Before you even ask, absolutely, this is more a reminder to myself than it is a missive towards you. But isn't that what the best missives are anyway?

As bitcoin mania moves into altcoin season, you're going to see a lot of people make a lot of money. What you won't see is exponentially more people lose a lot of money. Maybe all of their money. Crypto (like everything else concerned with investing) has rosy retrospection bias. just as that dude in telegram is only going to tell you about his 100 X and not his 48 losses, crypto as a whole is only going to show you the memecoin millionaires in a bull market.

When the media decides it's more profitable to share all the loser singin' the blues stories, then the narrative will switch.

But for now...

How To Make Money in a Crypto Bull Market

Making money in a crypto market, especially the tsunami we're about to experience, is as easy as showing up and not fucking up. That's really all you have to do.

Unfortunately, every crypto cycle produces exponentially more opportunities to not show up to the things you should be present for, and to fuck up the easiest, most straightforward set of actions.

All the scammers are back in full force, and they brought their friends with them. There are 200 more blockchains to deploy scams on than there were in 2021. There's exponentially more money to take because pension funds and other normies are finding their way into the crypto space through ETFs.

Automation has improved and a bad actor can spin up countless websites, wallet drainers, Trojans, and phishing devices to take your shit. the new scam is building out an entire project, website, Discord, and all, then DM you on Twitter to ask if you want to be the community manager. when you look at the website, you see a unique UI that seems to match up with what your attacker has described to you. When you visit the Discord, you'll see people talking. If you're not careful, you'll get drained without even knowing what happened.

Trading is the same way. You think that because Dextools has implemented better scam detection that you are more protected than you were in past bull markets. The scam is now to create a legitimate project and take your money through KOL groups. So the project is fully legitimate – it just sucks. And the people who are in on it have absolutely no intention of trying to make the project work. If they have plausible deniability, then they have your money.

This is the second cousin to the scam that influencoors like Alex Becker, Elliotrades and 0xJesusMartinez are constantly running on you. It's an affinity scam wherein you believe that even if these influencoors get early deals on tokens, they're still in the same boat with you. As in, more people have to buy/the project has to be good for all of you to make money. Right?

Wrong!

The people who really make money in crypto, including Elliotrades and the Scam Brigade, aren't in the business of trading at all. 

They're in the business of making you trade. The higher your trade volume, the more money they make, whether they trade or not.

That's Not How to Make Money in a Crypto Bull Market

Doesn't seem like it, but yes, it is!

If I've scared you out of doing anything except hold on for dear life to the coins you already have, then that last text block did its job. I don't want you to move off of your square. That's how you make money in a crypto bull market.

What does this really mean? It means to defining yourself within this web3 space more specifically than you ever have.

The Secret: Low Trading Volume

The temptation is as crypto expands, to take in as much information as possible.

The temptation is as more tokens show up, to trade faster to keep up with all the new releases.

The temptation is as you get invited to more TG groups, to follow more influencoors and get more computer screens to show more charts and do more, more, more, more, more...

You get the idea.

The secret: Low trading volume. Think about it.

When do you make the most money — when your trading volume gets high...

or when you make the right move, sit, then watch trading volume get higher around you?

Ding ding ding.

When your trading volume is high, swaps make money from fees, projects make money from taxing you, influencoors make money because projects pay them to bring eyes to their project.

What's more, your chances at winning reduce themselves mathematically. It's a simple calculation. An example:

Let's say you have a 75% chance of winning every single trade you take. You then want to take that money and flip it into another trade, obviously. Let's say you're the best traitor in the world and you have a 75% chance of winning that trade as well. And the next, and the next, and the next.

Your probability of coming out on top in total hits 42% by the third trade. Once it goes below 50% (trade 3), it falls off precipitously.

Ofc this is a simplified calculation, as it doesn't take into account sizing or exponential spreads (putting a $10k victory into 5 new projects @ $2k each). The point stands. You lose the ability to win the more you trade.

And the further you drill down into crypto, the shorter the timeframes get and the more you have to trade to keep up. The incentive is all the guys in the TG talking about the 20X they just made in 2 minutes. Again, not talking about the 15 losses they took the day before or the timing and insider info they needed to make the trade work.

My Solution

Like everyone else, I sometimes get caught up in the craze of short-term meme coin trading in these crazy pump and dump groups. I sometimes put my money in a Ponzi thinking I'm first in line so there's no way I can lose.

Most of the time I lose.

Grand about life – and by extension, crypto – is that you only need a few wins to make up for a metric ton of losses. The name of the game is to never lose all of your liquidity. Above all things, stay in the game.

How I do this: Nodes. Nodes are just glorified staking, but they have higher APRs. What's really great about nodes is that they admit tokens at a rate that is too slow to speculate like a true degen. Because I only get a few plays per week, I have to really dig deep into the research and wait on the good ones.

The second most important thing is to forgive yourself for losses quickly. It does only take a few good decisions to make a lot of money in crypto. If you are crying about your loss yesterday, you will definitely miss the score you could have had today. And yes, I am self-aware that thinking this way is what causes the winners' bias I just talked about in all of these crypto P&D groups. I accept that, but I don't talk about my wins either!

Having a consistent source of liquidity through nodes definitely helps me to forgive losses more quickly. So get you some.

Third on the list is investing in people, not projects. If you're playing early stage projects like me, you're never going to know who's larping as a dev. The game is all technical chart analysis and narrative. Narrative is all about what people say about the project and who's going to be shilling it on launch.

How I do this: Learning from the mistakes I made in the previous bull market concerning NFTs, I now buy them sparingly for the connections they give me — not for flipping. This is a strategy that's proven successful. Even though I don't care to be an active part of Bored Ape Yacht Club anymore, being in the tokengated local Telegram groups from that club has led me to various VC conglomerates that get great deals on upcoming projects. I don't know how I would've gotten into these groups without having owned the Ape first.

I'm expecting Sappy Seals to pay off the same way.

Thing four: Once you find your thing, stick to it. Although I'm not perfect at this, I do my best impression of Drake's "No New Friends" whenever I can. That is, now that I have a trusted group of alpha callers, everyone else is met with skepticism from jump. I don't care if they have 500,000 Twitter followers or they just posted a 10,000X. Their methodology may be different from mine, which would keep me from duplicating their results.

I'm also very resistant to look outside of the niches I've now chosen as this bull market's cash vehicle. I'm personally interested in those niches, which makes me passionate to research them. This gives me an edge, however slight, that will allow me to profit in ways that I see no influencoor talking about.

Fifth thing: Take in limited research. If you try to take in all of the research crypto offers, you'll be overwhelmed. I limit my research by my peer group (Thing four) and my chosen niches. Everything else is noise to me at this point. The goal is to make enough where I can lay back and actually research what I want, but for now, discipline and focus is the key.

Bottom line: Less is more. No trade is trade. Take the time to consider if you are trading based on your own inner voice or if you're being prompted by one of many outside influences that make money from trading volume.

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