Think Like the Casino Owner, Not the Gambler: Simon Mach on the Crypto & Coffee Podcast

How has crypto trading changed since 2017?

The hosts opened with the market itself. Simon’s answer split crypto history into two different games. In 2017 there were few altcoins, so the money in the space concentrated into whatever existed, and a bull market lifted almost every coin.

“You buy an altcoin and you have very high chance that you will end up just like a bag holder, right?”

A bag holder, in trading slang, is the buyer left holding a coin long after the market has moved on. That is his description of today, with every new token, as he put it, promoting himself to be the next dogecoin. Later in the episode he reached for a sharper analogy. In 2017 it was like that you would play a poker against drunk tourists, he said.

Nobody at that table was risk aware. Now, it’s like playing against really professional poker player. The easy chips are gone, everyone defends their stack, and the edge has to be earned with process.

Why think like the casino owner, not the gambler?

The strongest idea of the episode came early, when Simon explained why a trading strategy alone makes nobody money. A strategy is not a magic wand. What separates professionals is the seat they choose at the table.

“It’s about positioning yourself not as a gambler but as the owner of casino.”

The owner has the odds on his side, but no certainty about any single spin. Imagine a trade with a 90 percent probability: it can still lose. A coin can land heads eight times in a row and still be a fair coin.

That is why you can be a beginner that basically outperforms a professional trader in a week and learn exactly the wrong lesson from it.

“Same way with a bad process you can make a lot of money in trading. And with a good process you can lose money in trading as well.”

The house also sizes its bets like a house. Simon told the hosts the team actually have borrowed this from George Soros. Every trader starts small, and only a run of wins earns the right to risk more.

“When we start we risk very little of money but we make very little of money, right?”

After a long winning streak the counter resets to zero and the trader builds the right to size up again from the start. Risk is earned, never assumed.

Why does the ParadiseTeam change strategy with every market cycle?

Cordell Tanny writes systematic momentum strategies, so the conversation turned to whether one fixed system can survive crypto. The answer he gave came from nature, not from a backtest.

“In nature, in my opinion, water is the strongest element on earth. Okay? And what does water do? It adapts to its environment, right?”

Water does not fight the stone. It goes around it. In a sideways market the team leans on short-term trading. In big trending cycles it shifts toward swing and position trading. Different market cycles reward different tools, so the team watches all of them and commits to none permanently.

“We are not trying to force the trades. So we are waiting just for the perfect moment and then we execute.”

How did Simon Mach start MyCryptoParadise?

Simon did not enter crypto as a professional. He entered it as a victim. He came from forex and stock trading, and a high school friend introduced him to Bitcoin. The crypto of that era was ruled by pump and dump groups promising to turn $100 into thousands within a week.

His first pump felt like winning. The dopamine hit was real, he was hooked, and then the same groups took back everything he had made. The losses did something useful: they sent him looking for adults in the room.

“That made me to search more around crypto if there is somebody who is doing it professionally and there was nobody, right?”

So he built what he could not find. He brought the discipline he had learned in traditional markets into crypto, and the company grew out of a habit rather than a business plan.

“With few friends we have started to publicly share our crypto signals and then basically the word of mouth happened.”

The scams that shaped the origin story never fully left. Simon told the hosts scammers have cloned the company on Telegram with fake channels padded by fake subscribers. His advice applies to any crypto service. Before you send anyone money, really make sure that you are visiting the right website and that you are talking with the real person.

What data goes into a professional crypto trade?

Asked what the signals are actually built from, Simon described layers. Every trader on the team starts from a technical analysis base, such as Elliott Wave, a method that reads price action as repeating wave patterns. On top of that come order books, on-chain flows, positioning, and funding, the periodic fee longs and shorts pay each other on futures markets.

He walked the hosts through a recent Bitcoin reversal the team traded. Open interest, the total value of futures positions open in the market, spiked as the market rose. Then price stalled and scared leveraged longs out. The tell was in the cumulative volume delta, a running count of market buying minus market selling.

“On the cumulative volume delta we have seen that somebody is actually absorbing that selling pressure. But on a spot exchange. And spot that equals smart money. Because if you have a lot of money you don’t need to use leverage, right?”

Crowded shorts and negative funding then raised the likelihood of a short squeeze, a forced wave of buying as short positions close. None of it was certainty. All of it moved the probability, and the probability is the product.

Two of the inputs he named live on this site as free tools: the crypto Fear and Greed Index and live crypto funding rates. He says the pair can combine into really nice mean reversion trading ideas: bets that an overstretched price snaps back toward its average. And he told the hosts plainly: most of the tools we are using we are actually giving out for free on our website.

Why does Simon Mach trade only the top 50 coins?

The hosts pressed on altcoins. Cordell noted the algorithms he built for Bitcoin and Ethereum are stable, but break down the moment he applies them to a coin like Solana. His fix is a boundary, set before any chart is opened.

“You need to limit yourself to what kind of coins you will be trading. So we are focusing only on the top 50 market cap coins which has some kind of liquidity and nice volume.”

Below that line, he warned, everybody with few million dollars can manipulate the price action. Thin books are where pump and dump schemes live, and where influencers shill memecoins promising 5,000% profits overnight. He does not soften it: do your due diligence, and know which game you are playing. Memecoins deliver dopamine, not process.

“But if you want to do it long-term profitably, it’s going to be boring. All right? Because the dopamine will basically stay at the baseline.”

Boring is the point. When the stop loss, the targets and the risk are decided before entry, neither a loss nor a win produces a spike. No revenge trading after a stop. No overconfidence after a winner. The emotional cycle that empties most accounts never starts.

Can AI make money trading crypto on its own?

With Cordell teaching machine learning at university level, the AI question was inevitable. Simon’s team leans on AI heavily, but for gathering data, not for making decisions.

“AI for now cannot exactly for this reason make money in trading on its own because it doesn’t understand the context, right?”

The market evolves constantly, and a model trained on yesterday’s regime confidently misreads today’s. Cordell agreed from the quant side: models built purely on price data tend to fit noise, and a simple rules-based statistical model usually beats them. Simon went further than the quants would: human brain is still the best technology AI is nowhere close to.

Should traders trust their instinct?

The sharpest disagreement of the episode was friendly. Simon suggested experience leaves something valuable in a trader’s gut. Cordell pushed back hard: emotion ruins even experienced traders. Simon’s clarification drew the line precisely.

“You should completely remove your emotions from deciding when to enter the trade and how much to risk. But a better word for what I have said would be actually instinct.”

Instinct, in his framing, is pattern recognition encoded by years of screen time, the fast thinking that Daniel Kahneman describes. He treats it as one more indicator with its own probability weight. If the other indicators disagree with the instinct, the instinct is overruled. And he does not recommend it at all without roughly five to six years of experience.

The roundtable agreed on the rest. Markets humble the overconfident, and the biggest losses tend to arrive right after the biggest wins.

What advice does Simon give new crypto traders?

The hosts closed the show with one question: a single piece of advice for anyone starting out. Simon began with a reading list.

“I would definitely recommend them to read the series, the Market Wizards series. That’s really a gold of information.”

Then build a strategy around your own personality: impatient traders suit scalping, patient ones suit swing and position trading. And test it with skin in the game. He argues against demo accounts, because paper losses teach nothing about your own chemistry.

“You need to test your trading with real money to understand how your emotions are reacting.”

Start small, size up step by step, and expect the work to feel like a business rather than a casino floor. If you need excitement, he suggests getting it somewhere honest, like an adrenaline sport. The market charges too much for it.

Watch the full conversation

The full hour also covers operational security, impersonation scams, Fibonacci and the golden ratio, behavioral finance, and what institutional money changed about crypto market structure.

About Simon Mach

Simon Mach founded MyCryptoParadise in 2016. It began as a group of friends posting their trades in a free Telegram channel. It grew into an analysis and education company built around risk and process, not price predictions.

He entered crypto through the pump and dump era and lost his first stake to it. Then he built the company he had searched for and could not find. That history is why the mission has stayed the same for a decade: pull traders away from the casino and toward process.

Simon speaks regularly about trading psychology, risk management and disciplined execution. He argued that psychology decides more than strategy on the Market Mamas podcast, and explained what a real signal contains on The Gambling Files. He spoke about hearing the signal over the noise on the Crypto Hipster podcast. And he described building a company to survive every market cycle on 21st Century Entrepreneurship. The psychology side of the work continues at our sister project MyTradingCoach.

Crypto trading involves substantial risk and can result in the loss of your capital. Analogies and quotes in this article describe probability and process, not an expectation of profit. Nothing in this article is financial advice, and past performance does not guarantee future results.