Oil & Crypto Trader Jonah van Bourg: Altcoins Going to Zero, Bitcoin Bull Move Is Just Getting Started, and Oil Vol Is Overpriced

Speaker 0: Forward guidance is brought to you by VanEck, a global leader in asset management since 1955. You'll be hearing more about a VanEck ETF later on. But for now, let's get into today's interview. Very pleased to welcome to forward guidance, Jonah Van Borde, a macro trader who has lots of experience trading commodities, volatility, and crypto at the highest level. Jonah, great to have you here.

Just tell the audience a little bit about your background. How did you get into trading commodities? Thank

Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me on the show, Jack. I I really appreciate it. I love I love your show, and I'm honored to be a guest. So I graduated in 2007 and started at Lehman Brothers. Really awesome first job, to kinda pick the short straw there.

I picked the hot desk, CDS trading, credit default swaps. And then when Lehman blew up, I sort of saw the eye of that particular storm. So after getting kinda tossed around, finance for a while, I ended up in, oil trading just by happenstance. A connection of mine was looking for somebody with my skills to be sort of the junior trader on the oil trading desk at Goldman Sachs. And I ended up, doing that for 4 years, and then I got poached by Vitol, which is the world's largest oil trading company, shortly thereafter in London.

And I I worked there, for 7 years. At which point, crypto called. Not to bore your listeners too much with my career, but I was I was sort of an oil options trader at Vitol. I focused on systematic trading, oil just sort of listed derivatives options, a way to get leverage by buying and selling insurance on the price of oil. And then through that, I got some exposure to physical oil trading as well and some my hands on some physical cargoes as well.

Super exciting. Ultimately, though, when crypto started to look like a commodity in 2021 and an opportunity came along to run an entire trading business, it was pretty exciting for me. So I went and took it. That's that's how I ended up running trading at Cumberland, which is DRW's cryptocurrency arm.

Speaker 0: And when you said crypto was Bitcoin was performing like a commodity in 2021, what did you mean?

Speaker 1: So a commodity in and of itself, it can be useful if it's a refined commodity like gasoline, or it can be completely useless like crude oil. You know, it sometimes like, who who uses crude oil except a refinery to turn it into something useful? So to me, I looked at a commodity like ETH, and I thought, alright. In and of itself, this token is worthless. But if you refine it by basically buying some of it and spending a bit of it as gas to, you know, basically gain access to certificate of authenticity, like, you know, that basically proves ownership of your your digital goods and an

You know, you hey. You you can't get a a yield bearing dollarized instrument, but you can maybe access, you know, a yield bearing stream of income and, you know, you live somewhere outside of the United States. Like, to me, it was like, okay, this is a commodity. You buy it or mine it at the time, ETH ETH was proof of work. You refine it, I.