Generating Alpha: Strategies for Thriving Across Crypto Bull and Bear Markets - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2024

I'm back one two all right we're good um not about meme coins but about Alpha so still fun hope everybody's going to enjoy this one too uh I am joined by three of the top liquid fund uh traders that I've known for quite a while so I'm pretty excited and we're GNA get a little bit into uh specific strategies um maybe introduce yourself Jang and kind of tell us a little bit about you know is your fund uh fundamental tactical like what are you guys doing yeah so uh my name is shell I'm the uh co-founder of arbell markets we're a principal trading firm providing uh liquidity and uh with the focus on crypto derivatives markets uh we also build infrastructure to improve like transparency um uh for like the LTC Market Mars as well and previously I was the founder of uh Ledger Prime which is a multi strategy hedge fund uh within crypto as well um generally we're you know considered like a tactical trading firm uh a variety of like quantitative Market neutral um you know strategies um catered to our like counterparties so tactical is kind of like you're looking at the chessboard and all the data and you're you know you're moving the night across and and sort of capturing little ponds everywhere basically yeah that's uh you know just making money collecting coins just making money all right guys we're going to learn how to do that as well hopefully um so here tell us about your fund thanks JY um so my name isar I'm the founder and CIO of split Capital we are a liquid hedge fund in the digital asset space so we do a lot of the long buas stuff we'll buy and sell tokens uh we're pretty active in the derivatives markets um trading with firms like AR Bellos and then also on screens and binance bybit all that kind of stuff um and then also in addition to this we take a pretty active management on uh the short side of the book so when markets are a little bit more volatile we'll go and hedge a lot of the risk that we have so we kind of play both sides of the market and as you can imagine just from the panel it's moving a little bit more towards the liquid space um from a more traditional Venture uh asset class in crypto yeah very relevant because you know we have Arthur with us here who has been a very very well-known Venture Capital uh participant and now focusing on liquid so Arthur maybe tell us a little bit about what Defiance is doing now yeah um we have two funds uh right now our new fund is called a liquid Venture fund we invest in public crypto Market with a venture like approach so underwriting medium to long-term investment in the crypto um yeah so we don't do anything fancy like derivative just focus on Buy and Hold on a spot and really just focus on identifying 10 to 20 very promising crypto projects and protocol to invest in and try to support them as much as we can so it's a blend of the kind of like a VC style but on a public liquid Market of crypto yeah I mean we're talking about liquid because ultimately what we've realized maybe in crypto is that a lot of things go to market faster and things happen really quickly compared to you know deep Tech and things like that take many years to play out um how do you feel about the extra flexibility you have on just being able to buy sell and how do you think about time Horizons do you do you set a price Target you set a time Target how do you look at it yeah I I that's for me right yeah yeah yeah okay so I think the thing about crypto is is very Dynamic so I don't think it is super productive to put a like a hard limit or like a restrictions on like the time frame or the exit price and also this is actually what make uh crypto so challenging and also rewarding like sometimes your targeted return you expect 6 month to a year for the TCS to play out and it play out in three months and you should take profit and move on but sometimes due to some external changes the fundamental did improve that need you need to re-evaluate your investment thesis and adjust the exit and and a fair value accordingly and you do so so it's such a very Dynamic process and I think that this is just what the advantage the crypto Market give you because in the traditional Venture you get like the 50x 100x upside but you've never been able to adjust your exposure accordingly to the live fundamental of the project but in crypto you can do so like uh um in the past six months we have actually seen a very big uh dispersion of the crypto asset return I think someone show a chart we actually seen um in the top 50 I think at least only I think less than 10 of them up perform Bitcoin on a year-to DAT basis and if you drag back to one year back uh a lot of them actually went back to the last year Q4 prices uh but yet you have seen something like Solana have went up like more than 500% since like a Q4 last year so all this thing is just uh like live kind of like a change in the fundamental that we we should be able to uh make adjustment to it yeah mhm zah here how about you and how do you like think about uh you know benchmarking do you Benchmark Bitcoin is that still a thing uh no I think people and most allocators have understood that beating Bitcoin is very difficult especially in a bare Market which is also why we set ourselves up as a liquid fund that can you know it's not long only we you know make sure that we can take shorts and things like that um if you guys trade anything that it's just you'll realize that the derivatives Market is way way way more liquid than the spot Market um we we Benchmark in USD but obviously our you know index and targets for our investors for ourselves you know it's against Bitcoin and eth and sometimes even salana when we think you know we can be really high performant um but you know for a fund what that really looks like at the end of the day is in a be in a bull market amazing everyone makes money but what happens in a bare market right um and how do you make sure that you're not eviscerating your portfolio you know the last you know week or two I think bitcoin's been down 10 or 15% from the highs but most people are down 50 60% from you know from the high so that's something that is a major problem for a firm like us if we're not you know able to be dynamic yeah I saw a Twitter poll somebody was asking their followers are you still up on the year or not and I think like 50% had lost all their gains for the year at least in this uh this poll so it kind of shows that you know if you're late to the game and the hype is already too much it doesn't matter if bitcoin's up you know 500% uh off the lows you you you can still lose all the gains um shiliang do do you have a sense of where we are in the cycle I think everyone is a little bit confused we're not quite sure are we are we just starting the cycle is it over like what's going on um I mean I hope not I mean not necessarily in like the business of like picking tops and bottoms um but I like to think that like I mean previous Cycles right we've seen these large large Corrections especially around like the having um so I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be the same carbon copy I do think like Bitcoin the Dynamics with Bitcoin perhaps are a bit different now than they were um previously and I think after the cycle especially with the ETF uh and it becoming more of an Institutional product um I think it could help drive a different narrative than previously right I do think like the market will recover um there's still you you know a lot of capital that's sidelined um but I do think that uh even like the psycho as it plays out um Bitcoin could continue to suck up a lot of capital over time right I think like Bitcoin L2 defi summer is a potential narrative um and just Contin institutional Capital that's flowing into Bitcoin around the world you could actually see Bitcoin this cycle kind of um bifurcate from the rest of the market what do you guys think are we near potentially this like talked about but never seen type of cycle where Bitcoin goes off and then altcoins are not following no I so I think it'll always be hard for that to kind of exist in perpetuity I think it has boom and bus Cycles like we're seeing now um I would say to the question of you know I think we were asked similar question Singapore took in 2049 like two years ago um and I think at this point we're definitely later cycle I don't think we're end cycle necessarily but obviously like I don't make 6 month 9mth predictions on this kind of stuff so um I think what ends up happening in the market going forward is uh Cycles as we know it in crypto will probably start breaking off you know we had fouryear cycles and that's pretty common for most growth asset classes but for crypto I think this is going to start changing as now there's you know some floor value number one in you know through uh etps ETFs in general um and then number two also because because uh leverage and regulation have really impacted the kind of volatility that you might see from major bankruptcy fraud that kind of thing um so binance byet these exchanges aren't really seeing the same kind of Leverage or you know uh like systematic exposure that might draw prices down 80 90% um and even you know back in 22 when prices were pretty supremely depressed um that was mostly a function of just a lot of liquidation hitting the tape all at once so you know do we really foresee that happening in the future probably not the last you know week and a half we we drew down about 50% of the alt open interest so we're already kind of really seeing a lot of the froth clear out without pricing having to go down significantly Arthur do you have a view I mean to me it feels like maybe we're in that sort of Summer May 2021 period where we had a huge dip but it was it wasn't the end of the cycle there is like another how do you feeling about it so I think actually every every cycle um every new uh start of the market uh the market structure always change and mature so okay let's look at two major thing just looking at Bitcoin alone there is two major Market structure of Bitcoin that have changed that was not present in the past cycle first of all is the institutional flow um Bitcoin ETF have attracted more than 13 billion of net inflows since they were launched in less than four months second thing is actually there's a lot less talk about is the emergence of public L listed Bitcoin miners so in the past Cycles uh most Bitcoin miners you always see a very big boom bust because um they need to constantly sell their Bitcoins uh to fund their operating expenses but with uh them being able to publicly listed they are able to tap on Capital Market financing to you know pay for the operating expenses uh and not sell so much of the Bitcoin holding so these two thing actually have changed the Bitcoin Market structure a lot so which is why this is uh we have a Bitcoin going up to alltime high right even before Hing which on previous cycle you always see after Hing and you see Bitcoin going to a new alltime high again so these two new market structure changes was not in the previous Market cycle and the next is I don't I think in a way that we might not follow this classical foure cycle and what we have it's like a complex fouryear cycle but I think it is very difficult to be bearish on a market on a medium to long term because one statistic that I think is overlooked but make me incredibly bullish is binance 2023 at the beginning of the year largest crypto exchange everyone know that they have they announced that they have 135 million of registered user at beginning of 2023 if you go to their website right now you see they have 187 million user and 2023 was not a bu Market it was a complex recovery Market in that market binance added 50 million users I mean we can debate how many of them are real or not but this is the top of the crypto adoption funnel so imagine if they can grw like more than 50 million user in a bare Market or like a you know non Bo Market how much new user will be attracted to crypto in in the B market so I think on the medium long term this is very hard to be bearish on crypto and the second thing is crypto is one of the very few asset class in the world that attracts a natural Global demand like beside us stocks Market or you other US dollar denominated asset class you don't really have any other asset that just constantly attract like a global demands like you know anyone in know you know Africa southeast Asia China you know um South America will buy crypto but if you have a stock market in what China like in Singapore like even Dubai you don't attract that kind of global bid so you very much isolated to your local market demand but crypto is a global asset class in nature so you always have some you know unknown like you know some high nth they want to store their wealth in Bitcoin and that added another one two three $12 million of mind into crypto and this is something that you will not see in other asset class and if you want to see the performance of a global asset class just see the US Stock Market S&P 500 performance for the last 10 years it's up only every three four year we have a new alltime high so I I think that's what really um happening to crypto uh on the medium long term is a global asset class with a very good story very good uh growth traction so it's just hard for it to go down on like a longer term basis yeah yeah I mean I know your fund is long buas so you're not Market neutral you do have this bias long and I think everybody just heard you know your deep fundamental belief about the sort of long thesis um Chilean you're more tactical you're kind of willing to get get in the in the weeds maybe how do you think about um shorting even if it's just volatility you know that's another thing that can Spike how do you go about selling a call option when things can you know go insane on you yeah um in some ways like I describe our business in like the information gathering business in the sense that um we're providing like privil liquidity to a lot of our counterparties um and so the people that we want to trade with um obviously you know counterparties firms that are considered like poor Traders or bad Traders great we're happy to take the other side but we also want the smartest um best most toxic flow that are in the market because that's a kind of flow that that we can see and we can trade alongside of right and so in some ways we're more than happy to provide a tight liquid market for the top most toxic flow out there because knowing that information is way way more valuable than just trading like a coin flip right and in some ways as a liquidity provider that's the business you're in is you're basically building a community of like the smartest flow that's only trading with you and you have the information and you can trade around it um so we're doing a lot of like obviously like principal liquidity providing on exchanges OTC counterparties uh we're obviously doing it in a market neutral way um but you know that that's one way of of how I would describe you know our business is I here do you ever find shorting opportunities or is it like a relative value thing yeah it's both I mean it's very regime dependent so um you know in 2022 we spent a lot of time doing pair trades um putting on a lot of uh you know kind of outside risk because if we're holding spot spot uh altcoins or spot uh crypto then we need to go and hedge that out when markets are kind of moving against us um and then as of late it's usually against like unlocks or things you know new token launches that we think flop um that will go in short uh just to make sure that our book is kind of balanced um I think the problem again that that I've highlighted it's like um a lot of times people look at market cap of an asset and it's interesting but in crypto it's kind of a lie that we all know right like the FTV conversation is DV are circulating real um and I think what ends up happening is that once these tokens start unlocking uh people don't really think about the fdv in the right way and I think even the fdv is kind of misleading so we just look at it you know in terms of what is the real life liquidity on on chain or also on centralized exchange uh so when we do that we're able to kind of determine like okay if I have $5 million in you know X alt right then how much can I actually exit at that point right uh so things like daily volume are important but also like 2% uh book ratio depth 5% book ratio depth we don't want to be the only player in one market and kind of look at it at the end of the cycle be like we can't get out of this thing so yeah I mean how much of crypto right now in crypto trading does it feel like it's PVP because when the Market's growing and everyone you know is is up then it's okay but when things start to go choppy I mean Arthur you've seen you've been on the VC side you know when unlocks happen and and now we're in this like stage I think my uh co-host on study l thinky was saying there's like 200 million of altcoins getting released you know every day or some number like that um do you look at unlocks do you you kind of know the other VCS you know like which ones are going to sell which ones don't sell like how tactical and how PVP does it get yeah um I think this is uh it does impact the market yes we do look at locks up so we have a very high preference for coins that you know uh doesn't have a very aggressive unlock schedule in the next 12 months uh and we generally prefer coins that are mostly diluted already so I think um this is a very nuanced topic I mean sometimes fdv matters sometimes fdv doesn't matter so it's it's very context specific so you cannot just say oh you know like this is always going to be Apple for Apple it's very context dependent because you also need to know the the the makeup of the the unlocks like you know sometimes by the foundations or by the team they're usually not going to sell um that aggressive capacity but sometimes like a VC they up already up a 50x or 100x they're going to sell and actually even among a VC you also have see a very different Dynamic some VC are just very you know like um due to whatever reason they are very quick to realizing the gains but some VC are happen happy to be a bit more long-term in supporting if they are still bullish at a current valuation so it it's that's actually where why you pay the active manager like us to to look at do this homework you know talk to the market participants to understand the different Dynamics between different unlocks yeah but generally we we are quite careful um because I think they just especially the past cycle I think 2021 2022 vintage VC funds they raise a lot very little DPI that is definitely pressure to return some capital for them to raise the next fund so we are usually quite careful for the um the the projects with the Vintage VC fund that you know from the 2021 2022 period yeah yeah and one thing that was kind of relevant you were saying backstage is you're seeing a lot of opportunities that are not massive ly Capital uh like there there's a certain size that you can put in that's maybe more you know for an individual Trader rather than like a fund and there seem to be a lot of those opportunities U maybe you can like discuss a little bit of like what you're seeing that maybe you can't deploy you know industrial size like eight figures into a position but somebody can put six figures and and do super well on it yeah so I think this is my one of my biggest belief I think that crypto remain one of the very few places where it is consistently easier for retail to outperform institution I mean yes there was a lot of unhappiness about uh the VC getting and sit round way cheaper you know 50x after listing but those are mostly unrealized gain and these uh VC are like take a very long fun life to you know to to get to exit but as a retail uh there's a lot more opportunity that uh the big funds can't do it I mean we are even not that big but there's still a lot of opportunities that we just feel that it's a bit too risky and too challenging for her to deploy like uh you farming all the high risk uh D5 protocols or even mem coins I think mem coin of q1 is just a classic example that retail just massively outperform most of the institution because this uh for various reason number one is just like a reputation or like you know if you lose money in mcoin it's also very hard to just explain why you lose money in mem coins like especially how crazy the mem coin cycle is and just imagine some of the name of the mcoin is not even investable if you're having some LP from like a very serious kind of background like it's just completely Untouchable so um like farming all the new Air drops or like sibling your air drops I this something VC can't do in fact I think there was period cycle there was one VC that was found to be sibling their own portco and they will just completely destroy their reputation so just a lot of these thing um that that prevent a funds or institution from actively doing but retail can do this uh without any you know constraint and I think this is where retail have the opportunity like you don't really need to care about the the game like the big VC playing because they're looking at a 35x return over three four year um but what they care about is can they put 50 million to work 100 million to work and you do not have that constraint you should actually focus on you know what uh really makes sense for your Capital size and I think that's actually still plenty of opportunity that it's very good for like between few hundred, to like less than 20 30 million kind yeah yeah I mean I was trying to get I had has from dragonfly you know runs a big fund and I was trying to find a way that he would buy meme coins into his portfolio I was like what if it's just a mascot what if this it it didn't really work so like you said there's there are some places that the large funds won't go um Z here how about you like do you do you get in the weeds do you kind of find these tactical opportunities yeah so um you know we we we're the newest uh fund I guess in like on stage um for us you know when I was setting up the the structure the legality of what we were going to do um and we were pitching uh earliest investors we just told them you know we're going to leave this as open as possible so we do liquid mandate but we we can do a lot of things within that bucket because truthfully I don't know what will be a thing in 3 6 n months from now um so whether it's mcoins whether it's nfts whether it's whatever it is right I don't know I mean obviously we're not going to spend half of our book doing mem coin buy and sells but you know we want to be a part of the action wherever the liquidity kind of moves to in crypto um and these narratives you know whenever they're forced they never work out but whenever it's organic it just like Sparks like wildfire and it's there for three four five weeks and people hit like a THX within that time Horizon and if you're not there you're not capitalizing on that so for us it was very intentional when we were setting up the fund that we have the capacity and opportunity to do these things um and I think this is you know to Arthur's point this is one of those areas where if you're running a fund it's much more complicated to be able to do meme coins in like on average because you know for us it's like we have to multisig into the you know transaction try doing that on salana today right or you know two weeks ago like it's impossible your transaction will never go through right whereas if you know if you're some guy on a phantom wallet like clicking in like three or four times maybe your transaction goes through and you can participate so um in that way it's definitely feasible for retail to kind of participate and do well uh but I I think what we're also noticing like to counter my own Point here is that there's a lot of Market exhaustion too within more retail names like new token launches Athena does well right and then the next token behind it that launched before it just starts losing all liquidity um and it kind of shows that we're not getting as many new inflows as we hoped we would but I think you know after coming to you know token Dubai and meeting some more allocators and people in the space There's A Renewed sense of optimism that people are maybe you know more institutional capital is taking you know crypto seriously again so hopefully you know kind of does well for the market overall yeah shuliang like how do you see the flows coming right now does it look like they're slowing down are they going to pick up again how does it look yeah I just quickly add to what Z here and Arthur said um one is I I think like we're seeing compared like previous psychos um a lot of venture funds are playing a lot more in the liquid space um not just from a like liquid Venture perspective but also they actually like hedging using derivatives um things that you didn't really see nearly as much in previous Cycles uh and two is um another example is like the salana like FTX estate sale a lot of like Venture funds actually participated in that um and basically wrapped it as a venture investment um there are certain funds that wrapped it into and the thing itself has like uh a multi- multi-year lock right so in some ways it is like a venture investment um there are others that you know B salana in an open market wrapped it into a structure where they can't actually touch it for three five years um and that's basically considered Venture investment so we're starting to see actually a lot more of that kind of um investment style that we haven't seen like previous Cycles uh and then going back to just general flows in the current market um end of last year early this year at least from like the options Market it was pretty much like 99% just call option buying right anyone and everyone which just buying call options uh Bitcoin like ethereum we've seen call option Buys in like memecoins um any alts um a ton of that uh it's slowed down a bit I would say um people have pushed out their time frames so obviously the the ETF is not probably not going to come um we've started syic less Flows In ethereum in terms of like flows uh in the time frame I would say people are pushing out to like September December time frame and so if you're looking at like the longer tale uh options markets like December or even March uh there been a ton of action buying out there and like the implied vs if you look at the implied realized like V ratio for 9 to 12 months it's the widest it's actually been in the past two and a half years so like there's a ton of like long data option buying that market makers can supply um but the like realiz volatility actually like hasn't really caught up yet um and so like that that's a kind of flow but like near dated I would say people are pretty cautious people have been buying some protection we just sitting on the sidelines yeah I mean let's talk about something a little bit um spicy which is liquidation so you know crypto has more leverage than any other ass class and when things are going good that everyone's happy and then we have these days where you know 10% Plus you know we've seen um altcoins even lower you guys are multicycle investors so you you've seen it all you know probably a lot of the audience has been around a while we we've seen these crazy uh moves what does it take to like thrive in these conditions like do you keep some dry powder all the time so that the when the inevitable happens you can invest or do you just fully allocate and just you know just take a deep breath that morning and and uh um you know maybe take some ashanda or something and try to chill like what do you guys do maybe uh maybe zah here you can yeah so you know um this is something that I talk to you about quite often but also I sent out this note like a week ago to our investors just kind of explaining what liquidations are how they work and why they're important to us um so usually when there's like big liquidations that happened I'm sure you guys have hear you know x amount of people got wrecked or x amount of you know x billion got liquidated in crypto markets what does that actually mean so it generally means that those positions are now uh owned by The Exchange and they have to go dump those positions uh at Market so they do it right away so those are forced sellers um and we typically on the buy side look for those kinds of events to go and place uh our bids our sort of uh you know buying spots because we love when well we shouldn't say this but it's the best buying opportunity when someone else is forced to sell in the market so that's kind of the uh opportunity set that we look at the most um crypto's uh leverage ratio has substantially decreased since 2019 20120 um and we're still seeing that kind of decrease but every single time we see one of these liquidation events like we saw in the last week um it kind of really yields these negative outcomes for a lot of people so that's why you know generally derivatives are now being you know scrutinized a little bit more uh on platform right people are you know forced to take tests on binance and buy bit to trade derivatives however trivial they may or may not be um so it it's kind of you know entering that sort of Market um and then for us you know the volatility of crypto you can't have the upside without the risk profile so um you know after a while you just have to get desensitized almost to to the volatility and we keep ample amount of cash you know for these kinds of uh events but at the same time we will take book leverage as well so uh when we think you know other people are kind of out of out of a spot um most of crypto is just like self forced error from other people um so you know when other people make mistakes we try to profit off that that's kind of the business and you know same thing for Market making or you know flows trading or even Venture investing to some extent right yeah Arthur how do you feel on these like red days are you are you sort of you've seen so many of them now uh some of them were were much deeper this is like a little small thing of compared to what we had let's say in the Luna days um how do you react in those days what what what is the investor in you look at the market and and think are you looking at all the coins and like oh okay maybe like like a shopping list like May okay this one went to 60 cents how do you how do you how do you do it yeah so I think at actually at a different uh level of capital you manage uh there's a different optimized way optimal way to deal with it I think at a smaller Capital it actually makes sense for you to be a bit more Nimble uh you know to like move in and move out and then you do have the flexibility to do so but as as the capital size increase it it no longer become feasible so I think it's just really about like you need to optimize a kind of uh risk adjusted return you are taking and I think that generally it always makes sense to have some dry powder because um the op the value of those dry powder like exponentially increase when Market is having a stress event so you know um it's always makes sense to keep a little bit of that uh you know when when when a stress event happen like you know like it's like um once in a year you get this kind of great bu buying opportunity or just not just buying opportunity deal making opportunity and you be some people who like just completely blew up and you need to take over their position all this kind of things and and having some dry bullet for that is uh always very important yeah it reminds me a little bit um I I was reading about Jane Street and I I have some friends there so they've confirmed that this is true they always are buying out of the money puts so they're buying these like extreme uh protection and once a while when the market actually hits that level very unexpectedly you know they're paying like a a small amount constantly they're losing money right they're sort of like giving out and then that one time they have liquidity when nobody else has liquidity because they've bought that protection and that reminds me kind of little bit of what you're saying crypto seems like a very extreme version of that where you'll you'll you'll see things Spike to uh prices I think especially with perpetuals one example that people still talk about um I think on Ripple um some months ago the coin margin uh Ripple on bybit there was just no liquidity to buy it back and it was dislocated for like half an hour you could make like 30 40% so shows the value of liquidity being liquid we all get a little bit too um bulled up sometimes and forget to keep a little bit on the side yeah so um and and actually I would argue that actually we need more public liquid investor like us because the VC have all invested right they all went to the private rounds they're not going to buy when Market is crashing now who else is providing the liquidity when the market is crashing it's actually public investor like us and in fact um sometimes uh we sell something higher so that we have the dry powder to buy when it's coming lower so for any of the portfolio company that that think oh this guy is selling sometimes he's selling so that he can buy back when the Market's crashing he's actually going to provide some bid when the market needed the most yeah so all this is a good reason to tell everyone what why do you sell very good statement um we have five minutes left let's talk a little bit about specific indicators or things that you think are the most important I know like all of you had use different tools um maybe you can tell people you know for being successful what specific tools you like or what indicators you know for me looking at funding rates is the easiest thing because when when funding rates are 20 bips a window like we were seeing on uh some of the meme coins it means like people are just like fully fully speculating they don't care about you know the cost of the funding the capital cost um do you look at Capital cost juliang or what kind of indicators really signify what's what's happening yeah I mean definitely like Capital cost is just like another uh word for uh like Leverage in the system basically right you can look at like skew of options markets you can look at funding rates um I think like something else that's been pretty interesting um that we've seen uh like you know it's more like I would say like on chain actually is like now there's like this proliferation and you we promise to here we won't talk about meme coins but like there's been like a proliferation of all these like mcoins and all these like new chains like Bas and dgen um but something that interesting that we kind of noticed and uh was that like um and it was a pretty good sign though actually uh is and Alex from the is in here but like you can kind of track like the these newer like meme coin launches and like the wallet holders that are like holding them it's like extremely transparent um and you you can kind of see like what they're doing and when they're kind of like starting to like get in or starting to get out um and uh there was like one recent example in dgen like based uh L3 where like some of the Insiders like started selling um and it basically like very transparently like you know a few hours later like the price like started to weaken like significantly right and you can't necessarily like trade derivatives around it because uh there are no like derivatives from any of these like new tokens um but it does like give a lot of information for like tactical traders of like one you should be getting in and out uh because at the end of the day is really just like supply and demand yeah so generally so we have an in-house astrologist um and then we chart astrology and crypto seem to be like uh very intertwined no okay being more serious um overall I mean it's it's a pretty simple formula it's just uh and I've tweeted about this for like seven years now and it's been the same thing and people are always like great great post great note and I'm like it's not complicated but um you just we take a look at how many you know active positions there are in the market we take a look at how much people are paying to manage those active positions and then we kind of start determining okay we need to start cooling off here or we should start buying back because everyone else is kind of out of it um and then you know even to the point that Shang mentioned like something we look at is like how much a network gets used so the more the salana network was getting used the more kind of the chain was breaking down because everyone was rushing to you know make a meme coin uh we took that as kind of a sign it's like it's very bullish but at the same time like you people can't actually go and buy on Soul now uh it's a big problem or same thing with Bas you know it's kind of reaching the uh end of the risk spectrum and you know that's usually signals to us like we should be cashed up a little bit people are flexing on me telling me that they made you know x amount every you know every single day so usually that's kind of what we notice um and lastly to shing's point on on on looking at uh uh nen or you know you know Arkham or whatever kind of uh dashboard you use for U looking at onchain stuff it's very disheartening actually if you look at a lot of meme coins because you'll find out very quickly that usually they're all just basically rugs like the team is selling almost instantly so um not not the better ones but a lot of the the the newer ones so things like that are are pretty helpful uh and making sure we don't lose our shirt in investing mhm Arthur what are your kind of key indicat ERS I think number one is really attention uh so we've been finding uh constantly improving of our ways of quantifying the attention uh any project get because in with a lack of the standard valuation model or like accepted valuation model really like attention is what really drive a lot of the how do you differentiate between like a boded community and you know people buy Twitter followers and you know you can buy agencies and pay them to to generate this attention yeah I I think it's it's actually not that hard because you know if you go through to see like abnormal kind of like a likes like like a reaction kind of Engagement to some like an announcement it's not that difficult like uh and also you look at the followers you look at the comments you know are they like genuine account or like fake account if you spend some effort it's not that difficult to help but obviously we are using some more sophisticated tools we paid for some subscription like Kito uh do you know just quantify the attention and the token narrative market shares so we are constantly trying to see you know what is the best way obviously we have some high signal people that we follow so we think that these people present a more genuine reflection of attention and obviously there's also all this kind of like a private uh investor to investor talk you know what do you look at you know all this kind so you kind of gradually form your your your kind of like a network of you know like what is what are things that people are really looking at um and I think this really also really help to be early you want some really hardcore believer uh that really believe in something and that that's usually a very good Alpha at at the beginning yeah yeah I like to go through like even if they buy it sometimes you know they're paying agencies to do it but like you said you can kind of go through and you look at a tweet if the Tweet has more retweets than views or something weird like that you're like okay this is this is fishy so you're right you can uh you can tell sometimes I think it's also helpful if you like like I determine a project based on how many of my mutuals follow that project um and then I can a you know I'm able to tell like okay none of my mutuals are following this thing but then it has like 70,000 followers or something so it's usually a red flag um versus something that has a lot of people that I know that are you know kind of a part of it or talked about it or something like that yeah I can't tell you how many million follower Twitter accounts I've seen that I don't have any common follows with cool guys we're out of time thanks so much for uh sharing your strategies and thoughts hope the panel picked up something interesting and and uh yeah thank you guys thanks