I Made 4,000% in 2 Years Trading Crypto
The value of asymmetric bets.
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I’ve made 4,000% trading and investing in the past 2 years.
Yes, 4,000%, that’s not a typo… Today I am going to write an update about this year’s performance, and my plans as we head into the later part of 2025.
For the readers that have been following me for a while, you know that I’ve received an airdrop from hyperliquid, and you might be thinking that that is the cause of the spike in late November right?
Well… yes and no. I’ve subtracted the net value received from Hyperliquid’s airdrop from the performance above, as I don’t consider an airdrop as trading performance.
But then what generated that spike, that jumped my portfolio from 200% to more than 3,000% in a few months?
Before we get it into it, I’d love to ask you if it would be valuable to you to have a google sheets that you can access with my open trades, what protocols I’m farming, what strategies I have running, etc.
I took this idea from other great newsletters like Citrini’s Research, and I think it might be valuable for people to not only have access to my trading strategies, but also to which trades I have open.
I can’t show the exact entry price above because then my wallet could easily be found and I don’t want that, even though this isn’t the only wallet I trade with. One of the perks of trading onchain isn’t it?
Let’s get into today’s article.
2024 - A Frustrating Year with an Unexpected End
2024 was a frustrating year for myself. I started the year quite well, momentum was extremely strong, and at one point I had nearly doubled my account, from starting equity that year.
But by the end of it, I was only up 10% from the start.
I was getting too confident, coming out of a fantastic 2023. I just didn’t seem to be able to lose. I am a systematic trend trader, but I began taking sub-optimal signals, that I wouldn’t take otherwise.
Exposure became to me almost like a drug, I needed my dopamine hit, and when the market was quiet, I wanted more of it, and so I started looking for signals rather than waiting for the signals my system indicated.
I was naive, and hungry to make a lot of money. Despite all I had learned up to that point, and thinking I was somewhat logical, it got to me. I go a bit more in-depth into some of the problems here:
That led me into a deeper drawdown than I would’ve wanted. Don’t get me wrong, I would’ve gone into a drawdown anyways, as that was the peak of the market that year, and trend/momentum traders suffered shortly after.
But my point is that my drawdown was deeper than what it should’ve been otherwise, because I was too exposed, at the wrong time.
So I spent the remaining of the year rather quite. I was writing articles, writing content on twitter, and just waiting for a future regime where my systems would shine again.
That is the reality of being a trader…
Most of the time I am waiting and surviving for that short window of time, where I make a lot of returns, to compensate for future period of losses. It’s a painful way to make a living, but hey, I love it.
Come November 2024, and Hyperliquid launches their token.
I won’t get much into the details, because that’s not the point of this article, but I received an airdrop that nearly doubled my portfolio at that time.
Which is a lot, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t 10x my portfolio like other people, and I still had to do something to be able to grow it.
Based on my fundamental evaluation at the time, I made the decision to hold the full stack, even though it represented a massive % of my overall portfolio.
Over the next few months, HYPE ran from the initial price of $2, to a top of $35. I held all of it until I sold a significant amount at $26.
I spent the remaining of the year telling myself that I got lucky.
Part of it is the truth, I got an airdrop that doubled my portfolio at the time. I also was lucky enough to be trading crypto during a year that arguably one of the top projects in crypto’s history was launched.
But if I am a bit kinder to myself, I survived so far. I was able to manage risk all of these years since 2021, avoiding major scandals in crypto like FTX, not pushing too much risk, and keeping myself in the game up until now. I also made the conscious decision of taking risk on a project I truly believed had the potential to become one of the largest in crypto.
Today, Hyperliquid is top 12 of all crypto assets by market cap…
Asymmetric Bets
One of the best books I’ve read is “The Rule”, by Larry Hite. He there described the idea behind consistently taking asymmetric bets, where the potential is massive and the loss is capped or very small.
I live by that rule. I wouldn’t have held an airdrop in any crypto project today, because I don’t believe in them. Most crypto projects are just ways to “max extract” from their users, to the pockets of the founders and venture capitalists. That’s just the reality of a large chunk of crypto “projects”.
When Hyperliquid came along, they defied this conventional state of affairs, by not taking external capital, completely self funded, 0 marketing, a team that was exceptional at what they did…
I was sold, and I was willing to lay significant risk for its potential.
Opportunities like this come once in a while, and although most of them will fail, we must be open to detect them in real time, and swing for the fences.
Sure I can make the argument of survivorship bias, but I can also make the argument that I’ve survived enough and took enough bets to realize that one in a decade kind of opportunity. I missed the 2020-2021 era by trying to mid-curve my decisions, and I promised myself that when opportunities like this came again, I would be there, willing to put risk on the table.
I truly believe that 99% of the time we must do sensible things, with sound risk management and never bet the farm, because it doesn’t matter how good something looks, it can still fail, and if you lose all your chips, you can’t play anymore.
As we’ll see next, hype would suffer a -75% drawdown from the top, and many other events that could have killed it.
But that’s what we get paid for innit? To make good decisions, despite a highly uncertain future.
2025 - Putting all My Eggs in One Basket
This year has been a roller coaster and a grind (seems like I say that every year).
By April, I had lost over -35% of my equity. In normal times, that would’ve been business as usual, but this year was different…
Why? Well, remember the Hyperliquid airdrop and the returns from holding it from $2 all the way to the top?
A normal and wise person, would take a percentage of that, and send to their bank account for safety.
I took that, and just sent the entire stack straight to my trading portfolio. Didn’t take a cent for myself. As I did that, the market went nose dive into the floor.
I was down figures, that in the past I would only hope to one day hold. I’ve been doing this for quite a while, but I can’t say that I wasn’t affected.
But as professionals, you can’t let that affect you. You need to still keep doing decisions with positive expectancy, even when you’re going through bad periods.
Same with a poker player that is having a terrible unlucky night. He might be the best of the best, playing each hand with edge, but at the end, it ain’t his night, just out of sheer variance (luck).
Hype had declined from a top of $35 in December 2024, all the way down to $9. A total of -75% decline.
There were also situations that happened that were quite problematic. Here’s a brief overview of that time:
Wide criticism that it was not really decentralized and could face regulatory issues shortly.
An incident where one of their internal market making engines got cornered by a bad actor, and other major CEXE’s took that opportunity to try and take them down.
The Trump administration was coming down with tariffs, and the global markets were declining into oblivion.
Israel war with Palestine was intensifying.
It just was a nasty time, and a time where taking risk was hardest. But that’s where I want to be taking risk on solid stuff. Stacking those odds on my side and taking those asymmetric opportunities. When there’s volatility on the street, when everyone’s dumping their bags, that’s when I want to be taking risk. So I went on, and started buying bags of everything.
I started with hype at $9-11$.
I went and bought all I could of U.S. equities. Even though it was much smaller compared to my crypto portfolio, I still wanted to take down my average cost of my long-term portfolio. This one was especially hard, because I saw traders I respected, selling their own U.S. equities exposure, because they thought worse times were coming. Their arguments were solid, and from another administration I would’ve said the same, but this time I was doing a different kind of play.
I thought that with the 2026 mid-terms, Trump could not afford to have a weak market, to be volatile, because it would already be hard to maintain the majority, and almost impossible if the people’s pocket books were affected. I bet on the unwillingness of the administration to sustain short-term pain and losses, for the sake of a claimed “better future”.
The argument was a bit deeper than that, but that’s all I took as reason to start taking some risk. The asymmetry of the bet was once again there. I started maxing out credit cards, cash I had, etc, to buy as much as I could.
I also did other plays that were quite good in retrospect. I called ETH at $1,550, which is now trading at $3,600. But this one I played it badly as I sold way before the major pump. Oops!
Although most of these plays were mostly done thinking into late 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, the market is now showing some upside momentum and my that asymmetric risk I was taking all year, began to payoff.
Much can change, and markets are volatile, but today I am beating the market by a decent margin. Much driven by the risk I’ve accumulated, but a lot more now driven by systematic trend trading.
Actually, most of the returns since late June has come from systematic trend.
If we decompose the returns from the total portfolio, we can see that we’ve had a major spike in that model, which contributed a lot for this year’s performance so far.
There’s still a lot to do and this job is never complete. One step each day in the right direction, making decisions with positive expectancy and trying not to land on obvious traps. Eventually, despite market variance, if we survive long enough, that expectancy should realize itself.
Plans Going Forward
There’s plenty to do, and to optimize in my trading business.
I want to ramp up the articles that I write here, to be more active sharing positions I hold with all of you, and to continue digging into my research.
I am still running a small-account type strategy portfolio, when I no longer have such a small-account. I will eventually want to switch to a portfolio that is more sensible in terms of risk, and start thinking more about maximizing for sharpe, lowering market exposure, diversify into other markets (eg. U.S. equities), and just being more mindful about what kind of exposures I am running.
Capital is our tool as traders/investors. Without our tools we can’t work. But the thing about our tools is that they ain’t something you can just drop at a store and buy. It’s one of the hardest things to acquire and it takes time to build. Not all of us start with large accounts that can afford lowering risk and make an income based off that. I had to take a lot of risk to get here.
There’s still a lot of risk to be taken.
And all will be documented here.
Hope you join along!
Ps… Looking to Work With Me?
After testing 100’s of trading strategies and spending 1,000’s of hours studying trading and building my own models, I had a few clients reach out to work with me and the outcomes have been quite good so far!
I’ve helped multiple clients now:
Develop their first systematic model
Help reviewing their current trading processes
Build solid frameworks on trading system development
Stop wasting money and time on bad ideas
Develop better risk management models
And much more…
If you want my custom help on your trading business, or would like to work with me, book a free 15-minute consultation call:
And finally, I’d love your input on how I can make Trading Research Hub even more useful for you!
Disclaimer: The content and information provided by the Trading Research Hub, including all other materials, are for educational and informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any type of security or investment. Always conduct your own research and consult with a licensed financial professional before making any investment decisions. Trading and investing can involve significant risk of loss, and you should understand these risks before making any financial decisions.
%4k is more than impressive
Well written! Keep it up.