About Me
Although I began my career in IT sales, I fell in love with the idea of investing when I bought my first gold stock and started experimenting with bitcoin in 2015. Having grown up watching my mom day trade futures and options, the financial markets have always held a certain appeal.
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In 2016, I joined The Dollar Vigilante, where I spent nearly 5 years covering gold stocks and cryptocurrencies. During this period, I performed due diligence on small-cap gold exploration companies on behalf of accredited investors.
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The TDV team were early adopters of crypto, recommending bitcoin at $3 in 2011 and Ethereum at $2 in 2016. I was tasked with reviewing Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) during the 2017 bull market, which gave me a front row seat to the formation of an entirely new asset class. I helped launch a dedicated crypto newsletter in 2019.
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In May 2021, I called the top in the crypto bull market and made my exit from the business to focus on trading. My trading newsletter draws on my 8 years of accumulated experience, plus my talent for story telling and grasp of history and economics. I also run managed accounts (F&F), consult with hedge funds and family offices, and provide due diligence on individual stocks.
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I hold an MBA from the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras and a Bachelors in Biotechnology from Anna University. I live in Dubai with my wife.
The Story of Kashyap Sriram Research
On May 28, 2021, I quit my job at The Dollar Vigilante, bidding adieu to 5000 subscribers. The same day, I received offers to begin working on three different newsletters. TDV subscribers who were interested in my coverage of gold miners migrated over to the two resource newsletters at Louis James LLC, while those who liked my broader coverage of shipping, oil & gas, bitcoin miners, and other niches followed me over to Against All Odds Research. While my work at Louis James LLC is under a paywall (it is their IP), you can find past issues of the AAO newsletter under publications.
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By this point in my career, I had worked on nearly a dozen different publications, starting with Insurance Cognizance, a newsletter covering the global insurance industry during my days in IT sales, to Wealth Insight, India’s leading stock market magazine, during my days as a rookie equity analyst in India, leading up to AAO Research, a newsletter focused on fundamentals + trend following.
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In February 2022, I teamed up with Run with Bitcoin and spent a few weeks backpacking across the beautiful island nation of Sri Lanka. That’s when the entrepreneurial urge really kicked in.
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I wanted to make the change from being an analyst and investor to being a trader. Thus, Kashyap Sriram Research was born.
As luck would have it, the market turned just as I started switching styles. The Fed began to hike rates in earnest on March 16, crashing the entire global economy in the process.
It was trial by fire. 2022 was a down year for me but as I reflect on my trading journey, I’m glad I started out during a bear market. That experience really taught me the difference between being an analyst and being a trader. As an analyst, I had to get the fundamentals right. As a trader, I only got paid if I made money.
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Trying to pick stocks based on fundamentals while the market went straight down was a humbling experience. It taught me risk management and the importance of position sizing and using stop losses.
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Trading through the manic depressive 2022 bear market, followed by the wildly euphoric AI bubble market, has been like getting an MBA – 7 years of a complete business cycle experience compressed into a 2-year program.
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My current venture is the culmination of this long journey towards becoming a consistently profitable trader. It is easy to make money in a particular environment that caters to one’s expertise. Being a crypto investor during the 2020-21 bull market, you’re guaranteed to make money. That didn’t hold true during the 2022-23 bear market. Trading across sectors, across asset classes, and being disciplined about risk management is the key to making money in the long run, under all market conditions.
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Ed Thorp’s book A Man for All Markets is an inspiration. Ed Thorp was a mathematician who inspired the movie 21 and founded a hedge fund that used a version of the Black-Scholes option pricing model to trade warrants. His strategies were neutral to market direction, meaning he made money in bull markets and bear markets alike. That’s very tough to do as a discretionary trader (my style). However, I play good defense in tough markets and know when to press.
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New subscribers: be sure to read the first article on My Trading Style.
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Simple buy/sell recommendations don’t capture the essence of trading. It is not about having good ideas, though having good trade ideas is necessary. It is not about having a high win rate. My win rate is an irrelevant metric.
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What really matters is how I play the game. How do I determine gross exposure? How do I size positions? How do I manage the trade once I have a position on? How do I determine where to set my stop loss? When do I pre-maturely exit a winning trade, and when do I press? How to fight FOMO?
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Trading is a way of life.
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Trade ideas are abundant. Taking them and converting them into a consistently profitable return stream while living a stress-free life – now that’s the holy grail.
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A client asked me how is it that I’m smiling all the time. Traders are supposed to be a grumpy, angry bunch. The stereotypical trader in old movies breaks phone receivers, yells at everyone, pounds hard liquor at lunch and never gets a good night’s sleep.
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I have a genetic predisposition to high blood pressure. I developed a style that lets me go to bed every night with a smile on my face, no matter what happens to the day’s P&L. That’s only possible because of my discipline, risk management, and the insane hours of work I put in. There’s always a bull market somewhere, as the saying goes. I cast a wide net so I can find it – whether it’s LNG stocks, Chinese tech, small cap gold explorers or agricultural commodities, I am good at spotting opportunities across sectors and asset classes.
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It took me a long time to figure this out, but this is really the key to being consistently profitable regardless of market conditions.
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