Retail is gone, but not Really…

River Financial recently posted some bar charts on the socials and people are running with it. But seeing influencers are cheap and will run with any narrative you want them to if you pay them, most people are only getting half of the whole story.

The below image is what everyone is running with, and it’s accurate. No surprise there. Wall Street is here now and it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about bitcoin or a common stock of something, they have been scaring investors out of their portfolios for ages. They have a billion dollar legacy media and now social media apparatus that they can pull like the trigger on a gun to scare anyone out of their positions.

Why does this work? Because sentiment is cash flow. Most people only understand that if you buy something, you make money when the price goes up. Very few if any people understand how you can profit on the way down too, or even sideways. Wall Street does it. I do it. Making money shouldn’t be a linear endeavor. But most people get stock tips from a friend or co-worker by the water cooler, do zero research on it, and just buy it. In my world, that’s called gambling but many have confused it with actual investing. It’s not. So, so obviously.

This is the initial image everyone is running around social media with…it makes quite the point.

Now if we’re talking about traditional retail investors, these are people that sell off entire positions when it dips 1-3%. They’re like the sand people in Star Wars. They scare easily but return in greater numbers…..for the next market rally. We also have a president that can tank entire markets with talks of increasing tariffs internationally. This is what happened last October and the crypto market has yet to recover.

So in the digital asset space we have numerous mitigating factors that are constantly at war with each other and of course the average every day investor Mr or Mrs Retail (that’s you). All markets are manipulated, ALL OF THEM. I don’t like it, I believe it’s criminal in most cases, which is why we call it a casino. But believe it or not, retail still owns the lion share of bitcoin.

Let me show you:

This is the image that River also published, but nobody wanted to include with their initial narrative

As you can see, retail still holds over 60% of the total bitcoin in circulation. The bitcoin tourists always get shaken out every cycle because they chose not to understand the commodity they were buying, or they were simply looking to sell at a profit and move their wealth back into fiat slavery. Many such cases.

One of the positives that have come to fruition since Wall Street and financial behemoths like Blackrock being here are that we now have derivative instruments we can use from their own Bitcoin ETF’s to buy insurance on Bitcoin as it goes down. For me, I use what’s called “put options” which allows me to make money as the value of their $IBIT stock (directly correlated to bitcoin price action) falls. This isn’t something I’ve taught here at the Bitcoin Foundry because my goal is for all of you to own a significant amount of Bitcoin in the coming years and just hold it and hopefully pass it on to your progeny indefinitely. Options are complex financial instruments that require a decent amount of education to operate, but with them you can absolutely profit from negative market sentiment.

This is what I meant though when I said “Sentiment is cash flow” and I hope you understand what I mean now. When we look at the world of finance and money, psychology plays a huge part in how you operate within it’s confines. But retail has also been known to make Wall Street bleed too.

Remember that whole gamestop debacle years ago that started from a subreddit called WallStreetBets? That as the greatest short squeeze in Wall Street history. Thousands of average people just bought gamestop stock and refused to sell it despite how much Wall Street was shorting it. When Wall Street shorts something, their brokerage firms lend them the stock, and as the price goes down, they only have to give the brokerage the intitial amount of stock back and get to keep the difference in price.

So if a hedge fund shorts a stock at $10 after being lent 1000 shares ($10,000), they’ll immediately sell those in the market for cash. If the stock drops to $5, they still owe the 1000 shares to the brokerage that lent it to them, but now they’re only worth $5,000 and the hedge fund gets to keep the other $5,000 in profit. Very simple example with round numbers.

Well during the gamestop short squeeze, the price of the stock kept going up after they shorted it because people just kept buying more and wouldn’t sell. When this happens, those hedge funds get what’s referred to as a margin call, and they have to pay more money to cover their short trade losses. This is what made them hemorrhage billions before finally giving up. Some of the gamestop investors sold for some extremely nice profits, and many still hold to this day. But that’s an example of how retail has turned the tables on the casino.

In my courses, my goal is to mentally give you the conviction to hold this asset in times like these and not to get scared and sell at the bottom. My in person clients have all been told this is a 4 year hold minimum, and after that you probably won’t want to sell it anyway because you’ll slowly come to understand what this is (some haven’t taken the courses here, they just really really wanted to learn how to self-custody bitcoin).

As for me, I’ve never sold bitcoin. I don’t even know what that’s like. But I have profited from negative sentiment and have continued to do so the last few weeks without touching one satoshi of bitcoin. You won’t find me ever using perpetual contracts on exchanges and getting liquidated of all my bitcoin like those degens do. My trades are nothing more than downside insurance.

This write up is so that you yourself don’t lose your conviction in this asset over the long term.

Authors Note: If you want to learn how to trade options, YouTube academy has some great education on that. You can then open a schwab account, download thinkorswim, and paper trade options with fake money until you stop making mistakes. Focus on the greeks and open interest. Keep stacking those sats!