I have known Sean for a long time, and the opportunity to further interact with him came from Nathan.
Last month, Nathan told me: "Bro, I'm going to introduce you to someone who has a Studio, and a group of friends who are trading crypto, mainly MEME tokens."
I was very surprised to hear this, there are such geniuses, and it seems that friends in the south accept new things very quickly.
So in the second week, I met with Sean and his friends. It was indeed quite shocking, each person had three or four screens, and they were all doing transactions.
For this exchange of trading strategies, Sean even drew a diagram, very seriously.
In 2018, Sean briefly bought some Bit.
But at that time, he didn't have any faith, he just made some asset allocation.
By 2020, seeing the rise of DeFi, he felt that this thing was really amazing, and felt that it could change the world of finance.
So at the end of that year, Sean started to enter the crypto industry full-time, and since then it has been unstoppable.
Like many of his peers, Sean also first worked in the industry, at a US-listed mining company BitDigital, responsible for DeFi and Staking.
His strategy is mainly to buy large coins: BTC, Ethereum, and do Market Neutral, such as through stablecoins and DeFi's market neutral, or through arbitrage and market reset strategies.
So what is his profitable strategy?
According to Sean, he experienced a complete bull market and bear market while working.
In 2024, as the market warmed up, he started to trade and invest full-time.
He has experienced everything from MEME to ETF, to the mini-bull market in March, with both gains and losses.
In summary, Sean's current trading strategy tends to be a "barbell strategy":
90% of the funds are invested in relatively high-certainty conservative assets, such as Bit;
10% of the funds are used to pursue super high returns, mainly in the MEME tokens or high-risk assets.
The reason for this strategy is that at the beginning of the year, Sean found:
First, the performance of value coins was not as good as expected;
Second, the overall macro environment is not favorable to value coins, and they cannot make everyone money like last year or the previous cycle.
For example, in the previous cycle, many people made a lot of money through SOL, BNB and DeFi. At that time, SOL rose from 50 cents to 200 dollars, and their value grew with the participation of retail investors.
This tells us:
We need to determine the appropriate strategy according to the market, and the macro environment is not favorable to value coins, the good value coin targets are many and the difficulty is great, so we need to be prudent.
Sean's view on "assets that have not been priced by the market":
In April and May of this year, Sean happened to be on a business trip and sleeping on a plane.
When @pumpdotfun was particularly hot, there was also a very hot track, which was political tokens. In addition to the Trump project, there was also Fight that everyone was trading a lot during that period. Because he was sleeping, he didn't catch the earliest wave.
But then a series of events happened, especially the rumors of Biden's withdrawal and Harris' succession. At that time, everyone was judging whether Biden would withdraw.
But after a little research, it is unlikely to be Gavin Newtom or others, because Biden and Harris' campaign teams have already raised a lot of donations, and this money cannot be easily transferred to other candidates. So it was destined that the Democratic Party could only lock the candidate to Harris.
Wall Street and those sensitive to US politics have already determined that Biden will definitely withdraw, and Harris is the successor, but the crypto circle has not yet been transmitted.
So Sean laid an ambush in the Ethereum ecosystem for two related MEME tokens, one with the ticker Harris, and the other with the ticker Kamala.
Although he didn't know which one would become the only one, he felt that the loss of missing out would be huge, so he bought one Ethereum of each. On the day the news was announced, it directly soared 5 to 6 times, and the next day it rose another 15 to 16 times, and 5 to 6 months later it rose another 5 to 6 times.
In addition, Sean will decide to chase and exit based on the certainty of the data:
In the DeFi era of the previous cycle, he used the rule of TVL growth to obtain returns. In this cycle, he found similar opportunities may be realized on @pendle_fi.
At the same time, he will also judge the market trend based on the changes in the data, such as observing the on-chain transaction data, group activity, gas fees, etc., to distinguish between bull and bear markets, and adjust the trading position and valuation system accordingly.
This tells us:
We need to find and lay the groundwork for the certainty in the market in advance, and sell when the market is priced.
How to trade MEME to get 100x?
Sean said he has a complete trading process: mainly relying on the smart address system and the alpha community.
Building a smart address system and focusing on the alpha community is very necessary for discovering trading opportunities, but you can't rely solely on them to judge the good and bad of a project.
When you find that the smart addresses you are following or multiple smart addresses have purchased a certain token, you can consider following up, but you need to evaluate the background, story, and valuation of the project. You can start with a small amount to try, and increase the position after confirming the project situation.
At the same time, through the alpha community, you can understand your position in the project, such as whether you are an early entrant.
The basic process is as follows:
1. Understand the project background: After knowing a project, I will search for its Twitter CA, understand its background, participants, the proportion of domestic or overseas capital. If I can't find relevant information, I may withdraw or not participate.
2. Observe the chip structure: Judge the composition of the big players and their operation methods, such as whether they buy old rat cages by raising the tax, whether there are KOLs and Smart Money bringing chips, and also observe whether the big players are selling and the situation of the front-row profit addresses.
3. Develop a trading plan: Set a valuation target based on market conditions, and adopt different profit-taking strategies in bull and bear markets.
4. Set stop-loss positions and trading patterns: Generally speaking, it can only be traded when the EV is tripled, but at the same time it needs to bear the risk of the token going to zero. In a bear market, it may sell out when the token doubles or more, and for really good tokens, it may sell out when it is ten times, but according to Sean's trading system, the highest may be five or seven times, and Sean suggests that the EV setting should be strict enough. In addition, it will also leave the market according to common trading charts and patterns, such as double top, breaking through the previous low or high.
5. Phased profit-taking: Adopt multiple profit-taking methods, such as selling some profits when the market erupts "upward needle", and exiting in time when the event is priced in, and decisively taking profits according to the expected valuation in the trading plan, to avoid raising the valuation target due to the influx of market funds and good project performance.
6. Set up a large screen Dashboard to track popular tokens in real-time.
This set of processes is Sean's winning formula.
In addition to trading, what other interests and hobbies does Sean have?
Sean likes to read some long articles:
For example, Ni Da @Phyrex_Ni's articles, which are more objective and based on facts, without too much subjective judgment.
And Alex @xuxiaopengmint of @Mint_Ventures, he particularly likes Alex's articles on value coins, although he hasn't been trading value coins for a long time, value coins have not been very active recently, but perhaps there will be new opportunities in October or November.
Additionally, there are some overseas bloggers, such as @Rewkang and @brandank_cr, whose market analysis logic is clear and have strong subjective views, but are backed by data. Sean also thinks their articles are worth referring to.
Sean's warning to newcomers:
You need to learn to take profits in batches. He has three ways of taking profits👇
1. "Needle up": When the market is booming, it is a very good liquidity exit node, and you must sell a portion at this time. Generally speaking, his experience is that if the coin has already doubled or tripled, he may sell it. If you bought it late, sell it when it doubles; if you bought it early, sell it when it triples.
When "needling up", you must take out a portion of the profits, which will adjust your mentality very well.
2. Event Price in: At this time, it is time to exit, such as when Kamala is announced as the candidate, or when Trump tweets on X, these are the Price in nodes of events, which are usually accompanied by the needle up of prices.
3. Expected valuation based on your trading plan: When the expected valuation is reached, you must decisively take profits, and cannot raise the valuation target because you see the influx of market funds and the good performance of the project, which is a very emotional approach. At this node, you must take profits, and this generally allows you to make a relatively good exit.
Finally, a small trick:
Sean has a 24-hour and 48-hour hot coin Watch List, which displays the popular coins on the screen, especially those that have been washed for a long time and suddenly start up, Sean will capture them in the first time, and then chase the rise, which is a very good strategy.
Through this method, he has grasped many good time nodes to increase positions or take profits.
Finally, we talked about how the big players can also lose money.
I know some friends who are doing projects, and they have also invested in many projects, such as a project with only tens of thousands of US dollars, they will not easily run away.
And there are differences among the big players, there are smart big players, and there are stupid big players. Sometimes the big players can also lose money, the core logic is actually the problem of capital and emotion. When 100 dollars cannot pry open greater profits, it is time to rest.
After contacting the project parties or sponsors and big players, I found that their ultimate returns are more calculated on an annualized basis, rather than on a multiple basis.
For them, the most important thing is certainty, especially being able to sell enough tokens when liquidity is good.
This is also why many retail investors now feel that buying these tokens is meaningless, because they have nothing to do with the fundamentals. It is more about tracking addresses and address clusters on the chain, which may be more valuable, and this is also why everyone likes to play Meme coins now, because at least they won't deceive us with packaging stories.
