Conversation with Selini Capital founder: From poker player to trader, the mystery of doubling every year for 13 consecutive years

“For the past 13 years, Selini Capital founder Jordi’s net worth has almost doubled every year”.

Authored by: thiccy, Scimitar Capital Co-founders

Compiled by: Felix, PANews (This article has been edited)

Jordi is a true master of games. He participated in international chess and bridge competitions when he was young, often winning medals, and won the World Series of Poker bracelet again in 2024. In addition, Jordi is the founder of Selini Capital, a cryptocurrency trading company focused on market making, proprietary long/short trading, and venture capital. Over the past 13 years, he has achieved an astonishing 100% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), effectively doubling his net worth every year. Here are the highlights of the Twitter spaces interview.

When did you start playing poker seriously?

I started playing poker seriously in 2003 when I was still in college. It was the peak period of Moneymaker, a poker legend in the United States. He had just won the World Series and was very popular. Poker was one of the areas where a group of smart young people could make a lot of money, like a hotbed of money. Now it’s cryptocurrency.

How much money did you earn playing poker in college?

I want to be able to afford my tuition and live a comfortable student life. Maybe $50,000 a year. It doesn’t sound like much now, but it was a significant amount at the time. My major is in economics, which is not as hard a science as computer science or pure mathematics. Economics is a bit relaxed, but I did take a lot of courses specializing in game theory and wrote a paper. I also studied psychology. I never wanted to be a pure mathematician. I enjoy the social aspects of life. So I chose a double major in psychology and economics.

After graduation, I did not plan to play professional poker. It was just a part-time job for me during my school years. So I moved to New York, that was in 2007. I found a job at a major bank, doing some very boring work, mainly clerical work and some asset management. I did that for about nine months, and then the economic crisis of 2008 hit. I would sometimes play poker on weekends. At that time, I decided that instead of waiting for the financial crisis to be resolved, I would rather take matters into my own hands. I was more interested in becoming a professional poker player at the time.

During that period, what was your greatest realization about yourself?

On the one hand, I have built confidence, believing that I can compete with the best players. When playing against Scott Seiver and the best players at the time, I was not defeated. But on the other hand, I see that I lack emotional recovery ability. I am not a person who is easily out of control emotionally, but I need to learn how to deal with fluctuations and stay calm. You can imagine, if your life depends on your victory, and your first month is a bad month, and you have no savings, the pressure is very high. You start to face your darkest fears.

I noticed that many excellent traders have played poker before trading cryptocurrencies. They are able to control their emotions in poker. I have seen some people who originally had an advantage, but became emotional because of a small mistake, and escalated it into a bigger mistake. Before they realized it, they had lost 50% of their funds due to emotional trading.

When did you start getting involved in cryptocurrencies?

I started to get familiar with encryption technology because the company was in the Bay Area, which is a very unusual place. It was the only place in the world in 2016 where you could casually chat in a coffee shop and hear people talking about cryptocurrencies. I think Bitcoin was probably around $1,000 at that time. I remember thinking it was expensive, so I bought some Ethereum because it seemed cheap, and then I made my first cryptocurrency transaction. I realized that Litecoin was going to skyrocket because it was only a few dollars. I don’t remember what it was, but I realized this kind of normalcy bias. So I bought a bunch of tokens like Litecoin, and eventually sold them at $250 when it went crazy.

What was your first thought when you first encountered cryptocurrency?

In 2013, when I heard the news about Bitcoin, I felt that the chance of it becoming a fundamental currency was very small, and it seemed very far-fetched. So I didn’t buy it in 2013, and at that time I didn’t consider Bitcoin as a store of value.

Your versatile trading style reflects your personality.

My advantage lies in being very curious and never feeling bored. I can sit in front of the computer forever, and there are too many things to attract my attention. I have to force myself to exercise and work. Immersed in things, finding the subtle things that others find boring, I find it very interesting.

Since 2022, the casino rhetoric of cryptocurrencies has intensified. How do you incorporate this into your long-term vision for cryptocurrency?

Due to my background, I have spent most of my life in real casinos. I was shaped by it, born into it. Personally, I am very satisfied with this. I do believe that in the future, as the US government holds Bitcoin, the institutional importance will become more and more significant. This is completely fine. But I don’t mind being in it.

How to view the development of the cryptocurrency market in the next few years?

The market needs a new Ponzi scheme. For example, this round did not see the NFT cycle. Some players have tried, but without success. Then they tried meme coins because there are some stories about how they are more liquid. So maybe this makes sense. But now it may not work.

Some things will change, not be the same as before, it is always evolving. I think we will continue to see more game cycles, but the situation will be different. Maybe at some point, we will not have new Ponzi schemes, but people are creative in this regard. It is expected that artificial intelligence will play an important role in the future of cryptocurrency. I have always publicly expressed optimism about the integration of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. I think this is the trend of the future.

Many traders say that artificial intelligence will take over their jobs in a few years. Do you think this applies to your current work?

No, I think the tsunami of artificial intelligence will eventually engulf everyone, sweeping the whole world. I do feel like I am at a peak where the water level is continuously rising, but it will take some time before the water level rises to me. What I am using is not the kind of data that is easy to train and replicate, especially now, it is more like a combination in the brain that can generate alpha. Alpha does not necessarily involve trading, but managing businesses and adding value. I think my methods and knowledge are very professional and cannot be trained universally. So personally, I am not worried.

What is the worst trade you have ever made?

The worst trade was shorting shitcoins in late 2020. At that time, shitcoins had already risen 10 times. Then you think this is just a pile of shit, Cardano or Dogecoin, some of which I shorted. In Tradfi, at least some people care about fair value. People try to trade around this fair value. But for these shitcoins, I think I have to realize through painful experiences that there is no fair value, just pure greed, and the level of greed far exceeds my imagination. I did short Dogecoin several times, from one and a half cents to one cent or half a cent. Then one day, Musk announced the decision to adopt Dogecoin. When it surged to 10 cents, I suffered huge losses. I have made the same mistakes on Cardano multiple times.

This is a weakness for me, but now I have turned it into something manageable and actually profitable. But I want to say that shorting altcoins has been one of my biggest flaws over the years, but now it’s one of the most profitable trades I’ve made. You really have to understand the game you’re playing when shorting altcoins.

How would you advise others to improve their trading skills?

This is just inner psychology. Many things are like this, but even more so for traders. If you judge with blurred judgment due to arrogance, then it will only become more difficult for you. Almost everyone is like this. Many people will associate their identity and entire self with certain aspects. If you want to become a world-class expert in some field, you must keep your judgment uninfluenced. This usually means letting go of the ego. I think this may take several years for some people. For others, it is easy.

What are your different views on trading?

For me, risk and reward are the way I build my trades. Others have different ways, they are just constantly exploring alpha. There has always been a probability distribution in my mind. I mentioned this a few days ago, most of the time you are out of the market. You just go to sleep, you want to wake up energized, do some trading, and then go back to sleep after the trade is done. I have this rolling position distribution. Many assets do not need to have any fair value. Fair value basically means where the balance between risk and return is within the timeframe of my trade. That’s the position of not holding a position, because if the risk and return are balanced, there is no advantage. I have risk-return balance points for all these different assets. When it starts to deviate from the balance point, I start adding positions, continuously adding positions until I reach the maximum position, and my maximum position depends on not losing a large proportion of assets in the event of a catastrophic error. So I calculate my size in this way. Then adjust around this risk-return.

Of course, the difficult part is determining the balance point between risk and return. There are several ways to do this. At the end of the day, you must summarize five to ten things. You must consider the cost basis for short-term and medium-term buyers. I used to be very good at this. When I was doing high-frequency trading, I sat in front of the desk all day, with nothing else to do but stare at the charts. I became very good at day trading. In a very short time, I could look at the risk-return for the next few minutes or hours and trade around it.

In addition, it’s a bit strange in my career, I try to limit my annual net asset growth. I try to limit it to… at most 3 times.

So how do you deal with the remaining money? Donate it or?

I spend time training myself. Imagine you are a poker player, you earn 100,000 in a year. Then you earn 2.5 million in the second year, and you don’t play for the rest of the year, but enter learning mode, laying the foundation for the next improvement. Concentrate all your time and energy on this, rather than making more money in that year. I’ve been doing this since the beginning of my trading career, which has been 13 years. My goal is to double my earnings every year. I have always adhered to this goal. So it has been double for 13 years.