systems trader. sharing few things i find interesting. not financial advice.
Portugal
Joined May 2020
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Systematic Portfolio Performance: Nov 07, 2025 - May 30, 2026
portfolio: 21.88%
spy: 12.74%
btc: -28.71%
total2: -28.51%
others: -23.49%
Not the end of the month yet but I have time to kill at the airport and tomorrow I wont.
It’s been a weird 2 months, April through early May, was a bit hard because the crypto market was in this weird limbo where it was emerging from flat to a bit directionally positive, and the short leg took a hit.
The longs were there to smooth it a bit but if I had to point a finger at what happened just from eye balling it, since everything was so weak, I was short higher “quality” stuff and as the market became more favorable, those coins jumped harder off the lows and I took the hit before it shifted out of some of those shorts into a long.
Now the market has been declining a bit and then up, but it seems that the “right” assets to be long and short are clearer, and the portfolio is reflecting that. But this is just my observation I dont have data at hand to show that.
The systems I trade are absolutely having a grand time as of late, and I dont know how long its going to last. In the stuff that I do, most of the time it isnt this good. So I am already bracing for the next sucky period.
But I am happy that I've been able to perform regardless of conditions, and conditions in crypto have been absolutely horrendous.
I am also running all these trades through various new perp dexes farming their points. Not something I started now, but something I’ve done ever since hype tge’d so I have a decent stack of unrealized gains in each by now that should yield a decent return later this year if their base valuations are realized.
Systematic Portfolio Performance: Nov 07, 2025 - Mar 31, 2026
portfolio: 12.56%
spy: -3.07%
btc: -33.92%
total2: -30.29%
others: -31.76%
overall decent performance so far, I'm protecting capital in this terrible market environment (crypto) and that's the goal.
still looking to add new strategies, didn't add much this past month as I've been working on a few failed ones that took my entire time, but overall making progress towards that goal.
was brain rotting a bit on insta when this story came up
this 86 year old man, has been building a massive boat in his backyard since 1987
the goal was to sail to Alaska
I highly respect the persistence but the sad thing is that all these years and he doesn't even know if the boat will float
spent his entire younger life building something he never got to see working in the real world
I do think that's sad.
I like to think that I am someone who doesn't shy away from risk. sometimes I a am a bit too risk seeking , and I end up taking dumb losses that would otherwise been avoided with a bit more care.
but I am most afraid of the alternative. of the opportunity cost of not doing the thing even if imperfectly.
I got lucky many times in my life.
in 2023 I was getting a bit tired of trading. I had a decently paying job, and trading was just consuming too much effort for the capital I could allocate back then.
but in the summer of 2023 I was all in reading and listening to the old school trend followers and momentum traders. not to say that they are completely correct but this is who I was being influenced by at the time.
I deployed a very simple naive long-only trend model in crypto, tbh almost as the last effort at making some money that would justify my time, and i happened to make 200% in return through Q1-2024 just running that dumb naive model.
I didn't have a backtest , I executed it manually from an excel, just finger in the air and see where the wind points (with a system ofc)
I got lucky on timing there but had I instead went the nerdy route getting something with a great risk model, automated execution, backtestable, etc, I'd have missed one of the periods that catapulted me to the next version of who I would become
but it wasn't all luck
I think I knew about hyperliquid from 2023. I almost bridged a portion of my trading then to there but I ended up just putting a small amount really early on on their vault. had I traded there instead of thinking about it , I'd have ended with retiring money today. I did get a nice airdrop but it was far from what could've been had I just done the thing instead of overthinking it.
these days I see something interesting, I'm there the same day (if it doesn't consume too many resources ofc)
fast forward to 2025 I got caught on 10/10 with a decent long delta and saw my equity evaporate almost 60% over the following months until early 2026.
I decided I had to change, began building my infra and quickly deployed a very simple model in q4-25 which led me to trade what I'm trading today.
I ended up selling most of my hype and putting it towards my systems and in June I have a fantastic period of up only performance bringing me close to ATH's and above 10/10 level once more.
once again none of the systems above were perfect but I always figured I'd rather see my creations in the real world than in a simulation.
opportunity cost is real and I'm much more afraid of that.
I'd probably have quit trading by now had I now just did the thing.
be smart about it though
i've read Pete's blog for a while, real stuff right here
looking forward to this series mate
Introducing Churning and Chatting, my new trader interview series.
20 years of trading, from the 2008 financial crisis to retail hyperscalping in the 2020s. Meet an ex-MBC prop trader, Knish, whose entire MO is to finish green every single day.
churningandburning.com/2026/…
bro I'm not trying to pick on you , but please think for yourself.
do you really think these idiot streamers have your best interests in mind?
do you know how many of these Ive seen and how they ALWAYS play out?
assume everyone here is ready to dump on you as soon as it's mildly convenient for them to do so, never forget that.
these people are only here to make their bags off your hard earned money and bounce.
they have no other skills. they are entertainers and monetize attention through various ways , and crypto has allowed them another venue to grift off of their audiences.
assume that everyone is out to get you, and you'll do much better.
you might not care what I have to say, but over time you will inevitably learn.
good luck.
portfolio has been de-risking since the 6th. was taking quite a directional tilt long (by design) and it began reducing that quite aggressively during the past week. i was a bit concerned i was going to miss a leg up, but turns out to have been nice protection.
i wouldnt necessarily want to be too short here though, if i had to make a discretionary call. probably a good spot to start accumulating some of the high revenue winners and majors.
always thinking about new attack vectors. i try to stick with basics. i dont care if resellers have better prices, i dont care if its 50% off, i buy direct, with address protection. still not 100% safe, theres still a whole chain that could be compromized.
another crypto monday
UPDATE: I can confirm that the Ledger supply chain is compromised in Europe as well. @Ledger should initiate an immediate product recall to protect users.
I just purchased a second device from a different Mediamarkt location today, recorded the unboxing process, and discovered spyware once again (video linked in the second tweet).
The device was compromised in the exact same manner, featuring identical modifications (such as additional cables and an LTE module). This indicates its a widespread issue rather than an isolated incident, potentially affecting Ledger inventory across MediaMarkt and Saturn stores throughout Europe (comprising over 1,000 stores across 11 countries).
My initial hypothesis was that these devices were returns that looked unopened to the employees and were just sold again as new however, a MediaMarkt employee confirmed that the device I purchased was not a return, and that returned Ledgers are sent directly back to the manufacturer rather than resold.
Store records show the inventory originated from Aqipa GmbH. While Ledger's CTO was unsure if Aqipa serves as the direct distributor between Ledger and MediaMarkt, it appears to be the case. Given that Aqipa distributes across Europe, any physical retail store receiving stock through them may be at risk.
I sent the first ledger to mark and the second one is going to ledger now, so that they can analyse it.
If you purchased a ledger from anyone other than the official ledger store, make sure to check your device!!
when i was doing content here, my goal was maximizing views and subs to my blog. i needed an edge though, so i tracked every piece of data that i thought would be predictive of that.
in that year (2024) I got over 60M views on niche content.
I am going to make this about trading, idc that much about marketing now, but the relation between both activities is something that is interesting to me.
there's a similarity in what i did to exploit an edge in maximizing eye balls to my content, to working on new trading strategies.
the general idea of is ALWAYS about who's on the other side. you have to think about the other person that is scrolling through the social media you're working on, and figure out what will make them stop at your post.
why would they stop their mindless scrolling to read your post? and you have to be detailed, if you write about trading, you don't want a doctor to stop in your post, unless that doctor is interested in it. so you have to create an avatar you can refer to, of the target audience.
that to me sounds a lot like trading strategy design. when you figure out how people react/behave to certain things in markets. i tend to think about those people and what they are doing. picture in my head why are they doing this action, where they could be wrong, and if i could position myself to capture that.
then the next step was to find something that worked in another niche, say a viral fitness post, and apply the overall idea, but to the piece i wanna do now. I didn't just create content out of nowhere, we were using stuff that had already hit, and refactoring it with my original content.
another commonality to trading because we don't have to invent the wheel when finding new trades. you might find something that's really clever, but i do think that the meat is doing similar ideas in less sophisticated places or putting a bunch of these less than optimal trades together. there's only a few things that we know work, and we either figure them out as we get more experience or get it from people that share broad ideas and apply them to our use case.
another example on content, i found that different styles of posts achieved different results, so i began categorizing different posts by what kind of post it was (story, technical, etc), and measure their correlation to certain targets.
for eg technical posts led to many more conversions than story ones, although the story ones get a TON more reach on avg (best one got 5.3M) by a factor of 6, because they were easier to consume.
this is trading strategy design to me once again. when you work on different trading styles that you know work, or have worked for you better in the past, and you can just spin them up into different iterations of the same thing on different venues for example.
or you already know that this kind of idea will be an operational burden but quite reliable, or the opposite, will be an easier trade, but very short lived so you have to get in fast. you start to get an idea for what kind of trades are best based on your past experiences and results.
i was also tracking the correlation between different metrics to engagement rate, because engagement was the leading factor that led to more clicks on CTA, and clicks on CTA were very well correlated with purchases by customers, etc, (i won't get into funnel optimizations here).
i was going to the detail of calculating the decay rate mid thread to find out if there was correlation with how many people got to the end and clicked the CTA, so that I could optimize around that area so people don't fall off.
a lot of this was scrappy work, that I manually tracked (AI was not great yet back then), but it did work, I made a ton of progress by tracking every little detail and just iterating through new strategies to farm views.
at one point, and the point i called it quits, i was spending like 4-6h hours per thread getting everything together, making sure the words were in the right order , getting the clips of the videos together, etc.
now to why i wrote all this today. i've spent a ton time on beta trades (momo/trend) , building infrastructure, etc. i talk a lot about it here.
but i know I havent yet put enough time to do the scrappy thing, maximum focus on getting new trades on. like the obsessive way i did when i was getting posts out.
and i could do much better performance wise if i focus on that. especially these days with AI, for a solo trader, this is much more of an achievable thing.
but why haven't I? every day i come to my desk and i find something to do that isnt that, things break, things need extra monitoring, etc etc. but what if my focus was only on finding new trades? what would my trading look like if i did that?
i guess now that i have all the infra built that i needed for the trades that already work for me, i can run that experiment.
I've began tracking this data of new trades that i develop and get a sense for what types are best, etc. it's going to be a newer thing for me.
i also know that what made me money is what i do now. but im someone that apparently cant be at the same place doing the same thing for too long or ill get bored, even if doing well. i need a new challenge.
sometimes i am also blind sighted by the idea that i could just run one trade for the rest of days and just do that. keep it operationally going. but is it the best use of my time? i know i can do better than that.
one of the things that has been printed in my brain is that i should focus on making money rather than doing the things that don't make money and trying to compete with the big boys.
so that's that, i thought this might be interesting to some of you as it is to me.
i've began tracking that data now on a simple sheet. I am going to prioritize some easy tracking so that i keep the ball rolling. how many different strategies can i add here over the following 3 months, if i focus solely on it every day. idk, i guess ill figure it out.
pedma retweeted
I don’t invest in other hedge funds because all of my investable capital is committed to my own.
But if I ever decided to start allocating to other managers, rather than going through a barrage of questions attempting to assess areas where I lack genuine expertise, I would focus on understanding the broad risks and then dial in on two main principles.
1) Does management have meaningful personal capital invested alongside its investors?
It’s a relatively straightforward yes-or-no question, but I think the answer reveals quite a bit. You can rationalize all sorts of reasons why management shouldn’t have its own capital at risk, but to me, there is no substitute for genuine alignment of incentives.
2) Is management genuinely obsessed with its craft?
I think this is one of the most underappreciated qualities in evaluating any business. And I genuinely believe it’s what gets people from being in the top 10% to top 1%.
When someone is genuinely obsessed with what they do, late-night strategy discussions, weekend meetings, and countless hours refining the business stop feeling like obligations. They become problems that people have a burning desire to solve.
That obsession drives deeper thinking, better questions, and an unwillingness to settle for satisfactory answers when better ones might exist.
Over time, that passion and attention to detail compound. Small improvements accumulate, processes become more robust, and ultimately, that obsession manifests itself in the quality of the product and its results.
As humans it’s kinda hard to be bad at something you are obsessed and passionate about especially if your work ethic aligns.
Going from the top 10% to 1% at something takes so much effort that it makes no sense if you are looking at it purely from a time efficiency perspective
But that valley is where all of the returns sit if you want to go from being good to being great
Most people overestimate how hard it is to be the top 10% at something, and underestimate how hard it is to be top 1% at something
The ones who are willing to do the work to cross from one line to the other receive all of the glory
i've been farming points on variational so i've been manually rebalancing my portfolio each morning (i know i can automate it but it literally takes me 5-8mins each morning).
built this simple dashboard where i just import a screenshot of my portfolio page and claude takes care of filling in my current allocations, etc.
but the interesting thing is that by trading manually, i've been learning a few things about my systems that i wouldn't when i execute automatically every day.
certain details like why am I taking this position on this asset? why am I exiting a position yesterday, and re-opening today? stuff like this that are leading to some discoveries to be more efficient, which is quite cool.
so on top of the points i earned (for whatever reason i got 10x the usual amount this week), im also finding stuff to improve in my systems.
this brings me to the question if there's a more efficient way to get similar information but not having to manually execute every day.
because pressing a button or having it fully automated on the backend, you're not even seeing what's going out right. yeh sure i have dashboards and tables but lets be real, i dont look at them at the same detail, and just glance over at the summaries.
pedma retweeted
some Ledger fud going around today
if you are a Ledger user you should consider using the "passphrase" feature
it's a 25th seed phrase word you choose personally which gives you a separate, hidden set of wallets, different from the first / stock provided ones
you use one pin to unlock the default wallets, where you can put decoy funds, and a second pin to unlock the passphrase generated wallets
this should be done regardless of where you purchased the device, but especially if it was through a 3rd party (eg Amazon) since any individual link in the logistics chain could have tampered with the device
(also good luck tracing the exact logistics path your device traveled through)
don't hear about this 'advanced' feature much but it's worthwhile imo
so what do you mean by "expected value is in their favor"? what do you mean by "pattern recognition"?
isn't it a forecast when you enter a position that the market will drift in your favor on avg using that signal? you're an implicit forecast of where the market will go.
not going into all the technical stuff (not that i would completely grasp) , but this is how i try to keep my operations safe:
1) keep a decent portion of funds in receive only addresses (rotate when not receive only)
2) keep another portion of funds in bank accounts
3) another portion in a location that is purely used for cash management purposes (say keep up margin requirements, doing an adhoc trade i find, etc). here i use a mix of EEA regulated CEXE's and cold wallets
4) all the remaining wallets for trading with minimal funds to meet margin requirements
ensuring that there is not just a single point of failure
but knowing that you're in crypto, the security risk is why you still get paid a premium to trade here over tradfi
prob worst risk is to go rushing to rotate wallets and end up losing funds to malicious links
Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash.
Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase).
Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets.
IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster).
Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot.
Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time?
Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.)
Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once.
Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case.
I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026).
Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS.
Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security.
The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.