From the [adnotated] DMs with my star pupil. In a quiet corner of the interwebs where wisdom is shared, theses forged, and boys turned into men traders:
NFTier: So Pete, because we both started as toadzi believers together, I feel I have to share it with you but for the first and last time, I put one of my toadz for sale.ii Pains me to do but I looked at my portfolio and it is ~90% toadz so I wanted some diversification and money to trade with haha. I literally second guessed a hundred times but I feel it will give me the safety to trade, while still having toadz as my number one and only long term bet. What do you think?
Pete: 90% is a heavy weighting! Definitely safe and smart to diversify. I love Toadz and still believe in them hugely but it’s a flat market rn and could remain so for a while, there are definitely hotter opportunity for fast traders!
NFTier: I feel exactly this way. Plus, I am only selling one of 15 and I do not plan to touch the others so I feel I still have my conviction secured. Especially for people who need to trade to keep acquiring, like myself haha, I thought it was the best idea. But it does bring a tear to my eye! Maybe I’ll get it back someday.
Pete: There’s so many fish in the sea! I’m trying to learn this lesson as well atm. My latest thinking is that far fewer of the “gems” in our bags are truly non-replaceable.iii Even the really really rare shit comes back for sale eventually. Almost nothing is nearly as “vaulted” as OS handles would have us believe.
NFTier: Totally agreed! At the end of the day, this is a market, which means as much as we might love the art, artist or story, market forces can show us otherwise. Plus we don’t know people’s intentions when they are buying collections as it might simply be for quick trades so we can’t read too much into anything. I’ve learned that no matter how much I love something, due to market psychology, Its always better to wait for a pullback.
Pete: 90% of the market is looking for short term profit opportunities. At least in a bull market!iv
NFTier: Yess totally, for example, I was a bit surprised when I saw Anonymoux, who is of course much smarter than me haha, listing his recently purchased toadz for marginal gains. Was surprising because there are dozens of better opportunities for quick trades. I first saw the purchases as a sign of great conviction, which I’m sure it still is because he has so many, but after seeing the listings, it changed my perspective a little on thinking about people’s rationales for purchases. So it emphasizes your point that 90% people are in it for profit opportunities. I just thought it might not be the case for some people who already have great collections but can never rule anything out haha.
Pete: The copytrade always has risks!v My intuition with Anon in this instance was that he tried to pump the marketvi and wasn’t as successful as he was hoping, and so is moving on to greener pastures and faster opportunities. Anon is a [very good] trader at heart, that much I learned in New York hanging out with him a bit.vii
NFTier: And this in fact is a very important area of discussion. I’ve helped a lot of beginners in the space and one of the most common questions I’m asked is who can they trust? As in, who is a trader, a collector, shiller etc. I always back away from answering these because I hate to categorize individuals but there definitely is something to be said there, especially for someone just coming in. How do you think I should proceed to answer this question, while being very nice of course haha?
Pete: I’d say it’s a spectrum between trader [micro] and investor [macro], between people with very very short time horizons and very very long time horizons. KBMviii is one of the most extreme examples on the trader side where they trade many many times per day,ix and someone like me would be on the other end of the spectrum where we hardly trade at all, maybe only every few weeks or months in size.
NFTier: I think this is the most logical way to explain it – a spectrum. It’s important for people to look at influencers history and put them at the spectrum, while at the same time seeing where they fall so they are best aligned. This is another lesson I’ve learned from toadz haha, I just love toadz for all they’ve taught me!
Pete: Toadz really are the gift that keeps on giving.
NFTier: Which [still] leads to ethical questions about whether it’s right to buy something in the hopes that others you influence buy it back from you at a higher price – but I guess we’ll save that for later hahaha?
Pete: Whether or not it’s “ethical” or not, it’s the way of the world. Boomers had equities, [physical] art,x and real estate that they’ve tried this approach with. Gen X mostly bought in, lots of Millennials too but some rejected, most Gen Z seems to be rejecting!
NFTier: Great analogy there! Putting it in terms of generations really does make it clear that this is the way things have always worked.
Pete: Just consider how much “morality” had been infused into “home ownership” by our parents to their children (us). They want us to buy their bags! Lol and they’re willing to bring interest rates down to ZERO to give us a fighting chance, but it’s still not enough… and they’re loading the economy with waaaaay too much debt as a result, fragilizing the whole fucking thing, just to keep it alive.
NFTier: Omg wow, with this context, any thought of morality or ethics does indeed go out the window.xi But you are right, if we zoom out, Anonymoux NFT trading is a microcosm of what’s been happening all along, but at a much larger scale and with impact on so many lives. It all makes sense in my mind now. I can think about the ethics all I want, but if this is the way things work and it is, then I am better served using it to change mine and my family’s life for the better. I can philosophize later haha.
Pete: Absolutely! Take care of your family first and foremost. Philosophy and morality debates will still be there when you’re living like Scrooge McDuck.xii
NFTier: Can’t wait! We’ll discuss it together, sitting on top of gold, or Bitcoin, whatever works haha. Thank you Pete, you have clarified many topics on my mind, I’m grateful.
Pete: The pleasure is mine as always.
Whether we’re trading Toadz or our own time, it’s all a trade. Every moment we’re living is a trade with our environment on some terms and in some way. Socially, economically, or physically, we’re constantly exchanging parts of our existence for things we want and need from the world. Whether each of us trades with an eye towards one hour candles or one decade candles mostly comes down to our respective temperaments and constitutions.
The hours pass regardless of what we do with them, just as the decades do. Until they don’t.xiii
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- Recall my 1 TOAD === 1 TOAD article that helped light the match for the epic Toadz bull run in early October? What can I say, I’m not going to apologise, Toadz legit got me turnt and the gospel just spread itself from there. ↩
- For the hundredth time, Toadz don’t sell shame so not sure why my man was worried, but hey, I appreciate the possibly unwarranted respect! ↩
- There’s a subtle but oft-elided difference between “non-fungible” and “non-replaceable.” The former typically refers to the certificate of authenticity pertaining to a digital artwork or digital asset, but it does not strictly follow that these pertained artworks/assets are unique in the eyes of the market. Take a random XCOPY edition like “hello admin dm me,” barring extremely interesting provenance, THEY’RE ALL THE SAME. (Indeed, even for Top Shot, it turns out that serial numbers didn’t really matter all that much after all. Oh well, live and learn!) And for the mighty Punks, is there really that much difference between two straight blondes with different coloured lipstick? Really? ↩
- This figure is just randomly pulled from Gary Vee’s keynote at NFT.NYC, which I wasn’t in the audience for (I was in the audience down the street on Broadway) but this is the magic of attending conferences in 2021! We can spend all our time schmoozing (as the lord intended) and then catch up on the lecture content days, weeks, and months later. Anyways, suffice to say that I think that ape brother Gary might even have been conservative with his estimate: it could very well be 95%+ of NFT market participants that would just as happily be trading orange juice futures (not unlike SBF) but just see the ripest opportunities in this corner of crypto.
FTR, and just in case you hadn’t guessed, yours truly is in that 5% or less of thesis-driven long-termers who literally gets off on the idea of merging their two favourite things in the world – art and crypto – into one wonderfully nascent and opportunity-rife asset class. Being in this minority doesn’t make me “better” than the other 95%, even if it does mean that I’ll much less rarely claim to “not know what I’m doing here” and that “I’m just making it up as I go” (because I know exactly what the fuck I’m doing here). Still, I’ve almost certainly under-performed the majority of the 95% in 2021, the best of them by an order of magnitude or two. But we each have to work to our strengths, which we can only do when we know ourselves, and over a long enough time horizon, I’m doing juuuust fine, don’t you worry ’bout lil’ ol’ me. ↩
- Careful who you copytrade, kiddos. ↩
- Not in some filthy “influencer” way either, in the friendliest and toadz-iest way possible, ie. with a few hearty gm’s featuring Toadz from his excellent collection and a lot of “!vibe” comments in the twitterverse. Wholesome shit! If there’s any critique of this tactic, it’s that it’s actually not filthy enough to single-handedly move the market. Then again, in this November 2021 crab market, what would such a single-handed manoever even look like? Remember kids, timing isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. ↩
- I really do respect Anonymoux and other skilled traders like him who can read markets so well in real-time. Watching him fade the shit out of the mega Toadz bull run to
15 ETH1 TOAD floor, including his monstrous420 ETH1 TOAD Legendary sale to Meta4 was like watching a train about to leave the station but being physically unable to run after it; like he had on Nike runners and I had on Balencie Croc Madames and we were both trying to catch the Darjeeling Limited. ↩ - Not to single out KBM but he’s ~the only trader’s trader that I can even halfways tolerate on twitter, and ~the only one I haven’t blocked/muted. He’s as miserably pessimistic as the rest of them but at least he’s not as vulgar and flashy, and his memes are much funnier. ↩
- Lest you think I’m the kind of asshole/moron who looks down on micro-savvy traders, in the same way that it’d be insane to look down on micro-savvy Starcraft players, I most certainly do not. In the crypto/NFT space, guys like KBM, Anonymoux, and others provide an invaluable service in visibility and liquidity for macro-savvy players like yours truly (and eg. DCinvestor, etc). This market is waaaaay healthier for having the full spectrum of intelligent market participants in it. The fast-movers are the Marc Rich of our generation (for more on which, if in a slightly dramatised manner, check out “The World for Sale” by Blas and Farchy, published 2021 by Oxford University Press — indeed, data is the new oil). ↩
- Inflation is measured in art (and Nautilus), y’know. ↩
- It’s interesting to consider whether seeking money first and foremost [as the micro-trader does] vs seeking cultural influence and power first and foremost [as the thesis-driven macro-investor does], whether one is inherently more “moral” or “ethical” than the other. I’d argue not, morality and ethics being as they are relative constructs defined by the elite in a given group. So to the extent that both micro- and macro-driven market participants have honour amongst their respective bands of thieves, I can’t really see the scales tipping in favour of one or the other. ↩
- Sitting atop the mystical pyramid provides a certain sort of perspective. Sitting mid-pyramid is decidedly… different. ↩
- RIP to the man who inspired me more than any other since 2018, the greatest artist of the last decade, Virgil Abloh. ↩
Updated with the saddest final footnote since Steve passed, and before that, since Douglas.
Seriously what the fuck this hurts