MARKET UPDATE: Bitcoin Rally, Zcash ETF, Bessent Humbled, NVDA Earnings

Summary

• The debasement trade is back on, per Avi Felman: the AI trade “showed cracks and then fully collapsed,” equity vol cooled, and Bessent is “pushing tons of capital to basically protect our yields” — his two preconditions for turning bullish on Bitcoin and gold. Bitcoin’s ~25% rally in a few days toward ~$80K is a “lockout rally,” “a prize to those who are patient and a curse to those who flip around”; he sees a “reasonable chance we trade 95, 100K in the next six weeks” but insists “I don’t believe that this is the start of a new bull trend quite yet.”
• Avi Felman claims the AI-written Druckenmiller op-ed against Bessent’s bond intervention was “an op” — manufactured controversy he says he has “on good authority,” meant to keep the markets community from looking like it’s “in the pocket of the Trump administration.” He predicts “a big short squeeze in the bond market soon.” Jonah Van Bourg disagrees that it was necessarily engineered, arguing that intervention “almost never works” and that Bessent and Druckenmiller may genuinely have differing views; Bessent’s “I have asymmetric information” defense rings hollow if he will not release the information.
• Avi is bullish Zcash on the ZCAF ETF launch: ~$15.5M day-one volume versus BSOL’s ~$55M in October 2025, “as a percentage of market cap… about equivalent, Zcash actually a little bit better.” With the chart basing above the prior all-time high after a three-month bull flag from $400-450, he thinks “maybe we can get to 1200, 1300” — while ETH “doesn’t have a place in a portfolio anymore” because “everything else is out-competing it.”
• Avi’s tactical trade: positioned for an NVDA rebound into earnings, because the crowd finally learned the sell-off-into-earnings pattern — NVDA sold off seven of the last eight times into earnings despite beating every time — and flipped to “down only into earnings.” “Basically every trader I know is short, and that to me indicates that you might want to take the opposite side”: on a beat he expects “at least a one to two day rebound rally” in NVDA, Micron, and Intel.
• Jonah’s playbook is megatrends, not narrative rotation: “the key to wealth compounding over the long run is to avoid catastrophic losses” — US equities are a million-x since 1870, so pick the trend (AI, Bitcoin, more speculatively Zcash privacy) and avoid selling dips in a genuine megatrend. Long-run BTC hits “a million dollars a token” in 3-10 years on irreversible debasement, but near-term “Saylor is a huge overhang… he’s bigger than the market, and he will be the big seller” and $100K will be hard to rip through.
• Both hosts converge on psychology as the real edge: Avi’s “Costanza rule” — do the opposite of your emotions, since panic on the Aschenbrenner blow-up marked “the stone cold bottom” of the memory trade — and Jonah’s “mind like water” rule from a retired Goldman rates star. Avi’s GoldenTree confession: incentives, not logic, shape positions — he over-allocated a mock portfolio before EIP-1559 rather than admit “I’m not doing anything,” and was down 3% in week one.
• Retail attention is returning — Avi’s first session on the FOMO social-trading app showed “a ton of money being made” and 600 instant followers — which he reads as “green shoots” of demand for BTC and the alt complex. Jonah’s counter-rant on the same theme: never listen to non-trader financial influencers — it’s like asking “this waifish dude” for gym advice instead of Schwarzenegger.

Deep dive

1. The regime flipped from AI productivity to money printing — and that’s Bitcoin’s market

• Avi’s framing: this is a “lockout rally” — one that “pumps so hard off the lows and really doesn’t give you that much time to get in,” making it “a prize to those who are patient and a curse to those who flip around.” His two turn-bullish criteria both triggered: equity vol came off as the AI trade “showed cracks and then fully collapsed,” and Bessent is now deploying capital to defend yields — signaling money printing as a primary return driver for “at least 4 more days.”
• The mechanism, spelled out: when markets are driven by “true productivity” — AI revenue ripping through chip makers, OpenAI, and Anthropic — gold and Bitcoin are not in their ideal market, because they are “an expression of monetary irresponsibility” and real growth gives you no irresponsibility to point to. Now Sam Altman, on the David Senner podcast, says integrating AI is taking longer than expected, so “we’re back to the Treasury and the Fed driving the markets… a very good place for Bitcoin to be.”
• Jonah’s translation: the market went “from micro fundamentals to macro fundamentals… they’re literally doing yield curve control.” His core belief: “Currency debasement is an irreversible trend. The genie has been let out of the bottle” — Republicans or Democrats, “all roads lead to debasement, all roads lead to higher Bitcoin over the medium to long run.” Trump got elected promising to tame inflation and hasn’t. Jonah noted oil was roughly 30% above its level when Trump was elected; Avi countered that it remained far below Biden-era levels despite the Iran war.

2. Bessent vs. Druckenmiller: genuine rebuke or manufactured beef?

• Jonah’s history lesson: Bessent and Druckenmiller both worked at Soros during the 1992 breaking of the Bank of England — though Bessent “was actually just an analyst at the time” researching real estate cracks. Jonah’s claimed lesson is that Bessent should have learned intervention “almost never works,” because it presumes the market is wrong. Bessent’s CNBC defense — “I have asymmetric information… the market has bad information, I have better information” — fails its own test: if the information were real, releasing it would be the best way to calm fears.
• Avi’s dissection of Jonah’s bond logic — worth keeping: hyperscaler debt should not drive 30-year Treasuries. GPU useful life is debated at three to ten years (“if you said a GPU’s useful life is 10 years, you’re an extremist in the tech community” — consensus is three to five), and corporate issuance widens the credit spread, not the Treasury yield underneath, absent a sovereign-sized crisis. Jonah concedes Avi’s points.
• The genuine disagreement: Avi says, on “good authority,” the AI-written WSJ op-ed was engineered — “Druck is one of the most articulate markets minds in the history of markets. He doesn’t need to ask ChatGPT to write an op-ed” — as manufactured controversy so the markets community “doesn’t seem like it’s in the pocket of the Trump administration,” with a bond short squeeze coming. Jonah thinks calling it an op may be too conspiratorial and says Bessent and Druckenmiller could genuinely disagree. Avi counters that interventions run on perceived strength, so publicly inviting the GOAT to reprimand you seems unhelpful. Jonah’s answer: “It wasn’t compelling… if you have the GOAT produce a weak-ass argument against your intervention, that almost strengthens the case for intervention.”
• Avi’s side-thesis on the AI authorship: “AI is bad when it’s used for thinking, but it’s not bad when it’s used for writing” — prompting “generate arguments against intervention” is bad; dictating your own logic and saying “turn this into an article” is fine. Avi thinks Druck did the latter and says he himself abstains because “it degrades my thinking.”
• Net market read: intervention through the midterms “makes me nervous for equities over the course of three months” — probably good for BTC and gold, though “the question always is, has that already been priced in?”

3. Zcash ETF flows and a supportive Bitcoin tape — early innings, not a new bull market

• The Zcash case: the ZCAF ETF traded ~$15.5M on day one versus the BSOL Solana ETF’s $55M in October 2025 — but Solana was a $100B asset in a hotter market, so “as a percentage of market cap, they’re about equivalent. Zcash actually a little bit better.” Chart structure: a three-month bull flag off a $400-450 base, breakout to all-time highs, heavy selling near $840, and now a new base forming above the prior all-time high ($770). Investors finally have ETF access to the privacy narrative, so Avi sees “substantial flows over the next month, two months, three months” and a possible move to $1,200-$1,300.
• Same read on Bitcoin: after the liquidation short squeeze above $80K failed, “there are not a ton of panic sellers in the market” — a liquidation-only tape would have seen weak hands “come in and basically nuke the chart,” and BTC did not even collapse on the Nasdaq-down day. That says “early innings of the trend”: $90K, $95K, maybe $100K. But the hedge is explicit — “in my heart and in my gut and in the data, I don’t believe that this is the start of a new bull trend quite yet.” He’ll ride until funding rates, open interest, and altcoins go euphoric; alts down only 3-10% on the pullback means “capital is being allocated where capital needs to be allocated for a sustained run.”
• The full positioning ledger: constructive on Zcash, Solana, and BTC; bullish on gold, biotech, and uranium; neutral — not bearish — on equities; and kind of bullish on NVIDIA into earnings. He is also blunt on ETH: “I don’t necessarily think it’s an asset that has a place in a portfolio anymore, basically due to the fact that everything else is out-competing it.”

4. Pick your megatrend, don’t sell its dips — and take the other side of panic

• Jonah’s Daily Shot chart tour: “the key to wealth compounding over the long run is to avoid catastrophic losses.” US equities: a million-x since 1870. Russia: “not even a line between the Bolshevik Revolution and Boris Yeltsin.” Two rules follow — don’t get shaken out of a real megatrend, and don’t go all-in on a fake one. His megatrends: AI (“NVIDIA and Micron are gonna be just fine”), Bitcoin “absolutely,” and Zcash privacy “a little more speculative.” He doubts even the above-average listener can profit from narrative rotation; the easier move is “pick your spots and buy when the narrative is focused on something else.”
• Avi’s Costanza rule (developed with his old GoldenTree boss, from a show Avi admits he’s never watched): “do the opposite of your intuition, do the opposite of your emotions.” The neuroscience as he tells it: fear hijacks the prefrontal cortex and “literally shuts off your decision-making capabilities,” and reversing that takes reps — “that’s why people take 100,000 shots in basketball. It’s muscle memory.”
• The proof case: peak panic on the Aschenbrenner blow-up stories “was the stone cold bottom” of the memory trade — DRAM is up ~20% off the lows, while Intel is among the worst performers off the lows: “It will come back. I am very constructive on Intel.” Jonah: “Me too.”

5. FOMO-app green shoots — and a rant against non-trader influencers

• Avi’s field report from the FOMO social-trading app: Privy auto-creates a managed wallet off your X login, he had 600 followers within 30 seconds, and his 1000x token ran from about 1.5 to 3 as people copied his wallet before falling back. He treats meme coins “like a night at the casino,” but the sheer activity is the signal: “attention is coming back, and with attention will come the demand” — green shoots for BTC and the alt complex after a long period of absent interest.
• Jonah’s beef, delivered gleefully: “Why the fuck would you listen to somebody who’s never actually traded?” It’s like having 1970s Schwarzenegger in the gym and asking “this waifish dude” for advice instead. Carve-out: “respect to Ansem, like that guy’s actually traded. His new partner, the dude with the tattoos, I think is a LARP.” He’d put “1,000 times more weight on the Druckenmiller AI op-ed… than I would on any of these financial influencer shows.”
• His accompanying taxonomy: trading, investing, and gambling are three distinct activities never to be bucketed together — gambling wins one to three times in ten, investing is fundamental and all-weather, and trading is process.

6. “Mind like water”: the psychology and incentives that actually decide P&L

• Jonah’s origin story: three months into VITAL, losing money and “on the verge of getting fired,” the best trader he ever met — Steve, who ran Goldman’s interest-rates trading desk, went to Element Capital, and retired at around 32 — sent him a list of trading rules. The one that stuck: “Create a mind like water approach to trading” — “sociopathically disassociate yourself from the emotions of the P&L,” equally at ease with losses and gains. The meta-observation: your most dangerous moment isn’t peak AUM but when “the distribution of outcomes for your entire future is most binary.”
• Avi’s mirror confession from GoldenTree: forced to build a mock portfolio before the Ethereum EIP-1559 upgrade, he thought the market was overheated but couldn’t walk into Steve’s office and say “I’m not doing anything” — so he over-allocated to Maker and was down 3% in the first week. The lesson: “outside incentives do matter”; you can’t purely logic your way through P&L.
• The Twitter corollary: post “I’m bullish,” collect thousands of likes, and you develop “psychological attachment to the idea of you as a bull” — doubling down publicly rather than flipping. His antidote: “I always say, ‘I’m wrong all the time.’”

7. The NVDA earnings setup: the crowd learned the pattern, so fade the crowd

• The trade: NVDA has sold off into seven of its last eight earnings despite beating every single time — and that pattern has “finally percolated into the broader trading community.” Over the last seven days NVDA has been “down only into earnings,” inverting the old up-only drift. “Basically every trader I know is short, and that to me indicates that you might want to take the opposite side.”
• The payoff logic: he expects a beat because analysts tend not to be overly bullish, and with substantial de-risking, hedging, and pods out of the trade, there’s “room to beat and go up” — “at least a one to two day rebound rally in chips”: NVDA, Micron, probably Intel. He’s positioned: “Let’s see if I’m right. We’ll revisit on the next podcast.”