My Favourite Trade
no alpha, just for entertainment
I am currently stuck in some random college in the Bronx after having spent the last two months in LA. I am cold as fuck and hence refuse to go outside, so I thought I’d write the story of my favourite trade. There’s no alpha here or anything, just for entertainment.
Throwback to October 2023, I had just created my first trading group ‘Phoenix Perpetuals’ a week prior and we were already cooking. On October 4th, Trust Wallet posts an announcement of an announcement. These announcements of announcements were quite popular in 2023 and often resulted in easy sell-the-news trades. Actually, this strategy is how I first got my account up from 300$ to a couple thousand $. To this day, it’s probably still my favourite period of trading because of all the game theory trades.
Traders pumped $TWT heavily in anticipation of the announcement.
Expectations for the announcement were quite high and I believed it would result in a classic sell-the-news event anyways, but I still set out to find any edge for the trade.
I was able to find out that the Trust Wallet team did not only post from their main Twitter account ‘@TrustWallet’, but also from 7 other accounts that would post the same messages but in other languages. Most importantly, I found that not all accounts would post at the same time, some would post a few minutes earlier or later than the main account.
So we simply set alerts for all 8 Trust Wallet accounts, hoping for one of them to post before the main account. On October 16th, at 13:57, the Russian Trust Wallet account (@TrustWallet_ru) posted the announcement. Montag (https://x.com/MontagCapital) saw it first and sent it into our Phoenix Perpetuals Discord.
At the time I was at a hotel in Larnaca, Cyprus, practicing archery. (Actual pic from a few days prior.)
I see the announcement right after finishing practice, we realize that it’s incredibly underwhelming and I start pressing the red button on $TWT. It has just started raining and I’m trying to build a solid position while simultaneously running back to my hotel room to open my laptop. The raindrops are hitting my phone, messing with my screen and it’s extremely difficult to execute the trade. My Order Placement is set to $TWT units instead of Notional Value so I’m not sure what my size is. Changing it to Notional Value is practically impossible because my screen is soaked and I am unable to wipe it fast enough, so I try to guess what my approximate size is based on my Liquidation price. At some point on my way back to the hotel room, the official Trust Wallet account finally posts the announcement as well and $TWT starts cratering. I get back to my room and the trade is in good profit. My position size was much smaller than planned but in the end the trade still worked fairly well. If I remember correctly I made around 200$, which, at the time, was like a +35% PNL on my entire trading capital.
Afterwards I think I went to the pool or something, can’t remember exactly. Here’s a picture from that evening after the rain cleared, can recommend everyone to go to Cyprus, it’s an incredibly beautiful & underrated country, one of my favourites.
