Bull or Bear? What the Charts Are Saying | Ledger from Up Only

Transcript

hey bankless nation welcome to another episode of state of the nation this is the episode where we talk about something topical something top of mind i think this week the topical top of mind thing is the market specifically are we in yeah bear or bull market that's what people want to know and in order to figure that out of course like fundamentally look crypto is in a 10 20 multi-decade long secular bull cycle so if you ask someone like david or myself bear market bull market we'll be like ah i mean krypto is always in a bull market right kind of and yet there are some uh you know local bear and types of seasons as well that we have to

talk through so david who did we bring on and what are we going to cover in this episode yeah we are bringing on returning guest ledger his real name is brian but everyone calls him uh calls him ledger uh co-host of the up only podcast as well as the ledger cast podcast so a fellow podcaster and that's always a treat to bring on fellow content producers because they know how to make good content but ryan some a skill that you and i both completely lack is the ability to look at a chart and actually interpret it like i can draw lines it's like oh well there's a line here and there's a line here but that's about as far as i can go uh and so when it comes time to actually zoom out and look at the state of the charts because charts do matter

we need some extra help so we're bringing on ledger from ledger cast up only to help us walk through both the cryptocharts uh we'll start with bitcoin ether ethbtc some alt layer ones but then we'll also talk about macro because macro markets and commodity markets are also interesting right now so looking at the state of the charts today on the state of the nation and we hopeful we're hopeful by the end of this episode you'll have a good sense of what kind of market we're in right now is this a bear market is this a bull market and what are the charts telling us the future is going to look like so that's the goal for this episode stay tuned for that david before we get in we got to talk about our friends at opolis so opolis is a dow that provides healthcare benefits

for the self-sovereign employee the self-sovereign employee is is someone who is kind of a contractor they're in the web three space they're not tied down to their existing employer but they're working for crypto projects and uh we think that this is going to be a new way the workforce is shaped into the future a lot of people before they dive into web 3 are faced with this issue maybe they're in their corporate job at least in the u.s how do you get health insurance if you're working for a group of dows or crypto projects like how does that work if you're trying to be a self-sovereign employee and that's what opolis provides they provide you health insurance payroll benefits dental vision they can even pay you in crypto

they can help take care of your taxes as well it's like you get all of those corporate benefits except except you get the the freedom you're no longer a wage slave and you can engage in the crypto economy as a self-sovereign employee so uh opolis is a fantastic service for all of these things david there's also a special deal going on a bonus for members of the bankless nation if you are a um you know if you sign up before some certain date is it may 1st may 1st yeah may 1st to get a thousand work tokens which is the opolis dow token and a thousand bang tokens which is the bankless doubt token because opolis it actually serves a lot of the bankless dow members and they are using this this

service themselves to work at bankless dow and all the other dows that they work at uh and so opolis is basically uh collective the larger it grows the more leverage it has to get better rates with healthcare and other services so when you join the opolis dow the opus dow gets stronger uh so there's a link in the show notes where you can sign up with opolis to get your payroll your taxes your health care and all the other services that they offer so you can continue to be a self-sovereign worker all right david we're gonna get into the episode in just a minute but before we do i gotta ask you the question i start these episodes with every time which is what is the state of the nation today ryan we are charting a path because the fog of war right now is thick not only is there

actually a war going on which is making the markets confused uh but just the crypto markets seem to be coming to an inflection point the the three to four month bearish trend is seemingly colliding with the two to three year long bullish trend one of these things is gonna have to win uh and we need to chart a path into this chaotic future because the markets are chaotic right now and i'm looking forward to talking with ledger the chartographer if you will will help us navigate through these murky times that's awesome and so when we get back we're going to hand ledger the reigns literally he's going to be driving some of the charts that we're about to explore while we look at bitcoin price where we look at eth charts and price and alternative layer

ones as well as the the larger global macro markets and these commodity prices have been going crazy recently and we want to know uh what that means uh for the future as well so guys we will be right back with ledger but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible slingshot is a decentralized trading platform that combines the performance and ease of a centralized exchange with the openness and transparency of defy slingshot aggregates liquidity from all of d5 in order to find the best price on thousands of crypto assets every token on slingshot comes with a price chart and trade logs to give you insights into the market's activity in real time slingshot is available on polygon arbitrary and optimism saving you from the high gas feeds and low transaction

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know him he's been on the show before he also is a co-host of up only and ledger podcast uh both fantastic podcasts in and of themselves he's also a chartographer as david said uh and he's a friend of the bankless show ledger it's great to have you on how are you doing i'm doing great thanks for having me i don't actually know what a chartographer is but i do stare at you most of the day that's what you are it's a word that i made up it's a combination of charter and cartographer as somebody it's just brilliant david it's just like so i think okay so like i i want to ask you ledger so like you stare at charts a lot uh just a high level is this like an exciting time for you like like secretly or is this um is this not very exciting

to see this kind of action in the charts no this is not not very exciting in terms of uh from a crypto sense like it's just like a liquidity drain is what it looks like mostly there some of the legacy stuff is exciting just because there's volatility most traders want volatility in order to find uh profitable setups because they really need a trend one direction or the other and what we've been doing in crypto markets is just compressing so volatility has reduced even though at the same time interestingly we've been you know like options markets and stuff have been pricing for expected increased volatility so you

feel like you're pushing this spring together that you know is going to rebound back out but it hadn't done it yet so it's just this constant state of tension that's quite frustrating honestly whether you're an investor with some uncertainty about what you know whether you're going to make it or not or if you're a trader just looking for a setup and you know every time you you think hey this is the move then it ends up not being the move so it can it can be very frustrating um as a crypto trader when those markets are compressing like that you mentioned the liquidity drain and i've heard from a couple other people just how there seems to be less and less active traders at the moment and more and more just a percentage of like algobots

kind of indicating that there's like just less life in the charts that just let less action to trade on and things are just kind of settling out rather than actually take having like actionable things that the charts can you know lean into giving traders options to make trades so like how would you describe the trading environment over the last like three months or so yeah i mean reduced volatility is going to be a pretty natural or i'm sorry reduced volume is going to be a pretty natural outcome with compression in the market so i know y'all were both around as we compressed through 2018 it became it was lower and lower volume so naturally more and more people just get kind of fed up with it or stop participating and you end up with

you know your your market makers people institutional people that are always going to be there on both sides of the market waiting for the move to participate and and they're trying to eke out you know a little bit of profit here or there um and it eventually sets up for this high volatility moment and back then we broke down from 6k and went to 3k and volume exploded um and and that can same thing happens to the uh to the upside too it was i think the big moment um that at least in my mind when we got true confirmation of the bull market that we spent over a year in um in october of 2020 we broke up from nine and 10k

and that 10k to whatever on bitcoin you know most people were like yeah there's no way we're stopping at 20k not after this many years like in pain you know like none of the people that would sell would sell there they're all everybody knows what's next and what's next is price exploration um so then you had you know months of increasing volume as the price marked up and then as you start compressing again the you know interest in the market gets less and less and then you wait for that next high volatility moment so that's a cyclical nature of pretty much any market there are times especially in more mature markets where you can have longer periods where volume continues to decline and the price continues to go up

it doesn't have to have like more and more retail people or more and more you know velocity to keep the market going there's more of a passive strong bid like if you think of the s p 500 you've got the top most profitable companies in the world you've got passive investments every month by everyone with a retirement account that's just kind of a perpetual not high volume not high emotion activity that's putting dollars into that market um so those types of markets sometimes can be lower volume and and progressively maintain that trend emerging markets which all of crypto is basically an emerging market or smaller markets they're not going to be that way as much like they're going to be kind of nothing

going on and then everything going on so that's just what you tend to run into and what we've run into in crypto is we had kind of two peaks right you know like everybody got excited bitcoin and eth got pretty high um in spring of 2021 or so and then again late summer early fall of 2021 and those were the highs and it was a little different depending on what coin you were looking at and then you could find a bull market somewhere and whatever altcoin or layer one trade was moving uh but if you look at bitcoin and ethereum pretty much you had these two big moments in 2021 and other than that like a lot of people just didn't make very much money in 2021 if that's all they did you know like you had to really

get down into the weeds to make a bunch of money most of the money was made really before they heard about it so the latest participants are the the last you know the last ones in and it's harder for them to be profitable we've all been there most of us buy crypto for the first time like pretty close to the top and have to earn our stripes for a few years before we make any money um and that's kind of the season we're in again is you know people are earning their stripes right now and you know some of us who have now been in it a while too like we're trying to you know remind ourselves like it's not necessarily up only all the time even if it's a fun name for a podcast and mantra um so you got to be in it for the tech

every now and then you know so so so leisure in it for the tech these words like compression these words like liquidity drain uh you know last time we had you on i think we're talking about charts was uh where there was kind of a dip in in like beginning of summer last year and we're kind of talking about hey you know divine the future for us we talked about charts a little bit but i feel like you didn't use words like liquidity drain then and you didn't use words like compression then you're using those words now and you actually you know brought up another season that i think m maybe many people listening remember but certainly david and myself listened which is uh 2018. okay and that definitely uh felt like a liquidity

drain to me it was just like the market would drop 50 percent and then before you could catch your breath and it's like it's over okay it's got the pain has got to be it drops another 50 and this happened again and again and again and again are you thinking the setup right now does this feel similar to march or you know 2018 in general or uh are you a bit where you were like in the beginning of summer last year where you're like yeah it's uncertain could could go one direction or another i mean you weren't using these terms though is this more like 2018 to you or is this is this something else can i depress you a little bit yeah um

well for the record i'm the bearish one ryan's still bullish but i'm the bear i think it's fine to always be bullish with a long enough lens um and especially if you're taking stuff off at some points you know like taking profit pay yourself a little bit put a gigantic punk in your living room you know whatever fits for you um you know i i think those are important concepts that are going to enable you to sustain the times where you're not just constantly getting this dopamine drip of new profits you know and then i think most of us want to maintain some degree of exposure to crypto markets it just doesn't necessarily mean you have to have 100 of your net worth in like maybe it's 10 or

maybe it's 50 or whatever whatever you're comfortable with i think the same mantra should exist most of the time that like not you know once you've been in a long time not necessarily don't put in what you can't lose i think it maybe turns into more of um don't don't forget to take out what you're unwilling to lose right like if you make your first million or your first ten thousand or hundred thousand whatever that number is you wanna pay off for credit card debt or your student loans or your house or you know enough for retirement and if you can secure those dreams and those goals you should secure those goals to the best of your ability and then maintain exposure so that you have continuous upside beyond that or at least maintain an attention span beyond

that and i think after you have a period where you went through the full upswing of the market right where you you get to watch ethereum go from a hundred dollars to forty eight hundred dollars like that's a big move you know um and maybe you're maybe your price cost average was 400 but still like 400 dollars to over 4 000 is a is a nice move it's a life-changing move if you have any skin in the game um the reality now is and i can share it can i share a screen yet or yeah okay yeah this is the part that's depressing okay uh the reality is that relative to 2018 if you go to the absolute pico top in

2017 and you go out uh to the very bottom we spent almost exactly a year if you go like 50 to 52 weeks to the literal bottom if you do the same top at 2017 2018 the top took 52 weeks to go to bottom yes it took exactly a year to go to the bottom and from a time perspective we've actually basically passed that from bitcoin i i know we made a higher high here i don't think that's quite fair in bitcoin terms um to me it really felt like the top of the cycle for bitcoin because even here it was underperforming a lot of altcoins you know and you know your primary exposure if it's in majors

or whatever it's been 52 weeks since that high in april 2021 uh or it's been or we're almost we're almost up to it next month roughly tax week that's fun um so we're actually really close to that same period of time which felt for me this felt like a very long time you know this time around i've actually been a little more entertained so i don't know if it's the same thing i don't know if that means we're going to have a longer cycle of sideways but what i do know is that after that euphoric blow off top it took a long time to repair you know bitcoin moved up quite a bit but overall this move wasn't as impressive as you would have seen in

other markets like if you look at like a solana or you know the layer one trade or um even ethereum if we go over to that chart the if we take it out a log the higher high after that that first top we went from 3 900 it was a little bit better of a of a high after that right 4 800 um and then the first move out in terms of multiples was better than bitcoins as well like ethereum this gets a little messy uh ethereum gained quite a lot of strength relative to bitcoin throughout the cycle but there's no questioning that this is now uh perilous you know like this is not this is not what you want to see like you have a

breakout but then you only spend three weeks or whatever in price exploration and then you just bleed out and then when you do consolidate you do it kind of below all the same important levels so it leads you to this position where um you could have a move up but like where do you actually say now i'm bullish for more price expiration and basically you have to go quite a ways up to have that confidence you know and when you start to see like okay well where do i think this can move down and putting into the linear puts this in perspective sometimes because that's the percentage right when you that you lose you know unfortunately a lot of us know what our net worth is at the all-time high or

whatever so if you go peak to trough it's 55 a 55 correction in ethereum from that high to the to the low and uh this has to repair itself quite a bit i think it's just going to take time i guess is my point there and so to get back to that that timing angle the 52 weeks that i had highlighted of the prior chart to where we're almost at now yet it feels like we're more in this range you know what i mean it doesn't feel like we've had this like truly painful type of consolidation that could take even longer and i think what no one wants to hear and my friend uh crypto don alt if y'all know him he's a excellent kind of

patient traitor is what i would call him he legitimately thinks um this could take a really long time like two years of that um and as crypto matures and takes longer to kind of work its way through things it would be very painful i think for many participants in the market if we spent multiple years essentially letting everything catch up and letting it breathe and i don't think it's that surprising because despite the price having corrected this is going to bring some fundamental components to my personal not fundamental it's going to bring some personal experience components to it people that are doing contracting work

with me or people that are like you know they're very uber driver or you know they work at a restaurant i was walking past the coffee shop the other day and like i just heard the word bitcoin out of like five feet away from me everybody's talking about crypto and honestly i feel like there's a little bit too much attention on the market at the moment um despite price not being there alongside it and that that worries me from from that perspective and i think when you have those scenarios it just sometimes it takes a long time to repair itself and get back to a place where there's like a value trade if you will and it's not if a trade is really really crowded it's probably not

going to work very well because the as people start jumping off the bus they're going to be jumping off the bus too soon you need people to be jumping on the bus while it's already moving and i don't think we're in that place i think too many people are essentially bag holding crypto because they got involved that's great from an adoption perspective but it's not necessarily great from a price acceleration perspective because who's your who's your marginal buyer right like who's the person that's bringing money in the institutions are here the retail folks are here um really the only thing we're missing is like nation states buying in size or people automatically being able to buy in their retirement accounts for certain those are big changes that would would change

this a lot but in the meantime i think it's got to get a lot more boring first before you can get enough people kind of out of the market or under exposed or whatever to kind of catch that next wave of big upside there's a there's a couple of dynamics that i want to ask about um and so i'll kind of start start from the beginning you mentioned how in 2018 it took 52 weeks to go from the top of 2018 to the bottom uh like basically at the end of that year and you said that we'll we're almost there we're almost at 52 weeks from the first high that bitcoin set but i'm very cognizant that like a significant amount of the downside happened in the last four weeks of 2018 and like that's kind of how many weeks that we have ahead of us now of

course history never repeats itself but it does rhyme but if it did repeat itself it would be bad starting like almost this or next week and the other thing i'm cognizant about is how far away we are from what i believe that is the 200 week moving average in the green line um yeah and so like there's a lot of distance between where we are right now in the 200 week moving average and in the last four weeks of 2018 is when crypto prices went from meaningfully above the 200 movie week moving average to touching the 200 week moving average this is where bitcoin i think went from like six seven thousand to six thousand dollars and then it got cut in half to like three thousand dollars inside of inside of four weeks uh how fearful

are you that we uh rapidly approach the the 200 week moving average that's that's the first question and then the second question about like retail and people talking about bitcoin on the street and uh just like all of that excitement around crypto how do you square that with just like general mainstream adoption because that is the goal of crypto like we want everyone to be talking about crypto regardless of what the prices are so so two questions for you like how relevant is the 200 week moving average right now and also how relevant is just the fact that some of the conversations that people are having about crypto are just a symptom of adoption yeah so let's start with the 200 week moving average i love it because it's basically been the only thing that has perfectly on a

weekly closing candle basis um predicted the end of bear markets so you ask if i would be fearful that we go there oh i'd be freaking excited like if if i managed to like maintain buying power and we're at the 200 week like that's the one place on the chart where if i bought if i go all in at that point and then i'm wrong and i lose then oh well you know what you know like i that's that was the most high conviction bet that i could possibly make in crypto and there's zero chance i'm the only person looking at that which is the benefit of most ta in the first place right like you want to look at the other things that other people are looking at because those are the metrics that we've decided that's this

kind of mimetic element of any market you know that we look at price to earnings or price to sales in legacy markets we look at these fundamentals say well why do we look at those things well in ta you look at the 200 week moving average that's your that's your like true 200 day 200 week uh that's that's the biggest kind of trend following uh component that everybody is just going to look at just accept it you don't have to know exactly why any everybody cares just it only matters that everybody cares um so if we went to twenty thousand dollars on bitcoin next week i'd be ecstatic right because hopefully i will manage my risk well enough have buying power and i buy the crap out of that level

the more painful area is hovering where a 50 drop is what it takes to actually hit it and you're just like waiting for it to catch up you know and i think that's that's where this like pain trade of this constant chop and you know i i like to just uh you know draw on charts sometimes um so if you're just like drawing would it surprise you if you did something like that you know uh and i don't think most people would be too surprised but that's what gets you into your two-year kind of re-accumulation but the the beautiful thing about something like that is these 200-day or 200-week moving averages are going to just work their

way up right because the price is still above them therefore as you knock off these old weeks and add these new weeks that 200 week moving average keeps going up even though the price stays flat and it's essentially giving you a time weighted value um that it's okay to buy bitcoin with some support um this is this is your like launch pad into multi-six figure bitcoin right is you have a two or three year accumulation like where you're tapping into that ceiling price you know you're you're making some kind of higher low and then you're you're tapping 50 or 60k on on the top side until the people that are just like whoa i got out at breakeven or i got out and made my life changing money i didn't

lose at all i didn't bail it 30k i'm good like you re-accumulate to newer newer people newer stakeholders who are willing to you know absorb bitcoin in the 30ks then later in the 40ks and then it's pressing the 50ks and then you boom you look for that that breakout to the top side and that's what we did here right this was kind of the opposite or this was kind of the same thing with a coveted panic in the middle right right but like this was the um you know over exaggerated short squeeze but you know then it was kind of the synthetic 9-10 k resistance that when we broke above it no way i'm selling at 20k and we could do the same thing from highs and have

this compression into 50 or 60k who's selling who's selling above 60k after a two or three year consolidation in crypto markets it will still be uh an area of investment and technology that's exciting and then you get price expiration in it no way man everybody's gonna want a double or a triple or whatever out of that and that's when you get your 100k 150k 200k bitcoin move uh but you know it's unfortunate that it might take until 20 20 23 or or longer to actually realize that so ledger for people who can't see that the two the 200 week for for bitcoin is around 20k what is the um 200 week for eth right now um let's see i don't know off the top of

my head lower it's about a thousand oh god not a thousand yeah and then that's where you'd be excited for eve too you'd be like i don't think by the century yeah yeah that'd be the buy of the century so i think you know in markets that are newer now back here i was very excited right because this was this was any new market march 2020 was when the uh at least on in terms of being listed on coinbase that was the 200 week anniversary for ethereum being on coinbase so the the number didn't did not even exist then like in reality it existed on some market back here but it was on it was on coinbase pretty early as a token um so when it broke above that i was very

excited um and yeah any of these faster moving markets it's it's gonna show the potential downside uh just to freak you out um you know if you imagined where might it be i don't know which uh what's the closest moving average on a weekly basis for solana but um here's the hundred week because there is no 200 week yet at least from uh solano on ftx point of view and it's at 56 so your lifetime moving average on on solana is probably somewhere down like 30 or 40 dollars and it went to 250. so that's a long way down as a mean reversion trade that's all any of this means is it's a mean reversion trade

that you're trying to figure out like how much time has it taken to kind of normalize this price and in a trending market all you're doing is bouncing kind of off of your faster moving averages the price that you've normalized more quickly so that's kind of what this 20 week we talked about this last time whereas like the 20 week is always a great support but it's not like necessarily something you're gonna put like a line in the sand and say go in with my net worth that's what this is in in these faster moving markets that's more of uh maybe this isn't what i expected it to be and i need to risk off a little bit and looking back at it even though 3600 was not the top it's a

thousand dollars off the top it's still pretty darn good in terms of a place to have wrist off versus where we are today um when you're looking at the charts like this and i know i want to get back to david's second question in one second but as long as we have the eth chart up when you're looking at the charts like this um do any of the fundamentals like catalyst matter right so like we have we have the the merge happening right reduction of eve issuance by like 90 percent let's say that happens in the summer let's say that happens in june something like that does that let's say we are in the sideways kind of more secular bearish 2018 time period um does that actually have any effect on on the markets or

is that sort of a you know a non does that not matter when you're in a bear season uh it may not matter in the price for the short term but when the move actually happens it's going to matter a lot right because people will pick up on the narrative as soon as the price starts to support it now for those of us who kind of understand what happens in the supply and demand side of tokens bitcoin and ethereum ethereums are truly incredible because even we've we've had deflationary you know parts of pieces of time like a whole day that's deflationary or something like that even with the kind of double

issuance between proof of work and proof of stake so once proof of work goes offline the merge happens we're fully proof of stake the chances that ethereum is actually net deflationary cons deflationary consistently i think the probability of that's quite high and when you add something that has significant utility with the compute network of ethereum and you add this you know credit to y'all the ultrasound money meme um you put all you put that together and it absolutely matters because forever what did people love to troll ethereum about they're like well what's the supply you tell me and and you know they use that as their justification for why it does not have this inherent value because it does not have this known

emission schedule or whatever like um like bitcoin does and you know bitcoiners are going to have to question themselves if they have less utility and it's um mildly inflationary instead of instead of deflationary regularly uh and and they're gonna have to lean on okay well what do we have and what they have is this deterministic nature of the emissions schedule whereas uh the ethereum emission schedule is more variable right it's that but that is that really a big thing to hold on to um otherwise you're just sending and receiving bitcoins very very slowly uh so yeah i i think it'll very much

matter and if i shoot to the future i said you know maybe that that's your ideal scenario right that that multi-year consolidation with higher lows equal highs end up with some kind of chart pattern that everybody will talk about the ascending triangle on bitcoin it's going to 150 200k ethereum's going like 20k when that happens like i i will for sure be pumped about like the potential um you know 10x or so in ethereum off whatever the lows are because i think ethereum's potential to go to a five-figure asset that my conviction and that trade is very high my conviction in bitcoin being worth half a million dollars is not as

high um and that's the kind of equivalent move that's required right but you also think when this happens as much of a fundament fundamental catalyst as this will be at some point in the future you know people shouldn't expect if we're in a bear market an immediate market reaction to this so the merge is deployed and you're not expecting 20k like the following month or the month before is that something you would trade into or are you more focused on kind of the ta in the in the charts rather than the fundamentals at this point i love to focus i i i think you're just you're for some reason skipping valuable information if you

forget the fundamentals and only use technicals or vice versa i think they're very valuable when used in concert and you can certainly look at the fun there are great traders that all they look at is the fundamentals like what are the supply and demand concepts in a market um you know like if you're i know we'll get on macro later but like if you're drilling for oil it's like do we have enough people drilling for enough oil to meet the demand in the market if not number go up if we do then number stays the same or maybe it goes down if demand lessens et cetera et cetera the same thing's going to happen in in crypto as we create these metrics for what's happening with tokens are are there fewer tokens coming on the

market are there more people that are using these networks and in ethereum's case by using them also burning the underlying token as a as the the gas the fee to use the network to maintain um you know the efficiency of of those blocks like you have to pay to use it do layer one transactions go down because of layer two i've expressed before that i don't think that's gonna occur i think layer two will uh create just as much or more demand on layer one itself even though it'll make uh crypto much more accessible to more people so what you create there is potentially an extreme onboarding event where you make

crypto more accessible on chain to more people via native layer twos to specific applications or specific application layers and at the same time it's built on the security model of layer one and everything settles back to layer one and certain whales or whatnot are gonna always use layer one so layer one is not gonna be less used but your your person that can't afford a twenty dollar or a fifty dollar a hundred dollar transaction on layer one they can afford a 20 transaction on uh layer two or i don't remember which layer two is a sponsor of the bankless podcast many um you know like that

that's gonna be a huge deal and i think some people think that layer one will somehow have less usage because layer two takes off i don't think that could be any more wrong you add that fundamentally to all these technical things add it to the fact that the supply emissions are gonna go down add it to the fact that so much ethereum is getting locked away to be staked for that extra yield this is all very very good for the long-term prospects of ethereum so to your point earlier right i think you just continue to be bullish in the long long term just don't have those regrets in the short term you know well ledger you're definitely speaking our language with the bullishness of ethereum in the long term but i actually

want to ask you the same question i already asked you earlier but from a different perspective of how fearful should we be that we're so far away from the 200-week moving average and you said well you'd be excited if we saw the 200-week moving average could you buy you'd you know back up the truck but would it take the perspective of somebody that came into the crypto market in the crypto industry in the last like six to eight months uh and they did what everyone does when they get into the crypto markets the first you know few moments of their lives and they get irrationally bullish and they just dump their net worth in at the top and now they're in pain uh because we're almost 50 down off the top um uh like i guess i'm trying to ask you what's the probability of us actually

touching the 200-week moving average going back into my question of just like is the is the general adoption of crypto in 2022 going to help us stay away from the 200 week moving average or is the 200 week moving average like an inevitability it's always an inevitability at some point because it's an average of the prior 200 weeks of trading so at some point you know things that mean revert do mean revert like they they are an average of price over time um the the higher time frame the longer the moving average the less often that it'll actually hit but if you go look at the you know s p 500 over decades and or whatnot eventually they do mean revert

back to whatever those averages are so we'll get there i don't necessarily think if we have a long term sideways it's not a certainty that ethereum has to hit it um or that that signals the exact end of the market bull market or whatever um it's just a it is a guidepost it is not like an exact uh formula for for what to do but i do know for me it would give me confidence that at a bare minimum at that point i'd be happy telling my family just dollar cost average and quit looking at it you know just just dc and i already tell them this honestly when people ask me i'm like look if it's more than 50 down dca don't

put in more than you can lose don't look at it for 10 years and like if i fail at that then oh well they can blame me in 10 years but i'm pretty sure my conviction in the market if they're doing it with ethereum and bitcoin they'll be pretty happy um and and i have confidence in the overall technology on that long of a time frame and with that level of dollar cost average for the more tactical trader the person may be like i hope you're out there the person that said hey i saw enough stuff in the market that made me nervous i pieced out with half my portfolio at 4k i'm like licking my chops to get back in so like when do i get back in that tactical person if they see this kind of capitulation wick down

they need to be a buyer if they want that long-term exposure um and that would be a fantastic place to do it from if we do this kind of forever sideways that 200 week will move up to like 1800 or something that would be ideal in my opinion you know you remember that one on in 2017 it was moving up to 3100 and then it broke down here we'll just go to it so in that scenario when the market topped the 200 week moving average was at 1281 when it actually hit the 200 week the 200 week was at 31.50 so it more than doubled where the price where the 200 week moving average was between when it topped and when it actually hit it so if you were to say

in ethereum terms um you know 4 800 it was down here at 8 50 or 875 it what if it's here when it actually hits it you know and let's do some squiggles because why not like you do this long term type of thing and then you know something happens some exogenous event and it's like oh crap ethereum's dead you know minus 50 in in two weeks or something like that similar scenario and it goes back down to this um this prior level year 16 1800 and ta-da that's where your 200-week moving average has moved to this this is not me trying to predict this this is what will happen but

you know like eventually it'll hit it and um and yeah like if it does i'm buying it that's really all there is to it can we take a look at the eth btc ratio because ryan and i use this on the weekly roll up kind of just to gauge we use this as like our bull market indicator as in when ether is going down versus bitcoin is indication of a bear market if it's going up versus bitcoin as indication of a bull market do you agree with that indicator from the ratio and what are you seeing in the ratio chart yeah i think depending on kind of your lens um you should be very happy if you're an ethereum person uh with the performance of ethereum relative to bitcoin essentially since the market bottomed right so this is the prior bear market

bottom and then it slowly went up on a relative basis and then it quickly went up on a relative basis and now it's back to kind of this difficult to trade range now i've tried to trade it trust me i definitely have most of this time it's it's not been worth it i truly do think this kind of point one uh east to btc maybe even the 0.14 that's when you get into flipping territory like these seem like potential magnets to me from those prior levels back when we were in the bear market i was much more like okay this .055 is my line in the sand we blew straight through it and then used it as support and again if we've lost levels i would look at 0.055 as a

support again this is a very hard pattern to trade or chart level to trade when we kind of went into this .08 territory on the third time you expect that to break and then it did but then it failed to break out that's always brutal so when you do something like that it just it needs time so i have no problem holding ethereum relative to bitcoin honestly i i kind of in active trading accounts i tend to just kind of bounce back and forth depending on what i like the individual setup of that of better um or like maybe kind of the macro landscape right like i don't think even though we may think ethereum is a good store value i don't know that the market as a whole especially maybe hedge funds or people

that are looking at much more than just crypto if they're going to see ethereum as the same level of kind of a safe store value you say hey i think cash is trash but i want to hold something that's kind of safe they might hold bitcoin instead of ethereum during that time uh certainly bitcoin instead of like i don't know solana or avax or luna or like the you know the layer one trade or or or certainly d5 my god d5 has gotten knives absolutely crushed um so yeah i think in periods you can maybe think of it like the s p 500 for bitcoin and the nasdaq for ethereum kinda in a relational sense um so yeah and then one last question before we

turn to some macro related uh topics um some altcoins there's we've talked about solana there's avalanche there's seoul or there's luna uh how how is the l1 ecosystem doing as a whole uh poorly um how can you gauge how how can you gauge that for us yeah so i think from a pure price perspective it's we priced in perfection basically right like we priced in all of these are going to do things way better than ethereum and today polygons like down uh like just completely down um solana's gone down um

you know every every single one of these has had their their issues whether it's a layer one or a layer two um or like a side chain version of a layer two and they're priced in a manner to where that's not really acceptable i think some of these have truly innovative technology that's really interesting i think in particular solana i think has the capacity to build that and they have some interesting ideas i think adam actually has really interesting technology the whole kind of um multi-chain cosmos ecosystem whatever you know however that's structured would make sense but that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to reflect perfectly in the price like i

had this line drawn like just because it's like i said i like to squiggle um and i i think that these just when something was at 50 cents on public markets in mid-2020 um that does not necessarily mean that like 250 dollars is the right price when it uh or that 83 dollars is um a value because it's 60 or 70 down off of the highs there is nothing to say if the market continues to have downside on bitcoin and ethereum to say the solana won't go to 50 or 30 dollars now solana in that scenario may very well

have its ethereum at 85 setup right like a generational buy opportunity um i don't know which of these is going to become like the big builder and and do what ethereum did right and have this massive um explosion of developer activity that just forces things to improve because of the number of brains participating in the ecosystem versus the ones that are going to do like what eos did where it was like kind of a house of cards but had a four billion dollars in it [Laughter] but it didn't really matter because nobody wanted to build on it and uh yeah i'm not sure i just know when when you're looking at

a truly unique time we have not had many times in the last several decades like this in the rest of the market it makes speculating on this stuff really really hard really really hard um and hedge funds and whatnot people that have a cost basis of under a dollar or under two dollars or under five dollars they're at many many multiples in profit and so they can continue to sell solana and make tens of millions or hundreds of millions or billions of dollars meanwhile you're down 50 they don't care they just keep selling as they keep unlocking but if that's what they intend to do right if they're locking in their win whereas the distribution amongst

ethereum holders and whatnot sure there are many people that are in great profit on ethereum still but it's reaching more and more you know kind of new hands new participants and i feel like can sustain its current pricing a little better than a lot of these layer one trades which went 100x or like a thousand x i mean luna i i can't even comprehend how much it went up the percentage on it was absolutely insane um yeah it was 30 cents uh at the end of 2020 um so this is post-d5 summer whatever so say you became went all in luna and it's at 30 cents and now you've ridden it to 90 100 likes wow even yeah even if this has done what it's done i'm not buying this

there's no chance i'm buying this i do not care i do not care what it does from here i will not buy it i will not buy someone else's um 32 000 win it's not happening so ledger if i'm hearing you you correct you're kind of teeing us up for uh some difficult weeks difficult months ahead you know potentially so potentially a repeat of you know 2018 2019 maybe a little bit longer of sideways and you know downward type action of course people who are there remember that time where eth lost 95 percent um

other like alternative layer ones the eos's of the world for for example lost 99 some even higher than 99 some rebounded some didn't bitcoin i don't know how much that went down it's like 85 something like that uh between 85 and 90 um do you think if if we get a repeat of 2018 2019 are we talking about those types of peak to troughs from all-time highs like 85 percent to 95 percent to you know uh for for some coins up upwards of 99 uh yes uh i was looking at comp the other day i think we can all agree compound is a fantastic product um you

know compound and ave i think really led the way in terms of on-chain lending that did not prevent them during a bull market or mostly bull market from going down 90 off the top um i mean that's just absolutely brutal and it's because as as the price goes up no like everybody only cares that the price goes up as the price goes down people start asking questions about the fundamentals or like what's the purpose of the token or how's value accrual occur and all this stuff and um what we've seen is literally a complete retrace from defy summer and we all know how you know fun and exciting d5 summer stuff was most of these d5 charts have fully retraced it on a dollar basis so

on an on an eth relative basis because d5 summer eth was four to six hundred bucks right like in in that 2020 summer that is brutal so on each relative basis you just got crushed being in these things can you pull up the comp eath chart uh yeah i think i have it right here stop yeah look so you know for every every precious ethereum that you had you lost 95 uh since august 2020 which was the like this got listed at the at the peak of defy summer so but you're saying this paint is just getting started though no no i'm i think these things

you know how there's always a there's always a bull market somewhere or maybe a relative bull market um i don't know when you start hitting a fair price right on some of these d5 tokens where if we kind of know exactly what makes ethereum fundamentally valuable when do we figure out what makes the tokens built on top of ethereum fundamentally more valuable than ethereum right like that's a really difficult thing now i think many of them are valuable relative to the dollar but that's not saying much if you think the denominator is worthless in the long run right um so this is the downside of a deflationary economy right like what do you what why do you want to put money to work if you can just hold the money

and that prevents productivity in the market if you're like man if i would have just held ethereum in in in my uh cold storage i would have done way better than going and deploying financing it's so funny because the narrative was the literally the opposite 18 months ago which is like why do we need eth as an asset when we have d5 i can own bitcoin and defy and because they're producing exposure to eth exactly okay so uh we do want to ask about macro things you know in just a minute but just to tie this conversation this part of the conversation off on on crypto okay so what about the super cycle man like what's the potential that you might be calling this wrong do you think ledger

that rather than a repeat of 18 2018 2019 and actually this is kind of like a dip and maybe we go sideways for a while but we're still in kind of uh we're not going to repeat the absolute cliff of 2019 that we you know see some rocky months uh the end of kovid's stuff ukraine war you know that then the the merge happens let's say and then uh price starts to repair and like we're back baby it's it's full-on super cycle again do you think that is a possibility and how do you weight that as a as a possibility if we if we consolidate without like significant lows we don't go back into

the mid 20ks or something that to me this type of chart is the super cycle occurring yes um you need this is what i would call reaccumulation right like you didn't really break down so badly that everything everybody stopped caring about it no companies had any layoffs et cetera yeah bitcoin mining is profitable today and it's very profitable um you know obviously operating in ethereum node is quite profitable like participating in the ecosystem is very profitable what you would consider not a super cycle if you all recall uh the last time uranium went crazy was i think 2011 or something it took a there was a 10 year bear market and people just shut

stuff down and the reason was because the price of uranium was so cheap they couldn't actually afford to operate uranium production that's not a supersite goal right that's like full bear market last time bitcoin miners had to shut down because bitcoin mining was more expensive than the bitcoin that they got as a reward that is not a super cycle if you go through a supposed bear market and all of the activity within the market maintains profitability and maintains um this component of uh productive work uh then that that is kind of the super cycle to me and and if your max drawdown is like 60 and not

83 which is what it was ryan to your point with bitcoin while ethereum was 95 you have smaller and smaller kind of overall drawdowns that this is supportive of a super cycle i i think like honestly if we made new all-time highs before like the end of summer 2022 in in bitcoin and ethereum that would be stunning like stunning that would make you a believer in the in the super cycle i mean i think i'm a believer now i think it's very possible that this sideways outcome is the outcome okay so how do you weight these possibilities one is the sideways super cycle the other is like 2018 2019 what what kind of probability do you do

you assign to both right now well because the in that scenario we the market dropped a whole lot really really quick um in this scenario it was two weeks of down like this this whole move right here basically to the first trip to 30k was in two weeks and then we fully repaired it and then it's it's been it's just been different um and and the the move up was different as well like from all-time high to top was like a 3x whereas the time before that it was a 20x all that is signs of greater maturity in the market in this scenario bitcoin went from 5k to 20k in four or five weeks um those are the things that you don't

expect in the super cycle so we're already showing those signs of the super cycle um a lot of people think we need this capitulation that it means we lose 50 in two weeks now can it happen yes but even when covet hit like the degree that which we repaired that quickly was truly incredible and maybe that was the start of the super cycle right that bitcoin recover there was 20 million dollars of bid on bit mex at the very very bottom and you know like that was the beginning of the super cycle and and now it is just a much more mature market um i can't predict the future we will be impacted by the macro and maybe we can

transition into that uh but if the economy hits for a recessionary period then we will go down a lot more if the economy does not and the economy maintains some degree of workability doesn't have to be perfect but workability then i think that the likelihood is we go sideways work a lot of people out of the market and then eventually have a breakup all right guy guys well that's where i think that macro comes into play and we're going to talk about the macro global markets gold various commodities what they're doing equities that sort of thing oil with with ledger when we get back but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible

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in the direction that you think it should go thank you uniswap for sponsoring bankless all right guys we are back talking about macro this time which is the external force to the crypto markets whether or not we have a super cycle may or may not be determined on what happens in the macro in ledger you've got up the us dollar index the dixie um why is this chart significant what does this what does the dixie tell us about how it relates to crypto yeah so my favorite thing about the dollar index is that basically the two biggest runs we had um of bull markets in crypto occurred while the dixie was melting down

um so and it's kind of eerie in terms of when you look at it december 2016 as bitcoin started uh price exploration out of 1200 after that uh really nascent first bubble that it had in 2013 2014 uh and look where look where the dixie bottomed january 2018 all of us from that generation are going to know exactly how that correlates um and then you know with covid it had this crazy you know dump and then and then uh pum in march 2020 and then it had this double bottom january 2021 and may 2021 which coincides pretty nicely with where bitcoin especially

uh struggled and bitcoin is still kind of king in my mind in terms of what's going on and crypto strength right there's cycles of relative strength bitcoin all coins whatever you can't ignore this trend and this trend and the fact that crypto went nuts uh as the dixie went down so now we've had uh however many months this is a lot like almost a year um of the dollar recovering really well so what i want to be on the lookout for is when does this start ranging back down because i'll have a high confidence trade and hopefully it'll co-align with some of those things we discuss those things earlier that's a a probability nature of if you know hopefully this

happens or maybe this happens but if we can start to align these things with some other concepts then that would be indicative that crypto is ready to move positively and we see an up move in bitcoin ethereum whether that happens here or here or here or here or here i don't really know i'm not a i'm not a wizard i just get to watch the chart and then try to make smart decisions uh off of that but i i'm certainly going to keep an eye on the strength of the the dollar index which is a basket of currencies so as those weakened crypto strengthens that shouldn't be too complicated for us to understand canoe i'm confused as to why

the this is just me just being like naive but why the u.s dollar currency index is going up at the same time that we're having inflation conversations like isn't the value of the dollar going down there's a preference for liquidity in general when you have uh massive uncertainty in markets so i think that's partly like russian trade stuff and the war and people trying to get um you know foreign reserves back into the dollar assets that have been in other risk risk type of assets back into the dollar i don't i don't think it affects the underlying fact that we're seeing seven to eight percent sustained inflation um and keep in mind this is a relative

index so um you know just because you're the the best [ __ ] coin doesn't make you not a [ __ ] claim it's relative to other fiat currencies right yeah and if you there if you go look at this is a basket of fiat currencies the dollar index is a very complicated thing the dixie itself but like you can go look at like you know the usd relative to the euro or relative to the russian ruble you know everybody was posting those charts when russian rule went down 40 a day or whatever as the war started um i would love to see now i'm going next level on you here um in terms of the 200 whatever like the this is a 200 month thing so you know if we ranged back down to that that would

be nice and if we think the denominator is worthless and that fiat currencies in general are weak then you know send it down get it down back to 80 something and that would certainly coincide with bullish price action for um for crypto i think the uh the other thing that we're definitely tied to and we tend to be tied to i think during sideways slash bear markets is just the general equities markets the s p eq and the s p has had a pretty significant retracement uh and so my mind is mixed between two things where uh oh the s p's in a bear market well if that's if they're in a bear market we're definitely in a bear market but also that's our that's like three big red candles and three big monthly candles

out of the s p how much more can it go down ledger where do you find yourselves on on this side of the equation or what side of the equation yeah i hate having to provide this kind of probabilistic comparison because you know you're saying well it's going to either go up or down definitely going to the right but if you if you look historically typically for a regular run-of-the-mill dip you're kind of getting into end-of-dip territory right so if the world's not ending if this is not world war three let's say inflation does back off just a little bit uh who knows what that thing could be you could see an area where the s p says all right we've had three months and a 10 15 whatever

percent drawdown i think the nasdaq's gone down 20 something percent um it's okay for for stuff to bounce now for a little while maybe uh go sideways itself kind of like what we talked about with crypto um but we're not gonna have like new paradigm recessionary model right this is 2001. uh this is 2008. and this is one of my favorites right when ryan we were talking about those fast moving averages this look let me just look how cleanly this though all this uncertainty all this uncertainty uh and then we live in these recessions well below those fast moving averages um kovid we spent one month like in total

panic i call i call this kind of like the rebound or the rubber band recession because of how fast we like operate it out of it in terms of what the central banks did and printed money and supported all these assets maybe all that's going to come home to roost and we go down and now go to those magic 200 week moving averages you got a long way you can go there on the s p um treating this the same as crypto though is a little bit dangerous like there's real value here the uh [Laughter] in a different in a different way you know like these are companies that have um key financials that you can look at and you can look at things like you know price to earnings coinbase uh even coinbase right like a growth supposed

growth stock their price to earnings is 11 right now which is like pretty much value territory when you start looking at their expected yields and stuff and that's a a growth stock you go look at some of the other stuff in the market it gets even more severe in terms of what the value looks like unless it's a value trap and you say these ideas of the sustained earning potential is not what we think it is and we got a lot more pain in front of us and if that's the case then it's going to be a dark world and that's your scenario where we go a lot lower in crypto that said i i i think that these markets are really due for some kind of upwards uh rebound especially when you get into like the nasdaq which yeah it had a 22

percent correction so far wow yeah it's a 22 correction after it went up 147 from covet lows you know covet lows to the highs 147 percent you go to some of these individual equities names and it's it's kind of insane what happened on the on the high end one of the ones that i've always enjoyed looking at is which went to like 1700 it went to 500. 1700 to 500. you think your crypto bags are painful this is supposed to be like something that's relatively safe a long term about you know equities play that you think is like yeah this is going to be great or you go look at arc and

arc went from 157 dollars to 51 dollars so a two thirds etf which is an etf this is this is you know all of kathy's best ideas um very heavy tech weighted eta it's very tech weighted you know uh evs and and crypto but it went up 391 percent off covered lows so what's crazy is that these have completely retraced their covet moves right this is pre-covered covered low and then this is now so it is actually arc is cheaper than pre-covered which is kind of stunning so

these to me start to become again the scenario of like well maybe you just dollar cost average and freaking wait if if you want to have some exposure to equities that's not you know not crypto this is a little bit more of an indirect play and maybe you can do some stuff to try to hedge your way out of that like we seem to be having these kind of um new what you would call like a secular bull market in some of the commodities trades uh energy um so like oil and stuff was basically at record lows in terms of its uh composure within the s p 500 and uh like eight percent after peaking at something like i don't remember 25 28 30

so in terms of the number of companies from the energy sector that were in the s p 500 that number went down by like two-thirds over the years and classic meme is you go from negative oil prices to infinity oil prices which we just are living in the meme constantly right almost made it to all-time highs honestly it wouldn't surprise me if obviously this chills out this is actually quite a bearish reversal candle for oil which for the world is probably a good thing um but it wouldn't surprise me if we're kind of in a new era of expensive oil as producers just are not producing enough and we're assuming oh there's going to be so much less demand because of all

these evs but meanwhile you have developing countries that are increasing their oil appetites and the increase in evs and stuff in developed countries is just not enough to make up for that underlying appetite but meanwhile there's also not an appetite for you know new wells and things so you can create something where yes a hundred years from now our dependence on oil should be significantly less but over the coming 20 years we're probably going to need as much oil as we need today but we're investing in it much less because it's not something that people look upon very nicely so i think you could have an era of higher commodities prices um and maybe value are these growth stocks

come back in line a bit and people start looking for what are value producing uh you know equities and and there's a rotation of some sort from the things that don't have revenue don't have profits don't have dividends and people investors banked on the number going up and it moves into hey we want a four or five or six percent annual dividend yield and sideways are slightly up is okay what you hit when you do this where prices really don't go up that much in terms of the stock market or whatever but inflation is this sustained higher period is you hit stagflation and i actually think in this probabilistic outcome scenario that would be a painful

but in my mind probably the most high probability outcome where we do i just think it's going to be so hard for us to actually get inflation under control we don't have a lot of capacity to raise rates so you don't have these levers from a central bank perspective to pull to have much control so you you can't lower rates very much the alternative is to provide direct stimulus to the economy there's less and less appetite for doing that after we just printed money and gave it to people for years and you know you fracture decision-making capacities within governments then you have to have a crisis to print money or whatever um at that point and i think we could create a scenario where we have high inflation and low asset prices and we hit a stagflationary

period which again coincides with this multi-year sideways potential both in stock markets and crypto and but yeah but do you think ledger that this is why i'm curious how your your your macro mental model sort of feeds the the crypto uh prices we were talking about either sort of the sideways super cycle or a bear market so you would give higher weight to the probability of like stagflation which is uh inflate inflationary dollar plus plus recession basically and you think that could be persistent and you know we might get something close like the 1970s or something like this and if that's the case then you think that um a bear market is more likely in crypto than than the sideways super cycle play

is that the case um yeah kinda i i can't remember the ticker for the japanese market right now um but or how to spell it but the i guess the nikkei or whatever it didn't make an all-time high for like 22 years so japan had actual uh stagflation and you know can you imagine the outrage of passive investors if they're putting money into a market for 20 years and still can't make new all-time highs in the market they would be pretty upset so it would be very interesting not necessarily great

but certainly interesting maybe it's a stock picker's dream or like individual asset class ndx thank you chat um you know and that that's an outside 100 sorry i tried um i think i certainly think that it's a potential outcome i don't know exactly what that plays out how it how it looks in terms of what's bullish a bunch of random stuff had had bull markets uh in those days you know like i think that's when silver went absolutely nuts it went to it did like a 20x in value during during those years and there's like all these there's always a bull market somewhere we'll find something to look at and something to invest in

i hope crypto is one of those things is an emerging technology that it kind of shows up even in a stagflationary environment that people see like here's potential in this emerging technology that's going to take over the world yeah i don't know it's going to be a tricky one i'm curious about you you yourself so we were just talking about equities we talked a little bit about uh commodities you know yeah tech stocks this sort of thing uh do you hold these in your portfolio do you trade these or are you like just like kryptos enough for me and i'm not like with crypto yeah i definitely um i will say it was a higher not to flex but it was it was a higher percentage of my portfolio like you know my wife's

retirement account and like my ir i call it my degen i array so it started pretty small and then i was just kind of aggressive with it over the years um so then it became reasonable but it all paled kind of in comparison to what crypto did so um mine i do invest in gold or or uh stocks and other things in those um so like in my wife's 401k as an example i think it's like in 30 gold miners and you know then kind of a mix of um you know value stocks and cash and maybe a little bit of s p 500 or something i mean i'm curious like what so why do you do that is it just to kind of keep life interesting or do you do you think that this provides more diversification so it

keeps me on my toes okay it's like myself personally i'm just like more of the barbell strategy where i'm like i don't really want to hold equities at all stocks much if if any my i want my risk on asset class to be crypto and then if we're in a risk-off mode i'd rather just have dollars like right and then like keep my powder dry for a time where i can buy back in crypto so it's just like i want ultra safe type assets and then i want like the ultra risky crypto type assets and like for me there's no real room for for equities in between but that's also because i don't really pay attention to like equities in the in the stock market

what's your balance like with the i think i think it gives me some ability to have interest in those markets and i do think so those are long-term things that i don't plan to touch for another 30 or 40 years or whatever whenever you start liquidating retirement accounts so i think even though i you know they're real money but they're not like super duper life changing money over 30 years if i'm active with them they can actually i think become life-changing money in those later years and in a much more passive way than it's not like trading every day it's maybe trading every week or every quarter or something except for my rra i'm kind of crazy on that one but in terms of active investments i mostly agree with you what i've done a

lot more of lately is primary is crypto exposure and then a big secondary where i have tried to diversify is being more interested in real estate because i actually think that fits potentially in this safer investment not going to go down you know 85 percent like like bitcoin did in 2017. if it goes down 20 though and i still earn yield on it if i'm not like highly levered in commercial real estate or something then you know it might be an extra few thousand dollars of rent for my family as kind of a backdrop and in the 20 or 30 year term i'm pretty confident in in that market still existing if i'm investing in my town and whatnot and i also get to make a difference

so most of my like active investment would be um a little bit of private placement mostly crypto liquid markets and then like real estate type stuff outside of dabbling in retirement accounts with these kind of what i call boring assets now sometimes even in those and especially like in the ira uh thankfully every now and then if i'm really really really bullish on crypto i can throw it into subpar products like gdxj why not right and just let it let it yolo for a little while um but you know it i think it keeps me on my toes to look at all markets and makes me

uh hungry for more information i'm obviously i'm larping on most of this macro stuff like i'm 30 something years old i'm just i'm a guy like everybody else trying to learn over time um investing my own book i guess that'd have that going for me it's not somebody else's money but i'm trying to learn and all i'm doing today is sharing the things that i've tried to learn over the years well ledger that is why we call or i call you the chartographer because you are guiding our way through many many many different charts and trying to draw connections between all of them and that's what we enjoy doing here at bankless so since we can't know the future and since we don't know if it's a super cycle or a 2018 capitulation what advice do you have for people just

to keep their head on their shoulders how do they not get chopped up over the next three weeks to six months until like some conviction comes back into the market like how do we maintain sanity here i think you'd there's a couple of places you can make a lot of money one is if you have this massive kind of capitulation style wick and then you make 40 50 in a day that's one way is if you like manage to catch that just right but honestly you make even more money in the follow on when things are truly confirmed so to your point ryan like you could be dollars uh you know you could be based in dollars but then when you have confirmation of the trend you go a little further out on the risk curve and you make up for whatever of

the early trend that you missed heavily by the later trend you know the the luna's thirty thousand percent or your maddox which to this day david like your your dm gives me physical pain of when you told me i should buy it and i did and then i sold it like a penny later for context i dm'd ledger to just i only dm'd the word matic at 15 cents or something like that i think it was 11. um and i sold it basically at break even as it went to like 12 and back to 11 and i was like no i'm out and then it went to two dollars um so yeah like you get further out on the risk curve

where it's like we're not having this conversation of are we in a bull market or not you're saying it's a bull market baby let's go like what are we what are we aping today like in those markets you keep your head in terms of like maintain liquidity um don't buy outright scams be satisfied with a 100 move or 500 move you're not trying to buy shiba inu but you can still find ways to lose money in those environments by buying the top of a shiba inu instead of buying the middle of a matic move but you can make a lot of money down the risk curve once the trend is known like you know where things are going so i think you can just be patient wait for

it and i gotta give a shout out to crypto cred on that to keep me stable sometimes you do not have to buy the absolute bottom you do not have to be fully exposed at the perfect time you can just you can take your time be in a what cred says often is a position of control so that you have options if you leave yourself into a place where you're leveraged and it's going against you and you do not have options you're facing liquidation or ruin rather than being in a place where you you can sell for a slight loss or you can buy with confidence that's the place you want to be in you don't want to be in a place where you're forced out of the market because that's the only way you're not going to make it in the long term in the long term

a lot of good advice uh toward the end there ledger yeah we appreciate it especially people who are for cyclers i think are looking at some of these moves and and uh panicking a little bit and they're also hearing what you said and uh and maybe you know panicking a little bit but having options keeping it a cool head on your shoulders realizing that time in the market beats timing the market is the way to go so uh we appreciate you reminding us of that uh so thanks for joining bankless thanks for having me and just as a side note like i was exposed to the market i was very very bullish when bitcoin was 4k um did i don't know what my net worth was between bitcoin being 4k and bitcoin being 10k i just know it didn't go up

near as much in that time frame as when it went up in this time frame so just as proof of buying that bottom and i know for a fact like david and i have talked about this in a similar uh for you and for most people like you do not have to buy the bottom take your time have fun don't lose it all that's it take your time have fun don't lose at all guys of course none of this has been financial advice all crypto is risky bitcoin ether all risky we always tell you at the end of the show so is defy you could lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you

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