Let me start with the thing I love most about this job.

I get to talk - literally, weekly - with some of the smartest people on the planet. Not smart in the conference-panel sense. Smart in the only sense this industry respects: people who extract money from the most competitive sport that exists.

Trading is exactly that - a sport where the inefficiencies are the prize, the demand for them is bottomless, and there is effectively unlimited capital hunting every last one of them.

It's the easiest, hardest money you can ever try to earn.
Easiest, because if you do it successfully, every door opens and everyone wants to speak with you.

Hardest, because the number of people doing it successfully is vanishingly small - and even smaller is the number willing to even enter this endeavor, this lifetime pursuit of excellence, knowing the odds (95% of the people do not understand the odds, tho.)

Last week, one of those people asked me where I think the market is going. I asked him the same. And what we agreed on is worth an entire edition.

Here's where two people who live inside this market landed after going back and forth:

Nobody can time it. Nobody ever has.

Millions of people are giving opinions on where the market goes next - it remains the toughest question in the game precisely because the direction part is a solved problem. We both agreed on the simple narrative: Bitcoin goes up, and most likely, eventually, it reaches a million dollars per coin. That's not a hot take anymore; among serious people it's close to the consensus view.

But when? Through which levels does it trade first? Does it bottom at 50? 40? 30? Even 25 before the run? Complete mystery. In the entire history of markets, essentially no one has repeatedly, reliably predicted timing - and this asset class won't be the exception. If you've been reading me for a year, you know this is the drum I never stop beating: anyone can predict the direction; no one can predict the date.
Everything difficult in this business lives in that gap.

Two weeks ago I told you this market has shiny object syndrome - attention snaps instantly to whatever's new. And the uncomfortable update: the shiny object isn't in crypto anymore. (also mentioned it before but it is nothing new to anyone, we are all well-informed people, some of us maybe (too) delusional).

From a pure speculation standpoint, crypto has lost the glory. There are more volatile, more active playgrounds out there right now, and the speculative crowd has followed the action.

The asset class that was once the definition of excitement has become - say it quietly - boring and u n s a f e to a lot of people. Zero speculative relevance for the (smart) crowd that once lived here.

And that raises the question every smart person I talk to is now asking out loud, in one form or another:

Should you even stay in crypto?

The macro backdrop making the question sharper. Equities have had a monstrous run - the S&P just printed its best quarter since 2020, but the mood around it is turning strange.

Bank of America is warning that speculation is hitting extreme levels and reaffirming a year-end target below current prices, citing the kind of gap-ups in high-multiple stocks that historically precede a valuation snapback.

Even the bulls, like Fundstrat's Tom Lee, are openly telling investors that something which "might feel like a bear market" - a 10–20% drawdown - could arrive between August and October before any further upside. And if it does, it happens fast. The stock bags you hold and think are safe, start questioning reality overnight, and your mindset shaking.

So everyone's now living inside the same illusion-or-not question: is this a dip you buy, or a dip that just… keeps dipping?

… Ok so let us suppose the stock market has seen its high and bleeds slowly from here.

What happens to crypto?

My honest answer - and this is my opinion, clearly labeled as such: it might be the best thing that could happen to Bitcoin.

BTC, as a single digital asset, is still a relatively small market cap next to global equities. If liquidity starts rotating out of an exhausted stock market and goes hunting for yield and asymmetry elsewhere, digital assets are one of the very few places positioned to receive it - and BTC is the front door.

A small-cap asset meeting a large-cap rotation is how violent runs start.

Nothing guaranteed ofc. Nothing ever is (besides the fact you are going to pay taxes and die). But that's the setup I'd be watching and hoping for.

Hope is all that we have left anyway.

Meanwhile, the "should I stay" question has a very practical version for quantitative teams, because a quant doesn't need to believe in an asset class - they need volatility, liquidity, and inefficiency, wherever those live.

And the menu being discussed in my calls right now is wider than it's ever been: sports betting markets. Prediction markets. DEX inefficiencies with the Interactive Brokers setup aka multi-venue, cross-exchange arb spanning TradFi and crypto rails.

And tokenization, which a serious share of these people are actively positioning for.

You already know my through-line on this - it's the multi-asset thesis I've pushed all year.

The teams that survive won't be crypto-only, because no serious team or allocator ties its existence to one asset class's acting like woman mood on a random Sunday with no reason. (no offence, ladies reading this - we love you)

But - and here's the counterweight to all the gloom - while the speculators left, something else moved in.

The space is institutionalizing, fast. And that changes the size question entirely: opportunities here used to be too small to interest truly large participants. That's flipping.

The rails, the custody, the SMA structures, the RWA convergence - the market is becoming a place where scale capital can actually operate. The shiny-object crowd leaving and the institutions arriving is not a contradiction. It's a handover.

One more frame from that conversation, and it's the one I keep coming back to.

The technology got better every single year. Materially better - faster, cheaper, more capable than it's ever been. And the price action reflects none of it. No breakthrough moment on the grand scale. It's easy to read that as failure.

But zoom out. Blockchain as we know it is barely seventeen years old. Seventeen years is a microscopic horizon for an entire asset class to emerge - a rounding error in the history of markets, let alone humanity. Compare AI: the field is roughly seven decades old. Machine learning, big data - around for generations. And the actual breakthrough? The last few years. Seventy years of quiet compounding, then vertical.

We could be sitting in the same movie, earlier in the reel. I don't think crypto's breakthrough needs anywhere near that long - the institutional plumbing being laid right now is exactly what "quiet compounding" looks like. So: fingers crossed the four-year cycle does its job and something starts moving (and clicking) again.

And if it doesn't? Then honestly - more shops close their doors, more allocators ditch the industry and leave, both of which I'm already watching happen.

I've found myself wondering how Token2049 will feel this October - everyone seems so exhausted, so many are running out of funds to keep the lights on.

It'll still be a full house, I'm sure; it always is. But full house and meaningful money are different things. Those good old times everyone reminisces about?

Nobody is living them today - except a very small handful of companies that are extremely good at what they do.

Which brings me to the part of this edition that's actually for you.

Because here's what I'm seeing underneath all the macro noise, and it's the most hopeful pattern on my desk:

Teams that were invisible for a very long time are starting to break out.

I mean teams that spent a year-plus under the radar - doing seemingly nothing, gaining no traction, privately questioning their own life choices. And now, suddenly: everyone wants to talk to them. They're being chased, discussed, introduced.
The phone that never rang doesn't stop.

Here's the pattern, and I want every struggling team to hear it precisely: being good at something does not mean you'll immediately be successful at it. The traction gap is real, and it's long - in my observation, somewhere around one and a half years. Before that line, you're operating on nothing but blind belief in your own ability, because the market gives you zero external confirmation. At around that mark - if the ability was real - the breakout starts. Not gradually. Suddenly.

And the same paradox runs in reverse. I watch the mirror image constantly: teams that had the hype - everyone wanted to talk, they were the shiny object - and have now lost the status, facing the same cycle from the other side. It's exactly like the token market: the hyped names get bid, then die, and attention moves to whatever's new. Teams get traded like narratives. Neither the hype nor the darkness is permanent. Only the ability is.

So what happens to the teams whose hype doesn't die - the ones that stay excellent for years?

They disappear. In the best way. They transition to prop and close the doors. At some point, what they've built becomes too valuable to share - and the easy access, the open capacity, the "book a call" link, all of it goes away. The public never hears from them, except as rumor of their existence. It takes 7-10 years typically to know.

Here's my honest wish for you reading this: I hope one day you go behind those closed doors and become inaccessible. I hope you become the team people like me can't get on the phone and ask me to fuck off politely. And I'll be equally honest about the price: the chances are very low, and the road runs through sleepless nights, sacrificed weekends, family time you don't get back, and more.

Every single closed-door shop I know of paid that toll. There's no version of this that gets easier.

But that's precisely why the competition at the top is the smallest - almost everyone quits on the way there. And once you're there, the position is strangely durable: it's much harder to fall from the top back to zero than it was to climb. And even in the worst case, you keep the one asset nobody can take — the experience. Irreplaceable, portable, and the reason a proven operator can go from zero back to a hundred in a fraction of the original time.

So let me close with the words I'd say to any team sitting in the middle of tier two right now, feeling hopeless about making money in this market. You have exactly two options, and both are legitimate:

If it's too painful - quit. Genuinely. No shame in it. This pursuit demands sacrifices that not everyone should make, and knowing your limit is its own kind of intelligence.

But if your sacrifices are sustainable - keep going, and see where you are in a few years. Because the most consistent pattern I know in this business is the cruelest one: people quit right before the reverse starts. The eighteen-month darkness ends, and it disproportionately ends just after the moment most people stopped believing.

I hope that's not how your story goes. The light might be coming. It might not. Nobody can time it - that's where we started this edition, and it's true for your career exactly as it's true for Bitcoin.

But the direction? The direction was never in doubt.

That's the read this week.

If you're one of those under-the-radar teams approaching your breakout — we'd like to know you before everyone else does; that's literally the job. And if you know an exceptional team or allocator, connect us — we reward you properly for any introduction that turns into business: [email protected].

Stay patient. Stay honest. Stay alive.

See you next week.

Quants.Space is an institutional discovery engine for systematic and discretionary trading strategies — 130+ independent, world-class quantitative and discretionary trading teams, each with vetted track records and unique alpha sources, plus a dedicated Emerging Managers sector for early-stage teams. Our mission is simple: connect institutional capital and allocators directly with best-in-class teams, all within a secure Separately Managed Account (SMA) framework. If you're an allocator active in the SMA space, or a team opening SMA capacity for institutional tickets, get in touch at [email protected].