EXCAVO

As a kid, I wanted to be a builder. There was a Soviet cartoon I loved, Cipollino, and I adored the song at the end where they built a house together. Later, my parents ran a souvenir shop, and we had a night watchman. I genuinely wanted his job: he sleeps at night and the money keeps dripping in. And the third one: back then there were still payphone booths on the streets. Every time I saw people dropping coins in to make a call, I thought, I want to be a payphone. That was my childhood dream career path. In the end I went to study civil engineering, and realized it wasn't for me.

A childhood friend called me and said: "Come to this conference with me, there'll be some interesting things." It was in Kyiv, at the InterContinental hotel. The speaker was Bill Hubbard, a man who by then had been trading on Wall Street for 30 or 40 years. He made an enormous impression on me. I was almost intoxicated by it. I understood nothing, but it was fascinating. And of course, I saw the potential for serious money in it.

That was exactly it: that same conference. The thing I remember most: Bill Hubbard opened by asking the audience for questions. Someone from the front row shouted, "What about gold?" And he answered: "When I came to the market, one troy ounce of gold cost $15. Today it costs $1,700. So in the long run, gold goes up." Years later, when I became a speaker myself, mostly at crypto conferences, I told the same kind of story, only about Bitcoin.

Save more. Invest in Bitcoin and never sell it in your life. And: keep going. Keep going. You'll make it. Study yourself, study the market, it's going to be a fascinating adventure.

"Great deeds require tireless persistence."

As a great man once said, everything has long been known and written in books. So I gather information from many different sources. I am, roughly speaking, the filter: I analyze, I sift, and I try to apply it on the real market.

I saw the potential in trading and wanted to establish myself in this field. Then I discovered there was a platform where you could publish your trading ideas, and that's how it started. Honestly, there was never a day I wanted to quit. I just kept publishing and publishing, especially in the first years, every single day.

Consistency, and constant study of the market. I shared my recommendations and my ideas, and that's what brings people. And content: 2,110 published ideas and 32 scripts and indicators. That's no joke. Every post was written and analyzed, over two thousand structured, thought-through pieces of thinking that I shared with my followers.

It's when I broke down how exactly I make my biggest profits, and then decided to repeat that, holding a profitable position for as long as I possibly could. It's all documented in my channel: from the moment I opened the trade to the moment I closed it. The profit was around $300,000.

Yes: the night of the COVID crash in Bitcoin. I made over $100,000 that night purely off market inefficiency. I didn't sleep, and it was magnificent. I'll never forget it, because so many people got liquidated that day, but not me and not the people close to me. We managed to profit from it. You could say COVID fed us.

The hardest moments are losses, especially the first ones. Psychologically, the toughest period was when I lost money and lost the desire to trade at all. I took a long break. That was the beginning of 2019.

I prepared mentally and psychologically. Every day I did affirmations and manifestations, and every day I visualized lifting a trophy above my head. Exactly the one you see in the photo. Exactly the same trophy I had pictured in my mind, I lifted it. Except it turned out to be the third-place trophy. If I had known precisely what the winner's cup looked like, I would definitely have visualized lifting a different one. So before the next offline tournament, I'll be sure to ask what the champion's trophy looks like, because this stuff works for me. And of course I also prepared practically: plans, strategy, behavior, setups. I was maximally focused on the market at that moment.

Honestly, it was an unforgettable experience, and I want to do it again, I loved it. I loved a lot of what happened there, especially with me. And I like being the underdog. I knew nobody there was placing big bets on me. Of course I'm proud of this result, it's a fact, a verified fact. And what did I understand about myself? The same eternal truth: cut your losing positions as fast as possible, and hold your winning positions as long as possible.

Every exchange needs its arena. This is an industry where the tournament format simply belongs. Of course it's marketing, it's an event, a way to immerse as many people as possible in trading. It's not as dynamic as traditional sports or even esports yet. But it's a great experience and a great opportunity, both for the traders and for the exchanges.

Of course. I'm waiting, genuinely waiting, for the next big tournaments. I want to compete. I loved everything about it: the preparation, the participation, the feeling of becoming part of something big that draws attention from all over the world. It's part of my path now. And gold? Gold would mean that in that moment, in that tournament, I was the best, a confirmation of my competence, my knowledge, my skills. And let's be honest: everyone loves to win. At the next tournament I'll be fighting for gold. Because there is only number one. Number two, three, five, ten, that's not the same. Only number one.