The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin proving Wall Street wrong with legendary trader Jon Najarian

Episode Date: April 27, 2021

Jon Najarian left the coveted life of a professional football player to become a “nobody” in the trading pits, upheaving his world in an instant. Bit by bit, Najarian pushed through the tough challenges of the trading floor that molded him into a master of all markets. Recognizing crypto’s value proposition, he more recently shifted his focus to become an investor, trader, and commentator within this new market. Crypto is causing widespread concern among legacy investors, he believes, causing a slow but steady shift to a new age of scarce value. Follow Jon Najarian: ​https://twitter.com/jonnajarian In this episode, Melker and Najarian discuss a range of topics including: Dominating Chicago football Options, calls, puts, and strikes Overleveraged speculators Learning to trade in the pits $10B flushed in 4 hours Wash sales and artificial pumps The Doge day sell signal Million-dollar baseball cards Bill Ackman and Carl Icahn The smell of fear on the trading floor The intrinsic value of dollars Market Rebellion --- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co --- 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 9.5% interest on top coins with no lockups and no limits.  Go to https://thewolfofallstreets.link/voyager and download the Voyager app and use code “SCOTT25” to get $25 in free Bitcoin when you create your account. --- Mina Mina is the world's lightest blockchain, powered by participants. Rather than apply brute computing force, Mina uses advanced cryptography and recursive zk-SNARKs to ensure a super-light and constant sized chain, that allows participants to quickly sync and verify the network.  The team behind Mina is backed by VCs, including Coinbase Ventures, and Mina's adversarial testnet was the largest public testnet outside of ETH 2.0. To get involved ahead of Mina’s mainnet, visit https://thewolfofallstreets.link/mina  --- Matcha Matcha is the easiest way to trade in DeFi. Matcha enables traders to seamlessly swap tokens using 20+ aggregated liquidity sources that deliver better prices than going to a centralized exchange or Uniswap.  Connect your wallet and start today at https://thewolfofallstreets.link/matcha  ---- Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members

Today's episode is brought to you by Voyager, Mina, and Matcha. Stick around to hear more about them. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast. Now, I can't tell you how excited I am to talk with today's guest, John Agerian. After dominating Chicago Bears football, John turned to a different contact sport, trading, and did what he does best. He destroyed the competition. From working on the trading floor for over 25 years, John has amassed a wealth of financial knowledge, even developing his own trading algorithm known as the Heat Seeker along the way.

Now he's arguably a living legend, the author of four bestselling books, and a popular face on TV screens everywhere. But most importantly to us, he loves crypto. It's my goal in having John on today to better understand where the crypto market is at in this bull run, what's left to come, and also just to hear his incredible background story. John and Jerry, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Scott, I am delighted to be here in the wolf's den. It's great to be here. I love your insights that you offer freely and actively on Twitter and other social media. So I've been a fan and it's great to be on with you. Thank you. Thank you. I can't tell you how much that means to me. So once again, before we continue, you are listening to the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast, which airs twice a week. I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, and politics, and some guests who have done all those things

like today, seemingly. Now, this podcast is powered by Blockworks, the fastest growing media company in the digital asset space. Visit blockworks.co for access to the highest quality information in crypto and finance. I promise you won't be disappointed. And if you like my podcast, you follow me on Twitter, then check out everything else I got going on at thewolfofallstreets.io. So now to get into what's actually important, John, question I've wanted to ask you for a long time. If we lined up at opposite ends of a long hallway

and ran at each other full speed, how many times out of 10 do you think I could get past you? Well, it wouldn't be fair for you because not because of my skills, but because of the hallway, because that's why the double, double wide. I don't know. Okay. If we, yeah, if, if, if we put it on a double wide, then, you know, at least one out of 10, you could probably get by me. I'll take one. Maybe how now, how big are you, Scott? Oh, I'm only, I'm like six foot 165. I'm small. Okay. And I'm down to six, two and a half and about 211. I was 250 when I played.

So I am faster now, but considerably smaller because you don't need to carry the weight so why carry it but uh that would be an interesting uh video just we'd break the internet with that maybe next time we're at the same convention we can we can do it but i'm wearing full pads this is not happening uh all right oh yeah that's not my natural element one of the reasons I'm so grateful, Scott, for not making it as a pro football player. I played four games. And even as a, you know, an also ran or as a second teamer, the hits are pretty intense. You know, they keep getting more and more intense as you move up from high school to college to pro. And, you know, my hat's off to these guys because I see the pads that they're wearing these days. They're faster, they're bigger, and they're

wearing less pads, except for the helmet. They're wearing less pads. You know, you see their shoulder pads, none of them have, you know, thigh pads anymore. They have knee pads just because of the artificial carpet. In some cases, you know, they have pads that they'll wear like a wrestling knee pad on their knees and, you know, just tape covering their elbows, which, you know, slide and get burned on that carpet and all that stuff i mean you talk about getting hurt you get hurt playing pro sports in particular football but uh it only hurts our egos and our wallets if we screw up when we're trading right yeah of course i yeah i don't know how you guys do it i see you know in green bay negative no sleeves. I mean, I can't even conceive of the level of pain that you guys can withstand. But now moving on to market. So obviously,

you made the transition from playing football to trading. I know you've told the story a lot of times, but the part that I love about it is sort of the lore of being in the trading pits and the physicality of that. Now, actually, I'm assuming playing football, being a linebacker probably actually gave you a huge edge. I'd love to hear about that experience of that transition and what's actually like in the pits. Sure. Well, I didn't just throw a light switch and go from pro football to trading in the pits. But I did throw a light switch and go from pro football to trading in the pits. But I did throw a light switch and go from pro football to being a nobody in the pits.

Because, you know, you get down to the floor, you don't know a thing. Whatever you think you know, you don't really know. I'd been interested in markets before, but I never had stood there and tried to buy and sell, nor did I start buying and selling on my first days down on the floor. More or less took me three months

just to get over all the differences of being in that environment, Scott, where everything's buy, sold, buy, sold, you know, back and forth like that. Because it's not just, oh, I'm going to buy this and then I'll kind of wander off and then I'll try to sell it later on. You know, it's not like that.

You'd be standing in the back of the pit. If you want to get down there right into the heart of the pit where the brokers are and so forth, you've got to be trading all day throughout the day, making a market on both sides. In other words, the broker says, you know, 55 calls. He doesn't just say or she doesn't just say, I want to sell the 55s. They want you to make a market. So they want you to give them a bid and an offer. And, you know, the people that do that fast are the ones that win the trades and the people that do it slow sit there and wonder what went on. So what it was like was three months of really beating myself up watching videotapes two or three times a day. They had a lot of tapes that other traders had recorded. And you could check them out. But you had to watch them in this little tiny closet, upstairs off the trading floor,

sometimes by yourself, sometimes with a couple other people, and trying to stay awake in a little tiny room like that with no air when you're watching a 60-minute video of some guy writing on a chalkboard about gamma, vega, theta, and trying to figure out, okay, so an option at the money should move this fast. An out of the money option should move this fast. If I'm selling a put, I'm really obligating myself to buy the stock if it drops and all that stuff. That took months. So like I say, it wasn't a switch that went off and just I went from playing football for the Bears to hanging up the helmet and shoulder pads and coming down to the floor. No, it was grinding for three months

before finally the light came on. And I started figuring things out. And even then, all I was was a runner, meaning I just took the orders from the guys I was working for, my agent and his traders. I'd just take the orders from the desk and bring them out to the pits. And then another three months later, they actually let me write the orders. They let me find which opportunities I thought were best based on a computer model that we were using. And then I would give run those out to the brokers on the floor. And when I got the fills, then I'd have to input all that into a computer and look at how that position was moving and so forth. So it was about a year of that before I finally took the money I made from the bears, put it up on the line and started trading in a pit. And then that was still an

eye-opening experience because watching it every day, you think you know what's going on. When it's really you standing there, it's a completely different thing. Yeah. And we have so much access to information now. Literally everything's at our fingertips. And even if you're a technical analyst, I always tell the story. My grandfather was a stockbroker and he used to draw his charts on the kitchen table every morning at breakfast. Now, you pull up TradingView, you got a thousand charts at your disposal. We have so much information. How did you decide what to trade and what was actionable and what information were you able to process at that time without

computers and all that at your disposal? Sure. Well, and I know just what you're talking about when you say drawing out point and figure charts and so forth at the dining room table. There was a guy on the floor that had a chart that went back into the 40s and he had done it every day, every trading day since the 40s. Now, granted, options didn't start trading on the floor till 73. But this guy had been point and figure charting the equivalent of the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones. Going back that far, he would unfold this thing, Scott, it would be like eight feet long. And then every day, he dutifully sit there with his pencil, not pen, and he'd be drawing in, you know, exactly the point and figure charts and so forth to try to figure what was going on.

I always joke about every ship at the bottom of the sea was loaded with charts. And then people push back and say, yeah, but if you would have paid attention to the charts, you wouldn't have hit the reef and you wouldn't have crashed and sank the ship. I think a lot of folks, when they get involved in trading, and I count myself in that group, are looking for how do I decide how to enter or exit a trade? And a lot of us are like, you know, three blind mice. We're just sitting there with our canes, you know, three blind mice. We're just sitting there with our canes, you know, and we're tapping around trying to figure out, okay, what is this?

Is this a dog in front of me? Is this a cat? Is this a house? You know, what is it? They're tapping with their canes because we don't really know going forward. And that's why some people rely on charts. Some people like Warren Buffett are more in the fundamental side and, you know, picking it up when they think it's cheap and they don't care if the market closes for, you know, several years because they think they've really bought this asset cheap. And then there are people on the floor who are really trying to be right for a few seconds at a time. They're not trying to put on a trade for weeks or months or years. They're trying to say, my advantage is that by owning this seat, I get to stand right here. I see all of the brokers that are coming in with orders to buy or sell. And only the folks on the floor actually know at that time that there were more buyers than sellers or more sellers

than buyers. And that's going to influence which direction I think the market's going in the really short term, not over, you know, the next month, but right now today they're coming in and they're buying, buying, buying and PLBY, Playboy, for instance, and they're buying the crap out of anything that, you know, any offer we put up on the screen, they'll take it. Well, you have to be pretty stupid to not want to run with that same direction. electronically on the ice, the International Securities Exchange. Some of it's trading on Philly. Some of it's trading on the Pico. Some of it's trading on the Amex. And you don't really see the whole picture. And that's why we created that heat seeker that you spoke of, that algorithm that's just looking for where are the blocks of options trading? Are they on the offer or are they on the bid? And that's the direction that we run.

You just want to be on side. I mean, basically, you just want to be, you know, the trend is your friend, basically on the right side of the trade. So very simple, but. We're the ultimate momentum players. And the nice thing about options, as you may have heard me say many times, is number one, they give you time frame. When do I think something's going to happen? Well, they're buying June options or they're

buying options that expire tomorrow, April 23rd. Big difference. June, two full months into the future. Options that are weekly that are expiring the next day. That means somebody thinks they've got time critical information, and they want to be invested right now. And then they tell you the strike price, Scott. So are they buying the at the monies? So if the stock's trading 55, are they buying the at the money? Or are they buying one strike up to strike up three strikes up? You know, again, all of that information is in options, and that's why it's a much more robust, it's esoteric, but it's also more robust tell about which direction we're going and how far we're going. Interesting. And you were there, obviously,

in the earlier days, I guess, of options. And it seems from what I've heard having these conversations, there was a lot of inefficiencies in the market, sort of like you just touched on, that you could take advantage of because of options. So I want to kind of carry that forward to today. Obviously, the trade right now, seemingly with Bitcoin, is this cash and carry trade with Contango on June, July, August options and the huge expectation, obviously, that price will go up. That's how we're seeing yield on all these platforms. So now we have this inefficient market in Bitcoin. What happens when that market becomes more efficient and these huge opportunities that are just so obvious start to disappear? Well, as far as from a trading standpoint, that should affect, you know, Deribit.

They are far and away the biggest in options, you know, and it's a factor of 10 or 20 bigger than the CME, for instance. The CME is a real player, but they're only this big and Deribit is way up here. On a daily basis, it's averaging 10 to 1 open interest trading volume, any way you want to measure it, derivative. And they're just one of many that has options. And in fact, they had them in many cases before the listed exchange actually put them up. And the leverage they offer, not just for the options, but for the futures is incredible. And you saw this past weekend, when we had that flush. And it was kind of amazing to me, Scott, that it wasn't amazing, because I didn't know for sure that they would flush them out at that level. But I didn't know how much leverage some

of these speculators had availed themselves of. You and I know that you can trade up to 100 to 1 on an exchange like Deribit or Binance or whatever. The CME won't give you 100 to 1 on Bitcoin, Bitcoin futures or options. But when you go to those offshore exchanges that you need to hit through a VPN or something like that, you can get extraordinary leverage. But again, as a trader for a long time, you know that you can get flushed really fast. I mean, there was one guy-

1% move on Bitcoin with 100x leverage is I mean, you can be you can be liquidated three seconds after you enter the order. Right. And there was there was one of those traders was somebody who was up $68 million and got flushed on that liquidation. And just for your listeners and viewers, how that works is, of course, John, I'm not going to say Scott, because I don't want to put it on Scott. John buys 100 to one leverage offshore through Deribit or through Binance. Okay. How much do you think they'll let that thing tear through my money versus their money? And the answer is about a hot second.

So when you're on the right side of that trade and you buy a bunch of leverage and buy Bitcoin at $55,000 and it's moving back up to $58,000, you're a god. Because you didn't just make $3,000 on that trade. You made $3,000 on that trade, you made 3000 times 100, you made $300,000 on that purchase of those, you know, with using that hundred to one leverage. Well, that cuts both ways. All of a sudden, you know, somebody took a bunch of coins out of cold storage, put them on Binance and whack, and then started to work that market hard. And next thing you know, it waterfalled because all the risk managers, whether they were artificial intelligence or an actual person, start, bang, snapping all of those

necks of all of those traders that are double leveraged, 10 times leveraged, 100 times leveraged. They just cut them out without remorse and absolutely without mercy because their job is to make sure that Deribit doesn't lose all of its money, that Binance doesn't lose all of its money. So they just bang, cut them out. So that waterfalls from that 59,000 level all the way down to about 51,000, depending on the exchange, and created a hell of an opportunity, of course, for somebody, because somebody bought an awful lot of those. I bought on that dip as well, Scott. But as they bought, then they took their coins off and put them back into cold storage. So that was a very shrewd trade by somebody, but it flushed

about a million accounts. All of the money they had in those accounts was gone. $10 billion. $10 billion, basically, effectively in four hours. I mean, a bit more after that. And that was by many multiples, the biggest liquidation we've seen. And you talk about the opportunity, obviously, for someone to buy at that point and move those coins off exchange. But obviously, there's also the opportunity when you know there's that much leverage in the system and you have a ton of money. I mean, all someone had to do was short the spot market $5,000, $1,500 to start that cascade. So if you shorted before that, sold a ton of coins, watched the cascade, covered your short at the bottom and bought, that's probably what happened. So probably somebody didn't even just catch it on the buy

end, right? It's a full, full circle of profit. Yep. And, you know, that happens all the time. For any of those folks who, you know, thought that they were gamed or whatever else, just look at Ackman and Icon, you know, Ackman shorts herbal life and Icon comes in and says, I think you got a little too big for your britches, my man. I'm going to start buying this thing up. And Ackman's like, well, why? You're just doing this to screw me. You don't even argue that it's that great a stock. And Icon says, well, it is a good

stock, but if you want a friend, buy a dog. Yeah. I mean, it's GameStop, right? I mean, it's GameStop. Just everybody now is aware of the concept of a short squeeze or a gamma squeeze because it became mainstream news when a bunch of Redditors, if that's actually what happened, were able to squeeze those GameStop shorts. But you don't hear about the long squeezes often, which is effectively what we're seeing here, right? Exactly. And I think whenever folks ask me about Bitcoin, which honestly, Scott, I've only been in since 2016.

And I didn't really get active until 2017 because like everybody else, there wasn't as much information. You already did a great job describing all the free sources of information now, like CoinDesk, like things on TradingView or Voyager or whatever. But when I got started, it was a little tougher. And everybody's warning me, don't leave it on your computer. Or if you do unplug that computer, so people can't hack into you and take it. And then there's tracers. And then there's all these different forms of tracers and jump drives.

And all of a sudden, you know, you know, your head's swirling and you're trying to understand it. But now it's so much easier, especially with a platform like Voyager. That's where I trade most of the time. And I love it. I think Erlich and Steve Erlich, the CEO and his team have built a great platform. But this isn't just me trying to push them. They are a sponsor of things that I do.

But I love their platform. I use it every day. But when somebody who comes to me now and says, all right, so how do I get involved now, Doc? And I don't want to look back at them, Scott, and say, well, I told you to buy it at 3,000. I told you to buy it at 10. I told you last year to buy it at 20. And now here it is at 55.

And now you want me to tell you, go all in? No. What I tell them is, do what I do. Buy it on dips. You don't have to buy a whole coin, of course. We all know that you can buy fractions of a coin. So if you want to buy 500 bucks worth, do that. Buy $500 worth, have it, you know, buy it on a dip. And then you'll get used to, you know, seeing how it moves, and seeing how, you know, the market in general, is supportive of technical analysis, for instance, right, and how certain key levels, whether you're using whale maps, or anything else, key levels are really key with these digital assets. Because again, there's thousands of exchanges. So you might think that you're seeing all the activity, I guarantee that except for some

of the best traders out there, you're not seeing all the activity, you're seeing what's going on on Deribit, what's going on on Coinbase, Binance, wherever Bitfinex, any of these places, you're seeing that and you're trying to derive, okay, but where are the blocks? How much is being put? No, just buy a little bit on dips and then start adding to it, adding to it. And you don't need to go all in. You don't need to buy a $55,000 coin, even if you've got the money. Start small and buy on dips. If you've been paying any attention to me or have been following me for any length of time, then you know I absolutely love Voyager. Every single time someone tweets me or asks me, where do you trade and invest? The answer is always Voyager. They offer over 50 assets to

trade commission-free. I save so much money, it almost feels too good to be true. And that's not even my favorite part of Voyager. My favorite part is the insane interest that I earn. Up to 10% of my USDC, 6.25% of my Bitcoin, and 5.25% on my Ethereum. Whether I'm trading or not, I'm earning interest on what's sitting on the platform. Making money literally couldn't be easier and there are no lockups or limits. Go to thewolfofallstreets.link slash Voyager. That's V-O-Y-A-G-E-R and download the Voyager app and use code SCOTT25 to get $25 in free Bitcoin

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exciting is Mina just had their public token sale on April 13th with their official partner coin list. Once again, go to the wolf of all streets dot link slash Mina to find out more. Everyone is seemingly making insane money in DeFi, but getting started and working through the mess can cause an absolutely massive headache. People are always confused how to open a wallet. They go to Uniswap. The prices are high. The gas prices are high. They don't know how to execute an order and they have to take whatever price is being offered. Well, Matcha fixes all of this. They have deep liquidity. They source liquidity from multiple exchanges so that you get absolutely the best price and always know that your order will fill. And most importantly, for someone like me who trades, they have limit orders, which means you actually get to choose

your price and fill like you're used to on a centralized exchange. If you want to trade like I do, sign up for Matcha now and join the tens of thousands of traders already a part of the movement. Start now at the wolf of all streets dot link slash matcha. That's M-A-T-C-H-A. There are two things that you just said that sort of struck me. One, what is it with human beings that they finally get interested at $60,000 when they weren't interested at $6,000? That's one. But two, also, I think anyone who's traded, what you just said is so important because if you get used to buying dips, you're never scared of them. And you actually get in a mentality where you look forward to those drops as

opportunities instead of selling in fear on drops, which is, which is what I think humans tend to do. So I guess what I'm asking human emotion, why does it tell us, you know, implicitly to do the dead opposite of what we probably should be doing and how does that carry over to trading? And, you know, there are several adages built into what Scott just said, folks. You know, for instance, supply and demand. There is less supply now than there was in the case of Bitcoin. Why? There are more Bitcoins mined every day, John. Yeah, that's true. But the miners are getting half the reward that they were getting into last May of 2020. Why is that? Because the halving. That is a thing that happens

all the time. It was built by Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he or they were or are. It's built into Bitcoin that every so often the miners who are doing this proof of work, they're doing this complicated puzzle and they're getting rewarded when they win. They're getting rewarded with a Bitcoin. They're getting half as much this year as they were getting last year, up until May of last year. So you've got the same amount of demand, but you've got half the supply. That would mean that either the hodlers or the people that owned it have to be sellers to meet that same demand curve that there was, or prices have to go up. So that's one thing.

So supply and demand still works in any market, it works in Bitcoin, and then fear and greed. Obviously, right now, we're primarily experiencing the greed side of this. Scott and I have lived through the fear side too. Because as I said, you know, 2017, I thought I was a genius when Bitcoin went from whatever 2000 to almost 20,000 thought I was genius. And then when it comes crashing back down, that fear side, people were just selling, selling, selling, selling, selling, selling, selling. And finally, that was a very dark crypto winter, Scott. It could barely lift back to 6,000.

And then it would be whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, back down sub 4,000 again. And it was just that kind of torture that know, torture that we all hate when you're owning an asset that just can't get out of its own way. But fear and greed, the fear of missing out, obviously, is what is driving people now. Like you said, they didn't care last year at 6,000, but now they love it at 60 and they want to get in. I probably have, you know, I don't know how many calls a day from friends that are asking exactly that. And like I say, I don't bring up that I told you to get in at this level because it's not about me. At that point, it's about, okay, how do I express to them the best way for them to start taking little bites of this,

rather than for them saying, I could have bought 10 Bitcoin last year at six. Now I can only buy one at 60. You know, instead, I just say, let's just get in slowly. That way, you're not going to feel like an idiot when it goes to a million, because at some point, these assets like Bitcoin that have, again, they gather their value by their scarcity. There's only going to be 21 million Bitcoins. And it'll be way past our lifetimes when they finally mine that last Bitcoin, the 21st million Bitcoin. Could it be a million bucks? You know, way ahead of that? I think so. So just so you don't, you know, have that, you know, total regret of not participating at all, buy on dips, buy small, work your way into a small position, because it's not 6000 anymore, it's 60. And then just be happy when you're

able to recognize that kind of asset appreciation. People always think it's too expensive, no matter how expensive it is, right? I mean, it's just the nature of it. I could have bought it at six. I'm not buying it at 10. And you never end up buying. Mark Yusko I had on the show recently, and he said something brilliant. He said that he thinks that people won't think about Bitcoin as a whole Bitcoin. We'll talk about the 21 quadrillion sats because it'll get so high that you'll just talk about buying sats instead of about buying Bitcoin. It'll sort of be a reset in the mentality.

And all of a sudden, perhaps it'll look cheap to your average investor again, because you'll be talking about sats. Yep. Well, that's, you know, Yusko is a smart guy and that's a good way to express it, I think. Stacking those sats, that's what people should be looking at rather than, you know,

the difference between where it was and where it is now. So I noticed that you put your name, John, Dr. Doge Najarian, as opposed to Dr. J. And you can't walk this financial planet anymore without being asked about Doge, which to me is so crazy because I've traded these Doge cycles five times before in the last five years, probably myself, and always laughed and said, I'll just set my bids down at 15, 20 sats. I'll wait again. It'll come back down. And then a few months later, it'll pump. Talk about FOMO. What do you make of what's happening with Doge right now?

Well, you and I know that, well, a guy like Scott, folks, who's an influencer, he talks about a coin, that coin generally moves. Then you take Scott or John on steroids, and you get to Gene Simmons. And then on Gene Simmons on steroids and you get to Gene Simmons. And then on Gene Simmons on steroids, you get to Elon Musk. And when you get these kinds of folks talking about, you know, that people recognize, even if they don't recognize either of those two individuals as the expert on crypto that maybe Scott is, nonetheless, they have mass followers. These are truly influencers. And when Gene Simmons says, I bought a six figures worth of Doge, people pay attention. When Elon Musk said about Bitcoin, and then about Doge subsequently, that when he tweets out a meme about Doge and the Doge dog, that's fantastic. But my daughter called me, Scott.

People that have heard me say this before, I apologize. But she called me and said, she's a junior at Tulane University. She said, Dad, you got to put some more money in my account so I can buy a bunch of Doge. And I said, why is that? And she said, because everybody down here is buying it. So I said, I'll tell you what, hon, I'll buy it and I'll split it with you. So I bought a bunch of doge, seven hundredths of a cent, right? Not a penny, seven hundredths of a penny.

This is like February, right? Yeah. Then it goes to nine cents. I didn't buy it and sell it at the high, but I did get out at eight cents and thought I was an absolute genius. And, you know, sent her half the money to her wallet. And now she continues to trade the shit coins. And I love them. Gateway drug. I love altcoins.

They are one of my favorite trading vehicles right now. You know, rivaling options. Because you can buy one of these little suckers. You know, maybe Litecoin doesn't double in a day, but I can tell you so many coins that you could trade. And I don't want to drive you guys into coins right now, but that you could trade and see a 100% return in a day or in a week. But anyway, so it ramped to 45 cents or 44 cents and then hovered around that 39 cent level into 420 you know the doge day yeah you know that's a signal to sell oh yeah so um but there's just I I think the power of influencers in this space is incredible.

And to real aficionados, again, like Scott, or like Pomp, or like Tone Vays, or Charlie Schrem, to real guys that have had the chops and been in the game, for them to recognize something going on is completely different than for the masses to all of a sudden say, oh, well, Kim Kardashian tweeted about whatever. If Kim Kardashian tweeted about the crappiest crap coin out of the top 200, that coin would move. It'd be top five market cap in a week. I mean, it would, we just saw it. Yeah, absolutely. And so I can't dismiss that. And instead, I just try to ride those waves. And I try to, again, just like we said, without mercy, without regret, just knock it out. When you decide to buy into that, and it ramps like that, just freaking

take that money off the table, run like a thief in the night. But that's the thing, right? So you start with this influence and then you start to get this swelling FOMO and someone like you is trading it. You're not investing in Doge. And I think it's such an important distinction, but then you start to get to 10 cents, 15 cents, and you start people hearing people talk about it as the future of money. And it's like, I was on Tampa radio the other day and every call was about Doge and they were coping. Oh, but 20,000 Doge have been spent at Dallas Mavericks, you know? And so it's going to be money. Come on, man. You know what I mean? Isn't that like speaking of the fear and greed and the signals when you start to hear the new paradigm and the full euphoria, is that your signal? Because you're trading this base, you're trading it on momentum

and because Elon Musk tweeted, not because you care about Doge at all, right? Right. And we can't do the exact same thing that we do with the heat seeker on altcoins or Bitcoin. Again, because there's way too many exchanges. Some of those exchanges, regular viewers and listeners to Scott will know that some of those exchanges are very suspect. There's almost 90% that are doing wash trades, meaning they're just trying to circle it and trade it to make it seem like there's volume. And there is volume, but it's just them buying and selling and flipping it around. And, you know, that in stock trading, that's illegal. That'll get you sent to prison. The IRS, not the IRS, I'm sorry. The SEC will come in and charge you with trying to do wash sales and trying to artificially

pump up a stock. Real trading is different than a wash sale. So I think that there's just, when we're looking at these exchanges, I try to look at the top 10 exchanges that I've named them a bunch of times here already. But I look at those and I look at the 24 hour volume. I try to look at the one hour and 15 minute volumes that are trading. And Scott, I'm looking for increases in volume to be a trigger for me to get in and ride that wave. Because ultimately, when you're a person like me, you're a surfer. We sit there waiting, waiting, waiting. Anybody who's surfed knows this. You don't just paddle on every single little ripple that you feel in the ocean, and again, I'm not a big wave,

so I'm not Laird Hamilton, for sure. But what I do is I wait, and all of a sudden, that wave starts lifting up. Now I'll paddle. In other words, as that volume starts picking up, I'll paddle. I'll go in the direction of the volume. And that serves us really well. We also have sentiment indicators that we're looking for social media. Yeah, we strip Reddit, strip it bare, looking for how many times is Doge being mentioned or Bitcoin being mentioned or Litecoin EOS, or any of these, how many times, you know, in this five minute period, one hour period, 24 hour period, we're looking at that on that bit of social Reddit, and we're looking for that on Twitter, and Facebook. And we use an artificial intelligence to take that fire hose of all that data, and then say, here's where we're seeing the momentum

building and so forth. And then we run in that direction. It's really helpful. And that's how I traded Scott as a trader, because I'm looking for, you know, again, where's the pump coming from? Not, I don't care if it's Kim Kardashian or if it's a thousand people talking about Doge. I've already said, I think Kim can lift it more than them. But if a thousand of them are posting up, posting up, posting up, posting up, that's going to dominate people who are looking for that. And that's going to lift it as well. So I'm looking for social and I'm looking for volume.

So volume precedes price, which people always say, but people generally don't end up looking at it. And it's kind of so simple. It's funny, I had Mike McGlone, a friend of mine from Bloomberg, who I'm sure you know. I love that guy. Guy, I love that guy. I can't, I love that guy so much.

Smart guy. There's a real commodity analyst and has now turned his focus, as Scott is saying, over to Bitcoin, but I'll step back. Oh, no, he's amazing. But he made a comment when he was in the pits. I can't remember if it was volume or volatility, but he said that he could smell volume or volatility in the pit, you know, based on how much people were sweating and how excited they got on what was coming. He said you could use smells to know what trade was coming. Yep. And that's true. I mean, you could tell if the pit was making money overall by how stinky it

was. In other words, because some of the traders would wear the same clothes that they wore yesterday, right down to their socks and underwear, because they're superstitious. And they said, I did everything right yesterday. I don't know why, but everything worked. So I'm not going to stop doing that until it stops working. So you could tell by the smell. And then you could also, conversely, you could tell by the bad smell that's not just body odor. You can tell by the bad smell of fear when the pit is on the wrong side of the trade. When the market rolls over and goes down 100 and everybody's playing for the bounce and then it keeps going to the downside and they're caught, that's when you smell that fear. The sweat, flop sweat, comedians call it, but you can tell by the smell in that pit that the pit is not happy

and that this is not working for them. It's really crazy. Man, something I wish I had experienced in my lifetime for sure. But so we obviously talked about Doge being obviously a trade, right? You've been in Bitcoin since 2016. You've already touched on the fact that you think we could see it at a million dollars. So I know that your mind is different on Bitcoin than as Doge. How do you view Bitcoin as a piece of someone's portfolio? Should they just be investing in it if they're a trader? Should they trade around their core position, but not only trade?

What's your position on how to treat Bitcoin? Especially after a run like we've had, I think it's sort of incumbent on anybody who's got some to think about, OK, do I really think that Max Keiser's right? And he just moved his target from 77,000 up to, I think, 90,000 for Bitcoin in the short term. He still says 220,000 this year. I don't see that. But I but Max has been at this much longer than me. And he owns a lot more coins than I do. He and Stacy are probably very much enjoying this run. But I would look at it and say, you know, we've certainly had a hard time getting through and staying above 60. 50 has held pretty well, you know, 51,000. And if you look at whale maps or something like that, folks, you can see where the most likely accumulation areas are in the market, where the whales step in and buy.

And then, you know, when we've gotten up to resistance points. So I would not be uncomfortable selling futures against doing that basis trade, Scott, at these levels, because I'm not looking for that breakout to 90,000 that Max is looking for in the short term. But I would say that you need to be nimble. And you could certainly make an awful lot of money selling upside calls against Bitcoin that you own, which is just as it is with Apple. I like renting that condo rather than letting it sit empty. Although at Voyager, they'll pay you, what, 8% for your deposited? Yeah, I was going to say up to 10 on USDC, which to me is like, I mean, I sit in that all day. To me, that's been the hugest innovation, I think, in the crypto space. In 2017, the fear that FOMO, like the fear of selling and missing it because you had to go to dollars was

one thing. Now, for me mentally, when I can sell into USDC, if I sell something and just sit there and get 10% yield compounding monthly, it's a game changer. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, some of the complete DeFi folks would say you can never leave your coins on an exchange, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I get it. But, you know, we're talking in the case of Voyager, we're talking about a three or a four billion dollar company. This is not like just some crappy offshore exchange. And publicly traded. Yep. Publicly traded in Canada. Wait till they uplist here. You want to see that? I mean, knock on wood. You want to talk about what pisses me off is that I've been focused on like

the token and the platform and I didn't buy the stock. Yeah. Up thousands and thousands of percent. Yeah. The stock last June, folks, was 19 cents. And it's traded as high as I think like $27. I mean, that's a return that would put Doge to shame. And that's because they're doing a lot of things right. They just announced a stock buyback over there, I think yesterday, if I'm not mistaken, Scott. Yesterday, I think Voyager announced some sort of share buyback when they uplist to the NASDAQ instead of it being an OTC over the counter.

It'll be on the big NASDAQ. I think that'll be a game changer for them, too. But, you know, there's all these others. I mean, you had that great article or article and tweet about Coinbase. And you and Charles Payne talked about that, which was great. Coinbase, obviously, was a heck of an investment and has done phenomenally well. It's kind of, when I look at those big companies like Coinbase and like Voyager, I look at them and say, it's almost like if Morgan Stanley said, here's the 50 things you can trade, because both of those two companies, that's more or less, you know, the range of the amount of assets that they have available. Now, you can go through a VPN and trade a whole bunch of stuff offshore too. We all know that. But so in other words, these aren't

exchanges. Coinbase isn't an exchange. Voyager isn't an exchange. But they tell you, here's the 50 assets or 60 assets that you can trade on our exchange. Some of these were too low. So Coinbase won't put them up. Can't trade them on Coinbase. Some of them have regulatory issues, like XRP, for instance, that even though that they seem to have been winning lately, that is hardly decided by the SEC. And so you can basically trade what they let you trade. But again, does the NASDAQ have the ability to hold to custody your assets? No. But these guys do, Coinbase and Voyager do. They'll pay you for it. So I mean, this is like when interactive broker says, we'll lend your deposited shares and give you a percentage of what we get for that loan, because the short sellers are always looking for a place to borrow.

Everybody wants leverage. And what's interesting is that that's transparent in the way you're kind of talking about it. And I think it's transparent with these exchanges, but then you go down the rabbit hole to like the Robin Hoods of the world, where people didn't understand that their securities are being lended. And when you buy a fraction of a share, I mean, on GameStop, people who thought they owned the stock were being liquidated when they didn't even use leverage, right? They bought a share, thought they owned that share, but it had been lended and liquidated. Right. So it's funny, I think that the stigma about the crypto space, but it's actually worse or the same in traditional markets.

Oh, yeah. The same things happen on both sides, really. Traditional markets have been around, obviously, for longer. But Bitcoin's up on its, its what 12th year now um being around uh got introduced in 2009 ish i think so we're up coming up on the 12th year of it being around and you know look at how much it's grown look at the amount of accounts i mean mean, again, you know, it sounds like an ad for Voyager, the whole thing. But Voyager announced 1 million verified accounts had been funded over at Voyager just a couple weeks ago. I mean, Scott, I created a brokerage with my brother Pete for stock and options. We sold it to E-Trade. We had 156,000 accounts that we grew from 2008 to 2016. So basically eight years, we had 156,000. Granted, those were bigger accounts,

probably, but a million accounts. And then you look at places like Coinbase and Binance, and you're just like, oh, my God, you know, these guys are financial giants. You know, those are huge numbers over there. And again, Binance is much bigger, but Coinbase is the one that's public now. But that's why, Scott, I love trading that Binance coin. Yeah, I mean, what a monster. Again, I trade it. I'm not just an investor. But I think when you were describing what really happened in that Coinbase direct listing, I think that opened some people's eyes.

Because it's not something that's as apparent to everybody as perhaps it should be. Sure. Yeah, I get the confusion. I get the confusion. I just don't get people retracting when they realize what the facts are. Like once you know that you're wrong, just say I was wrong and there was some confusion. And what's funny to me specifically about the Coinbase direct listing that I was thinking about yesterday is that there was all this outrage that they sold, even though for people that did understand it was direct listing, but none of that outrage was there before it happened when they registered those shares to sell that they had to sell. It's just a very funny thing. But I think that rolls into something we talked about the

recent drop, which was a result of liquidation and high leverage, of course. But when that happened, we heard Coinbase direct listing is the reason, US Treasury going after companies for KYC AML, America investigating Russian wallets, Chinese hash rate blackout. Okay. So every time we see a drop, you get five to 10 narratives, most of which are completely false, some from reputable sources about why it's happening. Why do we see that? Why is it always bad news right after the event trying to explain it? And why is it generally false? I wish I knew. A little bit of it was lazy reporting, quite frankly. There are a lot of regular or I'll say traditional finance, which would be stocks, bonds, options, futures. Those folks have always kind of looked askance at the crypto side of the world.

They joke about it or they look at, they love Doge, not in terms of buying it, but they love Doge because they know it's a joke coin. And they say, yeah, look at this joke coin. It's gone from hundreds of a cent to 45 cents. It's now worth more than Ford. What the heck is going on? That's the narrative that they want to push.

It's almost like the old adage, if it bleeds, it leads, Scott. They're looking for some hole in the story that they can poke at and say, see, this is garbage. This isn't a real asset. This is garbage. Meanwhile, you know, we could look at a Jim Dine or a Jackson Pollock or any of these things and say, oh, you know, that's fantastic art, a Lichtenstein, a Warhol, whatever. That's art. That's beautiful. Or you could look at it and say, this is garbage. You know, was this guy high when he just sat there dropping droplets of paint on a canvas or whatever? But nonetheless, they will justify that and not really give something that's as exciting and new as a cryptocurrency it's due. And, you know, obviously, when Satoshi created Bitcoin and, you know, more or less said, here's how we're going to do it, it's going to be proof of work. You know, obviously, there are

proof of stake coins out there as well now, but this is going to be proof of work. Here's how the miners are going to make sure that something isn't double spent and all that sort of thing. And why? Because they didn't like he or they didn't like the idea that the government was just printing money in 2008. And it was just now what are they doing? Yeah. Yeah. On steroids, which contributes, I think we would probably agree, to the run that we've seen in Bitcoin. Because you're taking all these dollars, you add $2.9 trillion here, $2.2 trillion there. They just keep printing it. And again, the asset gathers its value by its scarcity.

You're increasing the supply. Demand remains the same. It's worth less. Not worthless, but it's worth less. And that's kind of where we are. Right. So beauty is in the eye of the beholder with art, right? As you sort of touched on, one person's trash is another man's treasure, however you want to say it. NFTs, right? So now we're seeing this in the crypto and digital, in the crypto space with digital art and NFTs are much bigger than art and collectibles, but let's focus on the art side, obviously. What do you make of that space where it's headed, where it currently is in a cycle?

I'm sure that some people will overpay like crazy for something that's really not that valuable. But I'm sure also, based on what I've been saying, asset gathers its value by its scarcity. When I was talking, Scott, with one of our reporters at CNBC about Playboy, PLBY, huge unusual call activity. The stock has doubled and then tripled, and it's still on a zoom path. Obviously, Nifty Gateway, which is owned by the Winklevoss twins, they saw NFTs coming years ago, created this platform for trading non-fungible tokens. In other words, one and done a unique piece of digital art. Now that could be, for instance, like the Honus Wagner baseball cards. If there was only one, instead of, I think there are what, six or whatever Honus Wagner, six or seven of them. If there were only one, it would be worth much more, but they're still worth millions of dollars a piece. Why? Because there's a lot of

baseball fans. And if you want to own one, you know, it's going to be very dear. You're going to spend a lot of money to get it well, but anybody could, you know, take out their phone and take a picture of a Honus Wagner baseball card. Okay. So what's that picture worth? Almost nothing, whatever you want to put that it's worth, it's worth. But if you have, if you owned the one, Mona Lisa, again, just like Honus Wagner, there's a bunch of Mona Lisas, but he is recognized as only finishing one. A bunch of his students worked on the others and so forth, but there's one, Mona Lisa, it's probably worth a billion dollars hanging in the Louvre. If they wanted to turn that into an NFT and they said,

there's only one Mona Lisa NFT, what is that worth? An awful lot of money. Marilyn Monroe, since I mentioned Playboy, they have the rights to almost all of their digital images from Pam Anderson to Marilyn Monroe. They're NFTing them. It's happening. I'm assuming that's what you're getting at with the stock going up is that they've announced that Playboy is going to take their classic centerfolds and sell them as scarce NFTs. Yep. And that first cover with Marilyn Monroe on it, or a cover with Dolly Parton on it, or whatever. So I'm not just getting into the blue stuff where it's topless and so forth. I'm saying that there are unique pictures that were on that cover, that if there were only one, an NFT, a non-fungible token where it's the only one of that, that's worth a lot of money. you know, Sony or Paramount or Fox or any of these libraries, Disney, obviously,

weren't probably being properly valued as a long-term asset, because if they own that catalog, that's a valuable thing. So perhaps Disney stock wasn't being recognized as more than ESPN and the theme parks and the cruise ships and things, because they've got this asset that now we know is worth, you know, not as much as the whole company, but it's freaking worth a fortune. Same thing here with Playboy. That long time, that was just garbage. Even when they went to a website, from publishing the hardcover, not hardcover, but from publishing the paper physical version

to going just online, which they've done, that created some additional value for them, because they don't have the cost of the production distribution and all the rest of the magazine. Instead, they just have the website, which we know from you porn and all the rest are worth, you know, an awful lot of money. Now, all of a sudden, take all those images that they own, and say they could sell those as an NFT. That's why that stock is doubling and tripling is because those unique NFTs are worth a fortune. Look at that deal that that that SPAC MUDS Murdoch, when they bought tops, and they've got tie it back to

Disney, they've got Michael Eisner, who is the owner of Topps baseball cards company. And now he's going to be the head of this digital asset monster for all those cards, which is, you know, going to be trading under muds, or until they decide to change the name to Topps, I guess. But what are those NFTs worth? You know, whether it's a Bo Jackson card, or whether it's a Ted Williams or whatever, you do the NFT of that, you know, it's worth a fortune. It's why I laugh kind of when the huge criticism of Bitcoin is that it has no intrinsic value. And they'll say the same thing about NFTs. But isn't scarcity intrinsic value? Yes. Yes. And all you've got to do is find somebody that wants that asset. And now, and also imagine how easy it is to trade these assets.

So let's say that Scott, you have a Jackson Pollock hanging on the wall and you decide you'd like to sell it. Are you going to put it up online? You could, I guess, on eBay or something like that. But with a digital asset, you might be able to gather a really big crowd right away by going to Nifty Gateway or any of these others and saying, yep, I'm putting it up for sale. You know, i bought it a year ago at five mil i think this thing's worth 15 based on you know whatever and you put it up there and somebody says oh yeah i want that i mean it's much it's bringing like a christy's auction house that one room that you always see the guys with their things to the entire world in you know

with no delay the drops on these you know on nifty and all to the entire world in, you know, with no delay, the drops on these, you know, on nifty and all those, the entire world can watch and bid. And you made the best point. You only need that one sucker. It's the classic saying, there's an ass for every seat. It's like, you can build the dumbest house in the world. And if there's one guy who loves it, you know, someone will buy your house. It's so true. So yeah, the argument about intrinsic value just always makes me laugh. And you talk about money printing, what's the intrinsic value of a dollar? Yeah. I mean, what, you know, is it trust in your government and God we trust? Where does the intrinsic value of other currencies come from if Bitcoin does not have intrinsic value?

Right. And some people would say then, Scott, that, well, the value of the dollar is the United States itself and our military. Backed by the US military. Yeah. If you've got soldiers that can defend and or attack offense or defense, your currency could be worth something. It's interesting that, you know, I was just reading a book about pirates. And it's a great book. It's called The Republic of Pirates. And I think it's on either Amazon or Netflix now as a eight part series as well. But they were talking about how France and Spain were on silver and gold. And they basically minted those coins. Spain, of course, came to the New World, went down into South America, did a bunch of, you know, dastardly things to the native or indigenous people down there,

stole all the and started mining as well, didn't just steal what they already had mined, started mining themselves and bringing it back. And of course, pirates hit them as they were coming across the ocean. And meanwhile, England had paper money at the same time. you know, these coins that actually had some value based on what people would pay for an ounce of silver or an ounce of gold or a fraction of either of those. And paper money, when it just gets printed over and over and over, and there's a pile going like this of paper money. Meanwhile, there's, you know, a limited supply of an asset like Bitcoin. And again, that's why Satoshi did it the way that he or they did it. They wanted there to be a limited supply. And they didn't want it to be made worth less by simply printing with ink and paper. And these days, as we both know, they don't even

print it. They didn't print $2.9 trillion more dollars. They just moved a bunch of zeros and ones on the spreadsheet of the Fed. Yeah. It's really crazy. So I know we're getting close here with time. I'm curious. So I make the argument Bitcoin is digital gold. I really think it's the greatest investment of our generation. I really do. But as a trader, I actually right now like Ethereum better. I think it has more upside. And I'm more kind of interested in that as a trader.

I'm curious what you think about Ethereum, where its place is, and where it's headed. I agree with you 100%. If you only focused of the DeFi world, if you only focus on Bitcoin, I think you're missing out. I'm not saying you have to drop down into all the crap coins that I scalp and trade. But Ethereum, I don't scalp. I just think it's going higher. You know, smart contracts are not done. They've just begun. And Ethereum being DeFi as well makes it one that I think you really want to own. And I will make you a pinky bet right now, Scott, that it outperforms Bitcoin for the next year at least, significantly outperforms Bitcoin in terms of the return on whatever you invest, whether you buy it at $2,400, $2,500, $2,600 versus Bitcoin at $55,000.

I think from this date forward, from $422.21 till $422.22, I think it outperforms significantly. I couldn't agree more. And there's so many reasons. First of all, the Ethereum versus Bitcoin chart looks ridiculous. Like if you've ever rounding bottom, breaking out from descending resistance, I mean, everything you could possibly want. And if you just simply look at what Bitcoin did when it broke its all-time high and quickly tripled, we haven't even doubled, Ethereum hasn't even doubled from the 2018 highs. I just think technically and fundamentally, there's so many reasons to love it here. So that's, I was going to ask you for a bold prediction, but I think for the next year, Ethereum outperforming

Bitcoin, which I would make as well, I think that counts as a bold prediction. So where can everybody follow you and follow what you're doing after this conversation? Over at Market Rebellion, we have various educational courses. So we have them for stock options, futures, and cryptocurrencies over at Market Rebellion. We've got coaches and mentors. We do an awful lot of videos that we put up on YouTube. We do them live and we put them up on YouTube. So if you search Market Rebellion on YouTube, you can pick up our YouTube channel and subscribe there.

It's really been an honor and very fun to be on with you, Scott. I hope when you're publishing some more really cool things like your Coinbase article that you'll make sure that I see it so we can tweet it out and maybe talk about it again in the future. You are invited back literally anytime. It's one of the most fun conversations and enlightening. Like I said, honor someone I've wanted to talk to on the podcast for a very long time. So thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate the kind words and we will definitely do it again. Thank you, Scott.