 Welcome to Digital Asset News. Take a look at top stories in crypto and bring out a bite-sized piece. Today, just like the thumbnail suggests, we're going to be talking to a hedge fund insider. They're going to give us some pretty great perspective as far as what's going on. But first, we're going to take a look at Bitcoin, the price action, as it pertains to 2016, all the way to 2022. We're going to get into the big stuff with the hedge fund insider and their mentality as far as the hedge fund mindset. I can tell you right now, it's a lot different from the average investor like me and you. We're also going to take a look at his prediction for the bull run end timeframe and probably the most important thing as far as taking profits and this person's strategy as to how they do it. As we're going to be asking him and some other people about taking profit strategy along the way, and we'll be talking about that in a little bit. So before we get all that, let's take a look at what's going on into the market. So today, it is Tuesday, a beautiful day. Markets up fantastic, $2.23 trillion. It's up 3%. Everybody's happy using trade the chain, Bitcoin daily sentiment, 62 out of 100. You can't beat that. And then as far as like who's going up or which coins are going up, actually it's all pretty much the big guy Bitcoin hitting at 4%. So not too bad Bitcoin at 50. Wow, 51,000, 403. So it jumped like $1,000 just since I was putting this together. The theorem is at 3%. Binance coin in the third spot now, 4%. Cardano kind of underperforming, but doing okay, $2.22%. XRP watch out, 3%. Solana down a percentage point and so on and so forth. So Bitcoin really pulled ahead for a while and now the altars are starting to catch up. But I believe that Bitcoin's doing pretty good and should be in a pretty sustained run. So that is what is going on. If you're a big trader, here's the projected range is the things to look at as far as sentiment analysis goes. Let me sort this out. Take a look at Wink, Engine Coin, I had a bunch of that. Red Coin, Stormax, I had a bunch of that. Ultra, Vethore Token and Hive. So let's take a look at what's going on with a little perspective. And this was actually sent out as a tweet from my friend Digital Dave over at Crazy for Cryptos. Actually retweeted the trust wallet. And I think this is good to know as far as to get your mind straight. Because look at this. This is the price of Bitcoin and we know everything pretty much falls Bitcoin for the most part, not everything. But 5th of October 2018, Bitcoin was $6,600. $6,600. Everybody thought it was dead. Then 2019, it was $8,200. So in one year, it went up just a whopping less than two grand. Watch out. That is awful. And then in 2020, another two grand went up 10,600, nothing to write home about. And then in one year's time, we're at $50,400. I will just say this. In 2017, Bitcoin was at, and October wasn't $20,000 yet, but it was pretty high. I think around 5 or 6. Check me the comments. Not like it did too much. The big action comes around October, November, December, maybe January, February. I don't know. But if you can take a look at this, in October, just how far ahead we are, that's amazing. So things are going in the right direction. The thing that concerns me right now is I think everybody has a feeling that we're going to see some pretty big fireworks come around in Q4. I keep saying fireworks, I think it's going to actually have. The thing I want to make mention of is that it's not how much you make, it's how much you keep. So I want to bring somebody in here to bring a little perspective as to what is going on, what you can expect. If you've been here for any length of time, and I think a lot of you have not been since 2017, it's a good lesson just to see how things can go. So I'm going to bring on Alex Maschioli. He's from Trade the Chain. He was head of institutional investment at Bequant Services, and he handled multi-billion-dollar accounts. And he's going to give us a little perspective as to the mindset of hedge funds, how they are going, where things are going, and how much it takes to actually manipulate this market. And really, it's all a bunch of whales and whale games what's going on. Can you be protected from this? Can you do stuff? Yeah, it's called taking profits. And again, this is not investment advice. This is investment opinion. This is what Alex was doing. This is also what I am doing. I'm taking profits along the way. And I'm trying to get as many people as I possibly can to talk about taking profits and how that works out for them and how they do things. Because on every other channel, it's just buy and hold and buy and hold and buy and hold. And I had to tell you, I don't think that is the greatest strategy of all time for all time. I think at some point, you have to get into other assets and really just protect yourself and de-risk what is going on. So without further ado, let's talk to Alex Maschioli from Trade the Chain. So everybody, as promised, I brought on a guy who could give us a little bit of background. And as you may know, this is Alex Maschioli, Alex Maschioli show. I'm one of the co-founders of Trade the Chain sentiment analysis, all that good stuff. Alex, thanks for coming back on the show to give us a little perspective. Thanks, Rob. Always happy to be here. Fantastic. This is harrowing times, right? Everything seems like it's going to go up. It's the moon and it's forever. And we shouldn't be scared or anything like that. We should just let the whole bull train go until the wheels come off, maybe. But I think that it takes a little bit of time to just kind of step back and just get a little of lessons from history. So the first thing I was going to ask you about, you had told me a story about when everything was going like crazy in the S&P 500, back in the day when you were big equities and all that stuff and stock. And what did you do at that moment when everything was starting to kind of like you could feel the momentum pick up? How did you ride that train all the way up? Because right now it kind of feels like we're kind of going in that little direction here in the crypto market. Yeah, it was definitely a time where it was on the upward momentum. And I wanted to try something out new and it kind of goes along with the dollar cost average tweet that Trade the Chain put out the other day. And so what I did was I took the S&P 500 and I reversed it with the greatest losers at the top descending down. And so what I did was I packaged up a bunch of the largest losers in the S&P 500, invested into them, and then watched to see what that performance would do. And it turned out to be 84% over the course of the following 10 months. So when was that? When did you do that little launch? 2011. Okay, fantastic. So everything was going up and do that. Now that you've got, you kind of see the patterns and whatnot, what did you do here? So with Trade the Chain, which we use every day, take a look at sentiment analysis, do the same thing, you flipped it on it just to see the sentiment itself. But then, and I'm not the sentiment, but the actual how things were going as far as crypto, which were underperforming. So you did that, but you can't get into every underperformer and you also use sentiment, right? Correct. So what I did was I basically took the order, reversed it like I did in that S&P 500 example. And then I went through and I compared sentiment to price loss over the last 30 days on blue chips. So things like ADA, COM, LINK, and basically selected those because for me, that was a dollar cost average play right there. We all know where they've been. We all believe in certain projects. And so I just put it into that. Gotcha. Okay, cool. And then I'm sure you'll do, at some point we'll get you back on, you can show us exactly how that works as far as with Trade the Chain, but we kind of, well, I did that in the beginning. Okay. So then the next question is it's about your history over at Bequant, head of Bequant institutional services. You worked a lot with the hedge fund guys, the big players, the money that was coming in, and they got into crypto and they're all, they're still all excited, right? The thing is, is that I keep hearing the narrative that look that crypto is going to go forever or at least going to go for an extended period of time. Sure. Okay. But then we take a look at, well, which crypto projects? Because in my personal opinion, I think that the black hole that is Bitcoin could be sucked into micro strategy and never come out. That's what Michael Saylor says. And some other different players could do the same thing. However, does that mean that everything is going to keep going up all the old coins? And how does that work as far as market manipulation? Because I don't think it takes a real big swing to manipulate this market. So talk to us real quick about the people you used to work with and their intentions and what their mindset are. Because I can tell you right now, their mindset is not like my mindset. It's just totally different. Yeah. So when I was at Bequant overseeing about $35 billion a month in crypto trading with hedge funds and institutions, the mindset was, well, first of all, a lot of viewers here are a lot of long-term investors or mid-term investors. theirs was constantly trading and trying to produce strategies that generated alpha and beat the market. But what people, a lot of people also who watch didn't come into this market until, let's say, last year and a handful, even this year. So all that they've seen is up. You and I, we cycled through the last event, which was 2017, going into 2018. And then we had three very, very long years of looking at each other and waiting to see what happened. I can't tell you a more boring three years in our lifespan. So as we go into this cycle, when we're on YouTube or whatever form medium and we're trying to relay some knowledge of this is what we've seen in the past and this is what we're thinking about in the future, it's coming from real-world experience. And you need to be able to maximize your profit potential in those short spans of the cycle because you're going to have a long time between them to really contemplate what you're doing in this space. Yeah. And then real quick, so it makes a lot of sense, right? But real quick, talk to us about the guys that you are involved with, those hedge fund guys. What's their mindset? Is it long-term big-time investors and just stay and hold and hold all forever? Or is it like max profits? So it's both. You look at different firms like Nidik, which are, they've always been since the creation of their crypto group, long-term Bitcoin holders and then trickling down into other top assets. But then you take a look at firms like Pantera or other various hedge funds where they're trading every day. They don't actually care about long-term profits. They're looking for arbitrage on a day-to-day week-over-week basis. So there's two different mindsets. I like to think that I'm a blend of both, but there's definitely one side that has conviction and the other side that doesn't. Yeah. And I think it's one of those things where I think there's not a lot of pressure to move the needle either way as far as market manipulation. We're only at $2 trillion. It's not like the stock market can be manipulated. That's at $90 trillion, $100 trillion. So it's not that much. That's what concerns me. And then the last two things we need to look real quick, Rob. Apologies for interrupting, but right now, $2.23 trillion around there as we were speaking, let's go back three months ago, that was almost $1 trillion less. Yeah. And then what is the big asset that's making the big gains? Bitcoin right now. Could it be that way forever? No, I think all kinds are going to do pretty well. But then, as people cycle through and investors, they're like, this is a little more safe, and they kind of move into Bitcoin. I'm not saying that your project you watch this is not going to succeed. I think a lot of are going to succeed, but it's the long-term. And I think it's the big thing that we have to get in our brains, which is we got to be careful first. It's not how much you make. It is how much you keep. And it's more important to have assets on the books than just to be there holding forever. And I can tell you from experience, it sucks. That's how it goes. So that leads us to our last ones, Alex. Your predictions for this bull market, are we going to see an extended bull market where this is the last four-year cycle, where we're going to just keep going up and up and up? And then a little bear, a little bull, a little bear, a little bull, more bull, a little bear, or is there going to be like a little bit of a stop point at some point? Yeah. Six months ago, I was definitely preaching, we're going to have our second leg up. We're going to run into the first quarter of next year in this bull cycle. We've had a great play coming out of this late spring bear cycle of having that little bull, little bear, little bull. There's a lot of profits to be had in that market. Now, we're in October and we're not back to where we were, but yet we're going in the right direction. So with that, I've over the last week and a half, two weeks, corrected myself a little and just shortened the timeline. I think we're good until the end of the year. I think it's going to be a steep climb up through the October momentum, but then I think it's going to cut short at the end of the year. I do not think we're going to bleed over into a bull run into 2022 with any great length. Yeah. So hopefully, hopefully we're both wrong. I can see it going to February, January, February, and then we kind of tail off maybe even March. I don't know, but the big thing is, and this really is the last one. Sorry, I forgot this one. This is the most important one. How do you take profits? And I'm trying to get a sense from different people and their perspectives to give these to my subscribers. How do you take profits to make sure that you are in the game when everything's going crazy? Yeah, absolutely. And you can attest to this. I can attest to this during the last cycle without taking profits. We held on to what we had for those three long, boring years, and there was nothing we could do for it. What during the summer, you know, what was created was that the ever famous Monday, Tuesday, sell-off followed by a run-up Monday, Tuesday, sell-off. It was a step-and-repeat process. Almost, you could take your time to it. During that process, what I would do was I started entering positions on Tuesdays, and a little before that it was Mondays, but it went to Tuesdays. And I started entering positions into Tuesdays, and I would start de-risking my holdings come Saturday. And I want everybody to know this. I have a base, a core of long-term investments, but I also have a pool that gets swing-traded. And that counts for everything, whether it's the ones that people are passionate about, VGX, StormX, but also other ones where I see opportunity and sentiment and other things. But that's basically what I did. And I would de-risk every Saturday. I would pull cash out, go back into the positions on Tuesday, and pull cash out again that following Saturday. I've done that every single week for the last 10-plus weeks. It's crazy. And then whatever you want to do with the cash, you can go back in. You can do it. You can put in assets, whatever else, and you can kind of de-risk yourself. Got it. All right, Alex, thanks for stopping by. I appreciate it. If you want to check out Trade the Chain, sentiment analysis, the link is always in the description. There's a link. It looks just like this. And then you can check it out and talk to everybody. And the big thing that Trade the Chain does is community, not so much about this sentiment, which is great for learning from everybody else. Alex, any last words of wisdom for everybody? Absolutely not. Just make sure you take profits when you can. Perfect. Everybody, let's jump back. All right. And that's it. And then first, Alex, thanks. I appreciate it again. Just like Alex was talking about, it's good to take profits, have things in the sidelines, but it's also good to have other assets. For me, I love real estate. And I take profits out. And I purchase real estate down payments. I do short term rentals for Airbnb and VRBO or Verbo, or they call it Verbo. And that works out pretty well for me. Also, I'm getting into a little more safety as far as like an uncorrelated asset, which is art and artwork. And I'm already signed up for Masterworks. And they use a fractionalized type of system where they fractionalize multi-million dollar paintings. And over time, and I'm talking time, I'm not talking about like six months. I'm talking like three years, four years, five years, up to seven years, since it is uncorrelated. It depreciates pretty well. We're talking about 16%. And it's just a safe haven and another avenue. You can take a look at that. And what I talked about as far as the link in the description, I'll be doing a deep dive in that later. You can check it out and do your own research. But then on top of that, also I want to make mention that we are going to be having, I'll be on the show, the Conscious Crypto Traders, and they're going to be going over their methods. These ladies are 4x traders, real hard core, that kind of soften a little bit as far as like what they do as far as taking profits. And just to see how they do it. So I want to be on their show. I'm going to ask them these questions as far as taking profits and trading and whatnot. Just to get a grander perspective about what's going on. Then we'll have some more people on to help you guys out. So that is it. So look, if you like today's video, give it a thumbs up. That always helps. Consider subscribing. If you like these types of videos, it's always great. Time sensitive, all that good stuff. But that is it. So thanks so much for watching. I appreciate it. See you on the next one.