PoolTogether Community Podcast #22 with Glen Goodman, The Crypto Trader

This is the Pool Together Community Podcast. Pool Together is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the Pool Together Community Podcast, and I'm Hot Mike, aka Timmy Timmy Tim Tim. Cha cha cha! I like French fries, and this is Glenn Goodman, the crypto trader. Wrote a book, got a Twitter, trades the cryptos. Yeah.

A trader trader.

And we're excited to have you. That's right, Glenn. Thanks so much for being here.

So how would you know this? This this group of avatars that I'm talking to here? Hi, avatars. That's right. Are you like people who already know a bit about crypto, or a lot about crypto, or nothing about crypto? You know. What's, what's the situation?

Yeah, so some of them are PoAP farmers. So some of them do engagement in Discord to try to get like, to get like badges, NFT kind of stuff, you know? Some of them are actually people who are part of the community. Like you'll see in the chat, Mon and Livester are chatting and, and, and being all friendly and warm. And then, and then the others are just, they might've rolled in because, because they just rolled in. I don't know. Or they could be AI or something like that. So we have, it says 93 listening here. But really the only people that I truly think are listening are the ones that chat it up. So I'm going to encourage people to chat it up in the chat. But I would assume, Glenn, and this is how I think of the podcast, I think of the podcast as an entryway for people into crypto. I think that PoolTogether is like a really good killer app for crypto, or at least for DeFi. And it makes a lot of sense and it kind of attracts people like, oh, that's interesting. I didn't know, I thought you just buy and sell coins. I didn't know you can also like save them and win prizes and stuff. So it adds like an extra feature to somebody who might not be into investing. And so when I do the podcast, I come at it that way. I think about it like, what kind of questions, how do we, how do we use this podcast to onboard people to crypto and make them more excited about it? That sort of thing.

Right. I'm sure. Yeah.

So, so you, Glenn, you are the crypto trader. You're, you've, you've written a book on it, a whole, a whole And you post on, on your Twitter. Twitter. Um, can you tell me your origin story? Superhero origin story. How'd you get here?

Okay. Uh, basically I was a TV reporter, uh, for the BBC and then for other channels in the UK. Here in the UK, I was a business correspondent mainly, and I got into trading quite young. Very young, started with the stocks and the shares, the stock market in the dot-com boom. So more than 20 years ago now, and I lost a whole bunch of money, made a lot of mistakes like people often do, and I was determined to kind of learn from that. It was very similar to the crypto booms and busts in the sense that most people who were in it were losing their money at the end of it. You know, everybody shows off at the beginning, yeah, we're doing so well, and writes things on Twitter and no doubt communicate on Discord about all these fantastic gains they're making. And then they all go really quiet because they've lost all their money. Usually, usually literally all their money. Because that's, that's the way it tends to go. You know, people lose a lot of their— they'll lose what they put in, but then they'll put some more in on the way down because it's a bargain now. You know, as things are falling and falling, and then they'll put even more in. This is what I was doing 20 years ago. Yeah, but it's even more of a bargain now. I'll put in even more. I'll put in every penny I've got. There was nothing left. So I've been there and I've done that. So what I decided to do, unlike a lot of people who just kind of give up at that stage and just go, I'm just, I'm never doing, I'm never touching this again. I sort of had the bug. I decided that I wanted to beat this Game. You know, that's kind of how I saw it, I suppose, as a game. I wanted to beat it. So I started reading a lot, a lot of books and a lot of articles and just anything I could lay my hands on to try and work out how to get good at trading. And actually, that was a lot harder in those days in a way, because there wasn't so much information readily available. It was all a bit kind of spotty on the internet. You know, there were bits and bobs, there was bits here and there, but You know, these days, obviously, there are so many guides to how to make money trading. The only problem you have now, of course, is too much information. A lot of it is bad information and will make you lose your money, or at least not help you to keep it. So that's the problem you have now, whereas back then it was just trying to find anything that was useful. And after sort of experimenting with a bunch of different strategies, I finally kind of cracked it. I worked out, well, not worked out, I learned some from some of the best in the world how it's actually done and how it's done in a sustainable way year after year after year. Because it's one thing to, you know, make a bit of money or a lot of money in a good year like 2021 when the crypto market was going crazy. You know, it was easy to make money then. But the 2 hard things are, Are one, to keep the money after you've made it in a year that's not so good. And number 2, to actually make money even in bad years and make money year after year, or at the very least, not lose money year after year. It's, you know, the whole kind of trying to do it on a long-term basis is a whole different kettle of fish.

This will be great. Cool. So then, okay. So, so you're doing all right now? 'Cause it's not, it's not nice out there.

Yeah, I'm doing fine because I, you know, I have strategies that, that's, that's the, that's proper trading for you. You have strategies where you get in when the going is looking good and you make lots of money and then you get out before it all turns to shit. That's, that's the general plan. And, uh, and yeah, got out of nearly everything before it turned to shit this time, uh, as per usual. I mean, the reason I wrote this book, The Crypto Trader, was because I called the top in 2017 and I did it publicly on my Facebook page, which was, it was all Facebook at the time. Everybody was into Facebook in 2017. Well, not everybody, but all right. Okay. It was already sort of on the way out, I suppose, even back then. But I built up about a quarter of a million followers on Facebook at the time, which seemed like a big deal back then. Back in the days when not many people had quarter of a million followers. And I posted on the, I think it was the 26th of December, 2017, right at the end of the bull market, a sort of a big warning. I think things are starting to look a bit shaky now kind of thing. And I sold my Bitcoin and cryptos very shortly after. And that was just at sort of just after the peak basically. So it was good timing. And that's why publishers offered me a a book deal to write this book 'cause they thought we, they wanted somebody to write a kind of guide to how to trade crypto. And that sort of persuaded them that that's why they got in touch with me. They heard about me and that was that. So I wrote The Crypto Trader, which sold no copies practically for about the first, you know, 2019, 2020. It started to pick up a bit. Basically my book sells whenever the crypto market's doing well. So in 2021 it became a bestseller here in the UK and has been translated now into a number of languages. The Korean edition has just come out, all in Korean, obviously, and Vietnamese is on its way. And, you know, this, so like I say, I think it's a good book. I think it tells you everything you need to know, but the sales just go in line with whether the crypto market's doing well, which kind of makes me feel like I could have written anything.

You need a book for shorting, right? Or something for, you know, whenever it's tanking or something to hedge your bets on the other side of things. But that's, why don't you short when it sucks? You know?

Well, I have something about, I have some shorting information in my book, but actually because it's a book for beginners, not just for beginners, but it's aimed mainly at beginners. I don't encourage shorting because it's very hard to make money shorting. It's possible and some people manage it, but very few. 'Cause it takes a really refined skillset, trading skillset. You have to be very good with your timing, very quick at getting in and out because shorting, the trouble with shorting is that when the market plummets, it really plummets often very fast and then it recovers really fast as well. And so if you don't get the timing right at both ends, you don't make money. It's much harder.

The thing I, so I actually, part of my story is that I was, looking into trading stocks. I have a friend who's into options and he was trying to get me into options. And then I talked to Leighton who runs PoolTogether and he, or he's one of the main contributors and one of the co-founders. And he is like, no, you should do crypto. So I studied technical analysis with crypto charts and it just kills me because the market never stops. Like how can one trade in a balanced way in these sorts of conditions? And like, you know, live a happy life?

Oh, is that a question? Well, basically you do it by trading longer term. So the way to live a happy life is not to be in and outta the market constantly all the time. What you want to be doing if you want to live a nice comfortable life is do what I did in 2020, which is basically the market consolidated. It sort of meandered downwards. from the beginning of 2018 to the middle of 2020, right? You can, if you look at a chart of Bitcoin, you can draw a kind of triangle around all the price movements in those, that 2-year period. And me and lots of other people were watching this triangle forming and we were just kind of going, okay, so from our knowledge of trading and how markets move and market psychology, Charts tend to form these certain patterns over and over again. It's the psychology that kind of drives the movements. And what was happening was prices were trading in a tighter and tighter range over that 2-year period and sort of coming towards a point of a triangle, if you see what I mean, like the point of a triangle. And it hadn't quite got there, which is what you want to see. You want to see the prices sort of moving towards the edge of the triangle and then breaking out. through the top of the triangle. So we've been watching this a couple of years, and then finally it happens in July 2020, and that's when I bought Bitcoin. And then it went up about 400 or 500%, and I sold it near the top when I saw that it was starting to falter. It wasn't as, you know, there wasn't as much momentum behind it as there had been before. It was kind of the first sign that the boom was starting to end. Which kind of comes partly from experience. But, you know, these methods can be taught to some degree, as I do in my book. And, and so basically what I'm saying is if I hadn't traded other cryptos as well, which I was doing, which kept me busy, well, let's say I just decided to trade Bitcoin on its own. I, I would've made like a 400 or 500% profit by just buying it in July 2020 and then selling it in about February, March, April. 2021, and that's it. That's like 2 things. You have to do 2 things, which takes you like 5 minutes, and that's it. And then you make a massive profit.

So you just walk away. You're not, you, you take the charts off your phone, you stay on the what, weekly timeframe? What are you doing? Weekly, monthly?

Definitely not daily. Daily timeframe is fine. Or,

or weekly.

Daily is fine. And then you just, you know, you, you hardly need to, you know, this is a long-term strategy, though not as long-term as some people are. Some people obviously have such a long-term strategy that they buy Bitcoin in like 2013 and then hold it for 10 years. You know, that's a long-term strategy and that involves doing absolutely nothing at all. So, I mean, you know, those people, the people who did that, started that early. I wasn't quite that early. I think 2014 was my first Bitcoin buy. You know, the 2013, 2012, 2011 people who just hold it, they haven't had to do anything. They just, They just make lots of money. They just became rich by doing literally nothing. So what I'm saying is trading doesn't have to be busy. It doesn't have to be.

That's right.

Whether you want to be a short-term trader or not, I don't recommend day trading. Certainly, you know, being glued to a screen all day, that is not fun. And it's also not very lucrative. It's very hard to make money that way. Most day traders lose money. Nearly all of them lose money. Only a handful really make it long-term day trading.

So you're more of a week trading, month trading. That's the suggested happiness.

I personally, I do a mixture. I do a bit of shorter-term trading though, not really day trading as such, but you know, I will hold positions for days at a time sometimes rather than weeks or months. It just depends on the trade that I like the look of, but I do prefer longer-term trading. As I say, it's less hassle and it's also probably the most lucrative kind of trading as well.

And you're a technical analysis guy, right, Glen? Like you're not, you're not looking at, you're not looking at, you know, financial stuff. You're just, you're looking at the charts. The charts are the Bible to you.

Charts are the main thing for me, but they're not the only thing. You know, I'm very interested in the technology of cryptos and I know a lot about it and I have to know a lot about it because I do speeches and things where I talk about it at conferences and that kind of stuff. So I have to know my, I have to know my stuff. And also I like to trade cryptos that I respect and that, that I know about. Also, actually, I go on, I quite often go on TV and radio, you know, they call me up and ask me to, to talk about the latest thing. I don't, I haven't done CNBC or that kind of, I don't really do business television. I do more sort of mainstream, like the BBC News. channel, that kind of thing. And, and, and as I say, radio stations. So again, I have to know what I'm talking about. So for example, when Luna collapsed last week, that was a very major event in the crypto world, and I needed to understand exactly how it had happened. So, you know, it's necessary for me to understand all the technology behind these things. Luckily, I didn't have a position in Luna. And actually, I was aware of all the warnings that had been going around for months that there were problems with the whole setup, really. Luna was kind of— it was almost like it was designed to fail. I'd go so far as to say not on purpose exactly, but the whole incentive mechanism, the whole reason why the price just kept going up and up was exactly the same reason why it then went down and down, you know, sort of without going into too much detail built into the algorithm itself was a kind of virtuous circle on the way up and a vicious circle on the way down. So it sort of accentuated any extreme situations that might occur. So it was kind of almost inevitable that it would collapse at some point. It feels that way now. At the time, this is the problem. When I read all the warnings months ago, you know, I read them and I took them seriously, but because I wasn't trading Luna myself, I just kind of went, yeah, yeah. You go, because the world of crypto is full of warnings, isn't it? Everyone's always warning about everything because everything is so dodgy in so much of the crypto world that it just didn't even seem out of the ordinary for Luna to be dodgy, for its algorithm to be so sort of faultily written. But now obviously it seems like a massive deal and it's really a salutary lesson for all the people who say, for example, that we shouldn't worry about Tether. which is not an algorithmic stablecoin. Tether is an asset-backed stablecoin. But, you know, for years and years people have been saying, look, it's all Tether FUD. Don't worry about Tether. Tether's going to be fine. And it's like, well, is it though? Because it's not properly backed by dollars like it's supposed to be, or like I think it should be. There's a lot of unknown assets, shall we say, backing Tether. And that is an accident waiting to happen and has been for years now, and just because it hasn't yet fallen apart doesn't mean it's not going to. Just as we've seen with Luna, you know, everything seems hunky-dory until the day when suddenly it isn't anymore.

That's, uh, yeah, very painful. I, I'm at Permissionless right now, which is a crypto conference in West Palm Beach, and just left and right, it's just Luna jokes. Luna jokes everywhere. And it's not funny anymore. Okay. No more Luna jokes. Yeah.

Well, they're all joking, but you know, their crypto will be the next one to collapse, so then they— That's right.

That's right. You're asking for it. You're asking for it. So, Glenn, you're trading Bitcoin. What else are you trading? Are you going shitcoin route?

I have done, I mean, I'm not trading any cryptos really right now because I'm waiting to see how things pan out. The, the whole crypto world is pretty much, I mean, the whole crypto market is pretty much following what the stock market is doing at the moment anyway. Oh, I'm kind of more interested in trading the stock market at the moment because otherwise it's like trading the tail rather than the dog. See what I mean? Because crypto is following what the stock market does. So it kind of seems a bit weird to be trading the thing that's following rather than the thing that's leading the charge. So I'm trying to, I mean, you know, the stock market is falling very heavily, just like crypto. And so I'm looking for the right moment to kind of possibly buy a short-term bounce. It might only be a short-term bounce. You know, we might not have hit absolute rock bottom for either the crypto market or the stock market yet. There could be further to go. It's always hard to know, but if you choose the right moment, you can buy a decent bounce, ride it for as far as it goes, and then get out before it goes all the way back down again. As I say, I'm not sure yet whether it will go all the way back down again or whether this would be the proper recovery. There are lots of different signs to look at, and one very key sign at the moment is that pessimism is at almost an all-time high. And that goes whatever survey you're looking at, whatever indicator you're looking at, they all say the same thing, that pessimism is at an absolute peak, both in the crypto markets and also in the stock markets as well. Investors are very, very upset at the moment. And I'm laughing, I suppose, because that's a good thing in terms of buying time. The point of maximum pessimism, you know, Warren Buffett is famous for this, for saying when people are fearful, that's the time for you to get greedy. Now, I mean, it's all very well a billionaire saying that because he can afford to make mistakes. It's a little more difficult for people like us who, you know, I'm not a billionaire. So it's, you know, I'm doing fine, but I ain't a billionaire. So the problem is that if you do try and catch the falling knife, as Wall Streeters would call it, the problem is that the knife can fall straight through your hand and you end up with a bloody hand. You see what I mean? So the time that I like to buy is when things have actually turned around and started going back up. But when you're talking about a short-term bounce like this, you have to get the timing just right. Because you haven't got, you haven't got much of a window of opportunity. You wait for things to turn around and then you quickly get in, sort of snipe your way in and then snipe your way out. Maybe some days later, maybe even weeks later, we shall see.

So Glenn, there's just a time for you where like, oh, now it's the time. And then boom, you're back in. You're watching it daily. You're watching it daily. But then there's just like this kind of moment where you're like, okay, it's time to go to work. You make your moves, you make your, you make your deals and you make your trades and then you just set it and forget it again, right? That's what you're doing. You're, you're using stop, you're, you're putting stops on there, right?

Yep. Use stop losses. They're pretty much essential really. Um, like many people, I've used mental stops a lot in the past instead of physical ones, which basically just means you have an idea in your head of what price you will sell at. And no lower. But the problem is it's very easy to override those mental stops. No human being is strong enough mentally or emotionally really to override that deep-seated need to ignore your stop loss and just wait a little bit longer because you know the price is going to turn around and go back in your favor. The problem is quite often it doesn't. So this sort of also applies to what I was just talking about with the catching the falling knife thing. As I said, it's all very well for a billionaire like Warren Buffett to say, oh, you should buy when everybody's terrified and the markets are plummeting. But for an ordinary person, if they buy when the markets are plummeting, they can then lose all their money very quickly, which is why I always wait for the beginning of the turnaround, which usually means I miss the very bottom, but I'll get the bit just after the bottom and then all the rest of it all the way up. And then again, I will usually miss the part at the top. This, this This type of trading is called trend following, and it's been around a very long time. It's been around in various forms for, you know, probably centuries, but it's only been called trend following for a few decades. And it's, you know, the general idea is that you wait until a market has turned around. You have various strategies to gauge when a market has turned, but at its very simplest, you could just say, well, you look at a chart, You see a line that's just going diagonally downwards and you wait until it stops going diagonally downwards and starts going diagonally upwards. Or maybe it'll go sideways for a bit at the bottom and then go diagonally upwards. So the point is you wait until you see a turnaround or signs of a turnaround. Maybe you use moving averages to give you a stronger feel for when things are turning around. Some people use other indicators, but whatever you choose to use, you're basically looking to see when the market's changing direction. And when you see strong signs that it's changing direction, that's the time to buy. And then likewise, at the top, you see signs of a change of direction. That's when you decide to sell. That's exactly what I did in that Facebook post on, what was it, 26th of December, 2017. I'd seen signs that the market was turning.

Yeah, I've heard that it compared to American football where you want to go from the 30-yard line to the 30-yard line. You don't need to go to the end zone to the end zone. You want to, you want to at least, you know, get, you get close on both sides and you get the gains there. But you had said something earlier that's really interesting, how crypto is coupled with the markets, like the stock market. And then suddenly, I mean, we saw this a couple weeks ago, it decoupled for a bit and then recoupled again and we're back there again. And, and you're, and I'm always, when I'm looking at charts, I'm always frustrated. I always want to trade the primary source. And so for crypto, that's Bitcoin, but then Bitcoin responds to S&P. So I, how do you, and you just said this, Glenn, you were like, yeah, so I'm interested in trading stocks right now because that's the primary source. So what happens? Like, why not just trade stocks? Because that's generally what happens is it follows that the stock market, the S&P 500.

Well, it's only been following it since about November. So it's been about 6 months now, basically ever since we hit the peak. That's when they sort of coupled up the stock market and crypto.

Oh, there you go. That's when I got into crypto. So there you go. It's been that way ever since I've been here. So that's good. I just thought it was always that way, Glenn.

That's all you've ever known. But yeah, there's a whole different world out there and I'm sure it'll be back. I don't think we are going to be coupled with stocks forever. I mean, they're 2 completely different assets. There is a certain logic to them being coupled up more so in the future than in the past, I guess, which is that The institutions got in, the bankers and the hedge funds and so on over the course of the crypto boom over 2021. So those people tend to think of things in terms of risky assets or non-risky assets, and they sort of lump cryptos in with stocks as risky assets. So that's partly why the two of them are trading in line with each other. But I still wouldn't expect it to go on like this forever. It would be very odd if it did.

What's your take on NFTs? How do you— have you Tried to apply your crypto trading to the NFT market at all?

I tried, but it's really, really difficult because the markets are so illiquid. You know, you don't, well, I mean, the whole fungibility thing is absolutely essential for trading crypto, stocks, commodities, foreign exchange, forex, treasuries, anything. They're all highly liquid markets and that's what makes the charts So watchable. That's what makes the charts mean something because they are, they include the psychology of millions of traders all fighting against each other constantly. And that psychology is boiled down into the shape of the chart. And so learning to understand the patterns and the shapes in charts is all about learning to understand the human psychology of what moves markets. But with non-fungible tokens, of course, they, because you don't have the fungibility, each one of them trades To some degree individually from all the others. And if you look at their price charts on OpenSea or something like that, you know, you only have a few transactions for any one particular NFT. For example, you can kind of obviously group together entire sort of bunches of NFTs, the biggest projects, I guess, like the Bored Apes and so on. you could arguably put together charts for the entire group. I haven't seen any. Have you seen any convincing examples of that where somebody manages to put together all of them into one enormous chart somehow?

Well, Glenn, you're the expert, but of course, I mean, I have seen the Index Co-op has— there have been these indices. So a JPEG market, You know, where they'll take like a bunch of blue-chip NFTs and create an index off of them and you could trade that. I know there's that, those attempts at financializing those to make 'em a little bit more liquid. I'm not sure how good they are. I know that they're new. It's a pretty nascent, and I'm part of a group that buys NFTs and we're even thinking about how do we do that? How can we create a something that's, you know, like a token or something based off of our group portfolio and allow people to buy in to that sort of thing. But I guess that would be a shitcoin too. Maybe.

I should take a look at the— that's a good point actually. I should, I'll do some Googling after this and find out what the NFT indexes are like, see if they've developed a lot since, 'cause the last time I really checked was probably 6 months or so ago and I just couldn't find anything that was that usable. But I expect things have changed a lot even in 6 months. I should take another look.

Yeah, I think Index Co-op's the, the way to go with that. I know there are a couple others, but I just, I really trust Index Co-op's products and they're very smart people and they're also part of PoolTogether. We got Crypto Texan who was part of Index Co-op and now is with Polygon, who is a pooler. So yeah. Glenn, what's your next book? What's the, what's the follow-up to Crypto Trader?

Good question. Probably not allowed to say. I haven't started writing anything yet anyway, but I don't think my publisher would like it if I— better not. I better not say just in case I haven't asked permission in advance. Yeah, my publisher.

Which you could totally hit at Glenn. We're— this is not, this is not MSNBC. This is Pulled Together Podcast. We're not, it's not the same audience. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, I know.

Different sizes. Scales. Oh yeah. We're here for that alpha.

Yeah, well, it's, it's, what's the point of me telling you something like that anyway? I haven't written anything. There's no out.

Oh, okay.

All right. I got no out for you.

That's right. Don't, don't tell me that book, but what's another book that you would recommend? I wanna know. I wanna know like what you're into.

I'm into, I'm gonna look. All right. Uh, what am I into? Uh, God, you know, just, just ask me a different question. I don't know. What am I into? I'm into all kinds of things. What kind of stuff?

All right. All right. Cool. All right, cool. So, so what, what coins are you— well, 2 things. What, what do you see? How are we going to get out of this? What is it? What is Armageddon going to look like? Are we at the bottom? When is the bottom? All that. And then 2, what are you interested in? Are there other coins, other things that you're looking at trading that you're like, oh, actually this looks really great, or this could be interesting in 2022 and beyond?

Okay, well, look, the 3 main areas, and it'll come as no surprise to anybody listening, I'm sure, but the 3 main areas are, you know, NFTs, metaverse, you know, Web3 type stuff, DeFi. Those are the 3 main growth areas at the moment. Those are the ones that I'm watching most closely for recovery. But you know what crypto's like, new areas will just suddenly emerge all the time. The next time there's a crypto boom, Whether it's in 3 months' time or 2 years' time, whenever it comes, massive new growth areas will suddenly appear and we'll all suddenly forget about NFTs and the metaverse. And we might not forget about the metaverse and DeFi, you know, DeFi is, these are massive growth areas, but the problem with crypto is that it has its fashions. And so what actually are the areas that will provide the growth in the long term aren't necessarily the things that everybody's talking about. You know, there'll be some new fashionable thing that everyone will get very excited about temporarily in the way that Dogecoin became huge and SHIB for about 5 minutes, and then everyone will just get bored of them and forget about them again. But those are the 3 areas that I'm most interested in going forward. And what was your other question? Oh yeah, when's rock bottom? Here's the thing. To be a good trader, as I said, you have to wait until after the rock bottom and then you buy because nobody ever knows when the rock bottom will be. Hopefully the past couple of years, for, for all the people listening who have spent time on places like Twitter or even Discord or anywhere else where people are talking about crypto, one thing you will have noticed is that everybody talks utter shit all the time about where the market's going next. Right? If you look, you've probably got your favorite influencer and you'll go, yeah, my influencer's right most of the time. You know, if you actually go back through all their tweets and look at all their market calls, I bet you find out that they were right 50% of the time and wrong 50% of the time. And if they weren't, if they were right more than 50% of the time, it's probably just statistically somebody had to be right more than 50% of the time. You know, it's like if you toss a coin 100 times, if you get 100 people to toss a coin 100 times, one of those 100 people is going to get heads a lot more than 50% of the time, just by, you know, sheer luck, just by sheer statistics. So what I'm saying is, if you've got a favorite influencer who guesses correctly the market direction most of the time, it's probably just dumb luck that they've done that. And they probably won't do that in the future. And the reason I so confidently say this is because I've been doing the markets, as I say, for more than 20 years, and I have never, ever come across a single human being who is able to call the direction of the market correctly time and time again. Those people don't exist because they would basically be gods, and no human is a god. We are just humans and we don't know the future. We never know the future. We don't know what the future holds. If somebody had told you in 2019 that you were gonna be locked in your house because of because of a disease in a few months' time, you wouldn't have believed them because, well, nobody knew that it was going to happen. Nobody knew. See what I mean? And you can apply that not just, I mean, that's a particularly obvious example, but there's a great document that was put together by an aide to George W. Bush about 20 years ago because they were asked to predict what was going to happen in the future. And they were a kind of intelligence guy and they put together this great document which they'd cribbed from somebody who'd written many decades earlier, basically showing that every decade they outlined world events going over every decade and made it very clear that every single decade, all the main world events, the ones that were most important, were all things that nobody could have predicted. Every decade we try and predict, oh, what's going to happen next? But ultimately, the really important stuff, the stuff that changes the world, is stuff that we just cannot predict. It will just happen suddenly, like World War I suddenly happened, or like COVID suddenly happened. You know, that's how the world works. So what I'm saying is don't try and pick the bottom of the market and don't listen to anybody who tells you it's the bottom of the market. Yeah, we can have indications, like as I said, the Fear and Greed Index, which tells me that people are particularly scared right now. And I know that when people are particularly scared, that's often a good time to buy over the long term, that prices quite often turn around. But there's nothing absolutely certain about that. It's just all you're doing is trying to rig the probability a little bit in your favor that things will turn out, you know, by looking at these kind of indicators. But as I say, you can't rely on them. Nobody ever knows when a market is going to bottom out. And that goes for this crypto all at the moment. Like I said right earlier on in this discussion, I said that when the market starts recovering, when it starts rebounding fast, I don't know whether that rebound is going to be a long-term rebound or whether it's just going to be a little flash in the pan before we go even lower. But, you know, looking at how the economy is throughout the world, I would say you shouldn't rule out even lower. Put it that way.

Glenn, who are those influencers? You mentioned that I mean, you're an influencer on Twitter as far as like people to follow for technical analysis, for advice, for, you know, guidance in the crypto trading world. Who are the people that you follow? Who do you keep track of as you're sort of—

I've traded with pretty much nobody technical analysis. There is nobody I've come across who's that great. The people who I follow, I mean, it doesn't really matter because you can trade crypto using technical analysis just like you trade stocks and so on. So the people I follow, I mean, here's a good guy, Mark Minervini. You might have heard of him 'cause he made a bit of an ass of himself recently on, I think it was CNBC or something when I say he made a bit of an ass, he says, he says that they made a bit of, people made a bit of an ass of him. He, he couldn't hear the, the, the guy who was asking him questions. And people said, no, you could hear the guy. You just didn't know the answers to his questions. And anyway, he got a real roasting on Twitter. But forget all of that because the guy's amazing. His track record speaks for itself. He's made really solid profits year after year for decades. And that's what really marks somebody out as a winner, somebody who has got a great track record that is publicly available for decades. I mean, I don't even have a publicly available track record because I've never had a kind of the stuff that he has, you know, trading academies and all that kind of business that he has. So, you know, he has business reasons why he has to kind of have himself properly audited and all the rest. I'm just a guy. I just trade and, you know, I gave up my job a decade ago because I was making a lot of money trading. So the only proof I have that I'm such a wonderful success is that I, until I wrote my book, I was basically just making all my money trading for almost a decade. And I've got a wife and children and they haven't died of starvation. So that's my proof. That's my proof, basically. That's all you got. And actually, even since I wrote my book, even though it sold a lot of copies, the way publishing works, you get hardly anything. Amazon take 50%. The publishers, whichever publisher it is, no, not disparaging my own publishers, but any publisher takes nearly all the rest. So you have to be J.K. Rowling really to actually make serious money out of selling books. Very few people do. So I didn't write it to make money. I wrote it for partly out of just frustration that it was so annoying that everybody had been taken in by idiots during the crypto boom of 2017. And I kind of wanted to prevent that happening again. And I hope I've prevented some people from making those mistakes. Certainly though, you know, many tens of thousands of people have bought my books and hopefully, well, some of them have even written to me in recent times saying, thanks so much. You stopped me from losing everything. You helped me make money during the boom, and now I haven't lost money during the crash. But, you know, I'm not an ongoing, I don't have any kind of subscription service. like Mark Minervini does. So I don't have a sort of ongoing commitment to help people. I just wrote a book and put it out there, and if people want to ask me questions about it, that's fine. I don't mind answering them. Mark Minervini, meanwhile, he doesn't trade crypto at all. He trades stocks. I don't know. The reason I recommend him is because his tweets are all just bang on. They're exactly— I agree with pretty much everything he says. about trading and the mindset that you need that is so important. And, you know, he follows little trends. He's a short-term trader, unlike me, but the principles are still the same. You're still kind of getting in while the going's starting to look good and then getting out before it all goes to hell. That's pretty much how he does it, just on a shorter timescale. And he makes mammoth profits.

Well, I think that your wife and children and you not starving is a good indicator. I appreciate that. That's very, you know, solid. I mean, that's, that's the dream, right? Being able to make a living from being able to trade or doing what you love.

And I'm giving a presentation. You know, I bummed a round and I feel bad about it now. Now I'm trying to be more active because I'm like, I'm still not old and I, I should be doing things in my life. But basically, like I say, I was a TV reporter and I was living a really hectic life interviewing prime ministers and presidents. And, you know, it was like a full-on job. And that's why I had to give it up because the trading was starting to make me more money. I didn't really have time to do both because it was just doing my head in, you know, it was just a mind— it was screwing with my mind. So I decided, right, I'm going to do the trading. And then basically because I trade mostly longer term, I didn't have much work to do. So I was just kind of sitting around a lot for years. I watched, you know, the sitcom?

Yes, I know Frasier.

Right. So Frasier was on, we have a channel here, Channel 4. I mean, it sounds ridiculous to you because in America you have a million channels, whereas in Britain until quite recently, we only had like 4 channels, 4 TV channels. And then we got a 5th one, which was, you know, cause for great celebration. But anyway, on Channel 4 in the mornings, they would play Frasier like a double helping of Frasier every morning. This is after I'd given up my job in 2012. And I would watch the double helping of Frasier every morning from, I think it was something like 10:00 AM till 11:00 AM. And then I'd get up and go and wander down and get some breakfast at 11:00 AM. And I did this for so long that I watched, I think all, how many seasons of Frasier? Hold on, let me, I'm gonna quickly check. Frasier. Be a sec. This is, this is good podcasting, isn't it?

This is good. That's right.

Frasier, season, episode 372. It's a lot of episodes, isn't it? How many, how many seasons is that then? I don't know. But anyway, hundreds and hundreds of episodes. So I watched them 2 a day for, I don't know, how long would that take? Months and months, I suppose. Months and months and months.

Well, I mean, with COVID I mean, you've got Netflix and all this stuff now. You can just binge everything.

Yeah. But the point is, back then it was just, they were playing the entire thing from the beginning to the end. I just watched it every single day, never getting up out of bed until at least 11:00 AM in the morning. And then when it got to the end of the final season, what did Channel 4 do? The very next day they started the whole thing again at the beginning of season 1. And what did I do? I watched the entire thing. again, entire, all the seasons, 13 seasons or whatever it was, all the way from the beginning to the end, twice, all the way through. That's how much of my wife, my life I wasted after I gave up my job to trade. And like I say, trading, if you do it right, and you have to do it right, and you have to follow rules, and if you follow the rules and you do it right and you have discipline, it doesn't need to involve a lot of work. As you can tell, it didn't for me.

So, Glenn, this is my last question. I'm presenting on crypto and how it can benefit humanity. Like, how can Web3, decentralized web, cryptocurrency, what is the good coming out of it for society? I'm doing a presentation on it tomorrow. And one of the things that I tell, it's to people who are normies, right? They have no clue about crypto. They might have some FOMO. They definitely don't have FOMO right now, but they're, they're, they want to know more about crypto and how it can help. And One of the things that I tell my normie friends is there's 3 ways to get involved with crypto. The first is to trade or invest, which are 2 different things, but that's, that's that one channel. The second one is to explore, and that's how you get these airdrops and you, you, there's so many things to explore and just have fun. Go, go around and check it out. And the third thing is to build. It's to be involved with a protocol, an app, a dApp, an NFT project, some sort of community in the Web3 space that you can contribute to and help build. And so, Glen, instead of watching Frasier for the 17th time, what, what would you do in crypto that wasn't investing and trading? What, what appeals to you?

You know, when you just said that, you made me feel so— I felt a pang of guilt, not for the Frasier, because that's all in the past, but for the fact that I'm not part. You know, I'm not involved in building anything. I'm not involved. I mean, you know, I'm in and out of various communities, but I'm not, I'm not, I don't know. I like the way that people commit to do that, and I should, I should do that. I'm too much of a spectator. But I do have my hands full now because people asking me, you know, because, because my book sold well, people are constantly asking me questions about trading, and I do give them free advice all the time. Look at me trying to justify my existence. I do help people all the time. You know, they write to me day in, day out, constant messages, and I reply to every single message and I give people as much advice and help as they want. I don't tell people what they should buy or sell because I'm not a financial advisor, but I give, you know, loads of general just kind of guidance. So I'm a great guy is what I'm trying to say, even though I'm not.

No, you're an educator. That's what you're doing. You're educating people. And I think that's great. I think that's great.

So I think that— I'm a builder, I suppose. Because I respect that, obviously, because that's what makes the whole thing tick.

Well, I think, I think now I need to expand my categories instead. I like 3s. I like having the simplicity of 1, 2, 3, but maybe I need a 4th. I mean, we have Chris K in the PoolTogether community. He has his DeFi Wealth Bible. He is the reason I was able to go from November to a podcast on crypto because I took his course and I was like a very He basically held my hand through decentralized finance. Just like I know I have a, we have a mutual friend who I know has sent you charts and their technical analysis, and you've taken time with this person to help them through their charts and be like, this is right, this is wrong. This is, I wouldn't call it this, I would call it that. And that's education. So we need that for sure. Glen, thank you for your service, sir.

It's been an honor to serve.

Well, listen, we're going to wrap it up, Glen, but I want to know, did you have anything else you wanted to talk about? Anything we could promote? How could the PoolTogether community help you? What can we get? What can we do? How can we serve you,

sir? I mean, you know, you would serve yourselves by buying my book.

There you go.

But the thing is, look, for most of the people listening now, you know, bear in mind this book was written in 2019 and I'm gonna do an update. Actually, that's when you ask me what I'm writing next. That's, that's what it is, is the update of the book. 'Cause it desperately needs updating. Obviously it doesn't even have DeFi in it, you know, 'cause that didn't barely exist at that time. So, you know, so what I'm saying quite honestly is that parts of my book are out of date and people reading it, you know, if you read the first parts of it, apart from the entertaining stuff about my background and all the rest of it, that where I introduce Bitcoin and Ethereum, it'll all seem like, you know, ridiculously just old-fashioned in a way to you. But the meat, the stuff that's worth the money, is later on in the book when I get to charting, technical analysis, how to buy and sell. Because even though I do rely heavily on fundamentals in stocks and shares, as well as technical analysis and charts, you know, I pay a lot of attention to fundamentals when I'm doing stocks. But with crypto, it's just virtually impossible to put a value on most cryptos because ultimately they're kind of like early stage tech projects. Like you have that program in the States, Shark Tank. We have a version in the UK called Dragon's Den, which is basically the same thing. And you know how those people go in with their early stage tech project and they're— or early stage project of any kind. And they're like, and they're like, hey, look at this, it's really cool. And you go, yeah, yeah, okay, we'll give you a bit of money. We don't know if it will succeed or not. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But here's a bit of money, give it a go. That's pretty much the stage that most cryptos are at in my eyes. And yet many of them are valued or were valued at least some weeks ago in the billions. And it's like, really? Would you put billion-dollar valuations on some guy coming into the Shark Tank with like a clever idea and some nice technology that may or may not ever take off? Of course you wouldn't. I mean, it's absolutely insane, the valuations. Okay. They bear no resemblance to the real world that we live in. So that's why fundamentals have to be taken with a huge pinch of salt in crypto and why I rely more on charting techniques. And, you know, they work frankly, so they can make you money if you do them correctly. So that's that. If you're going to buy my book, that would be the reason why too. Trading is like a craft, like a skill. That's how you have to think of it. It's something that you learn like An example that's sometimes used, or I sometimes use, is tennis, right? You wouldn't go onto a tennis court and swing your racket around for the first time in your entire life, hit a few balls, go, oh, I've had a bit of, bit of beginner's luck here. I think I know how to do this. I'm ready to take on Serena Williams. Right? You wouldn't say that. Okay. But that's what people do every day with trading. They're like, oh, okay, I'll try a trade. Yeah, here we go. I think I can trade against the best people in the world. 'Cause that's what you're doing every day when you're trading. You're trading against the best people in the world. Right? And if you're going to do that, you need to be trained up and you need to understand the skill, the craft, just as you would need tennis lessons to learn exactly how the swings should be done and so on. It is the same thing. So for heaven's sake, don't just chance it. Find out how to do it properly.

But let's be real, Glenn, you're trading against robots. It's not people anymore. It's computers,

but they're all trained by human beings, so they all act—

that's right. That's right.

They trade in human ways. The machine learning isn't advanced enough yet for them to be kind of doing their completely own thing. They're still basically just sucking at humans.

Well, that's the way with like chess, right? You have the chess computers that can beat the humans, but then human plus chess computer against a chess computer, the human plus computer wins. So we're still in that vibe right now. Until the computers completely take over, and then we have a whole host of other problems.

Yeah, I'll be giving up on trading when that day comes. Sure, I won't be able to beat them once they're, once they're doing it properly.

I'm pumped. I didn't read your book to prepare for this podcast, but I'm gonna read your book after, Glen, because of the impression that you've made on me and the rest of the PoolTogether community. So thanks for being here, and thank you for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. It's been a pleasure. See you next— or hear you next week. Thanks for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit, and we'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. So visit the PoolTogether Discord and let us know.