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STA #20: Trading & Investing: Navigating Crypto Markets w/ @gammichan
Recorded: Aug. 28, 2025 Duration: 1:14:51Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Hello, everyone. All right.
Nice.
We have Gamachen here with us.
What's up, man?
Hey, how's it going?
All good.
All good.
Thanks for coming, man.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
My pleasure. We'll give it a couple minutes for people to join. good all good thanks for coming in really appreciate it thanks for having me my pleasure
um we'll give it a couple minutes for people to join
and set everything up what's up with you how was your day uh pretty good i caught uh i caught a
short on link this morning so oh nice that was nice the announcement is so funny yeah popped popped real hard on that and
yeah i felt like it was a fade i shorted it like 26 oh that's sick or like 25 90 i think i got
nice you still holding it yeah I'm still in it.
It's mostly to just hedge my spot position.
Okay.
So I don't think I'm going to TP it.
I'm just going to either it'll round trip
or if we do roll over here harder,
it'll just protect me from taking losses on my spot position.
Yeah.
I love taking short hedges.
It's such a nice tool to have.
Yeah.
It's a nice thing to have in your arsenal,
like your comfort of doing stuff like that.
Yeah.
My link that I'm holding,
it's in the long-term tax bracket. Cause I've had it over a year.
So if I would, if I would sell my spot
that would trigger a tax event.
And then if I would rebuy it,
then it would now be short-term tax
and I'd get charged twice as much tax.
So instead of selling my spot, I just hedge it with perks.
Yeah, nice.
Finally, some people actually using leverage for what it's for
and like coin margin and stuff like that yeah um all right i think we can uh start with everything
i want to welcome all of our listeners to the second season of spill the alpha we are at episode
number 20 uh which is kind of crazy uh we've had so many many and I think we've been doing this for two years now
that's insane anyways I hope you guys will enjoy this episode thanks for joining us and Gavin Chan
thanks for coming man I really appreciate it again wanted to have you for quite some time and
finally you know we managed to hook it all up so yeah thanks for coming man awesome thank you
and for all the people who don't follow GambyChan,
make sure to give him a follow.
I think he's a super underrated account
that one of the few accounts that still posts
about trading sometimes and actually like some charts
here and there and just a good addition to the timeline.
So make sure to give him a follow, huge addition.
And yeah, you're not gonna regret it i'm sure
um yeah just before we start i want to remind all of our listeners um that on the bottom right
corner you have a chat box icon and if you click on it you can leave any replies if you have any
questions if you want to know anything um you know anything that's on your mind write it there and
we'll touch on it towards the end of the episode. And, um, yeah. And one last thing, huge shout out to Kuma for, uh, making these
spaces happen now live. You can trade with up to 50 X leverage. We're giving out $7,500 every
single week in rewards. So check it out. Um, well, yeah, I mean, Sean, should I call it Gami-chan
or do you want, did you go by any other names um a lot of people just
call me gammy for short just because it's a little easier to say all right so we'll go with gammy um
so i wanted to know tell us a little bit about your background how did you get into crypto and
into trading um i actually i started trading before crypto existed um so i started in the stock market when i was like 14 or 15 my
grandfather made like a sub account on his um what is now td ameritrade used to be td waterhouse
he made me a sub account on his td waterhouse account and i could trade under his account
a sub account on his TD Waterhouse account.
And I could trade under his account.
And my grandmother let me borrow a little bit of money,
and I traded with my borrowed grandma's money.
I think I bought some biotech company
that it was looking like their new drug
was going to get approved.
And it did.
And then it doubled in like a month.
And that was my first trade.
You wait straight away to the most DGgen things yeah i i guess so i also used to like i would paper trade with my grandfather um like
yeah my grandfather my grandmother and i we'd all paper trade because that they would watch me in
the summers when i was off from school so i'd spend my days with them and uh yeah i remember i would always just be like
oh well like nintendo you know they launched the new nintendo 64 and i think it's pretty cool so
i'm gonna buy nintendo and like i would always win the paper trading competitions i'd have with them
just like you know super like left curve, simple stuff like that.
But I've honestly kind of like,
you hear this story from a lot of traders that it comes full circle.
Like you start when you're a beginner and you start really simple and then you
like way overcomplicate things in the middle.
And then a lot of people,
they kind of find that they come back full circle to just being simple again.
Yeah.
You can see it on
the charts that people post it starts with nothing and then like 10 indicators and it goes back to
nothing yeah like so many people they eventually just come back to like simple trend algorithms
or something like that and like yeah there's not yeah i mean it yeah it depends i think there's a couple different like classifications of what
kind of trader you are obviously like you know long-term scalp swing like fundamental ta but
within each of those categories there's a lot of uh just simple simple methods to do well in each
of those yeah 100 i think once you perfect the basics,
it's like almost all you need.
And then you develop from there.
But yeah, so how did you go from like trading stocks
to crypto?
So I've always been into computers.
Ever since when I was a kid, I wanted
to play a new Dragon Ball game that came out,
but it was Japanese only.
It was like Dragon Ball GT back when still in the States,
we only had Dragon Ball Z.
GT wasn't out yet.
So I really wanted to play it on my PlayStation, but I couldn't.
And my dad and I, we installed a mod chip on it
to remove the region lock.
And I think I was nine or 10 years old at the time.
And then ever since then, I was into computers.
And I'd spend a lot of time on computer forums.
And there was this one site, overclock.net,
that was all about modifying and overclocking
computers.
And, uh, yeah, just one day back in 2011, uh, there was a thread that came up about
Bitcoin mining.
And back then you could still like solo mine on a normal computer.
Like you didn't, their ASICs didn't exist
or anything like that yet.
So I was like, hey.
2011 or something, right?
Yeah, 2011.
And I was like, oh, like I can,
I already have a gaming computer
with like a decent GPU in it.
This was right as it was transitioning
from like CPU mining to GPU mining.
So like it was really from like cpu mining to gpu mining so like it was really
inefficient back then too like nobody really cared about optimizing anything so like most people were
still mining on cpus even though you could be on gpus at that time and it's like just a normal like
i had like a ati 5000 series or whatever at the time.
And just one of those would mine like four or five Bitcoin a day.
And it was like, also I was in college at the time
and electricity was like included in my utilities at the dorm.
So it was free electricity.
I'm like, literally I just run this app on my computer and I make a couple hundred dollars a month. Like there's no downside
to this. So I just started mining Bitcoin. Yeah. It's great to think about it today.
I actually mined, like my computer mined a block. Like I solved a block of 50. So I got like, but I was mining in a pool.
So I had to share my whole block of 50.
I couldn't keep it for myself.
Yeah, it's a crazy throwback, man.
So yeah, that was like what pivoted me over into crypto.
Mainly once I started mining, then it was a slippery slope into
like trying to trade a little bit with what i had mined yeah i'm guessing then just over time you
started uh you know turning more and more into like the trading side of things until you just
totally stopped mining yeah or do you still mine a little bit um yeah i don't really i don't do the mining anymore i like i was kind of
off and on with the mining because um like there were times where the mining wasn't really profitable
and also when i would go home in the summer um like to my parents house the electricity wasn't
free anymore and i figured my parents would probably be pissed if i was like running up
their electricity bill and heating up the house mining so i would i would stop mining in the summer
and then i'd only mind like in the winter back when i was in college um but yeah unfortunately
like just being a broke college kid basically everything i mined um i had to like sell right
away like that couple hundred dollars a month that I would mine was just being sold
so I could like buy groceries.
So that the whole period from like 2011 to like 2016,
I really didn't make anything.
It was just like an income source for me that was getting spent.
It wasn't really until i found ethereum
i had i had missed the ethereum ico um but i found ethereum like late 2015 early 2016.
and then i was like oh like we can actually do things with this now it's not just like sending money a to b and then i like
that's when i i really got interested in i've been like 100 in it since then it was like pretty off
and on before that um and also a big thing that helped i tell a lot of people the best thing that
ever happened to my trading was getting a job um so like for
the first two cycles like the the 2010 2011 pump and then like the 2013 pump um i didn't have a
job yet i was like a broke-ass college student and so i had like i had no money to invest in
the market really and anything i was making mining i was spending but then finally 2016 2017 that was like the first cycle that i actually had some success because
i had a i had a job for a couple years at that point i had a little bit saved up
and i actually i cashed out my 401k and I put it all into Chainlink.
And I was like, well, I have a job now.
And if I lose all this, it's fine.
Like I can just make it back in a couple months of pay.
It's not a big deal.
But before I had a job, I couldn't do that. Like I needed that money.
And it's always terrible to trade when your portfolio
is also what you're living off of really affects your abilities yeah i i fully agree with that i i
made a tweet a couple of months ago replying to us saying that most people in this space and
in trading overall care more about the first 10 and the last 10 percent than the 80 in between
right and um and i feel like having a job is exactly what gives you this this leeway of you
know not being so stressed about money being able to take trades and you know not freak out about
every you know couple percent move it will make you less degen about like taking crazy leverage trades because you know you
have an income you're not in a rush to pay for groceries pay for rent and stuff like that
um and i think just the you know the reason probably a lot of people don't want to you know
they have this dream of like i want to quit my job and do crypto full-time or whatever
um they think that they're gonna have like way more
opportunities that way which for most people is not the case and even if you do end up you know
coming back from work and seeing that you know some crazy coin launched overnight and there was
something insane you'll probably be able to still cash in on that in the next few days in between you know work and
breaks or whatever um i never got it personally i'm also like the same i had a job for most
of the of the time that i've known crypto until a couple of years ago when i when i went full-time
trading and yeah never got the super crazy rush I was just stressed about like just thinking about the idea of me, you know, risking everything without any stable income.
Yeah, I like actually like drawing an analogy to like meeting women.
You know, there's the stereotype of like the cool guy that doesn't like care about meeting
women at all and like women are all over him and then there's like the like needy nerdy guy that's
like so desperately trying to like meet a woman and they're all like it'll get away from me and
it's like funny the guy like the guys that don't care um yeah they yeah they get the attention and
it's like it's the same in trading too it's almost
like the people who don't care about making money and it's just like oh whatever like I'll let it
ride yeah like I mean yeah you have to like care to a certain it like you don't want to just bag
hold everything to zero or whatever like you have to have some risk management but you have to like have this
kind of almost i don't care attitude um and not be like rushed so many people are rushed to make
their money and they feel like if i don't make you know a million dollars by the end of this year
like i'm cooked but yeah i mean people like you that have experienced you know every single cycle pretty
much have heard this back in like 2013 i'm sure like i'm sure there's been many people back in
2015 2013 saying that you know that's it this is this is this was the last one if you're not a
billionaire that's it it's over for you yeah the whole like we're never gonna have another alt season like it's never gonna pump again like that
that's been said pretty much every cycle because like even even back in like like the 2011 pump
the 2013 pump even then it was already on mainstream news, because it was up thousands of percent.
So it was still getting a lot of attention and people would be like, oh, you
know, everybody knows about it already.
It's all over the news.
Like it's never going to get any bigger than this.
And, you know, here we are over a hundred thousand dollars.
Yeah.
Which is crazy.
Um, but yeah, you gave a really good example with this uh you know you don't have
to think about it so much and like the people that think about it less uh you know it works out
for them more often than not uh but it's real you know it's like i'm sure almost every man
experienced this thing where you get into like a new relationship you start dating this chick it
becomes serious and suddenly like every single chick like texts you like hey
let's let's go out or something like that and you're like nah yeah they they have a sense for
when you suddenly like aren't needy anymore but and the market does too it it like price action
kind of naturally eliminates those needy people like the market will hunt out
people that can't hold underwater a little bit um unless like i mean there's certain trades that
minimize that like if you're a momentum follower or something like you're only trading like
like you're only trading like breakouts or stuff like that.
You're trading with the momentum and you're trading into like a move up or a move down.
You probably shouldn't go underwater too much.
And if you do, maybe that's a sign that the trade's wrong.
But for most other types of trades, I feel like at some point during the trade, you're going to go underwater.
And that's where a lot of people go wrong.
They start panicking when it moves against them and they close out.
There's a stereotype of like, oh, it fell and hit my stop and immediately took off.
That happens to a lot of people.
And it's because the market knows that.
It knows that there's people that get scared
if it moves against them a little bit.
And it hunts that liquidity.
Yeah.
And I mean, again, the reason that it hunts your stops
is because you're probably, you know,
using a very logical, very obvious point
to put your stop loss.
And a lot of other people do too
and that's exactly why it bounces from there because you've been stop lost right yeah um i
was wondering how long did it like from the point you started trading how long did it take for you
to feel like you know you're starting to get the hang of things and starting to turn a profit
and was there like a pivotal moment that made you realize you okay this is what i'm gonna do for a living um so like like i was saying how i would uh paper
trade with my grandfather before i started trading i guess uh kind of fortunate that i was successful right away with trading.
Also a lot of, like I started right away
as a narrative fundamental kind of trader.
So I didn't really have to learn anything specifically
about trading.
If you recall, the two trades that I mentioned were like,
oh, Nintendo just launched the Nintendo 64 and it's good. I'm going to buy that. Or like, oh, this biotech company has this new product that looks
like it's going to get approved. I'm going to buy that. Like neither of those trades required to
know anything about trading. Like I don't even have to look at a chart to formulate those trades.
So I started off that way.
Another big early one for me was back when Android,
or back when Google first launched Android phones,
like the Nexus, I think it was called.
Back then, phones didn't have NFC chips.
You know how you can tap to pay?
No, they didn't have that when it launched.
And Android released a new software update that enabled NFC.
You previously couldn't do it because it wasn't even in the software.
And now suddenly you could.
And Google, on their new flagship Android,
it was the first phone with an NFC chip.
And I was just like, well, now that the software supports it,
I'm betting every other Android phone
is going to start putting NFC chips in as well.
And I just looked up, well, who's
the supplier for these NFC chips?
And I bought that supplier, and I think they tripled in two months or something like that.
But most of my good trades have all been some kind of thesis, some kind of fundamental-based trade,
not so much technical trading off the charts.
I use stuff like that more for my Link Edge
that I opened up this morning that
was more technical based.
And I use that for finding entries and taking profit.
But for determining what i want
to actually buy it's usually more just a like fundamental product thesis yeah so pretty much
your strategies in their core stayed the same over all these years yeah i've uh i mean i've i've
over it all these years.
Yeah, I mean, I've dabbled in a lot of different things.
Like for the longest time, I didn't trade perps.
Like I wasn't on BitMEX when that first showed up.
I just had my spot holdings on like, remember BTCE,
the one that got?
Yeah, this was the first exchange where I started.
Yeah.
Yeah, the feds shut that down.
I remember logging in one day like, oh, what in and then they changed i remember i've seen that i had some coins there and then they
changed it to wex.nz with those shitty tokens or whatever that was that they were giving us
and uh yeah and then it was gone again thank thankfully i always self-custodied so like i didn't get hit with mount gox or like btce or any
of that but um uh yeah so um my my tradings evolved a little bit around like
how i use how i like manage my risk with with take profits and entries
and stuff like that.
But my core behavior, I guess, was created pretty early on
and hasn't changed too much.
Well, no need to fix what's not broken, you know?
Yeah, I think having fundamental product thesis,
like, I've tweeted about this before.
I think it's a good way to get an edge
because, like, when you're trading against Wall Street,
you can't be smarter than them in terms of, like, math or finance,
things like that.
They have optimized endlessly.
But a new product launches,
and that's something they can't apply their general financial knowledge to.
They now have to take a moment to learn the product.
Because you can take technical analysis or whatever and generally apply it to any chart,
but you can't take knowledge of... Say you're an analyst who knows a lot about the automobile
industry. That analyst isn't going to know much about GPUs.
They probably missed the AI trade.
But someone with a computer background
was probably right on the ball with the AI trade
and saw it right away.
And I think that's a really good way to get an edge
because product knowledge is specific case by case.
So fund managers can't know everything about every product in the world, but they can know everything about charts and price action and finance and math.
So you don't want to compete with them on that.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I mean, at the end of the day,
they also have very different risk profiles.
And even if they do have the knowledge,
and you might have a little bit less,
but if some idea makes sense to you,
you probably have a much faster reaction time
in the smaller things
where it might not fit their risk profile
or it might take them a couple of days to like
think things through or you know build uh all the paperwork or whatever the fuck it is um
there is definitely an edge in like you know being a smaller player that can more freely
take action on things yeah i think you know especially if you have some knowledge on it
like one of the biggest edges is just like as a personal trader you don't have to always be
allocated whereas most funds like they have mandates that they have to be like a certain
percent allocated at any given time but like i think one of the greatest strengths that personal traders have is just at any moment
uh you could just cash out take a step back and like reassess and these fund managers they they
can't do that yeah if they don't if they don't outperform you know some benchmarks there's going
to be questions so right um i. Um, I was wondering,
what do you feel were like the most significant mistakes or just general challenges you've
encountered in your early trading days and how did you overcome them? So actually my very first
trade I ever took taught me a good lesson. Um, that example I was saying where I borrowed some
money from my grandmother, um, she let me borrow the money for three months was the agreement that we had.
And then I had to pay it back.
I was allowed to lose like up to two grand.
And if I lost any more than that, I had to like cash out immediately and pay her back.
But then whatever I made, I could keep.
And I doubled it within the first month.
So then I'm like, oh, awesome.
Like I have two more months to trade.
Like I just, I'll double it again next month
and then double it again the third one.
And the lesson I learned there was, you know,
you can't force the market.
You got to let the market come to you.
And I was, because I was on a time constraint
because I had this idea in my mind like I only have this money for three months I need to make
the most of it while I have it I was trying to force trades and I wound up at the end of the
three months I was a little bit lower than if I would have just stopped after the first month I
think at the end of the three months I only only had like a 50% profit instead of like a 100% profit that I had at the end of the first month.
So yeah, early lesson right there.
Don't try and force your, like trade the hand that you're given.
given and if you're not given a good hand like just don't play it yeah which is i mean the time
And if you're not given a good hand, like just don't play it.
constraint is again very similar to the example we mentioned earlier where you know like the
financial constraint when when people don't have a steady income and they're trying to trade it's
like you know sometimes the market is not going to do anything for two weeks and you have zero
setups but you have rent to pay so you're like okay i have to take a trade
in the next two weeks or where i'm gonna like be in trouble or something um so it's very similar
yeah another analogy i like is like if you were playing some casino game like blackjack or poker
or whatever and like you get a bad hand you can't just leave
like you already have money in the pot or whatever but in in the market if you're dealt a bad hand
you don't have to play it you can just walk away and i think that's a huge advantage that you have
in the market and so many people don't utilize that advantage because they always feel like they need to be taking a trade every day. And so often, the best position is no position. If you're not confident in what your
position is, why are you in it? Just stay. It's okay to be sidelined if you don't feel
confident about anything at the moment
better to better to miss out on some profits than to to lose profits yeah it's like it's like it
feels much worse to you know force something and lose money rather than just not make money and be
flat oh also actually back to your previous question of, like, how has my trading changed?
That reminds me of one thing.
I've kind of started viewing, like, one of my issues
has been I'm like a swing for the fences kind of guy.
So I buy and I just hold for a long time.
And sometimes it works out.
Sometimes I fully round trip.
And I've kind of started viewing even my long-term holds
as multiple connecting short or mid-term holds.
So you could, just looking at the Bitcoin chart,
like high time frame since like the FTX bottom,
it's just been going up into the right.
But there's been a lot of like local tops
and pullbacks along the way.
I've started more now to view them as like separate sections
and separate trades to be connected versus just like one
buy and hold through the whole thing. And I think that that helps a little bit with like not round
tripping because like if you take profit at a level where it as a local top initially, right?
Like you don't know at the time this could maybe be the local top.
It could be the macro top.
So it's better to like take the profit there.
And then what you can do is you can just like you can reenter if it reclaims the level that you were selling at
and kind of just now treat it as a second new trade
rather than holding it as one continuous trade.
So you lose like, you miss out on a couple percent
because you're like selling a little bit below a certain level
and then you're buying back a little bit above it.
But I think it's better from a
risk management perspective because you're giving less back to the market and then when you open
that like second trade you now have like fresh confirmation and you're also now above you're
holding now above a support instead of holding right below a resistance.
Yeah, it just puts you overall in a better spot.
Also, I think just psychologically,
you having a fresh position just from evolving R perspective,
like the concept that Tom Dante always speaks about,
makes a lot of sense.
It's just a really healthy thing to do.
I do think, though, for some people,
having the fresh
position makes it harder because when you're holding like an older position from lower you
see all the like pnl that you have on it and if it pulls back it feels like you're just giving back
profit but if you close the trade and then reopen a new one, now you see this big negative red number and it feels more like you're losing money.
It's like just a cycle.
I mean, obviously, that's both the same thing, whether you took like a 10K drawdown on a new trade or an existing trade.
It's the same thing, but psychologically, it feels different.
Yeah, 100 percent. but psychologically it feels different yeah 100 what from your time spending on you know ct all
these years what would you say is like the most reoccurring thing or a mistake whatever you want
to call it that you see other people around you happen to them um so actually i was kind of late to join CT. I was a lone wolf for many years.
I just traded on my own from 2011 to 2017.
It wasn't until I found the Chainlink community in 2017
that I actually got involved on Twitter and stuff.
I think I was one of the first 500 followers of Chainlink.
Chainlink literally was why i made a twitter
because they made a twitter and i was like oh now i gotta follow them on twitter
yeah um so i didn't join till 2017. yeah so i like even though i started in crypto in 2011 i wasn't
on twitter until 2017. that's when i made my account and chain link was crazy but i remember
the whole bear market link was the only thing going up every single day yeah yeah that was a wild time it was like a
perfect confluence of events but you were so i just sort of make sure i got your question right
you said like how have how has ct changed over the years no no. From your experience of just interacting
with other traders on CT, what do you
feel are the most common mistakes
that other traders have?
I mean, I think people, I mean, there's a lot of common things.
Like people can be too reactive.
You know, the whole meme of like it's up 1%, like bottoms in,
and then they start smashing longs.
Like, I don't know.
Like it's a balance.
You have to wait for some confirmation,
but you don't want to wait too long because you're giving up profit.
And again, it also depends on what kind of trading you're doing.
Like if you're scalping, then that 1%,
like, yeah, you want to try and catch that.
But if you're trying to do a swing trade,
like you think it's going to swing like 30%,
you don't really care if you give up a couple
percent on your entry and a couple percent on your exit as long as you catch like 25 percent of that
30 percent um but yeah one thing i guess um people yeah people get baited into like changing their
opinion i mean it still happens to me even.
I don't really have a good solution to that,
but I think it's a matter of coming up with good ways
to confirm and invalidate your trades.
Yeah, I see people have a hard time holding underwater.
That's another thing.
So often, people, if they just held a little longer,
the trade would have worked out.
If you're holding something good, that's the big if.
Is this a good thing?
But it always comes back.
You could have bought Bitcoin anywhere on the chart, basically,
and you'd be in profit right now,
unless you just bought the top in the last couple of weeks.
Anybody else is in profit.
You might have held through a bad drawdown in the middle,
but see, I think learning to be comfortable
being a little bit underwater is a good thing.
I see a lot of people close out the moment it goes a little against them.
Yeah.
I mean, that makes sense.
I think it's just this conditioning
people have that crypto goes up and like you're gonna be rich you're gonna make a lot of money
but you know taking losses is fine like you know a good example for this is how
you know so there's days i'll finish my day and i'll you know either go out with my girlfriend
or see some friends and they're like, Oh,
how was your day? How was work? I was like, then I'll say like, ah,
it was shit. I lost a bunch of money today. Like, ah, dude,
I'm sorry to hear that. Like, I suck. I'm like, ah, it's a part of the job.
You know, it's like, it's just,
it's just a part of the job. It's cost of doing business.
Yeah. Yeah. It's tough. Sometimes like the whole like cost of doing business yeah yeah it's tough sometimes like the whole like cliche
of like nobody knows what you're going through kind of thing like you're out with friends or
whatever and everybody's happy and having a good time and you're like yeah they don't
they don't know i lost a house today
i remember i remember in may 21 when we had the 50 drawdown in like two weeks
from 60k to 30 i was having like a crazy existential crisis i was down so bad
and there was like a day we were sitting with all of my friends all of my colleagues and everything
at some restaurant in the city.
And like everyone's laughing, having fun.
And I'm just like fighting demons in my mind, you know.
It was so insane.
Yeah.
And then one of the guys pulled up his phone.
He's like, oh, dude, Bitcoin's down like crazy.
I'm down like 10K.
And I was like, oh, fucking God.
Oh, yeah.
But yeah. and i was like oh yeah but yeah um may may 2021 was literally the worst month of my life yeah yeah the same for me it was like it was insane it was so bad but uh but i feel like it's
it's almost like a rite of passage, especially in trading in crypto, where everything is so volatile and everything.
I feel like almost every single trader I speak to on the show or in private talks about how they had an event like this, where they had a crazy drawdown.
It's just a thing where most of us have the same dates
as those bad times but uh but yeah it just happens yeah it's like um it's the difference between
like knowing something and really feeling it like you don't really feel it until it happens to you
you see stories of other people like oh this
person lost what like millions overnight or whatever and you still like stay risk on and
you feel like oh that's not going to happen to me and then it happens to you
and it's a lot more real and it does does wind up changing how you trade i
and it does does wind up changing how you trade i i like break down my journey to
like so my early bitcoin mining that i all that i sold all early because i just needed to pay for
food like i had i had that regret of selling too early which that regret helped me hold my Chainlink.
So I think if I hadn't sold all my Bitcoin early,
I wouldn't have been able to diamond hand my Chainlink like I did.
I put everything I had into it at the ICO,
and I legit held it for four years straight, not touching it,
wrote it from 10 cents to 50 at the peak but then my lesson that
i got from chain link was holding too long i got destroyed on the downside in the in the may crash
because i held it too long so i got like the opposite lesson and now i feel you know i've
been cut both ways i'm a little bit more balanced now.
Yeah, it's really important.
Like there's definitely a lot of lessons that I've learned from that month.
And I don't think I would be where I am today without that happening to me.
Yeah.
I've kind of like those lessons, I guess how they've changed me is I've taken this blended approach of where I have trades based on a fundamental thesis.
But I also use price action as a bit of a safety net. from a technical perspective, I'm like, all right, maybe it's time for me to close out
and reassess and just protect what I've made so far, even though I still believe in this
from a fundamental perspective.
Fartcoin was a good example of that.
that I held that the whole run up and was a firm believer that it was going to go to $5, $10.
I still think it could if we get a massive alt season at the end of this run.
But back then, and then the Trump token launched and it kind of sucked all the
momentum out of it and the chart was just telling me like it started losing trends that it was
previously holding and i was like all right i'm gonna i'm gonna cut like even though i believe
in this from a fundamental perspective the chart's telling me that it's rolling over. And I use that as like a risk management
just to like put a cap on how much I'd give back.
So like I didn't sell the top on Farcoin,
but I did sell, I think I sold it like $1.50.
So it had pulled back from like $2.50 to $1.50.
So I gave back a lot,
but then it fell from $1.50 to like 30 cents.
So by using that like technical backstop i saved myself otherwise i would have like held it all the way back down
to 30 cents and gave back way more and how how do you manage all this psychological side of
of trading like you know dealing with the stress of maintaining the position,
just having discipline during volatile times
or just challenging periods where you have an underwater trade,
you gave back a bunch of P&L,
or a bear market, a bull market,
where you're sidelined for some reason on a few assets,
for some reason on few assets, stuff like that?
stuff like that.
How do you handle all this?
How do you handle all this?
So even though I know it's not like a correct opinion
to have, I think the whole like,
well, it's just profit I'm giving back.
Like thinking like that actually does help me psychologically
because a lot of the like
a lot of the trades i'm known for are ones that went on big runs and i was able to like hold it
for the entire run and i wouldn't have been able to do that if i like was getting nervous every pullback. And yeah, I think, yeah, the whole, well, I'm up a bunch on this.
It's okay if I give a little bit back.
That attitude, while not exactly correct, it's still a loss.
Giving back profit is still like losing money that you could have had.
It helps hold if you have that perspective
on it like oh well whatever it was just it was just profit and i like in order to have
in order to hold something like 100x you have to have a really wide risk tolerance for it
um otherwise you would have like you would have sold somewhere
along the way like on some 20 pullback and then missed the whole rest of the run so
i've kind of taken on a mindset of like i'll let it run i'll give it like a very wide safety net
especially once i'm like in profit quite a lot on it.
It's like, okay, I can let it ride.
It's just profit that I'm giving back.
And I'll use some trend or some level or whatever as my spot where I'm like, okay, if it starts losing that, then I'll get out.
So I know approximately how much I'll give back.
And you kind of just have to become okay with giving back a little bit of your UP&L.
More often than not, you're probably not going to exit something at the top,
especially if you're holding it for like some fundamental reason and you're not trading like technicals or trading some levels
like if you're trading levels and you sell and it like hits some resistance and then it pulls back
like yeah you might like sell the top but if you're holding something for some fundamental thesis it's
really hard to say when the the top is so chances are you're going to give, you're probably going to sell at least
20% down from whatever the top was. And you kind of just have to get okay with that.
And to use Farcoin as another example, yeah, it sucks that instead of selling at like two dollars and 50
cents i sold at a dollar and 50 cents i gave back a ton of profit on that but on the flip side
i held it from like two tenths of a cent to a dollar 50 like you gotta reframe it
to be like look at how much i'm up versus how much i gave back from the top yeah but i mean
that's also why you managed to hold it from you know from that low to that high is because you
are not thinking about i have to sell the pico top and you know being afraid of giving back some pnl
being afraid of giving back some P&L
is exactly why you managed to hold it.
Yeah, it's a trade-off.
You have to be willing to give a lot back
in order to also experience the upside as well.
Because if I would have played it tight,
I probably would have sold it at 100 million market cap
or something instead of winding up selling it at 1.5 billion.
So ultimately, it does work out better.
Yeah, it's like the people saying,
I wish I would have bought Bitcoin at like 10 bucks.
I'm like, you would have sold it at 50.
You know?
Right.
Yeah, if you don't have some kind of fundamental belief in it and you're just trading
the chart, like, like chain link, I held that through,
I think like four different 90% drawdowns.
And like, I mean,
in hindsight I do wish I sold and rebought and like kind of played those
drawdowns a little better.
But ultimately, the only reason I experienced so much upside on that is because I was willing to live through the downside.
And I had such a strong fundamental belief in it that it would come back.
And I feel like you can't really get a hundred X trade
without some kind of mindset like that some kind of fundamental belief you have
to be a little bit crazy to hold something 100 X yeah 100% it's like
that's why there's two very different types of mindsets and you can see it
very clearly on the people on CT,
the people who trade and the people who invest, right?
Because I feel like they're very, very different things.
And most people who trade on daily
are not really good investors and vice versa,
because it's just very different mindsets
and very different set of rules and tolerances and stuff
like that.
Yeah. And I think CT would be a lot better if more people kept that in mind. very different set of rules and you know tolerances and stuff like that yeah and i think
ct would be a lot better if more people kept that in mind back to your question of like
common mistakes that i see people make you always see people talking past each other on ct because
they are on like different time frames like you'll see somebody say something bullish
one day and then something bearish the next day,
and people shit all over them.
And it's like, well, you don't realize their bullish thesis
is on a year time frame, and their bearish thesis
might just be for this week.
They think there's going to be a temporary pullback.
And people don't keep those different time frames
and those different mindsets in mind
when they talk to each other.
Yeah, it's like people playing with the same toys,
but they're playing a different game, pretty much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wanted to also ask you about just angel investing.
I know you've been investing in a bunch of stuff uh you wrote
about it and um i was wondering like because there's a lot of people interested in it and
it's very clear because we've had you know platforms like uh echo of kobe's that he launched
and just all these different like launch pads they're that are like trying to help people invest into early
stage stuff how does one get into angel investing and like how is your
experience with it and is do you think it's something people should you know
look into so how it happened for me like I guess I don't have too much advice for that because it kind of fell in my lap.
Just as I've grown the account, I'll get more people messaging me like, hey, are you interested in this seed round or whatever?
So I guess my advice would just be to network, network, network.
The more people you meet, the more friends you make,
the greater chance that some kind of deal
will come across your desk.
Other than that, I haven't.
I mean, that's a question I have personally.
Sometimes I see people getting in these deals,
and I'm just like, holy like how how'd they find out about
that i i want to know what like their research pipeline looks like that i could like find out
about that that early as well um so that's something i'm still working on personally
um i think like i i still like haven't really gotten an exit on any of the stuff I've seed invested in.
So I don't know how much I recommend it.
I think there are a lot of benefits.
Because 99% of my investments went to zero.
Yeah, I mean, well, most of my stuff still isn't even completely live launched yet.
The stuff that I gave seed money to.
So again, when I say I haven't gotten an exit,
I mean, it hasn't even TGE'd.
So not so much that it went to zero or something.
But yeah, it's like, I don't know.
It's a whole different mindset.
And there's a lot of pros and cons to it.
Like trading a public market, like you have liquidity whenever you want.
Like if something goes wrong, you can just sell and you get as much of your money back as you can at the market price. But if you're holding some private round
and the team messes up, you're stuck.
There's nothing, there's no market for it to sell into.
And also, I think, I mean, we've just been seeing
more and more of the risk reward getting sucked out of private rounds.
Like, used to be free money, because private rounds would be so cheap.
And the whole stereotype of these VC tokens, where they have so much supply that they got so cheap,
and then the charts down only.
The market kind of learned their lesson with that,
and that doesn't happen as much anymore.
And stuff that does have private rounds,
they're raising at valuations that are closer
to what it's probably going to launch publicly anyway.
You're not seeing stuff so much anymore
that right when it goes public,
it's an immediate 10x over what the private round was.
Maybe it'll be up 10% or 20% over the private round.
So yeah, I think...
Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
I was just going to say,
I think a lot of the juice from that has been squeezed.
But obviously, there's still good opportunities out there.
I feel like a part of it is probably because it became much easier to access these rounds,
whether if it's by platforms like what Kobe built or others is,
or if it's just because there's way more people on CT now.
So there's way more KOLs or whatever you want to call them that are getting these offers.
And Kobe once, like he wrote, I think it was a blog that he posted about angel investing and just, you know, raises and stuff like that.
and stuff like that, or maybe it was a post he made.
Or maybe it was a post he made.
I can't remember.
But he said something like that makes sense,
where the easier it is for you to get into the round,
the likelihood of it being shit is way higher.
From my experience of the things that I've invested in,
it's 100% correct.
I mean, yeah, it's pretty much like a a direct
correlation between the two like um because the whole like the whole benefit of a private round
is that only a limited number of people can get in so you have everybody that couldn't get in
that couldn't get in they're a buyer after you exactly you need you need buyers like everybody
like the whole meme of like oh crypto's a ponzi like you're just trying to convince more people
to buy every market is like that like the stock market like like you need you need somebody to
buy and make the price go up after you bought.
But if everybody's getting in at the private round at the same valuation you got in, then like who's left to buy?
You're just you've got a bunch of people holding that all they can do is sell and you've got nobody left that can buy um people who were around back in the uh ico days they remember like all the good
icos had hard caps like um and the lower the the lower the market cap on that hard cap the better
um because like like people used to have gas wars to try and get into these icos they'd be spending
like a hundred thousand dollars just in gas to like get into the ico because it was like so tight
so strict and then let's see you'd have like very few people get in and just a huge amount of upside
after because all that demand that couldn't get in on the ICO
is just waiting to buy the moment it launches publicly.
Yeah, exactly.
And also just, you know, companies now or projects now,
some of the DMs I've been getting recently,
it's like, yeah, we're raising it like a $2 billion valuation
or like 750 mil. I'm like, dude, what the fuck billion valuation or like 750 million.
I'm like, dude, what the fuck?
You have like seven users.
What the fuck are you talking about?
Yeah, I think another thing that happened is like
the more successful cryptos become
and the more like the more large raises there have been,
it's easier for these teams to justify raising at larger amounts.
Whereas back in 2017 or whatever,
you couldn't justify raising at that.
So you'd be forced to start at a low value.
Yeah.
I'm only going to do investments in the bear market.
That's it.
Like the peak of the bear market,
where people are humble and there's just no one to invest anymore
yeah that's better especially like you know depending on what the lockups are like
if you're if you're doing angel investing like at peak bull by the time it unlocks it's probably
peak bear.
You obviously don't want to be unlocking into the peak of the bear market.
Yeah, I mean, peak of the bear market with a four-year unlock, that's perfect.
Yeah.
I was wondering, what would be an advice that you would give your younger self or someone listening to this right now who is just entering into the trading world
and just makes his first steps, first couple of months in trading or whatever that is.
I'm trying to not be too specific because the specific advice advice I'd give myself would be hold your Bitcoin you idiot.
But that doesn't you know that advice doesn't really apply to people anymore.
Unfortunately.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're not going to get another 100,000 X on that one.
100,000 X on that one.
But.
But yeah, I guess I'd say like my general advice to people always is patience.
Like patience is a huge virtue in trading.
Like take a step back, your time be calm think clearly
um yeah like take take the time to actually think things through and like have have a reason why
you're entering a trade don't just be like hopping around slamming trades like take a step back be patient wait for the wait for the market
to come to you you don't have to take a trade ever if it's not a setup that you want like
don't fomo into it um i i am a believer in that whole uh the tweet of like five times a year,
there'll be money on the ground
and your job is to pick up.
Like, I think I've more and more
been trying to move towards that
where I like, I don't do anything.
I sit back and if I see a good opportunity come to me,
I'll strike, but like otherwise,
like just don't take a trade
yeah i feel like most people should print out this tweet and like have it on their wall or something
yeah even like i don't know it's again it's one of those things where knowing it and experiencing it
is so different because you can know it but you'll still be sitting at
your computer you know 12 hours a day like anxiously like is this a good trade is this
a good trade is this like um even though you say it to yourself it's it's hard to actually feel that
and be able to like calmly take a step from back from the market and be like, I'm okay if I miss out on some things.
That's another thing with crypto is there's so many trades.
There's so many opportunities.
There's always something pumping somewhere.
If you miss a trade today, it's okay.
There will be another one.
Just wait for the good one to come to you like the uh
like the casino analogy i was using earlier you don't like it's like if you're playing poker
blackjack but you had the option to just like opt out anytime you didn't get a good hand like you
wouldn't if you got dealt a bad hand you wouldn't be like oh cool i'm gonna bet a whole lot on this like
no just walk away from the table until you get a good hand yeah i feel like it's just again it's one of those things that you also just learn with time because when you're early in the space like
when you're a beginner in the space rather um you just feel like you have to catch on and like you
know can't miss a day can't miss a moment but after you've been around for a couple of years you just feel like you have to catch on and like, you know, can't miss a day, can't miss a moment.
But after you've been around for a couple of years, you just realize there's going to be new things,
there's going to be new advancements, there's going to be new trades.
And that's just how it is.
And like sometimes I'm even, you know, like I'll take a day off.
I'm not like finally I reached the stage where i can take
days off without checking charts at all and like you know if i miss something i miss it i don't
really care yeah it comes back to what we were talking about earlier about people like uh who
really like need the money versus people who don't really care and are more calm about it
like if you don't have a pretty sizable portfolio already or at least like
you know you should at least show some consistency like in your trading like if
you're consistently making like a few thousand
a week or whatever then maybe consider doing it full-time but like i don't know there's people
out there that they have like maybe a 20 20 grand portfolio and like are not very consistent and
they're like doing this full-time and it's like's like that's money that they need to live off of
so they have this extra pressure.
And that is just not a good environment to trade in.
Yeah, 100%.
I think every person that starts in the space
needs to have at at least a year like
at least six months ahead or a year of expenses fully that are not in a trading
account or something or just like in a savings account you know put aside and
then you'll be able to have like a clear mind mm-hmm you'll be able to make good
decisions because again this this feeling of like i have to take a trade to make
money because because you know it's like this thing where um early on when you're trading
especially if you're you know it's the first couple of months when you're doing it full time
if you don't take any trades for a week you feel like you've done nothing right it feels like you
haven't worked where that's just a false feeling because you are
working it's just that there's nothing you know there's nothing to do um yeah my uh my girlfriend
and i we joke all the time because like she'll come into like my office area and i'm just like
scrolling twitter and there's like memes on my screen and shit
yeah and she's like oh i thought you were working and i'm like i i am i know what you mean
so so much of so much of the time is just like it looks like idle time but you're like you're
kind of you're like sitting back and you're watching the landscape but you're like, you're kind of, you're like sitting back and you're watching
the landscape and you're like, just kind of broadly keeping your eyes open for an opportunity
to show up. Um, but yeah, most, most of the time, like 90, 95% of trading is just kind of sitting
and doing nothing and waiting for an opportunity. So you're trying to just keep yourself busy
in between trades. That's pretty much what you're doing. just keep yourself busy in between trades that's
pretty much what you're doing yeah i'm fortunate oh god yeah no go ahead i was just gonna say i'm
fortunate that i have like enough hobbies and things to keep me busy that i don't have to just
be like obsessing over crypto all the time yeah thankfully i'm like i started playing video games again and i'm like i started
playing runescape again a bunch of other people from ct there you go i bought i bought like 3d
printers and like getting into like 3d printing modeling and stuff like that like my office just
looks like a like a nerd's heaven pretty much and uh yeah it's the same experience people go into
my office and i'm like
oh dude i'm working and i'm like my runescape is open i'm like killing a boss or something
yeah and it's happening because like i remember there was i spoke about this the last episode as
well where like a friend of mine called me but i missed his call i haven't noticed that he called
me and i called him back like an hour later i was like hey dude i was working i'm sorry he's like dude you weren't working you piece of you were like
tweeting all day long like dude that's that's work yep and now that uh now that twitter actually
pays you for engagement you can now you you can legitimately say that like look i'm getting paid
for my yeah you know it's kind of crazy because i i think i'm getting like
i'm getting a 250 or 300 bucks usually every month and i don't even notice it and i just took the
whole sheet of all the payments figures it's kind of crazy
yeah
it's enough to cover
food expenses
and everything I feel like
it covers my bills
it's pretty crazy that I'm shitposting
I get money from it
that's what heaven is like.
Anyways, I have one last question for you.
And that's a question we give to all of our guests.
And I'm interested in seeing what you're going to say.
And that's what do you believe making it is?
And do you feel like you've made it?
I think making it is a mindset you know there's like uh there's miserable
rich people and there's like euphoric homeless dudes so um i think making it's going to vary
person to person some people aren't going to be happy.
They have an innate desire to conquer the world,
and they just want more and more.
Other people, they're as happy as can be working a nine to five.
They got their wife and kids, and they live a happy, great life.
And I think you just need to find,
like it's a very personal question.
Like I could tell people what making it is for me,
but I don't think that would apply to everybody.
I guess like for me personally,
ever since I was a little kid,
I always knew I wanted to be like at a point where I was self-employed.
That was always important to me. I didn't want to work for somebody
else. I enjoyed doing my own thing.
So from that perspective,
I've made it. I've achieved that goal.
But there's still things like I have some goals in my life,
like family goals that I haven't gotten to yet
that crypto honestly has kind of gotten in the way of a little bit.
And I've been feeling like it's more time to pay attention to those things
those things and and make it from from that perspective so I I'd say like even
and make it from that perspective.
I still haven't completely made it yeah well we're gonna follow you and watch
you as you do that's beautiful man I don't have any other questions to you
that's pretty much it from me is there anything else you want to add?
nothing jumps to mind
alright
there you go
well guys
thank you so much for coming
this was really really awesome
I really enjoyed it
and I'm sure our listeners also learned a lot and had a lot of fun
and uh yeah guys if you don't again if you don't follow gammy chen make sure to give him a follow
as you've heard really good ideas and thoughts and i think seeing them on the timeline has a lot
so make sure to do that thank you so much yeah my pleasure man thanks uh thanks a lot. So make sure to do that. Thank you so much.
Yeah, my pleasure, man.
Thanks a lot for coming.
Hopefully, maybe someday we'll do this again.
Maybe we can have an episode with Marusha together or something like that. Shout out to
Mauro in the crowd.
Yeah, I'm done.
Yeah, that'll be awesome.
We're thinking to start, I'm thinking to actually
start doing
semi-live live streaming like basic
ones just like showing charts so that
we can see some charts while the guests are talking
I don't know maybe that'll be interesting
okay we'll try that yeah that can be fun
yeah all right well that's
pretty much it man thank you so much for coming
again really appreciate it
to all of our listeners thank you guys
for coming and for making
this happen.
Really, really awesome to see all their regulars in the crowd.
And to all of our listeners that joined in the middle of the show and missed something out,
there will be a recording.
So once this episode ends, you'll be able to just listen back to it instantly.
And on Monday, as always, there will be notes on my profile
made by Manuel,
the head intern of Kuma.
And yeah, that's pretty much it.
And speaking of Kuma,
thank you to Kuma
for making these spaces happen
now live with up to 50x leverage.
Like I said earlier in the show,
we're giving out 7,500, around around 7500 dollars in trading rewards every single week and all you have to do
is trade um on top of that we have a weekly raffle of 1200 in rewards uh all you have to do is to
have trading volume the more trading volume you have the more raffle tickets you have for the
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So yeah, make sure to check that out.
If you haven't tried Goom Out, there's a link in my bio
that gives you 40% off of fees forever. And all the rebate goes back to you guys so yeah enjoy that um
yeah gamachan again huge thank you for coming man this was really really fun um and yeah i appreciate
you man awesome thanks for having me i enjoyed it awesome all right see you guys bye bye
