Finance · Satire
MIAMI — Local crypto trader Brandon Wexler, 31, whose portfolio has declined 80% from its peak, patiently explained to friends, family, and a visibly exhausted Uber driver this week that he has not lost money, but has instead achieved the rare distinction of being 'early twice.'
'People don't understand market cycles,' Wexler said, gesturing at a chart on his phone that resembled a ski slope with a small hospital at the bottom. 'I was early when I bought. The market wasn't ready. Now it's gone down, which means I'm early again — early for the next run. Being early is the single most important trait of successful investors. I am the earliest person I know.'
Wexler's holdings include several major cryptocurrencies, a token named after a dog wearing a hat, a token named after the hat, and 40,000 units of something called QuantumGrindCoin, whose founding team communicated exclusively through a Discord server that now redirects to a wedding photographer in Slovenia.
'The QGC situation is actually bullish,' Wexler explained. 'The devs going quiet means no sell pressure from the devs. The website going down means they're rebuilding the website. I've learned to read these signals. It's called on-chain analysis. Technically this particular analysis is off-chain. Everything about QGC is off-chain now. Off-chain is the new on-chain.'
Wexler's philosophy has attracted a following. His podcast, Diamond Everything, draws 20,000 weekly listeners to segments like 'Loss Is a Construct' and a recurring feature where he reads his portfolio balance aloud and then says 'in dollars, which are also going to zero,' a mantra his listeners find soothing and his accountant finds actionable.
Family members have staged what they carefully avoid calling an intervention. 'We call it dinner,' said his sister, Megan. 'Every Sunday, dinner. We eat, we talk, and at some point Brandon explains that the family home is a depreciating asset and Mom asks him to just eat the chicken. He's actually up 4% this month, which we've learned is the worst possible thing that can happen. When he's down, he's philosophical. When he's up, he leverages.'
Financial advisors say Wexler's case, while extreme, reflects a common psychological pattern. 'The human mind will do extraordinary things to avoid the sentence I was wrong,' said certified financial planner Andrea Solís. 'I've heard down bad reframed as accumulation zone, wiped out reframed as fully deployed, and in Mr. Wexler's case, an entire cosmology. He has a term, conviction yoga, which as far as I can tell means holding a losing position until it becomes a stretching exercise. I've stopped correcting him. Honestly, some of it is catching on around the office. We're all a little worried about that.'
Asked whether there is any price at which he would admit defeat and sell, Wexler considered the question seriously for the first time in the interview. 'If it goes to zero,' he said finally, 'then I own the bottom. Nobody can be earlier than the bottom. At that point I'm not even an investor anymore. I'm a founder.'
At press time, Wexler had put his remaining savings into a new token he described as 'basically un-losable,' named QuantumGrindCoin 2.