What's The Trade For 2026?

Summary

• Jonah’s headline call: 100k Bitcoin by end of January, “and I think it happens fast.” His bottoming logic — “you don’t bottom when big buys come in. You bottom when sellers decide that the price they’re selling at no longer makes sense to sell” — and even in post-holiday, tax-selling, low-liquidity conditions BTC touched 80 but couldn’t hold below 85, so “sellers have run out of ammo.” He expressed it with IBIT $55 Jan-30 calls at 82 cents, a ~5-6x if BTC does the 20% he expects; Jonah agrees, expecting 2-3x even without 100k because “everything rips in January.”
• The metals disagreement is the episode’s spine. Jonah: “I think we’re in the eighth inning, maybe the top of the ninth” — sovereigns move gold (a market 10x Bitcoin) and “sovereigns don’t FOMO like retail does,” with PBOC data showing gradual buying, not panic. Jonah’s bullish counterargument: gold runs 15-year cycles, not crypto’s four-year ones, this one is only 5-6 years old, and “the eighth and ninth innings are always the craziest part.” He puts 80% odds a 50/50 gold-silver basket beats the S&P in 2026; Jonah won’t take the other side.
• Avi’s most striking data point: as of October 23, BRICS plus SCO members “now hold more gold than the United States. And that has not happened ever before.” His frame — it’s not gold sniffing out war, “it’s China knowing that they’re going to be aggressive and stockpiling gold… they are telling us what their plan is.” Rule: “listen to the big boys.”
• Jonah’s contrarian “kingmaker trade” for 2026: the alt bear market continues and shorting finally works — collect positive funding on “high FDV, low-float tokens. There will be no squeezes. Every insider, every VC wants to get out.” The marked basket: after BTC bounces to 100-110, short Polkadot, WIF, Pepe, Worldcoin against long Monero, Zcash, and Bitcoin, checked end-2026.
• The privacy-coin why-now, per Avi: $2.7 billion was stolen in crypto hacks in 2025 (Jonah guessed $350M) and stolen funds get washed through Monero/Zcash. Jonah adds that California’s wealth tax and likely Mamdani coming to New York will press people to start hiding assets. “No cash flows, which is perfect for huge upside.”
• Memecoins don’t come back in 2026 despite White Whale running $100k to $70M market cap in 10 days — proof “the gamblers are still here” but a deep-cut CT trade, not a trend. Jonah’s epitaph: the game went from “Settlers of Katan” to “buying amphetamines from a teenager in the men’s bathroom at a nightclub — 10 minutes up and down.”
• Jonah calls NFTs a dead fad: CryptoPunks floor to 8 ETH, 9-of-10 conviction it eventually trades down 70% — though he concedes the 12-month bet window may be wrong (“may take 27 or 28”). The trader lesson from the Dudas pile-on: he got filled at 5:1 and 6:1 rather than betting even odds — “I basically wagered a Ford to win a Ferrari… no matter how convicted you are, always maximize your payout.”

Deep dive

1. Metals: eighth inning, or a 15-year cycle barely halfway through

• Avi’s setup: 13D Research “absolutely crushed it this cycle” with the call that post-COVID inflation is endemic — no return to 2%, maybe 2.5-4% baseline — while geopolitical fracturing (China tamping down exports of silver, while palladium and other commodities are “battled over on a country basis”) powers the run. Metals “have discovered the technology that Bitcoin had in 2017 called Up Only.”
• Jonah’s counter: “I don’t think 26 is going to be the year of the crazy metals rally… I think we’re in the eighth inning, maybe the top of the ninth.” Price-wise he has no view — “this is a parabolic rally… you never really know where it’s going to top out. Nobody does by definition” — but time-wise the rally is almost over.
• The mechanism behind his call: to move the needle in gold — a market 10x bigger than Bitcoin — “you got to be a sovereign,” and “sovereigns don’t FOMO like retail does.” China, the biggest buyer, slows purchases rather than force the price “into their own face” — at least in hydrocarbons — and the PBOC’s published reserves show gradual accumulation now, nothing like the 2022 post-Ukraine surge or Europe’s panic LNG buying.
• Jonah’s bullish counterargument: gold does 15-year cycles, not four-year ones, and this rally is only five or six years old post-COVID. “Even if you’re right that it’s the eighth inning, the eighth and ninth innings are always the craziest part” — the blowoff top. And with retail allocating to gold in size for the first time in a long time, as also happened in the 1980s, gold and silver “could be very reflexive assets.”

2. BRICS out-holds America — “listen to the big boys”

• The stat Avi read from research: as of October 23, BRICS combined with Shanghai Cooperation Organisation members “now hold more gold than the United States. And that has not happened ever before” — the multipolar-fracture thesis in a single line. “There is no longer one hegemony.”
• His reframe of the “gold sniffs out wars” take: it’s not gold doing the sniffing — “it’s China knowing that they’re going to be aggressive and stockpiling gold… they are telling us what their plan is.” The rule he names: “listen to the big boys” — Nvidia buying Intel, Trump buying Intel, China buying gold and commodities.
• The bet on the table: Avi puts 80% odds that a 50/50 gold-silver basket outperforms the S&P in 2026. Jonah declines to fade it — “I don’t have enough conviction to bet against you” — admitting he missed the paradigm shift from gold as 2008-style risk-off asset to momentum-bought inflation hedge: “I’m not a very good gold trader.”
• Jonah’s debunk worth keeping: the viral tweet (10-15 million views) claiming silver’s market-cap ratio to gold was historically 10-15 and is now 60 is “just completely incorrect” — the ratio today is about 1-to-10. Silver “feels like a Wall Street Bets, Reddit mafia” trade — “it looks squeezy to me” — and he’d buy both metals on a pullback, not here. Avi’s own tilt: gold over silver, miners keep outperforming, and REMX, a rare-earth and critical-minerals position, is one of his biggest bags.

3. The headline call: 100k Bitcoin by end of January

• Avi’s bottoming framework, laid out in early December: “You don’t bottom when big buys come in. You bottom when sellers decide that the price they’re selling at no longer makes sense to sell.” He’d hoped for a capitulation to 74-80; BTC touched 80 — and even in the low-liquidity, tax-selling environment post-October 10th, “we haven’t been able to hold below 85.” Conclusion: “sellers have run out of ammo.”
• The call, conditions included: if new buyers arrive in the new year, tax selling abates, desks refill, and “NASDAQ doesn’t collapse in on itself” — “I think we see 100k Bitcoin by the end of January and I think it happens fast.”
• The stated invalidation: a break below 85 that sticks could trigger panic selling — “but in my opinion that would be the last bit of selling that would occur. Either way I’m very bullish.”
• Jonah’s independent agreement: the DATs have blown up, Bitcoin has “underperformed gold and other inflation-debasement hedges massively,” and it’s “festering around 88k, almost pre-Trump levels” — so participants come back in January and “let’s yolo a little bit.” His seasonal law: “everything rips in January.”

4. Vol is so cheap the calls are almost free

• The trade expression: Avi bought IBIT $55 calls, January 30 expiry, at 82 cents — effectively a ~97k Bitcoin strike, a 5-6x if BTC does the 20% he expects. His confession: “It’s technically a 97k, but 100K sounded better than tweet… Never let the truth get in the way of good tweets.”
• The vol math he wants retail to learn: take the option’s implied vol from Deribit, divide by the square root of 365 — at today’s 39-40 vol that’s ~2% a day implied. “A 2% move a day. Are you kidding me?” — cheap for a January squeeze. The one hard rule attached: “you should really not be selling options ever unless you really know what you’re doing… that’s how you end up bankrupt.”
• Sentiment corroborates: the crypto fear-and-greed index hit 82 in February at the Trumpcoin launch, sank as low as ~10, and now sits at what Jonah calls “the buy with both hands level.” Even without 100k by January 30, he thinks the calls probably hit “a two or a three bagger” sold into the pump.

5. The gamblers are still here — but memecoins stay dead

• The evidence of risk appetite: White Whale — a huge Hyperliquid trader turned memelord — launched a coin that ran from a $100,000 to a $70 million market cap, ~4,000% in 10 days. Avi’s read: “the gamblers are still here,” and crypto insiders “have managed to hold on to some of their money” — but he flags it’s a deep-cut CT phenomenon, “not trending on TikTok.”
• Jonah’s epitaph for the category: memecoins went from “a strategic, fun, interesting game like Settlers of Katan” to “buying amphetamines from a teenager in the men’s bathroom at a nightclub — 10 minutes up and down.” Runs that lasted weeks in the Boden era now last hours.
• The prediction: “The memecoin space does not come back in 2026. There’s no resurgence.” The lottery returns eventually — “but it’s not going to be for years.” The coin-sniping game persists, but “you need a bot. You’re not going to click-trade this profitably and consistently.”

6. The “kingmaker trade”: short bulge-bracket alts, long privacy coins

• Jonah’s contrarian 2026 prediction: the altcoin bear market continues and — against the conventional wisdom that shorting requires constant management — this year it just works: “flip your chart upside down on TradingView, pretend it’s going up,” and collect positive funding on “high FDV, low-float tokens. There will be no squeezes. Every insider, every VC wants to get out. These tokens are worthless and have no uptake.”
• The trade they mark on air: after Bitcoin rallies to 100-110 and the alts bounce, short a basket of Polkadot, WIF, Pepe, and Worldcoin against long Monero, Zcash, and Bitcoin — check back end of 2026. Jonah calls it “a kingmaker trade,” with the caveat to rebalance (cover shorts) if markets crash 30%.
• Avi’s privacy-coin why-now: $2.7 billion was stolen in crypto hacks in 2025 — Jonah guessed $350 million — with no single big hack, just relentless scamming. Stolen funds must be washed through Monero or Zcash: “there’s a reason why on a day last year Monero went up 25%… somebody needed to get their money out” (his speculation, flagged as such). Privacy coins finally have use case plus narrative. Jonah adds that California’s wealth tax and likely Mamdani coming to New York will press people to start hiding assets — and says their “no cash flows, which is perfect for huge upside.”
• The mechanism for why old alts die, per both: attention rotation. “Nobody cares about dog with hat when White Whale is out” — “everybody’s chasing the new new thing.”

7. NFTs were a fad — CryptoPunks floor to 8 ETH, eventually

• Jonah’s call, with a time-frame caveat: “Just as insane as it was to spend $20,000 on a JPEG in 2019, it will once again become insane to spend $20,000 on a JPEG.” NFTs are collectibles like jukeboxes in man caves — versus a Birkin bag whose TAM is “four billion women,” the NFT audience is “this really tiny little sliver niche of online male degens who happen to be active in crypto between 2017 and 2022.”
• The specifics: the likely Bored Apes floor is 4 ETH — “why should the CryptoPunks floor go there? Why not?” He estimates 1/3 to 2/3 of the 10,000-punk collection is “floors, just ugly crap that no one will ever buy.” Conviction calibrated precisely: 9-out-of-10 the floor trades down 70% eventually; explicitly not 9-out-of-10 within the 12-month bet window — “may take 27 or 28.”
• The exception, and an arb: he likes Ringers and Fidenzas aesthetically — and wants the physical, not the token. Tyler Hobbs signs one physical print per Fidenza, once per NFT, for a few hundred bucks, and “I think the physicals trade well below the NFT level… I think that’s an ARB. I think the physical will matter.”
• The humility check both endorse: in 2021 everyone was certain digital had irreversibly replaced physical — it was likely Zuck who renamed his company Meta, Decentraland’s MANA is “down 99.9%,” New York was supposedly dying. “I sort of believed it too,” Avi admits. Instead under-25s withdrew from NFTs and the metaverse, tourism ripped, “you can’t get a seat anywhere in New York.” His tweak: the trend pendulum now swings in ~5-year cycles instead of generational ones — so NFTs may get a swing back, someday, like memecoins.

8. Never bet at 1:1 when the market gives you 5:1

• The Dudas dust-up decoded: after Jonah posted the punks call, people including Mike Dudas criticized him for not betting D’s at even odds. He instead asked for 5:1 and “got filled instantly,” then did a follow-on clip with Jez at 6:1. The lesson: “If the market gives you five or six to one, you would be economically irrational to take one-to-one, no matter how convicted you are… I basically wagered a Ford to win a Ferrari. And it would stink to wager a Ford to win a Ford if you don’t have to.”
• The generalization, in Avi’s words: “people these days require you to be a martyr for your views” — tribalism versus traders thinking in probabilities. Jonah’s corollary: emotionally trading at off-market prices is a commission you can never win back — “transaction fees and commissions are certain losses.”
• Kept for flavor: Jonah consulted his rabbi about roasting NFT Twitter at scale, was told it was “very bad” (“the equivalent of Jew hell”), deleted the tweets and apologized to D’s and 6529 by name — while holding the line: “I vehemently disagree with them.”