For those unfamiliar with the name,
James Wynn is a pseudonym of a self-proclaimed “degen” whale trader who primarily trades on the Hyperliquid platform. He gains his reputation and the title "whale" mostly because of the bets he made on some meme coins (among them the PEPE, FART and TRUMP), turning $500,000 into $87 million. Of course, almost all his bets/ positions are in the Perpetual market, regularly topping nine figures, and with 10x to 40x leverage.
The previous week got liquidated since his long position on BTC failed and led him to a ~$100 million loss. I don't want to post specific articles, you can all read the whole story on various channels on the web, and the updates of it (yesterday he tagged CZ on X and urgently asked him to DM him, and the answer was a "positive" one). The question(s) here are this: Do you believe that he is a legendary trader or that he is a shill and a fake/ scammer trader? Does he know what he is doing, or does he get lucky out of nowhere? He gets busted by manipulation tactics, or does he just speculate wrong? Just for the record, another trader who consistently counter-trading James Wynn’s positions has raked in $17 million in profits...
P.S.: If this isn't the proper section, please let me know so I can move the thread to the correct one. Thank you.
There are lots of people trading every day and some actually have genuine strategies where they can grind a profit. However the one distinguishing factor is he apparently started with $500k which is an inaccessible amount of money for most people and for those that do have such sums, they are wise enough not to dump it into shitcoins that have a high probability of losing value. Anyone who is tuned in to the right media can potentially turn a profit, even people who are slightly behind the news information curve could have made bank from TRUMP or Doge if they got in hours or days behind the news - it's people that join weeks later when the wave is about to come crashing back down that really get wiped out the hardest. It appears he joined the wave of one altcoin at the wrong time, but really he was just ultra greedy because he could have banked some profits and continued playing.
I do wonder why and how he is able to get such leverage though, as if he cannot afford to pay it then technically the broker might be on the hook for it? Unless all the liability stays with him and he has to declare bankruptcy. Brokers usually try to liquidate when the market wipes out trader positions, but apparently the market completely collapsed or there was simply no buyers. If it was bitcoin he had built in zero tolerance for a downward swing of minimal size.. which was very silly considering price movements of the last few months.