Pumponomics@ThePumponomics
road to (hopefully) $30m | month 4 recap
the goal, for anyone new: documenting a run from $6m to $30m in spot crypto ($5m start plus $1m added in june), every position shown, the losses too. sold solana near the top last cycle and retired off it. doing this one in public.
running tally: $6m start, $10m peak, july closes just under $7m. second down month in a row.
monthly grade: D
the portfolio looks completely different than it did 30 days ago. here’s how that happened.
early in the month i sold the smaller zec and near positions i’d kept. that closed the book on zcash for now.
then i changed my mind about something i’d believed for a year and a half.
since early 2025 my view was that meme mindshare peaked last cycle and the category would fade. i held that view right up until i kept noticing it stopped matching what i was seeing.
it’s the middle of a bear market. prices are down bad. and memes still dominate the conversation. they’re the only corner of crypto where a normal person can still dream about turning $1k into $100k, and retail wants lottery tickets more than it wants anything else.
if memes own the conversation now, at the bottom of the fear cycle, i have to assume their mindshare grows when times get good. so i stopped trying to fight what my own eyes were telling me.
then the question was how to express the view, because i have no edge in new memes. i’m almost 40. i buy a couple things in size and sit. that’s the opposite of the pump fun meta. so i went looking for memes you can hold.
considered doge first. it’s the one meme that survives even if all memes die. passed because it made a lower high last cycle and i couldn’t see the market cap going somewhere that hits my goals. passed from greed, honestly.
landed on two. fartcoin, $2.4m: a timeless joke, big mindshare last run, only in its second cycle, down 90%+ from its high, and tied to solana if solana wins again. pepe, $2m: the OG ethereum meme, and a bet on eth itself. sentiment on eth has been in the gutter for years and i’m seeing signs that flips this cycle. if eth runs, its whales get rich, and rich eth whales buy eth memes. pepe also lives outside the solana arena where a thousand new launches a day fight for the same attention. that matters for staying power.
that’s the thesis. now the execution, which is where the “D” grade comes from.
i had pre set bids on fartcoin at 10, 12, 13 cents. price bounced before filling me. and instead of letting the bids sit, i pulled them and bought everything at 16 cents.
the logic in the moment: still cheap enough to hit my target, majors look bottomy, no guarantee we ever see 12c again. well, we saw 12c within a few days. we’re sitting there now. the bids i cancelled would have mostly filled, and i’m down about 20% and roughly $500k on the position, basically without a green day since entry.
pepe i bought right after without chasing anything and it’s slightly green. the difference between those two entries is the story of my last two months.
hype had a rough july too. big holders unstaked and sold into the 60s and 70s and price bled to the low 50s. i haven’t touched it yet. it made a huge move during a bear market and it’s allowed to rest.
so the book now: fartcoin, pepe, hype, and a little cash. $6.96m.
how i plan to hold the memes, since they’re a different animal than anything else i’ve owned this cycle: the view i’m taking with the memes is the stop is zero. the risk was taken at entry, in the sizing, and the size is an amount i can ride down hard without it changing my life. so there’s no price where i panic out. price alone isn’t information here. i knew these could drop 30% the week after i bought when i chose the size.
what would actually change my mind is staleness. the bet on both of these is that they’re the rare memes with staying power, the ones that catch the wave again when times get good. the fate of 99% of memes is the opposite: each pump smaller than the last, mindshare bleeding to whatever launched this week, until the chart is just a slow fade dotted with bounces too small to see.
the tell is participation when money comes back into crypto: if majors recover and fresh memes run while these two lag the move, the staying power bet was wrong and i start looking for the exit.
honestly, the staleness risk is bigger for fartcoin than pepe. pepe was an internet meme for a decade before it was a coin and lives on eth away from the solana meat grinder. the market agrees, which is why it costs 10x more. fartcoin is the higher beta, higher risk half of the pair, and it’s also the one where i chased.
so the plan is: sit, take the drawdown my entry earned, and judge these on the next real move up, not on the bleed. if a pump comes and one of them isn’t participating, that’s data and i’ll decide whether to act on it.
checked the sell framework: nothing close to firing. we’re about as far from euphoria as this market gets. that cuts both ways. it’s why i wanted to be a buyer, and it’s why being early might hurt for a while.
portfolio screenshot below.
month four done.
