Maine's first cycle ended with him buying altcoins as Bitcoin fell 87–88% in 2014, right after he'd made 'a little bit of money' in the 2013–14 bull and thought he knew what he was doing. He taught himself forex and options while working a job, came back in 2016–17, made money — and, he stresses, kept it. The light-switch moment came at the November 2017 top near $20K, when he started shorting and refused to believe the $6,000 floor would hold; BTC dropped about 50% to $3,000. He launched crypto-only prop firm Breakout in 2023, later added TradFi assets, and sold it to Kraken in 2025. Now 'approaching 40 and still doing it.'
Maine calls himself a price-action trader — 'I'm not trading narratives' — with a mandatory checklist: high-timeframe/low-timeframe alignment, asymmetric risk-reward, and a known invalidation point before entry. His win rate last year was 47%, but with 2:1 reward-to-risk you only need to be right 33% of the time to break even, versus 50% at 1:1 — 'that all of a sudden seems like a much more manageable task.' His working example: BTC entry at 100K, stop at 90,000, target at least 120,000. On TA he argues it's partly self-fulfilling prophecy, citing Tom Lee buying 'like a billion dollars' of ETH near $4,000 on a quant's trendline.
The best advice he ever got came from forex OG Tom Dante: remove the P&L screen from your monitor and trade the chart, because closing early in the green or the red is 'trading your P&L.' He quit making half-asleep trading decisions at night — 'my phone's on airplane mode at night now' — journals targets and gratitude, and credits the gym with the discipline that carries into his sizing. He takes trades that are 99.9% his own idea ('trading is a one-player game'), and only enters when he can answer one question first: how much do I lose if I'm wrong?
His most underrated narrative: 'everything is becoming on chain and basically tokenized' — FOMO, Kraken, Hyperliquid, Coinbase and Robinhood all heading toward a Nexus where single-name stocks, pre-IPO markets, prediction markets and sports betting trade 24/7 with 'unparalleled transparency.' His proof point: oil trading on Hyperliquid over the weekend during the Iran war, with the real market snapping to Hyperliquid's price at the open. Overrated: the PvP, never-hold-anything culture — 'people are very short-term focused.' And memecoins, he agrees with Ansem, aren't going anywhere: there are few places left that turn a little money into a lot.
Traders who learned in a bull run and traders who learned in a bear market are fundamentally different people, Maine argues — bear-market learners become the Capos who short 'every high.' He cites Leopold Aschenbrenner as the cautionary tale: right with size and conviction, killed by leverage, liquidated to Citadel, with his positions bouncing 30–40% 'immediately after.' The takeaway he repeats: 'nothing goes up forever,' and the traders who make it are the ones who adapt and simply don't quit.
Answering a question relayed from earlier guest OSF, Maine said it's the burning desire for an extraordinary outcome — freedom of time and location, no limits on earnings — plus 'unrelenting belief in my own abilities beyond what is probably even real,' even after losing money on FTX. At his lowest he tweets 'stamp it' and gets back to work. He journals gratitude, breaks goals down to the daily level, and stopped comparing himself to others. A performance coach he brought on 12–18 months ago, he says, 'changed my life.' And the thing that still perplexes him: 'the market will always humble you.'
Maine's pick for a future guest is Ansem, and his first question would be whether a Creator Coin like Ansem Coin is a better way to onboard retail than apps like FOMO, Kraken and Polymarket — 'how does it end?' He rattled off the recent guest list as the show's batting order: Mando, OSF, Simple Farmer (who started STONKBROKER), Rasmer, Logan Lim (who made roughly $1.2M on FOMO in 26 days), Boostry Tang (KATE), Sad Chrissy, Lucanets (Pudgies), Meat God (developer of PAWNS, the token launcher on Robinhood Chain) and Amit from Amit's Investing. He pointed listeners to his Whiteboard trading boot camp on YouTube, and streams every Tuesday and Thursday at 3 p.m.