crossing the 50% return mark on the crypto portfolio for the year. on vacation so putting a few thoughts together. will do a mid year review when im back.

rebalanced my long-term hype stack on the 16th so the outperformance is mainly driven by the systematic side and no longer by the idiosyncratic hype bet, which is good, what I wanted for a long time.
my single focus over the past year has been building out my infra to be able to handle a bunch of different trades, each with their own design needs, different data feeds, hedging controls, etc etc. all of this done from 1 place, rather than having a bunch of adhoc scrips all scattered , which is harder to maintain. I am not sure if this is the correct way, because maybe I couldve been faster to some trades and made money rather than building out all of this first, idk, im happy how its turning out. i still have adhoc script like for example for variational to farm points there, since they have no trading api yet, so i have to execute manually each morning. ive also built out others that got me to a trade much faster and i was able to make decent cash. so the way i did it is not the way for everyone, and probably not for the small solo trader.
I've went from trading 1 type of way last year, to trade at least 3 different things, with multiple variations across each, on 5+ exchanges, and dozens of different wallets. it might not be much yet, but the work to handle all of this in a robust way, with tight risk controls, margin requirements, etc, is done, now its just scaling the strategy side which is what my focus will be for the next year.
one of the big things Ill also focus on will be moving into other markets. start with what i can do in rwa assets in crypto, and if i feel capped there, open IB accounts and start allocating capital to those markets. I have an allocation to tradfi, but its long-term, and really small compared to the overall portfolio.
with AI I can be much more nimble as a solo trader. I can go to many more markets than before. people in our niche are worried that AI will make alpha decay much faster. and tbh, I tend to agree. if I am able to build at this speed, all my competitors, which lets be real, many are much better than me, also can get to the trades im doing much faster. but what we dont factor in is the new opportunities that will open up from all of this speed. the new markets that will develop. the things that before speed was their bottleneck, but now will flourish.
so my bet, if I am right, is on being nimble and willing to go first to the riskiest places that more established players are not interested in. I think my edge has been that. and thats what I'll press on. where before I was constrained by my own lack of dev skills, now that is mostly gone, and I can just make into reality whatever I think its a good trade.
I am excited for the future as a trader, or any other business. AI isnt changing you from a bad trader into a good one, trust me. thats not the skill required. but its a multiplier if you were decent before. so I intend to take full advantage of that for as long as I can.
taking risks will continue to suck. no one likes risk. I dont mind it. I kinda get a thrill from it (which might not good). but ive been able to control that side of me by doing mostly systematic stuff. but i do think that risk taking is always going to continue to be inefficient regardless of how good AI gets. the human is still there to mess things up at the end of the day.
so as long as there's opportunity, the bottleneck is just finding those opportunities. making discovery as much as factory like where ideas get processed and sent for review in the most efficient way possible. I've made developments there but not as of yet as id like it to be. will be soon though.