The Wolf Of All Streets - A Trader’s Edge with Mati Greenspan, Founder of Quantum Economics

Episode Date: October 8, 2020

As a child, Mati Greenspan would report to his grandfather each morning on the price of commodities. It was at this young age that he developed his passion for market. Mati later became one of eToro���s most popular traders. Looking to unlock his full potential, Mati decided to leave his job and found his own company. Quantum Economics is now a highly respected company offering a number of high-end services.  Scott Melker and Mati Greenspan further discuss the good QE, Elon heading to Mars, COVID’s lasting impact, a self-made billionaire grandfather, Mati as the face of eToro, managing other people’s money, receiving $30 in Bitcoin as a gift, Link Frogs attacking, leverage, most traders failing, meditation and prayer and more. --- VOYAGER This episode is brought to you by Voyager, your new favorite crypto broker. Trade crypto fast and commission-free the easy way. Earn up to 6% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits. Download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account. --- ELECTRONEUM Electroneum, has gained widespread adoption providing a mobile-first payment solution to the world's unbanked, attracting more than 4M users worldwide in less than three years. They have since launched a new freelance marketplace, AnyTask.com, which is providing thousands of freelancers the opportunity to sell their services to buyers globally, without the need of a bank account. Learn more at Electroneum.com. --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe.This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

I'd like to thank my sponsors, Voyager and Electroneum, for making this episode possible. Stay tuned for more info on them later. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and you're listening to the Wolf of All Streets podcast, where twice a week, we talk to your favorite personalities in the worlds of finance, Bitcoin, trading, art, music, sports, and politics. The show is powered by Blockworks Group, a media company with over 20 podcasts in their network. You can check them out at blockworksgroup.io. If you like the podcast, you follow me on Twitter. You absolutely need to check out my website. Join my newsletter where I share all my trades, charts,

analysis, market thoughts, lessons on improving your trading and investing. You can check that all out at thewolfofallstreets.io. Now, today's guest is a well-known personality in the crypto community and far beyond. Growing up in a business-oriented family, Mat's guest is a well-known personality in the crypto community and far beyond. Growing up in a business-oriented family, Mati learned at a young age the entrepreneurial skills that he's utilized in his own impressive professional career. Now, he's the CEO of his own company, Quantum Economics, which provides a number of successful financial services to his clients. Mati Greenspan, man, thank you so much for coming on and taking the time. Great to see you again, Scott. Yeah, we keep meeting like this.

We need to do it in person one day. We will. When the virus is over, we'll do it. Indeed. I'm due a trip to Israel anyways. So your company, as I mentioned, is Quantum Economics, which we'll call the good QE. And I love that it's QE. It makes me laugh every time I see it on Twitter, actually. But let's talk about the bad QE. Let's just jump right into it. What do you make of the behavior of the central banks now and monetary policy that we're seeing sort of pervasive around the world? Where to begin, man? Seriously, it's a big topic to start with. Boy, so central banks around the world have been printing money nonstop for the last 10 years, and they've been slowly accelerating. They've been kind of encouraged by the fact that there hasn't been any kind of inflation. So usually when you increase the money supply by copious amounts, you would get some sort of inflation.

But there has not been. In fact, periods from 2013, 14, 15, they actually saw deflation in many countries despite copious money printing. But now with COVID-19, they basically added more stimulus in a single month than they had in the first 200 years of the country. So we've been an experimental monetary policy ever since 2008. And now we're really seeing the peak of that. So where do you think it takes us from here? I mean, we obviously hear all the Bitcoin maximalist theories that we've heard forever, hyperinflation, the dollar dies, we go full dystopian future. I'm not really on that boat necessarily, but I would love to hear your

thoughts on the path that we're headed on. So it might seem that way in the United States, I suppose, especially with COVID. I'm sure there's other places as well and um certainly uh covid19 has done a number on many different industries some which may disappear forever some may be uh forever altered um it's also had some very very serious impacts on um the poor people of the earth, people who don't have as much access to infrastructure and water and stuff like that. They're having a very rough time of it. Those of us who are able to work at home should be grateful every day for that. And, you know, that's pretty much where we're at with that.

And, you know, as far as I see, it will be over at some point. And there's an old saying, every downturn is eventually for the sake of an upturn. So I believe that's what we're seeing right now, where we're seeing a big relaxation in the world's economy, everything cooling down. And then I believe that over time, as things start to pick up, we'll be able to rebuild even better. Do you think that we were headed on that path regardless of COVID and it just sort of, you know, sped everything up tremendously, but that it was somewhat an inevitability with what was happening regardless?

In general, I think that COVID-19 has been an accelerator of many things um you know many work from home for example was it before that right there was people i was working home uh working from home since november i quit my job at etoro and i started working from home immediately with quantum economics and then covet 19 came in March, and then we see the forced lockdowns. And all of a sudden, you know, everybody's working from home. So everybody who can anyways. I think that one of the major, and I apologize for the background noise.

You were the smart one to put your office in the closed room there. I think that renewable energy and the push away from fossil fuels could be one of the things, positive, permanent changes that we're going to see from COVID-19. We saw the negative price of oil as airline traffic completely died down overnight around the globe, demand for crude oil just completely tanked. And then we're seeing people investing in renewable energy sources, so much so that fossil fuel energy is having trouble. And we saw what happened in California. They can't get funding at the moment to power the regular infrastructure. I mean, in the old days, no problem. The power companies

will come out with a new bond or whatever, and people will pour money in. Nowadays, all the money is being funneled toward renewable energies. And you can see that in the pinnacle of that in the share price of Tesla, for example, where people have just thrown the evaluations out the window and they're all full in on impact investing. Yeah, it's definitely been interesting to watch that roller coaster and sort of the other companies that have followed along or ridden the coattails and definitely a little nervous for people who bought near the top, but I guess we'll see how that plays out. I think over time they'll be fine but um you know a lot of that is definitely I think driven by retail traders and the sort of Robin Hood Robin Hood crowd but uh perhaps yeah when I see something that doesn't make sense I don't touch it I

know that people like I know that I've seen you momentum playing on a YFI and all that stuff. Honestly, for me, Tesla, YFI, all of those things, they're way too volatile. I mean, it's not, it's not the market I'm looking for. And I've heard you say it on a podcast as well recently, if I can pull 10 or 20% consistently every year, I mean, that's all you got to do. And that's what I want to bring for my clients. I want to take that volatility out for them. Take that complete nonsense away and say, okay, look, there's a ridiculous valuation. Will the market catch up eventually to Tesla's valuation? It might.

Sure. But also Elon Musk might take SpaceX to Mars and leave Tesla here on Earth. So people have to understand there's two different companies. If Elon Musk is going to the moon or he's exploring space, that has nothing to do with Tesla. Tesla is a car company. SpaceX is the rocket company. So if he makes advances in the rocket area, it's not necessarily going to affect the share price of Tesla. Right.

People have to understand, and this is kind of a lesson that we learned from the ICO bubble, right? There's a utility token, and then we say, what does the utility token do, right? And I was speaking with a journalist today who made an interesting comparison of EOS, right? Those who bought the tokens completely got left in the bag with Mike Novogratz and his buddies who funded Block One, they made it like a thousand X on those shares, which were private equity, public number summit. Yeah, it's kind of the pickaxes and shovels model.

You know, talk about the gold rush and none of the people who are rushing for gold actually made any money, but the people who sold them their tools did. And it's kind of a similar, it's why obviously we see everyone opening an exchange and exchanges are going to make money, whether, as long as we're not at zero, they're going to make money either way. Right. So I think that there's a lot of, a lot of, a lot of instances where we're, we're going to see the businesses do well without necessarily the coins or, or the people who jumped on board doing as well.

But you touched on already your clients and your goals for them. Can you talk a bit back up and talk a bit more about what quantum economics is and what you're doing? Yeah. So quantumeconomics.io, we have, as you mentioned, a range of different financial-related services. It's broken down into three main categories, which are analysis, advisory, and money management. As far as analysis goes, first of all, you have the daily newsletter that I'm writing, which is sponsored by MediaShower and Bitcoin Market Journal. And it goes out, it's read by just about every top tier financial media in the

world bloomberg cnbc uh thompson reuters financial times wall street journal um and um about uh 2 000 active readers at the moment um it's also completely free so anybody who wants to sign up, you certainly can. I'd love it. Thank you. And then in the analysis section as well, we have an entire team of analysts. We have five analysts on board from around the world, each one in a unique geographic location and has a plethora of experience in their own personal market that they're dealing with. So equities, treasuries, energy market, tokenization, of course, DeFi, blockchain, and a Bitcoin analyst as well.

So we kind of segregate them out into different markets. And the analysis team is headed up by Mr. Charles Bovard, who you've probably seen as a senior contributor on Forbes. He writes a lot of articles about cryptocurrency. He's also an independent analyst with Moody's and the president of the Financial Writers Society. So that's all under analysis. Advisory, of course, as you know myself, I'm personally an advisor to Lunar Crush and Chili's, and I just added Electroneum as well. As well, the members of our team,

many of them are advisors on different projects. One of our directors, Mr. Ethan Pierce, just closed a deal today or announced a deal today that he's partnering or as an advisor on Green Tech Earth. I believe it's called green earth green earth tech uh one or the other um who is uh of course working on green energy and tokenization um yeah you mentioned electronium which is awesome because uh they're uh one of our brand new sponsors and we absolutely love them i just just had Richard Ells on the show and I find them to be just a mind-blowing team and concept. And one of those few applications in

blockchain where people are actually using it, it actually has traction and can actually change the world to some degree. I know it sounds pretty hyperbolic, but I don't think it is at all. What interests you with them and what are you doing with them? It's changing the world already. I mean, it's not like it can change the world. It's already there. I mean, they had tremendous experience right out the gate with airdrops, and they realized that airdropping ETN onto people who needed it, especially in communities in Africa and Western Europe, they were basically giving out free money. And the people, you know, signed up for the app because they wanted the free money. And then they realized that they can actually build kind of an ecosystem.

And now their main focus is on financial inclusion so basically they're taking people in Africa teaching them how to make I don't know a logo for a company right in a video promotion and then they have their own marketplace where everything happens in ETN and that that person in Africa can now join the entire financial revolution of the Internet that he's never been able to before and there's different ways that I want to see that scaling up. Number one, I think that they get to the point sometimes where they have clients that are so big that they just need more liquidity, more trades happening in ETN.

So if people are trading more in ETN the volumes go up that'll enable them to take on those bigger clients like you know the I don't want to mention any names or anything like that but there are certain industries no providers yeah mm-hmm yes exactly and you know let people top up their their mobile minutes with ETN but they need to have that liquidity as well. So the more people trade on it, the more we're enabling them to accomplish their mission. So talk about the money management wing. You said you're very happy if you can get your clients 10 to 20%, which in the pre-crypto days would have made you like a top manager on the planet, basically,

if you could consistently do that. But now we're in this space where people think that they should be doing 100x a day, much less 10% to 20% a year. And as you touched on, I'm thrilled if I'm doing 10% to 20% a year. So obviously, that speaks to your experience and how long you've been here. All the pepe meme frogs that are YOLOing down on link are going to go, 10%? Are you freaking kidding me? And then you feel like, I definitely feel like a baby. Go buy a Bond, boomer. Yeah. You feel like, oh my gosh, I've been in this market for years of watching this guy who just got in, take the rocket ship up and he's sporting you know, he's, he's, uh, sporting his moon book moon boots doing the Michael Jackson thing.

Yeah. Um, Some of them might actually keep that money at the end, but most, I don't think so. We hope so for those. Uh, but you know, as, as it often is, it was, we've just recently seen with Dave Portnoy who's slithered back into oblivion as far as his trading goes. A lot of the time what happens is

people join in at the right time on a right trend if they don't cash out early and often they're gonna end up losing that money it's just it's just the nature of the beast and then a lot of the time people get a very big ego go oh my gosh I got this and this amount of profits And then they go and tell their grandmother about it. And then that's how bubbles get started. And I was out at, you can go back on Twitter. I was telling them at $20 on link, I was like, guys, now is the time to take profits. If you're up more than 10x, now, $20, cut it.

Maybe it'll surpass that Sunday maybe it won't but what you care to bank you know 3x right and let the 7x ride right you know what I'm saying so that's kind of what you need to do especially if you're trading on some of these really highly volatile things and you see some good profits take those profits on the table. And then of course, money management, right? You trade on it with 10% of your equity, like go nuts, 10% of your entire portfolio, throw it down on really high risk stuff. But the rest of it, you know, you got to save that. I mean, that's your money. You don't want to lose that or else you won't have any left.

Right. And it speaks to, I think, the general strategy that you need to employ in this market, which as you said, selling early and often, but just scale in and scale out and you'll never really deal with the emotional side of those problems. Like, yeah, sell 50% of it if you're really so attached to it when you've done 10X and let the rest ride into infinity, up, down, wherever you at least can walk away and say, damn, I made a lot of money here, right? You have no idea how much those Pepe frauds were trolling me at the time. And I'm like, I didn't say anything against Link. I didn't like say it's a bad project. I have no idea. I didn't research it. I don't know. Maybe it's the shit. Maybe it's the Oracle of the century and it's going to replace on those things,

do your due diligence and risk management. I think that's the bottom line. I think it's fair to say that every trader or Twitter personality that I've had on this show has taken a beating at some point from that community, myself included, and just vicious. Embrace it, Ben. Embrace it. I took one of their, one of their Pepe meme frogs that they made of me, which somebody, somebody spent a lot of time on that. That's awesome. I want one.

They put my face with the red tears. I was like, wow, that's so cool. And I put it as my profile and I changed my bio to frog slayer. I was Monty Green's Pepe for a few hours. But you're right. History,

history, in this case, history, history will judge you well on saying sell at $20. I didn't say sell. It profits. Yeah, yeah. He didn't say short it. So I would love to hear your story

of how you actually got into all of this. I mean, I know that you have like a very colorful background and a long, long history in markets. So this would be a good time, I guess, to start at the beginning and see how you got here and why you're still so passionate about this. Yeah, I mean, I've been interested and in some way connected to the markets just for about as long as I know myself. I mean, the story that keeps getting out is that paper trading at the age of 13, I mean, that's not exactly accurate. What I was doing was really tracking the prices. I didn't really know what paper trading was at the time. Paper trading is basically when you put a fake position, you write it down on a piece of paper, and then you see, like, in a few months' time, how did you do?

When virtualstockexchange.com opened up, I was one of the first people to sign up where you could, on the internet, open up a virtual account with stocks. And I was trading, you know, Google and all of the tech names back then. You know, it's, it's always been a hobby and a passion and something that I've been closely connected with. But where did that come from? I mean, I know that I've read that your grandfather was into markets and was a self-made billionaire, correct? Self-made billionaire. Yes. With a B. Yeah. He, from rags to riches. I mean, his, his parents couldn't afford a model airplane to buy him for his birthday. Um, he was a scrawny kid. He learned how to lift weights. Uh, he went out and he got this great stories

about how he met my grandmother and went after her and, um, you know, and how he just, he went scaled up every single time he scaled up. He wasn't, you know every single time. The billions didn't come until much later in his life when he was already able to build credit with the banks and then leverage that credit in the financial markets, but that really came only within the last 10 or 20 years. The rest of his life has been hard work, head to the ground. You build up, scale up slowly, and it's really the right time, right place, the right personality for it. My grandfather was a stockbroker and used to, every morning, lay out the paper and check everything and draw his charts on a piece of draft paper. I talked to my dad about it. It's really my dad's memory, not mine. But

I always remember him talking about that. And every single morning, get out, draw the candles manually. Pretty crazy to think about it in that regard. And definitely something that stuck with me and for my grandfather that made me very interested. What's it like having that sort of example in your life? You know, somebody who you saw work that hard and realize success at each step? Because there's plenty of people who work hard and, you know, are somewhat stagnant. That's an interesting question, Scott. For the most of my life, I didn't really think about it too much. I mean, like the lessons were there. I mean, the talking about business openly at the table, but I didn't, you know, at the time go, oh, wow, these are really valuable lessons for life.

Actually, I didn't really care much. I mean, I listened, right? When my grandfather told me, hey, you know, I heard you're into the stocks. So, you know, GE just dropped 20 points. I'm like, so, well, you know, it's a good company. It'll go back up. And I get, and I, those things kind of tend to seep in or when they so well you know it's a good company it'll go back up again and I those things kind of tend to seep in or when they say it's you know when you're when my mom says to me you know the price of gold always goes

up and you know and you watch it it does and she said that when I was very young and you know over time it always goes up I mean especially since the purchasing power of you know if he had money is designed to go down. My grandfather and I have a turmoil relationship at times. I mean, I've been a bit rebellious, I suppose, in some parts of my life. And when he doesn't, my grandfather has this thing about golden parachutes and um there was this one case of a teenager who had inherited millions of dollars and then uh i don't know he bought some really fancy car and spent all the money and then killed himself or something like that so

he really didn't want to give for any of his offspring uh free handouts so it's always like you got to earn it you got to work for it. And there's always some of these kind of strings attached. So what I'm proud to say is that out of pretty much all my family, siblings and cousins, there are very few of us who are completely financially independent. And I'm very proud to be one of them. But obviously, I wouldn't have been able to do that without the lessons that I learned as a child. So, you know, obviously, we've talked about you growing up, but your professional career, what have the steps been? Where have you been before? And what were you doing that led you to where you are now?

My schooling, I would say, is mostly incomplete. I have a high school GED. I tried college for a while. The first semester I got straight A's and by the second semester I completely lost interest. I moved to Israel when I was 12 years old. So high school was know I went to probably a dozen different high schools in Israel just to learn Hebrew took me three years as a child so grade school not so much college not so much and then I decided to get into music and I really like music I know you play a bit. I play guitar. I can play a mean clarinet, saxophone, or side flute. And I really connected with that. So, I mean, these days I don't get to that much.

But I went to music school, college for about three years. And then I met my wife. And my wife says, well, you've got to get a job. Okay. What's a job? Right. I worked for, you know, for my grandfather within his firm in every position within his company when I was, you know, summer school, you know, summer, summer jobs.

But to actually get, you know, a paycheck and pay the rent and everything like that. And I found something or a friend of mine helped me put a resume together, showed me all about resumes and then got me a job at a telephone sales which English is a very valuable commodity in this in this part of the world if you have good English and so I kept my California accent as much as I could and they taught me how to sell things on the phone there was that was a company called yes and are they had a great sales training program. And then after that, I mean, one day I woke up after about eight months and I go, I don't really want to sell

things to people on the phone. And, you know, over the green card lottery, I don't know if you've ever heard it, probably haven't in the United States, but in Europe, everybody knows what it is. It's basically the United States government has this free program. And then my job was to sell it to people. So, you know, people go, but can't I do that for free? And then you go, well, yeah, I guess you can. But we help you process the papers. Right.

Yeah, okay. I didn't want to do that anymore. I called up my boss and said, I'm not coming in today. He said, oh, what's wrong? I just don't want to do it anymore. And then a few months later or a month later or so, I got an interview at AvaFX. I don't know if you've ever heard of them, a popular FX broker. It was 2008, right before the financial crisis. Good timing. And they go, oh, I see you worked at DSNR. They have a great sales trading program. You're hired.

Just like that. I'd actually signed up for a virtual account without VFX even before I ever had an idea to go work in that industry I said you know I was looking online what how to make money online day trading yeah I can do that I like the markets you know and then apparently I had a virtual account with app fx already um i worked with them for a couple of years uh and then i got uh into etoro i mean with the with that kind of experience it was like a position um you know doing vip account management uh so you know the higher equity clients and uh assisting them in the markets and i've seen probably thousands of different clients' firsthand experience in the market and how they get in

and how they go out with their tail between their legs, you know, 95, 99% of the time, unfortunately. And that's, you know, that's even before crypto was born. We don't need crypto to go broke as traders. We can do it with anything, man. It's been happening since the dawn of time, not even since the dawn of the internet. I mean, I'm sure you've seen Boiler Roman. Of course. You know, Wolf of Wall Street. I don't know if you've ever heard of that movie. Are you sick of paying ridiculous fees to trade crypto? It's time you try Voyager. It's hands

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Maybe it's, he stole my name, but other than that, yeah. So it's funny you mentioned going to eT, though, I mean, and I think probably for a lot of people in this community, I think of you when I think of eToro, like it became somewhat synonymous. I mean, I think I somewhat knew of eToro because of following you and knowing who you were. So clearly, you had a huge impact there. I'm wondering what the impact of working there had on you. All right. So right now, as we're talking, I mean, my eToro account is open. I mean, I've got an account in eToro. I lived in a extremely bittersweet, it was the most risky thing that I've ever done in my entire life,

leaving there. And I had a good job, like a really good job. And I said to myself, am I doing it? Am I not doing it? What happened was I realized that throughout my entire career, I'd been on a steady line of progression, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. And I got to a point in the tour where i realized that i needed to continue to climb that ladder right um i need to have uh you know certain certain things higher salary people under

me that are titled you know that next step in the ladder and it just wasn't coming and i said you know what and it's not any anything that etoro did wrong. It was just that, you know, nobody had ever given me the opportunity to manage a team with an eToro, right? And I understand that. I mean, and, of course, people there are like my family still to this day. I mean, there are certain people that I would trust with my children or my car keys or my house, honestly. And it was very difficult to leave there. But it took me about a year from the time where I said, okay, I have to either move forward here or move on.

And during that year, I took some risks within the company. I said, you know what, I'm going to break it or I'm going to go forward. I'm going to break this. Swing for the fences. And what happened was I going to break it or I'm going to go forward or I'm going to break this. Swing for the fences. And what happened was I ended up breaking it and I broke some relationships. I broke some relationships with my manager. A few of them were dicks, so I didn't really care. But Yoni is cool.

By the way, I'm supporting GoodDollar right now, which I don't know if you're familiar with them, the GoodDollar project for universal basic income, which is a brainchild of Yoni Asya. But, and then, and it was so difficult because, you know, these people that you've built such a strong relationship over seven years, and you can't tell them, you can't say, oh, by the way, I'm quitting. Right, of course. You can't. And, you know, it's like this kind of

big secret and then i'm like can i swing it can i not do it i don't know i've been on a steady paycheck my entire career right i've been paycheck to paycheck um did the math and i said you know what it's risky but if i if i end up falling i'll uh know, I'll be able to get another job. Of course. Um, I'll be in a bit more debt, but, uh, it's something that I'll be able to pay off by the end of my life. Um, that was the exact, that was exactly what was going through my head. And I've got three kids and one, one of them was just born at this time. So, um, I decided I had to, I had to make the leap. And that's when I did it. And I said, you know what, guys, I love you very much, but I got to go. And started thinking about the different ideas. What can I do? And I said, you know what, I want to do everything. I want to do everything that I can. I want to do, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to go as big as I can. And that's why you come to the website and you get lost because you don't know exactly what it is that quantum economics does. But that's because we have a very broad range. And so far, the success of a knock on wood have been success to success.

And we have already 13 members on the team we're we're onboarding all the time and uh you know we're onboarding new clients all the time especially for our content generation services uh for the analysts and then as i mentioned uh going into the money management right now the money management aspect is just eToro and we're doing well there i mean we got 50% gains year to date, which is pretty good. So eToro is in copy trading, effectively? Just copy trading and just in the United States. Right.

So it's basically, when they went into the United States, they segregated United States from the rest of the world, which is unfortunate. And the United States has only access to crypto. So in Europe, and when I was managing, I was managing a quarter of a million dollars on an account, an eToro account in Europe. eToro, I was working there. And that was, you know, it was doing 10% to 20% per year. But that was on all assets like commodities, currencies, stocks, you name it. And I was able to hedge Bitcoin against the S&P 500 like a freaking champ. Now, and I try to be as clear as possible, the Toro team that I'm

managing is crypto only, so I don't have the options to hedge different assets against each other. So it's extremely high risk account, which means that if the price dips, the only real option that we have is to load more money in so that we can buy the dip. The only play that I can make that makes sense is a long-term strategy. I can't hedge it. I can't hedge. There's nothing. I try to hedge my personal finances against other accounts that are private.

At the moment, that's where I am. We've got half a million dollars under management, 750 people copying on real money. But I want to go into traditional funds. And then fortunately, that's not something I've done before. I've got the license. I have a license from SISEC, which is the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission. It was very difficult to get. I mean, I was the only person in Itoro who evero whoever tried this examination they sent to the basic examination which was the step below that they sent probably dozens of different account managers and they had a pass rate of maybe like one in three or something like that to get

the basic exam and then to get the to get the advanced exam was the only one who ever whoever even attempted it um so that that to me was uh that's a piece of paper that says okay i am allowed to make investment decisions for my clients obviously knowing their appetite for risk and knowing their uh full background and what it is they're interested in um i'm never gonna you know i'm not gonna tell people on twitter buy gold right now it doesn't make any sense I don't know how you are I don't know in what situation your portfolio is so important and then people are gonna come at me and say you said buy gold and it went down and then like yeah I'm talking about for 20 years from now and you're talking about for 20 minutes from now so it's the context is everything.

Exactly. So especially whatever you see on Twitter, tweets are not financial advice. But basically what this allows me to do is to be the director of a company or director of a fund in Cyprus. So that's what I'm doing. And spent the last I don't know four months just researching how is this done because I've never done it before my initial thought was okay I'll get somebody to do this who knows what the fuck they're doing and I'll give them guidance on what we're investing in and you know we'll take it from there nobody stepped up hey look and I look that it looked at it just know it okay doing it myself so I researched into it

and the best way to do it I sent out a little teaser in my newsletter saying okay guys we're looking to put together a fund who's interested and the response that I got from my subscribers the people that are overwhelming a chance was I couldn't I want to like whoever whatever one of you whoever's watching from like really thank you guys I mean it's like really, whatever one of you, whoever's watching this from like, really thank you guys. I mean, it's like really from the bottom of my heart because I really surpassed all my expectations. I mean, just from, just from those core, uh, followers and readers, I said, okay, we, we

have more than enough to go on. And I'm not even talking about, uh, advertising on social media or anything like that. And we can build a proper, uh, which is completely regulated, completely diversified, and I'll allow... Basically what it is, it's kind of like a choose your own adventure. It's like an investment. So the person invests X amount, and then we have ready-made portfolios for them. So I'll give them different titles, but let's say four to five or three to five different portfolios,

and then they can decide the allocation. Right? And then it's going to be something that's locked in. I want people to understand I'm not building another casino here. Right? This is a casino. Binance is a casino. Ameritrade and Robinhood, those are casinos.

This is not what this is this is something that people want to make an investment over time continue to invest and continue to see consistent growth this is really what that's aimed at and then look I mean if we have a bad year and I'm sure that'll happen I don't want to go below five or ten percent drawdown and then we say okay you know what we pick ourselves back up and we continue to claw it back. And as long as the markets continue what they've been doing for the last few hundred years, we should have no problem doing that over time. So they're your own custom structured products, basically.

And somebody just puts their money in that basket. Then you say, it could be like moderate risk, high risk, or whatever, or based on what the exposure is. And then every six months or a year, you reassess and recalibrate, rebalance. Exactly right. And then within the next year or two, and here's where it gets really fun, I believe that the regulation here in Europe will be sufficient to be able to tokenize them. And then we take those funds, we hop them on a blockchain, and we send them to Fidelity,

we send them to the Stuttgart Digital Assets Exchange, which just opened up and is definitely looking for these type of investment products to add to their books. Singapore Digital Assets Exchange. I mean, they're all going there. They don't have everything. They're just frantically right now crossing their T's and dotting their I's. And as soon as they do, They don't have everything. They're just frantically right now crossing their T's and dotting their I's. And as soon as they do, I don't necessarily need to be the first one to do it. But as soon as I see that, I don't want to be the first pioneer to cross the. Right. But we are seeing, not to that level and with these legacy companies like

Fidelity that you're talking about, but obviously, we're seeing these index funds sort of being thrown around on all the exchanges now. It started with like the ETH bull, all these things, but then like the DeFi index on FTX. So it gives you some exposure to DeFi without having to like go on burger swap and figure out what the hell is happening there. So I think that it's a very popular concept right now and is definitely somewhat the future, certainly in crypto. And it's the way that I think that it's a very popular concept right now and is definitely somewhat the future, certainly in crypto. And it's the way that I think your average person is familiar with or wants to invest. Right.

I mean, someone buys an IRA or gets a 401k and they just buy a bunch of mutual funds and hope for the best. Right. So. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that is the idea. You're correct. This is a diversification aspect. And somebody goes, I think DeFi is interesting, but they don't have the time, the energy or the understanding to go today Polkadot, tomorrow YAMS.

And some people do and it's fun. I can't. I don't, honestly. We put some Polkadot, we put some Yams, we put some Ethereum in there, and we make kind of a crypto assets portfolio. And then we have another one, which is structured towards, let's say, the central bank money printing problem. And we say, okay, we put hard assets in there, gold, Bitcoin, real estate, things that are designed to appreciate over time, stock indexes included, and especially in the face of monetary debasement, these assets can go up any number. So those are all really interesting concepts. I think that's going to be very popular.

I want to talk about, obviously, I mean, eToro was, I would say, I don't know if it was early or if they just had a more noticeable commitment to crypto. Is that where you initially were introduced to Bitcoin and and yeah of course I mean Yoni gave me my first Bitcoin when it was 30 bucks a pop he gave it to me flat out people were giving him away back then I mean like that was that was the community at the time it was airdrops and giveaways and gifts I gave a few to other people I mean from that one Bitcoin I gave some to this friend and that friend.

Some people came back to me, saying, "'Mati, I saw Bitcoin. Where's my Bitcoin? I can't get it back.'" Well, I already lost it. And then the ICO market and all that stuff. Around the beginning of 2017, or even at the end of 2016 I noticed that Bitcoin was doing like this thing where it was gaining really

consistently like not a lot maybe 2% a week 1% a week 5% a week right and like but kids every week was up and around January 2017 it's okay $1,000 again and that was like a significant level and he said okay you know what making a video about it and I made this video called Bitcoin rush I think to this day it probably has about 20 million hits on YouTube not because it went viral necessarily because somebody in our marketing team decided that they could slap a free demo banner on it. And it had the craziest conversion rate that they'd ever seen on YouTube. Basically, eToro blew out their Q3 and Q4 budgets in Q2 because it was doing so well.

And then we decided to play with it was okay that one's good but people are getting you know that used to it or whatever they're getting you know and then we we started a be testing and optimizing it and using different people and you know different account managers and and it was just by the time we got to q3 of 2017, the crypto rush was in full boom. Things were going nuts. Servers were going down all over the place. eToro had upgraded there.

They did a three-year upgrade and it lasted three months on their servers, quite honestly like that. Basically the whole company went into this whole hyper overdrive situation where marketing is completely closed. There was no budget for marketing anymore. And nobody in marketing even needed to do anything because the customers were coming by themselves already. The word was out. The eToro has crypto. The eToro has liquidity. Even sometimes the buttons got gray and clients got frustrated. Why can't I buy right now there's no liquidity in the market everybody's buying and nobody's selling um so i mean we we broke so many records uh even within that month and like basically toro had to retrain their entire staff and at one point i walked by

one of the senior developers of itoro like the guy who built the platform from the ground up. And I walked by his desk and I see somebody's passport on his screen. He was verifying fucking KYC docs, right? Like himself. That's so crazy. Like himself, yeah, because that's what everybody was doing. We were just onboarding new customers.

And customer service was completely overwhelmed. They said, okay, the chat room, we're going to close it three hours a day just so that we can get back on track with with the tickets and i said you know what three hours a day chat i'll do it and i did it by myself for three hours a day because you know at fx i did the customer service chat it's a big deal you know everybody with their 200 bucks and it's the most important thing in the world to them right now where is my 200 bucks why isn't my account verified yet why can't i buy xrp right it's minute um and so i did it was like 10 20 30 chats at a time you do the chat cans and everything but

there's no way to really stay on top of it like as you should um but it was really interesting times uh to be to be around and to be a part of the market. So you've been in, I mean, you've been in Bitcoin for most of its history. So what is Bitcoin to you now? Having seen the entire roller coaster and heard all the narratives and probably supported or rejected a lot of them throughout time. And listen, this isn't finite. Things change. But I'm just curious how you view it at this moment.

I view it now exactly the same as I did after viewing it for five minutes I saw the email from Yoni Asya who said this is the money of the future and explained a little bit about decentralization because my mind wasn't there yet we're having witnessed the 2008 financial crisis and the bailouts, by the time we got to 2013, it was like, you know, this whole financial system. And to finally say, okay, we have this kind of money that we can take that power away from the central bankers

and put it back in the hands of the people. And I immediately went to Facebook because everybody was using Facebook back then. I was a laggard on Facebook, but I was one of the first off the platform. I'm sorry to say that as soon as the testimonies came out. Mind control, thank you i'm out um so the first thing i did after reading two articles uh was i went to facebook and i posted hey everybody the money of the future is here and i put this uh link to an article about bitcoin and surprisingly and even though i was getting at the time 20 to 50 likes on each post there was no engagement. It was like nothing.

People were like, they weren't even interacting. People didn't even look twice at it. I guess just they scroll down the feed. Yeah. Every once in a while, I see people like nowadays responding on that same post, right? Now that they've gone back and look at it. But I still, you know, and then a few months later there was the Cyprus thing that happened with Cyprus bail in.

And then, you know, Bitcoin rose. That was like the first analysis that I did was like Bitcoin rising because of, you know, a geopolitical event. Right. And then Bitcoin never reacted to another geopolitical event until January of this year when the missile hit Iraq and killed that general. Like from then, like from 2013 until 2020, it's been completely disconnected from the rest of the markets. But at this point, I see it exactly the same as I did.

That was like the money of the future that it belongs to the people that belongs to the internet and not to the people the powers that we call them Do you think that it's good money or do you think that it's a better store of value or both? I? Mean get you know that that obviously there's a crossover there because you know hard money That's deflationary obviously makes it good money, but it's you know We obviously know that there's better crypto currencies for for transacting you know things that are faster but uh but i don't think the world is there yet you know i don't think that the world is really demanding uh third part or a third option money system that's instant and you can buy coffee with it. Fiat works in most of the world,

with very few exceptions. I think that people get a bit overboard when they think the Fed is going overboard and the whole system is going to crash. I don't think so. We might see a bit of heightened inflation, but we haven't seen it until now. There's no reason to think that it's suddenly going to be doomsday scenario as far as the global economy is concerned. As an investor, it always pays to be an optimist. And I learned that the hard way in 2012 when I said, 2012, the world is crumbling. The Mayan calendar is over. Greece is completely messed up. Italy is next. Right. And you short everything European. And then the Europeans, somehow they dug their way out of it.

Like somehow they said, okay, you know what? That's the ground austerity and stimulus. And we're done. And, you know, Greece is already there, there by now.

Um, mostly out of the woods. Yeah. Exactly. And, uh, the world's not over and the world continues and we economy. Yeah, exactly. And, uh, the world's not over and the world continues and we continue to, uh,

you know, uh, we continue to do, uh, to do the same thing over and over again. And I think that that's, that's, that's the strategy that you kind of have to take.

Um, because you know what happens if you're wrong, fuck it. The world's ending anyways. We don't hate all that. It's true. Right. Why do I need all that money for?

Yeah, it's so true. And if you zoom out far enough, markets never go down. So as you said, I mean, it pays to be an optimist, but that's because the nature of markets, unless you're literally in the tulips and you know, beanie babies, they go up.

They go low investing. But you touched on something earlier, which is something I love to talk about. The stats, 90 to 95, maybe 99% of all traders fail, right? Yes, they do. And you saw it firsthand over and over again with people blowing up their eToro account. So why do you think that that is? It's not just eToro. Every broker I've ever worked for has always been like that. And there are those brokers that kind of prey on

those people as well. They come in and get them to invest and then they even eBook it. You know, like most people don't even know what eBooking is, but it basically means that the broker is a casino. He takes your thousand bucks, puts it in his pocket, and he gives you some virtual money to play with, knowing full well that you're going to crash your account no matter what you do. Yep. They give you enough leverage to hang yourself. And then they're like, you know, if somebody comes and demands his money and he's making

a lot of stink with the regulators and or on social media, okay, we'll give it to him. Give him his money. Yeah. Yeah. But other than that, I mean, they're going to continue. But why is it? Why is trading so hard? I mean, why, why do they, why do they all inevitably fail? Because largely because people have unrealistic expectations.

They believe that they're going to with $500 become a millionaire within a year. Like that, that is it. Like, you know what, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to make right now a lot of money and then I'm never going to have to work for the rest of my life. It's not how, it's not how investing works. It's how trading works and trade your traders with money. Investors make money. You know, as Warren Buffett's old saying, you know, the transferring wealth from the inpatient to the patient. Really all it is, it's people that come in and they don't know what

they're doing and they use too much leverage because they realize that the leverage is their only way out of the situation where they can get the edge. I only have 500, but I need 5,000. Or try 5 million, right? And then they go, they trade $5 million worth on $500. You're going to get liquidated real fast and lose all your money. And that's basically the story of traders. And I've seen some successes too along the way. I mean, I've seen people both who've done their homework or got completely dumb luck.

I saw some guy in Germany. Oh my God, he makes so much money. He put in like 20 grand, and he bought like three houses for his children after that. He shorted the euro dollar at the right time, right at the peak. He rode this massive downward trend, and he frequently cashed out. He frequently wiped. He put some more money back in, but he kept cashed out. He frequently wiped. He put some more money back in, but he kept cashing out.

And that was how he was able to keep the money. After that, the Euro dollar changed its course and started doing up and down rather than straight down. And then I'm out. I don't have my thing anymore. That's just good trading. That's a good trading.

Yeah, I've seen scalpers who beat the system consistently. They see which broker is going first and then which broker is behind and then the broker that's behind. They've got a really fast computer, lots of nice monitors and they see that non-farm

payrolls report come out, the market booms and that broker who was last will take them for all they're worth. And you know what? I've seen non-farm payrolls report come out the market booms and that broker who was last they'll take them for all their worth and you know what um i've seen it happen and seen people make lots of money in the markets um but it's it's infrequent it's like really infrequent i mean maybe your chances are better than playing the lottery i would say but uh the stakes are higher yeah but worse than a casino worse than blackjack. Look,

if 1% are making money, I mean, how many, what percentage of people who play the lottery make money? We talk about edge as traders and everybody has their system and their, their indicator and the thing that they love. And I, I always joke that like, that's not where edge comes from,

even though I think younger traders think that it does to me, edge comes from just that emotional control and the ability to just be stone cold and, you know, play out your plan with, with no emotion. I mean, do you agree? Yeah, I really, I, that was really interesting to me because in a certain way you do get desensitized to it. Um, I wouldn't say like, if I have any money on high leverage,

I cannot get desensitized. Like if it's like really high leverage and I'm playing and I like it and I, and that's fine. You know, I know that I'm gambling and I know that, you know, that five, I'm never going to see that 500 shekels again. That's fine. Um, but you approach it with that intention it's fine if you if it's your last 500 money is live yeah no you can't you have it has to be money that you're willing to lose you it's you compare it to going to a casino you're putting you're going down to the blackjack table you know that the money is not coming back you know it and you're fine with it it's i'm happy yeah you paid a I'm happy it's a rush and I and I

feel the rush and I can't put the phone down I can't sleep you know it's fine where I really learned to desensitize was when I was managing a larger portfolio with the Toro on the Toro platform and what I realized is with the massive diversification like when you're involved in 200 different assets like whatever you decision you take on today whatever you know it doesn't matter because I'm just treating with a fraction of a fraction of my total portfolios if I make an adjustment like if I'm going through my portfolio and go hmm maybe I should close that position today or scale down

the amount of percentage of gold right over the next few months and like say instead of 10% I'm gonna get it I want to get it down to like 8% over a month yeah and when you when you look at it like that you have the fidget I can still fidget right and I can still close very small positions within the larger portfolio. And then I realized that I can, I can kind of have it both ways. Like I can be excited about it, but at the same time, take these type of decisions and overanalyze on the very small things that are not going to, they're not going to make those type of big decisions. So I don't, I don't, I mean, for me, I know that from what you've said, you're completely different.

I don't feel decentralized at all. But what I do feel exactly along the lines of what you've been saying is balance. And I think that balance is critical and balance in your life. I mean, for me, like balancing my family, balancing my work, and even religion, I would say, plays a big part in that. I pray for sometimes an hour a day, from 30 minutes to an hour a day, which is basically my form of meditation. That's my form of getting my head into the game because it is, for me, not 24-7. I mean, for you, I know that you trade 24-7, nonstop. Crypto never sleeps.

For me, it's like I take Saturdays off. Friday night, close the phone, close my computer. I have family time. We do a dinner. 25 hours straight, I don't touch work. I don't watch Netflix. I'm not that religious. You see me with a beard.

I'm not like the whole show see me with a beard. I'm not like the whole showmarsha this thing, but it's for me, it's like that. Digital Sabbath. I digitally detox. I stay away from work and I completely try and get my focus back. And then during that meditation daily, again, try to regress take take it away from work maybe I'll maybe I'll sit in that yellow chair and maybe I'll see the charts out of the corner of my eye or something and maybe even meditate on that a little bit but try and clear my mind as much as possible which I think

is extremely critical for for keeping that balance and keeping kind of a cool head and trying to um take this type of these type of decisions um and there's not many decisions that you need to take like that but you know even just one or two a day can be quite critical yeah and for longevity too you know you just can't, nobody can go 24, seven, three 65 and sustain. I mean, you just have to, and I think as parents, like we have, we have a forced break no matter what. Right. I mean, there's just times you're just, I mean, you got to take care of your kids. It is what it is. Right. And, um, but yeah, I mean, for you, it's religion for another person. It might be to go for a jog for 30 minutes and listen to music.

But it's just so, so important that you're able to detach and put your phone away and not think about it. And I think that's been a huge difficulty for a lot of people, definitely for me with COVID, because I can't do or have not been able to do necessarily a lot of the activities. I don't go to the gym. That used to be, I used to go to the gym every day for an hour and they'd yell at you if i even like picked up my phone so it was you know it's just not i don't get that now it's very hard right yeah and for me also i mean like i mentioned i mean i i was commuting you know all the way for seven years or even my entire career up until last november and the commute itself for me was like kind of personal time like i could

drive to work but i'd rather take the bus because i don't want to sit in traffic like this when i either scroll on my phone or let my mind wander take a nap or learn something new i have like an hour a day each way that i could like just me time and do whatever i want for myself and that was kind of critical and then once i started working from home i realized that i needed some kind of other escape and that's when i realized okay i can pour a bit more text like i was doing three minute prayers when i was commuting like but uh you know now i can at least i have two hours that are free i can put 30 minutes back into um you know yeah um balance i know that we're up against it here with time i

just want to ask you one more thing and that is um what difference do you see in your trading or mentally emotionally when you're doing it with other people's money versus your own. Because for me, I don't really have the urge to manage other people's money. I think that I sleep very well at night right now. I can mentally handle my own losses. It's totally fine. It doesn't bother me, but I don't know if I would sleep as well if I was losing my friends and families or strangers money. Yeah. So, I mean, my parents also come to me especially you know about bitcoin they always want to know hey you know should i buy and i told them dca you know that's what my parents do yep my my dad figured out the cash app real quick how to buy bitcoin and then the cash app now does

dca automatically if like he's you know that was that's it that's all i need to tell him and he's like i said a little bit often and that was when that's exactly what they're doing I don't okay so I don't really feel much of a difference between managing other people's money and my own money it really to me is kind of one in the same I don't feel more responsible because it's not mine um and i don't feel you know less responsible because it's not mine right um i feel kind of the same level of responsibility i will i want to treat other people's money as if it's my own and there isn't any kind of real difference between it. And

every once in a while, you'll look at the number, okay, half a million right now, which is on high risk. But the point that I've made as far as informing the people who copy me, Honey Toro, at least, is look, this is a high risk. And I try to do the best I can to inform them of the risks and that way they can understand and then inform them of my strategy and tell people, look, if we see a dip, which happened several times already, we're investing more. And there are those most, like very few people have uncopied me because of that. Most people are like, either they continue to invest with me, buy the dips with me, or

they sit out with their original cash. Either way, generally speaking, out with their original cash. Either way, generally speaking, they've been very happy. Like Anitoro, the community there, you know, the people that are copying me. Like every time I write a post about what we're doing, what our strategy is, this, they always come back, thank you so much. Thank you for updating. And that's really what I just want to be transparent with them as far as what my strategy is. And as long as I do that, my hands are clean. People understand when they're investing that there are risks. You know, thank God we've been more than successful so far. But look,

if things, you know, if things go pear-shaped, that's what will happen. But I'll do my best at that point to, like, you know, if there was some real red flags and I saw okay you know bitcoins going back to 3k or had any kind of feeling like that you know we pulled the scale back on the risk and make sure that we do the best I can to protect everybody's money but as far as the fundamentals so far as you know Bitcoin and Ethereum right now things are really really incredible I mean Visa MasterCard PayPal the US government with the really incredible. I mean, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, the US government with the OCC updates. I mean, like the way that European is going full hard

on like the people that I'm speaking with about setting up my fund. They're all like, tell me what's happening in DeFi. What's the latest coin? And these are like people that don't get on a Zoom call without a fricking suit and tie, right? Right. The real money is here.

And they're asking me about like Polkadot, like really like that today I was on a call and this guy like from Cyprus, like he's been in like the most knowledgeable people as far as hedge funds go. And he's like, how's, you know, what's going to,

what's going to happen with Polkadot? I don't know. Let me get one of my analysts on the line. Yeah, somebody who can tell you. We'll put together a nice portfolio that'll reflect that type of growth, but not necessarily be exposed to all of the ups and downs. And that's the best really I can do for it.

Awesome. Well, man, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. A lot of really valuable information. So where can everybody follow up with you, follow you, and if they want to copy you or participate in what... There it is. He's pointing at it. QuantumEconomics.io. Where do they follow you personally? Sign up for the newsletter. I'm writing a newsletter every single day, which has all of my deepest, darkest thoughts about the markets, all markets, not just crypto.

And that's really the best place if you want to know everything. If you just want to know a little bit, Twitter, that's where, you know, the little things that float into my head and I go, let me test this idea out on the crowd today. It's a learning tool. Great for sentiment. Great for sentiment. Exactly. LinkedIn. But, you know, that's where our badges of honor go. Yes. We just passed this month, a hundred, out of the whole team, a hundred mentions in the media, like journalists that were like asking us questions and then quoted somebody from Quantum Economics, either one of our analysts or directors or VPs. And 100 Mentions, that was a milestone for us.

And we hope to grow from there. Awesome, man. Well, thank you so much. I know it's nighttime where you are, even though it's only mid-afternoon for me. My girls are going to be up until 3 a.m. We're on COVID time. It is what it is. I mean, we've gone native over here as well.

So I can understand that for sure. What a time to be alive, right? Seriously.