Author: thiccy , co-founder of Scimitar Capital
Compiled by: Felix, PANews (This article has been edited)
Jordi is a true master of the game. He participated in chess and bridge tournaments in his youth, often winning medals, and won a World Series of Poker bracelet in 2024. In addition, Jordi is the founder of Selini Capital, a cryptocurrency trading company focused on market making, autonomous long and short trading, and venture capital. Over the past 13 years, he has achieved an astonishing 100% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), effectively doubling his net worth every year. The following is the essence of the interview on Twitter spaces.
When did you start playing poker seriously?
I started playing poker seriously in 2003, when I was in college. It was the peak of Moneymaker. He had just won the World Series and was all the rage. Poker was one of those areas where a bunch of smart young people could make a lot of money, and it was like a hot ball of money. Now it's crypto.
How much money did you make playing poker in college?
I would say enough to pay for tuition and live a good student life. Maybe $50,000 a year. It doesn't sound like much now, but it was a lot of money at the time. I majored in economics, which is not a hard science like computers or pure math. Economics is a little loose, but I did take a lot of classes specifically on game theory and wrote a paper. I also studied psychology. I never wanted to be a pure mathematician. I liked the social side of life. So I chose to double major in psychology and economics.
I had no intention of playing poker professionally after graduation. It was just a part-time job while I was in school. So I moved to New York City, and that was in 2007. I got a job at a big bank doing some really boring work, mostly paperwork and some asset management stuff. I did that for about nine months, and then the 2008 financial crisis hit. I would sometimes play poker on the weekends. At that point, I decided that instead of waiting for the financial crisis to resolve, I was going to take matters into my own hands. I wanted to become a professional poker player.
What was the biggest thing you learned about yourself during that time?
On one hand it built confidence that I was playing against the best and could compete with them. I was playing against Scott Seiver and the best at the time and I wasn't defeated. But on the other hand, I saw that I lacked emotional resilience. I'm not someone who gets emotionally out of control, but I needed to learn how to handle the swings and stay calm. You can imagine if your life depends on your wins and your first month is a bad month and you have no savings, it's very stressful. You start to face your darkest fears.
I’ve noticed that a lot of the best traders out there played poker before they started trading crypto. They’re able to get their emotions out of their head in poker. I’ve seen people who had an edge but got emotional over a small mistake and compounded it into a bigger mistake. Before they knew it, they’d lost 50% of their money on emotional trading.
When did you start getting involved in cryptocurrency?
I became familiar with crypto because the company was in the Bay Area, which is a very unusual place, the only place in the world in 2016 where you could just randomly chat in a coffee shop and hear people talking about crypto. I think Bitcoin was like $1,000 at the time, and I remember thinking it was expensive, so I bought some Ethereum because it looked cheap, and then did my first crypto trade. I realized Litecoin was going to explode because it was only a few dollars. I can't remember what it was, but I was aware of this normalcy bias. So I bought a bunch of coins like Litecoin and ended up selling them for $250 when it was going crazy.
What were your thoughts when you first came into contact with cryptocurrency?
When I heard the news about Bitcoin in 2013, I felt that the chance of it becoming a base currency was small and seemed very far-fetched. So I didn’t buy it in 2013. At that time, I didn’t consider Bitcoin as a means of storing value.
Your "jack of all trades" trading style reflects your personality
My strength is that I am very curious and don't get bored. I can sit in front of the computer forever and there are so many things that can grab my attention. I have to force myself to exercise and do things. Immersing myself in things and finding subtle things that other people find boring, I find it very interesting.
The casino narrative for crypto has intensified since 2022. How do you fit that into your long-term vision for crypto?
Because of my background, I've spent most of my life in real casinos. I was shaped by it, I was born into it. Personally, I'm very happy with it. I do think that in the future, with the US government holding Bitcoin, the institutional aspect will become more and more important. That's totally fine. But I don't mind being in the middle of it.
How do you see the development of the crypto market in the next few years?
The market needs new Ponzi schemes. For example, we haven't seen the NFT cycle this time. Some players tried it, but it didn't work. Then they tried meme coins because there were some stories about how it was more liquid. So maybe that worked. But now it may not work.
Some things will change, it won't be the same as before, it's always evolving. I think we'll continue to see more game cycles, but it'll be different. Maybe at some point we don't have new Ponzi schemes, but people are very creative with it. AI is expected to play a big role in the future of crypto. I've been very bullish on the convergence of crypto and AI. I think that's where the future is going.
Many traders say that artificial intelligence will take over their jobs in a few years. Do you think this applies to your current job?
No, I think the AI tsunami will eventually sweep everyone and the world away. I do feel like I'm on the crest of a rising tide, but it's going to be a while before it reaches me. I'm not using data that's easy to train and replicate, especially right now, but more like a combination of alpha in my brain. Alpha isn't necessarily making deals, but running businesses and adding value. I feel like my approach and knowledge is specialized and can't be universally trained. So I'm not personally worried.
What is the worst trade you have ever made?
The worst trade was shorting altcoins during this period in late 2020. Altcoins were up 10x at that time. Then you think it's pure shit, Cardano or Dogecoin, some of which I shorted. In Tradfi, at least some people care about fair value. People try to trade around this fair value. But with these altcoins, I think I had to learn the hard way that there is no fair value, pure greed, and the greed is much greater than I thought. I did come in with the expectation that if a coin goes up 3x, players will exit and then there will be some selling. But there is more greed here. I shorted Dogecoin a few times, from a cent and a half to a cent or a half a cent. Then one day Musk announced the decision to adopt Dogecoin. When it exploded to 10 cents, I suffered a very large loss. I made this mistake many times with Cardano.
It was a weakness for me and now I have turned it into something that is manageable and actually profitable. But I would say shorting altcoins was my big flaw for many years but now it is one of the most profitable trades I do. You have to really understand the game you are playing when shorting altcoins.
How would you advise others to improve their trading abilities?
It's just internal psychology. It's true of a lot of things, but it's even more true of traders. If your judgment is clouded by your ego, then you're going to have a much harder time. That's true of almost everyone. A lot of people tie their identity and their entire self to something. To become a world-class expert at something, you have to uncloud your judgment. That usually means letting go of your ego. I think for some people that takes years. For some people, it's easy.
How do you think your perspective on trading is different?
Risk vs. reward for me is how I structure my trades. Other people have different ways, they just keep finding alpha. I always have a probability distribution in my head. I talked about this the other day, you don't have a position most of the time. You just go to bed, you want to wake up refreshed, make some trades, and then go back to bed at the end of the day. I have this rolling distribution of positions. Many assets don't need to have any fair value. Fair value basically means where is the risk and reward balanced over the time horizon that I'm trading? That's where you don't hold a position because if the risk and reward are balanced, there's no edge. I have a risk reward balance point for all these different assets. When it starts to move away from the balance point, I start to add to my position, and keep adding to my position until I get to my maximum position, and my maximum position is based on not losing a large percentage of my asset if something goes catastrophically wrong. So I calculate my size that way. And then adjust around this risk reward.
The hard part, of course, is determining the balance of risk-reward. There are a few ways to do that. At the end of the day, you have to add up five or ten things. You have to think about the cost basis of the short-term, medium-term buyers. I used to be pretty good at this. When I was doing high-frequency trading, I sat at my desk all day with nothing else to do but stare at the charts. I became really good at day trading. In a very short period of time, I could look at the risk-reward for the next few minutes or hours and trade around it.
Also, a little weird thing about my career is that I try to limit my net worth growth each year. I try to limit it to… 3x at most.
So what do you do with the remaining money? Donate it or?
I spend time training myself. Imagine you're a poker player and you make a hundred thousand in one year. Then the next year you make two and a half million and you spend the rest of the year not playing and you go into learning mode and you're laying the foundation for the next improvement. Focus all your time and energy on that instead of making more money that year. I've been doing this since the beginning of my trading career and I've been doing it for 13 years. My goal is to double my money every year. I've stuck to that goal. So it's been 2x for 13 years.
Related reading: Experienced traders’ 2024 “cultivation guide”: how to capture opportunities from volatility and keep profits
