Thread by @Tree_of_Alpha

By popular request: Tree origin story.

Tackling:
-grinding from $1000 to 8 figs
-imposter syndrome
-algo trading
-market inefficiencies
-telling yourself something is impossible without even trying it
-origin of "Tree Of Alpha" name
-...

Might be a long one.

1/n

2/n I graduated from Engineering School in 2017, while Bitcoin kept going up throughout the year.

My major was IT, but very broad and mostly theory. By the time I graduated I knew a lot of concepts, but hadn't done that many projects at all.

3/n As a result I had massive imposter syndrome after graduating. All I could think was "I don't see how anyone would employ me and pay me a salary with my current skillset".

This kept me from trying to land a job. I couldn't imagine myself interviewing while feeling this way.

4/n At that time I had maybe $10k in total savings to live on.

A few months later, in December, I started creating accounts on Crypto exchanges, and made my first $1000 investment on Dec 27.

It quickly became $2000, but went back down as I had bought near the picotop.

5/n At the same time, I started trying my hand at a bunch of projects.

I made a very primitive dashboard for my Binance holdings and to be able to swap from one coin to the other more easily.
I started making tools to track very simple arb opportunities, and discord bots.

6/n Crypto is the reason I started developing more and more tools/bots.

I became obsessed with fully-automated trading and spent the next year on that.
All the data is available for free, and the idea you might find a recipe to lasting financial freedom is inebriating.

7/n For 12 months, I developed hundreds of tools, bots, indicators that were supposed to give me an edge.

I backtested insane amounts of strats, from simple EMA crosses to complex mixes of indicators, all to try and find that holy grail.

8/n Several times I thought I'd found it, only to find issues in the backtests that meant results weren't how the strategy would perform live.

I was living, breathing and dreaming crypto & bots.
I was also sleeptalking about it every night.

9/n I apparently once said, during my sleep: "It's simple. To get the money, you go in the room, and you touch the fish."

To this day I still have no idea what I meant. Follow the whales, maybe? Who knows.

After a year of this with no profits, I started getting tired of trying.

10/n In March 2019, I dropped to €300 in my bank account, unable to pay the next month of rent.
I decided enough was enough.
All this time I had told myself botting exchange announcements was impossible for a noob like me.
I decided to invest €1300 from my small wages, and try.

11/n At first I was slow, but I quickly learned to use the most underrated tool around: the Dev Tools window (F12 on Chrome/Firefox).

By embarking on this endeavor, I started gathering highly-specific scraping knowledge that allowed me to get better and faster.

12/n Quickly, I became among the first to buy any Binance announcements, and started branching out to Coinbase, Upbit, Huobi, etc.

Profits started rolling in, slowly, from the €1300 investment.
By the end of 2019, my net worth was up to €13000, a 10x increase.

13/n In 2020 Binance Futures came out, and it was a gamechanger: I could finally leverage on those highly-profitable asymmetric entries into highly-liquid books.

I decided that people should benefit from getting fast information, so in July 2020 I decided to create @MadNews_io

14/n Initially I was only trading those Exchange announcements, and forwarding them through the MadNews Twitter, Website, Discord.

Realizing that was the fastest source around, people started arriving in the Discord and telling me we should follow blogs and Twitters too.

15/n Over time I started adding tracking for every Medium blog of every coin on Binance, as well as their Twitter account.

I had effectively become a full-fledged news trader. That same year (late 2020), my net worth finally hit 6 figures.

16/n 2021 came, and with it the full strength of an alt bull market.
Utilizing everything I had learned and built thus far, it became the year I hit both my first million, and my first 10 millions.
Thanks to news trading, I also managed to keep most of it with limited drawdown.

17/n In november 2021 I decided to dig into the code on the tesla.com website, only to find references to both "Bitcoin" and "SHIBA (SBA)", and digging into it to figure out it was actually Doge.

18/n Being a bit paranoid, I decided to create a new Twitter account for it. Having talked at length with GCR in discord servers and hearing about his tree of life, I thought the name "Tree Of Alpha" would be a fun nod.

19/ That's about it! Oh and I found that cute exploit in Coinbase in February 2022 too I guess.

All in all it's been an absolute insane ride. I honestly never thought I would come this far, and I hope for all of you to achieve the same.

💪