Something feels off with this market. I agree with Smiley that the PA feels quite similar to pre FTX implosion where they were selling off a bunch of assets causing some large irregulaties in the market. The idea is that someone (wintermute/maybe another fund) was hit extremely hard in 10/10, causing them to liquidate the fund. A retarded thesis I came up with is the way onchain has front ran majors by 2-3 weeks for the last 9-12 months could potentially be what we’re seeing with BTC in comparison to stocks. As crypto is the smaller, illiquid sector, smart money is exiting through a small door. I’m quite confident that the larger crypto investors are indeed some of the smarter traders in markets overall as they recognised easy money over the past couple years and came in like sharks to squeeze out inefficiency’s. There’s a lot of factors for us but also against us. We have the Trump crime syndicate who’s undoubtedly siphoning money out of this eco like no tomorrow + OG whales selling hard into the 4 year cycle thesis. It almost feels like summer 2024 where we were in the 7+ month range, although the backdrop we currently have feels considerably better. Even the best of the best traders who use to be considered as having crystal balls have been wrong numerous times over the past 12 months and it feels like there’s less and less traders who are being publicly accurate for a sustained time period. This along brings me concern as when you think about it at a deeper level, there should be a subset of traders, no matter the market condition who find signal in pattern recognition. The fact no one has been able to find consistent pattern recognition means there’s either unprecedented levels of crime or some type of advanced AI algo which is out trading basically every participant (there’s rumours about OpenAI/other large companies using their data for sophisticated options models). Our industry has been declared as cowboys who would steal from their own mothers. Go back to early internet stages, remember how scared everyone was to put their credit cards online because scammers kept taking advantage of them? I’ve said in a lot of writings that I believe crypto is in the 2004-2006 internet era where we’re just starting to see the amazons, googles, facebooks get birthed into the market (part of my ICM thesis). I know it’s hard not to have that doomer mindset when it feels like there’s very little innovation happening around us. Remember why you first entered this space, the tech is genuinely better, we just haven’t matured enough to see the fruits of it yet. Maybe it takes 6 months, 2 years or a decade, till this day I still find it the most fun industry and don’t see anything coming close. If you genuinely don’t enjoy then there’s no point being here, you’ll perform much better in something you enjoy. These are numbers on a screen at the end of the day, would a grown man who’s in control of his own emotions sit there and sob about bad it all looks or take action and find edge in this market through asymmetric plays other emotional traders are overlooking? Everyone talks about survival, nobody talks about showing up everyday no matter conditions and continually refining your edge, gradually out ranking everyone. Just showing up here every day isn’t going to cut, you need to be actively getting better, researching, journalling, upskilling in everything aspect possible. Take everything in this post very lightly, I’m just rambling trying to make sense of whats happening. The fact I’m writing this probably means we’re quite close to a bottom.