My Half Year Review

Marking my own homework

Before my life descended into the sheer madness that is being a full-time digital coin and internet picture speculator, I had many somewhat normal jobs.

Some of the better jobs I had would encourage management and employees to participate in performance reviews twice per year.

Although most people I knew often prioritised gaming the "score" rather than maximising performance for the company's benefit, I still perceive personal performance reviews as beneficial if carried out with intellectual honesty.

As someone with no boss, it can be pretty tempting to meander about without goals or focus, and to be honest, that's kind of what I did for the majority of last year as the bull market came to an end.

This year, as avid readers will know, I'm trying really hard to treat my Crypto journey like an actual adult human being's job. Because although we're not in Up Only forever mode, this is still the most abundant ecosystem for financial opportunity that exists in the world, and not working hard to capture the upside here is truly wasting the greatest opportunity bestowed upon an individual.

Sounds somewhat hyperbolic, but I really believe it. I mean, three weeks of full-time, structured, sensible, low-risk Blur farming would have paid you an annual salary higher than that of the literal Head of the UK CBDC team!!!

So anyway, to continue with the theme of psyopsing myself into believing this is a grown-up job and not simply a virtual casino, I’m going to mark my own homework and carry out a half year performance review!

For brevity, I'll just provide the highlights of some of the more meaningful events this year and provide you all with the shortened version.

The Great

My Portfolio allocation

The biggest win for me this year wasn't actually one that took much "hard work." It simply involved doing basically nothing and sticking to the plan I set for myself in the moments after FTX crashed and burned.

Thankfully, and largely due to the fact that I took a huge amount of time off last year, I was level-headed enough to recognise that FTX going to zero would probably be the bottom of the market, and if we went lower, it was probably over forever, and I'd have to get a job again.

So, thankfully, in the weeks following the crash, I deployed almost all of my stables and became essentially fully allocated to mostly Bitcoin and some Ethereum. I’ve sold exactly 0% since then, so the unrealised return so far this year has been fantastic.

I then keep a small % of stables and active ETH that I'll use for trading whatever the latest metagame presents me and cash out any profits to my local currency to increase the number of months buffer between me and actually updating my CV.

As a result, I'm pretty much at portfolio all-time highs, with an allocation I'm happy with, that requires little thought or tinkering.

While this way of trading is unlikely to make me a billionaire, it will allow me to capture significant upside if we go into a full bull market while stopping me from doing dumb stuff in the moment and blowing up my whole portfolio out of boredom chasing the next hot narrative.

Spotting the opportunity with Blur

I’ve written about Blur many times at length, so I won’t go into detail here but TLDR - questioned narrative that it was being heavily farmed and did fundamental research, discovered that it wasn’t and spent months farming full time, got lots of free money.

My Fitness journey

At the start of this year, I could barely run to the nearest lamppost.

Since then, I've completed four half marathons and haven't missed a gym session all year.

While I'm still really very slow and really very weak by most people's standards, and I continue to get lapped by sixty year olds at my local park run, it's a humongous improvement from the desk-bound anxious weak wreck I was a year ago.

Exercise for me has moved from being something I rarely considered to being the absolute number one priority for me every single day.

I wrote a more detailed, very personal overview of this part of my life HERE.

The Good

Trading the Pepe Meta

Somehow, I was able to buy PEPE in the low single digit millions.

Somehow, I then sold all of it for a 2x before watching it go to $100 million.

The reason I've put this in the Good section instead of the Bad is that I was able to re-enter the trade at around $100m and hold most of it until the day of the Binance listing.

When I heard Avi Felman on 1000x mention that he thought there was a non-0 chance it would be this cycle's Shib, it was an easy buy back in as I knew it had made it above the strata of on-chain degens and into the circles of those with wider levels of influence.

Not my biggest profit ever, and certainly not as good as it could have been if I had held the entire way, but it's now cash in the bank and has paid for next year's family holiday.

I wrote HERE about how to recognise the “current thing” and how it can be the best indicator for future performance.

This Blog!

I started this blog as a challenge to myself to sit down once a week and write something that made some level of sense that might help me improve as a trader.

I had no real intention of publicising it, or any real expectation that anyone would read it, so seeing that over 1,000 people have stumbled upon this page is kind of absurd.

The fact that even one person reads the random words that appear in my brain is a huge shock and greatly appreciated. It helps hold me accountable and prevents me from typing random gibberish just to hit my own stupid, badly thought-out personal target I set at the start of the year

However, there have been some downsides. Right now it kind of feels like I’m midway through a marathon, and i’m questioning the reasons why I started to do this in the first place.

The initial fun spark has ended, and at times it does feel like a slog. It can take a significant amount of time and effort to write something semi-interesting, which sometimes leaves me with less time than I'd like to achieve my other tasks.

I've still found the process hugely valuable, and it's introduced me to some hyper-interesting people and opportunities that otherwise would never have become available to me.

But next year, the quantity will for sure be reducing, and the quality increasing significantly.

The Bad

Too much social media

At the height of the last bull run, Crypto Twitter was a joyous place to be. It felt insulated from the wider world of cancellations and hatred and was a place where fun and joy were abundant.

Whether it was Cobie encouraging people to give money away to random talented singers on Twitch or watching the latest CMS intern video, it felt nice to be part of the wider organism that is CT.

Now however, we we are about as far from it as can be.

The level of pessimism and general negativity is at an all-time high. Most annoyingly to me, the current trend seems to be to purposefully avoid all nuance to maximise engagement.

I can feel myself getting dumber and angrier with each passing day I spend on that site. Yet I still find myself habitually checking it far too frequently. This is something that I need to improve on.

So here I’d give myself an F grade. I know the solution - either spend less time on Twitter, or significantly curate my timeline and unfollow anyone adding zero value.

Optimising for volatility reduction

This is a bit of a niche topic, but one I certainly need to improve upon in H2.

There have been a few times this year where I've had high conviction that an NFT or token is likely to do very well as a result of some upcoming catalyst. But rather than fully capitalising on this opportunity, I've often tried to benefit from the upside while minimising volatility.

This has often resulted in me making way less profit from a trade than I should have.

A good example to explain this is Opepen. For quite a while, some of the early editions were selling for 10+ ETH, while the floor price remained flat, down significantly from its all-time high.

It was fairly clear here that people would take note of this and want to accumulate Opepens to enter the lotteries in the hopes of securing an early edition that held such a big premium.

The sensible thing to have done would have been to just buy like 20 Opepens, hold for a bit until the price re-aligned, and then take some profit.

What I instead opted to do was place a ton of bids just below the floor to "double dip" and generate Blur bid points as well as get some upside from Opepen.

While this worked, and I was able to profitably get about 1,000 extra Blur points and about 1-2 Eth of profit, had I just purchased 20 Opepens instead, I'd be up about $20,000 right now.

Tax planning and banking

A very boring topic that I won't talk about for very long, but a big issue for me over the past year is being unwilling at times to take on new opportunities because of the eventual tax headache I know it will cause me.

While this hasn't cost me too much upside in this slower market, I know that in a full bull run, I'll need to be more willing to venture to new chains with terrible block explorers and just accept the fact that I'll need to spend many days wanting to claw my eyeballs out as I desperately try to re-configure my records to calculate my tax burden.

The upside from trading in places that are difficult to use is HUGE and well worth the pain later on. The aftermath however is a massive, unenjoyable pain and my least favourite thing about this job.

Summary

So overall, in typical mid year review fashion I’ll give myself a score.

I’d say this past six months or so have been a solid B+

Despite the market being relatively slow I’ve capitalised on most of the major opportunities that have presented themselves. I’ve made some great friends in the space and put myself out there far more.

Most importantly, I'm continuing to prove to myself that I can be continually profitable, even when the market is boring. Ultimately, that's all that really matters and is all that stands between me doing this really fun thing and having to return back to working a boring office job again.

There are some areas of improvement that are required, but they are relatively minor, and with some adjustments, I think I'll see some significant improvements here over the next half-year.

Join me next week where I’ll talk about my goals for the second half of 2023!

P.S. I haven’t forgotten about the AIxCrypto intersection post - that’s coming. Just in a different surprise format that you’ll hear more about soon :)

The information contained in this text is for general information purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. The author of this text does not make any representations or warranties, express or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability with respect to the information, products, services, or related graphics contained in this text for any purpose. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk. The author of this text does not endorse or recommend any specific products, services, or companies. The author of this text is not a financial advisor and this text should not be used as a basis for any financial decisions. Always seek professional financial advice before making any financial decisions.