Julien
2.1K posts
Julien
@JSterz
Prop Trader. Orca Traders. Mainly cryptocurrencies; we make markets on BTC and ETH options. Twitter advice: The struggle is where greatness comes from.
Germany Tham gia Kasım 2009
493 Đang theo dõi5.2K Người theo dõi
Julien đã retweet
Asset managers have completely closed their ETH Long Future position.
No more selling from this cohort.
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Julien đã retweet
If you bought into the mini Anthropic IPO last week you're now up 18x 🤯 this is just insane this point
- $VCX is now trading at $565
- The fund's actual net asset value is $19 per share
- Investors are paying ~30x what the underlying holdings are worth
A $650 million portfolio of private companies is being valued by the market at nearly $10 billion.
To put the premium in perspective:
If you buy one share of VCX at $565, you're getting roughly $19 worth of Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, Databricks, and Anduril.
The other $546 is pure demand premium. You are literally paying $546 for the privilege of accessing these companies.
And people are lining up to do it. Truly insane scenes
Josh Kale@JoshKale
The Anthropic mini IPO is unfolding and you already missed a 15x return The stock is named VCX by Fundrise and just went up 1,500% in 5 days on the NYSE It’s a fund holding: - Anthropic = 21% - OpenAI = 10% - SpaceX = 5% - Databricks = 18% - Anduril = 7% $VCX has a NAV of $19 per share. This morning it just traded at $312. That means the market is valuing a $650 million fund at $5.4 billion 🤯 Investors are paying an 8x premium just to touch these companies. Why? Because the most important companies being built right now refuse to go public. And people are so desperate for exposure that they will pay almost anything to get it. The private markets are sitting on trillions in value that public investors have been locked out of and this stampede tells you everything about how much hype there will be around these IPOs. I hope this speeds things up
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@AviFelman The question is what exactly is "soon". I see only really narrow de-escalation scenarios at the moment. Because a ceasefire or anything else would only be a "soft" de-escalation. Currently I would see the scenarios for true de-escalation extremely unlikely.
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There might soon be a generational opportunity to buy Dubai real estate
Daily Mail@DailyMail
'Dubai is finished': Expats say they will leave and never come back as tax-free dream is shattered by war and officials begin prosecuting people for posting videos of missiles trib.al/hwJQqDC
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@TedHZhang Yeah, pulled up the bond charts after his interview and was thinking "huh bonds at range highs, sure you want to be short this?" That was literally the top. Druckenmiller is just incredible.
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Stan Druckenmiller's intuition on the markets is just extraordinary.
He naturally sees his portfolio as a matrix of instruments that can counter-balance each other's correlations.
In his last interview with Morgan Stanley, he mentioned having a bond short as a hedge for his portfolio of longs in Korea, Japan, Gold, Copper, $TEVA etc.
He discussed that if we see disinflationary growth, he breaks even or loses small, but if we see inflationary growth, it will act as a hedge.
Of course, he couldn't have anticipated the Iran War and the oil supply shock, but now bonds are selling off on higher yields, and his bond short is working nicely.
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Second best day of the year for me with roughly +35% on my trading equity. Locked in some, mainly calls expiring this Friday.
Still swinging over half of my long exposure with the expectation that we'll get at least one more day up before a pullback or at least a pause.
Jeppez@Jeppez420
Loaded up long on cryptos (IBIT ETHA MSTR BMNR). Really like the daily as well as the reaction to recent events
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Dropping this here, because its just so good and worth a read. I'd argue that this reminds me very much of Druckenmiller's approach to sizing. 1) Test 2) Core 3) Press.
lordfed.co.uk/p/size-matters
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Deutsch
2026 @Traders4ACause TAKEAWAYS
The last week of my life was dedicated to Traders4ACause’s annual event, which has become the Mecca for serious retail traders globally.
This year we had dozens of prop traders from @smbcapital, @TRLM, KTG, Chimera, FNYS, and more. Insane retail talent like @thelaptoplegend, @traderkylec , @edu_trades, @dax50, @TheStrongTrader, @AT09_Trader. All of these traders I am now friends with only thanks to this conference.
Whether you go with friends, a partner, or all alone, you will never be alone and never find an opportunity to connect with so many traders at once.
This weekend I was inspired by the strength of traders like @zander_odom, I reconnected with traders from Spain, connected traders from Germany only for them to realize they were literal neighbors in Düsseldorf! This event keeps proving how small and powerful the trading world is.
One talk that resonated with me this year was from Dr. Tom Crawford’s concept of “crossing the bridge” after a tough day at work and the importance of truly disconnecting when the trading day ends. I need to get better at that.
I also loved hearing @lx21 crush it navigating the panel on alt investments. And seeing Gregg commit to donating a whole school 🤣
It was awesome to witness past attendees experience huge growth like @Jeppez420 to then become a speaker, welcoming back legends like @Tradestl and @theshortbear, and of course seeing @CenterPointSec @ClearStreetLLC still investing in this mission.
Wild to think back on how I met Scott Herman and Matt Marino at my first T4AC conference in 2019 and that relationship became a key part of my own journey. Not only having Scott, Matt, Ryan, Royce, Amanda and others become some of my best friends, but they became my paid partner and broker of choice as I work to bring top-tier education to more traders.
So grateful for this community and everything it stands for. Special thanks to @zkschell for making this event what it is.
Zander Odom@zander_odom
This weekend's T4AC was exactly what I needed. It was so incredible to reconnect and meet new people! It was also such a pleasure to be invited on a panel with some incredible people. I really appreciate everyone's support in my journey.
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Grateful for #T4AC2026. The event was blast and it was a pleasure to meet so many interesting and high integrity people. It was the first time for me. Looking forward to the next one @Traders4ACause
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Julien đã retweet
$XLP most overbought since 2017.
Chart does look great though, I must admit
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@degentradingLSD It was a great and fair system. They decided however to abolish it and instead implement capital gains tax, which is imho a huge step backwards.
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It was today that i found out that the netherlands currently taxes wealth already via "fictitious returns" wtf??? Sorry europe is permanently cooked
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@TheShortBear I disagree. The options market has nothing to do with it. Also call selling as you describe does the exact opposite: for a call seller to stay delta neutral he has to buy delta in a rising market and sell delta in a falling market. A short vol position is by nature gamma short.
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The main reason crypto hasn’t gone anywhere is that its momentum engine was structurally altered by the introduction and scaling of options markets.
Bitcoin stopped behaving like a pure momentum asset and started behaving like a financialized one.
What changed wasn’t demand. What changed was market structure.
Before options, price discovery was driven primarily by spot buying and perpetual futures. Large inflows created reflexive upside: price went up, shorts got liquidated, momentum compounded, and you got vertical “God candles.”
Once a deep options market developed, that reflexivity was absorbed.
Market makers who sell calls hedge dynamically. When price rises, they sell spot or futures to stay delta-neutral. That hedging flow mechanically dampens upside momentum. The more calls that are sold, the more supply appears into strength.
At the same time, long-term holders discovered yield.
Instead of simply holding BTC and waiting for a moonshot, institutions and large holders began selling covered calls to generate income. This created a structural “call overhang,” especially at psychological strike levels. As price approaches those strikes, gamma hedging flows and call-related supply create a ceiling effect.
Bitcoin transitioned from a convex speculation asset into something closer to a yield-bearing instrument.
The acceleration of IBIT options made this transformation explicit.
The key structural changes were:
• Initial approval (late 2024): 25,000 contract position limit
• First expansion (mid 2025): 250,000 contracts
– 10x increase. Enabled meaningful covered call programs and volatility-selling strategies to scale.
• Super-size proposal (late 2025): 1,000,000 contracts
– Institutional parity with major ETF options. Large funds could now run systematic yield-harvesting at size.
• Early 2026 normalization: Removal of special caps
– Bitcoin ETF options treated like standard commodity ETFs. Full integration into traditional derivatives infrastructure.
Each increase expanded the capacity for:
1. Call selling
2. Basis trades (long spot / short futures)
Volatility harvesting
3.Structured yield products
The result is a structurally different asset.
Price is no longer just a function of conviction. It is a function of gamma positioning, volatility supply, and institutional hedging flows.
Momentum hasn’t disappeared, it has been redirected into yield.
Bitcoin itself has entered its institutional phase. Yield and volatility management now suppress the explosive reflexivity that once defined it.
Crypto didn’t die.
It got financialized and the last weeks showed what the volatility trading could do to the underlying asset by breaking.
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Julien đã retweet
This post is doing the rounds on a possible scenario.
I like the idea that is IBIT related for US hours execution.
I like the idea it is perhaps linked to a HF with exposure to IBIT and metals, given the almost unprecedented moves in both.
But there are alot of IFs and speculation, which is fine, since we're all speculating. But there needs to be some support from data before we conclude this is it, just because we are tired of not knowing.
Looking at @Amberdataio new Amberdata Intelligence which tracks IBIT options, we can see some large ITM Puts being bought back, the top 4 representing $150m of premium, which is certainly painful, but the full $900m is made up of a chunk of smaller $1m-$20m clips which are the nature of a busy day - ie as a product of, not necessarily cause of.
There are a bunch of profitable net premiums too, and at present the AD data does not show if some of the losses are attached to profitable trades as spreads.
So this is inconclusive from the Options standpoint.
It also doesn't seem enough tbh in size.
Ofc we could then speculate that there is massive size being done OTC; then counterparties other than the exchange might whisper, but many in the know don't seem to know. That is more IFs.
But it doesn't have to be options, the theory can still be plausible. It's an awful lot of spot though, but there's an awful lot of knock-on effects that happen when risk-parameters get tightened and the unknowns grow larger than reality.
This is the frustrating part of this unwind - the unknowns.
During cases of previous meltdowns eg LTCM, Dotcom, 9/11, Financial crisis, European crisis, Covid, Luna, FTX, etc we knew at the time so much more and we're able to take justified decisions; this time is different so far, and hence the severity of the drop.
GIF
Parker@TheOtherParker_
This was the highest volume day on $IBIT, ever, by a factor of nearly 2x, trading $10.7B today. Additionally, roughly $900M in options premiums were traded today, also the highest ever for IBIT. Given these facts and the way $BTC and $SOL traded down in lockstep today (normally SOL trades with beta) + the relatively lower liquidations on CeFi exchanges, this leads me to believe that the nexus of the problem lies with a large IBIT holder. IBIT has become the #1 venue for BTC options trading, so my guess is that a hedge fund trading IBIT options is the culprit. If you look at the 13F filings for IBIT (I like whalewisdom dot com), you'll find a number of interesting names that have the majority of their fund in IBIT. In fact, there are a few in there (not naming names) that have 100% of their fund in IBIT, which likely means no cross margin. In fact, the biggest reason to set up a fund to hold a single asset would be to isolate margin, so that if the trade blew up, the brokers wouldn't have claim to any other assets. Interestingly, most of these giant, single asset funds are based in HK. We know that Asian traders, particularly in China, have been deeply involved in the Silver and Gold trade. Silver was down 20% today, which was the 2nd largest 1 day move in a very long time (largest on Jan 30). We also know that the JPY carry trade has been unwinding at an increasingly rapid pace. This leads me to think that the culprit for the IBIT blowup today was 1 or more HK-based non-crypto hedge funds. As @FranklinBi pointed out, the fund(s) being non-crypto would explain why no one sniffed them out. They would likely have few/no crypto counterparties, meaning complete isolation from CT. The last small piece of evidence I have is that I personally know a number of HK-based hedge funds that are holders of $DFDV, which had the worst single down day ever, with a meaningful mNAV decline. The mNAV had been holding steady surprisingly well throughout this pull back until today. One of these fund(s) could have been connected to the IBIT culprit, as I highly doubt a fund taking that large of a position in IBIT and using a single entity structure would only have the one fund. Now, I could easily see how the fund(s) could have been running a levered options trade on IBIT (think way OTM calls = ultra high gamma) with borrowed capital in JPY. Oct 10th could very well have blown a hole in their balance sheet, that they tried to win back by adding leverage waiting for the "obvious" rebound. As that led to increased losses, coupled with increased funding costs in JPY, I could see how the fund(s) would have gotten more desperate and hopped on the Silver trade. When that blew up, things got dire and this last push in BTC finished them off. I have no hard evidence here, just some hunches and bread crumbs, but it does seem very plausible. Let's see if some more concrete evidence floats to the surface here soon. The smoking gun will be a large fund fitting this profile filing a 13F showing a giant IBIT holding going to zero. Unfortunately, if a fund had their IBIT position liquidated today, they wouldn't have to disclose the position change until 45 days after the quarter end, so we'd be looking at mid May for the smoking gun from 13F filings most likely. Hopefully some of you out there with too much time on your hands this weekend can snoop around more. My guess is that word will start to get out, because something of this size is just too hard to hide. Additionally, if the broker was not able to liquidate the fund in time, the broker may have a hole in their balance sheet, which would be even more difficult to hide.
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Julien đã retweet
By far the most vicious selling I’ve seen in Crypto, feels forced, indiscriminate.
Few theories:
- Secret Sovereign dumping $10B+ (Saudi/UAE/Russia/China)
- Exchange blowup, or Exchange that had tens of billions of dollars of Bitcoin on the balance sheet forced to sell for whatever reason
- Large Deca/CentiBillioniare family facing liquidity crunch (Ellison/Oracle?)
- Hidden leverage in the IBIT ETF, people could borrow against an asset for the first time from GSIBs and potentially over extended themselves significantly
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@mvcinvesting I mean they are data centers, but they are also crypto miners primarily.
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What on earth was said on $IREN's call to justify the stock being down another 25% on top of today’s 11% drop?
Yikes.
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@TheShortBear To honest price action has been relatively orderly so far.
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Update.
Full meltdown and -30% move within the past 2 weeks.
The Crypto market is being consolidated with no space for Alts.
Now under the 2025 lows and stopping out everyone with it.
THE SHORT BEAR@TheShortBear
RIP crypto market. We went from a breakout and reclaim of the range to a breakdown. Even worse we cracked on what many believed would be the catalyst for the bottom, metals topping. That said we have the Monday Crypto meeting at the white house and I would highly caution that it takes a few days and weeks before flows settled. In the past metals topping was a positive catalyst but it took a bit of time for the trend to establish itself. The funniest outcome now would be a bad crypto bill being accepted. I see this as stable coin yields not being passed through to customers as a major win for banks and against crypto and done in the name of stability or at least argued so through US banks lobbying. An outcome like this might price in all bad news while metal flows stabilize the backwind in the asset type. To be back in a bullish environment I would need to see a reclaim of the range and 200ema. Equally important is the speed to me, if we can quickly reclaim the range I would expect a very violent recovery of the uptrend, should we just fizzle lower, I think we are in for a larger bear market. The biggest risk to crypto is a general recession hitting us with sticky higher inflation. If we see that we would get retail and institutions pulling back while higher rates than needed would kill risk appetite. Time will tell, a dark day though.
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@TheShortBear It is surely oversold, but it still lacks level of despair we have seen in 2018 and 2021/2022.
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Huge opportunity for those that waited, unlike me unfortunately.
If you believe and wanted to own crypto at any point, this is it.
Not saying this should be the full portfolio but a piece is probably warranted.
The major issue like always, when panic spreads, beta goes up to 1 and everything is down, with no more capital to deploy through it.
Subu Trade@SubuTrade
Bitcoin is in a bear market, and its weekly RSI is extremely oversold (below 30) Bitcoin was this oversold only 4 times before. In every instance, Bitcoin was higher 4 days later, with an average gain of +16% $BTC
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@TheShortBear The 2018 crypto bear market took BTC down -83%. The 2021/22 bear market was -75%. Sure, crypto has been institutionalized, volatility tamed. Yet crypto is ultra reflexive. The tech is advancing fast, but I doubt that it takes out its reflexivity.
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$BTC
5 year support about to fail.
Stops got taken, liquidations are adding up with more shorts to be liquidated above than longs below.
Is this the end?
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