlestick charts the way GPT reads English.

Trained on 12 billion records from 45 exchanges. Outperforms every model by 93%. Live BTC demo. Free.

It's called Kronos.

The first open source foundation model built for financial markets. Not a general AI repurposed for finance. An AI that speaks the native language of candlestick patterns.

Every other model treats financial data like weather data. Kronos treats financial data like financial data.

Here's what it does:

→ Price forecasting. Feed it candlesticks. It predicts where price goes next.
→ Volatility prediction. Forecasts how volatile an asset will be before it happens.
→ Zero-shot. No fine-tuning. Works on any asset, any market, any timeframe.
→ 45 exchanges. Binance, NYSE, NASDAQ, LSE, and 41 more.
→ 4 model sizes. 4M params runs on a laptop. 499M for max accuracy.
→ Live demo running right now. BTC/USDT. 24-hour forecast. Updated hourly.

Here's the wildest part:

→ 93% more accurate than the leading time series model
→ 87% more accurate than the best non-pretrained baseline
→ All zero-shot. No fine-tuning. Out of the box.

Hedge funds spend millions on proprietary models. Bloomberg Terminal costs $24,000/year.

This runs on your laptop. Few lines of Python. Free.

Built at Tsinghua University. Accepted at AAAI 2026. Models on Hugging Face.

11.6K GitHub stars. 2.4K forks. MIT License.

100% Open Source.

[Ray Dalio @RayDalio]

https://t.co/p6JrkCnXZG

[TrueNorth @get_truenorth]

https://t.co/bumoKC4cqz

[mr enjoyer @100xChaser]

🚨 LISTEN UP 🚨

I'm making $800/day from a bot I built with zero market making experience

here's how 👇

XMR/USDC pair on Wagyu DEX is one of the most inefficient markets in crypto right now

the main spot pair gets absolutely slammed by huge orders constantly, from regular traders AND their instant swap platform routing through it

when that happens, the slippage they leave behind is enormous and almost nobody is sitting there to capture it

so I vibe coded a simple MM bot over a weekend

no prior MM experience, just used the docs Wagyu provides

it quotes around the spread, captures the slippage and hedges against Hyperliquid's official XMR perps pair

even on quiet days when there are no massive trades, the market is just generally more profitable to make on than most pairs I've tried

I'll link Wagyu's docs below to help you setup an MM bot

this is honestly one of the better alpha opportunities I've found this year

result: ~$800/day on autopilot with minimal ongoing effort

[ctoshii @cuantoshi]

@whalecalls Thanks

[ctoshii @cuantoshi]

@whalecalls Any data from deribit, sir?

[ctoshii @cuantoshi]

Good thread on recent geopolitical condition

[İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي @iyad_elbaghdadi]

This thread is divided into 8 sections, here's the outline. (I could have made this 8 threads, but I wanted to give you everything in one place.)

Please read, comment, and share. I'll be tracking your questions and comments and posting follow-ups, maybe even a live space.

[hoeem @hooeem]

https://t.co/huYMi70onK

[ctoshii @cuantoshi]

Useful resources for AI

[hoeem @hooeem]

if you have ai “anxiety” or you just want to learn how to use ai in 2026 then here’s a FREE list of resources ranked from beginner to expert for your convenience:

> beginner

1. Anthropic Academy: Claude 101 & AI Fluency https://t.co/cQF64cun2Y

2. Google AI Essentials https://t.co/Wu90h555Wi

3. AWS: Generative AI Essentials https://t.co/ge0ZQlb33p

4. Elements of AI (University of Helsinki) https://t.co/J6uGbO9wqi

> intermediate

5. DeepLearning AI short courses https://t.co/GGz4kCyGoz

6. Harvard CS50’s Introduction to AI with Python https://t.co/aPmkffY6MY

7. Hugging Face AI agents course https://t.co/6P5WnKkZAt

> expert

8. Anthropic: Claude Code in Action https://t.co/cQF64cun2Y

9. Practical Deep Learning for Coders https://t.co/kz5moubIai

10. Google Generative AI Learning Path https://t.co/is5FFjMY7M