URGENT UPDATE: A Guide To Don't F*ck This Cycle Up

0:28Meet Magic Eden, the home of Web3. If you've used any of their protocols, you can claim some. So check out Magic Eden today and watch them become a super dap in the home of Web3 in real time. Go to realvision.com forward slash magic for more information. Hi, everyone. I'm Ralph Powell, the CEO and co-founder of Real Vision. Here at Real Vision, we're committed to give you the best knowledge, tools, and network to help you succeed in your financial future. If you're enjoying this podcast, please take a moment to give it a five-star rating. It truly helps us continue to bring top-tier content. Thank you so much.

1:03Join me, Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto, and exponential age landscapes. In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.

1:21Hi, I'm Raoul Pal, and welcome to my show, The Journeyman. Now, this is a special for you because I think you know by now the banana zone has started, and that's the silly season in crypto when prices start to go mad. And we have one job here, and that's not to fuck it up. And I'll explain a little bit about that. But first, the bigger picture. You see, we're on this journey. Today, crypto is a$3 trillion asset class. But I think it's going to$100 trillion by, let's say, 2032, 2034. So within 10 years, it goes to 100 trillion, which would be the largest, fastest accumulation of wealth in all human history.

2:01Now, my job here is to help you navigate that. I want you to all make it to the other side. I want you to make money and unfuck your future. You see, all of these things you hear me say, the banana zone, unfuck your future, don't fuck this up. They're all part of the big thing is how to navigate this megatrend. Many of you are newer to crypto. So I've been in the space since 2013 and I've learned many, many lessons. And so I want to talk a bit about lessons today, how I fucked it up. Maybe some misapprehension, some wrong stories about me, but I'm very honest in where I've screwed things up. And I think it's important to know.

2:40But first, let's look at the principles you all need to understand about don't fuck this up. I sent this tweet out in January 2024, and I maintain that this alone will help you. So this tweet says, remember, no leverage. So what that means is if you start borrowing money against it by using perps or other means, you have a risk of losing your coins if you get something wrong in a pullback. And then if you lose your coins, you're out of the market and you have fucked this up. So please don't use leverage. Leverage is for experts and shorter-term traders and people who really know what they're doing.

3:19Even then, I personally never use leverage. My job is not to lose my coins. Secondly, no FOMO. That's the fear of missing out. You see, when things get crazy in crypto, somebody on Twitter or one of your friends will be making more money than you. In fact, it looks like everybody's making more money than you and you don't have the right trades and you're feeling terrible about yourself. that is just the engagement trap that is twitter or the boasting of your friends you don't get to see the trades that aren't working for those people now really what it's about here is not doing stupid things so not suddenly fomoing into a trade because something else is going up the more than your coins that's an easy way to lose money because you end up usually getting into a trend too late it then reverses you've then lost money that you then try and get back into your old trend, your old trade, that starts outperforming and so on and so forth.

4:17It's a mess. Don't do it. I FOMO'd in many times into things that I shouldn't have FOMO'd into. Often, it's been in a mean coin where I have a very low allocation. We'll talk about that in a bit. But often, it's a friend calls me up and goes, you've got to get this one. This is so good. And for some reason, my guard is down. Now, I know I only have a very small amount of mean coin holdings or money allocated to that. So I can't do myself that much damage, but I suddenly get excited. You know, I got an email a few months ago from a friend and client of mine said, hey, you've got to look at this thing.

4:52It's amazing. I'm fully loaded up. This is really cool. And I'm like, oh yeah, this looks really cool. Now I'm shit at early stage stuff, but here's me thinking, yeah, I'm going to follow this guy. He's really smart. Obviously I lose 70 % of my money in that trade. I then did it again recently where somebody came on and said, listen, this is a really great idea. I have a history of doing that. I did it in the last bull run several times. So please don't FOMO. You will lose out. Meet Magic Eden, the home of Web3. They are getting into the token trading space in addition to NFTs to become a super dApp where you can do everything cross-chain all in one place.

5:30They're solving UX issues by building products across every chain ecosystem, swaps, borrowing and lending, NFT, perps and more, all seamlessly cross-chain. Instead of hopping between countless sites and handling multiple wallets, just use Magic Eden. Plus, the ME token is coming out this quarter from the ME Foundation. If you've used any of their protocols, you can claim some. So check out Magic Eden today and watch them become a super dap in the home of Web3 in real time. Go to realvision.com forward slash magic for more information. The other really crucial one is only have three to five of the top assets in your main holdings.

6:13This is to de-risk. You see, the space is going to go up plenty. You don't need the fastest horse in the race. You need just good, fast horses. So for most people, just Bitcoin is good enough. Or maybe you want Bitcoin and Solana because Solana has been the blockchain with the most network adoption this cycle. Or maybe you have Bitcoin, ETH and Solana. Have you ever wanted to trade Bitcoin but haven't dared try? With Plus500 Futures, you can trade crypto without the hassle of opening a wallet. With just a few clicks, you can register and start practicing with their free and unlimited demo. See a trading opportunity?

6:52You'll be able to trade it in just two clicks. Feel ready? You can move to real money with as little as$100 once your account is approved. And the great thing is that in addition to crypto, Plus500 gives you access to a wide range of instruments. S &P 500, NASDAQ, gas, and much more. Explore equity indices, energy, metals, forex, and beyond. With a simple and intuitive platform, you could trade anytime, anywhere. Experience the fast, accessible futures trading you've been waiting for with Plus500. With over 20 years of experience, Plus500 is your gateway to the markets. Visit us.plus500.com to learn more.

7:27Trading in futures involves the risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus500. It's trading with a plus.

7:37And then maybe you want to go a little bit further out the risk curve, whether it's SUI or Celestia or Say or whatever that one is for you. But remember, don't have that as your main holding. Because again, we don't want to fuck this up. And the others are proven over time. They have Lindy effects. They survive. And I want you to survive. So don't have this broad portfolio. Now, I've done the broad portfolio trade as well. And I fucked that one up. So The last cycle, I started off thinking, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm going to buy a large basket on top of my Bitcoin holdings. So I had Bitcoin, and then I had a large basket of 10, 15, 20 different names thinking, well, these will work over time.

8:18My basket should work. It ended up being a wallet of shame. Most of those didn't work. I got a couple right, but they didn't really pay for the losses. It left me unfocused. I wasn't focusing on what really mattered. and it was my Bitcoin bet and then my switch into Ethereum. That was a big bet. But that wallet of shame is something you'll all go through, but try not to do it. Try not to go too far out the risk curve into midsize and smaller caps and hold a big basket of those saying, well, the AI theme is going to play out and the meme theme is going to play out and the real world asset theme is going to play out.

8:54I want an allocation to all of these. It generally doesn't work. Honestly, it is not easy. So don't try and be a genius. Just let the secular bull market rise the value of your wealth. That's what I'm trying to do here. Hi, Raoul here. Listen, I think we've got until 2030 before the economic singularity arrives. Now, it might not be the exact date, but it's around then. So we have about six years to figure out how to unfuck our future. I've put together a report to help you called Prepare for 2030. It's going to help you take the first steps in that journey to make sure you're secure past 2030.

9:32So just click on the link below and start your journey now. And also, most of us, well, I'm going to talk about another thing. There's talking about the holdings and stuff and how to manage that risk. We talked about no leverage. Now, I've been in the hedge fund industry for 30 years. I know how to use leverage. and at the end of the last cycle i thought there's a decent probability that ethereum has another leg high now i was all in on ethereum at this point um and so i bought some call options and i spent five percent of my entire holding um on call options in case eth exploded up towards 10 000 now that never ended up happening i lost my five percent five percent is nothing in a market that moved 5 % in a day.

10:21So I was very happy with that bet. But on social media, people turned it into, I went irresponsibly long and leverage long at the top in ETH and lost money. You see, social media, you can't trust anything. Everything that I do is fully recorded in Global Macro Investor and Real Vision Pro Macro. Anything else is just what you see on social media. You don't know what the truth is. But that was calculated leverage at the top and it didn't work out. That's exactly right. There's another something that went around about me that I had got everybody into Luna and I'd blown everybody up and just the bullshit online again.

11:02Again, I'd never recommended it. I'd spoken about it in about two videos and explained where everybody cut it off that it is risk-free in terms of you will get the tokens as long as the token value holds up. And I explained that. if you want to take the risk in this currency. But again, people on social media cut it up and made lies about me. But again, I have a recorded track record. It's one of the best in the world. I've been recording my track record for 20 years in Global Macro Investor. So there is always a source of truth. But those things also show how emotional this space is. People start following other people's ideas.

11:45Don't follow my ideas. I'm not a guru. I'm just here to help you think through it. I'm not here to tell you which coins you should have in your bag. I'm just saying, be sensible about it. Don't put it all in to something that is unproven to outperform. I like to look at a chart to say, is it going to outperform Bitcoin? And if it looks like it's outperforming Bitcoin, then that's a decent bet. If it's not, then just hold Bitcoin. That's what I did with Ethereum when I got into Ethereum in 2022. That's what I did with Solana back in, sorry, in Ethereum back in 2020, Solana in 2022. I all look for the outperforming of Bitcoin, if not just hold Bitcoin.

12:27Bitcoin's a phenomenally good asset. So just keep with that. A lot of people get stuck with previous cycle bags as well. So just be careful of your bias. Really, you should be a mercenary with your capital. You're in this game to try and make money. You're not in this to die for a community that you once believed in. So I urge you to do that. Okay, the other thing here is self-custody. You see, exchanges can blow up. Now, we've got much bigger exchanges, and they're super high quality, you know, Coinbase and Kraken, etc. They've proven themselves over time. But generally, the magic of crypto is it's an asset weak in self-custody.

13:09So that means nobody can take it away from you if something goes wrong. And I think that's one of the key use cases. Now, if you're new to crypto, don't worry about that yet. First buy your crypto, store it on exchange, and then go out and buy something like a ledger device and figure out how to use that. That stores your passkey for your crypto in a safe and secure way so nobody else can get access to it. But again, you need to be really careful where you store your seed phrase that gives access to that. But what it allows you to do is that it becomes portable. So if you have to leave a country, have to move around, you can then hide the seed phrase, hide the ledger device, and you're in control of your own assets.

13:53That's a really key thing. Having been through the European crisis where they took all your money out of the banks, I think self-custody is incredibly important. You may not think so now, but one day, it will be you know people lost a lot of money holding it on ftx for example um again that's the reason i like self-custody now for those you have more tokens then you get into a multi sig world uh where you have multiple signatures so nobody can move it without a consensus group of people agreeing to that so that's the next stage forward whether it's gnosis or a number of others that allow you to do that.

14:30So those things are important. Don't lose your tokens. The small degen bag, that's another key thing, is we all have the inner gambler in us. The emotions run high when crypto is exploding. I get it. It's fun. It's exciting. And before you know it, you're switching out of all of the things you should be holding, your Solana, your ETH, your Bitcoin, your SUI, whatever it may be, and you are holding tons of meme coins going out the risk these are definitely going to 20x, 50x. And before you know it, they don't. Or you get caught when the tide turns. Don't forget, with memes, you're trading attention.

15:10And attention can be persistent, but mostly it's not. It lasts for a period of time, and then it dies. And before you know it, you're holding the bag with a bunch of losses and you've fucked up the cycle again. Please don't do that. I say it all the time. Friends of mine do it. Please, please, please keep your DGEM bag relatively low. Now, you might want to rebalance it if it does well, if you've chosen well, or you can keep running it. It depends. It's up to you. But again, just remember, don't overstay your welcome in the really risky stuff because you will end up losing money. The other key thing, the actual real hack to all of this, is just hold for a long time horizon.

15:54Just holding means you don't do anything. It's very difficult to make mistakes. You're self-custaining, you're not trading, you're not trying to scalp anything, you just hold it. And guess what? Over time, Bitcoin's down about 150 % a year, including three 70%, 80 % drawdowns. and by doing nothing you just compound the returns over time i like to add to my bags into the big cyclical sell-offs that once every four year down cycle i like to add and then your your holdings compound and you make more and more money each time but just have a longer term time for sure look at the hourly charts it's fun i've got them up all of the time but i don't trade them I just hold.

16:41I barely do anything. I make a couple of asset allocation switches in the entire cycle and that's it. And magic happens and it stops you fucking up. So try your absolute best not to do anything with your main holdings. Also, zoom out. This space is all about noise. It's called FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. You'll find that somebody somewhere is trying to scare you. telling you it's a scan, telling you it's going to collapse, telling you something is going to happen. The Chinese are going to do something. The Russians are going to do something. Something's going to go to war. All of these things are going to come across your screens every day, and they will make you feel insecure.

17:27Remember, this is noise. This is an adoption of technology. And if tomorrow is going to be more digital than today, we will use blockchain rails for proof, for social proof, consensus proof of value, of transferring assets, of holding assets. Everything in a digital world is going to require blockchain rails. It'll be equity markets, bond markets, currency markets. It'll be art. It'll be tickets. It'll be anything. Any contract is better on the blockchain because you don't need a trusted third party because the consensus mechanism allows everybody to trust it. So over time, the adoption of Bitcoin is huge.

18:11In fact, it's still growing at twice the speed of the internet, back when the internet was in its early days. So something that grows at that speed also goes up in price. So zoom out, remove the noise. If tomorrow is not going to be more digital than today, then start worrying. You can also worry at some point about the big cycle. So 2026 is likely to be a down year. Will that happen? I don't know. Most likely. Now you can either hold on through the down years and keep adding and increasing the value of your portfolio, or you can unload some risk. And we'll talk about some of that. Don't forget, on route, make sure you take some lifestyle chips off as well.

18:55This is a really important concept. I've got another video on this, but lifestyle chips are the ability to take off some profits in things that really matter to you. So if the markets turn around, you don't time the top properly or whatever you're trying to do, you've paid off a mortgage or you bought the car or you bought the holiday, you've done whatever it is that you need for your own life. And you're going to hate selling out when you have to, to take some lifestyle chips off. But at the end of it, your future self will thank you massively. So make sure you think about that. The time for lifestyle chips are somewhere between December and March.

19:32We will obviously get more volatility in the space. Expect 30 % pullbacks frequently, maybe 35%. These will happen. Maybe Bitcoin goes to 100 ,000 and then pulls back to 70 ,000 and goes up. Don't freak out about it. It's really normal. but remember to take some lifestyle chips off at some point um then you're just going to have this sense of security that you can run the trade longer you can't just leave it all in and hope that you get it right so again i'm trying to save you from yourselves here and the other thing is buy the fucking dip if you can so if it does sell off 35 you've got a bit of extra cash buy it if it's not the end of the cycle.

20:14If it is the end of the cycle, then you wait till it goes down 70 % or so. And then you pile in as much of your savings as you can on top of your existing holdings and let the magic compound over time. Let me tell you a little bit about that because I've learned that the hard way. So the mistake there was I bought Bitcoin at$200 back in 2013. Amazing. I then rode it all the way down 85 % because I knew it was a long-term bet. It then went back up in 2017, and it was trading about$2 ,000. And there was some FUD, the forking of Bitcoin into two different Bitcoin blockchains. And I was like, I don't really understand what's going on.

20:58And so I sold out. So it was the FUD that got me. And I then had sold out. But I was pleased. I've made 10 times our money. Great trade. I thought, yeah, I'd done it well. It then went up another 10x in the last five months of the year, which was unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it. I missed that, but I was fine because I'd taken money off the table. I'd taken my lifestyle chips out. So I felt pretty comfortable. The market then falls all the way until 2019. So that was the down year of 2018. And 2019, I started looking at it again. And really in 2020, during the pandemic, when it fell 50 % is when I got back in.

21:42I think I averaged it about six and a half thousand and I'm still long to this day. Okay. So that looks pretty good. I bought it cheap. I sold it expensive. I bought it back cheap. But when I looked at it and I bought a lot more at the end, the second time around in 2020, when I go back and look at if I just held my original bet, which was much smaller, I'd have made five times the money from trading it. You see, that's the issue here. Now, had I listened to myself and bought the big sell-offs and added, doubled up my position every four years when we had the down cycle, out of 25x my position.

22:23And again, you can only do this in the very top tokens, mainly Bitcoin, but maybe Solana, Ethereum. But really in Bitcoin, that's where you can do this very long term because Bitcoin is much more secure as an asset over time in terms of its adoption and acceptance at large. Then you can diversify out into riskier stuff. But buying the dip would have made me a fortune. The FUD cost me money. Trading cost me money. I didn't do the hold. You see, so there's a number of ways you can fuck up. You can lose your tokens. That's when an exchange goes down. Or you start using DeFi and you put your money for a yield into some stupid shit, which is what people did in Terra Luna.

23:12And again, I did not do that. Or BlockFi or Celsius or all of these things, everybody lost money because they parted with their tokens. Storing in the wrong exchange. OGs remember Mt. Gox. They still have been paid out. That was, I don't know, 10 years ago. So that's why I don't like to keep things on exchange. Hold on, let the gains compound. I've also screwed up by having this big diversified bag where I thought, you know, all of my tokens will go up and I tried to asset allocate. That's screwed up and I've got a wallet of shame like most of you have and that failed a lot of people have got wallets of shame from the nft craze in 2021 and many of you will end up with a wallet of shame from the meme coin craze so in meme coins keep it to a small weighting please it's great fun get involved but if you've got too big a weighting you risk losing everything and then you've fucked up with rule number one, which is don't lose control of your tokens.

24:19And leverage is another one. If you remember, I bought call options on ETH. I knew I could lose 5 % of my capital. Most of you don't trade options, but you trade perps. And perps give you leverage. And before you know it, the market has that 35 % pullback that you expect, and you've lost control of your tokens, and you're out of the game. Staying in the game is how we get from 3 trillion to 100 trillion. I don't want you to fuck this up. So learn from me. I fucked up many times in the past and I don't want you to do it. We will all screw up in some way. We'll get something wrong. Nobody can get this all right, but just adhere to the main principles and you'll have a much better chance of unfucking your future.

25:04The other key element of don't fuck this up is you need to have experts helping you. You need to see what the crowd is doing. You need a community. And Real Vision is all about that. Our job is to unfuck your future. And so make sure you join Real Vision. It's free. And there you can get the best ideas. You've got a community to talk to, super high quality, trusted content from a broad group of people, not just me, because I can fuck it up too. So Real Vision is a superpower in this. So make sure you sign up for that as well. Okay, take care. Meet Magic Eden, the home of Web3. They are getting into the token trading space in addition to NFTs to become a super dApp where you can do everything cross-chain all in one place.

25:51They're solving UX issues by building products across every chain ecosystem, swaps, borrowing and lending, NFT, perps and more, all seamlessly cross-chain. Instead of hopping between countless sites and handling multiple wallets, just use Magic Eden. Plus, the ME token is coming out this quarter from the ME Foundation. If you've used any of their protocols, you can claim some. So check out Magic Eden today and watch them become a super dap in the home of Web3 in real time. Go to realvision.com forward slash magic for more information. If you liked this episode, I'd love for you to head over to realvision.com forward slash join for a free membership.

26:32Start your journey today to unfuck your future. Just one click away.

26:53clicks. Feel ready? You can move to real money with as little as$100 once your account is approved. And the great thing is that in addition to crypto, Plus500 gives you access to a wide range of instruments. S &P 500, NASDAQ, gas, and much more. Explore equity indices, energy, metals, forex, and beyond. With a simple and intuitive platform, you could trade anytime, anywhere. Experience the fast, accessible futures trading you've been waiting for with Plus500. With over 20 years of experience, Plus500 is your gateway to the markets. Visit us.plus500.com to learn more. Trading in futures involves the risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone.