Jack of All Trades

Interview of Jordi Alexander done by Thiccy

I first heard of Jordi Alexander in mid-2021 when a friend told me he had turned down a return offer from Citadel to move to Singapore and trade crypto under him instead. At the time, Jordi felt larger than life—sharing $5 million+ PnL screenshots from large directional bets, writing deep threads on the game theory of crypto, and going to war with the biggest Ponzi schemes of the era, publicly calling for their collapse (and watching them all go to zero). Over the years, what started as admiration from afar grew into a genuine friendship—one built not just on a frequent exchange of market ideas but on deeper discussions about how one should approach life as a whole.

Jordi is a true master of games. In his youth, he competed internationally in chess and bridge, routinely medaled in a global multi-game competition that tests all-around strategic thinking, and most recently, in 2024, added a World Series of Poker bracelet to his list of accomplishments. Jordi is the founder of Selini Capital, a crypto trading firm specializing in market making, discretionary long/short trading, and venture investing. Over the past 13 years, he has achieved an astonishing 100% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), effectively doubling his net worth every year.

We conducted this interview over Twitter spaces, where Jordi frequently discusses market takes.

What in your childhood led you to the trading path you're on today?

Playing chess, playing poker and bridge was part of my childhood. I took chess and bridge specifically very seriously in my teenage years. And playing on an international level, competing at like international youth championships and stuff like that gave me the confidence. But the one thing that's consistent across my life is being around other top performers and just picking up stuff through osmosis. So I'm from a small country called Cyprus. I did live in the US for a good chunk of my childhood but in Cyprus, you're not going to see a lot of world class performers on any level. I've tried to share stuff around my process for years now and I think other people learning through a similar type of osmosis as I did is good for society.

Did you have a natural talent towards these games?

I had a very strong raw talent, for sure. And I would define that as being mathematical, being relatively quick on your feet. I had what is called a good card sense. In Bridge, this was kind of obvious. You think about what the other cards other people have and you kind of start planning around it. So that stuff was very natural to me, I would say. The thing that I lacked deep into my adult years, was the structure around taking the raw talent and like directing it properly. It'scool to see all the people that don't have to go through what I went through. In crypto, others have become very successful traders from a young age but for me it was a struggle taking that raw talent and applying it properly.

I've noticed a trend that the world has gotten better at like matching talent with games that they excel at. The process is a lot quicker.

It's so much easier to get good at things now. I was just thinking about this earlier today. Nowadays, whatever you want to learn whether it's chess or poker, you really have all these tools like simulations. You can look at the raw truth and it's verifiably correct in a way versus having to build up your intuition. If you have to do it organically, you make a lot of assumptions and you don't know if you're correct. You might have your chess teacher showing you an opening and showing you the move based on 20 years of theory, but it's actually wrong. There's a bad continuation that they don't know about. Nowadays, you can skip through a lot of that. Maybe that's partly why you feel like it's a lot easier and quicker to get good at stuff now.

You often describe yourself as a first principles thinker. Do you think that having to figure these games out on your own versus the kids of today that are getting coached and told the truth has required you to flex that first principles thinking muscle more?

Yeah, I think so. There's a couple advantages to going the slow route. Sitting down and doing the math yourself many, many times versus having intuition that it takes to you, let's say four is a valid total. But once you reach four, you keep building upon because you really understand things at a much deeper level. I played chess from a young age, then with bridge in my teenage years, and really fell in love with that game. Then poker from 18, when I went to college, it was a way to actually make money from all this other stuff. So it became not just for fun, it became like a way to gain independence from your parents and from people having to pay for you and be able to for example to take your girlfriend on a trip. And after that, there was a period I was doing sports betting, which really builds your intuition for odds changing in real time. You have to keep readjusting probabilities. And those things just provide a foundation that maybe you don't get if you just speed run through.

When did you start playing poker seriously?

I started playing poker seriously when I was in college, 2003. This was literally when the Moneymaker peak just happened. He just won the World Series and was all of the rage. And we've seen this thing throughout the past years. It was one of those things where a bunch of young smart people could make a lot of money. And it's like the first half of my story. Right now it's crypto, maybe in the past it was poker, maybe it was like daily fantasy for some period. The fads just kind of move around.

How much money did you make playing poker in college?

I would say enough to pay tuition and live a good student life. I think at the time, maybe it was like 50k a year type of thing. Doesn't sound like a lot now, but back then it was a decent chunk. I majored in Economics, which is not a hard science like computer science or pure math. Econ's a bit looser, but I did get to take a lot of classes specializing in game theory and wrote a thesis on it. I also studied psychology. I never really wanted to be like a pure math guy. I liked the social aspect of life. So doing a psychology and econ double major was what I was interested.

And then I didn't really intend to play poker professionally when I graduated. It was meant to be like a part-time thing I was doing while I was doing a real job. I did move to New York and was earning from 2007. Got a job at one of the big banks doing some very dumb first year grad student stuff, just, you know, mainly like paper pushing and some asset management stuff, whatever. And that was paying a pretty decent bonus. I think I did that for maybe like nine months, and then the crisis hit, the 2008 crisis. I had been playing poker on the side sometimes on the weekends. And at that point, I just decided rather than waiting for the financial crisis to resolve versus just taking matters into my own hands, I preferred to just become a poker pro at that point.

The poker sort of market was not as impacted by the 2008 financial crash as other markets were?

Yeah surprisingly, like the gambling market isn't recession proof exactly, but there's a certain element of people that are more active when the normal market is down on these types of things. So, didn't feel like poker changed much.

What was your mindset getting a job instead of, like, focusing on poker full-time out of college? Because the economics probably would have worked out in favor of just focusing on the. Why did you decide to try to get a job in banking?

I guess like always, it's like short term versus long term. So short term, yes, like you can probably do better. But the growth on the poker path, sticking with that for decades, at some point. Yeah, you can be Doug Brunson if you want that much then I think it makes sense. But for me it was always just something that I enjoyed and was passionate about. I like competition, but it's not something that I wanted to make my life's work. But I did want to give it a shot. So as soon as I had the first excuse, which was, OK, well, it's 2008. It's this financial crisis. I had to tell my parents that I'm not going to do the Wall Street thing anymore. I'm just going to move to Miami and play poker. I got a lot of pushback, especially from my mom. She was not happy at all to tell her friends that her son is a card player. She was like lying to all of them saying that I'm doing a PhD or something.

I really cherish those years. They were years of a lot of personal growth. When you don't have a structure and you don't have a boss telling you what to do, you kind of have to figure it all out for yourself. You have to start taming your ego and have a handle on your emotions. It's such an unstructured life. It's actually like a very difficult life to be a good pro, especially for somebody who hasn't grown up with all these ways of thinking like, oh, I'm going to keep a spreadsheet with all my results and going to be very prone about what percentage of my bankroll I'm. I wasn't doing any of that stuff. It was purely oh, I'm good at this. I'm just going to play anybody at any stakes and see what happens.

During that period, what were the biggest things you've learned about yourself?

On the one hand, I built confidence that I was playing against literally the best players and being able to match up against them. I wasn't getting destroyed playing against Scott Seiver and whoever were the best players at the time. But on the other hand I could see that I was lacking emotional resilience. I wasn't like a fill member or anything. But I needed to learn how to handle swings and keep a cool head. And it's quite emotional. I mean, you can imagine if your life depends on you winning and you start having a bad month and you don't have years of expenses saved up. It's extremely stressful. So you kind of start tackling your darkest fears.

I've noticed that a lot of very successful these days almost poker theory. They're able to get the unemotional out of the way in poker. One of the deadliest sins I've seen is someone who has an edge but becomes emotional over a small mistake and compounds it into a larger one. Before they know it, they've rage traded 50% of their portfolio away.

Yeah, there's a thing in psychology that's called the belief in a just world. And some people have a very strong belief in a just world. Most people, I would say, your belief in a just world is that the outcome is deserved. So if you got hit by a car, you probably did something wrong. It's kind of a way of thinking that is inbuilt in a lot of people. But in poker, there are times where you clearly did the right thing. You put your money in good and you still lost. And it's undeniable that it's not a just world in a simple way of thinking. That doesn't work. It rains you to just accept that bad things happen to good people, and bad things happen when you do the right thing and you can't control randomness. It basically makes you much more comfortable with randomness.

I like that, because in poker it can be clear when you got it in good and it just didn't work out your way. If you have ace preflop, you go all in, you lose to kings, you can't do anything about it. But in trading, you never have ace preflop at the knowns. There's always unknown unknowns so you're never quite sure if you made the right decision or if you were just missing something obvious. You never get as strong of a feedback loop to be okay with losing after making the right decision.

Yeah, and there's even more factors in trading, of course. Even how you might make a trade, but how do you size it? There's so many elements that have to get optimized, and the unknown unknowns are everywhere.

In poker, you can only bet as much as you have on the table, but in trading, you can bet more. You can bet your house and more with the leverage. The sizing space is a lot larger than in poker.

Yeah, exactly. The sort of Kelly criterion adjustment you need to make is hard because in poker, you play a tournament or a cash game, you're going to lose whatever you have. If you're trying to trade directionally and you think, worst case, this is going to go up 2x. So if I short it and it goes up 2x, I'm going to lose $1,000 and then if goes up 10x, you start betting with a probability distribution that maybe wasn't Kelly criterion approved.

Did you go through any drawdowns during your professional career in your mid 20s?

The only time I had a bad drawdown was after I had a breakup. At that stage, it was a formative stage where you're having to carry this game that requires you to not tilt and be emotionally very neutral. And at the same time, your life is just not a reflection of that. So that was a real challenge I shouldn't be playing at all. That year of my life, I was down like 40-50%. I played super rosebleeds, took a bad beat and just tilted and blasted more. I didn't get hit bad in general, but I was playing way too high where the variance was going to result in just that.

How large was your bankroll at the time?

Like 400k, something like that. Nothing insane, but certainly it was painful. And, getting into that depressive period where everything's going badly in work life and you've had a long-term relationship end and your finances insecurity is gone. You don't know what you're doing with your life because you've been investing years in a profession that doesn't really have a career progression. You're not getting promoted to senior poker player, there's no ladder to climb. I think I had six months that were probably the hardest of my life where I was just in a very dark place. And I would say that that's been thankfully one of those make or break times. And it ended up being a blessing in ways that time is supposed to and just deal with so many demons I had growing up. You either find your peaceful self and your Zen self or you get over everything and you start growing or you just get stuck. And unfortunately, a lot of people get stuck in that. In a parallel universe maybe I would be one of those people. But I had some good friends and maybe just had some inner resilience that came out of those tough times.

In around 2010 or 2011 this ended up being a point in my life where I also just decided, okay, poker was fun. I want to get back into the real world on the perch. I left poker and I went to this one interesting stint where I was also thinking and doing a lot of sports betting. I was focusing on tennis and basketball. And at the time, all the software wasn't that advanced. And if you were quick on your feet you could find live. I did a lot of Betfair trading, live sports betting, all this fancy stuff. That ended up being another feather in my hat as a trader. I have to believe that added to my intuition for probabilities. I feel like I can see probabilities. Distributions for me are like colors. I just see it like it's a language. It feels innate to me. And a lot of that was being built around those years.

What did you do after 2011?

I applied for an MBA. I got into top school and it was quite unusual that they accepted a professional gambler when everybody else is like a BCG consultant or something. I got into a one-year school in Singapore. I went to a school called INSEAD, which is a really good MBA school, and just got experienced by being around all these professional finance people and professional entrepreneurs. Going back to learning through osmosis and just seeing what people out in the world were doing.

What attracted you to Singapore specifically?

I was kind of done with anything U.S. I just felt like I didn't really want to stay in the U.S. I just wanted a new experience, something foreign, something different. Never really traveled around Asia much. Yeah, it was fantastic. Obviously, I've since moved here full time, so clearly it was a year that left me with a desire to return. It was really nice.

When you applied to the business school, did you write something in your personal statement about playing poker and games in general?

Yeah they definitely took a flyer on me. And I had to write these essays explaining how my training in poker is going to be relevant to what I would do next. And I didn't think I was going to be a trader. I thought I was going to do some kind of startup consulting. Though the training element was going to be the one that would be like the common theme. But by the time I graduated I was doing all the interviews, they didn't really want to hire somebody who wasn't really cut out to be kind of gay. And I was a t-shirt kind of guy.

The only job offers I was getting were from hedge funds. Trading was the only thing offered to me. I didn't really want to be a trader, to be honest, at that time. I thought it was too similar to my previous life, and I would just fall back in playing a game. I'm back to just sitting in a desk and just doing what I've been doing my whole life. I wanted to get out there and do something entrepreneurial, but the only job offer I was getting was trader. They love the poker players.

That was their signal. So that's actually the time I read Market Wizards, because I was getting approached by these big hedge funds. One of the guys just sat with me in coffee, and he's like, look, you have the profile. I can tell you're a trader. And read these books. Read the Market Wizards. And he gave me his copy. But it was kinda like my destiny was being laid into my lap set.

I ended up accepting one of those offers, which was just moving to be in a proprietary trading firm. Instead of taking the job with him, which was like discretionary long short trading, I took a job in High Frequency Trading (HFT) and moved to London, which was very strange, given that I had heavy poker experience and nothing on the quant side. In HFT, you need two things. You need to be a good coder, and you need to be very good at statistics. I'm good at math in general, but my formal training on lasso regressions and all this stuff wasn't something I was doing after just playing poker. So I would say that I was severely underqualified for being an HFT trader. But the same thing with the CY with the poker and being able to interview well on any kind of game theory questions or logic puzzles just got me through. And I just said, look, everything's becoming more algorithmic. I can either stay in the past and do some of this discretionary stuff or I can try to go towards the future. And so I accepted the algorithmic trading role.

So you're trying to be more forward looking and not just be a discretionary trader at a hedge fund. You wanted to work on something more future proof. I think 2012 wasn't the heyday of HFT, but it was still very juicy if I remember correctly.

I still think it's still very juicy and still in the heyday. I mean, people are printing everywhere. At the time, there were not many firms. So you were in the sweet spot and you were kind of dumb. And you still had like one leg up on the other guys at the table. And it was crazy because I joined what at the time was still the top firm in the world called Getco. This is before they merged with Knight and then eventually Virtu and all this stuff. So they don't exist anymore. But at the time, they had the top technology. And I remember my first day showing up, my boss asked me to make a model trading the Euro versus the Dollar. And you can just put whatever parameters you want. It's gonna to make money. Like no matter what you do, it's going to make money because the tech was so good and fast that you always just had an advantage. So sure enough I put something late and I was just making like a hundred dollars a day or something.

I was definitely out of my comfort zone. Before joining, I was told, OK, here's an offer, but you have two months to join. You should learn Python. So I just went online and Python and tried to get through some exercises and stuff. I was still pretty weak. I had to find other ways to contribute because I was not going to be the guy like coding up all of the stuff.

Thankfully, I did have a reason to exist because all these guys in HFT are very good at coding and being technical, but they aren't very good at markets. It's not something that is being looked at. And I just started finding all these really basic improvements. Some of these servers, I know it was very euro-centric. I don't recall the buyout, but in Europe, them especially share improvers. Some of these people didn't even know European markets. They didn't realize how limited they were. So they were completely, some of them really basic improvements.

Getco shares improvers. Some of these people didn't even know European markets, they didn't realize if you traded Eurex, that 4-5 minutes before Eurex closes, especially on the Bund, the 10 year Bund markets, there was just amazing flow because people were trading at the end of the day, and they were just crossing, whatever. If you realize that, you could just tune up like 5x and just print a ton of money. And this is the kind of stuff that I would realize and start adjusting our models. The entire HFT space was even thinking about. And I remember I mentioned it to a friend at Jump and then years later, he's like, yeah, you know, you shouldn't have told me that because I ended up making millions and millions of dollars. It's just like everybody else who was thinking like me wasn't being hired by an HFT. So like, I was just like in a foreign land.

I don't know if you had the same experience, but I felt like there were three stereotypes of people working at an HFT desk. One like the French or Chinese quant that were really good at statistics and modeling. Another one was the Russian developer that was good at low latency tech, understood the systems very well. And the third being the poker playing trader type that understood market structure, had good trading intuition, and understood what an edge is and how to monetize it.

Yeah you need a trader's input. I think at the time there weren't, there weren't that many of them in HFT, they were still doing discretionary stuff. I did end up adding a ton of value and a ton of PNL to them. My team was one of the best performing teams at Getco, if not the best. We were like four guys and we crushed it. I did some crazy stuff. I basically took over the desk. I was like switching off the models at times. I was betting on some mean reversion spots, like crazy stuff. Like nobody did it at the time. They were like, "this is insane, what are you doing turning off the model?" I started realizing that there were spots where US and Europe would diverge and recovering every day. And I would manipulate the models to do what I wanted them to do. So my boss had to pull me aside and he's like, "what are you doing?" But at the same time, you seem to be making a ton of money. So we agreed that we would do an A-B test, where I would have all our models deployed, and they would do the size that they would do. So instead of doing 10 lots, I would average like 80 lots, and we would just have two versions. And on days they would run by itself, just run normally all day. And then the version 2.0, I would get to manually adjust whatever I was doing. And, you know, we would see what happens. And I guess I did have some pattern recognition ability because just four months and months, I was outperforming by, like, a 3:1. So we ended up kind of moving the size to whatever the hell I was doing. Yeah, that was a wild time.

I've noticed that in the HFT world there's a general skepticism towards people that discretionarily trade. It's skepticism. Is there actually an edge here? Are they just getting lucky? How do you measure it? It's so nebulous. How did you counter that during your time there? I guess your example you just said was that you had to do an experiment? Did you have to prove to your boss statistically that your decisions were making money. Did you have a theme of trying to fight against that?

I mean, that was the only way that they would agree to it was like a long statistical AB test. Otherwise, it was like yeah, maybe what you're doing is good, but we don't really know.

A lot of the stuff that influenced me as a manager later on, which was just really bad politics. First of all, you had a firm where the founder was trying to cash out. They had made too much money. They wanted to IPO the company and retire. Don't get me wrong, the Chicago guys that founded Getco were great guys. But I think at the time they were just like, okay, we've done this for a long time. Where our exit? And the bonuses they were paying were of shifty because they were trying to get the numbers good for their stock debuts and everything. They did a reverse merger with Knight, who had a big blow up. And you could just see the culture fall apart. And you could see that when the top traders don't get paid properly, they start leaving. So people start going to other firms. And it was really interesting, because so many of them went to Tower. I ended up joining Tower as well. And Tower is this funny firm where the only alpha Tower has is the compensation model. And it kind of showed how important, how you structure compensation is. They literally were the only firm that was doing this profit sharing with all the different teams and pods. And so they just ended up getting all the talent because the top talent of every firm wanted to get a profit share. And that was something that was eye opening.

Yeah I think people in crypto understand the power of incentives very well. But at the time maybe it wasn't as well understood.

I mean it's huge. Incentives are, I've been writing this for years, but incentives are everything.

On an organizational level, employing someone or working under someone is a trade at the end of the day.

Yeah, they're going to see if I stay up late and do the extra hours, is that going to matter? Is that going to impact my bottom line enough? So, it's helped me design things later on and now running a firm and having a lot of talented people, having to think about these things and take all the lessons. It's easy to be experimenting with more and more kinds of smart ways to incentivize. So yeah, that was the next step. Once everyone started going to Tower, I was doing that on a small team that left Getco. And that was interesting because you went from a place where everything was already built with the team was super mature. You knew what you're making when you had a bare metal, you have something. But it's nowhere near the level of sophistication. Tower has a lot more optionality, and you have to just make money. And that was a place where it did matter what you put in. It wasn't going to make money unless you really dialed it right and you really got it. You just have to figure out how to be like"give me just put together a wire and a form, but just make it make money."

What did you trade at Tower?

Fixed income. We did start expanding into other stuff but mostly fixed income. I ended up building a very good understanding of the fixed income market, which is probably the most important market in macro.

Would you say you learned a lot of your macro knowledge you have now from trading fixed income at Tower?

Yeah, at both Getco and Tower. At the beginning, all we were doing was just reading the Draghi and the Yellen press conferences. And you had read the Bloomberg articles and try to understand why the markets were moving. It didn't really matter too much in terms of the algorithms you were running, but it mattered for understanding volatility regimes, and when they were changing, and when you had to change your models, why did we make money or lose money today. So you started just being around it, just being steeped in these conversations around the central banks and what they're claiming to be doing.

They were interesting years, especially in Europe. I mean, Draghi was doing a lot of crazy stuff. The team that I was on was a fresh team and ended up doing quite well. I mean, the numbers are all relative, but during the first year we already made eight figures, which most teams can't really start off that well. It takes much longer sometimes. So I was there for two years. The team was doing extremely well, but I felt like I was contributing a very large amount of that growth. My models were really driving a good amount of it, but I wasn't the portfolio manager. And I think that that was kind of the thing that made it hard to excited. I wanted to take a job on a myself and just be my career and just be the myself, but joining something established. And it was a bit scary because I'm not technical. I still don't really have good coding skills, even after all those years of HFT. So you think you understand the trade, and you do, but you don't really understand the full tech stack components. And it's not something that I speak the language of. Other people are much better than me at really understanding the whole tech stack.

So that was a bit of a risk, I would say, that I did decide to take in the end.

So you started your own HFT firm?

So I didn't start a firm, but I did join as a partner in a small firm, and one of the two founders I had this really strong connection with where I felt like he didn't understand trading, but he was maybe better than all the devs I had ever seen at Tower. Technically, he was just like such a great technologist. And I had the other part. So the combination would make a great team. And we became relatively we couldn't, to most, but together we could. So I joined the partner in like a 15-person kind of small shop. They were trading some equities and doing some random futures trading. But we spent six months building something bootleg, which has kind of become the basis of Selini now. We already had built a lot of the code, the infrastructure back then. So I wasn't fully starting my own company. I wasn't quite ready for that. It was more like I'm starting my own team and I'm joining in a place where I have a lot of responsibility, but not quite like I'm running a firm. I don't think I was ready for that.

How old were you?

I was turning 32.

When does crypto start entering the picture?

I just started getting familiar with crypto because the firm was in the Bay Area, which was unusual, because that's where they were living. And I had to move there, which I didn't mind. And it's the only place in the world in 2016 where, you know, you just had randomly have conversations in coffee shops and hear people talking about crypto. I think Bitcoin was like $1,000. I remember I thought it was expensive, so I bought some Ethereum instead because that seemed cool. And then I did my first crypto native trade, which is I realized that Litecoin would pump because it was only like a few bucks. I don't remember what it was. But I realized that there would be this like normie unit bias. So I just bought a bunch of this like Litecoin, ended up selling it at 250 when it just went crazy. So I went from friends in the area were running one of the first hedge funds doing crypto. Obviously, it was quite small. But I guess that was my first exposure.

What were your thoughts on it when you first discovered it?

I had heard about it in 2013 when there was news about Bitcoin. I think it had this mini run and you had these Bloomberg stories about it back then when I was at the trading desk. At the time, I felt like maybe base money's hard. And if the thing is trying to be base money, then it's a very small shot. I mean, gold makes sense maybe, but this thing is just too many people in the world have to suddenly agree that they treat this as a store of value for their own wealth. And it just seemed very far-fetched at the time. So I heard about it, 2013 did not buy um, 2016. I guess my reaction was kind of positive, especially the fact that it seemed like there were these other coins. And I felt comfortable with the economic element. I guess. But I still wasn't thinking about Bitcoin as a store of value at the time.

What was the world consensus view on fiat at the time?

Obviously, we were in this artificial environment of low rates, but I think people were just happy to get out of the financial crisis and get through unscathed after a few years. I don't think there was this big hoopla around flat at the time. It was more like discussions around the euro versus the dollar, that kind of stuff.

Got it. When did your firm start trading crypto systematically?

So it's funny. The other co-founder, he started getting a few of his interns starting trading crypto pretty much soon after that. And I did not end up participating in whatever they were doing. But I remember they were trading some of the exotic exchanges and trying to do some arbitrage and then they would forget where the money was. The keys and the money were sometimes just missing. It was just like the Wild West, especially back then. The exchanges would lose track of it. It was just completely insane. It's not like it is now. The professionalism level of the exchanges was just not there. And for me, I was just doing it on the side and I had to kind of agree not to spend too much time on it. So, I guess I got familiar with the markets, but I wasn't full-time on it.

Part of the reason was just that it was going so well on the fixed income stuff that it was going to be a big opportunity cost to divert my attention. There were many points that I stayed up thinking, should I just try to do crypto instead? It wasn't much of a cost at the time. I wish I did and I had more of a head start, but I ended up visiting those years. I felt like a genius in 2018, 2019. I thought thank God I didn't drop everything to do crypto because I'm doing great and crypto is dying. But it wasn't until 2020 that I personally started doing it more seriously.

Up to this point it sounds like you mainly use your discretionary understanding of markets to play defense on the market making side. And you didn't start playing offense on the discretionary side until later?

Yeah, the discretionary thing is really funny. Because like I said, when I started HFT I was doing these discretionary overlays, which were not encouraged by the firm. But at some point, I just forced it down their throat because it was just working much better. I remember there was this kind of ok accepted it. I actually felt like the most exciting thing growing up in my 20s was being a macro trader. I remember starting university and just reading these blogs. I remember that the name of the web site was The Big Picture. There's this Wall Street Oasis kind of stuff or whatever. And like the guy talking about the macro, it just seems so fascinating because he wakes up really early to potentially catch an Asian move somewhere. And it just seemed like such an exciting problem to be in. There's so many factors in it, and it just seemed so fascinating. And here I am running algorithms that are just printing a few cents per trade a million times a day, which is fine. It's great.

What ended up happening is, I started taking some of the profits from my desk and starting to put on just macro, just moving it to a separate account and just taking directional bond bets and whatever, equity bets, index equities and bond bets. And sometimes the volatility was high. I remember the first time my special risk account lost 10K, there was some non-farm payroll number. It came the wrong direction, and I couldn't believe how much it moved in the wrong way. Because that was maybe my first 10K loss. You're not used to losing that. You're not used to HFT, you're just doing HFT. I just had got noticed by the other two partners and got some comments. But my response was like, look, I'm playing with some profits. It's not an environment where I was not welcome. It was noticeable to be doing something, to be trying to put on a macro, but I was just figuring it out. I was very green back then I felt like I was going to start doing more. But then I just sort of continued to do, trying. But I was still young and growing and learning. But I was very passionate about it. And I did the for 2016 with small size, 2017 bigger, 2018 I would swing hundreds of thousands, 2019 maybe swinging half a million, 2020 was a really where things got a little bit in the trading career, I would say. That's really where things got a little bit wild.

How wild did it look for you?

I mean, anyone who was trading that year, the COVID shock to the market, obviously in February, everyone's pretending like everything's good, nothing's happening. Markets are just brushing it off. And then suddenly, in March, you just get moves that are multi-sigma moves. I mean, they were calling them eight-sigma moves, which is pretty funny. Obviously, your probability distribution is not normal if you're getting eight-sigma moves all the time. But that was some crazy shit, which makes no sense. Things were blowing up left and right. People that are professionally putting on trades, like basis trades between, let's say, the futures and the spot. If you're doing it on bonds, you are just facing insane dislocations at some of those points where literally Unity Charter line, Citadel would not exist if Griffin didn't ask Powell and ask the Fed to fix it. They were probably a day away from the entire Citadel not existing. That's how bad it literally was that bad. They had to get a bailout. Otherwise, they would not exist.

Completely blown up?

Yeah. I think they've kept that secret. But being in the books, and you could see what was happening, and then you heard it, you knew what was happening, just nonsensical pricing between butterflies and things that normally have a very fixed structure in the fixed income curve just completely broke. And there was no liquidity, you couldn't even get out. It was just a wild time. And I think at that point, having a discretionary skill set kind of saved the firm. We were in a spot where one of the... Anyway, maybe I can't get into details, but basically what I can say is that there was a need to do well, especially like March 2020. At the same time, you know, everyone's worried about their family, their health, and just working home and going down. That was probably the most stressful month, I think, for a lot of people, including myself. The whole world, it felt like everything might blow up. The whole world was just, you know, was ending. People were dying. That's all we knew. I ended up printing that entire month nonstop. I found some trades that I think work, but are also very useful for the market. It was basically providing liquidity for some of these long-term bonds. There was basically nobody in the market. No bids. If you looked at the order books in March 2020 on CME, especially for 20, 30-year bonds), UB (Ultra Bonds), and ZN (10 year note), they were practically empty. Liquidity had evaporated. And it's probably just me just putting on like these positions and trying to manage it and just printing money because nobody else is willing to show anything on the books. So I ended up having a very big month. A career high kind of month by the factor of 10 or something. That made me believe in myself because of the amount of challenges that specific month had and surviving it. And I guess also making a good amount of money, which then use later on for growing the firm.

The discretionary overlay scheme, it really is vital in these disaster scenarios where nobody knows what's going on.

It's like standing on quicksand. You have to just keep jumping around and figure out what to do. But yeah, that was a defining month, I would say, both financially, but also from a self-belief kind of side.

The market reaffirmed you that you were doing the right thing, putting on this discretionary overlay onto your systematic strategies. And I guess also you had less skepticism in your own firm that it was working.

Yeah, definitely. I think at that point, everyone was just in this chaos and just hoping that everything survives. Thankfully, we got through that. The rest of the year was good. I think everybody had a record 2020 at most HFT firms, because if you survived, there were some firms that blew up, disappeared. There were quite a few. But if you made it through, then for the rest of the year, the flow was just very good. I don't know how to say it, but it was just very good flow. So 2020 was a very strong year for a lot of trading firms. I did do one thing wrong that year in discretionary, maybe I gave back like 10-20% of something, which was not fun. We still had a great year. But that was not fun. I expected certain things to happen, like maybe just a big inflation coming, there was just so much stimulus. There's the Fed, there's the money printing. And there's a lot more in a company paying back its debt if the world economy is blowing up. That seems like a reasonable assumption, right? Well, the Fed decided that they're just going to buy all of them. It's like you think you're playing basketball and the referee just starts taking the ball from you himself and scoring baskets for the other team. Some things were happening that should not have been happening.

I like the story we've painted so far with discretionary into systematic and then back to discretionary.

Yeah. The one thing I did underplay was the systematic side. I did end up building quite a strong intuition for microstructure. The other thing that I could do apart from discretionary trading that is actually relevant to HFT is really understanding the thing they call microstructure, which basically means not just long-term prices and charts, but the exact nature by which orders hit the book and how they're moving from different geographies and how they're getting onto like a matching engine and how does the matching engine process them. This kind of order nuance is a transparent when you're dealing with venues HFT and you have a clear concept of like receiving one order versus a lot of competing orders. So that's something that I do actually have a very strong understanding of and helped that side of the business, the more algorithmic side of the business, understanding what to prioritize and stuff like that.

Microstructure is like a game in and of itself.

It's like a very niche game, but also it's not as big as making massive bets and holding them for a long time. But it matters a lot. And when you look at crypto now, every DEX (Decentralized Exchange) that tries to exist, whether it's GMX and you have this kind of oracle microstructure, or it's like a Hyperliquid versus these venues versus these hybrids with AMMs (Automated Market Makers). The microstructure is literally everything. I mean, it determines whether there's enough balance between the different participants that can facilitate price discovery in a way that's not too riggedy doody of, and it creates an ecosystem that's responsive that can swing back to its course. Hyperliquid is having some issues right now, but certainly their background in HFT I think gave them a distinct advantage of understanding the microstructure enough to design something better than some of the other DEXs, let's say.

In broad strokes, how would you categorize the different microstructure metagames? The ones I can think of off the top of my head are which place leads price discovery and how quickly the exchange processes, like canceling orders versus placing new ones. What are some other ones that you think about a lot?

I mean, that lag is the biggest thing in HFT. On this microstructure level, that is the most important thing. You get one thing that we consider a signal. Think about it from the other side. You're the guy executing. And you can't hit one thing and have that order hit at the same time in perfect beta ratios and everything. You're just going to say, look, I want to buy a ton of features. I'm just going to buy in some sequence, whichever feed is coming to me first, or other market that correlates tends to have to react. You know there's two types. You have the geographical one where this is maybe what people think about when they hear HFT. They think about these undersea cables and wires through the mountains. And of course, these things move through microwaves and then eventually even more crazy stuff like atmospheric plasma paths or whatever the hell they're doing now. This geographical arbitrage is one. There's actually an intra-exchange level lag, or even within CME, the 10-year bond moves, who's going to take the five-year bond? That's usually, you're getting into hardware, in FPGAs, in ASICs, all that stuff. That's a game which I never liked playing that game. It's a really shitty game to play that specific game because you're making a ton of money one year and then you're making zero after that because somebody figured out one extra trick and then your entire firm disappears.

It's very winner-takes-all and zero-sum.

It's winner-takes-all. It's very cap-ex and it takes a huge amount of investment. You think you make a lot of money. But if you don't reinvest it all to keep ahead, then the next year you kind of lost it. So that's a shitty game. But you actually do want to be decent at all of these. Maybe you're not #1 at X, but you're top 10 at everything and then you're still in the game.

That's a common theme, not just in HFT or trading, just in life. Being good at more things stacks super linearly.

Yeah, I mean that's the story of my success, I would say being pretty good at everything. Well, I mean, like eventually you get excellent at the combination of the things. And the combination of the things is a game that matters, then you're the best because you're the only one that has a combination of. You understand the microstructure and the speed but then maybe you're not the best at each individual game and you don't care what that means. And similar to poker, like I was never the best poker player on a specific variant, like Omaha or Hold'em or whatever. But I was one of the best at mixed games - the overall. And so when there's like a mixed game going as often there is in life you have to like compete in every dimension. Entrepreneurship is definitely like that.

Your trading style of being kind of like a jack of all trades reflects your personality

My strength is that I'm very curious. I don't get bored. I can sit in front of a computer forever. And just there's so much that engages my mind. I have to force myself to exercise and do stuff. I just get so immersed in stuff. And I find micro things that other people get bored of. I just find it so interesting. You can always dive deeper and understand more. I was really wanting to learn about things that I don't know about and it stacks so well. After many years, you start tapping into your experience in different things that you've done before. The funny thing is even now I'm looking into venture investing. I mean, venture is like so far away from HFT, it's almost the opposite. And nobody in their right mind would give me money to venture invest a few years ago, when I didn't have any experience in it. Because obviously, there's going to be a learning curve. But I don't know what I'm doing. But I kind of did it anyway. I just self-funded it.

Doing together HFT and discretionary trading has always made sense. But it was never HFT and Venture. These are just completely opposite scales in trad-fi. But in crypto, because of the nature of the market having deals and because liquidity is such a desired thing for all these projects, it's a different game.

Not only that, but you actually understand crypto venture investments, like the projects themselves well. Whether we like it or not, most of crypto is around creating infrastructure for exchanging tokens, right? If you boil it down to what an L1 (Layer One Network) is doing, it's usually just creating tokens and then people are trading these assets on some dex's or whatever it is. It all comes down to that. And actually, having a trading background can help you evaluate whether the project actually adds value to people who are trying to exchange assets and create capital formation and price discovery.

This casino thesis of crypto has only gotten stronger since 2022. How have you incorporated it in your long term vision of crypto?

Because of my background I've spent a lot of my life in actual casinos. I was molded by it. I was born in it. The fact that these two things are intertwined in crypto, personally, I'm just very comfortable with. And the one thing that over time with the US government holding Bitcoin we're having more where the institutionalization aspect matters more and more. And that's totally fine. But I don't mind being in the casino and doing both side.

How do you see the crypto markets evolving in the coming years?

In the markets overall, obviously it's like fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. And the market wants new Ponzi's. So we didn't see an NFT cycle this time around, for example. People tried it and it didn't work. And then they tried this meme coin thing because there's some story how it's more liquid. So maybe this one will work. And I guess right now, maybe we can say it probably didn't work.

Something's going to change, and we're going to get it again. But it's not going to be the same. It's always going to evolve. People have to believe that they're going to make it, and the collective belief just drives this reflexive nature. So I think we'll keep seeing more cycles of games. I guess, but it won't be the same. And maybe at some point we run out of new Ponzi's but people are pretty creative with this stuff. I expect AI is going to play a big role in the future of crypto. I've been publicly very bullish on crypto and AI merging. And I think that that's what the future holds.

A lot of other traders have said that AI is going to take over what they're doing in a few years. Do you think that holds true for what you're doing?

No, I think maybe eventually the tsunami of AI takes us all and sweeps the entire world. I do feel like I'm at one of the highest peaks where the water level's rising, but by the time it gets to me, it'll be a while. The parts of my brain that I use are not the type of thing that are easy to train data on and replicate. Especially nowadays, I don't really use a lot more like hybrid stuff, a combination of things for generating alpha. And when I say alpha, it's not just statistically like putting a trade on, but just like running a business on market making, and I don't know if that's like my approach and my knowledge is a bit too specialized to train something general on. So I'm not personally worried about it.

Fair enough. In the grand scheme of things you are still quite young in your early 40s, but relative to participants in crypto markets, I'd say that's skewed towards like mid to late 20s, early 30s. What has contributed to your longevity?

I mean one, it's all very math-y. So at this point, there's a lot of chunking that's happening. I've chunked so much knowledge and so much pattern recognition so that when a situation comes up, I can instantly tap into some cognitive structure that I've created and just tap into that and instantly have a way to react to it. So that's a huge advantage. I think, I've purposely built this up over the years. I remember listening to Gary Dalio for the first time like a decade ago. And I was like, this guy doesn't seem like super high IQ. Like he's kind of old, he's kind of slow. But then I realized, yeah. But then I'm like, okay, clearly like there's humans where the hardware is just the raw IQ. And then software is the way they think and make decisions. And I just decided, you know, I have decent hardware, but I just, I just want to be more like Ray Dalio. I want to be more like software. And, how do I get my software to be the best? So I've just been improving for a long time, trying to be the best, the judgment, best decision making. And judgment is like one thing that is valuable in any scenario, any state of the world. I mean, these AIs will only really make a difference in the world when their judgment becomes very good. And it's one of the hardest things to do.

What was the worst trade you had?

The worst trade coming into crypto in 2020 from TradFi was shorting alts during this period of late 2020. They had gone up 10x. And then you think that it's purely this piece of shit, Cardano or Dogecoin, some of these coins that I shorted. In TradFi there's at least some semblance of fair value that people care about. People are trying to trade around this fair value. But with these alts I guess I had to learn the hard way. What I realized is that when you take that away, it's just momentum and just like pure greed. And the greed is much more than I thought. I really had trouble with the expectation that if something goes up 10x, people are just going to get out and take some money off the table. It's going to reverse. I showed Dogecoin at several times, you got in there for like a cent and then it's half a cent. And then one day Elon Musk decided he was going to adopt this thing. I took like a very, very big loss when it just skyrocketed to 10 cents. I repeated that mistake many times with Cardano.

That's been a bit of a weak point for me, which I've now turned into something that I can manage and actually is profitable. But I would say shorting alts was a big leak that I had for years, which more one of the most profitable trades that I do. You really have to learn it. I've written a Twitter thread about how it's like a dark art and it's only for the masters. You gotta really understand the game you're playing to short alts.

Yeah, it seems like a lot of people come from TradFi and they look at these coins and it's like it's a free short. All the supply coming makes it inevitable. It's always like a lesson in path dependency, eventually, that they learn.

This Fastcoin run, I imagine a lot of that was just like you said, driven by the liquidations of TradFi guys trying to come in and put some margin and get out. It was just fed on the liquidations from those guys.

Have you noticed that especially when things get quiet, squeezing shorts becomes like one of the favorite games to play in the alt markets?

Yeah, I mean you get all kinds of funny moves that are similar to the Hyperliquid guy who's trying to manipulate things right now. You have a lot of smart people around the world looking at crypto markets because it's a good use of time if you're just trying to independently make money and you have a really strong mind set. They'll find these spots that are structurally in their favor, whether they want to call them highly profitable trading strategies (an allusion to Avi Eisenberg) or whatever. Like you said squeezing shorts, manipulating oracles or all this stuff. Especially when things are quiet, people have to go further out to find stuff to make money on.

In altcoins because the participants are not very diverse there tends to be a lot of crowding in certain spots that really matter hard in certain scenarios.

The funny thing is, shorting is so difficult that it actually ends up making prices go too high, and then there's money to be made by buying the crash. This is like the vicious cycle where people try too hard because there's so much free money, because everything is obviously overpriced, but then it becomes crowded and funding gets negative, all this weird stuff happens. So it's definitely one of the most interesting aspects, because perpetual markets, especially, are different from calendar futures. And you don't have margin calls. You can just suddenly get liquidated on an account without having the chance to top up. So it's a very unique game, I would say.

The life cycles in crypto are also much quicker.

Yeah, everything is accelerated and because of the lack of shorting, the bubbles just get bigger. But there's a lot of really stupid money that does stuff that makes no sense. They're buying tons of stuff. When the Trump token comes out, there's people buying it at 70 or 80 billion, just like not looking at prices and not understanding anything. They're just clicking buttons. It's just like when you're playing at a poker game and someone's just calling you on the river and they have like three high and like obviously they can't win but what are you doing? You're being? "There's the royal flush". There's like this population in the markets that has to get demolished down over time, but then maybe they find more money in the couch cushions and they come back. It's a weird combination of professionals and inefficiency.

What would you recommend to others to improve as a trader?

It's just internal psychology. This is true for many things, but especially for a trader. If you have clouded judgment because of your ego, you're going to have a much harder time leveling up. And almost everybody does. And it's the kind of thing where a lot of people attach their identity and their whole self to certain aspects. And the way to become world-class at something is you have to have no clouding in your judgment. And what that usually entails is letting go of your ego and kind of rebuilding from a very solid foundation back to like your thought process and your acceptance of weaknesses and strengths. It's something that I guess takes years for some people. For some people, it's easier. It just sort of depends on which part of your psychological journey you're on. But if one out of every psychological step, I feel it would be that. I can see how innovative you are and stuff like that, but ego, you're doing. The only way you're going to make it is you have to let your ego go, just start all over, like, hey, I'm going to start from ground zero. Just let your ego just accept being nothing for a little bit and just build back better. And you can build back really quickly, but you have to build it from a solid foundation. And for me, getting through some of the challenges, and I had a lot of self-doubt, I guess. Some people call it imposter syndrome. A lot of the top traders that we know in the space, I talked to them, and plenty of them have, maybe even still now, have imposter syndrome, despite being legends in trading and the whole space.

I think that's okay. I mean, it's healthier than the opposite, where you don't go through that process of doubt. Because the doubt is helpful. It sort of makes you challenge yourself. Are you really good? Do you already have what it takes? Do you need more? It's okay to have that self-doubt. I think the end goal, like the god tier mode is when you even get out of that self-doubt. I don't think imposter syndrome until about a year ago.

One year ago? Really? That's crazy.

Yeah, I would say around the time of winning my WSOP bracelet, accomplishing the last few things I had on my bucket list. It kind of made me like, okay, maybe now I'm actually good. Fine, I'm not an imposter anymore. And then I think that unlocked me. I feel like there's a new level now that I unlocked not having that imposter thing on my back and just coming from a very confident but very humble place. And that's what I think about. And a lot of these young founders in their 20s, they have success and sometimes it's like crazy monetary success. So they I'm even felt a bit. But I felt bad for them the, just feel sorry for the people who can't temper that with a more mature side. It's hard to describe, but mood, the kind of thing that they've solved it. They're the shit and they become a bit unbearable and it usually leads to their downfall. I mean, we've had SPF, we've had a lot of cases of founders growing way too cocky because they had some numbers go up and they attach their ego to it. Yeah, I'm always going to stay humble, I'm never going to think that I'm some special category over other people. And I think that grounding is really necessary to keep growing.

I like that takeaway. You have to avoid the one-hit wonder syndrome.

Yeah, I mean, so many people do the one hit and then they just assume they can replicate it and everything else. The amount of they focus and keep grinding, they can, but yeah, there's a lot of overconfidence that builds when, especially if you're young and you just suddenly come into millions of dollars. It usually doesn't end well.

I always have this analogy that trading is therapy in some sense because you have to be calibrated with how the world actually is in order to consistently make money. You can't have any biases.

That is my favorite part about trading. It's not about going into a room and bullshitting your way through it. It's really the great equalizer where it doesn't matter who you are or who your parents are and who you know. If you're on the other book, it's just gonna be the truth comes out, that's it.

What do you think is differentiated about your view of trading?

For me, risk versus reward is how I structure my trading. Other people have different ways that they just keep day trading. I guess I have a probability distribution in my head at all times. We talked a bit about this the other day where, you don't have positions most of the time. You just go to sleep and you're just hoping you don't miss any great trades. I have some traders on an IV back to sleep when they're closed. I have this rolling distribution of positioning. We talked about this in some of my friends, a fair value for a lot of assets, and obviously, they don't need to have any underlying value. T fair value basically means within the time horizon that I'm trading, where is the risk versus the reward balanced? That's the point at which I don't want to have a position, because if it's balanced, there's no edge. For example in Bitcoin, I don't have a huge position right now because I wouldn't be surprised if it goes up 5K, up or down, right? There's no reason for me to have such a big position. So I have like for all these different assets, I have this like risk reward balance point. And as things start to deviate from their balance point, I'll start adding, and then I'll add more and add more. And until I hit my max position, and my max position is determined by if I'm 95% catastrophically wrong, I still don't lose a huge percentage of anything. So I calculate my sizing that way. And then I settle in around this risk reward. And this is how I extract alpha from the market.

The hard part, of course, is determining where the risk reward is balanced. There's a few ways that you can do this. You have to, at the end of the day, aggregate five or 10 things, because you have different aspects. You have to consider what's the cost basis of the people that bought, short-term, mid-term trades. I used to be very proficient at doing this. When I was trading HFT and I was just sitting in front of the desk all day, I had nothing else to do, just staring at the charts. I became very talented at doing it intuitively. It's a very short time span. I could look at the risk reward for the next minutes or hours and just trade around it.

I had to make a decision in 2021. It was another big part of my career where I had two choices. If I did nothing else and just traded for 2021, I would make $100 million in trading profit. And I based this kind of based on my hourly results of paying attention. It was like a reasonable assumption. I had that chance to just do that. The alternative was to do a little bit of it, maybe like 10%, but spend most of my time building an HFT firm, building a company that will provide value long-term. And I think it's a tough decision because there's no certainty, right? So you can make quick money. Or you can have something that is more lasting in the world.

And, you know, that year I kind of decided that I wanted to do more than just trade, trade myself. And I really enjoyed the aspect of building a business and having a team and growing with them and creating more lasting elements. So that's thankfully worked out for me. I mean, I definitely could have made a lot more money in 2021. But I wouldn't have the pleasure of being in the incredibly fortunate spot I am today. And the last thing on this is, one thing I've done, which is kind of weird in my career, I've tried to cap my annual jump in net worth. I tried to cap it at like a, like a maximum 3x.

So what do you do with the rest of the money? You just give it away or?

I spend my time on training myself. Imagine you're a poker player and you made a hundred thousand one year. And then the next game you're up, 250, you spend the rest of the year getting even your way up into study mode, right? So you're building a foundation for the next jump. And you're focusing all your time and effort on that instead of making more money that year. I've done this since the beginning of my trading career, and it's been, it's been like 13 years of doing this. And I just target like 2x a year. And I've kept that. So it's been like 2x for 13 years.

Every single year you've 2xed your net worth?

Yeah, I mean, some years, it's 1.5. Some years, it's like a 2.8, whatever. But it averages out at this rate. And the way you bank is sustainable is because when you're running above trend, you, you start using time to think about, okay, what is going to be needed for the next year? Forget this year, I don't want to keep going. What's the foundation needed for a decade? So what do I need to build? What kind of pieces do I need to put together? This has two huge benefits. One is, psychologically, we talked about the feelings of making too much money, too quickly. You never get experienced if myself, but just like looking at people who've gone from like sub one million to suddenly a hundred million, like really quickly. Many of these fuckers are just lost going drugs all day and like, or like blowing up or like not appreciating what they have? Crypto is full of examples of people who have done this. Keeping a rate that is healthy for the mind has just worked really well for me. It just keeps you very balanced and you're always happy every year. You don't want to peak too early. I don't want to give specific examples of people, but if you have sudden success, and you hit your best year that you're going to have in your career when you're like 28 or something. It kind of fucks with you, I mean, I imagine professional athletes kind of have to deal with this as well. It's just physical, they can't do that much. They can't use software past a certain level. It's a much happier life if you can always look forward to more growth. Earlier we talked about compensation as well. People never like to take steps down. Like if you're paying somebody a lower bonus in the previous year it doesn't feel good and it doesn't really matter what the numbers are. So somebody would rather make a 200k and then make 300k rather than make a 800k and then like make 200k even though they have more money. They start worrying if they're going in the wrong direction? Like we're kind of weird as a species, we get like unhappy on a primal one level if we feel like we're going in the wrong direction.

Yeah, that's that's super interesting. You're kind of trying to avoid a blow off top in your PnL. When you hit certain milestones, you start optimizing more for the longer term partly for your own sanity as well.

If I look at someone like Ken Griffin, I don't know him personally, but they seem to have this type of trajectory where there's always a next level and it seems to happen slowly. But then after a decade, suddenly people start noticing. And I found that with myself as well. I mean, every year it feels like I have become more respected. I have more influence in the world. Like I'm not even doing anything. It just sort of grows organically. I really enjoy that part where it just happens organically and slowly rather than trying to be an overnight kind of success.

Don't you think it's inevitable that you'll hit maybe like a four year trough or something?

I mean, obviously mathematically at some point you have to, right? I would like to think that I have a few more years at this run rate and maybe it's not sustainable anymore. And that's okay.

The nice thing is that Selini at this point, the firm I've built, just has so many different arms and some can outperform and underperform in different years. Obviously, if the entire crypto market stops existing, then we'll have to adapt and go to TradFi. But even that door, we've still got open. We have the ability to do that. I'm not too worried. If you start building resilience into your growth, it's okay.

I was surprised by, when I was 40, I would have stopped learning so much. I thought that I was kind of keeping a mental reference in my head of like where I thought I was on a learning curve. And I was at like a 92% and then, I kind of felt like next year, I'll be at 95%. And now I'm like a 97%. I just kind of estimated that by the time I was 40, I would be like, I would be done and there wouldn't be much more to learn. It's just execution now. And then like when I was 39, that's far from what I considered to be like 95 to like 102. And then you realize that it's actually not out of 100 because it doesn't make sense. You happen to have 102. And then it's actually probably like out of like 500. And you're just like nowhere near, like you're so far from knowing, like there's so much more. So I've ended up accepting that my 40s are gonna be like, a lot more learning and growth than I thought. I thought I would just execute, but there's so much that we don't know. It's not just about me. I think collectively, we're all learning so much more than we didn't expect.

I know ultimately being in a growth mindset keeps you from feeling like you've peaked. It's the thing we talk about, you don't want to feel like your best years are behind you, and now you just have to adapt to your retirement years past. Luckily we have examples in the world that people can keep crushing it into their older ages. Like Warren Buffet it's possible to never peak.

It seems like you would agree that self-mastery is probably the top end game in the human experience.

Exactly.