Scott Melker: From DJ to famous trader and YouTuber | Crypto Stories Ep. 22

When I first got into crypto, of course, was shut up, dj, stay in your lane. Right? People largely don't like to believe that someone can be competent at more things than one at the same time. That's actually how the name the Wolf of Wall Streets came about. Somebody jokingly told me that, why are you talking about these charts? Dj, stay in your lane. You know music, you don't know anything about markets. You're some kind of fake Wolf of Wall street or something. And I said, ha, I'm the Wolf of Wall Streets. Like, as a joke, I changed my name to it sort of as a temporary joke, Wolf of Wall Streets. And it stuck, and people. It was a joke, and I just sort of rolled with it. Well, my parents say that I loved music from when I was a baby. That I used to rock back and forth from the crib when they listened to Fleetwood Mac, and that I was always obsessed with their record collection. I started pounding on the piano keys when I was old enough to even sit up and touch them. I did classical piano competitions. I was always just consumed entirely by music. There were huge barriers to entry to becoming a DJ when I started in the 1990s because you had to have, first of all, very expensive equipment. Turntables, needles, headphones, a mixer, all those things. So, A, you had to have a lot of dispensable income. And then, B, you needed to bring five friends with you every time you wanted to go DJ somewhere to help you carry your records and all of your equipment. The commitment it required to be good at it and to actually do it as a career was massive. But there was definitely a defining moment, and it was the birth of my daughter. I was so clueless about what parenting would be like that my only concern at the time was whether I was going to make it to south by Southwest to play a series of four gigs that I had booked in March. What happened was my wife had the baby on her due date. We stayed in the hospital for a day, we brought the baby home, and two hours later, I went to the airport and left. You know, I was a very successful DJ who got to play huge stadiums and concerts, but I was not the name on the top of the flyer. When I got home from that trip, I said, not anymore. Never again. One thing about DJing is that you have a lot of free time during the day. So I was always a trader and I was always trading stocks, but very poorly, to be quite honest. So I lost a lot more money than I made over those first 15 years of trading Went broke more times than I would like to admit. Basically what happened was when I graduated college, I thought I would make a very smart investment. And I took 5,000 doll, all the money I had in the world, and I put it into a mutual fund that I was going to save forever. But of course that didn't play out as intended. I had to pay bills and the market actually went down during that period. And I was forced to sell that $5,000 investment for $2,000 just to pay my rent and then had absolutely nothing. 2006, I finally got out of debt. I started investing again. I had money to trade. But the Great Recession hit me. I had just finally gotten new money to put in the market and got absolutely wiped out the next time. Basically a great stock tip from a friend who was consulting for a pharmaceutical company who heard that this company was about to get approval for a blood thinning drug. And so I basically put everything that I had into this stock. Soon after, CEO got on an earnings call and basically said that they were running out of money, they weren't necessarily going to get approval. So it was a publicly traded company and it literally went to zero. And I didn't sell at any point there because I didn't believe that a stock that was publicly traded was going to go to zero. And I lost everything in that case as well. Well, I took a few years off. It was more of a forced break for a while, but I was definitely had a bit of PTSD from those experiences. When I got back into it, I approached it a lot less like gambling and going all in and FOMO and all of the pitfalls that we all know exist for trading, but you sort of have to experience them yourself. That I just took it far more seriously and was able to slowly ramp up. I think because I was married, I was trad with a very limited budget by the time I had the money to do it. And then to be totally honest, because I found crypto when I did the end of 2016, beginning of 2017, it was just very good luck and great timing. Right. You didn't have to be a great trader to make money in crypto in 2017. You just had to buy stuff and watch it go up. It started with bitcoin, and bitcoin was secretly very popular in the DJ community. In 2015, 2016, I started to hear about it. I had a lot of other DJ friends who were traders as well. We had little groups where we were would talk about stock trades and things like that. And crypto just sort of creeped into the conversation consistently and I started to hear about it over and over and over and over again. And then in 2017 after I had finally bought a bit of Bitcoin, people started talking about moving your bitcoin to this exchange called Bittrex. Right at the time there was no USDT pairs, you couldn't trade in USD. You had to buy bitcoin, transfer it somewhere in the United States. There weren't that many options and trade altcoins from Bitcoin. That's when I heard about Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, obviously all of the early XRP which I bought at a penny. To be quite honest, I say this all the time. I didn't come to bitcoin or Crypto because I cared about the assets at all. Right? I was a trader, I was looking for money. It was a opportunity where there was unicorn 100x pumps happening all the time. I had no idea what was going on. And it really came later that I started to passionately care about the asset class more than is just something to trade and try to make money. Honestly, I've effectively stopped being a trader or at least at the velocity volume obsession that I had with it before. I've never believed that I would be able to maintain a successful trading career forever. I think it's a very, very hard life. People who want to become traders say they're giving up their 9 to 5 job and I joke it's because they want to work 24 hours a day instead and sit at a desk and stare at their screen. If you want to really, really be successful and active day trading, you have to be in it almost 247 and it doesn't leave much room for a healthy lifestyle in my opinion. And so I feel like now as I've evolved, I've become much more of an investor and even just a longer term swing trader. If I'm buying something, I'm not trying to sell it tomorrow, I'm not trying to sell it in three months. Maybe I'm trying to time it for six months or a year. But largely I'm just at this point protecting my wealth and investing and not really looking to aggressively grow it through trading. I used to when I had a small account I used to love obviously I was trading aggressively and I used to love trading smaller cap altcoins and I would share the charts all the time. And then there comes a time when people start to criticize you and accuse you of manipulating the market. So my decision at that time years ago was I'M just not sharing those charts anymore or even talking about it, which sucks, to be quite honest, because I love that, right? I love doing it. I love trading those things. But when you have 1000-003000-00500,000, 800,000 followers, you learn to be much more responsible or discerning about the things that you share. On social media, people think that you just one day wake up and you have 800,000 followers who are looking to your words to figure out what to do with their investments, but they forget that you started with five. So I would say that a lot of the criticisms, which are for Anyone who's on YouTube or has a big account, is that you might be shilling something or that it's for your personal gain and not for your audience and things like that. Even if the negative comments are only 10% of the comments that you're getting, when you have 10,000 followers, that's fine. When you have 800,000, you're talking about hundreds and hundreds of comments daily of people trolling you and negativity. So you just stop reading them all together. So to me, if you ask, how do you deal with it, I just don't. I completely ignore it. I don't give it any power over my life or my opinion, but. And a lot of that's just because you were a guy who was willing to make a prediction about something. I just wrote a newsletter last week about all my bad predictions from a year ago, right. Just to be transparent and say that I did it. And then there was an article which I actually found very funny in a crypto publication. And mine was simply that I thought bitcoin would make an all time high again in 2022. I was obviously wrong, but. Right. So like, either you can continue to be yourself and make these predictions and try to add value, or you can just completely disappear, become vanilla and not share anything because you're afraid of the criticism. I choose not to fear the criticism, just to sort of ignore it and be myself and assume that there's a lot more positive than negative. I think for most people who are in crypto and are suffering in the bear market, you have to zoom out and remember why you're here. And I think returning to the original ethos and the original ideas that you loved about bitcoin and about the asset class in the first place will keep you going and allow you to look at it through a lens of the next 5, 10, 20, 30 years and not be concerned about what's going to happen in the next five months. The more you zoom in, the more you're concerned about the price. I will tell you this is funny. My portfolio tracking app forever was blockfolio, which of course was bought by FTX and I was tracking my portfolio in there forever. FTX obviously went down. Blockfolio disappeared. I've never replaced my portfolio tracker app and my life has been so much better when I don't check that on a day to day basis. We'll change the world and that you're a part of that and you're still exceptionally early. And don't get frustrated by the price because the price and the value are two wildly different things. Sam.