Youngest Bitcoin Millionaire: Secret Sauce to Success

Welcome back everyone to Box Money. Today we have a very special guest. Hi, my name is Ansuz. I'm coming from a YouTube channel called The Traveler. Yes. Now I'm running my own quant fund and also running a platform, trading board platform called Cybertrades. I guess I actually really want to know because you started at quite a young age, around 19 years old. How do you get into crypto and Bitcoin? Yeah, back then I was studying in college. So I'm coming from Johor Bahru. It's the southern part of Malaysia. So when I need to study, I need to go to the capital city, Kuala Lumpur. It's the central region. So I go to study my own, but I'm coming from a not so rich family. And I always experience those kind of things like, oh, you need to save money. You cannot spend much. Everything you need to see at the price tag. So actually since small, I already like, I want to make some big business. And this is also actually why I, actually I studied science during secondary school. Right, right. But I turned my major to finance on college degree. And that's why, so I want to make money. Okay, I want to change my life. So it's the hunger, the hunger of the tribe going forward. I'm already hungry. So I tried a lot of different kinds of things like e-commerce, doing some small business, doing some sales, sales on credit cards, asking people to sign up. And I ended up inspired by a movie called The Wolf of Wall Street. Right, right, right, right, right. So at the beginning of the movie, it says that if you want to make money, you need to go to the place that is full of money, which is the answer is financial markets. Right. So I started looking, which kind of money finance market is the one I want to spend time and effort in it. So I find that because there's a time around 2019, 2018 and 2019. So it's bear market. Right. So that's a legendary story back then, 20K, the Bitcoin ones go to the peak. So I said, why this thing is so kind of crazy going from $1 to like so high. So I'm very interested in it. So I've searched. So this is actually in the bear market. So you actually chose to. Because I know, because I just graduated. I started looking for opportunities. I really hope that I can go in earlier. But even though the number was going down, so Bitcoin prices at that time was dropping, right? So even though it was dropping, you still were like going in. Yeah. Because I. Why? Because as I said, I tried to find opportunities. I also go study in properties, classes, and also going to like. So you saw the potential beyond just the short term, the dump, right? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I started asking myself why? How can it be? There must be a reason for I go study. And I find that there's still a very young market. There's still like potential because we have just gone through like the dotcom legends. So that I think that's the next big thing. Before we continue with the interview, guys, I do have to say that right now on our channel, we're giving a wave iPhone 15 Pro Max. Three of them, Ashley. And all you have to do to enter is to sign up for the Bybit exchange using the link down below. This link. And once you get into it, you'll see our offer, which is if you deposit 100 USDT and make one trade, you'll get a chance to win. And we'll do the live draw on this channel too. And one of the reasons why we're working with Bybit really is that they have a very, very good trading interface now with lots of volume. Plus, they also have one of my favorite features, which is tons and tons of subaccounts that you can easily access. It's pretty awesome. So what are you waiting for? Get that. Oh, fail. Get that iPhone 15 today so you have a better trade experience. So I think this is actually super crazy because at the same time, I was actually passing back there. It's like this is Decentral, it's Hong Kong finance district, right? And all around me, I just see people fighting Bitcoin. It's 2018. They're like, oh, this is over. There's no one. There's no one. There's no one. There's no one. Bitcoin. You're like, how's your Bitcoin going? It's trash. A lot of people trying to know how to do it. Right. So you actually went in during this time. So how did you learn everything? Like, how? Oh, yeah. So I continue to research. And of course, the Facebook ads pop up. Right. So there's an academy called David Justin. Right, right. It's the biggest Mandarin-speaking crypto education in Malaysia. They're still teaching now. So I'm one of their students back then. Right, right. So from there, I'm inspired because back then they were teaching about mining. Right, right, right, right, right. Even Masternode. Right. Sorry. So because I have no startup capital, even if I go to attend courses, I still need to borrow money from my friends. So you actually borrow money to actually get it. That's courage. Yeah, courage. That's a lot of courage, man. Even though my starting trading capital is also borrowed. Nice, nice. It's not a good demonstration, but this is how I started all of them. Right, right. Because it's never easy, right? Like some people are not born. It's like you're not born with the money, right? No background. No background. No, nothing. Right, right. So that took a lot of courage. So when you started in 2018, then there's still a 2019-2020 bear market. How would you even proceed to continue generating money during that time? And how would you, you know? Yeah, sure. Why I finally picked trading, especially in crypto, is that it gives me the, ability to win through all kinds of market situations. Because when you do trading, you can go long or short. Which is, if you can get the trading skill right, even bull market, bear market, you can make money. So during that time, it's bear market. Yes. And also, actually, my first pot of gold is coming from shorting Bitcoin. Right, right, right. So that time, it's around like, the big short is coming from like 9,000 to 6,000. Around that. I cannot remember clearly. Back then, I was trading on bid-backs. So a lot of my overload issues. Right. That's how I started. So I made some money from there. And it's actually quite interesting because you spend the effort to look into it. But then you have to separate that and say, okay, look, the better trader right now is a short. Yeah. Right. Like, so it's actually just like, kind of like two different philosophies. One is, okay, you still believe in crypto. You're still going to invest your time into it. Right. But at the same time, like, fuck this. I'm not sure. It's the right call, right? During that time, because BinEx is live. It's inverse perpetual. It means that you're using Bitcoin to trade and you earn in Bitcoin. Right. Of course, in long term, I surely believe in Bitcoin. That's why I still try to accumulate as much Bitcoin as I can. So I keep shorting. Right. Right. Because it's a bad market. Makes sense. Nice. So, of course, I lose money in the beginning. And as you can see, my email screenshot, there's a lot of liquidations back then. But anyhow, I keep trying, trying, trying. And I found that when I keep losing money, I start to ask myself. Because I know trading is a zero-sum game. So if you want to make money, you need to find someone that is losing money to you. So I understand that I came up and find something called funding rates. Back then, right, funding rate is a very powerful indicator. Not quite. Yes. Not anymore. Because during that time, the market is still very naive. Okay, people are just going long short of DGEN. But I know that funding rate is actually telling us long short ratios. So when the funding rate is high, this means that a lot of people is long. A lot of people is short. So if you are the market maker behind, what you do is basically you dump the markets. So when I find this pattern, then I literally keep my success rate is very high. My greatest record is for three consecutive months, there's not a single losing trade. Right. So it's really the counter thinking. So if everyone's going long, then it's much easier for the market maker to liquidate all the longs. Because at least you cannot lose money. If you go another way around, you need to pay a lot of money. Then this doesn't make sense. Right. Especially you have the so-called controlling power. You have a lot of Bitcoin deposited in your market. So you're thinking about how the market maker reacts. And it's kind of like counter thinking. So you use that as a strategy to trade. You kind of got more successful in trading. And then how did you fit that in? Because you actually grew a community of traders too. So how did that happen? Because back then I was attending a course that said that you need to build your self-branding. So I think that that's a very correct way to think. Because self-branding is a set. You accumulate slowly. The earlier you start, the story will be more complete. Because people need to know you through a story. So I think YouTube is a very good place to write the story down. So then I started to shoot videos and started to record journaling my trade with my guys. And I also know that community will somehow in my future, I will be using it. Leveraging it. Right, right, right. And I just do it. So you definitely made a lot of trader friends along the way as well. Right. And the comment saying is 80% of the traders are going to be losers. And 20% are the successful ones. So I guess how do you spot the good ones? Because you've been saying that your community has a lot of good traders. How do you spot? What sort of traits do the successful traders have? Okay. For me, for manual traders, you must see this pattern in this one guy. He needs to know when to give up opportunity. This is very crucial. Because you cannot catch every single opportunity in the markets. Which means that if the guy doesn't know what his trading system will be really performing versus really not performing during a certain period. Because every strategy itself has a good side and a bad side. Maybe you are a trending strategist. Every trending market, you can catch it. But when consolidation comes, you need to keep card lossing. Right. This is the very conscious thing you need to be aware of. If you're not aware of it, you will think that our consolidation, you keep card loss. You will think that the problem is me. It's not a good trader. And you keep upsizing. Then all the world management sucks. Then, of course, you lose money. So, really, it's not just about spotting opportunity. But it's also about knowing when to just cut loss and just exit an opportunity. And also know what kind of market is not for you. You maybe need to stay out. Or you need to know how to switch. But, of course, if you can manage two kinds of trading systems within regime switch, that's like a pro trader. So, I always encourage beginner traders to try to adapt it to one kind of style of trading. And I think always the best one is trending strategies. So, I always say that the best strategy and best indicator is the simplest indicator, which is the MA. Actually, as you can find, all other indicators are lagging indicators. And somehow, it's like a lot of noise. Actually, why a lot of very experienced traders, 30, 40 years, they're still using MA because that's a very simple indicator and less, least noise of indicators that you can use. Right. So, for beginners, if you can just trade using MA and you can perform it, that is already a very good sign of you are a good trader. So, I think that's kind of interesting. So, it's like finding when to lose. So, being extremely logical rather than like, okay, stubborn. Right. So, the stubborn guy is probably not going to succeed here. Also, in terms of, do you focus more on technical analysis? Do you, how's your trading like? Back then, when I was starting as a manager trader, I'm most focusing on technical analysis. And also, non-price data, which is a funding, right? Stuff like that. And after I started to do Kwan, because why I'm doing Kwan is that because I have a background of AUM company. I'm a shareholder of it. And when our fund keeps growing and growing, we find that there's a challenge. We cannot digest all the money. The fund is a bit big. So, what we do, we're trying to do with that. Back then, we're trying to incubate new talents, new traders. But we find that to manage people is very not easy. And somehow, whether the people can perform you, also a question mark. So, we try to sit down. This time point is around like 2020. At the end of 2020, then we try to sit down and figure it out. How should we break through about this challenge? So, we find that the answer is quantitative training. This is also why I form my coin firm. Because we know that only through computer, you can manage multiple accounts. You can test multiple alpha strategies. And you can have a more diversified portfolio. Which is a better performing of fund fund. Yeah. Strategy of my friend. So, that's very interesting. So, basically, you start from manual. So, it's starting manual trading. Technical accounts analysis. Then you grew to quant. Okay. So, what are you doing now? So, you're managing a fund. You also have a platform as well for trading, right? For cyber trade. But for quant, actually, there's a lot of approaches. But actually, it's quite similar to technical analysis. Because when you do technical analysis, you also need to do back tests. Yes. In quant, you also need to do back tests. Of course, there's some kind of approaches. There's no way you can do back tests. Like doing high-frequency trades. Arbitrage, market making. Those kind is like you are earning the money from the table. You already see the money. But let's say you are doing like CTA. Which is like doing directional trades. But using bots, quant, machine. And you need to back test. So, it's all about stats. And this stats is not things rocket science. It's the thing that you learned back then in your secondary school or even primary school. So, I think you guys have learned the normal distribution curve. Yes. So, actually, it's just collecting data. Collecting a bad test result. And trying to find the abnormal or we call alpha signal through the distributions. So, the distribution will tell that what standard deviation, which is the opportunity that came up not so frequent, is the good opportunity. Because you need to find that the spread is like opening so big so you can take opportunity and try to make that spread. So, this is how quant works. But actually, the basic logic is same to TA. Technical analysis. You try to find a pattern and take advantage on the patterns. So, for cyborg trade, I try to use my resources. Because as we do quant, we have a lot of expensive data. So, like from TARDIS, from any kind of way it's soft, we can take in. For the data, we'll take in. Just for maintaining data for one year, every year, we need to pay around 60 to 80K USD just to maintain a database. So, from there, because since I have a sole committee, I try to make it happen. Make it ecosystem. So, I build cyborg trades. So, cyborg trades, I want to aim for the user-friendly for people like retail. So, what is this platform? So, like, you know, obviously, I've seen it, right? But can you describe to people what this platform is and what it's trying to do? Sure. Okay. So, server trade basically is a trading platform for people to deploy their code strategies. Because if you want to deploy your code by yourself, there's a lot of effort. You need to build a server and you need to figure out a lot of things. But in here, you can just put your code by using Python code or using Pinescript, using TradingView Webbook. Then you can just deploy your strategies. This is for the trader side. So, if you're not a trader and you don't want to learn a lot on ad hoc, you can go there. You can just plug in the API, follow the strategy that you want. All the things you need to do is just analyze that using Sharpe ratio. Whether it's the max rollout, is it aligned with your risk appetite? Then you just can plot it and try to make it happen. So, it's really just automated trading, but for everyone. Right. For normal users. Yeah. Awesome. So, okay. Now that we know what you're building, what do you see in the future? So, I mean, obviously you're heavily committed into the space. Where do you see yourself going and where everything is going? Okay. For trading itself, I think that the future trend is definitely related to social fight. As you can see, last year, like BitGap, Pionex, all this kind of platform is pushing about copy trading because you know that there's not a lot of traders in the markets. Not real traders. Even though a lot of traders come in, they just want to make fast money. Yes. So, definitely if you can provide a good strategy for people and you charge a little bit, maybe 10% profit share, people will be willing to do it. And it's a win-win-win situation. Three wins. Okay. Platform wins. The trader wins. And also the investor wins. So, I think this is the future of the trading. And I also believe that the trading will be more automated. For now, there's already 70% of trading volume in buy bots in the trading markets. So, I also believe these numbers will keep increasing. In the future, like now I already have ChattuVT, I think that automation trading will be a normal in the future. There's no people who will do manual trade anymore. Exactly. Okay, cool. So, now that we have our audience, would you have any advice for the audience if they want to start trading or quant trading? What are the top three tips? The top three tips. Okay. Always cut loss. Always cut loss. Okay. When I say cut loss is that you need to know the cut loss point before you know how to exit when you take profit. Because if you don't know where you need to cut loss, you don't know what is the risk-reward. When you don't know about risk-reward, definitely you will not succeed in trading. Because in order to just find a one to two risk-reward ratio, it's not as easy as you think. Right. So, if you have no clear direction on how you cut loss, definitely you don't know how to exit. You just exit randomly. Maybe sometimes make money, sometimes break even. Then let you know. And the second thing is that you need to, because people have the mentality of loss aversions, means that people will tend to be more afraid to holding a winning position compared to a losing position. Which is, this is very weird. You're losing money, but you're keeping like, gamble mindset. Wait, wait for people. This is a very common mentality mistake that people do. So, you need to tweak. When you're winning money, you need to have a losing mental. I don't care. I keep going one. I keep going one. But when you are losing, you need to cut loss fast, which is related to first again. Yeah. So, always do a lot of backtests. And also, when I say backtest, it means that it gives you confidence. Because if you don't backtest your training system, you're not going to make it. Because you yourself will contact yourself first. So, whenever you're losing money, you will like, doubt of yourself. Freak out, right? Right, right. Freak out. So, of course, the last thing and the most important is backtesting. Awesome. So, through backtesting, you only know that your training system works and you can stick with your trading strategies. Awesome. Make it. So, basically, it's three suggestions. That's really cool. I think it's actually really, really insightful. So, guys, thank you, Anson, so much for coming. Thanks for having me. Guys, check out his social. So, you have your YouTube channel. My Instagram and my... I do my track course on my Twitter. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, you can check it out there. Awesome. Guys, we'll put the links down below as well. So, guys, thank you so much for watching. See you next time. Peace out. Peace out. Awesome. Really good. Thank you, man. Thank you, thank you, thank you. All right. Let's hope the footage is good. Okay. Hoi yi. Hoi yi. Hoi yi. Good, good, good.