Trading as an Esport? What Fantasy Investing Can Teach Us

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1:36GMGM, it's Web3 Wednesdays on Crypto Daily Briefing. And thank you for spending some time to join your learning journey in Web3 with me. I'm Elaine Lee, your friendly crypto host and producer. a little bit flabbergasted before the show started because I'm already busy welcoming our community who is here watching. Welcome and GM to all of you. So joining me today is Brooker Belcourt, founder of Covey. Brooker, welcome to the show. We're finally here on the platform. Yeah, I've been excited to come on the show. It's been a long time coming. Yeah. So look, I've wanted to bring you on the show for a while now because you're very much like us.

2:15You are someone who loves the digital asset space, but has a really firm grasp of all things macro. And what you're currently building out right now is really interesting. It's a gaming platform where you can trade and allocate your positions with traditional investments and your digital ones as well. And it's not with real money, but it's using a bit of a digital token called Matic, as some of you would know, you are able to allocate your trade onto the blockchain. Now, it is a Web3 investment portfolio trading game. And because everything is now in the open, well, that means newfound talent can be found and we can gather data and how your investment strategy works, what were your tools, what were your educational platform that you made those sort of trades and how they worked out for you.

2:59So currently there's over like, I heard 300, correct me if I'm wrong, Booker, about 300 community members. Are we using it? 300 RV members on here across 14 teams competing to be the best right now. Damn. So you guys are under the radar, building and growing within Web3, making your trades, and they could be read on the blockchain. So a couple of hundreds of just RV community users using it. And how are you finding it? I want to know. So please leave your comments in the below and I'll get through them after the show. But it's really important that you let me know about your experience but that's enough of me babbling through this though brookka belcourt thanks for giving me some of your time today brookka i would say we've had a lot of fun this year what are your thoughts so far yeah we've had some good quarters in the real vision investment league we've had a lot of competition there a lot of different winners and we found some amazing analysts that we've highlighted on different shows together so i'm excited to talk about them yeah i can say this with you because you know every quarter we sort of like you send out an updated email.

4:04We sort of give a YouTube link to the people who's involved and see how we go through your trades, see how you've trade, how you've done. Some of you have failed us miserably and some of you have done pretty well. All right. So, Brooke, let's tell the audience at Real Vision here your background first, because I think that's very important. I mean, the journalism fiend in me, of course, went to do a bit of stalking on your LinkedIn. You know, you are former Goldman, former Citadel, and an analyst for what I read was one of the largest technology focused hedge funds in the world. So no stranger to the investment world.

4:38So why don't you go ahead and tell the audience just who is Brooker once again? For sure. So I'm the founder of Covey. And Covey, we just want to find and reward the best investors so that we can give them our money to manage. And so really straightforward. And we do that through a competition, individual and team-based and we also have it with Real Vision. My background before founding Covey a few years ago, I worked at hedge funds. So I was an analyst covering internet and tech stocks at Citadel using some software that's actually really similar to what we give to all the analysts for free on Covey.

5:16And before that, I was at Tiger Management and before that at Cotu working for a single manager, Philippe Lafont, and investing in, again, a lot of tech stocks and internet stocks. So I had a really big journey for about seven years in the hedge fund world. And so understand the value of finding these amazing analysts and knowing that they do tend to stay the same and we can allocate our money to them and we can all be better off. Yeah. So seven years in the hedge fund world, that's probably a lifetime. I would say you're someone who's definitely done your of due diligence and uh i guess yeah i guess seven years then you are completely used to um whatever cycle is out there going on right i've seen a few cycles i'd like to see more but i've been around yeah i started my career in like 2008 at goldman sachs as everything was blowing up in september so i saw that cycle and now uh has still been investing ever since so for sure all right so brooke let's start broad here so you're building out a web3 game essentially you know Gaming to me, for someone on an everyday basis, when I hear the word gaming in Web3, I get a little bit paranoid.

6:25I really get a bit anxious. I roll a little bit because I'm scared that it's like clunky and whatnot. But this game is, you know, it's not a Pokemon lookalike. It's not some clunky. It's actually working. It's beautiful. And it's building out beautiful sets of data where we're trying to, you know, break down how these analysts are trading on your platform. But, you know, for Kovei, tell people what you're building out, essentially. is it like a esports for investing like tell people just what is it and what does that even mean like in terms of esports for investing so i love investing i love it more than i love watching any sport or or playing any game but like unlike poker um there isn't like a world series of investing there isn't like this u.s open of investing where anyone can go and enter and compete and it's broadcast and we can all follow in real time.

7:19And that sucks. And I would love to watch that. And so we partnered with Real Vision and they had a similar idea. And so we built this first ever team-based investment competition. And so it allows us to find and elevate the best investment analysts that are on our platform. And we think they should have a larger share of voice and we should pay more attention to them. They're all over social media. They're all on Discord. And so we really want to elevate the best. And that's where it started. Hmm. Okay. So let's talk about the Real Vision League, if you can pop that up. So let's talk a little bit about that.

8:02I haven't taken a look at it for like over a week because I've been on vacation and stuff. But lo and behold, the team I am part of is right at the very bottom. And we were number two. I've already kicked off in Discord what that's all about. So just talk to me a little bit about the RV League with a couple hundred people, people in our community from macro and obviously learning stuff about crypto, getting a digital wallet, et cetera. What is the RV Trading League? How are people doing over there? So RV League is 14 teams and they each have about 10 or so people on these teams. and these 14 teams are competing for quarterly and so you can win nfts that we'll talk about in a bit and they're competing for annual prizes and the cool thing is is anyone can join uh these teams they basically it starts in these recruitment clubs we've got the 14 teams and then it starts in these recruitment clubs so anyone can join these clubs and then they get drafted into the teams and these 14 teams all the magic button by the way you've given me permission to approve yes coming to my team you have also upgraded me to give me position to kick people out of my team that i have just learned but we you know just wanted to interrupt you there and say when we really are invested into seeing how you trade those prizes are thousands of dollars so you can celebrate with your team sorry brooker carry on yeah and so basically and i'll share my screen just for a second here so here are the 14 teams um and what they're doing is they're competing on a quarterly and annual basis and so right now on the quarterly competition uk is in the lead on the annual competition which started in january when we launched this this thing japan is in the league and so these people um we equal weight all can i stop you there quickly did you say uk is at the top of the league at the moment in the quarterly competition can i pop in there and see who the best trader is from the uk because i know our community and i know there's a couple of brits in there so i just want to see if we can get a name yeah we can jump in here so basically here's here's the annual competition you can track their performance over time and you can see again um at the top here is a lot of japan and canada competing for the top spot and what's going on in UK is we've got Maura.

10:31Maura is Sheila, Sheila the crypto Sheila. She's doing amazing right now. She was long XRP. Hey, everyone. We're going to take a quick pause and hear our word from our partners. We'll be right back.

10:46Yes, that makes so much sense. The thing is, I know exactly who Maura is. The funny thing is she is not even a Brit, but she has just joined the right team. that's funny that's funny yeah so the team captains um can decide who's on the team and they can bring people in when they want they can cut people when they want and so it's cool we see team captains building a team of like some macro analysts some commodities analysts some tech analysts some technical some quant and we see like even teams pushing into one more strategy than the other like i know team india is like deeper on the quant strategy then we have some like nft teams and so these are teams that are not held together by like region they're held together by ownership in an nft that's monkey versus dow and so they're like obviously going to be more crypto and then we have like the rb sisters who are like more behind this movement so we have all these these collection of teams and they're just competing constantly and you can see where you are on each team and so this is the leaderboard within each team and so you can see like how Maura did really well this quarter who are the different people in here like she's up 98 this quarter who are the people leading year to date and bringing up this team interesting really good some definitely some names sorry I'm bending forward to because I definitely uh well that's interesting and congratulations to the UK I haven't seen you guys on top for a while so okay uh Brooke do we know who the best RV analyst is because I know we're going through specific teams but overall who have you found who's the best rv analyst so far i mean we should really talk to that person one day yeah there's a lot of talent i think right at the top we've got um reese parkinson's uh who is just amazing and so i'm pulling up he's so bullish on tesla i already know his trades he's a very active community member again he's that guy who jumps on browse ama and then make sure he submits his questions through so i'm assuming there's a few tesla movement in there yes there's these definitely super long tesla uh super long eth right now and beam and this is their portfolio now the cool thing is we can follow him and see what he's doing over time and what covey does is we show like 50 metrics every five minutes and so you can you can track this portfolio and you can see like the three positions we've talked about but you can track this portfolio versus the s &p obviously he's crushing it versus the s &p you can track his portfolio, how he's trading, like tons of really fun metrics, sharp ratio, drawdown.

13:25As soon as you get more into investing and you're curious about how all the different metrics of your portfolio work out, if your long book is doing well, if your short book is doing well, we've got all that data for you and where you're making all your money. So basically, Reece made like all his money on Tesla. So watch this guy for his calls on Tesla. And you can see and then when it started to drop in april loaded up again and so made some great calls on here yeah be interesting to see what he's doing especially this week as uh tesla is down by three percent for the day actually uh right now um quite a low since well actually the lowest it's been over the past week um okay that's interesting and i do know reese is a brit as well so whoever hasn't uh welcomed him onto the uk team get on it because apparently he's doing pretty well with his trading strategy um so brooke how are how many people are using it um overall uh covey so covey has uh when you enter in this real vision league you're also going to be part of covey and so we've had like thousands of people entering our competition to compete and we've narrowed that down to about 300 people that are actually like staking tokens and really competing on like a day-to-day basis.

14:51And so we've taken a list of thousand, narrowed down to 300, and then from there, about the top 10 or 20 % receive rewards at the end of every month. So we have a leaderboard for the individual competition that is really fun. So Reese Parkinson will show up on the individual competition. That takes everyone from the Real Vision and Investment League and takes everyone from other platforms, brings them in here, allows them to compete and stake and win. And the cool thing is what we do with all that data, just to wrap it up, is we take the top 1 % from there and create a portfolio out of it and allow anyone to deposit fiat cash, like real money, through our app in the US to invest alongside, we call it co-trading, invest alongside the top 1 % so you can be guaranteed you're investing the best.

15:36So, Rhys is someone who is the top analyst in the RV analyst, but who is the top analyst overall in the app that you're building? The top analyst in the app? Do you know who that is? Yeah, I know who it is. It changes a little bit, but I'll show who it is right now. We call the top 1 % legends. And so, those are the people who have been the best over the last 12 months. And these are the people who you can co-trade with on our app. And so the best analyst right now is Swing Trader. And this person, I think, is based out of Denver, and they're running like a Druckenmiller style investing. So they lead with technical analysis.

16:17So they see movements in stocks, and they lead with technical analysis, and then layer in a fundamental view on the individual stock. You mean homework pays off, Broca? Yeah, it definitely requires work. It requires a little bit of love, of course, as well. You've got to be interested in this stuff. So right now they believe in crypto, Solano, DOT, and then they're also along Disney, AMD, and then some EV and some ETFs as well. And so really cool portfolio to watch. You can watch this thing live and see how they're trading around. This is the best on Covey. And they're on Team Canada as well, which is the team that I run.

16:56Okay. All right. I'll leave it at that. Who are the best? Where are the best analysts hanging out then? And is there a common space? Does Kovac have a Discord? Where are the best analysts hanging out? Do they hang out together? Yeah, they definitely hang out. We found they're hanging out in the Real Vision Collective Discord. We've got some channels in there. Then there's like the NFT teams have their own channels in the Monkeyverse Discord. And then Kovac has a Discord as well. But in the RV Collective is where we're trying to assemble everyone to hang out there. And so that's like a big thing everyone has in common.

17:29Right. Yes. I just remember that in our own Discord that we have individual channels for whichever people teams. Okay, well, it's not fun without any competition. So with all the data that you're getting, do you think retail analysts have a shot against hedge fund analysts then? Is this what this data is meant to give you some more information on? It's such a good question. I think they do. And I think they win because of numbers. And so when you look out in the world, maybe there's a few thousand hedge fund analysts. And when you look on platforms like us, which are brand new, and we've onboarded thousands of users already, like you start to say, OK, well, if I take the top 1 % of my thousands, and obviously we're growing, and we start getting to numbers like 10 ,000, once you start getting to those numbers, our top 1 % versus their top 1 % are going to be pretty competitive.

18:21And so I think that over time, we're just going to be bigger and we're going to win it in numbers. And as technology starts to get distributed, like Real Vision giving you access to tons of different data, things like, you know, Koi Fin for charts or TradingView for charts and fundamental data, like we're just getting so much of an equalization of data. And you don't just need a Bloomberg subscription to be a star investment analyst now. I think there's so many services available online that allow you to put up these amazing books like Swing Trader or Reese Parkinson, and you can go up against the big guys.

18:55Well, Reese, we did have a little comb through the Kovei website, and it does say that Kovei finds, rewards, and train top investment managers from any backgrounds for others to copy, ensuring everyone can win. So the potential issue is, you know, if everyone copies the best ones, wouldn't there be losers elsewhere in the market? You know, can everyone truly win in this scenario? So we've designed it in a way that we only allow like what we call large and liquid stocks. And so on Covey, you can invest in any cryptocurrency ETF or U.S. equity that is bigger than a billion dollars U.S. in market cap and trades more than a million dollars a day.

19:37and so that means that like if we find these best and they have this portfolio like you're looking at that swing trader they're invested in disney they're invested in amd and solana like huge companies there's a lot of room for us in there to follow them along so we want to make sure that we're doing that these aren't penny stocks okay okay um all right so i'm just you know i've been using it for like more than six months now but we need to talk about because at the end of the day this is a gaming platform it's not real money that you're using to investment it's a gaming platform where you use to test out your uh trading strategies and your thesis and what you have where you have your conviction and so brooker for people who are completely new to um covey how do people join like someone in the community chat is already asking um is there a how-to guide somewhere that's my favorite whales of Bitcoin on Twitter.

20:33He's asking, you know, is there a guide? Because it's not straightforward for some people. I know that. So how would you advise for one to start joining and start playing in Kove? Yeah, so we understand that creating is really important to people. It allows them to credentialize themselves. But at the same time, like we're posting your track record to the blockchain. So it's immutable. So you could actually use it to raise money. That's important. But to do that, it's kind of hard. Blockchain's a brand new technology. Yes, we can create an immutable track record for like less than pennies, but it's like, it's tricky.

21:08So all you have to do is go to Covey, C-O-V-E-Y.io and you can go slash RV and you can join the Real Vision Investment League there. There's lots of ways to join at the bottom of the page and you create your portfolio. And we have like a really nice step-by-step guide as to how to do it. So you'll need a MetaMask wallet and we'll lay out the steps of like how to connect a MetaMask wallet, how to get onto the Polygon network, and then some recommendations on like how to add trades. And so once you join there, all you're really doing is you're putting together a portfolio. And so you're saying like Meta, 30%, BTC, 10%, Netflix, 10%.

21:52And then you're just hitting save portfolio. But we like, we walk you all through that. If you have any questions, you can ask the team or the community on Discord. And there's lots of people who have done it so they can help you. Hey, everyone. We're going to take another quick break and hear a word from our partners. We'll be right back to the Real Vision Crypto Daily Briefing.

22:13And then I'm just looking at the bottom. It says next draft 30th of September. What does that mean? So basically, we have these 14 teams. and as much as people can join them anytime we like to every quarter revisit the teams and draft people from those recruitment clubs so anyone can join these recruitment clubs if you have an rv collective nft join the rv collective nft because that proves you're a real person and you're going to be seen much quicker by your uk captain because they're gonna be like well that's a real person that's not spam anyone can join cubby you could be spam so we have these nfts that allow you to say hey, look at me.

22:52I'm real. I have skin in the game. I'm in the RV Collective community. And if you have your NFT associated with your crypto account when you join Covey, it'll just automatically be placed there. And so you join these recruitment clubs. If you're doing great, you may just get drafted right away to a team. Or every quarter, we're going to look at you and draft you into a team and get you on Team Canada, Team UK. I'm always looking for a talent. wow brooka as as someone who works for the collective you are the the shiller that i didn't expect look um just like but no seriousness the rv collective has been a very fun family to grow and learn something in web3 together the people are in there i do uh stick to my guns when i say there are some wonderful and really nice people in there that you know uh because i just think even now in the world of crypto investing it's a very lonely space you know for sometimes people who are not in the space and don't understand anything of blockchain technology one they can lose their patience with it just don't want to listen to the amount of tech that you know so the collective is a really nice way to start finding your you know um crypto friends uh and it's a good place it's a good place to start and you know we're serious when we say about your learning and there's a whole you know trading platform that you can sort of play around with um okay so brookka what's next for kobe where will this all be in six months because i feel like you're i mean just looking at your it's a very small team i'm going i'm on your website right now i like this one from your director of software engineering he knows code foo um where will you be in the next six months where would this all go because obviously when something like this is so quietly building in the background in the world of Web3, when there is a bull run, things will be fun again.

24:42So where do you see COVID in six months? Yes, I'm really happy we've been growing in this bear market in crypto. And so we've still been able to double our analyst pool. But I think as over the next six months, we want to lean into this investment league. We have six months of data on this investment league. We found some amazing talent. I want to build this out into much more of an esports we're gonna do more commentary elaine get excited we're gonna do some more videos and we've already done a few of them we're gonna do more videos highlighting the best we're gonna bring the stars the monster games where like you know the ton of people just sweating and playing monster games i'm just happy this is a bit like you know using my brain power a little bit and sometimes even i message you and go oh my god i've allocated my positions but none of this was in real money and i've done so well i remember that oh my god your portfolio is killing it and so we'll bring out we're going to try to bring out people the stars from this league onto the show we brought out biz on the last show the amazing analysts and hear their story and so the goal is to find the best and we want to highlight that and so we're going to use the real vision platform to be able to celebrate these amazing star analysts and then as well we're going to be keep investing into the rewards for being part of these teams and so last quarter we gave nfts to the top what are we top two or top three i think top three and us on the individual competition top three we gave away uh a genesis which is access to pro crypto and it was definitely over i think yeah a genesis is 0.8 maybe a bit of beneath yeah so some serious prizes here in this league uh we're both going to invest more and so just more content more prizes and i hopefully hopefully we can add more teams we're really interested if you've got a people a group of 10 people or so even we'll take a little bit less than that but we were trying it for 10 uh and you want to create a team we're happy to get you on board reach out to us on discord and so we want to build this league out and we want to make it something that's like really fun to watch so those people who are like investing junkies like myself uh can can ride along and find the best yeah with the the best part of this six months plus journey ray do me on the platform is saying nvidia was the best position for me i think some people are watching the show as part of our community is literally remembered that they've got some positions and logging on to the kobe league looking at it right now um by the way viewers put your questions in the chat we ask the best ones to air and remember real visions take priority if we recognize your usernames even on the macro side or either you play along with us in discord from the world of web 3 if you're not a member yet though go to realvision.com forward slash crypto to sign up it's absolutely free it's where a new episode of Ralph House Adventures in Crypto premieres every Friday okay so I'm gonna see if there's any questions I don't think there's any questions for us today let me just check because I've sort of went through it with, well, actually I had one question from Wells of Bitcoin and we've already answered that one, which is how do you get started?

27:50So he's going to get started off in a couple of days. Ray Doobie on the community chat just reminded me that a Genesis RV, Genesis is actually worth 1.3 ETH right now, which is nice, which is nice. It's a great price. It's solid, it's solid. A diamond set of hands, I would say in it, that really understands, you know, well, the macro and crypto backdrop blended in together. I feel like that's the sort of patience and timeline the Genesis holders sort of have in that space, which is really nice. Okay, well, Brucka, any final words from you before I let you go and carry on building your empire? It's been really fun.

28:31Just a reminder, if you want to compete to be the best, join the Covey Real Vision League. if you want to invest alongside the best check out our app Covey Legends C-O-V-E-Y we're in the app store for U.S. residents and we're happy to have you invest alongside some of these stars without really doing anything. Brooker Belcourt a very patient hedge fund manager talking to a normie all the time thank you for joining us on the show pleasure having you. Thank you. All right that's it for today visionaries please make sure to go onto our website go to realvision.com forward crypto it's free to sign up for our crypto content tomorrow your boy ash will be back in the hot seat with co-founder of babylon see you at 9 a.m pacific time noon eastern and 5 p.m eastern london time where it is essentially pub o 'clock anyway thanks for watching see you guys on friday for a very special day.

29:25See you soon.