Episode 26 – Interview with Craig Cobb

Craig Cobb is the founder and head trader at TraderCobb. Craig is a trading expert with an investment portfolio of his own. We chat about his entrepreneurial upbringing and he gives us the low down on Cryptocurrency and what’s happening in the crypto space!

Mike Mortlock: Hi, and welcome to Geared for Growth. This week we’re chatting with Craig Cobb, who is better known as trader Cobb, the head trader and founder of tradercobb.com. Now Craig is a trading expert, hence the name. He’s also got exposure to property and his father was an accomplished property developer as well. We have a chat to Craig about his entrepreneurial upbringing, about his history and how we got into financial markets, and we get the lowdown on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology and a real great background into what’s happening in the crypto space. It’s a bit left field from property, but there’s some great investing tips that Craig has and I really think that you’ll enjoy the insights that Craig has to give as a mentor to thousands and thousands of traders and crypto nerds around the world. Here’s Craig.

Mike Mortlock: Craig Cobb, thanks for joining us on Geared for Growth.

Craig Cobb: Thank you, Mike. Pleasure to be here.

Mike Mortlock: Awesome. Now I’ve been looking forward to this one. This is a little bit left field for the Geared for Growth property investing podcast, but a kick us off Craig, who are you and what do you specialize in?

Craig Cobb: Yeah. My name is Craig Cobb, my pseudonym is Trader Cobb and I’m basically, I’m an investor at heart. I’ve been investing in various different markets all around the world since my first investment at 16 years of age. I’ve been a trader, actively trading full time for the past 11 years, looking at things like foreign exchange stocks, commodities, bonds, you name it. If it moved, I’ve, I traded it. I’ve been in property. I’ve done the lot, and now I’m really specializing in a very new technology and a new frontier in a very new market in the crypto assets world. So focusing on the crypto and blockchain marketplace.

Mike Mortlock: Yeah. Awesome. And we’re going to get into that and, and bitcoin’s reputation precedes itself. For a bit of an insight into you Craig, what posters were on your bedroom wall as a youngster?

Craig Cobb: Oh Geez. They were body boarding posters really. So I’m from a wonderful part of the world called Noosa Heads Queensland. I grew up at Sunshine Beach, a quick 10 minute run from the beach. So as a kid, it was body boarding body boarding to, I was into, I had my first business at six years old and for those that were up in Noosa Heads region at the time and had anything to do with the Noosa Dolphins rugby club. If there’s anyone out there, you’ll know that that little guy who was running around selling chocolate coated snakes after training, that was me. So my inspiration didn’t at a young age come from wanting to be a business titan, so to speak. It was always to do with what was going on in the water.

Mike Mortlock: Yep. Yeah. Awesome. And beautiful part of the world and absolute Mecca for triathletes. So everyone that I follow in that space seems to be in Noosa. It’s just the perfect little place for training and racing and water and all that sort of stuff. Beautiful part of the world.

Craig Cobb: Speaking of that, I’ll just touch on that, Garth Proud, the organizer of that event is a good friend of ours. He unfortunately passed last year and he lived just up the road. He was a neighbour of ours, so very close ties with the Noosa triathlon.

Mike Mortlock: Yeah. Wow, awesome. And you’ve got multiple Olympic gold medallists up there. You got Hawaii iron man champions. It’s a real hotspot for it now. Now, Craig, obviously you’re a mentor in the crypto space, and that’s probably the focus of what we’re looking at today, but you actually did have quite a lot of exposure to property yourself and through your family. Can you run us through your exposure to property?

Craig Cobb: Yeah. So again, that’s started at a very young age. My father is a builder up in Noosa and has built a lot of the town, a lot of the very large houses, and it’s a very touristy, wealthy, so it’s sort of where Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Perth money sits for their weekenders. Dad sort of did that. Throughout my childhood Dad was developing as well as building, buying, selling, renovating, doing what builders do, you know, they can make the margin because they’re the ones that are building it. And what we used to do on weekends as he would pull out the section of the paper that we have now, or back in the olden days we didn’t have that entire 600 page magazine, we used to have a couple of pages. And he’d say what would you buy for x and what would you do to it? So I was introduced to thinking about how to, I guess, increase property value from a value add perspective from a very young age. And just growing up around it, it was, it was kind of just part of being a Cobb, essentially.
Now fast forward many years, to where I’m at right now. I do have a company called Park Edge Capital and Park Edge Capital specializes in searching development sites for large scale developers, but also in offering funding solutions for your small to medium to developers, up to about $5 million we can fund fairly quickly. So it’s in that space where we do the due diligence, we look at the projects feasibilities, we do the research in that space to decide whether or not we’ll either do one of two things.
One is a joint venture where we’ll bring the money partner and also help to run the project with you. And the second one is just a straight lending for people, sort of, you know, potentially as we know, especially at the moment the banks can be a little bit tricky as far as you know, you might find the great site, you might need that $100 thousand deposit, but it will take you three months to get it because the banks being very, very difficult, which means you’ll miss that site and there goes your opportunity. So we offer some lending solutions there and parkedgecapital.com.

Mike Mortlock: And you’re talking, you know, based on the due diligence, stacking up a 72 hour turnaround or something crazy like that, right?

Craig Cobb: Yeah. So, not so much for the joint venture side of things because that of course there’s, I’ll tell you honestly, nine times out of 10 people that are looking for joint ventures don’t have all the documentation that we require within 72 hours. So it’s a little bit more going back and forth. But certainly, for the fixed lending, and the reason we put the 72-hour deadline from our point of view is that’s effectively in property, speed and property are not things that go hand in hand that often. But obviously, like I say, to secure the right site, often we do need speed.
Now how many of how many investors out there have actually got $300 or $400 thousand in cash just sitting there waiting for a good home for the right site? Well, not many. Usually their money’s tied up in other projects or more so it’s tied up in equity. Now, unless you’ve got a really great relationship with your banker, it’s very difficult to release that equity very, very quickly, unless of course you’ve got the facility to do so. Now if you’ve got the facility, you don’t need us. If you don’t have the facility or you’re stretched and it’s a fantastic site and you can show us how you’ll get that money plus the interest back to us within the timeframe, then yes, we can turn around and fund within 72 hours. So speed is our friend.

Mike Mortlock: Awesome. Let’s get into your sort of path to today, Craig. You’re a sales guru, obviously a property expert, a financial trader, mentor. In what sort of order did you acquire that skill set? And can you tell us a little bit about your journey to how you’re getting today to being a mentor to tens of thousands of crypto traders?

Craig Cobb: Yeah, sure. It’s a good question. I’ll try and keep it brief because there’s lots of little steps, but it’s sort of, the entrepreneurial spirit came first.

Mike Mortlock: The chocolate snakes?

Craig Cobb: Well, it was actually before the chocolate snakes, it was I’m six years old, grade one, Sunshine Beach High School. Remember those 30-centimetre rules you’d get, there about two and a half centimetres wide 30 centimetres long, and everyone got issued one of those on their first day of school each year. Now I never got tuck shop money. I was always the healthy kid with fruit which I’m thankful for now, but back then not so much. And effectively, what I wanted was money to buy sweets at the tuck shop. So I chopped these rules in half. My Dad’s a builder, as I said, I put the belt sander upside down in the vice in the garage as a six-year-old. I was pretty familiar with tools and I would shape these rules into surfboards, fold my book over and sort of put blue tack on the board and surf my book at school, which of course created a demand. People wanted these things. So I’d stand just in front of the tuck shop line and sell them to people to get my tuck shop money. That was the first one.
So it wasn’t that I was trying to do anything. It was born out of necessity. I want that. I can’t get that. Oh, I just found a way to get that. How can I get that person to give me what I want? And they have something that they want. And that was the simple transaction that sort of spurned the entrepreneurial spirit within me. Mum got called to the principal’s office, thankfully credit to the principal, it wasn’t a telling off, it’s a good thing, but you need to nurture it.

Mike Mortlock: Yeah, I want to invest in this kid, where do I sign.

Craig Cobb: Yeah. Yeah. So it started very organically and very, very young. Through there were obviously lots of little businesses as a child. Then I moved to London, had a couple of businesses and made me some decent money in Noosa doing shop fit outs, that sort of thing. And decided I would travel. I got a round the world ticket with my best friend and off we went. I ended up spending some time in London running out of money. Two wonderful, very wealthy young ladies, from wealthy parents, had very expensive tastes, and my money soon ran out, and it had kind of pushed me into getting a job.
And I started looking into trading in a serious way at that point in time. So naturally started looking for jobs in that marketplace in the industry and was fortunate enough to be able to work with some really good traders. I’d go into the office while it was still dark, which is kind of most of the day in London in winter. But I was up bright and early learning what they did for no pay. And then I’d stay in until late at night. So I could again just sit with them and watch them and learn from them. And based around that, I was able to start to create my own code and I don’t mean, you know, code writing, I mean my own sort of view of the traditional trading world.
And from there it just started to grow and I started to get recognized and my commentary and my presenting abilities and my ability to sort of take something that can seem quite complex and make it quite simple got me on stages all around the world. So I’ve been very fortunate to travel all around the world as a trader, as a presenter, as a mentor, as a coach, call it what you will. Back in Sydney six years ago, trading full time, got a bit jaded by it, started to go back towards property again, with Park Edge Capital and all that sort of stuff. And then cryptocurrency came along. I’d been introduced to it in 2013. But for me at that moment in time, there wasn’t enough volume. So as a trader, I need to be able to have the volume to get in and out. There’s no point in owning something if you can’t sell it. And it didn’t have, you know, as you will with property you, you’ll be looking for maybe a checklist, or certainly the way I teach is I’ve got everything in a checklist form, you’ll have your strategy. I needed to have volume as part of that strategy. Bitcoin didn’t have the volume back then.
People say to me these days, oh, are you kicking yourself for not buying bitcoin in 2013, and the answer is absolutely not, no. Because if I had bought bitcoin back in 2013, yes, I would have had financial gain. There’s no doubt. However, I would have broken my rules and if I had started breaking my rules back then who would I be today? I probably wouldn’t be in the same position that I am now. So, the discipline has paid off in a big way. And now I got the phone call about 12 months ago, something along those lines. Maybe a little bit less than that, saying Cobby, you’ve got to have a look at crypto. And the phone call came from somebody who I was more than willing to listen to, somebody who I considered to be a mentor and if they speak, you listen.
So that was what got me back into it. And all my strategies have worked phenomenally well. They actually work better in this market than they do in traditional markets. And when I say better, I don’t mean, there are more trades or more frequent trades or anything like that. I mean that for the risk, the reward multiple is far greater in this market just due to the fact that the volatilities absolutely insane. So I’ve thrown my considerable, I’ve thrown everything at it. Everything, I’ve never been so bullish in an industry and it’s not just bitcoin, it’s not just cryptocurrency, it’s what I call crypto assets and the blockchain technology sphere. I see it as being one of the biggest advancements since the Internet. So I am very much behind it and enjoy it.

Mike Mortlock: That’s awesome. What a journey and you’re not an old man, so you’ve got more of the story to write. I’m looking forward to the memoirs if I’m still around. So Craig, for, for people who haven’t dipped their toe into crypto, I’m sure a lot of people have heard of bitcoin. What is crypto? What is blockchain, and what is the technology that is really sort of parcelled up in this currency? Is it just about buying rpgs on the dark web? I threw that one in there just to see how you’d-

Craig Cobb: That’s great. I love it. The first thing is the association with a lot of people is that if you don’t want to learn about it, you’ll just find the easiest reason not to. And that’s what the Silk Road, the drugs and all that sort of stuff, you know, the dark web, that’s where, that’s a very convenient way of effectively burying your head in the sand to what could be the biggest opportunity you’ll ever see in your entire lifetime. And for those people, that’s fine. I’m not here to try and change anybody’s views, I’m merely here to educate and to help you to understand it. So the question’s very valid one, what is cryptocurrency? What is blockchain? We’ll start there.
Cryptocurrency, by the virtue of its name is a currency, it’s a method of transacting. Now, bitcoin got to a stage where, and I’m not, I’m not talking about the speculative value here at all, I’m talking about the actual technology, what it is and what they’re trying to facilitate. Bitcoin got to a point where, it sort of ended last year, even early this year. It was quite expensive to transact. It was rather slow, they hadn’t built the network to deal with the amount of transactions that were taking place. So other other cryptocurrency started to step into its place. They could do, you know, 10 thousand transactions a second, that sort of thing. Really, really fast. Now bitcoin rolled out what was called the lightning network. The lightning network has brought the cost of transacting in bitcoin down to being nearly nothing.
So if you consider your bank right now, you go and use your bank card or you know, I mean the best example is now gone, which was the, they charge you $2 to take your money out from an ATM. What a scam that was. Bitcoin has now, you can transact with not just on these shores in this country, but think about if you want to send money from Australia to London for example, you’re going to get slugged with a bunch of fees for it to get there. Now with bitcoin, it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, it is still its value and you can withdraw it, you can use it, you can spend it however you like.
Now what it does is effectively captures on the blockchain. So the blockchain is like an online decentralized ledger. So think of it like this. When you go to the shops and you buy your groceries, you give them the money and then if it’s cash, for example, there is no record of the transaction other than the record that you get given, which is your receipt. And the record that the business gets given, which is their receipt for their taxes. So therefore that transaction has taken place and it is available now. Both of us can quite conveniently lose those receipts, and nothing ever happened.
On the blockchain, it never disappears. And the longer ago it happened, the more unhackable it actually is, because it goes in and then its layered over by more. And it’s not your name, it’s a code. Okay. Now I don’t want to get too, too complex because the technology side of, like if we talk about, yes, I like the BMW X five as opposed to the ML Mercedes. Well we talk about the car as the car, that’s the vehicle, but there’s a lot of pistons and whatnot that goes on within that car moving. We don’t care about that, we don’t need to care about that. All we care about this at all works. So coming back to bitcoin, each transaction is online. It’s on an online ledger. It’s there forever.

Mike Mortlock: And what about the anonymous nature of it, is that something that you think is pushing this technology forward? Is that something that people are looking for, to be able to transact anonymously or is it more to do with the freedom and the lack of taxes and checks and balances on it?

Craig Cobb: The anonymous, I struggle, with that word, being anonymous, I’ll just stick with that. Anonymity or whatever it is. There’s one word I can’t say. I think that that’s a bit of a myth to be absolutely honest. The reason being, if I go through an exchange, so I moved my Australian dollars into bitcoin, then send my bitcoin to a broker or platform, just the same as you would if you were gonna use common sector by shares. There is a very clear and distinctive pathway of that transaction. Then it goes into the market and, and it’s all linked. If they really want to find it, they can. So it’s not completely anonymous there. If I was to sort of give somebody, you know, $50 thousand and they gave me a wallet with an address, because your money is at an address. So it’s like a PO box, but it’s online. Nowadays they’ve got these little devices, like it’s pretty much like a little USB stick. You keep your crypto on there, therefore it’s safe. It can’t be hacked. It’s not online. And then you can put that in your safe at home. Very simple way of storing your crypto.
But yeah, aside from effectively really trying hard to avoid anybody knowing who you are, it’s not completely anonymous. If they want to find you, they’ll find you. There are some tokens out there that are anonymous completely. And they obviously do have their benefits for some people. When people think of completely anonymous, what they are typically leaning towards in my experience is bad things. Now people talk about money laundering, people talking about buying drugs.
People talk about buying rpgs in your case, but at the end of the day, the biggest currency for all of that is the US dollar. Where there are bad people, bad things will happen. The Internet is exactly the same. There’s all sorts of horrible, horrible, horrible thing things going on, on the Internet. Does that mean that the Internet is bad? No, it just means that it’s human nature. It’s like the human race. There are some bad things about it, but overwhelmingly it’s positive.

Mike Mortlock: And it wasn’t set up for negativity, it’s actually a technology that should benefit the way that we transact. Right?

Craig Cobb: It was set up basically because of the 2008 financial crisis. I mean, there’ll be a lot of your listeners here, I’m sure that are still coming back from that. We didn’t cop it so bad here in Australia because during that period of time we were pretty strong, A, banking regulation and B, the mining boom had come off but it hadn’t come right off. So we were still much more of a China backed, commodity forward nation as opposed to the UK, Europe and the US, were very much so a finance backed economy. So obviously they are the financial centres of the world and they were hit astronomically by that financial crisis.
Now, the trust that was lost, we see it to this day, the big bankers that made these decisions and put everybody effectively bankrupt or hurt them significantly, they’re off on their yachts. They just went, oh, that’s a bit of a bummer, isn’t it? No, I’m not going to jail. I’m not taking responsibility. It wasn’t my fault. Screw you. I’m going home. So the trust that was broken and the, they basically just discredited themselves, and Bitcoin was founded just to try and give people another option. And from there it’s gone above and beyond what anybody could have thought even passed the second Satoshi Nakamoto, who is maybe one person, maybe 10, who knows, an anonymous human being or a fictional human being. It’s gone a lot further. It was there born out of the mistrust for the bankers.

Mike Mortlock: Now when we compare crypto to property, firstly, can we, are there any sort of correlations other than the human element you can sort of over analyse, you can be too fearful of risk. It is something that we can consider as similar, with crypto and property, are they both basically things that we trade with a view to capital gain?

Craig Cobb: They’re similar definitely in the sense that they’re both investment vehicles, both investment tools, but that’s about where the similarity stops. With cryptocurrency, we do carry with us a large degree of risk due the volatility of this marketplace and the fact that it is a very, very new marketplace with property, we need a very relative speaking to crypto, we need a much larger sum of money. We are holding our positions in property for a considerably longer period of time in most cases, of course you can just flip it, move it on, do an auction. There are plenty of options where you can be in and out quickly, but never as quickly as what you can in crypto.
So what you’re looking at it is an investment vehicle in cryptocurrency, I’ll call it crypto assets because currency is just one form of that. Whereby you can take a small amount of money and turn it into a large amount of money. Obviously, there are a lot of things that needs to transpire for that to occur. But you don’t need to have such a huge amount of money.
So if I’m going to be going into property and I’m looking for a 30 percent on a million dollar investment, then you know, I’m looking at $300 thousand. Now I’m going to leverage that, but I probably still need in today’s market $200 to $300 to make that work. Then the construction costs on top, of course, we can borrow, we can leverage. The banks are a little bit tighter now. So for me to make $300 thousand I may need to use $300 thousand of my own money. So I’m getting 100 percent return on investment if I do well and get out, and let’s say that occurs over the period of a year. So that’s $300 thousand for a year. It’s a 100 percent return.
Compare that to cryptocurrency where it’s not uncommon to see times 10 on your money, times 100 on your money or even times 1000 on your money. So that’s where the difference is. If I put $10 thousand into a way into a blockchain based asset class in crypto asset space, my $10 thousand, which of course is nothing like the $300 thousand we’re talking about, well let’s make a comparable. Let’s say I put $30 thousand in and my tokens or my portfolio grows by a multiple of 10 over that period of the year. Well, that $30 thousand is now given me $300 thousand. So with a lot less I can have a lot more. Of course, with these massive upsides does also come larger risks. But I think that it levels out quite nice because the amount that you need or the amount that you can start with in crypto currency can be much, much smaller. Whereas with property you can’t really start that small.

Mike Mortlock: Yeah. And I guess it’s not one or the other. Right. So you could potentially diversify away from property with a smaller amount and potentially get the same returns. Obviously the risk is presumably higher, and I’m interested why you sort of move from general trading into bitcoin. Is it because of that extreme volatility and that potential upside, and how does that balance with the negativity of investing in something that is as volatile as bitcoin has been?

Craig Cobb: Yeah. Look, great question. I mean there’s two sides to that. First of all, I mean, yes, I think that it’s wise for anybody that have a balanced portfolio and crypto assets, if that is something that you’re interested in, would be a wise thing to consider. Absolutely. You know, you got to speak to your financial advisor who will tell you that you’re mad, because you know, people don’t want to be, they don’t want to have to learn things. Like I said before, it’s very easy to stick your head in the sand and miss everything. If you want to be at the forefront of a new industry and really have those massive gains then you need to do your own research. It does come down to you. So I think about portfolio it’s a very good idea no matter what asset class we’re talking about.
As far as why am I trading crypto now as opposed to traditional markets. It really is just the volatility, Mike. In cryptocurrency, I mean I’m looking right now at my chart and I mean I’m looking at, you know, Neo’s up four percent. I’m an Aero’s up six and a half percent and this is, this is, you know, we only just. This is a really slow day. This is a really, really, really slow day. Now if I was trading say dollar yen for example, if I got a three percent move on the day, that was a big move. So that’s sort of saying, you know, my risk multiple, so let’s say my risk multiple is $5 thousand for a trade. Then in traditional markets, my one to one, so my risk multiplied by one would be double.
So my $5 thousand risk is $5 thousand reward. That’s a risk of multiple to reward multiple of one to one. Now if I was to say take that in traditional markets and be happy with my one to one, I.e. risk $5 thousand to make $5 thousand. In cryptocurrency, it’s more than likely and very, very common to take that $5 thousand and turn that into 25, 35, 45, $50 thousand. So from a trading perspective, the movement of the market is significantly greater. The volatility is greater. The risk, I manage the risk. So, I choose how much I risk, the market just chooses how far it moves and because I can control my risk and the market moves a lot further, my potential upside reward is significantly increased while my downside is still managed the same as it would be in traditional markets.

Mike Mortlock: And you’re managing that by putting in stops, right? And because of the liquidity, let’s say you’ve bought a property in a mining town and you can just see that it’s absolutely tanking because you know, everyone’s leaving, you can put in a stop to some degree in that, you can put it on the market, but it might take six weeks for you to get that and already you’ve lost quite a bit. Whereas you can put a stop in for a particular day, right? Is that how you manage that potential downside risk in in a way that takes out that huge downside volatility but still exposes you to that upside volatility?

Craig Cobb: Yeah, absolutely. I use stop losses. I use target orders as well. So I can put an order in so that if it comes down to that point, it will take me out automatically. Now, you also have to be a little bit careful because it is still a very new market. If I’m trading on larger, if you’re looking at one or $200 a trade, you can kind of cover the top 100. All right? If you’re talking about multiples of $5, $6 thousand a trade and you’re looking at leverage, of course you’re looking at a much bigger position, then of course you will be looking to probably stay with within the top 20. But I mean that’s, that’s sort of what I teach through my education series and what not, is to help people to understand why, based on your account size, you do need to have some additional risk areas in place. But the beauty of it is, Mike, is that whether the market goes up or the market goes down, I can make money. If I’m an investor, and this is a good point to make actually, if you’re an investor in crypto, you want to find a good project to buy into and you might just sort of sit back and do not a great deal, kind of like you do with stocks, but maybe bring that timeframe forward little to know where it might be a three year plan for a foreign equity, for example. You might be looking at a, you know, six to 12 months for a crypto to then refresh revise and review.
Now, if you’re going to be investing, well then obviously we need a bull market. We can only make money as the market goes up. If I’m a trader, I can make money whether the market goes up or down. Now if I combine both of those to be an investor and a trader, I can invest in the long-term growth of this very new emerging market, and I can also trade the momentum throughout that period. And I think what I’ve seen a lot of across the board is saying that even a turkey can fly in a hurricane. As the markets go through the roof, everybody’s happy, everyone’s an expert. Everyone is really, really fantastic and everyone’s an expert, right? When the markets fall, everyone’s crying, they’re screaming from the rooftops. I will say that as far as the way it moves, there’s very little institutional money in there. So it does go wild. And it will solidify and have more of a Nasdaq type feel to it eventually once this market matures. But for the time being the volatility’s there and with that volatility comes opportunity.
My sort of take on it is this, yes everybody does very well when the market goes up because it’s really, really easy. There’s a lot of people out there that are flogging things to, they’re not going to work in traditional markets and they’re not going to work when this market does level out. I give people the opportunity to make money whether it goes up or down.

Mike Mortlock: And case in point, it’d be a different sort of conversation for us to have at the peak of bitcoin, a cursory Google of bitcoin shows that, you know, we’ve fallen back quite a bit. We’re roughly around $10 thousand at the moment and we got as high as 22, correct me if I’m wrong. There’s been a lot of talk about the bubble and people sort of that haven’t invested rubbing their hands together with the idea that the people spruiking it at the barbecues are gonna lose their potential Lamborghini. What’s happening with bitcoin in the market? Is this a bubble? Can you still make money in a bubble? And obviously I’m guessing that you’ve been investing all the way through the peak and you’re still existing on the downside and you’re still making money. And can you talk us through how that’s possible?

Craig Cobb: Yeah, absolutely. So yes, you’re right, we got up. So, you know, we approached $20 thousand US dollars, so that gets us what, 25, 26 Aussie, at the peaks of its run up. Now there were some very, very tell-tale signs up around those highs that we would see a pullback and I can remember as I was commentating and doing my videos and putting my content out there and what not, people that hadn’t learned how I trade and done my programs and whatnot, I was saying it’ll pull back and you know, $6 thousand’s probably a reasonable place for it to happen. And this is when it’s up near $20 thousand US, and people are saying you’re mad, you’re an idiot, you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about, blah blah. Like I said, everybody’s an expert when it’s going up.
It’s because I’ve been there, I’ve done that. I’ve been in the markets longer than six months, longer than two years, I’ve been in the market for a very, very long time, for my lifespan, right? A considerable part of my life has been spent trading. So from my perspective, this is a market. I know what markets do. Did I sell bitcoin? Did I exit up at around those tops. Yeah, there was some very clear, for me and the people that I’ve taught, it was obvious. It was, this is silly. This is absolutely silly. It will not be sustained. This market will fall back, and it did, and it has at the moment we are in a consolidating fit period, but we might go lower.
I do daily analysis and whatnot, but I don’t have a crystal ball. And on my podcast each day, the Trader Cobb Crypto Show, you’ve got access to see what I’m saying each day and bringing bits of news and whatnot. But the reason I’m not concerned about it right now is because I can make money either direction as a trader. But what I’m saying, if you take yourself out of the noise, and you’ve heard this from a lot of people as well, Mike, the idea of how do you take a business from turning over 2 million to 200 million, you take yourself out of the business and you start working on the business. People get caught up in the noise and all the rubbish that’s being said, it’s not knowledgeable rubbish. It’s just noise. It’s an echo chamber of rubbish.
Now, I try and focus on what is actually occurring. What is actually occurring is that the space is moving forward in leaps and bounds. We are seeing some massive traditional business players moving into the space and becoming a champion for blockchain technology. We’re seeing new businesses coming in that have had a lot of prior experience. We’re seeing partnerships. We’re seeing big institutional funds. I know, not directly, but indirectly, I’ve been in several talks with some sovereign wealth funds looking to enter into the space, they start at $200 million. That’s they’re lowest investment. So as far as giving you the, I’m outside of the noise and looking down on what’s happening. I am very, very, very clear as to what occurs and if you’ve ever seen an emerging market and what it does and what it goes through and if you studied them, you’ll see some very, very close similarities to the Internet. Everyone back then said it wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t happen. It’s a load of rubbish. It’s never gonna work. Well look at us now. And that’s why I say, people can bury their heads in the sand and possibly missed out on the biggest potential opportunity that is right in front of their nose right now.

Mike Mortlock: I think you’re right with the Internet comparison. I remember it came to my local library and I went down there with a couple of URLs I’d written down from a cricket magazine, I think it was, and went to kookaburra.com.au and then I thought, oh, what’s next? There was no google. There’s no way to sort of navigate. And I thought, oh look, this is a little bit shit. I’m not sure this is going to take off, but look at where we are now. Obviously I got that one a little bit wrong. I’m interested in the way that you trade a trade, traders talk about trading the news, so something will happen, there’ll be an announcement and you can basically trade the market just based on that. There are people that look at the fundamentals, the candlesticks, the fib sequences and all that sort of stuff. Can you explain some of these sort of basics and how you actually apply that to make money in crypto?

Craig Cobb: Yeah, certainly. I’m a technical trader, when it comes to trading not investing. They’re two different things. Investing is obviously doing the research on the projects teams, the progress, where they’re going, what they’re doing. That’s one’s kettle of fish. The trading side, which is the stuff that I teach in my programs is that it’s down to technical analysis. I use written checklists, not just for the actual strategy. So, you know, I’ll go through and go is there an uptrend, tick, is there this. I literally go through a list of the essential rules, and you’ve got to tick off all those essential rules and then they’ll be bonus rules so I can try and find the best of the best before I place my order. Because at the end of the day, it’s my money. I’m not going to take a trade is for the sake of it, you know, I’m taking a trade, I want to try and find the best.
My process is a process of elimination. Whenever I’m doing my daily scan with my members, I’m looking for reasons to not take the trade. Whereas most people looking for reasons to take a trade, because they want to have that excitement. They want to have that feeling like, you know, if someone’s gambling, they like that feeling of having the opportunity. I look at it purely from an objective point of view. There are no grey areas. I’m looking for reasons not to take trades. I’m a trend follower, so I’m not looking to do anything other than trade the chunk in the middle. So I’m not looking to pick the top. I’m not looking to pick the bottom. I am not a hero. I do not need the accolades. I do not care. My job is to pick the chunk in the middle and to make as much money from that chunk in the middle as possible, exit before the top wherever that may be and just be safe when it is falling. Find that trend and trade short when the opportunities arise. It is a very structured, straightforward process. It’s about repetition, it’s about practice, it’s about repetition, it’s about practice. Did I just repeat myself?

Mike Mortlock: Yeah you did but I get the point. So a good day for you could actually be turning down what you saw as maybe 10 or 15 potential opportunities for trades because they haven’t met your metrics.

Craig Cobb: Absolutely. For example, today I have one, two, three, four, five. I’ve got five on my list right in front of me right here. I took one trade on, what’s today, Thursday, on Monday. That trade is in very good profit. It is also a really, really good hedge against my portfolio right now. If the market does decide to fall further, I’m safe in the knowledge that I have a good short that will help to hedge that position. I’ve locked in profit on that trade. What else do I need to really do this week? With trading, you know, if we’re used to traditional working, you know, you give your time for your money and that’s how we work. With trading it might take me 15 minutes to find, assess, do my whole structure, my entire morning routine to put that trade on. Now whether that trade makes me $5 or $5 million, the amount of time it took was exactly the same. It’s just relative to your account size. So money is not directly linked to time when you’re trading. It’s directly linked to outcomes.

Mike Mortlock: Yeah. Interesting. And I guess it’s a levelling thing, isn’t it? Because I mean, there might be a certain property market where the houses are all $5 million and you could potentially do a better return than if you’re buying in a market where the houses are all, you know, $300 thousand, but you can’t access it. But with crypto it’s all the same. It’s just how much you’re wanting to put behind it.

Craig Cobb: You are as good as you wish to be.

Mike Mortlock: Yeah. Wow. And I’m interested in I guess how people get started, if there are people listening that want to sort of stick their toe in the water. I’m interested in how many successful full time traders there are. I’m guessing that there are a lot of people that are just jumping in because money’s burning a hole in their pocket. How successful can people be? What sort of knowledge do they need to start with, and how do you help people get involved in crypto and get positive outcomes?

Craig Cobb: Yeah. So how successful can people be? Well, as successful as they wish to be. As with any industry, it’s you that makes a success. It’s not anything else. It’s up to you ultimately. I have seen… The crazy thing about this space is this, I know guys that took $150 thousand and now they’re worth $60 million in 24 months. I mean, you try and find any other market in the world where that is possible and has happened plenty. So as far as the variable of monetary success, because I don’t see, monetary success in this space doesn’t necessarily mean they’re successful. Because luck played a big part for a lot of people. Being successful is something that you can replicate and it’s yours and you own it and you can just keep on doing it.
Now, this is where I’m finding that my educational pieces have taken off so well. There’s a lot of people that have made money in that run up, but they don’t know what to do now, and because I’ve got years of experience trading, investing and just being in that space, I’m able to help these people to not only keep their money, because that’s the hardest thing. Once you make your money, you gotta keep it. I’m helping them to also multiply that and teaching the real life skills as far as becoming somebody who knows how to manage money.
So the way to get started, I mean, the easiest way for people to sort of dip their toe in the water, to be completely honest with you is to just get started. And to get started, I’ve got the Trader Cobb Crypto Show, you can listen to the podcast, I do it daily. If you want to follow me on twitter, I’m @tradercobb. I put posts up there, I’m on Facebook, Craig Cobb and Trader Cobb, the business page. So there’s videos that goes out every single day. I put a huge amount of free content out. A massive amount of free, I’m basically a content churning machine, and the idea is that, I just got sick of seeing all the rubbish out there. I know that there are people that want to enter this space, but they haven’t got a voice they can trust, a voice of reason and somebody who actually comes from a bit of a structured background. I am being that person in the space and you can view it on the website as well as plenty of content on my website tradercobb.com
Aside from that, if you do want to actually get started, I do have educational programs with lifetime memberships which will help you to A, show you how to, first of all, buy your very first cryptocurrency, how to move it across to the exchanges, what routines you need, all the way through to the written checklist strategies and following on with daily commentaries and whatnot. So, for me to tell you everything that I do, it’d be hard. Effectively, if people would want to start to plug into the free stuff, hit me on my socials, hit me on the podcast, go to tradercobb.com. You’ll see what I do, and then it’s just a matter of, take your time. There’s a lot of people rushing in this space. When have you ever made a good decision when you’re in a rush, do you know what I mean? When have you ever made a good decision when you’re emotional? Don’t let the fear of missing out take you away from what your objective is. You need to plan what you want and then slowly go about getting it. This space is very, very fast. Don’t get whipped up in it. Take advantage of it, and the only way you can do that is by being clear on what you want on your objectives, and then educating yourself around those outcomes and practicing. That’s really it.

Mike Mortlock: Awesome, and there’s some great resources out there. You are absolutely a content machine. I can testament to that. Now, Craig, I guess we’re just a bit weary of the of the time. We want to try and wrap this up. I’m interested in, I guess people are going to be annoyed unless I asked you the crystal ball question about what’s happening on the technology side and what’s the market going to do and, and maybe if you can just sort of wrap us up with your best piece of advice in this space.

Craig Cobb: Yeah, sure. The space itself, it’s going from strength to strength. The technology is growing faster than ever. You can choose to read the negative stuff or you can choose to, like I said, take yourself out of the noise and focus on what is, and what is happening right now is that we’re saying the biggest brain drain out of Silicon Valley in the history of brain drain since the Internet. So we are seeing the best players, the best brains, the best minds, in technology and this sort of area of advanced technology, being drained into blockchain. It is growing fast.
There are some concerns around people, you know, again, looking for another reason to stay away. People are saying, well, hang on, the energy consumption of the mining that is required for these currencies to take place. It’s going to wreck the world. Yes, it will do it’s current rate. But so, we’re using fossil fuels. The difference is, is that the people that are in the blockchain technology, are young, smart, and they actually want to see change, because we are the ones that see what these old thinking has done. They’re wrecking the world and we know we can’t continue on it.
So you’ve got two things. You’ve got the brightest brains in the world coming together in one meeting spot. They want to make this work and guess what? Those brains also want to see the world move forward and away from an absolute 100 percent, we will kill ourselves model. So you put these two things together, we will find outcomes. So the technology is well placed to continue its advancements.
The market is still very young. It is not the end, it is the beginning. The total market capitalization across all of the crypto right now sits at about $350 billion. To give you some perspective there, apple is worth $880 billion by itself. One company. Now if you consider the Nasdaq, which is essentially the tech index. It’s not the global tech index, but it’s where a lot of global companies list on the Nasdaq. The Nasdaq last time I looked at was about 8.8 trillion. Now the Nasdaq didn’t exist. Remember that. The Nasdaq is more or less a result of what’s gone on with the dot com, the technology boom. If we can get anywhere near that level, you can do the math. From 350 billion to 3.5 trillion. That’s a multiple of 10. We’ve got a long way to go.

Mike Mortlock: And I guess there’s a lot of people thinking that the ship has sailed. We’ve seen the boom of bitcoin, and interesting to hear you say, you know, don’t rush in, but you see the opportunity’s there for, we’re talking potentially decades or longer maybe.

Craig Cobb: This is a new industry. Will the Internet disappear? No. This is an advancement of the Internet.

Mike Mortlock: Awesome. Alright. Craig, very much thank you for your time. It’s been very illuminating and I encourage people if they’re interested to have a look at your content. Thanks very much for your time and all the best.

Craig Cobb: Mike, thank you very much for having me on. I hope this has been a benefit for everybody listening. Thank you.

Mike Mortlock: It’s been a pleasure. Cheers.