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Spill The Alpha #11: Trading Education Session w/ @TraderMercury
Recorded: June 12, 2025 Duration: 1:22:29Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent episode of Spill the Alpha, Trader Mercury shares his journey through the crypto landscape, discussing significant partnerships, fundraising efforts, and personal growth. He emphasizes the importance of respecting market trends and adapting trading strategies to navigate the ever-evolving crypto environment.
Full Transcription
Music Thank you. yay man what's up yo what's going on, man?
All good, all good.
Sorry for the delay.
We had some bugs with the spaces.
It's always so buggy.
It's horrible.
Yeah, Twitter spaces are weird.
Yeah, yeah.
It's so, like, it's funny to me because they've had it for, like, two and a half, three years now, and they still can't figure it out.
Yeah.
Can't figure out the bots issue either. dude it's getting so bad it's actually terrible
yeah like you'll make a post and you'll easily have like 20 bots and like one regular person
yep i'll look at my post and it'll be like, there's 58 replies. I'm like, how's there 58 replies?
I just posted this eight minutes ago.
It's funny because back in the day, two, three years ago,
it only happened if you mentioned Metamask or Scam or something like that.
Now it's just no matter what you post, you'll instantly get 20.
Yeah, now it's tied to the account itself.
Every time i post i guess that's what happens when you fire like everyone besides like three people
yeah yeah it is what it is how's your day uh day's going well man i've been crazy just running around
doing some errands uh trying to get stuff coordinated for the house and
yeah things keeping me busy but but yeah it's been good how about you it's a good time to be
busy honestly because like i don't know like the market is pretty boring like it i feel like
when you're already positioned it's the best thing you can have just have other things to do
yeah yeah i'm sure we'll talk about this more like in the actual spaces
recording itself. But yeah, trading is boring, just in general, markets are boring. Very rarely
is there like an adrenaline rush, I think maybe like, once every three or four months, we get
like a nice flush in the market where, you know, it's actually like, you know, adrenaline, kind of
driven, you know, trading where everything's
just selling off like crazy and it's a lot of fun.
But other than that, man, trading is boring.
Like 99% of the time that I'm quote unquote trading, I'm not actually trading.
There's nothing for me to do.
There's no buttons for me to click.
There's no trade for me to manage, nothing for me to, you know, get into or whatever.
So, yeah.
I feel like Hollywood kind of romanticized this whole idea from like, you know get into or or whatever so yeah yeah i feel like hollywood kind of romanticized this
whole idea from like you know dramatizing trading floors and stuff like that so that's what people
expect when they come to the space they expect like taking like a thousand trays a day and like
every second selling and buying um but like it's it's that it. Yeah. And I used to do that. I mean, I definitely was that person before at some point, but it's just like, you know,
why do that just to achieve the same results or maybe even lesser?
But in order to achieve those results, you're also sacrificing your mental, right?
You're sacrificing so much time in the day.
Like, if that were my trading style, I wouldn't be able to participate in this market at the moment and deal with everything that
I'm dealing with in real life. Like I like, I got a lot going on right now. So, um, just between
like family and, you know, not to get into it too much, but, but yeah, I mean, you know, life gets
busy sometimes. So it's like, if that were my trading style, then I wouldn't be able to, you
know, trade markets at the moment.
I would have to sacrifice that, prioritize real life.
But I don't have to do that because the style that I implemented.
Yeah, we'll touch on all those transitions and everything in a couple of minutes.
Well, before we jump into just discussing all of that, I want to welcome everyone to the 11th episode of Season 2 of Spill the Alpha.
Today we have an episode with Trader Mercury.
If you don't know him, if you don't follow him, I highly suggest you go and give him a follow.
One of the few legit, kind of like, I guess we can call you OG nowadays, right?
Dude, yeah, it's crazy. I'm only probably 26 in a week.
But yeah, I've been here since 2017, so I'm considered an OG.
It's kind of wild.
Yeah, almost a decade, dude.
Yeah, wow.
When you put it that way, it makes me feel old for real.
So yeah, if you don't follow him, make sure to give him a follow.
A lot of good charts, a lot of good shit posting.
A really, really good balance between the two, unlike my account, which a lot of good shit posting a really really good balance between the
two unlike my my account which is like 99 shit posting um so yeah give him a follow we really
hope you'll enjoy this episode I'm sure you guys will um and yeah I want to remind all of you that
on the bottom right corner there's a chat box icon and at any moment during the space if you
have any questions if you want to know anything specific just click on it leave any questions you have and we'll touch them towards the end of the episode and a huge thank
you to kuma for hosting these spaces for making them happen now live on bear chain you can trade
with up to 50x leverage and we're giving out around twenty thousand dollars every single week
that you can claim daily so if you guys want to take part of that pie,
you can click on my bio.
There's a referral link at the bottom
that gives you 25% off of fees.
I don't even make any money off of it.
All goes to you guys, and you can give it a try.
So yeah, huge thanks to Kuma.
And just one last note,
I'm a little bit sick for the last couple of days.
I might cough.
I might be a little bit lower energy than usual. So if that's the case, I'm a little bit sick for the last couple of days I might cough I might be
a little bit uh lower energy than usual so if that's the case I'm sorry in advance uh but yeah
let's go back to you Mercury um I want to know a little bit more about your background I've been
following you actually for a really long time like a couple of you like we chatted back in like 21.
I was going over our DMs uh when I was inviting you to the space and i saw that i
sent you an invite back in like 21 to join uh cyborg discord yeah which was such a throwback
man yeah um like back up to the day when we were just starting out all those like group chats i
remember i joined ct back in 2020 and suddenly in 21 i'm like a part of that like the people that
kind of collect everyone and
tries to make all those group chats so that's uh that was a good throwback yeah and that's a good
bunch of uh bunch of people in there too yeah it was it was i think it was super active during the
bear market and then once we started pumping everyone kind of like split around and went to
their own niche um but yeah it was really really fun chat to be a part of during the bear market.
That's for sure.
But I don't know a lot about your background and I'm not sure how many of our listeners do.
So how do you actually get into crypto and trading?
Okay, so I have covered this a lot in like previous recordings, but I'm just going to give you a full story.
I have covered this a lot in like previous recordings, but I'm just going to give you a full story.
When I was about 17 or so years old, so this is 2017, 18 years old, I was just scrolling through Twitter one day and I saw an advertisement for Ripple XRP.
And I was like, oh man, what is this? This is cool.
So that got me into crypto, ironically. And I remember, man Binance was so backlogged with their registrations
because everyone was just, you know, sudden influx of retail that when I registered for
my Binance account, they actually told me you have to wait two weeks before you can even
actually access the account before we, you know, actually register your account. So I had to wait
two weeks. And then once that two weeks was up, I immediately deposited
money to Binance. At this time, they weren't KYC or anything. So I just like deposited all my money
to Binance and just started buying a bunch of shit coins. I bought Ripple around like 70 cents or 60
cents, something like that. Verge, Tron, Cardano, right. And everything just immediately went up,
Cardano, right? And everything just immediately went up, I think on average, like four or five X.
So, you know, me being the naive 18 year old that I was, I was like, Oh, man, I figured it out. Like,
I'm just gonna hold these forever. And, you know, they're gonna go up to, you know, gazillions,
and I'm gonna be a deca millionaire, and I'm never gonna have to work again. And yeah, I mean,
that's what happened. They went up five Xx and then immediately, you know, they started to crash back down. So I didn't take any profit because I thought I was a genius. I, you know, struggled the entire bear market, just watched them, you know, depreciate. They were up 500%, you know, total to all of a sudden I'm down, you know, negative 80% and only like three or four months have gone by.
sudden I'm down, you know, negative 80% and only like three or four months have gone by.
So it's like just crazy kind of experience. You know, that was my entrance to crypto.
And that was very demoralizing, but it was also, it was intriguing, right? It was like,
you know, I've seen the appeal. At some point I was up 5x on my money. So like, how do I keep that?
And so that's where, you know, got me into trading. And so I spent the entire 2018 bear market just kind of toughing it out, trying to learn how to trade. And I was like we what we just said, I was that Hollywood glorification of a trader where I was, you know, zoomed into the five minute chart. And I was taking hundreds of trades a day. I quite literally nuked my mental health, physical health, every
social, you know, aspect of my life. You know, at some point, you keep telling
your friends like, No, I don't want to hang out this weekend, they stop asking
you, right. So a year or two goes by, and I quite literally spent 12 to 14 hours
a day staring at charts for the entire, you know even like you know up until like 2019 uh midway
and um and then eventually i actually got really good at trading i put so much time into it um
and i managed to run up my account again five or six x um heading into like march of 2020 so
um heading into like march of 2020 so heading into march 2020 i was up like 6x on my you know
whatever i had poured into the market meanwhile every single dollar that i'm making from like
you know my job or you know side hustles whatever i was just pouring it into crypto so whatever i
put in i was up like five or six x you know on my initials. And then March 2020 happened, I got,
you know, my ass handed to me, I got just humbled by the market. Because I was up five or six X,
I was like, my ego is through the roof, like, you couldn't tell me shit, because money talks
louder than anything you had to say to me. You know what I mean? So like, just just crazy ego,
like, hey, I am superior. I was quite literally that guy.
Trader Mercury, you know, the Twitter account didn't exist yet.
But I was on, you know, my actual Twitter account replying to, you know, all these other influencers and whatever saying, like, you don't know how to draw your trend lines correctly.
lines correctly. You know what I mean? Like, like I was that guy. And so eventually, you know,
You know what I mean?
Like, like I was that guy.
that ego just kind of got squashed because March 2020, you know, I had nailed every single move
heading up into that. And that only inflated my ego further. And then March 2020 happened,
and I was caught, you know, more than 100% exposed with my entire net worth. Because at the time, I'm still 19, 20 years old.
And every single adult role model in my life had always told me like, you're young,
take lots and lots of risks. So I, you know, I heard it, and I ran with it. And so I was like,
okay, I'm just gonna take lots of risks. I remember a time where my mother asked me for for gas money and I was like mom I don't have
even ten dollars to send you like it's all no I'm being serious like it like I took it literally
every single penny that I had was invested in this market and in my own trading ability and
whatever and it just went to shit so you, you know, March 2020 happened. I immediately drew down my account,
I want to say negative 80% in the span of, you know, three weeks. So imagine being up 6x your
initials over the course of two years, and then within the span of three weeks being down negative
80%, right back where you started. So just absolutely ruined me, you know, put me in this
like situation where I basically was a shell like corpse
like version of myself, didn't eat for days, didn't come out of my room, you know, just
kind of laid there in the dark, wouldn't get out of bed.
And eventually my dad came in to check on me.
This is all written in an article, by the way, for anyone who wants like more detail
on this.
It's one of the only articles I've ever written.
But my dad came to check on me
and asked me what's going on, explained to him. And my dad is, I don't want to get too deep into
it. If you read this article, it'll explain all of it. But my dad was a serial entrepreneur,
started with nothing and made several businesses throughout his life. Some of them successful,
nothing and made several businesses throughout his life. Some of them successful, some of them
total failures. When I was about 13, 14 years old, he managed to have about two businesses that were
worth several millions. And eventually the ripple effects of 2008 got the best of us and my family.
And we had to quite literally declare bankruptcy and we were homeless for the next few
weeks. So that's, you know, my dad's story and his journey and his background. And I remember him
coming into my room and saying, you know, like what's going on and whatever. And we just talked
about it. And he looked at me and he said, you're crying over money. He said, and he gave me an ultimatum.
He goes, you have two choices. You're either going to stop trading or you're going to stop
crying over money. Pick one. And like, when I still think about that and I can see his face
saying that to me, it gives me chills because he's so right. And like, this is someone, you know,
if this or any other schmuck off the side of the road, like I wouldn't care. But knowing what kind of journey and hardships my dad had to go through,
it meant that much more to me because he had seen more money and he had been worth more than I could
even ever fathom at that time. And he was telling me like, you're not allowed to cry over money.
So that really meant something, you know, that that was really the catalyst, like, you're not allowed to cry over money. So that really meant something, you
know, that that was really the catalyst that like, okay, I was an arrogant, egotistical piece of
shit. You know, I got lucky for two years straight. But, you know, clearly, I need to figure it out.
And ironically, the easiest path for me at that time, even though I was 19, 20 years old with,
with basically nothing, right? I dropped out of
college and I didn't even complete a full semester. I put all my eggs in this basket of like, I'm
going to master markets, right? The easiest thing for me was just keep trading and just figure it
out. Just change the strategy. Just find a way to not be able to cry over money like ever again.
way to not be able to cry over money like ever again. And so I just, you know, totally refined
the system, the strategy. I tried to, you know, I put a lot of conscious effort into trying to
dictate what is winning philosophy long term, and what is simply just lucky variance, right. And,
you know, poured all my, you know, effort into that. And that was ironically the easiest path for me because for the past two years,
I had gotten used to drawdown. I had gotten used to having to stay in positions in large
amounts of unrealized profit. I'd gotten used to clicking the buttons, right? Markets were
my best friend at this point. I had poured dozens and dozens of hours every single day into markets for the past two and a half years. That was the
path of least friction for me. So I just kept at it. I changed
the philosophies, I changed my system, and everything that I'm
going to spiel to you today, all stemmed from that March 2020
moment. It's all those winning philosophies, those are all been
developed, you know, throughout the past five years or so. I feel like it's a really similar route that a lot of successful traders
go through, where, you know, you start, you go through all those hurdles, and eventually you
pick up, you know, you pick up on a good streak, and you start making money. And at some point,
the ego just takes over
and I feel like just everyone has to go
through one of those moments like what you had
in March 2020
mine was back in May
21 really similar
where you know I did the same
I just shut everything down closed
all my positions and just laid in my bed
for like two weeks trying to recover
from this physical
and mental stress and crash out that I just had.
But, you know, it's I feel like really just like having, you know, getting a degree where
you go through this process of learning everything for four years.
It's, you know, it's not similar, but it is also similar at the same time where becoming
a trader will take you years like i
don't even i don't think i know a single trader that has been doing this for a long time that
you know got it within like the first two months or something it just doesn't happen or if it does
it's super rare and that's just like a lottery ticket type thing you know um and it's it's funny
because i i am like i remember my own down moments and my own big losses and
like horrible moments in my career and uh you know i'm grateful that i've had them because
without them i know i wouldn't be the traitor i am today exactly it's very funny how that works
it's like at the time it's the worst thing that ever happened to you and five years later it is the
best thing that ever happened to you yeah you know what i mean because if it didn't happen so much
yeah it absolutely does and if it didn't happen to me in march 2020 then like you said it would
have happened to me in may of 2021 and if it didn't happen then then it would have happened
you know in in may of 2022 if it didn't happen then it was going to happen March 2023 when USDC depegged.
You're just pushing it off further, right? But the market is always going to find a way to win.
It's going to find a way to humble you. It's just uncannily good at that.
Yeah, it's just inevitable. Those moments that push you down, teach you, and just
kind of give you this reality check,'re inevitable and the question is how much
are you going to learn from it right because some people just go through this like routine of going
through those moments um and unless you actually take the time to just sit down and study those
moments and understand what the hell just happened um it's it's just going to keep on happening um
so was there just a moment just a pivotal moment where it just kind of felt okay
i can do this for a living i can keep on doing this was this like a combination because you
did mention you've you've went through this back in like 2018 after you lost all the money
and then you told yourself okay i did it once i can probably do this again do you feel that the
moment you know after talking to your dad and him explaining that it's just money
and you got to keep going at it,
was the combination of the two the thing that just made you understand,
I'm going to keep on at it and do it?
Yeah, so you know what?
That was the light bulb that went off,
but really the nail in the coffin,
the thing that really solidified that,
like I am genuinely on the
right path, like my philosophies are genuinely going to have me winning long term, like I can
navigate up, down, sideways, and, you know, a little bit of up, a little bit of down a little
bit of sideways, or even extreme up, extreme down extreme sideways. The thing that really solidified it for me was I had managed to be bearish, right?
I'd shifted my entire system around.
I was no longer finding myself in a five-minute chart.
I was more so adapting into like a swing trader role where I was just simply respecting trends
and taking on that kind of momentum-based strategy, that kind of philosophy,
and always constantly trying to fine-tune that system and make it higher hit rate, mitigate some noise, lessen the severity of the drawdown
and still reap all the benefits. So throughout 2022, I had managed to
be bearish for essentially the entire year. I think throughout 2022, I probably took 20 trades
and I actually was profitable that year.
And that was very signaling to me,
especially during a year long bear market
where the base asset went down negative 80%
and everything else went down negative 99.9.
So it was very like eye opening
that I had managed to do well in 2022.
But really the thing that like just even vindicated it even further was throughout 2022, I remember getting poked fun of for this because, you know, everyone runs their victory laps on crypto Twitter or whatever.
So, of course, I was doing that.
You know, I was posting all my thoughts publicly and therefore I would come back and run my victory laps and, you know, poke fun of
bulls and say, hey, like, all you had to do was respect the trend, you know, we're clearly heading
lower, blah, blah, blah. So I was that person, right, just running my victory laps, everyone
does it, it is what it is. But I was doing that. And I remember people would reply and say, oh,
so you don't have any Bitcoin. And I'd go, no, I have Bitcoin in a ledger.
It's being invested, right?
That's totally separate from my trading portfolio.
And this was another part of like what I realized that I was doing inappropriately was, you know, I just told you prior to March 2020, I was trading with 100% of my net worth, but
I had an emotional attachment to Bitcoin.
So it didn't make a lot of sense for me to not have exposure to Bitcoin, because every time that Bitcoin would bounce 3% higher, I would feel like I'm missing out.
I would feel like I'm the worst trader in the world.
I would have to, you know, find something to chase those losses.
Right. And I would be able to remedy that by zooming into the five minute and trading that time frame.
And that way I'm not missing those 3% bounces. So rather than do that, I changed everything. And that meant finding peace
and finding balance in the market. So I found a more structured kind of way that I don't need to
be so glued to the screen. And I don't need to have this emotional attachment of, you know, my,
my baby Bitcoin is going to run higher without me. The way that I'm going to
mitigate that is I'm going to invest in Bitcoin long term. And that's something that I started to
really, you know, hone in on and apply in March of 2020, like after that, that event. So throughout
that bear market, I remember telling myself like, okay, I'm going to sell my spot positions, but I
need to keep my Bitcoin bags.
And what that's going to do for me is on relief bounces throughout, you know, major sell-offs or even a bear market.
I don't have to be fearful that I'm going to miss out because worse comes to worse.
You know, my trading portfolio, I don't catch a move.
I don't get the pullback I'm looking for, whatever, but that's okay.
I don't need to fear that because I have that balance.
And so people made fun of me.
They said, wait a minute, you are running victory laps and saying that you're so accurate
and you were the biggest bear in 2022 and blah, blah, blah, but you own Bitcoin in a
ledger and your name is Trader Mercury.
How does that make sense?
And I'd go, okay, I mean, I guess you're right.
But what you don't realize is my investment portfolio is allowing me to be the best version of myself as a trader.
Right?
It's allowing me to be that much more efficient in my trading portfolio.
My trading portfolio was up.
And even though, you know, the entire market was down, that portfolio was up.
And that was vindicating to me.
What really, really, really solidified it was come March of 2023, my ledger account is still
drawn down negative 60%. But as a whole, my net worth is at new all time highs.
Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. Bitcoin is at, you know, $28,000 at this at this period,
it's q1 of 2023 just ended, we're coming off of, you know, $28,000 at this at this period. It's Q1 of 2023 just ended. We're coming
off of, you know, a year long bear market, everything down negative 80, negative 99% still,
right? And Bitcoin's up 100% off the lows. And yet my net worth as a whole is new all time highs.
And I look at my ledger account, it's still down negative 60%. That is what solidified it. That's
what's like, oh man, I figured it out. This is truly the strategy for me. This is how I best
resonate with markets. This is how I'm going to be able to thrive for the unforeseeable future.
In my humble opinion, this is not arrogance. This is just confidence. As long as markets exist, and I do
too, I'll win. I'll figure it out. I will find a new trend. I will rotate somewhere. There's going
to be a new opportunity. I'm going to be able to figure it out. And that was really solidified in
that March 2023 when I'm just kind of basking in the glory of all my hard work. And then ever since
then, I've been able to keep riding that same
momentum and i've been very blessed man it's been a it's been an amazing journey yeah it's really
awesome to hear and about the at the end of the day there's so many ways to look at these markets
like some people don't even trade spot and or hold spot at all some people just hold you know
stable coins and use them to trade futures um and there's so many ways to treat these
markets and at the end of the day there's no right or wrong here um there's people that will hold
altcoins there's people that will only hold you know majors uh there's people that will stake
there's people that never touch perps there's people that mix the two at the end of the day
you just have to sit down and do what you just did, which is just looking at what is the way that will give you the best clarity to just focus on making way more money without having the fear of missing out if something happens while you go to sleep or something like that.
And I feel like, again, as long as that works and it makes you, helps you make more money, you know, long term wise, it's the best solution.
A hundred percent.
Yeah. I mean, the things that I do are not necessarily orthodox. Like I don't short, I'm strictly long bias only. And when the
market is selling off, then or if it's chopping sideways, I won't even trade the range at this
point. You know, back in 2019, ranges were my bread and butter. That's, that's really the only
way that I made money is I would trade a range on the five or 15 minute timeframe. And I would allow the trade to break out of the range and
just keep running. I didn't know what to do in a trending market. Nowadays, if something's
chopping sideways and I can acknowledge a range, I won't even bother to trade it unless there's
some kind of like context trending momentum on a greater timeframe, et cetera, et cetera.
But yeah, I mean, it's very unorthodox and people give
me shit for it all the time but i'm like i'm me and you're you so like it's so ridiculous it's
such a waste of time yeah it's like it's like i'm gonna trade the way that i want to trade man and
the market only exists because we trade differently because we see things yeah i i remember uh there's
a guy on twitter called cast short he's a fantastic trader, one of the best traders I know on this platform.
And he's like on the Binance leaderboard and everything.
And he posted his Binance analytics and like 90% of his trades were shorts.
And he's up like 15 million or something like that.
And so i remember seeing
someone replying to him saying like dude why do you short it's just like it's a waste of time
because markets mostly go up look at the last year blah blah blah and i'm like and i was just
i'm just reading this and thinking like dude you're out here critiquing critiquing someone's
technique and and methodology while he made 15 million dollars in the last year
you know yeah like that's what the dude does that's how he made his money just leave him alone
yeah you know i actually have a couple friends that are like that where they
they really their brains for whatever reason are it's just so much easier for them to trade markets
and make money when they're shorting.
And I think a lot of that has to do with maybe the nature of markets. Like you always hear the
saying staircase up, elevator down. So it's like if you are taking short positions, typically what
that means is you're going to hit your take profits, you know, relatively sooner than a long
position because, you know, liquidation cascades happen,
et cetera, et cetera. Whereas typically for like prolonged bull market periods,
we see grindy price action upwards and then infrequent, you know, pumps. And then the retrace
comes and all of a sudden, you know, you know, in the course of a month, we've retraced, you know,
three months of uptrending price price action so i could see it um but
yeah i mean it's like dude markets exist because people trade differently like arguing over technical
analysis or trading or or whatever at this point as a grown man in 2025 it's embarrassing you know
yeah i mean if it works it works it's so like such a waste of time to do to look into anything more than that like any and
every person in his own technique and you know whatever they do and their own edge um but i
wanted to ask you what do you feel were the biggest mistakes or just challenges that you've had in this
whole journey of yours whether if it's you know just just the first couple of years of you trying
to make it as a trader or even things
that you still struggle with to this day um yeah but easily the hardest thing that i've ever have
to had to overcome was um holding unrealized profit so like my issue is in my innate nature
i'm a risk-averse pansy like dude I say it all the time to all my buddies,
my wife wants to go skydiving. I'm not jumping out of a plane. Like, it's not happening, right?
It's not my thing. I don't like roller coasters. I don't like risk. And that's the irony of,
you know, me being a trader is that I don't like risk. I value the value of $1 a lot, right? Because at one point, I was homeless. Prior to
being homeless, I was super wealthy. Prior to being super wealthy, at the age of 13, 14,
I was piss poor, right? So it's like, my valuation of money is so skewed in that, like, I'm still
poor mindset, that I value things so much. And when you combine that with,
I'm a risk averse pansy, just like in my innate nature, like I'm not getting on a roller coaster,
I don't like adrenaline. It was hard for me to want to hold positions in unrealized profit.
So I would enter a trade. And you know, I'd be like, Okay, my target is 50% higher. But I would,
you know, check the trade back two hours later, and I'd be up 5%.
And I'd be like, Oh, my God, this is I see green monkey neuron brain market close, right. And that
hurts me, because all of a sudden, now when I'm winning, I'm not allowing my wins to overcompensate
for the losses that I'm inevitably going to take. And this is just something that you you have to
come to terms with, especially as a trend trader, You're never going to lock in your new all-time high net worth. There's going to be a haircut. There's haircut
number one, because whatever the peak was, that's not going to be whatever you start to lock in.
Because you're not willing to call that top, that means that the only way that you were able to see
that profit in the first place is because you weren't willing to call a top for the other three
months on the way into the real top. So you have to eat a haircut, right? You're
going to have to eat negative 10, negative 15, maybe even negative 20% drawdown. Then there's
haircut number two, where you start to go buy the same trend pullback that you've been trading,
you know, for the past three months, it's been making you a shit ton of money. And then you're
going to have to give back money because eventually that trend is going to break as well. So it's like these haircuts
are gonna come no matter what. So if you are not really making the most out of those fruitful
opportunities where your system is finally applicable, and finally rewarding you enough
so that you can overcompensate for those inevitable haircuts that are going to come later,
compensate for those inevitable haircuts that are going to come later, then you're no longer
profitable because you're not able to see the true extent of the reward of your system. That was the
hardest issue for me. So what I literally had to do was I would force myself to put on a trade
and just let it be. And I wasn't allowed to touch it. No matter what I thought, no matter what kind of logical, rational analysis that I was going to implement in terms of micromanaging the position, I had to just force myself to'm putting in place, even if I'm not, you know,
using greater discretion to fine tune it and achieve greater results, the results that I'm
getting on its own is good enough, right? It's good enough to be profitable on its own.
Then I have to be able to be vindicated in the system, in the ideas, in the concepts,
in the setups, in the philosophies philosophies right that i'm implementing and then
from there i'm allowed to start trying and dabbling and fine-tuning it and and starting to you know
um jump the gap between being good and being great but i had to be good before i was able to be great
and you know when i was trying to be great I was really just shooting myself in the foot the entire time. Yeah, this is actually a huge thing.
Just by talking to people and, you know, people sharing their journals and even me at a certain point, you know, checking my own journal.
This is super common where people cut their winners too fast and they just let their losers run.
fast and they just let their losers run like you you go into a negative and for some reason
psychologically we will hold our losers for such a long time but the moment we have a profit we're
so afraid of giving it back that we just cut a good trade and again this this just comes back
to this thing where trading is i feel like being a good trader is really hard not because the job
itself is hard but it's just because you're going against so many natural mechanisms
that you have built within you where you have some profit,
you want to just take it.
You want to cash it in and go home.
And when you have a loss, you're unwilling to accept it
and you're just fighting against it.
You're going to give it extra time and and you end up getting liquidated yeah um but yeah i feel like this is one of the biggest
reasons that having a journal is so helpful because it helps you to see those things you're
able to follow up on trades and you know see statistics and stuff like that um you know this
is this is definitely a huge thing that even i, to this day, sometimes struggle with.
I'll cut trades too early and sometimes I'm not going to be patient enough, but work in progress.
Yeah, I mean, the beautiful thing about markets is that you can't ever master them.
It's not possible.
There's always room for improvement.
I just put out a whole lengthy, probably the longest article that I've ever put out. But it was a thread about my experience trading Fartcoin the past two and a half months or so. And dude, when Fartcoin is trading at 40 cents, I was talking about it. I was bullish on it. I even entered a trade. I was targeting, you know, a 300% move higher. the trade worked out beautifully and my stop loss never would have been hit. Um, you know, I would, should have been up 15, 20 R on that
position alone. And I closed it for 0.6 R profit. And you know, like, yeah, it's a classic. Um,
because what I was seeing and I did use my greater discretion.
And the thing is like, in that case, it hurt me.
But long term, the reason why I'm using my greater discretion nowadays and not being so strict about it is because, you know, the 15 R, 20 R that I that I missed because I wasn't a robot on that Fortcoin position.
I've overcompensated for it somewhere, know and saved myself two are here five are here
three are here whatever through that greater discretion so it's like it's a blessing and a
curse and it's it's looking back on it it was poor execution um but the beauty of it is man like
markets are so damn abundant that you can figure it out you can find a way to win there's always
another opportunity yeah it's like you said there's always going to be a better way
that you could have executed the trade,
that you could have done it, everything.
But I feel like traders, my trading is very similar to yours.
I'm also very risk averse.
I don't like taking crazy risks.
I do like jumping out of planes and stuff,
but when it comes to markets, I'm much more risk averse.
And that's just the way it is you're gonna usually underperform in a bull market and
you're gonna outperform in a in a bear market um and it's just because of this tendency of you know
securing profits not taking crazy risks thinking more logically sometimes um and yeah that's just a part of this recipe
yeah like you said uh you know you are going to underperform in bull markets and that's just
i mean everyone's going to underperform in a bull market typically the people that are changing
their lives you know through a three-month-long rally that goes up 10x and they you know go from
being worth a thousand dollars to million, typically what ends up
happening is the same way that they made that money is the same way that they're going to blow
it up too. So generally speaking, everyone underperforms in a bull market. We will too,
because we're risk averse. But again, this market is so extreme. Crypto especially is just such a
small piece of the overall pie in terms of the greater finance world.
Like I think Ansem put out a post the other day.
It was like if Bitcoin had the current market cap that gold has, we'd be trading at 500,000 on Bitcoin.
And it's just, you know, it's crazy stuff.
Is it really only 500,000?
Yeah, it would be 500,000 if Bitcoin had the same.
I believe so.
I want to say gold is.
Well, maybe I'm wrong.
I don't know.
Maybe it's all of crypto.
I don't know.
But basically, the idea is, right, we're such a small piece of the pie.
Like the statistic that blew my mind, I want to say like a year ago was NVIDIA stock.
Just that one stock alone had a greater market cap than all of crypto combined.
I'm not sure if that's true still today, but it's like it just kind of puts things in perspective, right?
Like this market is so extreme that even if you're applying a balanced, rational approach to the market, the gains are still
extreme, especially relative to like the, you know, traditional finance world. So it's like,
you don't need to fight fire with fire, you don't need to be an extremist in an extreme market with
an extreme mindset. You don't need to do that. You can do incredibly well for yourself just being
balanced and getting by. And what that also does is, you know, I'm not going to be able to change my life.
You know, if I take on a more balanced mindset, I'm not going to retire my parents in 2021.
But I'll also never blow up again.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like, is that worth it?
Yeah.
And in my humble opinion, going through it twice.
Yeah, it's absolutely worth it.
And then getting vindicated throughout the journey.
Oh, yeah, these gains truly are, you know, exceptional and whatever and exponential.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like we have vintage porn replying to the space.
He said underperforming in relative terms, outperforming in risk adjusted returns.
And that's that's exactly it.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's actually something that so many people on crypto
Twitter, they don't even understand this term.
I remember Trading Horse posted about just made a post about
talking about risk adjusted returns.
And he got so much backlash for just talking about anything
risk adjusted, which makes total sense considering the space we're in
um but yeah it just makes you really realize how little people actually think about you know being
stable and you know not being too exposed and taking massive risks um but yeah that's that's
just the nature of it i wanted to to also talk about just your trading itself.
You've mentioned that you've been trading much more actively
and lower timeframes and stuff like that back in the day,
and now you're more into swing trading
and taking monthly trades and stuff like that.
How do you feel your trading strategies evolved over time other than that?
And are there any specific methodologies and tools
that you utilize tools that you
utilize nowadays that you didn't in the past? Oh, man. Really, the biggest thing for me in my
trading has been mitigating noise. So tuning out a lot of the noise. I used to be the kind of
trader that when you looked at my chart, you wouldn't know where the actual price action was
because there were so many trend lines and so many moving averages. And, you know, I had eight
indicators on the chart and it would all scrunch up the chart so that the actual, you know, chart
itself was like one bar. And then there's seven bars under it in terms of indicators. There's RSI
open interest and OBV and this and that. And it's like, yeah, dude, I just, I said, okay, how do I ride trends?
How do I have an invalidation for when it's time to no longer ride the trend?
And I was able to accomplish that feat by just kind of assessing market structure.
And this is the kind of thing that like when I post a chart, it, um, what's the word?
I'm like, I'm not trying to do this.
I'm accidentally confusing people because when you look at my charts, they're black
and white and gray, right?
It's like the candles themselves are black and white.
Um, and the actual background is white and the boxes are gray.
And then you have these moving averages.
It's the 200 MA and the 200 EMA,
and they're blue and green. So they stick out like a sore thumb. So everyone focuses
on the moving averages themselves. But what people don't realize is that is not the foundation
of my system. The foundation of my system is momentum, direction. And the way that I'm
actually constituting that is by market structure, higher highs, higher lows. The reality is
that even a four-year-old can tell you which way the market is headed at any given time, but I'm using market structure
to be able to give myself a more detailed representation of that. Moving forward,
then I tag on moving averages, and that's going to help me digest that information a lot easier
because I can more visibly and tangibly portray the market structure of which
I already knew and I already understood. So the reality is that moving averages do not show me
anything that I don't already know. They're just helping me solidify something that I already
understood and giving me a little bit more digestible understanding of what my thoughts
already were. So that's how I use my system today. It's very simple. It's very
much like broken down. There's three parts. It's market structure, moving averages, and support
and resistance. And that's it. But the reason why it's so simple is because it allows me so much
freedom from a more discretionary state of mind. So when I'm actually considering, you know,
what is my discretion? My discretion is, you know, what is my discretion?
My discretion is, you know, what strong coins am I looking to play into?
And how am I dictating what's relatively strong compared to the rest of the market?
You know, that's winning philosophy, the way that I break that down.
I'm going to gravitate towards those coins. Of those coins, what is the moving averages or the levels and the way that you draw your
support and resistance, again, is going to be discretion because we're discretionary traders using discretionary trading systems.
So how I draw those and then what constitutes a breakout?
People are like, oh, how is this not a breakout if we closed two four hour candlesticks above the four hour 200 and moving averages?
And I'm like, because it didn't look like a breakout to me.
Right.
And that doesn't make sense to people, but, but it makes sense to me.
It's my discretion.
It's my head.
It's my trading.
It's my execution.
So like, I've had people ask me before, um, Mercury, your system is so
simple and you have all these videos and education and blah, blah, blah.
And you, you quite literally have broken down the entire system, the exact way that you trade. Are you fearful of alpha decay?
I said, you can't have alpha decay if you don't have alpha. There's nothing alpha about my system.
You can try and copy and paste it, but the reality is it's always going to come down to
the person behind the system, how you're using it. And that's always going to be discretionary.
the person behind the system, how you're using it. And that's always going to be discretionary.
So the only alpha decay that I'm ever going to have is if I get dementia. It's like, you can't,
you can't copy me. Like you can go ahead and throw 200 MA, 200 EMA. You can interpret market
structure the same way as me. You can download my brain and draw support and resistance the same
way that I do, but we might not find ourselves in the same positions. Even then, if we do find ourselves in the same positions,
I might manage the trade differently than you.
Yeah.
I feel like nowadays it feels like there's a lot of –
I see this pretty often where people say like just being a discretionary trader
just means that you're basically gambling and you have no idea what you're doing
because you don't have a system that can be automated and everything.
But it's just kind of ridiculous because using your discretion to trade just means that you've sat down for a couple of years in front of those charts.
And you just recognize those things and just work based on just your brain reacting to things that you've seen a thousand times before.
Right?
Absolutely.
And that's why, exactly like you said, it's different for every single person because we have different
experiences we've watched different assets um like for example if i take myself i i barely
trade altcoins i barely touch them i if i want to gamble and have some fun i'll you know trade some
with like 10x leverage or something um but i don't really have that much experience of watching altcoin charts and how how they're moving and stuff like that um and
i know that with all my experience of watching btc eth and you know solana and a couple of other
majors i'm gonna eat if i trade altcoins and and that's exactly what this discretion is it's just you use your experience
that's basically it it's like driving right like each of us has his own driving experience we both
have the same license right we had the same lessons we had the same exam but our driving can be
totally different yeah that's a good wow that's actually a really good comparison i'm stealing
that just so you know.
No worries.
No, but seriously, man, discretion is, discretion is truly an edge.
And the way that I'll prove this to you is this is not me trying to claim clout and say that I'm superior and I'm the best trader on this planet, right?
But my system is quite literally curated in a way so that I catch every single major movement this market will ever have. So the idea is a
momentum-based strategy. That's really what I lean into. If I'm not catching those movements,
then I'm not even meeting my par. So I've caught every single meaningful rally this market has
given us the past three years, but I've only ever compared to the bear market lows once.
And that was September of 2024.
And that was my greatest trade of all time.
And Bitcoin only went up 70%.
So people in crypto, especially look at you and go,
how is only a 70% movement your greatest trade of all time?
Because it was conviction.
Because I've seen this market for the past seven years.
I'm not just a stupid little moving average.
I didn't just read Investopedia
and say, what's the difference between MA and EMA? And now I'm
expecting to be George Soros, right? I have watched this
market trade for the past seven years every single day. So my
discretion is my edge, my thoughts are my edge. So when I
saw a higher low, and I saw a reclaim of a high timeframe
trend, and I saw the sentiment in the air, and I saw this and I saw that and I said global liquidity, I saw a higher low and I saw a reclaim of a high timeframe trend. And I saw the sentiment in the air and I saw this and I saw that.
And I said, global liquidity.
I saw these narratives and I saw potentially bullish, you know, Trump presidency for crypto
and blah, blah, blah.
I said, this reminds me of 2022, the bear market lows.
That's the only time I've ever made that comparison.
So, and that ended up being my greatest trade ever, right? Because at this point, seven years in, it doesn't make sense for me to take
the same position size on every trade ever because no opportunity is created equally. And that's
another topic that we, you know, can potentially dig into.
Yeah, it's like it comes down to EV and all those things like yeah position sizing management stuff like that but it is ridiculous
like when people talk like every single time i discuss it or anything any other person discusses
it on the timeline about like how amazing btc has performed in the last like year and a half or
something or whatever and people are like oh dude it only went up like what? Like 4X, 5X since the lows?
Like what the fuck?
I'm like, dude, do you realize how ridiculous you sound?
It only went up 500%.
That's it?
What?
Dude, it's really.
And the funny thing is, and that's like, because it's infuriating me.
The funny thing is the same people, it's like, oh, it only went up 5 infuriating me. The funny thing is the same people.
It's like, oh, it only went up 5x.
Really?
That's what you're proud of.
Joe, AOM like 700 bucks, like down 65% on Shiba Inu.
And it's, you know?
Yeah.
No, dude, that's a man.
You're going to make me spiral.
I could go on about this topic for the next three hours yeah yeah the funny thing is i think like
all of us started as reply guys and i mean to this day i'm a reply guy i just shit post and have fun
with my friends on ct but for some reason people follow me right i have no idea why but when you
have a lot of followers and like you you, you have like, what, 100K?
Like, almost 100K.
Like 80 or something.
Like, every single time you post any sensible opinion, you'll have those fucking idiots coming to your posts and just spitting out some nonsense.
And that's just, I lose my shit, dude.
I just lose my shit.
Now, you know what, though?
I have been able, finally, I feel like I can finally say this.
For the past year or so, I feel detached from crypto Twitter.
I feel detached from social media.
I feel like, you know, just in the past year, I've gotten married.
I bought a house.
I retired my parents.
It's really time for me.
Like, if I'm being honest, man, I got what I wanted out
of crypto. I could walk away from it at any moment. I just simply don't want to. This is
what I'm good at. This is what I enjoy. Markets excite me. Why throw away the thing that I've
spent the past seven years trying to master? Not mastered. I can never master it, but trying to.
And I've done a pretty damn good job. I'm, I'm getting closer and closer, right? I'll never be there. But I've come to terms
with that. So it's like, you know, I finally have been able to, to genuinely say, like, I don't care
about Twitter anymore. Somebody could, you know, spread dirt on my name. And like, two years ago,
years ago it would have driven me crazy and you know i would i would probably would have slept
it would have driven me crazy. And you know, I would, I would probably would have slept, you know,
you know lost sleep over it because i would have cared so much about my image or my um you know
respect on my name as trader mercury it's like now it's like dude i have a life you know like i
genuinely have a life this is going to be the the very beginnings of my family that i'm getting
ready to start and and yeah so it's really a blessing. But that has come along with, that's been a side thing.
Just cherry on top.
Yeah.
I mean, even putting aside the fact you got married,
having a house, building your family,
retiring your own parents and stuff like that.
Just the fact that you're doing this purely because,
well, obviously you want to make money and that's nice,
but you're doing this because you well obviously you want to make money and that's nice but like you're doing this because of the you like it you enjoy it that's i feel like one of the best
feelings you could have and that's you know that's to me what succeeding in life means you know in
all honesty um i wanted to touch on some of the negatives of uh of this job that we have um and i
wanted to know how do you manage the psychological aspects of trading crypto?
You know, just dealing with the stress of it, maintaining the discipline and, you know,
both in volatile events or just challenging periods where, you know, you take a big cut,
you take, you know, a losing streak, which is never spoken of on CT, which all of us
have.
How do you handle all that?
Man, I use long-term philosophy as a crutch.
I'm not even kidding you.
It really is the thing that gets me by all of that.
What's so easy to forget is that the past two months I've done incredibly well.
My system is curated in a way to make sure that I'm I'm performing in these kinds of rallies
the ones that we've seen the past two months but it's so easy to forget that just before I was
doing well the past two months I was on like a four or five trade losing streak and you know
that was because you know things got chopped up I got false signals of course I'm never going to
lock in my new all-time high net worth I was bullish at the top
nothing new I'm bullish at every top I'm a trend trader it's a feature not a bug so it's like you
know the drawdown on top of the drawdown on top of the chop on top of the chop but I'm always able
to just kind of you know allow myself to be sensible and really lean into the idea of winning
philosophy because I understand
that similar to how what goes up must come down, like eventually better days are coming.
And when those better days come, my system is going to thrive again.
And when it thrives again, it's going to grossly overcompensate for any hardships that I had
to endure, you know, on the most recent sell off or any chop that I had to endure to be
able to put myself in a position early enough to take that risk to allow myself to just be able like today just to say like hey I'm up you
know 100 on my Aave position and you know my invalidation is 60 higher than my entry like
that is such a luxurious position to be in because now I as especially as a risk-averse pansy, which I am. Let's all
acknowledge that. But now I get the ability to say, the market can't hurt me anymore.
There's nothing. I could be gigable posting at the top, but because I have the right philosophy
set in stone, my confidence doesn't scale parallel to price action itself. It scales in waves,
right? In like stair steps where we do
something significant. And now I'm anticipating a specific outcome towards a specific level or
a certain extent. And then I'm allowing myself to ride that wave. And then from there, I get to feel
comfortable. But the only way that I can be in that position where I'm up 100% unrealized and minimum I'm going to yield 60% from that trade is because I had to endure the losses.
I had to put myself in a position to get chopped up three or four or five times even before I found myself in that luxurious position.
And I never knew. I didn't know if I bought Aave a month ago, if it was going to be that trade for me.
But I didn't know that when I was buying Bitcoin either, you know, on the way down when it started to chop up for our 200s.
And I bought the slight breakout that it had twice, actually, and I got chopped up.
So it's like I never know what the market's going to do.
Like I never know what the market's going to do.
I just have to put myself in a position to, you know, be susceptible to getting chopped up, be susceptible to giving a little bit back to the market, because that's the same thing that is inevitably going to reward me.
And so it's not really like when I'm taking a loss, I'm not looking at it like I'm taking a loss.
I'm looking at it like I'm just simply playing into the system.
Is it really a loss i'm looking at it like i'm just simply playing into the system it's a feature it's not a bug man like this is it comes along with the strategy that i'm implementing this is what i signed up for i signed up it's like you basically know that if you keep
taking those trades eventually you'll be in profit it can be 10 losers in a row but you know if you
keep on doing it you will be in profit
at the end of the day yeah exactly so it's like is it really a loss if at the end of the year i'm
profitable you know like that's how i'm looking at it or at the end of the month i'm profitable
and it's a really good i actually made a post like i think maybe six months ago and i was like
i've been so blessed i haven't had a losing month in like years. And then a couple months came by and then I had my first losing month.
I think it was like January or January or February.
One of those was my first losing month in a very long time.
So, I mean, it happens, but it's like, you know, it really, it is what it is.
Like I might have a losing day, I might have a losing week, but very rarely do I have a losing month.
And even if I have a losing month, I'm still going to have a winning year.
So it doesn't matter.
You know, I feel like people who don't have business experience
are having a much harder time of just accepting that.
Because if you come to trading from just having a job,
you're used to having a positive at the end of the month.
It can be a shitty positive, but it will be a positive because you're used to having a positive at the end of the month it can be a shitty
positive but it will be a positive because you're getting a salary yeah I had a business before I
got into trading full-time and you know you just you're just used to having negative months it just
happens it's a part of business it's a business expense you know and so when I had bad months and
you know early in my trading career from the point where I became profitable basically if I had bad months and, you know, early in my trading career, from the point where I became profitable, basically, if I had bad weeks, bad months, whatever that is, I mean, sure, it sucks.
But again, like I said, if you really know that what you're doing is working, then that's just a part of the game.
That's just a business expense for the sake of success in the longer term.
That's just a business expense for the sake of success in the longer term.
Yeah, it's like no matter what the drawdown is, no matter what the losing streak is, I'm still making a higher low in my portfolio.
So, you know, typically the next wave, the next time that the variance plays into my favor, it should be a higher high.
That hasn't happened yet.
I haven't made a new all-time high yet because of this rally, but we're close.
You know, if it keeps going, it's going to happen again.
Yeah.
But yeah, man, and the weird thing about markets, the tricky part is that I've said this before.
I made a couple of posts about it, I think, but it's like the Ouroboros of markets.
And Ouroboros is the snake that as it's being rebirthed, it's also eating itself.
So it's like something that is so contradicting.
But when we apply this to markets, like the way that I apply it is the best way to navigate
markets moving forward is to have already navigated markets.
So it's like, how do you even get to the point where you have the ability to really
lean in to winning philosophy?
It's because you had to fake the confidence to find yourself adherent to that
philosophy for long enough to be able to experience the fruitful parts and the choppy parts and the
bad parts and yet still come out on top. And that's what really solidifies you in this mindset
that like, okay, and I think Doc XBT says this all the time, like every single market movement
is a mini
cycle inside of a cycle, right?
So it's like whether you're looking at the hourly timeframe, the four hour, the daily
or the weekly, it's all cycles.
It comes and goes in waves.
It's all the same dynamics that gets applied no matter what.
So if you've experienced, you know, extreme up and also a fluke, a fake out, a bull trap,
but if you, you've also experienced, you, a bull trap. But if you've also experienced two-week range,
but you've also experienced an eight-month range, and you've experienced a fluke, a fake out,
a sweep of the lows, but you've also experienced the three-month-long negative 80% downtrend,
and yet you're still making higher lows and you're still able to make a higher high
in your portfolio, that's what vindicates you. That's what really
makes it to where, you know, no matter what losing streak you're on, no matter how big the drawdown,
negative 10, negative 25%, you're always going to be able to see the bigger picture and see the
light at the end of the tunnel because you've experienced it before. And you've, you know,
you can continue relying on your abilities to continue
achieving that same experience, because it's all it's going to be the same market. It's the same
dynamics. It's the same system that continues to be rewarded. It's the same long term winning
philosophies, like these stupid analogies that I create, man, that people know me for, like price
action is a snowball. And so like, like, every single movement, you know, you have to see coming because
it started somewhere. Like this is not a philosophy that trader
mercury did not create this. This is something that existed
well before 25 years ago when I was, you know, born on this
earth. It's the same philosophy that I've just kind of, you
know, attached myself on to my grandkids will apply these same philosophies and
markets. So you just got to believe in it for long enough to
experience the good, the bad and the ugly. And then one day,
you'll be able to actually believe in it.
Yeah, 100%. And again, it all comes down to it's just a part
of the game. Like I don't think I've ever met a trader that has
100% success rate.
Just on Instagram.
That's it.
At some point,
you just get so used to it.
I'll sometimes finish my day.
I'll come down and see my girlfriend.
She'll be like,
how was your day?
I was like,
it was shit.
I just ate shit all day long.
She's like, that's okay was shit. I just ate shit all day long. But, you know, she's like, ah, that's, I'm like, yeah, it's okay.
It is what it is.
But I have two more questions
to you, and before we go to those questions,
I want to mention again to all of our
listeners, if you have any questions
to Mercury, you can click on the bottom
right corner of the chat box icon
and leave them right there, and we'll touch
them in a couple of minutes.
So Mercury, two last things uh first of all what advice would you give to your younger self or someone
listening to this right now and uh you know who's just entering into the trading world or just
having a hard time you know trying to capitalize on these markets right now, holding underwater ETH longs, whatever that is,
what advice would you give them?
Oh, man, maybe two pieces of advice.
One, respect trends.
It's very simple.
It is the most generic advice I've ever heard in markets.
It's probably the first thing that I heard when I entered markets,
other than never invest more than you can afford
to lose. The next generic advice that I was given was respect the trend, trade the trend. So it's
very ironic. It's like, I spent the first two years of my trading career, not adhering to that idea,
even though that was the first thing that I heard. And then just to come around and cycle all the way back. And now the epitome of my system
can be summarized with, I just respect trends.
And that goes for upside and downside.
And again, if you tie that in
with just very logical sounding arguments,
like price action is a snowball.
In order for us to enter a bear market,
it had to start somewhere.
That weakness had to creep into the market somewhere.
So you're not allowed to say like, oh, I never saw this coming. Like it was, it's so
funny to me. Like someone came into my free discord like a month ago and said, wow, man,
this Ethereum rally, it just came out of nowhere. And all I did was I sent them a picture of Ethereum
along four hour, 200 moving averages. And if you go turn on that chart, man, you'll see that Ethereum was clearly using that trend
in Investopedia fashion, like in textbook fashion.
Every single push higher was just a lower high along four hour 200s for four months
straight and negative 65% of drawdown throughout those four months.
And then only one time, you know,
a week prior to this person entering my Discord
and saying, oh, I never saw this coming.
It came out of nowhere.
Only one time did we reclaim that trend.
So it's like, we're doing something different.
Just be objective.
Just acknowledge that.
Just show that some respect.
There's so many people where like,
we discussed that move, you know, in my discord, we discussed it for weeks on end before Ethereum rallied,
you know, 60% higher. And, and so many people are like, yeah, I didn't take that trade,
even though we talked about it for two weeks straight, because of I don't like Vitalik,
because I've gotten used to Ethereum underperforming the past two years.
And it's like, okay, but all you had to do was respect trends though.
All you had to do was be objective.
All you had to do was say, we haven't been able to do this in four months
and we've gotten negative 65% as a result.
And now we're doing it here today.
So maybe we finally get a different outcome, right?
It's that meme of like, oh, it's probably nothing.
No, it's not probably nothing.
It's probably something.
All you had to do was respect trends. All you had to do was, you know, be objective oh, it's probably nothing. No, it's not probably nothing. It's probably something. All you had to do was respect trends.
All you had to do was, you know, be objective.
And it's very logical.
Like nothing that I can tell you in terms of like philosophy or concepts or, you know,
mentality, anything.
It's not like prescient.
Like I'm not, I'm really not an intelligent guy.
Like I don't have high IQ.
I just have found the courage, right?
I found the stomach to be
able to execute. Everyone has the brain power to make money in markets. Not everyone has the
stomach. So one of my favorite quotes, but that's one piece of it. The other piece is you're not
going to get anywhere by trying to copy someone else. You have to be unique. No one else knows
your background. No one else knows what your risk appetite is. No one else knows you know
what your valuation of money is. Nobody knows any of that. So
you're not going to be able to apply general rules, general
things or even try to copy someone outright. These, you
know, paid trading groups, whatever. I love them because
they're my friends and they teach genuine
education. They're helping you, you know, gain the experience and gain the knowledge to find
your own path, not because you're trying to copy trade them, right? That's the only reason why I'm
willing to advocate for, you know, Haven, Chroma, Paragon, etc. So that, because in my experience especially on twitter you know before trader mercury existed
i was the kind of person where i was trying to find a hero and i would find someone where you
know their variance their system would work the past you know six times around and i go oh my god
this person knows everything they're you know perfect They're a hundred percent hit rate. I'm going to try to tail them.
And then with my luck, you know, they would finally enter their losing stage.
Yeah.
You know, and then, and then I would go, Oh man, this person sucks.
All right, nevermind.
I'll go with someone else and I say, this person's been winning as this
person's been losing.
I try to tail them.
And then with my luck again, now that person starts to lose and I would just
keep doing that.
And it's just this constant cycle of like, dude, you have to find your own path, you got to get out there, you have
to gain the experience yourself, you can take bits and pieces, you know, from different people,
that's fine, you can allow people to influence you, you can pick up on things, I did the same
thing. Right? That's how I got to where I am today. I learned from crypto Twitter, and I'm
trying to give back. But you're never going to be able to copy me or anyone else. Or, you know, it's just not, it's not the way it's not going to do anything
for you. And really, I mean, think about it in 40 years, you want to be able to tell your grandkids,
I made it because I made it not because trader Mercury held my hand and, you know, forced me to
make it and put on positions for me. So like, yeah, those are the two bits of pieces of advice
that I would probably give myself five, 10 years,
six, seven, eight years ago.
Yeah, those are these two are really good.
I mean, first of all, following the trend,
it's one of those things that I feel like are so niche,
so like basic, but one of the best tips
someone can get and actually execute.
But again, it's one of those things that
it's easy easily said and very hard to actually do um because again it's sometimes you know you
try to predict the trend flipping or you know you're you're it's hard to believe that something
has finally changed and etc um and the second tip is is also fantastic
i feel like following traders is is good um i do it as well like to this day you know i care about
certain people's opinion and i like discussing ideas with them i'll never like i feel like copy
trading people is really just a waste of time and And if someone is doing that, you might as well just have a job
and automate it, if anything.
Yeah.
But what I enjoy in that
is my ability to discuss people, their ideas.
And if I see someone posting a chart
that I disagree with,
I might DM them and say like,
hey, why do you think that?
Because I disagree. I think your trade is dumb. So let's talk about it. And that taught me so much. So many concepts I've
learned from people just by DMing them like this and just replying to their tweets and trade ideas
and just having a discourse. It's really a fantastic thing.
I feel like that's what people should strive to do.
Just try to learn from others rather than just copy them
and staying clueless about what's going on.
Like if someone posts a trade idea, great, copy it if you want to,
but try to understand where it came from.
And then someday you'll be able to make those same
decisions yourself yeah so i always say uh like the justification for why you're entering a trade
is also the invalidation so it's the same inverse reasoning as to why you would no longer want to be
in a trade anymore so if you're entering off of someone else's thoughts and you don't understand
why they wanted to get into that trade then you can't possibly know why they would ever want to get out. So that also applies if you're trading based off of noise.
So if you're like, oh, I'm going to buy Bitcoin because Michael Saylor is buying. Okay, cool. But
he was also buying throughout the four months where we were downtrending. So that's not a signal.
You have no way to invalidate that. So it's probably not a good thesis. It's probably not
a good justification. So you just have to live in your own mind. You have to
be able to have your own reasonings, have your own thoughts. And then that's going to be the only
thing that really allows you the fluidity to preserve that capital so that you can, you know,
have the ability to take the risk later on for the next opportunity. Yeah. I feel like it's
something people naturally go towards where, I feel like it's something people naturally
go towards where, you know, they want other people to make their own their decisions.
And, you know, just so they can reap any benefit while avoiding any accountability. It's just the
nature of being human. Yeah, absolutely. And it's not even so much reflected through other people.
A lot of the
times it's reflected through the market where people will just kind of like, okay, I'm a trader,
but now that the trade is going against me, I don't want to be a trader anymore. Market,
you take the wheel, right? Just don't punish me. Don't give me negative 80% drawdown. Just
eventually give me a higher low and a reclaim and price discovery and blah, blah, blah. That's how
we call that complacency
right and we've seen it happen just this most recent sell-off on its own so yeah yeah and i
mean at some point most of us have been through it as well so you know good good ways to learn a
lesson yeah absolutely um so the last question i have for you is what do you believe making it is
and do you feel like you've made it?
You know, there's a quote out there, I want to say it's from Naval. And it says the greatest
measure of intelligence is getting what you want out of life. And I think that's an amazing quote.
Like, you can't tell me that I'm stupid because I got what I wanted out of life. You know, I got to retire my parents.
I got a house.
I got a wife that I'm planning on, you know, creating a family with.
I got the ability, the freedom to be able to travel the world.
Finally, you know, the past eight years, really all my life, I've been telling myself, all right, I haven't been out to, you know, travel the world.
I've barely been anywhere.
Once I'm, you know, I've made it, then I'm going to start to travel.
Once I have this amount of money, blah, blah, blah, then I'm going to start to travel.
Well, it's time.
I've been taking vacations.
I've been traveling the world and I'm going to keep doing it.
That is, yeah, man.
I feel like I've made it because I feel like I've gotten what I wanted out of life.
And that doesn't mean you have to be a deca millionaire, whatever the fuck, right? You don't have a hundred million.
That doesn't mean that, by the way, I'm not worth a hundred million dollars. Please don't rob me.
That doesn't mean that, but it's just getting what you want out of life, right? If you want
to be a stoner that lives in your parents' basement, well, if you found out a way to do
that, cool, right? like you got what you wanted
um but yeah just achieving your goals and i i think that i have done that i finally can can
feel confident saying that i've made it because my parents don't have to work anymore i finally
have a house i have a house by the way i don't know how the fuck anyone my age is expected to
buy a house if they aren't trading crypto.
Dude, it's insane.
It's absolutely crazy.
When they tell you, like, it's so humbling, right?
Again, like, don't risk more than you can afford to lose.
Nobody listens to that shit until you experience it.
And then you realize, oh, shit, they were right.
But, like, when people tell you you have to be able to afford a house twice they're not kidding man there's so many like it's so many unexpected things dude so many things
break down and just you have to buy i talked to a contractor before i bought the house and
they're like oh yeah this chimney yeah no big deal we can repair it yeah and then i go to okay
yeah can I hire you
to repair the chimney they're like yeah it needs to be torn down and rebuilt what that's different
than what you just told me two weeks ago dude so the first house I bought uh for for myself I
I think I reinvested like I think 75 percent of the property value just like on the refurbishing the whole place and just
rebuilding everything it's crazy yeah so yeah i have double it's been it's been a fun experience
it's also been very satisfying man but like i mean yeah i wouldn't be in this position unless i you
know endured the hardships that i had to endure and traded crypto the way that i did and and yeah it's, it's been very rewarding. So I feel like I've made it. I feel like, you know,
all of crypto could go to shit tomorrow. And I could walk away from it, you know, after the dust
settles and be able to humbly say, like, I achieved my purpose in this venture. And it's,
you know, if whatever happened, and I was forced to have to move on, then I would be able to walk away comfortably.
Yeah, that's that's a really, you know, out of all the different ways people talk about making it and everything.
I feel like this is this is probably one of those things that I really connect to.
So I love hearing that, man.
That's really awesome, dude.
Appreciate it. Yeah, it's time for babies, man.
Man, you sound like my parents.
Give me a couple of years.
And yeah, if you ever come down to South Europe, just let me know.
Come visit.
It's a really nice time of the year.
Absolutely.
It seems like we don't have any specific questions from the crowd? We have Krillin saying,
a fellow EMA 200 enjoyer who also got direct in 2018
and worked his ass off to figure it out.
Shout out to Krillin.
Krillin's a legend, man.
Yeah, yeah.
We had him a couple of episodes ago.
It was also such a fun episode.
Really cool.
If you guys missed it out,
you should go to the Kuma account and check out the recording.
Well, yeah, that's pretty much
it from me man uh thank you so much again for coming man it was really fun thank you so much
for having me yeah my pleasure man my pleasure and uh it's been a really fun we went like 20
minutes past the time that i've allocated for this but yeah it's really fun so i don't regret it
yeah i like to yap sorry yeah yeah don't worry i love hearing it um and yeah guys if you don't
follow mercury like i've said go ahead give him a follow uh his pinned tweet is his youtube channel
with a playlist of all the educational material that we that he've made and like he said if you
want to get a much deeper view into his strategy into how he does things make sure to give it a try and check out that
youtube channel give him a i've also seen that you're giving out a computer right you're giving
out a macbook and a pc so if you guys want to check it out uh go check his profile see how to
get a chance at winning at that um yeah is there anything else you want to add man no nothing more to add
just thank you for having me man it's always it's fun to talk to you thank you so much my pleasure
dude we'll do this again sometime maybe uh we'll talk to krillin or something bring him on as well
do like a fun reway episode or something yeah that'd be fun yeah that'll be awesome um so
thanks again for coming mate um my pleasure to have you on. And to all of our listeners, thank you guys for being here.
As always, without you, it wouldn't be the same.
And if you've missed out a part of the episode,
a recording will be available the moment this episode ends.
So you can listen back to it and see if you've missed anything.
And on Monday, as always, there's going to be notes posted on my profile
for all the lazy homies.
So you can follow me if you don't already.
And I'll be posting those notes on Monday around US Open.
And yeah, give Kuma a follow to stay up to date with all of our episodes.
We have an episode every single week with different traders talking about markets.
And sometimes we also have just random episodes about just talking about current markets,
current price action, stuff like that, current news.
So make sure to give Kuma a follow.
And yeah, before we wrap things up,
huge thanks to Kuma for hosting these spaces,
for making them happen now live on BearChain
with up to 50x leverage on majors.
If you didn't give Kuma a try yet, you can click on my profile.
There's a referral link in my bio.
You don't have to use it.
You can skip using my referral link, but it gives you 25% off of fees.
I don't even make any money off of it.
It's just for you guys.
So you can go and give it a try.
We're currently giving out around $20,000 every single week.
They're distributed every single day.
I actually believe it might even be every eight hours or something like that.
So if you want to take a cut of the $20,000 prize pool, about $20,000,
all you have to do is go to Kuma and start trading.
On top of that, we have a weekly raffle with three winners getting $400 each.
All you need to do is trade, make volume.
And the more volume you make, the more raffle tickets you have.
All you need to have is $100 of volume to get a raffle ticket.
And yeah, and the Academy is back as well.
Last week we posted an article that Nexus made.
Shout out to Nexus.
We've had on the show twice already,
where he was breaking down his
news trading strategy and uh yesterday we dropped i think it's five new articles about just about
defy and a couple of trading stuff just basic defy things um so if you want to check out the academy
go to the kuma page and you'll see everything there um and yeah one last thing we currently have a bunch of extra
stuff for all the comaniacs we had an nft mint a couple of weeks ago a free nft mint uh just for
all of our friends and followers uh i think the comaniacs themselves are traded at secondary
markets they're not super expensive if you want to pick one up and uh this week they get a bonus raffle tickets and
also they get early access to different events uh last week they had access to a poker tournament
for the bear chain um so yeah if you don't have a kamaniac and you want one uh just join the discord
of kuma uh react to the late the latest announcement and uh yeah and you'll be participating and we'll be able to claim
some of those perks as well uh that's it from me guys again mercury huge thank you for coming mate
and to all of our listeners thank you for coming pleasure to have you on to kuma for hosting for
manual my homie the guy behind the kuma account setting up all the spaces and preventing any
technical difficulties shout out to manual and yeah that's pretty much it guys we'll see you
next week as always mercury have a great great day ahead mate thanks much love brother see you guys
bye bye
