When 121% Won't Do
What the hunger for speculative excitement says about the market
Stocks are so passé…
The real money’s in crypto. Almost daily we hear about new crypto millionaires. One after another, people’s dreams come true in this exotic new market.
My new favorite YouTuber, 25-year-old “Champ,” reports, “multiple people just became millionaires.” While he’s careful not to specify exactly who these 7-figure winners are or what caused the sudden windfall, we assume it’s crypto-related.
I really like Champ. His site shows drone footage of him chilling out poolside in Monaco, and living the good life.
Except, I’m intrigued by the lone female tigress apparently commanding Champ and his crew to line up single file and jump into the pool…
Either way, his site offers a “Free Lambo” if you subscribe to the YouTube channel…
Not just a chance in a rigged sweepstakes. The way this reads, it’s a free, no asterisk, which any rational viewer would assume is the luxury Italian supercar and well-known symbol of success in the crypto world, as well as the South Florida illicit drug trade.
Also Champ, Lambo is a brand, and should be capitalized…
I’ll pass on the Lambo anyway. I don’t wear cologne, and I’m also short on garage space.
Champ might accuse me of being part of the old-school segment of the crypto market, if you can imagine there being such a thing. It’s the slower, 75% per year crowd. That’s the rate Bitcoin (XBT) rose between 2015-2024.
Michael Saylor, the psychedelic crypto evangelist who turned his company into a heavily-leveraged XBT repository, called the best-known coin, “A game we can all win.”
To eliminate the possibility of confusion, he went on to compare owning XBT to, “…a basketball team with legendary players such as LeBron James and Michael Jordan, where you can play alongside them.”
That sounds fun. Like wearing one of those virtual reality masks to do a spacewalk from the comfort of a La-Z-Boy recliner. Without all the hassles of training, preparation, and detailed focus required to do a real spacewalk.
What Saylor means is all you need to do is click, buy, hold, and never sell the leading token, and you win like a champion. Over and over again. You just keep winning, and you’ll win more when you play more. It’s a virtuous feedback loop.
But 75% per year is not enough for Champ and mobs of other thrill-seeking speculators. They need bigger returns to get to an Airbnb in Monaco this weekend with a rented Lambo.
Bitcoin is the blue chip crypto. Its $2 trillion market value makes up a king-sized ~56% share of the total crypto marketplace. That’s the value of all known coins. And believe me, there are a lot of them.
And while XBT posted a compounded average return of 75% over that 2015-2024 period, it rose 121% last year. Younger speculators like Champ point out $1,000 growing 121% in a year is only $2,210.
But older speculators point out that $1,000 growing at 75% from 2015-2024, compounded annually, is $269,389. That’s enough to buy a new Lambo. It’s also an unusually brisk pace of growth.
It’s all a sign of the times. 75% per year for a decade or 121% in a year isn’t enough. The average American worker salivates over the idea they too can strike it instantly rich in the wild world of crypto. And they’re willing to go to extreme lengths to do it.
Moonshot Gains
Not content with 121% merely holding XBT all of 2024, the masses need more, and they find it in the meme coin market.
Meme coins are digital tokens branded and marketed to capture hot or trending ideas. They have no actual value or tether to tangible assets. The goal is to buy them faster than the other desperate speculators, then sell them for a profit before the price collapses.
While we thought PancakeCoin was idiotic in the last crypto frenzy, it looks top-shelf compared to what people eagerly buy today.
These coins come and go so quickly, they don’t have time to even list on the leading meme coin exchange, aptly named Moonshot.
Take for instance, DeepSeek. It’s a coin created Tuesday morning, that’s two days ago, around 4:00 AM EST after a company with the same name dominated headlines the day before.
Launching at a value that appears to be 4 zeros past the decimal place, then shooting to near 0.014, it now sits at around 0.006 just before 2:30 PM EST.
The problem, or one of the problems, is if you type DeepSeek into the search bar on Dex Screener, a leading meme coin information platform, you get dozens of coins with the same name. Mistype, with an extra letter, you get dozens more. There seem to be an uncountable number of DeepSeek variant coins available now following Monday’s headlines.
As a reminder, not one of these coins has any discernable relationship to the company mentioned in news headlines. And that’s just one buzzword.
It’s the same with any trending headline. Take the well-known DogeCoin for instance. Started as a clever mispronunciation of the word dog, this is the leading meme coin with a $50 billion market value.
However, if you try to buy DogeCoin by typing “Doge” into the search box of a major crypto platform, you’ll return these variants:
Baby Doge Coin
Dogelon Mars
Department Of Government Efficiency
Department of Gov Efficiency
DOGEai
Own The Doge
Doge Killer
Dogechain
Doge Eat Doge
Dogecast
Feisty Doge NFT
DogeGF
DogeBonk
dogecast
Doge Caucus
Internet Doge
Doge Mascot Shibu
DogeFather
Dogefather
Doge Jones Industrial Average
Chinese Doge Wow
Pepe on Doge
@DOGE
Each of these knock-on coins hopes you’ll mistakenly click and buy. People do it. Some of these freshly-minted coins shoot up to tens of millions in market value…before crashing. All within hours.
And you need to get the lingo right to play in this wild market. Crashing is being “rugged.” Short for having the rug pulled from under you.
That’s only the beginning. In the meme coin market, things go from party time to patty wagon quickly. And the steps between the two are some of the most onerous I’ve ever seen.
A Complex Way to Lose Money
Champ walked me through the way to supercharge action in the meme coin market.
He showed a coin with huge profit potential, Chill Guy Coin. There are dozens of variants, so it’s critical to get the right one, and fast.
By the time the video ended and I pulled up a quote for Chill Guy Coin, it was already down significantly. Someone got rugged.
The first thing to realize about meme coins is they don’t trade on traditional markets. In this case, Coinbase (COIN) is an old-school brokerage… only useful for the first step in the process.
1- Buy Solana (SOL) from a major brokerage like Coinbase.
You’ll need SOL to get started. SOL is a ~$112 billion market cap mainstream coin. Coinbase will take deposits in the form of U.S. dollars, and report account activity to tax authorities. It’s a respected choice for crypto ownership. In this case, it’s only a gateway.
That’s because step two is, download a separate wallet called Phantom:
2- Download the Phantom wallet
With Phantom, you’ll need to create a secure 12-word key which is the only way you’ll have access to the wallet. Champ makes it clear if you lose this, you’re permanently rugged… there’s no recovery.
He suggests etching the unique phrase into something metal, which would survive a housefire. Incidentally, a gold kilo bar is soft enough to etch into, and requires double the temperature of the average housefire to melt…it’s just a suggestion in the event Champ has one handy.
But obviously, you’ll also want to keep the phrase out of eyeshot. Maybe carve it into a girder running over a busy freeway. Nobody will think to look there.
You’ll send the SOL coins from the mainstream crypto brokerage to this secondary wallet.
Next, you’ll need another platform called Photon. Developed “for traders by traders” this is an essential way to avoid being rugged, sniped, or generally screwed.
3- Connect Phantom to Photon
You’re still not ready to trade…
Dex Screener is a platform designed to filter, search, and generally discover decentralized tokens, meme coins. You’ll need this linked up and connected throughout the process. As you’ll see, there are endless coins listed there. You’ll need search parameters.
Parameters meaning a certain level of liquidity…daily turnover. And number of active wallets, meaning if a handful of all coins sit in one wallet, there’s high odds of being rugged.
But my favorite parameter is, slippage.
Slippage is your tolerance level for someone cutting the line while you place your trade. Meaning, you offer $1.00 and a computer bot jumps ahead of you finding shares for $0.95 then filling your order for $1.00. Champ says he’s only willing to lose 2% to slippage but novices sometimes lose the bulk of the trade value as the spreads can be exorbitant.
4- Set search parameters on Dex Screener
Then you’ll need a Telegram account.
5- Create Telegram account
And that’s to connect with your AI Agent.
6- Connect to and familiarize with an AI Agent
The AI Agent will scan the entire ecosystem spotting opportunities that fit your parameters. It will place trades based on your parameters, jumping into hot new coins right away, and out of them before the others get rugged.
Where This Ends
Once you’ve lost enough money in the meme coin market to satisfy the craving, reverse all these steps with whatever’s left after slippage and rugging. Take that meager sum and spend it on a nice dinner, which at least you and the guest of your choice get to enjoy.
People seem so obsessed with the chance at massive gains they forget what they’d do with the money.
I’ve seen this play out in other markets. Like a chicken with its beak on a chalk line, they’ll charge ahead ignoring every warning sign.
From the top to the bottom this seems like a societal affliction. We’re compulsive speculators. It’s unexamined cupidity.
And to be clear, I’m all in for big profits. I’ve tried life with and without money. With money is definitely more fun. But the extreme gain seeking does not make sense.
Like the average people, service providers, who find out what I do and ask me the dreaded question, “What should I do with $1,000 I have saved up.”
My answer, “Spend it.”
They always recoil in horror. Then when they find out I’m serious, they assure me this $1,000 is play money. I tell them I’ve never encountered play money, even in a Monopoly game with the Tucker kids. I play to win, always.
I explain to them that due to their expert-level performance in their given trade, HVAC, pool care, dental work, etc., they’re likely ill-suited for high-stakes trading. Meaning, they might treat the market like shopping for a sale item at a department store, red tag special, etc. In stocks, you buy what’s going higher, things get cheaper for a reason.
Plus, they won’t know when to quit. They’ll turn the $1,000 into $1,100 and double down on triple-levered ETNs replicating the trade on steroids. Then a Fed meeting breaks while they’re in someone’s attic changing an air handler and they’ll fall through the ceiling when they see the $1,100 cut in half, or worse.
Just spend the money. But they won’t. Absolutely won’t. They’ll ask about every idea they’ve heard of, then say they’re just sure I have a brand-new idea they can be the first to know about. If you didn’t have context, you’d think they were talking to a drug dealer.
But we do it all the way to the ladder. A billionaire with those chicklet teeth that can illuminate a room when he smiles bought my favorite hotel in Miami. It’s the most tranquil place I know of… and he agreed. So, he bought it, and plans to turn it into luxury condos, completely destroying the vibe.
He’s no different from the gambling plumbers, servers, and repair techs watching Champ lecture on YouTube, determined to figure out this meme coin market… so they can get more money they don’t know how to enjoy. They’ll never be satisfied.
Numbers Get Bigger
And all the while, they miss the big picture.
Once we entered the era of managed economics, centrally controlled markets, we changed American life forever.
Most of us still use a 20th century way of thinking about money. We think the debt is just, “Too High!” And we’re worried about it, like it’s a credit card statement, we just know it’s a problem, and we want to hear elected leaders talk about it.
Problem or not, it won’t come down. In fact, the debt doubled every eight years going back to Nixon. If that holds up, today’s ~$36 trillion federal debt would be ~$72 trillion by 2033.
As the world turns…the numbers just get bigger.
So far, the managed system works. While it might not work someday, trading against it has been a bad strategy.
Plus, it seems like many in the “debt’s too high” crowd are all-in for speculative meme coin action too. The same people who fear a market crash seem to light up at the idea of making serious gains in highly-speculative trades.
While their words say too high, their actions say plenty of room to run.
When you beg for a speculative place to lose your $1,000, you vote for stocks. If you really thought there was a cliff on the next frame of that chart, you’d keep the $1,000 in your pocket.
The Pain of Withdrawal
Say what you will about the great 17th century tulip mania. At least you got something to look at. Speculators today buy virtual assets notched into cloud-based computer code.
TTL subscribers know we’re managing money, we’re trustees. We have stocks up as much as ~318% in under two years. And we think they’re solid. We also have ~142% gains in hard assets, digital and otherwise.
We’re managing for a cycle. A trustee aims to grow, but also survive, to grow more in the next cycle.
Meme coin buyers likely will not survive. We’ll have a generation of dopes telling sob stories of how Bitcoin (XBT) at ~$250,000 isn’t fair because PancakeCoin didn’t pan out for them.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There are trends, in motion. And while the market looks set for one of those elevator shaft falls, the Fed and the U.S. Treasury know there’s no choice but to keep raising the bar.
Here’s how it works…