The cruellest toy ever invented is the laser pointer, and cats cannot beat it. Tuga knows the sofa, the garden, the neighbour's shed and the precise sound of the treat drawer — but put a red dot on the wall and every piece of that knowledge evaporates. She chases. She always chases. And she never catches it, because there is nothing there to catch.

Crypto markets run a laser pointer roughly every eleven weeks, and the results are identical.

1. What a Narrative Actually Is

A narrative is a story that explains why a particular corner of the market is about to matter. AI tokens. Real-world assets. Gaming. Memecoins. Modular chains. Whatever is on the wall this quarter.

Narratives are not lies. That's what makes them effective. There is usually a real, defensible, interesting idea at the centre — an actual technology, an actual trend. The problem isn't that the dot is fake. The problem is that the dot is not the thing you're being sold.

What's for sale is the rotation: the flow of attention and capital moving into that sector faster than it moves out. And attention is the one commodity in this market that reliably arrives before price and leaves without warning.

2. Why Rotation Feels Like Skill

Here's the trap, stated mechanically.

In a rotation, everything in the sector goes up at once. Good projects, bad projects, and outright frauds move together, because the buying is indiscriminate — it's flowing toward a category, not toward an analysis.

If you bought anything in that sector, you made money. And the human brain will interpret that as having been right. It will build a story about your research, your early positioning, your read on the technology. This feeling is extremely convincing and almost entirely unrelated to what happened, which was that you were standing where the dot landed.

The bill arrives on the next rotation, when the same confidence gets applied to a larger position in a sector that has already moved.

3. Telling a Dot From a Mouse

There is a real distinction between attention flow and adoption, and it's worth learning because it's the only thing that separates the two outcomes.

Questions that cut through:

• Does anyone use it who isn't paid to? Not "users" as a metric — real usage that survives incentives ending. Most sector activity evaporates the day the rewards do.
• Would this exist without a token? If the token is the product rather than the fuel, you're looking at the dot.
• Who is selling into your buying? Someone with an unlock schedule usually is. Check what the insider and investor unlocks look like — it's public, and it explains an enormous share of "unexplained" declines.
• How old is the story? By the time a narrative has a name, a dedicated index and daily coverage, the positioning is largely complete. You are not early to something you learned about from a feed.

None of these guarantee anything. They just shift you from chasing light to examining an object.

4. What Tuga Does

She has a mouse-shaped policy: pursue things that leave physical evidence.

Applied here, that means a portfolio built around what you'd still hold if the entire narrative apparatus went quiet for two years — which, historically, is exactly what happens between cycles. Everything else is a trade, and a trade must be sized like a trade: an amount that can go to zero without changing your life or your posture.

The specific discipline that helps most is embarrassingly simple: write down why you bought, before you buy. One sentence. If, three weeks later, the reason has quietly changed from "this technology will be used" to "it's going up", you're chasing the dot and now you have the evidence in your own handwriting.

5. The Honest Caveat

I am not going to tell you narratives are always wrong. Some of the biggest returns in this asset class came from people who identified a sector early and held through the noise — and they looked exactly like dot-chasers for a year first.

The difference is never visible in the moment. It's visible in the process: whether you can state what would make you wrong, whether you sized it as a bet rather than a conviction, and whether you'd still be interested if the price hadn't moved.

If the answer to that last one is no, you already know what you're chasing.

The Point

Tuga is not stupid. She is a competent predator with a strong model of her territory who is being exploited by a device that produces a perfect signal with no substance behind it. Her instincts aren't malfunctioning — they're being aimed.

The market does this to informed people every cycle. Not by fooling them about the technology, but by hijacking the same mechanism that makes them good at everything else: the pursuit of a signal that has always, previously, meant something was there.

Chase the thing that leaves footprints. The dot on the wall belongs to whoever is holding the pointer. 🐾⚡

Nothing here is financial advice — I feed a cat and write about Bitcoin, which qualifies me to advise you on neither. Do your own research, and size everything like you might be wrong.