Eric Juta — Set Social Trader AMA Series
This is a transcript of a recent AMA that was held between Eric Juta and the Set community in our Discord channel. The AMA was held on the 10th of May at 11:00AM PDT, 2020.
You can check out Eric’s Sets here.
If you want to be involved in future AMA’s, be sure to join our Discord channel.
Inje: Hello @everyone! Let’s get started!
Let’s give a warm welcome to Eric! Eric is the creator of the 12H Ichimoku HA EMA Breakout Set and the Chad Link Set.
As a reminder for everyone participating — please keep the discussion respectful at all times.
Hey Eric— feel free to give a quick intro about yourself, and then we can dive into the questions!
Eric: Hey everyone! Hope y’all good! Eric here of http://xbeforey.com/.
So intro to myself, I’m Eric, based in London, UK. Been full-time in crypto in 2017, day job’s as a software engineer. Essentially been building kauri.io, bounties.network, ConsenSys Codefi Data. I got into trading crypto before coding into it, learned about Ethereum and such. I then joined ConsenSys in the London office! Before blockchain I was into the e-commerce, music adtech industries. Topshop, Topman (Arcadia Group), Ivy Park, Shazam are most notable brands I guess!
Trading wise, it’s been a fun couple of crypto years going through the bull, bear and hopefully another bull market phase right now!
Inje: That’s awesome. I saw you created XBeforeY. Can you talk about the market thesis behind XBeforeY, aka the trend following BTCs S2FX model and if it’s true that you think that ETH’s value will flip Bitcoin’s in the future?
Eric: Oh you bet! So XbeforeY’s market thesis is that ETH as an ecosystem just expands and as much as the DeFi ecosystem has come into play, there’ll be multiple phases for ETH just like BTC’s S2FX model phases — DeFi is just one of most notable narratives at the moment.
So XbeforeY believes that Ethereum will just vacuum suck everything into it as a trust layer — asset wise and transactional ecosystem wise. BTC can’t do that as a foundational level, it doesn’t have the super computer capabilities that Ethereum does.
ETH 2.0’s scarcity will increase due to issuance model changes and ETH being a peg asset to all of those upcoming growing ecosystems, it’s inevitable we get the flippening.
Right now there’s the emerging #DeFi narrative, (shout out to KNC pumping), second order effects from BTC S2FX until ETH 2.0 is fully phased out… it’ll drain marketcap essentially.
Sorry for writing the essays but whole heartedly believe in ETH haha. Block interoperability will happen but Ethereum will always be the real trust layer with pegged assets. XbeforeY will just play emerging assets to accumulate ETH.
Fozzy: How do you feel about trading LINK considering it’s going to lose 80% of its value vs. ETH over the next two years? Check out this chart.
Eric: Fozzy I love that chart but Irespectfully concur. It’s not like an asset will lose FA and its ecosystem. ETH dropped 90% too to be fair so who knows I can’t disregard that chart. LINK’s been doing great growing its ecosystem, it’s not like it’s going to stop anytime soon. The community understands memes, the new internet understands memes to be honest. But yeah CHADLINK wise, reception’s been pretty great, bit rough of a start due to recent ETH PA admittedly. I even got some ConsenSys folk into CHADLINK or even speculation on the speculation.
Fozzy: I’m sure EOS and ZRX believers thought the same.
Eric: Market cycles Fozz, look at HTZ! DeFi standard wise, SNX and REN are ones I’d love to rebalance for as it’s so early in the ecosystem growth phase. I mean MKR is late to the Coinbase game so timing is everything + you’ve got Coinbase who’s still the major fiat on-ramp + they’re pretty pro ETH I’d say.
Inje: If you’re willing to share on a high level, can you explain how your trading algos work, who/where you learned these techniques from, and other traders you look up to on Crypto Twitter?
Eric: Trading strategy wise, it’s been recently trending towards more discretionary. We’re still not in a proper proper trend phase yet like we had in 2016/2017/2018. Even though ETH is ~2x from the bottom of the year, it’s still the start start of this new market phase. Give it to end of the year and without a doubt we’ll be in a full market phase. I mean we still don’t know if we’re out of Covid-19 yet despite all these countries trying to re-open.
At a foundational level, my trading algos are based on EMA 9/20/21 — that’s the absolute foundation. It’s just a moving average with more priority to recent price movements.
Fractals are great but right now we have newcomers into the market, especially smart money. Price action has been savage, as you can see from that ‘darth maul’ the other day. I also use dditional filters like ATR and Ichimoku + Heikin Ashi to identify the real trend.
Discretionary wise it’s CVD, Volume Delta, Orderbook asks vs bids pressure, liquidation levels and range trading + liquidity heatmaps to identify resting orders.
In terms of traders I look up to:
- RJ Kilmex
- LilMoonLambo
- RealAdamLi
- Crypto_y_tho
- Crypto_iso
- Joshonomics
- Timeless_being
- Workedia
- SimpleAlpha
Inje: This is awesome. When do you think the next macro uptrend is going to start hitting its stride? If stock to flow is any indication, it should start soon if COVID doesn’t have a big effect on the trend.
Eric: Haha i have so many thoughts on it — people might hate my CT profile up until recently. People are predicting another left tail risk in the stock markets — we’ve also got currency issues right now
Up until recently, we’ve been coupled to the other macro assets and I still think we’re coupled slightly so I don’t disregard the real flash crash — maybe worse than the march one. The fact that everyone’s buying calls vs puts is bad tail risk.
But honestly. who knows how money printing affects crypto — we’ve got the USD weakening and if that goes up then that theoretically makes BTC weaker — complicated stuff.
I think S2FX is real though but I just don’t know if we’ve already started because it takes ~6 months from halvening till a real market — thhough 6 months isn’t a long time. If we trend end of the year, sure that’s fine. I mean how do you trade against that without being discretionary? How are the markets not correlated? Things are so complicated right now
In saying that, I think there’ll be a trend. I can’t predict the rational behind it but $280,000 for BTC doesn’t seem irrational when you see the stock market and HTZ. RobinHooders are coming, it’ll be worse than 2016–2017 pump wise though I’m pretty hedged right now in the case of a flash crash. That’s the reason why i post what if bearish tweets.
