Crypto Gathering Day 2: What do the Analysts Think?

0:00Your favorite neighborhood spot grows with Square. Indeed, my favorite neighborhood spot has quickly become Todd Snyder in Williamsburg. Todd Snyder is one of my favorite menswear shops and has supplied me with all the clothes I have needed this quite hot summer. Every business has different goals, but Square is the business platform that supports them all. From opening a new location, selling something new, or just expanding their reach. Indeed, I've seen it with Todd Snyder. In Square, also, you can get real-time insights, so don't wait for end-of-day reports. Go to square.com forward slash go forward slash Real Vision to learn more about how your business can grow with Square.

0:43That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash G-O slash R-E-A-L-B-I-S-I-O-N. Rick Rule. Rick Rule is a favorite of the Real Vision community. If you'd like to meet Rick and get a masterclass from the master himself, you'll want to head to the Rick Rule Symposium on Natural Resource Investing in Florida July 23 to 27. You'll get access to industry insiders, elite bullion dealers, gold council members and uranium pros. Just head over to realvision.com slash Rick for tickets. That's realvision.com slash Rick. So Josh, first of all, welcome. Thank you for joining us. How are you doing today? You know, how are the vibes this week for you?

1:28Hey guys, thanks for having me. Fives are good. Coming off vacation. I think the rest of the market's also on vacation. So that's why we've seen a whole lot of nothing going on lately here price-wise. But when people get back, things are going to get interesting, I think, as some more news type events start popping up and wanting to move price. It's interesting how it seems like, you know, 32K has been really guarded and 30K has been really guarded from the buyers and the sellers respectfully, you know, inverse to that. So we really held this range extremely tightly. And one of the just, boom, throwing it out, Bollinger Bands, for anybody who knows what those are, you know, just the measure of a lack of volatility, just very, very tight on the Bollinger Bands here on the daily chart.

2:17well i'm definitely uh excited to talk about some of some of those uh events that might be taking place uh when everyone's getting back from vacation i want to hear all about this but you know josh before we we jump into things i i wanted to ask you if you can give us you know a quick primer on your demarc analysis and how that differs from other approaches in in this space uh yeah sure you mean um so i'm mainly a cloud ichimoku cloud trader um i think the td guys is it somebody else on the call but um really what you got to figure out for yourself is you know what type of trader are you like you were saying earlier are you a short time horizon person are you a long time horizon person you're better off over time using a long time horizon you know Five or 10 years, I think, is a bit much, but certainly acceptable for most people, depending on if you are leaning towards that investor mindset.

3:18I think the investor mindset is more five to 10-year time horizon. As a trader, my sweet spot personally is like weeks, months, days. But that's me, right? Some people are really good at trading extremely low timeframes. I just prefer higher timeframes. Higher timeframes generally just give you more data. So if you're making quick decisions all the time, if you're trying to swerve the car in and out of the lane constantly, you're going to crash a lot more often than if you're on cruise control. And you're just vibing, right? So from that perspective, I prefer trend trading. I prefer sitting in a position for a long period of time and letting the market just do its thing.

4:03Another thing people get into trouble with is they're just over-trading all the time. They just, I'm a trader, I got to click the button, right? Like, that's not how you make money. That just isn't how most people over time make money anyway. That's a very interesting point to make because I do know some people that have just gotten into the trading realm, and that's something they do. They always kind of feel like they have to make a trade if they see something. So it's actually very good that you mentioned that. So you talked about, you know, your time horizon and some things you look for. But what are some indicators that you look for when trading?

4:42You know, most traders I talk to are day traders, but it's very interesting that you're kind of a little longer term than that sometimes. So what are some indicators you look for in your trades? Yeah, so from a trend perspective, just what I mean there is, you know, are we making higher highs over time generally or are we making lower lows over time? If we're making higher highs, that's known as a bullish market. If we're making lower lows, then that's known as a bearish market. If you're making higher highs or lower lows quickly, then typically you see volume come along with that. But from a trend perspective, I prefer Ichimoku Cloud.

5:19I've certainly popularized it, I think, in crypto over the past 10 years since I've been trading. and that's just really kind of a seemingly complex moving average system when in reality it's just the checks and balances to sort of keep me on the right side of the trade. Basically you need some sort of litmus test to help get your mind out of it so subtract the subjectivity, use math and from then on out you know you can just use your system assuming that it works to some degree to help ideally make more good trades and bad trades over time and that's all that's the best anybody can do so what would you you know i'm kind of jumping all over the place here but like what would you say to someone who is you know kind of just getting in into they've been involved in crypto they're a holder so they have some knowledge of what goes on.

6:18They have an idea of certain trends, but they never traded, whether that's chart, cloud trading. They're wanting to get involved into it for the first time. What are some tips you would give them or in what direction would you point them to get that knowledge and confidence in trading? Yeah. So one of the things that really helped me initially was just being a of a group of people talking about, this is a great example, right? As a Spaces or early on it was TeamSpeak. Now it's more Discord oriented. Maybe it's even Reddit, whatever it is, right? WallStreetBets, right? Whatever community, crypto Twitter, trading view, you need to have some sort of exposure.

7:06So you have some baseline as far as what even exists, right? You don't know what you don't know. So you need some sort of initial springboard to at least show you what's going on. If you want a more structured approach, there's a site called babypips.com. It has like breakdown classes for people that are free. Like it's really good, super basic. If you know absolutely nothing. Another one I really like is TradingView again, just on the ideas section, just to see what people are looking at. Are they looking at Elliott waves? Are Elliott waves absurd? Are moving averages better? Do I like chart patterns, right?

7:47That way you have at least some sort of knowledge base to go forward and try to understand what's going on. And then from there, I would try to apply it yourself in some form, low stakes sort of situation, right? And learn from there. But a lot of people sort of just like click buttons and hope for the best, right?

8:12that's funny I think a lot of people do do that um so kind of a holistic uh view right now what where do you where do you see the market right now and you know where do you see it you know kind of heading what where do you see our trends heading you know I guess in the next six months to a year from now? Yeah, one good thing to watch always is engagement. So if you're in the spaces, you're probably aware of various crypto influencers or YouTube channels, whatever it is. And just watch how the engagement changes in the comment section and the views. Like this is just super basic anecdotal, right?

8:54You can look at this from a metric perspective when we're talking about Google Trends. but you'll notice now right it's sure it's vacation it's summer it's like you know low engagement anyway um but just notice how the engagement changes and how sentiment broadly changes that's very powerful for crypto has been since uh you know 2011 i think you're completely right there um just before you move on too quickly when you're talking about the markets within the next six months and engagement is very important we have a question from the audience called Alex Cod. I know Alex is not raising his hand up just yet, but he's asking you, what is a cloud trader?

9:35Because I think you mentioned that at the very beginning. So he goes, what is a cloud trader? Complete novice here. Sure, yeah. So Ichimoku Cloud is a specific indicator that you can pull up on most trading platforms. I don't know what people use other than TradingView these days. CryptoWatch is a good one as well. Back in the day, Bitcoin Wisdom, was a really good charting website. But I would definitely get out of the habit of if you're going to like google.com and like searching tickers and things like that, or Yahoo, like get out of that habit. Go towards things like TradingView. Again, these are free resources.

10:16So it's not like there's no cost there. Because then you'll see the tools that are available and you'll see this massive encyclopedia of trading resources. But the cloud was created by a Japanese journalist in the 50s, I believe. And again, it just helps you figure out what the trend is. Are we bullish? Are we bearish? And then it gives you sort of entry points based on certain crosses within that system. It's very hard to describe without looking at it. But if you go through my Twitter, you'll see plenty of examples of that.

10:59That was a great question, Alex Codd. Thank you for asking that because I did not really know what that was. I was going to revisit that, but great question. So Josh, so we're looking at engagement and that's a good way to kind of see where the trends are going. so I guess it's just like a non non-price metric you can use just anecdotally, right? Is your family coming up to you? Do people know that you're trading crypto or that you're into crypto? Are they asking you about it? Are people randomly asking you about Doge or some meme coin? Know when to remember those moments and remember what price was in those moments relative to now when basically crypto is kind of left for dead, you know, for most people.

11:50Most people, if they were in crypto last year, they lost a lot of money. They blew up their sort of sour grapes sort of situation on everything. And now we have institutions sort of rolling in, picking up pieces. So over the next six months, I think institutional flows are going to be critical. another free resource for people is uh james butterfield on coin shares does this weekly flows report from all the institutional products and he basically looks at where the money is going in the etfs the etps and you'll notice the complete reverse of sentiment there since the etf application by blackrock so that i think is another uh critical metric to watch over the next six months because where's the money going to be coming from?

12:44Probably not retail, probably going to be coming from institutional. That's where this unlocked flows. It's like a dam, right? It's been shut off for years. People just watching on the sidelines, watching things blow up and the BlackRock ETF, assuming it gets approved, will just open that floodgate.

13:12It's a funny thing you mentioned there about just engagement and kind of paying attention. We have a running joke in a couple of our community-run Twitter spaces that when your normie friends are asking you about the next or the hot crypto coin, that is a good time to start selling. But it's just a fun joke that we have. Don't do that to your friends, guys. But I'm really glad you mentioned that. So we just brought DeFi Deffen on the stage. Another one of our great visionaries. Lance, how you doing? What you got for us? Very well, thank you. Great to see you all again here. What I did like was what Josh said, and a lot of people sort of forget about this.

13:58He kept saying it. He said it multiple times. Over time, making money over time. I think there's so many people that are wanting to try and make money tomorrow. Bang, bang. You know, you can't blame these people. But I think the key is, like Josh says, is to make this money over time. And, yeah, there's plenty of free resources out there. So completely agree with that. And I wish that we could hear that more often from people just saying, let's grow this over time. There's no rush. The markets ain't going anywhere, you know. so yeah refreshing thank you josh

14:39yeah and guys the space is also recorded so you can always go back and and listen uh josh has mentioned a few different resources that you can you can go and check out as well uh so definitely uh check check those out so so josh you know in in our space and you know within the real vision community, we have a very degen crowd, if you will. You know, we people that like to, you know, go in on altcoins, as we call them shit coins. But, you know, an important thing when throwing money around is managing risk. Right. And in trading, I think that's a very important thing, just as it is important to take profits.

15:17I think it's also equally as important to stop your losses as well, to live, to trade another day. What what can you like? What are some strategies you use to manage risk or how do you view that as a whole in your trading strategy? Sure. Yeah. I mean, just being at the table is the single most important thing that you can do as a trader. The last thing you want to do is blow up, you know, and if you blow up, you're done, right? So most people need to blow up to figure out what they did wrong, which is unfortunate, but it's part of the trading tuition. That's just historically for most people, how it works out right either you blew up trading at ftx you blew up not understanding custodial or counterparty risk at you know celsius blocked by etc etc etc but hopefully uh you know that's a small price people are paying and they're learning over time but one of the first and easiest things you can do is uh from a risk perspective you know to avoid you know custodial issues or just you know misclicks, whatever, is set up sort of sub-accounts on your trading accounts, which just means either make multiple accounts or if the trading venue has the sub-account option.

16:35That way you can split up your funds separately. Another way I just do that personally is I keep a lot of my funds in a hardware wallet. I keep the trading funds on the exchange and that's that. That's sort of my version of a sub-account. But that way I'm not blowing up. If I do blow up or if there's a hack or whatever, I don't lose everything instantly, right? It's sort of protection against myself or any sort of other shenanigans. I was around for Mt. Gox, okay? So not your keys, not your coins is very real. And people realize that over the past few years. Josh, I've got a question for you. You know how you said you use your cold wallets obviously for stuff that you don't want to touch, but obviously for speed purposes, you do have to use sort of like a centralized exchange to unramp.

17:22What is in your eyes at the moment, dare I ask, one of the safest sort of exchanges to use out there nowadays, with the exception of Coinbase, because I think that one's too easy. Sure, yeah. This is highly dependent on jurisdiction. I figured based on the accent, most people are in the UK. But for me, I prefer Kraken and Coinbase. I onboarded with Coinbase in 2013 and traded with them for a long time. Kraken onboarded early days as well. Any other exchange, I would be very, very careful. You know, that includes Binance. That includes any high leverage shitcoin exchange. Prevent yourself from blowing up at their cost or your lack of discretion regarding custodial risk.

18:15split those funds up. You don't have to go all 100x long on BitMEX in one trade. Just split it up and be responsible. That's really the best way to not blow up. At the first sight of any issue with any exchange, just take the funds and put them in a hardware wallet. Just turtle up. It takes five seconds to do, assuming they have the funds to give you, obviously. But yeah, back to your original question. Coinbase and Kraken are certainly my top two currently. That's very good advice. Thank you. So hey, everyone. How's everyone doing? I hope you're all good. Why not Binance? Yeah, so Binance, you know, if you would have told me last year that all the things that happened with FTX happened with Binance, I think most people would almost not bad mind.

19:12You know, they just be like, oh yeah, okay. Binance has had issues for years and they continue to have issues even now. That's a risk I'm not willing to take. It doesn't mean like other people are okay with those risks versus myself. I just prefer not to keep anything on Binance personally. And it's certainly dependent on which assets you're keeping. Is it in BSC? Is it on Binance US? Is it in one of their staking or lending products? I just personally wouldn't use Binance at this time. Okay, interesting. And if I may ask a follow-up question? Yeah, sure. What are your thoughts on passive trading?

20:08So, I mean, there are some tools. There's a new Dapp called Astrodow, and it uses AI-powered signals and Uniswap, and it basically automates the trades. So you put your money in an index. You can put your money in there, whichever index you want, and it just automates the trading based on AI-based signals. What are your thoughts on passive trading? Are you into it? And would you consider it? Yeah, so I'm a big proponent of all that sort of stuff. And I've played around with a lot of that stuff over the years. I would just be really careful with, again, use the subaccount mindset in your head. you're not giving somebody 100 BTC or 300 grand or whatever it is.

21:03Split the money up, okay? Again, you don't want to blow up. You don't want to risk some trading error on some DeFi index, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You don't want to give all your money to BlockFi or Celsius, right? People learn these lessons now, but it's the same thing. That hasn't changed. I don't have any issues with those sort of automated trading, robot trading, robo trading, right? I would start small, see if it works. It doesn't mean it can't randomly blow up on you overnight, but again, just protect yourself from yourself. You know, use the sub-account mindset and split things up.

21:44You know, I don't like Binance, but it doesn't mean other people don't as well, and they can certainly keep funds there. But there's a difference between lunch money and losing your seat at the table, right? So I would just encourage people to be very careful with losing all their money in one place, right? Unfortunately, that's just this data thing in digital assets right now. Okay, cool. Check out the Jumbotron for the platform I was talking about. Thanks. And, you know, speaking of Binance, Josh, you know, just recently, I don't I believe it was yesterday or the day before. Binance had Bitcoin and ETH in particular trading at prices significantly lower than than the rest of the market or the rest of exchanges.

22:34Do you do you have an insight on why that might be with that? Was that just a glitch on their website or is that was that done purposefully? Is there any reason why they might do something like that? Yeah, anytime generally you see a disconnect, whether it's Poloniac, Kraken, you know, some other random exchange, it usually means there isn't an arbitrage ability there. There isn't a two-way flow that's easily reconnected between sort of the fiat markets, the banking rails, and what you're seeing on the market pairs. So it definitely be very careful. You know, you might think, oh, this Bitcoin's on sale in Binance, right?

23:18But come to find out like, oh, it's very hard to get fiat into Binance or someone is buying a stable coin or maybe Binance is selling XYZ crypto to shore up some other hole in their balance sheet somewhere else, right? these things happen at finance okay they just do again that's just me i'm um i just don't use finance anymore so at this point i any shenanigans you see over there uh i just assume it's not good things and and we know that they're baking banking rails aren't really connected at the moment and globally it seems like every other day you see a new bank or a new jurisdiction is dropping them as an ability to get money into the exchange.

24:08So you're going to see very weird prices on Binance because of that. That's great. That's great to know. Appreciate that explanation. Lance, go ahead. So Josh, when you're approaching the markets, are you having a view on what the US dollar is doing or interest rates? Or are you straight to your Ichimoku cloud and if it's above the cloud you're in the uptrend and if it's below the cloud you're in a downtrend or are you actually taking notice of what's going on globally? Does that make sense? Yeah, no, that's a great question. So for most of Bitcoin's history, for most of the history of cryptocurrency, rates were zero effectively, right?

24:57Or negative in some places. So most people, including myself, never really cared to look at rates or paid attention. I didn't really know who Greenspan was or anybody else. Now everybody knows who Paul is. That's a bad sign. Everybody knows that the CPI releases tomorrow. Everyone's super keyed into macro stuff. There's a billion podcasts on macro, right? so these days yes ever since the fed got more hawkish in the u.s definitely paying attention to inflation paying attention to rates paying attention to all those little data points again like okay you're going you're driving down some main thoroughfare is the amusement park parking lot full okay i just saw a headline today about the disney uh lines being the least long they've been in years.

25:54So this is some sort of anecdotal indication that Disney's too expensive or people are running out of money. It's all these little data points, again, that aren't necessarily actionable, but pay attention to what you're seeing out there because you'll hear people say, we're definitely going into a recession or everything's fine, and it's very hard to interpret everything collectively. so are you finding that kind of it's improved your risk management as well just being aware of them little things does it make you stop and think before well obviously it does but so to clean that question up do you ultimately find that it's helping with your risk management yeah so i think understanding like the tailwinds and the headwinds right is the Fed being hawkish, a tailwind or a headwind?

26:52Just basically understanding that, right? It's a headwind, okay. So what is the Fed doing right now? They're raising, but they're getting close to maybe ending that cycle. They may do a couple more raises, blah, blah, blah, right? So that does affect the risk management perspective as far as size is concerned, as far as trade duration, or even how far I expect the trade to run price-wise. based on market events, right? So again, tomorrow there's a CPI release in the US and we're probably going to see a lower CPI, which may end up breaking us out of this range on Bitcoin. And five minutes after that, we may drop right back down to the range because that's how we've been trading.

27:40So, you know, if I'm a breakout trader and I'm waiting for a level to be breached and there's a market event coming up, I may be reducing the size on my trades. I was about to say, would you be trading into that number? Are you going to leave your positions on or would you keep out of that position if you knew that the news was coming?

28:03Yes, I don't like to trade around the event itself. You know, like the number comes out and then you start trading it, right? I like to sort of in advance have an understanding of what's going on. again like I'm saying I think CPI is going to come down Truflation is a really good website for that it has both UK and US version and they've been dead on the money as far as sort of predicting direction and speed and intensity at CPI. Josh I was just going to ask then because I feel like you have a good grasp of the lay of the land out there a term that we often use at Real Vision is that macro is crypto and crypto is macro.

28:46And I think what you just mentioned touches on all that kind of stuff. So I think a very simple question to you is, do you feel that we still have a looming recession coming in? Yeah, I mean, again, like you go down the street, you know, restaurants are full. Everyone's looking for work still on the services side. But at the same time, houses are the most unaffordable they've ever been. Cars are the most affordable they've ever been. Credit card APY is the highest they've ever been. Non-revolving credit declining. Things are just all over the place. I don't have a good read necessarily. The expectation, the other side of it is the jobs data we get.

29:32When it comes out, it gets revised the next month and everyone forgets that a revision happened and it doesn't even matter. So the data itself seems to be corrupted in some fashion. So it's very topsy-turvy analysis paralysis type stuff. I don't know. And the other question is, will a recession even affect Bitcoin prices, for example, right? Like from an actionability perspective, I'd like to think it probably would. But ultimately, it probably comes down to the strength of the dollar. If the dollar continues to weaken, we should expect that to act as a tailwind for prices on the crypto side. So it's really hard.

30:17I don't know. I don't know. You know, it also depends on your political leanings. If you're a red Republican, you're probably seeing things like the SPR getting drawed down and people getting super angry and very doomerish. and if you're blue you're probably more hopeful and optimistic so I don't know, it's very tough The market and the economy are different things I mean a trader is going to make money on the way up and on the way down so they get twice as rich in a recession, it's just the poor bloke who's on the streets who hasn't got a clue what's going on in the world they're the ones that feel it the most but somebody that knows what they're doing they get double rich when people are getting their office is right for one to go back well one of the indications I look for and I see a lot at the moment is our customers switch from paying us on a debit card to paying us with a credit card and we noticed this in 2008 as well and it lasted for a couple of years and an awful lot of people that we see out and about in the supermarket they're paying for their groceries on a credit card instead of a debit card and the amount of customers that switch from debit to credit is outrageous so i think there's a lot more pain to come especially over here in the uk