Jez: How to Make it in Crypto (without getting lucky)

Jez’s route into crypto began with day trading Team Fortress 2 hats, then led through professional trading and quantitative high-frequency trading; he says he moved from degen trading into traditional finance, not the reverse. From 2015 to 2019, he market-made short-dated options for the first iteration of Wall Street Bets, serving traders seeking high-delta leverage. He sees speculation and the promise of outsized gains as crypto’s product-market fit for attracting people, alongside its utility as a financial database with wheels and programmable money. “Long degeneracy,” in his account, reflects people taking more risk as real returns compress and conventional paths to housing and wealth feel less attainable.

His own record, he says, distinguishes conviction from simply wanting a trade to work. Concentrated spot positions based on an edge helped him grow small portfolios into seven- and eight-figure portfolios, with theses typically taking six to nine months to play out. His blowups instead came from greed, tilt, poor risk management, and low-conviction, high-leverage trades—not from a sound application of his long-degeneracy thesis. He says full-porting ETH to recover losses was not intelligent investing. Conviction can make holding through volatility calmer than sitting in cash and searching for trades, but it can also become attachment to a losing position.

Jez argues that concentration can help grow an account, while diversification becomes more valuable for preserving it. Conviction means believing the market is wrong for a reason grounded in an edge; it does not mean needing the position to succeed. He has tolerated drawdowns of about 20% in positions such as Hyperliquid, Lighter, and Bitcoin, but says he has less confidence in his outside edge than two years ago and diversifies more as ideas become consensus. He kept buying Lighter as it fell from around $3 to below $1, citing his close knowledge of the team and his view that zero-fee retail trading, security, and technically ambitious development on Ethereum supported the thesis. Still, a market that contradicts a thesis persistently—especially for about a year—should prompt reevaluation.

For major trades, he looks beyond price to consensus, regulatory clearance, adoption, and the expected future flows that may change an asset’s relative value. Signals that once worked, such as an asset being mentioned on CNBC in 2017 or attracting Crypto Twitter attention, are less reliable now; institutional demand outside Crypto Twitter can continue to support an asset. He treats perpetual exchanges and revenue-generating protocols that return value to token holders as a growth opportunity across market conditions, though he says the investment thesis is incomplete. If perpetuals meaningfully displace options, he expects their growth to become less exponential and broad recognition of that shift to be a reason to consider taking chips off the table.

Jez warns that leverage can turn a correct directional call into a loss because liquidation boundaries interact with price variance. He cites a study in which 8x leverage over an hour produced negative results even when traders correctly anticipated the direction; a $2,000 Bitcoin position at 200x leverage could be liquidated by a 0.5% decline. He also found that leverage made it easy to keep adding exposure: after discovering Rollbit in December 2022 and investing heavily in its token, he later self-excluded because the platform tempted him into very large notional positions, not because of its casino. He says his October 10 loss was about 2% of his portfolio, but an early-November Bitcoin long below $100,000 cost slightly more and led him to impose stricter personal risk limits.

Jez says traders are both born and made: innate traits matter, but experience builds judgment, and luck can be met with preparation and decisive action. He recommends treating opportunities as scarce “bullets”—asking whether a trade is strong enough to be the only one taken that year—rather than chasing the constant stream of coins and pumps. Sharp, close-knit groups can provide ideas, feedback, and early warnings; his three-person investing group combines competency, distribution, and on-chain expertise, with members writing individual checks but presenting as a group. He also cautions against assuming every cycle will repeat the last four-year pattern, advises keeping a job until a portfolio could generate one’s income in T-bills, and suggests slowing down and diversifying around the high-seven- to low-eight-figure range unless one’s edge is exceptionally strong.