EP2 - Greed

On managing greed in crypto markets.

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Hello everyone and welcome to episode two of the Jords podcast, powered by Kinetiq, of course. I am extremely happy. I'm extremely inspired actually after episode one has dropped. Can feel like a little bit of a relief after so long umming and ahhing and thinking about releasing something like that, but to be honest, it was quickly followed by elation and contention, and I'm just very happy with the response from episode one, so much so that I have been inspired to record another episode in quick succession. My initial intention was to do a podcast every two weeks, which is my agreement with Kinetiq, but both them, myself, and I hope you as well will be happy to know that I I can't suppress inspiration. and I think this is probably part of the reason why I really wanted to record again, is because it's a timely episode. I want to talk about greed. I want to talk about greed and the problems that come with that. You know what I mean? I think it's an extremely prevalent, it's an ever-present, it's an omnipresence in the space we occupy, it's hard to get away from It always feels like it's just around the corner knocking at the door. And it's an extremely isolating and sad experience. You know, I can get caught in the flywheel of ingratitude followed by guilt. I'm in an extremely fortunate position. I have made more money than I had ever hoped to have, and I live a very nice life as a result, and that's something that I'm extremely grateful for. But I'm only grateful for that in the moment, but there's definitely times where I'm scrolling Twitter, and it's very difficult. It's very difficult to be so close to opportunity but not seize upon it, you know what I mean? I think it's very difficult to be in the room as a lot of people seemingly make a lot of money, and you you naturally think about what could have been, you know, it could have been me, could have been my friend, uh, my friend did this, we were meant to do it together. It's just a very common experience. I want to make these episodes timeless, so I'm not going to stamp in this particular time what's going on, but it's the same situation that we've had many times before. You know what I mean? We've had memecoin season, we've had NFT season, we've had airdrop season, we've had times when money falls from the sky, we've had times when people launch coins and make a lot of money in quick succession. And inevitably, the times when you're making the most amount of money are the times when you kind of feel the most sad about the lack of money you're making, which is a counterintuitive experience, but it's also the truth, I think, and it makes the top of the cycle and when a lot of liquidity is being thrown around, it makes these times particularly difficult because on the timeline you feel like everyone else is winning except for you, and that makes it a lot more isolating. And it's difficult to talk about it's one thing to talk about losses, but it's another thing to talk about loss of opportunity. You know what I mean? I think that especially with things like memecoins and NFTs, it can be really sad to sell too soon and and just watch them continue on without you, and then imagine naturally what would happen in a in a world which absolutely doesn't exist where you held it the whole time and you know you're you're on a boat somewhere and life is good, but that's not actually the reality. But it can be difficult, you know. I think the first thing I wanted to establish is why it matters, because I think that your ability to manage greed is the single biggest differentiator between you making it and you not making it. I think it's a powerful statement, but it's true because inevitably you have a certain amount of risk tolerance required to make a lot of money to make really high returns from a small bag, and that same risk tolerance that is required to turn 10k into 100k into a million or 1k into 50k, that same risk tolerance is the exact same risk tolerance required to lose it all, you know, and that's why we have these same stories of oh, okay, I've round tripped my net worth three times, but I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna make it again. That's all well and good, but that basically tells the reader or tells me that you've you missed that point of changing from wealth generation to wealth preservation because that's the difference between those three times you round tripped everything and the person that kept it was able to change their priority from I want to make as much money as possible, and the idea of losing it doesn't matter because I'm in this pursuit of a very big number, versus I actually live a very good life right now. I'm really quite content with where I'm at, and the idea of losing my money or changing my lifestyle or impacting the life that I live is so scary that I'm gonna change my risk tolerance because profit comes at a premium and loss comes at a further detriment. You know, it it feels worse than a gain. And I think inevitably profit and loss is always gonna be relative. comparison is the thief of joy, you know. We have a lot of stoic comments and and quotes that we can go into as well, but inevitably comparing yourself to others is gonna lead to your own detriment, especially in finance when it is really incomparable, you know, and someone who has 10 million might be extremely depressed and sad, but able to post really big PnLs, and someone with 5k that they've made might have changed their life, given them the flexibility to stop their work or maybe take a break, maybe pursue greener pastures. this idea of kind of life changing money or fuck you money is really unique and individual. So I think that that is another part. We we don't really compare ourselves as much when it comes to hobbies, you know. If we're playing tennis at the local club, yeah, we wish we were better, the guy who's the best in the club, it'd be nice to play tennis that well, but it's a stark contrast to actually saying, oh damn, we were both in that same token, that guy held it for longer, and now he's a millionaire, unrealized, usually, and I'm just sitting here working my same job that I was yesterday. I think there's just a lot bigger comparables. it's sometimes good and it's sometimes bad. I think it's the same as social media overuse. Like, how do you handle this greed? You know what I mean? it's fucking hard. it's really hard. I think that over time you become better at things by realising it earlier. I think that by identifying a problem at its earliest point, you become more likely to succeed or beat it next time. I think that there's a concept that I think it was maybe Sam Harris described once of having like a mental rep in meditation where essentially, yeah, you can meditate, you get distracted, but every time you try, you build one more mental rep, so then your sets get larger. And I think the amount of times that we deal with greed, identify with it, deal with it, and move on. Every time we do it, we get a little bit better and we get a little bit better at identifying it earlier, and then we need to be able to figure out what actionable steps we can take to take a step back. So I think obviously social media plays a very big role in it. We see people like Instagram, for instance, every single day on Instagram, you can see someone's best day. You can see someone getting married, you can see someone on a snowboarding holiday, you can see someone on their honeymoon, because everyone around the world has their best day that they've ever lived someday. And if you compile that onto one feed, then inevitably you're gonna see a compilation of people's best days, which is great because you should celebrate life and people are living well, and that's lovely to see. But it's not so nice when in the financial world you're seeing someone's best day every day, and you're comparing it to your everyday because you're gonna feel like you are not succeeding in a world full of people that are succeeding. And the other thing that is important to consider at least is how many people are showing you just kind of fake nonsense. We see a lot of fake PnLs thrown around, we see a lot of bundled coins, for instance, that you don't have that same access, and that person who is posting that PnL isn't necessarily more skillful than you, they just have better access than you, and that's all it is. So yeah, I think that greed is just something that we all have to deal with all the time. It doesn't necessarily go away. I mean, I've I'm very capable of feeling content when everything's going up and when I don't have as much exposure as I had thought I would, or when things are bad, I don't get greedy. It's when things go up. even if I'm extremely proud of what I'm doing, and the version of myself three months ago would be absolutely shocked by the results and euphoric at the idea of what the prices might be I can catch myself thinking, you know, I can catch myself feeling like I could have done better and like I should have taken more risk, and when it's obvious, it's obvious. And I think that for me, what is inevitably the underlying cause of all this is the moving goalposts. We move our goalposts from I remember when I first got into crypto, I had big dreams of owning a whole Bitcoin. That was my whole dream. I wanted to scale my holdings until I owned a whole coin. I wanted to be a whole coiner. I wanted to use my salary from my job to invest in Bitcoin over time, DCA. I wanted to try and create money through altcoin trading or NFTs or whatever it might have been that was possible. And my wildest dream was to own one Bitcoin. And when you're dreaming, you think of long-term horizons, you think of very lofty goals. And I think that that's really important to do. because it's beautiful to achieve things, you know, it feels really good to have a goal in mind and a big overarching light at the end of the tunnel that you try every day to reach. It's really important, and it's one of the most beautiful things in the world for me, right? like uh episode one of the podcast, it's been a thing that it's been in my head for a long time, and there was a lot of preparation, there was a lot of messing around, and to hit post on that felt really good, and it felt even better when it was validated by people who wanted to listen to it. But if in three weeks, in two weeks, next week, I am already normalised that the first episode was out, but now I wanted to be growing faster, and I have new goals, and I'm moving the goalposts already, then I'm sucking all satisfaction away from the success. And I think that's what we do with crypto. I think we start with a goal like owning a Bitcoin, we get there, and then we 10x that goal, and then we start taking other people's goals. We start taking other people's conviction to achieve other people's goals, and at the end of the day, all we're left with is a an empty mind and blurred vision, and we never get to stop and celebrate our success. And I think that is that is a sad place to be, and I think it's where most of us spend most of our time, especially in market conditions where everything is going up and it seems like everyone else is winning except you, it can be really isolating, and I know that feeling. I remember at the bottom of the FTX drop in 2022, I I had finally achieved my goals months before that. I'd sold really well, I'd waited it out, I'd felt really good, and I had I'd done everything right, and I remember entering Solana, started putting money in something like $20-ish, and I was I was extremely proud of my entries, I was very happy, I took a lot of risk in doing so, and then inevitably it goes down to eight dollars, and you think about the drop from 200 to 20, and you think, wow, that's 90% down, but you forget that there's still another 60-70% down if it just goes between 20 and 8 So I remember looking at my net worth at the bottom of FTX and just thinking, wow, you you fucking idiot. Like you did it again, you took too much risk, you didn't need to do that, we were happy, and I remember really really feeling isolated, you know. That's what it that's what it feels like. I do obviously remember being quite happy to get better entries in between that and I was able to shove more capital in, and obviously I wouldn't go back and change anything because it served me very well, but it is it's really difficult to look yourself in the mirror if you've given in to greed, and it can feel like that at the bottom and at the top. And I think what I promised myself, and this is maybe an example of of myself moving the goalposts, sometimes productively, sometimes not so productively, is I remember promising myself at that point that when I get back to what how much money I had when I was happy and when everything was good, then I would stop. And then I got there, and then I moved it a little bit more and I moved it a little bit more, and inevitably now I'm much further ahead than that goal that I promised myself to stop at. But I did action one thing, which was to decrease my risk tolerance as I got richer. I think as I made more money, I reduced the chance of me feeling like I felt on that FTX bottom with every dollar that I got more. Every time that I succeeded, I celebrated. Every time I hit the goal that I wanted to, I took note of it and I did something to mark it. Because I think there's very few times in crypto where we let ourselves win, you know. I think as soon as we get the trade that we've been dreaming of, we immediately think, wow, I could have sized up higher, I could have had that on leverage, I still sold too soon, it went up after. We just very rarely allow ourselves to be happy. And I think that that's a really sad underlying truth of crypto is we just very rarely allow ourselves to be content in a decision that we've made that has increased our success in life it's got us closer to our financial goals. And if you open Reddit for one second and you look at how many people are trying to save money to try and retire a few years earlier, or how many people are just getting by. And if you look at the stats around the US emergency savings, that's in a country like the US, how many people are limited and restricted of what they can do tomorrow or an emergency situation, or their ability to even have financial security to be able to seek greener pastures in a different job. You just see so much more caution and so much more awareness of small values in finance that we neglect. You know, we intentionally stay ignorant of that so we can be sad about not making as much money as we could. Like that is such a privileged position to come from, and I think we rarely stop to just appreciate how much beauty there is into knowing you did well but thinking you could have done better. I think that is a privileged position to be in, especially if you did extremely well but you didn't do perfect. These are positions where most people in the world would envy, and I just think we need to stop more and pat ourselves on the back, you know. Like maybe it's difficult if you don't pre-define goals. I think that there is specific problems that come with specific things. I think with perp trading, obviously you see the live number and you want to increase the leverage, you want to increase returns as quickly as you can. With meme trading, you have this inevitable collapse that you're trying to beat, and you have these very large numbers that get thrown around, and you have oh, if only I did this, if only I did that. you just have these very unique problems in crypto where it seems like the stars aligned for us to not appreciate how far we've come, and everything feels accelerated. It feels like instead of us not celebrating how far we've come over a year period, we get sad because we haven't made it overnight. what do I think I would do to try and best front-run greed? A few things. So one thing that I've spoken about is defining goals. I think that having goals in mind that are clear over a long period of time and defined are really important. And I think it's important to define them when you are not in the mix of it. Because if you've made a hundred grand on some meme and you annualize your run rate, and you say, Well, okay, I want to be a millionaire by next week, that is not a reasonable goal to set. You want to be setting goals like I want to own this much unit value of Solana, I want to hold it until this price, I want to have this much money. At this much money, I'm going to you know take my girlfriend out to dinner, I'm gonna buy my mom something, I'm going to just sit back and appreciate it. And I think I give this same advice to people in relationships or people in the extremes of anything. Like if you are, and by people, I mean also myself, this is how I handle it. When I'm really sad or when I'm really happy, I like to write down like a time capsule to capture that moment in time. And I think at the bottom of bear markets, at the top of Euphoria, these are good times to capture it. Or right now, you know, right now is the best time to do it. Is how do you feel about where you're currently at, and how do you think you would feel in the future if you achieved XYZ goal? If you got to this much money, if you had this much net worth, if this coin went to this price, any of things like that. If you write down how you think that would make you feel, and how special and grateful you would find that, I think it's quite empowering. I think that when you read that same that same note in the future, like no one can communicate it quite like your own voice to you. And if you were to communicate that properly, then you open it in the future and you say, Oh wow, I remember when I used to think like that, and I've fucking fried my brain in the meantime, and now I don't appreciate it or I'm not grateful for any of these things. So I think writing down now what you think you would feel in the future is really important because you'll revisit it in your own voice. I think that a gratitude journal at the risk of sounding a bit self-helpy, sorry, but I do think there's like no silver bullet, right? I think there's no silver bullet of do XYZ and you will you'll miss out on greed. I think it's naturally part of this ecosystem, for better or worse. But inevitably, what it is important to do is remind yourself how good fucking life is. Like life is beautiful. The fact that we breathe every day is just absolutely phenomenal. never take tomorrow for granted. Never take the fact that your parents or your friends or your siblings or family or anyone, like the health of these people in your life should never be taken for granted. And if we sit down for two seconds every morning or every evening and just think about that, I do like a little five-minute journal, it's two minutes in the morning, three minutes in the evenings kind of thing. And it's just like three things I'm grateful for, what I want to do for the day. Really, really basic things. I'm not gonna get too self-helpy or preachy. But if you can just take a moment to just consider good fortune, it's one of those things that helps. You know, it's one of those things that helps. I think the the other thing to remember is that opportunity is ever present. We have this weird obsession that like one last cycle, one last time to make it, one final year before the permanent underclass catches up on everyone. We just hear the same thing every time, every cycle, every few years. and I just really don't think. it's accurate I think in my experience, there has been opportunity pretty much every year, apart from a few around financial crisis, but even in financial crisis, there is opportunity for those who have capital. even in COVID, there's opportunity for people to do things and it resets markets. Like this opportunity just exists because inevitably the markets are controlled by greed and the cycles of greed. And as we're talking about right now, and as we've been talking about for the last 20 minutes, greed doesn't go away. Everyone deals with it, everyone actions things as a result of it, and everyone acts upon it. Everyone over levers at the top, everyone oversells at the bottom, forced capitulation. It's the same thing, and that's what controls markets, and that's what controls liquidity, and that's what controls opportunity. So we just need to all hold hands and accept that opportunity is here to stay. It's not going, you don't need to make it by tomorrow. you know, the average life expectancy is something like 80 years old now. You're probably not 80, you've got a long time to achieve your goals. And I think we just really need to fucking slow down and accept that we have time. You have time, you are okay. Every bit of underperformance in your past has accumulated lessons and goals and knowledge that you will use inevitably to improve yourself and get to where you want to go. You know, that you either win or you learn is the meme, but it's true. Like you can lose, you can learn, and over time you get better at losing and you get better at winning, and that's what happens. And I think we just need to accept that every decision we've made and every loss we've taken and every profit we've taken all accumulates to our story, and our story is long because that is our weapon against greed is knowing that we have fucking time on this earth to accumulate success. And if we don't think we have time in this earth, then we should step away from fucking computers and go outside and go hug our mothers and tell our friends that we love them because it's a fucking waste of time, you know. If if we accept that we have time in this earth, then we should use it, we should be grateful of it, and we should know that we have time and opportunity will stay, and over time we'll get better. If we don't think we have time in this earth, then go fucking do something more important than sitting in front of a screen and looking at charts. That's my thoughts. I do think it's also important to just fucking to have people who are normal in your life as well. I think a lot of people spend time with people just in this ecosystem, and it's really important to have people who have normal problems in the midst of us worrying about, you know, oh, I didn't make a million dollars yesterday. There is a normal person saying, Oh, you know, I you know, my tennis instructor broke his fucking arm last week, and that's pretty shit because he can't give lessons and he doesn't have a business that scales outside of lessons, so I had to help him to like feed tennis balls to other people so he could keep doing lessons, and it's just important to be around people having real problems and reminding yourself that like this guy isn't worried about not making a million dollars, he's worried about fucking being able to show up tomorrow. He's having to worry about if it rains and he can't make income because you can't fucking give a lesson in the rain Like it is important to be grounded by normal people in your life because if you let lifestyle creep just go all throughout your life, and you don't spend time with normal people anymore, then you just lose touch with reality completely, and I think that's not going to be good for anyone, and it also makes you kind of a boring person. You want to have a diverse group of friends with a unique set of circumstances and problems, and I just think that makes for a more fulfilling life anyway. But you need to make sure that you're connected with the real world and not just hyper-plugged in spending all your time on Twitter looking at PnLs of six figures, because that's just going to melt your brain, and you're not going to be an interesting person to be around. So I want to just close this out now by saying that you're not alone. You know, the curse is part of the blessing, and it takes time, it's worth improving on, and it'll help other elements of your life. Like managing greed and being comfortable with where you are in life and feeling successful in your own right is extremely important. And it's the same lesson we learn in finance, it's the same lesson we learn in relationships, and I think in general, it's a it's there's a reason that a lot of traders turn into philosophers and get really interested in the subject. It's because mastering your own mindset and understanding greed is an extremely deep battle, and it's a personal one, and I think it's worth investing on now. I think that there are infinite opportunities that lay ahead, but don't let anyone convince you that there isn't time because time is the one thing that we do have, and opportunities won't leave. I think that there's the whole time sensitivity thing is a tactic for salesmen and scammers. It's the whole you need to click this button right now, or you're getting hacked immediately, click this, or you'll lose all your money. And we do. We click it because we panic and we freak out. But as soon as we know deep breath, we have time, opportunity isn't going anywhere, then I think we can act much more reasonably and much more profitably, I believe. And last but not least, I think it's important to note that all the opportunity in the world doesn't actually fucking matter if you can't appreciate it. And if you can't appreciate what you have now and the opportunity you have in front of you and how far you've come, then you're not gonna appreciate future riches at all. I think there's a great quote that I'd like to maybe wrap up on or get close to is any man who does not believe what he has is more than ample is an unhappy man, even if he is master of the whole universe. And I think it's super important because you don't just reach a point in time where greed disappears and you're happy with what you have. It's an everyday process, and the more you're able to normalize it now and be happy with what you have, the more grateful and better you'll be able to handle the future. And I also think that moment that single important differentiator of changing from wealth generation to wealth preservation, the single most important moment of differentiation, you'll be more prepared to to make the right decision when it comes. If you can handle your shit now. And lastly, I just want to say I believe in you. I've always had the theory of why not me, and I can't imagine why not you. So I believe in you. Take your time, don't stress, look around, smell the flowers, smell the roses, life is beautiful, and I think we can do it. You know, I think we can fucking do it if we if we just take our time and appreciate the beauty on the other side of the curse of opportunity and greed. Thank you for listening. This is episode two of the Jords podcast. I want to say a big shout out to Kinetiq for sponsoring and partnering with me for this podcast. It wouldn't be happening without them. Very grateful for all that they do. if you want to check out their markets.xyz product, it is actually a pretty cool tool for social trading in the non-scammy way. It's for kind of perps and markets. And if you want to, they have kind of a pretty cool interface to track profitable wallets and interact with profitable traders. Even if you don't use it to trade and you just want to use it to track some kind of profitable people who aren't just talking shit. I think it's a pretty cool tool. And if you want to use that, you can get cheap fees in the show notes or just sign up with the ref code Jords. And that's how I want to end it. I appreciate everyone for listening. And yeah, hopefully, more of the same to come very soon. Have a great day, everyone. Happy afternoon, morning, night, wherever you are. I appreciate you, and I will talk to you soon. Ciao.