Just a reminder that you can buy coins spot and not have to pay insane funding rates

Example : $BONK

And you don't even have the excuse of high gas fees on Solana

Great episode about crypto trading in general + the Solana thesis specifically :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k24VoJceYY

One of my theses for holding a significant bag of $LDO is that it's considered as leveraged $ETH (and more than L2 tokens)

The market seems to confirm this

But now we have to see $ETH perform well if we want $LDO to return good gains too...

I wrote a thread about a few trading lessons of the week :

https://twitter.com/thedefivillain/status/1725172295205826762

If you lost money over the last 30 days, take some time to think about what you did wrong.

We've been in easy mode, "up only" kind of environment.

You should at least be profitable when the market is like that.

Think about how you should have traded, so that you will be prepared to extract the most value out of the bull run.

2 clear outperforming categories today :

- AI coins : $AKT $WLD $TAO $AGIX $FET $OCEAN $PAAL $RNDR

- Gaming coins : $IMX $PRIME $ILV $YGG $PYR

During a long time, since the Jan-Feb echo bubble, it has been mainly useless to track the performance of the different coin categories/baskets because most of the best-performers were either a few selected coins with specific catalyst or one single basket at a time getting all the attention.

When the market does not have a lot of juice, it can only focus on very few narratives at a time.

But the hotter the market gets, and the more it is able to offer attention to many narratives/categories at the same time, and rotate between them frenetically.

It is useful to both know :
- what are the current rotations of the market [short-term narratives]
- and which categories have been outperforming over the whole pump [medium-term narratives]

2023 echo bubble main narratives :
- LSD
- L2s + ecosystem coins
- AI
- ZK
- Perp DEX
- China
- BTCfi

Recent ETF-driven pump main narratives :
- AI
- Solana + ecosystem coins
- Gaming
- Strong Cosmos coins

And then of course, in both cases, there are some strong single coins, that don’t necessarily fit into a narrative.

AI is the only category that has been very strong during both of these risk-on periods.

$BONK has been giving me for at least the third (successful) time one of my favorite trading setups :

An explosive coin close to breakout, you can buy it when it's very close to go into price discovery with tight SL for a great R/R

- If it fails to breakout, you take minimal loss
- If it works as intended, the profits are massive

I have also been doing the same thing with $SOL a few days ago.

The risk is that your SL is hit before it pumps, and that is frustrating. To mitigate that risk, you have to keep the distance to the SL wide enough, but then each time the trade does not work, you take losses... that can become meaningful after a few unsuccessful setups. As always, you have to find a right middle-ground, and there is no straight-forward rule for this.

"He who chases two rabbits catches neither"

When the market is this hot, you will feel fomo constantly because so many altcoins are pumping across the board

Calm down

You don't have to catch them all, and most likely your profits will be decreased if you try to do it

Recap of the week + good tweets :

https://cryptonarratives.substack.com/p/narratives-of-the-week-november-22

Narratives of the past days :

- $BTC remains choppy in its $35k-$38k range

- CZ steps down as Binance CEO and Binance agrees to pay a $4bn fine to the US. $BNB takes a moderate hit (-5%).
Good news for the market overall, as the uncertainty has now disappeared and we're far from a catastrophic scenario

- The whole OpenAI drama pushed AI coins higher, with $WLD as the direct Sam Altman beta coin : $RNDR $TAO $AKT $AGIX $IMGNAI $FET $CTXC $OCEAN

- Blur founder announced the launch of the new Blast L2 with "native yield" : $BLUR rips as liquid exposure to this narrative. $MKR too (=> sDAI stablecoin yield on Blast)

- $SOL topped at $68, $BONK reached a new 2023 ATH and the whole Solana ecosystem has significantly pumped during the last weeks

- Gaming coins remain strong : $IMX $PRIME $SUPER $SFUND $ILV $MC

- $AVAX was the direct lagger to $SOL, and now slowed down too. Another alt L1, $KAS, is unstoppable, as usual

- The "Solana oracle" $PYTH launched its token : mimicking of the $TIA launch pattern in progress ?

- $SNX token among the best performers : launch of Infinex as catalyst ?

- Ordinals and BRC-20 still worth watching : $ORDI $TRAC (Chainlink of Bitcoin) $MUBI (BRC20-ERC20 bridge)

We all know that people like to long $AVAX as a catchup trade after a $SOL pump

But how strong is really this relation ?

Well, a lot of $SOL local tops were right before $AVAX local tops

I did not realize it was so obvious before comparing the two charts

Impressive

I wrote a short thread with a few long/short charts to identify trends and strength in the current market :

https://twitter.com/thedefivillain/status/1729491805966635253

Recap of the week + good tweets :

https://cryptonarratives.substack.com/p/narratives-of-the-week-november-29

Current narratives :

- $BTC is still in its range, fails at breaking out above $38k but respects the trendline

- Gaming has been the hottest narrative during the recent weeks : $AXS $RON $ILV $APE $SUPER $ATLAS $SIPHER

- Blast attracted $600M TVL in a week. The Blast-related $BLUR token did a 2x before retracing part of the move. $LOOKS followed that pump

- Best performer of the week among mid caps is $SEI (+70%), a new Cosmos alt L1 made for DeFi that never had its time to shine.

- UST 2.0 narrative : a new protocol "Mint Cash" that plans to burn $USTC pushed the token to 6X in 2 days before dumping a bit. $LUNC and $LUNA pumped too.

- New coins good ? The most recently launched coins $PYTH $FLIP and $VRTX did all pump this week

- $STX, the BTC "L2", is finally showing strength after underperforming during weeks

$TAO is one of these coins that I bought a small bag of just as a "psychological hedge".

When I first heard about it at $400M MC it already looked expensive, but it has become a cultish AI coin and I don't want to COPE seeing it rip non-stop without me.

The psychological hedge trade :

- If it goes to 0, my bag is small enough that I don't really mind

- If it keeps pumping, I won't be seething because it will be making me money

I find it useful to have small bags of some coins when I don't really have conviction in them but in the same time I feel that they *could* pump a lot and I don't want to be sidelined if that happens.

Customly-built categories but the 3 best-performing narratives of November have clearly been :

- Gaming
- AI
- Solana ecosystem

New article : November recap ! Main events, narratives, best-performers, and coins to watch

https://cryptonarratives.substack.com/p/november-recap-narratives-best-performers

Santi has very quickly become a huge $SOL bull, it almost shocked me when I listened to this recent podcast episode

I think a lot of VCs have been panicking and feeling underexposed to SOL, which explains both why SOL has been so strong recently, and why it is likely to remain strong

"I am 98% exposed to the Ethereum ecosystem... but what if... what if... it underperforms during the whole cycle and I did not hedge my bet with SOL exposure ?
Let's throw some money into the Solana ecosystem, I don't want to be sidelined !" [not an authentic quote]

To be clear, I don't think $ETH will underperform, but I am just picturing what is very likely to happen in the heads of a few VCs.

I own both ETH and SOL, and more ETH than SOL, but I think that SOLETH should naturally go up.