In early 2021 when everyone was hyper-fixated on perps and nfts, i came across a thread by a now deleted user ‘’CLs intern’’. That was my first proper introduction to the world of trading onchain.

prior to reading the thread i only knew of 3 ways people made money in crypto, perps spot and nfts. in this particular very cryptic thread he showed off his 10th 500x of the week that he hit by sniping a twisted variation of shiba, he made fun of people losing their minds over 25x leverage trades and explained that the most upside for a person with a low bankroll lied onchain.

‘’every transaction must be scanned, every wallet must be tracked, every etherscan page must be sleuthed’’ with a nasty pnl flex, i remember this quote vividly.

that got teenage me very hyped and as someone rapidly losing interest in studies as they reached more and more advanced levels i made it my life’s purpose to figure out how i could do the same.

with zero to none guidance i spent the next 3 or 4 months trying to figure out where to even start, i traded here and there on ftm/eth but nothing significant came of it.

by then btc had already swooped past aths and the dark ages of crypto were ahead of us with the inevitable breakdowns and collapses. i naturally slowly lost that obsession as i dawned over my failures for the now gone cycle and very troubling irl financial problems.

the year passed in a blink and on a random evening in early-mid 2022 a ‘’bsc trading guide’’ came across my feed on youtube with a discord server linked in the bio, i joined the server to find out there was a community of a few hundred trading bsc shitters onchain. that relit my obsession once more and my life slowly started to revolve around camping new deploys on poocoin and vetting them.

i would hawk telegram channels and deploys like a maniac for 18 hours straight non-stop weeks on end before i finally cracked how to decipher scams from actual coins, the next stage was predicting which coins would actually stick with people and i found out i had a surprisingly good sense for that.

‘’yo, im actually good at something in life?’’ as i depo’d my saved up $30 and began actually trading these, the server’s owner noticed i was pretty solid so he ‘’hires’’ me to ‘’call’’ stuff for like 1 bnb a month, perfect for me at the time.

within 3 months the $30 was $10k, another month from that and that $10k was $100k, within the first 6 months i paid off a huge debt for my family and gave them a fresh start which would’ve taken years to pay off otherwise.

with no financial troubles hanging over my head like a sword anymore i restarted my port with $5-$6k and once again flipped it to multi 6 figs within the year, badluck caught up to me and i lose 95% of my networth to ftx during the same week im planning to stable money and offramp a large chunk.

so im forced to restart a third time, however i didn’t resent it and just accepted what is and focused on making winning trades. by mid of 2023 i make back triple my ftx losses and by 2023 ends i hit my lifelong financial goals, purely trading onchain.

2023 is when i created this account originally with the idea to put out threads regarding onchain trading, just an effort to try and give newbies direction since the hardest and most frustrating times for me were the ones when i had to figure out how to do something with 0 hints.

but my boring backstory is not the sole theme of this article, its just an obligatory introduction to me as probably the last post on this account.

the purpose is to layout the culmination of my trading psychology, to truly keep up with this everchanging and absolute maze of a market you need to rebuild the way you think. so this isnt something technical like ‘’set X filters on memescope or track X wallets’’, rather my goal with this post is to shift the way you look at onchain trades and markets as a whole.

obsession - noun

the control of one’s thoughts by a continuous, powerful idea or feeling

Every prodigy you’ve come across, every credible trader you know of had similar beginnings. there may not be much alike between them as people, but one common factor always exists in their prime and that is obsession.

from the outside we see them spend 20 hours straight staring at charts and clicking all day and we think ‘’man, how is he capable of it’’. but that’s easily answerable if you’ve ever experienced obsession over something.

you didn’t dread spending 12 hours on fortnite when it had just come out, you enjoyed it and the enjoyment didn’t vanish after one ‘’victory royale’’, you wanted to keep winning. that is precisely what you call obsession.

to be able to put in the hours and screentime needed to succeed onchain, you must reach a state of obsession over it. if the mind does not enjoy it, it will never be able to focus 10+ hours every day doing the same shit.

this first stage is where trash is separated from actual capable individuals, you either enjoy it enough to obsess over it, or you don’t. its not something you can trigger by command in a split second.

someone doing it 3 hours a day purely to make $500 and log off will be lapped multiple times by someone obsessed doing it 20 hours a day for months and months.

‘’i dont get where this is going, what are you trying to tell me?’’

I’m telling you, to change your thinking. to make this game the highlight of your days rather than a sidequest, what is the first thing you think of when you wake up, what is the first thing you do when you wake up? is it a step towards understanding the game better and winning it?

are you truly spending ALL of your time trying to win at this?

if obsession doesn’t come to you, then you have to go to it. spend every waking free second hawking deploys, observing charts, weeding out patterns.

no matter how exhausted how boring or how ‘’useless’’ it feels in the moment. for a few weeks, im telling you to do just do it. before you know it, the day starts and ends with you thinking about your trades, all you think about while trying to watch a movie are deploys.

congrats, you’ve achieved obsession.

‘’hey im online 12 hours a day for months and im still shit! this doesn’t work! stop misguiding others its all gambling and luck’’

you are fucking stupid plain and simple.

you’ve been vetting EVERY deploy, watching EVERY runner for months on end and your mediocre failure of a brain could not notice a single pattern that you could capitalize off?

again, im telling you to change your thinking. How does one even change his thinking? You start fresh.

start by discarding all the stupid notions you previously had about onchain trading in your head, then discard the way you view money itself.

(memescope is gambling! luck is the only playing factor! its a losers game!, this the image of onchain trading in your head, rubbish, discard it.)

onchain is a game, dollars are your points.

its a business model, you get points by either identifying an asymmetry or inefficiency before your competitors do, or you provide value through a service to the participants in a highly demanding specific niche.

here comes your main goal at all times, hunting and targeting inefficiencies.

think, think, think!

none of you actually think before making trades, you blindly follow in wallets and rely on shillers like an absolute incapable failure. dependency on anything but your own system must be eliminated.

think, what are you seeing and noticing that the majority hasn’t yet? what can you foresee that the others cant yet? is there nothing like that in the play you’re looking at? move on.

eventually and always, something will pop up amidst the hundreds of plays and you will notice something that the majority hasn’t yet, that is where you position yourself and allow your vision to play out. if you turn out wrong, change your way of thinking again, you must have read something wrong, you must have exaggerated said play and its potential. fix it, move on.

repeat this until you perfect your ability to spot a lagging runner, the easiest and most common plays wont be elon and trump tweets, they’ll be lagging plays which you grasp before others.

all in all, the core weapon in identifying what you call ‘’narratives’’ is this way of thinking. you must perfect it no matter how long it takes.

obsession is good, this means you have a will inside of you strong enough to push your body through the brutal amount of screentime needed for a few months atleast before it withers away.

obsession dies down because of one reason and one reason only, failure to produce any results. if someone dedicates and revolves their entire life towards something for months expecting results from it, failure to achieve those results will slowly kill his obsession.

so how do you avoid this? you’ve got step 1 in practice which is being ready to sit infront of a screen for 10s of hours months on end. how will you insure progress and results, if any?

the answer lies in gaming your own ability to truly focus

humans have their own ‘’trance’’ like state when the perfect conditions are met. the brain becomes so deeply involved with the activity you’re indulged in that it starts to pick up on way more patterns that you otherwise would have missed, a state of absolute focus and involvement.

don’t simply be online, be involved and invested in what you’re looking at. achieve your own max-focus state when you’re staring at the screen. watching it isn’t enough, understanding it is needed.

in basic psychology they call this the flow state

Ayrton Senna, a famous f1 driver explains this state of focus during a competitive f1 race -

‘’I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by instinct only, I was in a different dimension. I was way over the limit but still able to find even more. It frightened me because I realized I was well beyond my conscious understanding’’

the first time i experienced it i was confused, 10 hours passed by and felt like 30 minutes. i was seeing information, scouring through every metric available, processing it and thinking of the most realistic outcomes at maximum throttle and speed.

human flow state visualized

set challenges for yourself based on your current skill and talent to achieve maximum focus

if your challenge is too easy, you will grow bored quick and lose focus.

someone with a 15-20k average monthly pnl aiming for a 5k monthly pnl will not be able to produce consistent focus because the challenge seems too easy for him and it doesn’t excite him.

similarly someone with a 10k networth aiming to make 500k in one month will never be able to produce the focus needed to win, the goal is too unrealistic and he wont be able to focus because of the unease and unlikeliness of it.

instead you need to set realistic goals, say someone with a 100 sol networth aiming to make 2.5 sol on the day, thats very probable. keeping this goal in mind he will focus on the market with absolute precision because the goal is very realistic

so place a goal, it doesn’t necessarily have to be about making X amount of money a day, could be as simple as hitting 6 figs networth this year. a goal that only takes in two factors, you and your current abilities.

this state where you aren’t half-ass focused and snoring while navigating through the most confusing market in the world will help you progress and understand what’s even going on, it allows you to put in your ‘’top’’ performance.

tldr: aim to perfect your ability to enter a state of absolute focus, this state is where you notice the most patterns, make the best split second decisions, and truly grow as a trader.

the current game, where it stands, and how to play it.

theres no denying that the onchain game is exponentially getting harder. about 4 years ago all you had to do was buy something with locked liquidity and it was enough to make you money.

as the environment matures, technicals matter less. in short, the more you know about and value the ‘’technical’’ side of these coins (ie: holders, liquidity, volume, chart) the more thrown off you will be and the more confusing it will seem to you.

the only consistent thing that you have to keep up with is the way participants react to coins. that has, without fail, stayed the same over the past 4 years. humans emotions are consistent, and we’re here to exploit them.

in this era, the starting base, the home where you’re meant to spend the most time is undoubtedly memescope/pulse

people ask me my style over and over, all i still do for the entire trading session is manually vet every single graduated coin looking for outliers either narrativewise or techwise, whatever doesn’t seem repeated and feels interesting to me i tend to grab 1-2% sub 200k and let it ride.

‘’why not pre migration’’ - not sure, this style of trenching where streamers buy 5 sol at 5k mc and sell for 12 sol at 12k is getting popular because it’s the outside world’s first introduction to trading onchain

but im certain that longterm only sticking to this style is harmful, you have to be reflexive and you have to be able to adapt to pve and pvp markets. there will come a time when coins take a week to top instead of hours, these same traders will then struggle to adapt and put in subpar performance compared to those who only traded clear outliers even in a pvp market.

and no, pvp markets dont stay forever neither do they rely solely on btc price action. they switch sides when the money has properly rotated hands from the unskilled to the skilled and extractors.

‘’do volume tools work, what about tracking wallets?’’

i dont use volume tools or any ‘’alerts’’ in that regard, tracking wallets is beneficial to have a grasp on onchain activity and what’s running. i have never to this day blindly copytraded anyone on any trade.

information overflow (a usage of many tools and tracking many wallets) is only good for those who can manage to mentally parse through noise to find actual signals of value.

i know traders who track 1000s of wallets at once and manage to get good pnls because they’re so used to the patterns they notice within these wallets and their activity.

regardless, your job is to camp this site for the rest of your days, vetting every single migrated pair until you figure out what runs and why it runs. you have my guarantee, even starting from zero knowledge prior to this, camping migrations and vetting them everyday for as long as you can for even 2 months will give you immense progress (not necessarily from a pnl pov but an understanding one, however they go hand in hand)

when you feel something different has popped up which will go beyond lasting 5 minutes you need to have a short but extensive thinking process on how to approach it:

understand what the others will think about it, understand how much attention it can potentially attract from that point onward. i chart present and future attention in my head by visualizing a chart for it, ofcourse a chart like that actually doesn’t exist but you can create a picture in your head

once you’ve made a realistic map to go with, nail your sizing (simple formula: size so that if the play goes your way a win should feel like a win, and if it doesn’t, the loss shouldn’t sting the port too much) then wait patiently for the results to come.

if you’re wrong, reassess and move on. if you’re right, well played you’re a genius thinking miles beyond the average participant!

get good at discerning and reading attention towards stuff, correlate attention with price, that’s how you value ‘’narratives’’ before they reprice. I’ve always said, entries, sizing and exit are all technicals and can be figured out and perfected as you progress. but getting good at valuing tech/narras yourself is crucial.

same goes for tech based plays, during the ai meta we had hundreds of plays which sat for hours and days sub 1m before running to 10m and beyond. those who grasped the tech’s true value before others frontran the inevitable repricings.

something could sit at 100k for hours when it should be valued at 5m minimum, (you figure that out by comparing it to the marketcaps/charts of current established tokens sitting at high valuations) these are the lagging outliers when it comes to utility based plays.

in some cases a coin will simply look good at the first impression with 0 info available but lots of volume, in those cases ill just size 1/3 of what i usually do while i vet it, if it turns out mid ill exit and if its something actually good ill increase size if its not too close to my expected ceiling for the coin.

tldr: the essence of frontrunning slow repricings regarding narratives and tech lies in your ability to read attention inflow and outflow.

‘’is news trading worth it onchain? are elon tweets not worth it either’’

ofcourse they are, but many people get burnt solely because they fall victim to the fast volume and quick vertical charts.

they dont think for 10 seconds if said news trade has already hit it’s ceiling, a random news article from a month ago mentioning something has 0 catalysts which would further bring in attention. on the other hand a new elon pet has lots of potential ones so that can be valued much higher, hope you get what im trying to convey here.

if you want to trade these, you need to perfect your ability to make a rational decision within 10 seconds. you need to value it, plan for optimal sizing and exit, all within 3 blinks of the human eye, which is why i scream to increase screentime because that is the only thing which will help polish this specific skill.

my entire trading system revolves around my ability to value narratives ahead of time, as is for the best traders i know

stagnancy in progress and results despite high participation. why does it happen?

the most common cause for this i’ve seen among older traders is their lack of accountability, they’ll miss a trade they very obviously shouldn’t have with the experience they have but chalk it up to external factors and move on without properly assessing the reason for their failure.

missing out on something obvious counts as a loss, it should be treated as such. humans naturally spew out cope reasoning and excuses when they fail to perform due to their lack of skill

‘’so what if i missed X coin, theres always a next one! ill never stop’’, and this happens 100s of times, again and again they tell themselves the same thing. you need to be harsh on yourself when you miss out on something you shouldn’t have, really experience the feeling of failure to truly understand the issue and grow, don’t ignore it, understand it.

i saw this in action the clearest I’ve ever seen after the trump trade. there were two types of reactions that came from people who missed it, one were those who fully blatantly ignored their failure and moved on without thinking, the others were in such deep despair they couldn’t focus on anything for like 3 days. the same ones who missed it and took action on themselves are the ones who are performing the best currently.

feeling despair over your failure is a must to grow. you can not be ignorant all the time and say ‘’but there’s a next time’’

something HAS to change that so there isn’t a next time. sure, the excuses provide temporary relief, but what future lies months beyond that if nothing changes? you’ll be sprinting in the same place and you’ll be exhausted.

dedicating a part of my life to this, truly worth it?

will die on this hill, yes it is worth it. yes, if you have it in you to change as a trader as many times as needed, it is worth it. the best chance for someone with a low bankroll and drive, is onchain.

i wish i could give a simple blueprint to success in this game but there doesn’t isnt one, its kinda like asking a very successful footballer how he scores so many goals, the most detailed answer he can give is ‘’kick the ball when Infront of the net’’

some of you are inherently stupid and will never be able to realize there’s an entire mental aspect to trading onchain, they’ll never realize you’re just competing 1000s of other brains like yours and that you need to learn how they think.

but a bunch of you have it in you, you just doubt it instead of sending it and committing to it. do not waste your abilities in exchange for living a long and unachieved life.

commit to really solving this puzzle, follow your process and rebuild your process as many times as it takes to win.

ending credits and some personal thoughts

above is the entire culmination of my trading style, i detailed the way i think as precisely as i could in words. as simple as it looks, thats really it, thats exactly how i’ve managed to hit obscene pnls month after month.

I’ve already put out 10s of technical guides for trading onchain but never really tackled the mental aspect since it was so difficult to verbalize. i’ve tried to convey how to achieve focus, i’ve shown where to channel that focus.

no doubt the game is difficult, but don’t let that scare you and don’t fear the game, face it head on. embrace the puzzle, enjoy the process.

think! think! think!

make sure you spend time rationally thinking. have the courage to really face your issues and I’m certain you’ll get it.

with that, i think I’m done here. and i end it with my favorite word,

Inshallah.

farewell from jacknuked!

Disclaimer:

1. This article is reprinted from [jack]. All copyrights belong to the original author [jack]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
3. The Gate Learn team does translations of the article into other languages. Copying, distributing, or plagiarizing the translated articles is prohibited unless mentioned.