Source: Podcast "HODLong Hou Lang" Issue 69
Organizing: Mable
Ogle had a small red box with his name written on it in a child's handwriting that he still keeps at his mother's house. Inside are pencils and erasers. When he was six years old, he discovered that the school canteen was only open for a short time in the morning, and no one could buy stationery throughout the afternoon. He used the two dollars of pocket money given by his mother to wholesale a few packages, put them in boxes and took them to the classroom, and sold them one by one to his classmates - "It was a lot more expensive."
More than thirty years later I'm sitting across from him recording this podcast, and he just lost millions of dollars in fifteen minutes two days ago.
The day before recording the show, Robinhood’s annual summit. Vlad Tenev stood on the stage, and when he mentioned the perpetual contract, Ogle almost jumped in front of the screen - the heaviest position in his hand was bet on this. Fifteen million day traders opened the floodgates and flocked to Lighter, and the LIT token took off—the story he’d been waiting for half a year to play out.
Not a word was said about Lighter on stage.
The press release went online at the same time, and it was written clearly: Perpetual contracts will go to Bitstamp, the old exchange that Robinhood acquired last year. LIT did not collapse immediately, it just stopped rising. Then people started to react and prices went all the way down. "Ten to fifteen minutes," he said—pause—"millions were gone."
He relies on two reasons for being long LIT, half and half: the founder of Lighter and Vlad Tenev of Robinhood are old acquaintances in college. According to him, both of them have positions on the board of directors of each other's companies - this is one line; the same founder also sits on the Innovation Advisory Board of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) - this is another line. Now the first one is broken.
"My reasons for allowing myself to retain the excess position were disproven."
So he cut his position exactly in half.
He emphasized that this was not a panic. "If only one of the two reasons is left, the position will be half." His tone was almost cheerful, like a math teacher who finally had a chance to demonstrate in class.
Most people won't close their positions when this happens. They will do another thing: announce that they are "now a member of the community", join the Telegram group, shout orders on Twitter every day, and wait for their money back. Ogle has an analogy for this behavior, and I noticed that he carries a pocket of these with him, like a tool kit, and pulls one out when needed.
"You bought a train ticket from New York to Chicago. You sat there for an hour and were very happy. When the conductor came over, you realized that the train was going to Miami."
"You can't just sit down because people are already in the car. Who wants to go to Miami?"
"No sane person would sit still, right? It's annoying to get out of the car - you've wasted an hour and you have to buy a return ticket. But you can't just sit down because you're already on the bus. Who wants to go to Miami?"
He smiled. "Not me."
There is one more. A few days ago, a friend was chatting with him about the same currency: If you make a profit, you should take profit, and if I lose, I need to get my capital back. Ogle said, if you think about it, does this logic make sense - whether you make a profit or a loss, what does it have to do with whether you should sell? The only question is: if you had cash in your hand now, would you still buy this coin? If you can, just keep taking it; if you can’t, just sell it, regardless of whether it makes a profit or a loss. "So what if you lose money? Every transaction is an opportunity cost. What can you do with the same money elsewhere?"
The third one has to do with winning. You divide the money equally among five coins. One of them skyrocketed. In the blink of an eye, 80% of your net worth is on one coin. No one would take the initiative to configure it like this, but many people just hold it like this, and then they can't sleep at night - if the coin moves one percent, they feel like their whole body is shaking fifty percent. He quoted a quote purportedly attributed to J.P. Morgan, in which an anxious trader asked the elder Morgan how he could sleep with such a large position. Morgan's response was:
"Reduce your position until you can sleep."
And number four, perhaps the most counterintuitive: He was always looking for an exit. "I'm actively looking for reasons to overturn my judgment." When he was long LIT, he would rather read "Why Lighter Will Die" written by Hyperliquid believers than read posts to cheer him up. He once held Ondo, and the reason for leaving was simple: the only thing he was optimistic about was the founder. If he was gone, he would clear his position. Later, Ondo continued to rise, and he did not regret it. "The reason I was there no longer exists." In theory, there can be six reasons for an investment, and it doesn't matter if one or two are missing - "But in a super competitive market like encryption, there is usually only one thing that really makes you bet, and the rest are all homogeneous."
Ogle went to eleven schools before graduating from high school. His father - "To be honest, he is a criminal, but he has a good business acumen, but he just got into the wrong industry" - goes in and out of jail, and whether the family has money depends entirely on this rhythm. Since he was a child, he has watched money being counted on the ground and things being bought and sold. His sense of "transaction" is much more concrete than that of children of the same age. Also know: these will disappear at any time.
"The only thing stopping me is two things - my last name and my money. Someone is born with a decent last name and a lot of money. I'm bad at both."
There was no bitterness when he said this, but rather like he was stating a solved equation.
When he was seven years old, he resold baseball cards. His aunt bought him a quotation book every month. He wrote the price on the card with a ballpoint pen - "You ruined the writing on the card!" In college, he speculated on penny stocks in the fan single market, "the stock version of Dogecoin". The first one was a Canadian company that helped people burn MP3s into CDs in shopping malls. I started taking options and futures in my sophomore year. Day trading Bitcoin in 2013 on BTC-e. I started my business three times and quit three times. The first time I was 22 years old - I went to California with less than a thousand dollars and became a millionaire six months later.
After making a lot of money for the first time, he donated almost all of it.
It felt like it came too quickly, too easily, and it wasn't fair. It's similar after the second exit. Later, even if he had money, he deliberately lived on only 5%. "Struggle is my fuel. It makes me feel alive." He said money is an "unnecessary evil" - but since it determines where you live and how long you live, this game can only continue to be played.
He had been building things for the past few years—first Glue, which took three and a half years, and then America.fun as an advisor—both of which, in his own words, failed. Others think that founders can always make money, but they say that I lost millions, and what’s even worse is that I lost time. He is certain that entrepreneurship and trading are two different brain circuits and cannot be switched at the same time.
At the beginning of this year, he set another test question for himself. After traveling for two or three months, take out a "token" amount of money - a little over six figures, traceable on the chain - and see if you can still turn a small sum into a big one. Before placing the order, he retreated for several weeks: reading the white paper eight to twelve hours a day for several weeks. "You can't make a decent decision if you don't even understand what game you are playing."
He read it out: The crypto world is finally integrating with traditional finance, and real money is about to enter the market. In the past, this industry did not need to make money - "Some chains are valued at two billion US dollars, and their daily fee income is sixteen US dollars. Their core ability is not to make money, but to raise financing." - But this era is coming to an end. So the next question: Can the money earned flow back to the currency holders? He said that he and the CEO of XRP once had a debate at a meeting: Ripple made a lot of money by signing large orders, which had nothing to do with the XRP token, but taxi drivers all over the world thought that their XRP was going to rise.
This round, he only looks at one type of project: using the income to buy back his own tokens in the market and then permanently destroying them. The circulation volume is getting smaller and smaller, and each coin is getting heavier and heavier - the closest thing to a dividend that currency holders can get. Some people say that good companies don't take money to buy back their own stock. "Then you're talking about stocks - stocks represent ownership. Tokens don't. Whoever said that didn't think clearly."
He found Lighter, a perpetual contract exchange that uses all handling fees to buy back and destroy tokens. He had never noticed this name before February. After checking the founder’s background—his connection with Robinhood and his seat on the CFTC—he entered the market with a heavy position near $1.18.
Then he did something a little shaky. The position was initially opened on Hyperliquid, but the more I thought about it, the more wrong it became—the bet was that Lighter would win, but the handling fees would go to its competitors. So the entire position was moved. The position was too big, and I lowered the price by 20% and pulled it back by 20%. If I were to be smooth, I would have lost about half a million US dollars.
Someone asked him, Hyperliquid is the obvious leader, why not buy it directly? He reaches for a supermarket metaphor. One cookie company's rivals aren't just another cookie company—it's potato chips, apples, the entire snack aisle, everywhere you might spend your next dollar. According to his rough calculation, doubling Hyperliquid would require about $280 million in net buying; doubling Lighter would require $3 million. "Is it easier to find a buy order for 3 million, or for 280 million?" Hyperliquid is suitable to be placed in a combination for stability. What he wants is to turn small money into big money.
The same set of logic also led to LayerZero, which used a large portion of its new business revenue to buy back and destroy ZRO; Ethena, whose digital asset trust product chain value was undervalued by the market by about six times; and Pons, Robinhood's largest currency issuance platform on the new chain, which burned supply on the first day of its launch. He publicly shouted out when the market value was US$450,000.
By the fall, he said the six-figure principal amount would generate publicly traceable returns ranging from $15 million to $20 million.
And then there was that Robinhood Summit.
I asked him how to guard the city river: Anyone can copy Launchpad, why can Pons guard it?
His answer is not about technical barriers, but about people. "When I work as a consultant on projects, one of the first three questions must be 'What is your moat?' The answer is almost always 'No'." So what? A moat can only become a relationship.
Bonk was able to escape not because the dog was cute - it was because as soon as he was born, he pulled together about 20 Solana protocols to form an alliance. Everyone agreed to connect, and each family received a small amount of supply. Orca took about one to one and a half percent. Everyone has a share, and everyone has the motivation to make it live. Pons also came to the top by stepping on the launchpad that made a mistake before. There is only one word for his style of play: fast. Attract big customers, sign cooperation, and get ahead of others. "If you don't lock in this cooperation, others will take it away. Those who can lock it in will defeat you."
Ogle claimed in the group that perp DEX was the future a few years ago, but it was too late. Hyperliquid just makes trading finally feel like normal software—not the technical details of the order book, but the experience. After FTX's Serum, the perpetual contract exchanges on the chain are more difficult to use than each other. It takes half a day to click on the card, and each operation is confirmed by popping up the wallet.
And Glue, which he spent three and a half years on, does exactly this - cross-chain, authorize, and eliminate trouble. "This makes me sad," he repeated. "It's really hard."
I asked him what he was after - there was enough money.
He said he was not sure whether his success was due to skill or luck. If it was luck, he didn't want it. "If I win the lottery, I will 100% donate it all. I can't be proud of a life earned by picking up money." After eight or nine big wins, he would still feel that he was outdated every once in a while, and then he would give himself exam questions like this year's. I said it was a bit like a forty-year-old man suddenly starting to run marathons - and he laughed at the recognition.
He feels that he has answered his trading challenge this year: It was still a bear market at the beginning in February, and he still did well. "I know how to pronounce the letters EMA, but I have no idea what they stand for. I am a value investor, not a technical person."
Starting a business is not that easy. He slowly realized that he was closer to users when he was in his early twenties - eating instant noodles then, and now eating fancy dinners. Now when building products, we think about "what I want users to think" rather than what they really think. In 2020, he built Safermoon on Binance Smart Chain, a one-click currency issuance platform, three or four years earlier than pump.fun. But he didn’t know how to raise money and couldn’t catch up with the times.
I add: Traders can admit their mistakes early and try again next time. He agrees: Entrepreneurs are already early and are already tied to investors, partners, and sales stories, and it is difficult to turn around.
At the end of the program, he mentioned that someone asked whether the large investors on Pons had too big positions to get out and were trapped inside. He said no - open an equal amount of short orders on the perpetual contract to make it delta neutral (the rise or fall has nothing to do with him), or find a professional trading desk to customize collar options and lock both the upper and lower ends. But he also reminded: If you hold the same coin with a giant whale, remember that the other party can press the sell button at any time, or a hacker can press it after the account is stolen.
Then he talked about FOMO, and his tone changed as he talked.
His friends tormented him for several months and finally got him to sign up for FOMO, a social trading app where who bought what and how much they earned were fully disclosed. Within a week he was in the top ten. He found himself enjoying it - "See you bastards, let's see who can trade."
At that time, Unipcs was dubbed "Bonk Brother" by the market. It is obvious that Ogle has more Bonk and lower cost. This thing has always made him very uncomfortable. This time, his cost was 10 times lower than that of Unipcs. Seeing that Unipcs was about to become the "Pons brother" again, he transferred a sum of money from an external wallet, which happened to be one more than the other party, and became the number one Pons on FOMO. Unipcs then bought two coins to return to the first place. Ogle throws in another five thousand dollars.
He stopped here.
"It's all ego." A man who dressed like a tramp, kept his face hidden, and purposely hid all his wallets found himself trading purely for the sake of being seen. "I was like - what the hell are you doing?"
I said this is called a Panoticon - the kind Foucault wrote about in "Discipline and Punish", where the guard stands in the center and can see every cell. FOMO is a panopticon. Maybe social media has already changed the whole world into this. He was very straightforward: I thank them for giving me the creator commission, "but these apps have really made me a worse trader."
He finally said something:
If you feel like you learned a lot after listening to this episode, but remember nothing, then you learned nothing. Every time he finished reading a white paper, he forced himself to retell it in one paragraph. If you can’t retell it, read it again. If you still can't repeat it - "it means that the white paper itself is not well written." Then set a reminder in two weeks to think about it again.
If you get on the wrong bus, get off. If you have cash in your hand, why don’t you buy it? Positions are reduced until you can sleep. Always looking for reasons to overthrow myself. These are the things good traders really use. "Nothing is inside information. It's just thinking about things the right way."
I told him that before DeFi Summer, I read a statement: Top traders all have a copy of the Diamond Sutra on their desks. It probably means that every time you watch something, treat it as if you were watching it for the first time, without any preconceptions, and just look at the moment. In the end, what you cultivate in trading is your own heart.
Ogle nodded: Most of the time when you scold the whale that smashed the market, you actually hurt yourself. You know you're making money, you know you can be safe, but you don't. Because you are greedy.
Most of the time, your opponent is yourself.