NEW POST (Let The Bubble Wash Over You)
some thoughts on market structure and what the new financial regime looks like including:
> convective weather systems
> the reality of rolling bubbles
> how did we end up here
> what does it mean for the future
link to full piece below
People keep confusing a bubble with “stocks go up and get overvalued”. A bubble is when when a prevailing trend and a prevailing misconception about that trend interact reflexively, each reinforcing the other until the gap between perception and reality becomes unsustainable.
A bubble is not when everyone realizes that right now every iota of AI demand eventually, at some point upstream, must move through memory OEMs. Nor is it when estimates continue rising because things are better than expected. And it’s not just when stocks trade expensive to historical valuations.
The reason behind the moves in the AI infrastructure layer so far have been simply that we don’t have enough. They’ve been driven by the fundamental reality more than the perception of the future. It’s why the bulk of the most bullish parts of this cycle have been lumpy and centered around earnings season when companies uniformly come out and confirm there’s still not enough. In the bubble, the reality is driven by the market - not the other way around.
Everyone keeps saying “people are gonna freak out if it’s not a bubble!”. I think that’s silly, we have a transformative new technology that needs crazy capital to fuel it coming to fruition, that has and always will result in a bubble as long as we have financial markets.
But if you want to call the top in a bubble, you need a much stronger view on what the misconception is and what negative catalyst forces broad perception to align with realizing it than you do on valuation.
Crypto will viciously test your conviction.
We go through entire market cycles, severe drawdowns and extreme euphoria, every few years. What investors feel in a lifetime, we experience every few years.
It’s brutally hard to manage positions. You want to be a long-term holder but the market reminds you how right and wrong you are daily.
Venture doesn’t have a ticker constantly grading your thesis in real time. We do. Every single day.
Right now, some of the most vocal believers are quitting. Throwing in the towel. Dismissing the space.
Remember this moment.
Years from now someone will scoff and say “oh yeah, you were just lucky for being early.” Being early is goddamn hard. Years ago you could’ve been too early. And being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong.
We’re not too early anymore. Read the room. Read the headlines. The infrastructure is battle tested. The adoption is happening.
And the cruel irony is that crypto natives are quitting just as non-crypto natives and new adopters are about to capture way more value than they ever will. A lot of the groundwork was built by the very people throwing in the towel today. That’s a shame. But markets don’t care about fairness. They reward conviction.
For anyone who told you that you were just lucky. None of this is fucking easy. The drawdowns, the noise, the conviction required to hold when the world tells you you’re wrong.
Learn to love the pain. Learn to love the work. Or you’ll always be a prisoner of the market and of other people’s opinions.
Find love for the game or go play another one.
If you’re still here. Still building, still creating, still grinding. I salute you.
This is a generational shift and we’re lucky enough to shape it.
Long crypto
On-chain analysis is one of the most powerful skills in crypto.
2020 → we knew NOTHING about Uniswap. Learned sniping by copying another sniper.
2022 → saw a former MEV competitor farming Blur. We farmed it too.
2025 → spotted wallets doing arb at HyperEVM launch. We tried it ourselves.
On-chain analysis changed our lives.
You need to TRACK and UNDERSTAND what is going on.
When ppl claim this I always wonder how they think it happens, or have unrealistic expectations on how much $1bn actually is.
I joined crypto with $200. If I held my initial bitcoin since then and never traded, I would have ~$300k.
If, instead, from that moment I sold the top and bought the bottom of every crypto cycle on Bitcoin, and never paid any taxes, I would have ~$6m USD.
If I put my entire net worth into the Ethereum ICO and never touched it, today I would have ~$150m pre-tax.
While it was definitely possible to have made >$1bn with the opportunities in the market, these versions of reality would also require me to make no mistakes, and have no need to spend $ in real life, or take excessive risk via leverage.
In reality, I grew up in a working class family. I didn’t have a trust fund and I had to pay off my student loan myself. I had a job at Tescos while at high school. After university, I needed to pay rent and fund cost of living and eventually buy a place to live.
I worked at startups for relatively little $ salary, and while a couple have done okay, they still are illiquid and worth nothing until some exit.
Perhaps if I erase a couple of dumb mistakes and drawdowns, or if I had a lil more grind, then my answer would be different today. But it is easy to say this with perfect hindsight vision. It’s easy to see where you could have optimised better, and decisions you made look dumb when the past makes things so obvious.
The truth is I have always optimised for enjoying my life and not going to 0. I never felt like I had a safety net, so it was never possible for me to do anything in any other way. I would probably have less money if I had tried to add more risk or chased $ harder, because being all-in with your entire livelihood is a mental battle and I feel I only win that battle when the stakes are lower.
In writing this, maybe I do understand why CT folks believe this, because modern CT sees crypto as a late-stage lottery ticket farm, where the optimal strategy is to 5x leverage up your portfolio in a hope of catching a good 20% move and then leaving. Or, literally going all-in on the next coin they heard Ansem is buying. So perhaps to them, looking back at the charts, of course that’s what successful folks did.
In reality, I use leverage close to never (and typically to reduce risk rather than add risk — have used it to add risk maybe 3 times in the last 5 years, and maybe 15 times ever). I never go all-in on anything, have only ever done that on BTC and ETH before in the last decade. When I buy other things, I limit risk to tiny amounts, because I treat it as a 0 until proven otherwise (so, always <1% liquid portfolio). Liquid portfolio is also a smaller % of overall portfolio to future-proof against my own fuckups.
Obviously I made a lot of money, I have been here 12 years! CT doesn’t want to hear about “getting rich in a decade” though. I am happy with where I am and have never really cared or optimised for maximising $ earnings, but instead having a nice life that lets me enjoy the game we play together.
Probably one of the most severe flushes I’ve ever seen on alts, I didn’t even imagine alts had this much leverage in them. It feels like someone got hit very hard and will see a large body float to the surface soon, reminds me a little of summer 2021.
Good reminder to myself to own things that I am actually bullish on, and not things I am trying to shift on momentum. Some charts look like they’ll never recover, whereas some things look buyable for the first time in a while.
When everyone is making hilarious amounts of money I am always tempted to start using leverage again. It is almost impossible to fight the feeling that you’re not making enough, or everyone else is outpacing you. Good reminder that fighting that feeling and avoid the wipeouts is worth it in the end.
Check on your friends, likely a bad day for many.
Personally, am concentrating my bags into the things I am happy to own for the next few years, and shedding the fat. Realised I own some assets based on not wanting to miss out, rather than on some actual thesis. Days like today are much easier for me if I think my bags will bounce back, and much worse if I’m losing money owning things I don’t even believe in.
Don’t let a leverage blowup dictate your long-term views. The future is bright, good things to come, patience is rewarded.
嵐の後
🚨BREAKING: Crypto liquidations soar to $9.4 BILLION in 24 hours – the LARGEST single-day event ever.
Bigger than LUNA. Bigger than COVID. Bigger than FTX.
We just witnessed history.
If you just blew up or lost a lot, remember - capital markets are the best MMO RPG in the world. You can always respawn and try again.
What matters most is turning the scars into lessons. Only then do they become beauty marks.
Don’t revenge trade. Sweat in the gym every day for the next month, then come back stronger.
If you stayed disciplined and still have cash, use the bounce to judge which assets are strong and which are weak.
Be obsessed with understanding what happened - the signals that triggered it, and what you can learn for next time to maximize gain / minimize loss.
Use the next few weeks to allocate slowly.
Avoid revenge trading and leverage.
Without blood, the cat never becomes a tiger.