Scott Melker, better known as The Wolf of All Streets, is a trader and crypto advocate who is much more accessible than his online handle suggests. A former DJ, Melker operates a small crypto advocacy empire spanning YouTube videos, podcasts and a popular newspaper.
Scott Melker has been open about his initial intentions in the crypto industry. “I just came here to trade and make money,” he admitted, joining after hearing friends about the gold-paved streets of the blockchain world, where 100x weekly returns were common. Having been familiar with the more conservative movements of the stock markets since childhood, Melker was lucky to learn proper trading before entering unregulated crypto casinos.
“XRP was like a penny or something,” he recalls. Crypto was also popular in the DJ community, attributing something to the risk-taking nature of the Melker community. He attributes his success to a lucky timing in early 2016, soon cashing in on his initial investment to play with his winnings.
“There was such groundlevel in the DJ community. They understand technology, and they are wild and speculative. That’s how I first discovered it.”
Crypto Beats soon took off. The 2018 bear market meant that “if you want to be around, you really have to justify it to yourself, and you probably went down the rabbit hole to understand the importance of movement,” Melker explains. . He really came to appreciate the fundamentals of bitcoin and “understands the purpose of individual altcoins.”
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Although Melker has invested in hundreds of tokens over the years, he believes that “Bitcoin is by far the most important asset” and that everyone should try to take some risk for it. Ether rises almost to the level of importance of bitcoin and may well have more upside, he says, while altcoins are more akin to individual speculative technology investments.
Connected with Melker, shortly after changing his Twitter tune from music to crypto in 2017. Christopher Incaso of the Texas West Capitol, who became a mentor to him. Melker became an analyst for Inks Fund, sharing charts and business ideas. He clarifies that he did not trade anyone else’s money, and does not have a license to do so.
Wolf emphasizes that trading is not easy, whether in stocks or crypto. “To trade full-time for decades, you are like a unicorn,” he said, adding that crypto markets are particularly brutal because they operate 24/7 non-stop, meaning traders have the opportunity to recharge. No, while the market is closed. of course you don’t need To trade all the time – Melker himself uses leverage only two or three times per year to trade bitcoins.
A curious aspect of trading is that as one’s portfolio grows, so must the bet size in order to remain profitable – otherwise doing so would be tantamount to withdrawing $10,000 in casino chips, only betting $1 in the evening. to put.
“When your portfolio reaches a certain size, you need to be prepared to increase the size of your trades as a percentage – and those numbers can be uncomfortably large.”
learn to fail
Melker quickly points out that the odds are stacked against day traders. “95% of traders fail – they break down quickly,” Melker says, explaining that those aspiring to be serious traders need to be prepared to lose their invested assets multiple times. “Most don’t have the time or capital for this,” he says. In 2012, Melker invested his entire portfolio in ARYX Therapeutics, which turned out to be zero. Despite such setbacks, Melker considers himself lucky to have “learned the hard lessons before cryptocurrencies”. They found that those who discovered trading via cryptocurrency for the first time lost everything to leverage.
“You have to be able to learn on the job and break many times and still stick with it.”
Although “investors almost always do better than traders,” Melker strongly recommends those who study risk management to trade. Long-term profitability, he explains, isn’t about selling tops and buying bottoms, but “the way you protect your capital and allow yourself to hit home runs.” He uses the example that a trader can be right in less than half the time and remain wildly profitable if they know when to cut their losses. Even a win out of 10 can be a recipe for success.
“It’s a math game of taking small losses and winning big.”
Another advice is to never risk more than 1% of your portfolio on a single trade. However, it is far from foolproof. For example, 30% of a portfolio can be spread over 30 altcoin positions, all of which suffer losses when Bitcoin takes an unexpected dive. Ego is the enemy, and emotional attachment to positions is to be avoided – something that can be even more difficult in the case of NFTs.
“Staying profitable over the long term is largely a result of your risk management strategy,” Melker claims.
dj bitcoin
Melker, 45, grew up in Gainesville, Florida, where her parents “instilled financial literacy and the importance of investing and saving at home.” He began experimenting with the stock market at the age of 13 when he bought shares in Disney with the help of his father. He headed to the University of Pennsylvania in 1995, where he earned an A. studied inAnthropology. The school was very business-focused, Melker explains, with consulting and investment banking firms recruiting large numbers of graduate students. The late ’90s, of course, coincided with the dot-com boom, and “as such it was impossible to escape the excitement around the financial markets at school,” Melker explains. He said there was a “just up” sentiment that is familiar in crypto circles.
Apparently I had a goat once. This is from 2007. Steve Aoki took this photo. At the time, he was transitioning from open-format DJ Kid Millionaire to his current EDM identity. The first song he played that night was Sexyback. #tbt pic.twitter.com/9bN4n5bHbq
— The Wolf of All Streets (@scottmelker) October 10, 2019
Taking piano lessons from a young age, Melker had a passion for music and began working as a DJ as he completed his studies. It started with house parties, which soon led him to play gigs in downtown nightclubs. In those days, DJing involved far more skill and investment than today, when one could only connect a laptop to a sound system. “It was the full vinyl era. I had to take four friends with me to take all the equipment wherever I went,” he recalls. “The hot girls thought it was cooler than the piano,” he says with a laugh.
Despite having the option of following his peers in investment banking after graduation, Melker decided on the entrepreneurial path, founding the nightlife startup Philly2Nite in 1999, which marketed events in the Philadelphia area. In 2001, he founded 101 Magazine, which he describes as “lifestyle rags—a magazine for everything that happens in Philadelphia, along with the kind of crappy content I now post about crypto.” am.” The magazine was a success and eventually merged with the larger Frank magazine, which moved Melker to New York in 2003 as the firm’s global brand ambassador.
He worked for several other companies, including a short stint in marketing as a music director and business developer and at Vice Magazine. Melker moved to Miami in 2012, where he worked as a realtor, only to return to Gainesville in 2017 to be closer to his parents after having children of his own.
Throughout his career, Melker continued to perform and produce music under such names as The Melker Project, Funkcontrol and MBS. Over the years, this resulted in him gaining a significant 40,000 followers on Twitter.
“One day, I stopped talking about music and started posting charts and talking about magic internet money.”
As he continued to post endlessly about crypto, he saw his Twitter fall in half. But soon, new engagements began to appear. “When you want to go from one thing to another, people dismiss it,” Melker says. He explains that in his early days in crypto, when he brought up crypto, he faced mean comments like “Shut up, DJ.”
That’s when Melker came up with his Wolf of All Streets moniker “as a message to people that you can be more than one thing.” The name stuck, and he maintains that it was simply a play on words, that the real Wolf of Wall Street was a criminal, not someone he wants to emulate.
$BTC influence
Here is some Grade A China White Hopium.
Every time the RSI (which is actually a meme on dominance) has been overbought on Bitcoin Dominance, we have a massive altcoin move.
Not saying it will happen, just showing you what happened in that situation. pic.twitter.com/pog7VclA0K
— The Wolf of All Streets (@scottmelker) 28 May 2022
“I get hyper-focused on that thing, and everything else disappears,” Melker explained of the sudden shift from music to crypto. to like last visit interviewer Carl “The Moon” Roonefelt, Melker, has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, commonly known as ADHD. “Crypto has a lot of ADHD,” he says, explaining that he considers it a “superpower” because it allows him to focus fully on his passions.
“I followed all the big accounts. I was trying to learn, I was commenting under their tweets, trying to connect with them.” This engagement could soon be seen in the number of his followers, and Melker became more convinced to share his thoughts. Considering Twitter to be “too shorthand”, he began writing a newsletter, which soon became a Turned out to be a full-time job. He was charging $15 per month and offering a limited free version, but he later made everything free because “I monetize my audience in some way, shape or form.” don’t want to.”
By all appearances, Melker is driven more by passion than by money. However, that didn’t stop the controversy from escalating amid a downturn in the market last year, when he was criticized for Removal of so-called “shill tweets” related to low-market-cap coins whose price could theoretically have been influenced by a highly visible account like theirs. “My account has grown to a size where I can’t tweet about certain things,” he commented After the controversy. He says that his family received threats because of the assault.
I used to hang out with many celebrities during my DJ days. pic.twitter.com/92ylU3d3Lz
— The Wolf of All Streets (@scottmelker) February 25, 2022
The success of the newsletter prompted Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz to contact Melker and suggest he start a podcast. “I literally asked, ‘What is a podcast?’ Like I’d never heard of it,” Melker recalls with a laugh. Today, he considers podcasting to be “the best job in the world”, partly because he thinks he can get almost anyone. Wolf of All Streets Podcast,
With multiple sponsorships, the show has become a business – but not devoid of purpose. Melker says the overarching goal is to “create content for the next wave” of crypto investors, such as grandma or the average person on the street. He sees himself as a crypto advocate, able to easily list what benefits society will gain from bitcoin and crypto proliferation. Considering the breadth of his YouTube channel, Twitter account, newsletter, website, and podcast—which are filled with thoughtful, measured comments—it’s clear that new followers will have no shortage of support.
“I wake up every morning at 4:30, excited to write the newspaper. I can’t sleep because of the thoughts I want to get down on paper.”