Buy the current thing
A story of Trends and Traps
Typically, a unique “thing” captures the hearts and minds of a subset of users, starting a new meta and spreading like wildfire across the virtual land.
What I’ve observed is that this strange phenomena happens multiple times per year and mostly follows a similar pattern or trend.
The current example of this is the Pepe coin, which has sparked a flurry of activity in the crazy world of Memecoins.
Before Pepe, we had Checks by Jack Butcher, and before that came countless examples of things that garnered enough attention to become “the current thing” from bull markets gone by.
Loot, Shiba, OHM, Historic NFTs, Goblintown, BAYC, and arguably alt L1s like AVAX and Sol are all examples.
This is usually quite challenging for those of us who are terminally online. If you’re in a few group chats or active on Twitter, you usually will have seen the latest “thing” pretty early on.
Maybe someone sent you a link when Pepe was at an $800k market cap, or you saw the SBF tweet about Sol at $3, or you skipped the Loot free mint because gas was too high.
What we tend to forget is that the link we were shared is often the 18th link we’ve seen that day. And for the past 100 days, those 18 links have amounted to nothing as we’ve slowly squandered our portfolio away gambling on the advice of random internet strangers.
But when you see that $800k market cap coin suddenly trading at $8 million, your brain plays this weird trick on you. It tells you that you are late, or that you’ve missed it, and that to cope with the pain of missing it, you should seek out the “next thing” so you too can capture that 10x.
So to feel better, you try to learn from your mistakes, and you spend every waking hour staring at your three screens + phone, unable to take your eyes off the charts, constantly refreshing Twitter, and seeking out alpha in Discord.
Copycats appear, PepeINU launches and instantly 5xs, BabyPepe on Arbitrum reaches a 500k market cap and rugs. Suddenly, every 5 minutes, someone is sharing a link to a new coin that's just launched, promising to be the next big thing.
Over the course of a few days, you’ve lost on 8 trades and won on 6. Overall, you’re up 0.3 ETH.
Even though you’re in profit, all the people you hang out with are up far more than you, and the “for you” page on Twitter keeps showing you how random people turned 0.01 ETH into $1 million.
You go to bed annoyed.
You awake to see that Pepe is now at $80 million. You’ve done it again. How could you be so stupid? That 10x you missed out on is now a 100x. What were you thinking?
It’s definitely too late now for Pepe. It's 100x from when you first saw it. The top is definitely in. Maybe you can make money on the newer coins that are launching?
So you repeat the exact same process.
A few days go by, and you’re now down 0.1 ETH because the third WSB token you’ve bought rugged you.
You’re feeling anxious, the few hours of sleep you manage to get are interrupted by intrusive dreams about red candles and honeypots.
You wake up, instantly grab your phone, and open Twitter. The first few tweets you see are people mentioning Pepe.
You check the chart, and Pepe is now at $700 million.
You did it again.
The funny thing is, I could have written this exact same post but swapped out the words and the x's for any of the "new" or "current" things we've seen over the past few years.
How many people bought the next 20 open editions after Checks reached 0.2eth but didn't buy Checks?
How many people lost all their money buying Loot for Punks or Bloot but refused to buy Loot because they skipped it when it was free?
How many people took to Twitter to laugh at videos of bored ape collectors making ape noises in the streets but then proceeded to buy the 112th ape derivative NFT?
How many people got rugged buying into OHM fork presales on obscure alt L1 chains?
How many of those people went on to cope and kick themselves when Checks hit 3 ETH, Solana passed $200, and Loot went to whatever crazy price it hit when the VCs decided it was the future of gaming and YOLO'd their LPs money away.
The pattern is usually the same.
Maybe the very thing you're looking for is actually the current thing.
Now, of course, critics of this will point out that you can still make a ton of money on derivatives, or they will tell me that it's very hard to spot a "current thing," and most "current things" go to zero anyway.
While the above are sometimes true, I'd argue that it comes down to a skill issue.
It's of course possible to make money on derivatives, but you still need to be early to the narrative. If you're buying the 15th OHM fork expecting to get rich, it's probably not going to work out well for you.
With enough time in the market, you can start to develop a sixth sense for when something has that special sauce that will capture the hearts and minds of the degens.
From there, you can hopefully capture the main trade and simultaneously profit from the early derivatives.
Sometimes even super experienced players get it wrong, but the beauty of this space is that the errors are vastly outstripped by the profits you make when you are right.
And, of course, you need to remember to sell the current thing when it starts to no longer be the current thing. Otherwise, you'll quickly end up as a bag holder when you realise your Moonbirds were never worth 40 ETH. You'll cope again, just in a different way.
But anyway, next time you find yourself in a Discord asking what the next "current thing" is, examine the possibility that what you are seeking is right in front of you, and has been all along.
THIS IS NOT FINANCAL ADVICE THESE ARE ALL LITERALLY THE DUMBEST THINGS I HAVE EVER SEEN. THEY ARE TOKENISED COINS OF A FROG OR A PICTURE OF A CHECKMARK. NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE. IF YOU ARE TRADING HERE YOU WILL LOSE ALL OF YOUR MONEY. PLEASE DO SOMETHING ELSE MORE PRODUCTIVE WITH YOUR TIME. THIS IS NOT ADVICE TO BUY ANYTHING PEPE IS ALREADY 700M AND WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY GO TO ZERO. EVERYTHING IS STUPID.