Chad Wittfeldt

I was in crypto before it had been in a single newspaper. The honest version of my story has a lot more losing in it than a bio line can hold, so here it is.

Where it started

I got into the financial markets at 16, working at a country club. One of my regulars was a hedge fund manager. I bought my first Bitcoin in 2013, at about $100 a coin, not long after it had been trading around $70 to $80.

The expensive years

I put myself through college tending bar in the summers at a private country club. No student loans, and I graduated with about $20,000 saved.

Back then I had no process, no risk management, no entry criteria and no patience. I put in about $5,000 and blew it. Then I put in $10,000 more and blasted up and down. Within about 10 months, the whole $20,000 was gone.

My first margin call came on a CFD account. I stayed up all night watching it, and it got margin called at 3:30 a.m. All I could say was, "Well, I guess I'm going to bed now." It wasn't the last one.

I paid for everything in those years. Telegram forex signal groups that charged a hundred to two hundred dollars a month. Indicator templates that printed buy and sell signals, and I hopped to a new one almost every week. Then automated trading bots. I blew a lot of accounts testing other people's bots.

After that I took about two years off, did real estate deals and rebuilt my capital before I came back.

Where my obsession with risk came from

Around my fourth year, I reconnected with a trader I'd met in a forex group back in college, who taught me patience and swing trading. I funded a $5,000 profit-share account for that trader. It was blown in about three weeks on oversized lot sizes.

That was the moment I got obsessed with risk management. It's why everything I teach starts with the stop and the size, and leverage comes last.

2017: the rookie who got a lot right

In 2017 I started trading crypto on CFD brokerages and posting my technical analysis on my personal Facebook, including a post in August 2017 on Bitcoin breaking $3,000. That's when people started coming to me for advice.

I got a lot right that year, but I was still a rookie. I traded price action breakouts, and I didn't understand liquidity or mass psychology yet. Today I do close to the opposite.

I also watched BitConnect and USI Tech play out in real time. The outsized affiliate payouts and how fast they spread told me they were Ponzi schemes, and I warned the people around me privately. That's why verification runs through everything I teach.

Mining

I was a late adopter to Ethereum mining. I got in around mid-2019, and I hit it hard. I read every Ethereum Improvement Proposal and developer update myself, and once I watched proof of stake working on the test networks, I sold all of my mining hardware in late 2021. Most of the mining community was sure the switch would keep getting delayed, and people thought I was crazy. The merge landed on September 15, 2022, and GPU mining on Ethereum was over.

How Crypto Renegades started

In 2020, Niko Mercuris and I were loosely connected through a Facebook group about apartment investing. I posted about mining Ethereum, and Niko reached out. We started trading new token launches together, friends and family asked to join, and the chat went from about 10 people to about 40 in a month or two.

I booked three one-on-ones in one week, and one person showed up. The same thing happened to Niko. So right before Christmas 2020, we put structure around it with group Zoom calls twice a week.

Later we moved from token launches to perpetual futures, because the launches got flooded with scammers. As I put it back then, "you could vet a coin every way possible and some random thing would still happen at launch."

Today

I live in Arizona with my wife and our dog. I trade a lot of altcoins, mostly off higher timeframe structure, and I set my orders ahead of time so I can get filled "while I'm out on a date with my wife, I'm out on the track in my race car... I'm living my life." I like to have the market work for me. I don't work for the market.

What I look for in a student

Someone who arrives with their own numbers, asks for an audit of their trades, and treats the process as a skill that takes time and effort to own. When I do a one-on-one, I ask people to bring their charts and their last trades, marked up, so we can separate mistakes from variance. Come like a professional.

You can hear me tell more of this on the record in my podcast appearances.