If you want to get your heart racing, you can:

Lean in for a kiss. Enter a high-speed chase. Steal batteries from CVS. Strike matches. Fight the cat. Doxx yourself. Shave your head. Grab a cop’s gun. Chop up a line. Play another hand of blackjack. Cause a total production outage. Pull the rip cord… or trade with 50x leverage.

There’s nothing quite like leverage trading. Trading itself is the single most potentially lucrative activity available to the common man. Old or young - wise or dumb - the market doesn’t care so long as you’re right. And the market makes it easy for you: all you need is a few dollars and an Internet connection.

Think you can predict the future? Great. You’ll be handsomely rewarded for your foresight.

I’ve had good trading days, and bad trading days. And one day I had a VERY bad trading day.

So I stopped trading. At least, for a week or so. This wasn’t my first big loss, but this was the first time I spent a couple weeks thinking about a loss. It wasn’t the money being gone that hurt. It was the realization that I had been making the same mistakes for a very long time. I concluded that I had two major issues.

1. I was addicted to manually monitoring the market.

   a. I often missed out on conversations, coding-time, reading-time, and face-time because I was too busy watching GMX (my perp DEX of choice) to see whether my retarded 50x-leveraged ETH short position was going to get liquidated soon or not.

   b. I often overtraded when I should’ve let my dry powder sit. When you look at a chart for long enough you start to hallucinate opportunities. Little demons flood your thoughts and make it feel like there is another landslide brewing… fake angels tell you that another stairway to heaven is being built.

2. For about 6 hours each day, I was asleep and I could not monitor GMX.

   a. I was often neglecting sleep to trade. Which lead to worse trading behavior… which lead to more losses… which lead to more trading… which lead to less sleep… which lead to more losses… et cetera.

   b. Often, when I would sleep, I would wake up to either a liquidation or a missed opportunity to cash out bigly.

Sub-issue 2b was the real killer. And I started to notice that it was a relatively common issue on Twitter:

During my week of financial inactivity I also realized that “not trading” was not an option. While I am well-off, I know that not taking risks with your capital is an anathema to one’s chance at both lasting material and spiritual wealth. As they say - many men die at age 25 and are buried at 75… and I refuse to die. We live in a risk society, and you must embrace it.

To quote a recent piece written by the venerable Charlotte Fang (金光 World Prince):

If you aren't aggressively pursuing make it plays, if you are content waging or in school towards that, you are never going to make it. Wasting away in school or waging instead of maximizing exposure to valuable equity is an immense opportunity cost you can’t afford to leave on the table.

(1) Risk aversion is the ceiling of the middle class.

(2) The wealth gap is growing insurmountably,

(3) At a rate wages are not.

(4) USD is an inflationary shitcoin.

$2MM net worth will be middle class in 5 years. If you've not already made it, this is your only chance to cross over the chasm.

There is no safe path: waging is slow death, you are in danger. You're in danger. You are in d—

Sprinkle in the approaching risk that autonomous software agents will soon take your wagee career too, and you’ll realize you’re being robbed of your wolf-nature. Much like the playful childhood gesture of your father pretending to take your nose, but this time that temporary moment of panic is unending. Your nose really is gone. For your entire life it has felt like you’ve been limping toward a promised future of absolute human freedom - that future has been cancelled.

The oriflamme has been raised. The crystals have shattered and disintegrated. The lifestream has evaporated. The herds of deer have died off, and all of the sudden you find yourself on the wrong end of the Lotka–Volterra equations.

…Your domestication began several millennia ago, and it finds its completion here. Overnight you’ve been forced into doggy-nature. Now, will you die a mangy street mutt after a long and torturous stray-life? Or will you be lucky enough to be a pillow-puppy at the Hotel For Dogs?

So, inspired by my predicament and some site-reliability tooling like PagerDuty, OpsGenie, Prometheus, and DataDog - I set out to create a tool to send me an email or text message when the net-value of my position hit a certain threshold (at first, this was only on upwards movement, hence “Upalert”).

The idea was that no matter whether I was sleeping, in a flow state, at the gym, etc - I could still have someone… something… tracking my positions and telling me when it was time to make moves.

The result is UPALERT. (the site is upalert.xyz)

It’s SRE meets trading; if I get woken up for critical Kubernetes issues, why not get woken up for critical price movements?

UPALERT is a Chrome extension ( + API) for position monitoring/alerting on perp DEXs.

For now, UPALERT works exclusively with GMX, but there are other perp DEXs on the roadmap.

The team is as follows:

1. Me (main dev, CEO, comms chief, etc)

2. ChatGPT (chief FE dev, staff backend dev)

3. GitHub Copilot (associate FE dev, senior backend dev)

4. A few contractors for VFX/Music (thank you @KvadraSophia)

Use Case Study:

Let’s do a mini case study on where UPALERT adds value for the typical trader:

The typical casual trader will do something like the following when opening a position:

1. Open a position (in this case, a BTC/USD short)

2. Create a stop loss at -50% to prevent a total loss.

3. Create a stop gain at +100% to prevent losing out of out-sized gains.

This isn’t the worst approach, but there are issues with it:

1. Setting a 100% stop gain puts a cap on your risk-exposure. You literally cannot afford to take an 100% gain when the max gain from a swing is could be 2x, or even 10x that. Wealth is synthesized via a mixture of high-leverage and supertall candles. Wealth = windfalls.

2. Setting a 50% stop loss, especially if your liquidation price is significantly below this threshold, minimizes your loss while also excluding you from any possible gains until you can open another position.

3. Your stop-losses are public information via the GMX OrderBookReader contract, and it is very likely that you will be hunted or factored into someone’s algo strategy.

4. You are missing out on at least one additional OODA loop when you set up automatic stop-losses/stop-gains. You are not giving yourself a chance to examine charts, volume, sentiment, hype, etc before closing a trade. Your situational awareness at the moment of trade execution is null.

What UPALERT ultimately does is prompt a new OODA loop at a user-set threshold. For those of you who aren’t in the know, an OODA loop looks like so:

You have 4 basic steps (as applied to trading):

1. Observation: Look at some charts, tweets, other info-sources.

2. Orientation: Interpret/synthesize the information from aforementioned sources.

3. Decision: Figure out if your trading thesis is still valid given the current information.

4. Action: Close your trade, add collateral, open another trade, etc.

Ultimately trading is just repeating this cycle over and over again until you’re rich or broke. Chart-watchers are constantly doing this loop throughout the day, and frankly I think that without a decent amount of discipline that sort of hyperfixation results in overtrading, which results in losses. Think of all of the broke-ass dudes you know with 4 monitor setups.

So, to go back to our casual trader example. Here it is with UPALERT added to the equation:

1. Open a position (in this case, a BTC/USD short)

2. Create a gain notification at +25%

3. Create a loss notification at -25%

Here, the trader will be prompted by UPALERT at the user-set thresholds, and will prompt an OODA loop. Maybe it seems like the market is dumping… fine, keep your position. Or maybe, it seems like you got a lucky down-swing, but volume is picking back up and the price is ascending… maybe you should pull the plug and switch to a net-long position. With UPALERT you can make these decisions in the moment that they matter, instead of constantly context-switching between trading and whatever else you do in life.

Constant chart-watching is dead. Get your life back with UPALERT.

Anticipated Q/A:

Q: Will there be a token?

A:

Q: How is this different from price alerts offered by CEXs and other sites?

A: I would say the primary differences are:

1. GMX-specific Pricing Information: GMX uses the median price of pairs on Binance, Bitfinex and Coinbase + Chainlink for calculating position values. UPALERT uses the same price feed for triggering alerts.

2. USD-focused Alerting: The year is 2023, and if you’re anyone (except my dad, who denominates everything in ETH), you still talk about things in dollars - that includes your positions. UPALERT allows you to send alerts when the value of your position on GMX is above and/or below a certain USD value, as opposed to having to do the mental work of calculating what your position would be worth given the current price of a given crypto pair + leverage.

3. Ergonomics: UPALERT is integrated into the frontend of GMX via the Chrome Extension, so the act of opening your position and creating an alert are unified. You click the “Long” or “Short” button, approve both MetaMask transactions, and you’re set.

DISCLAIMER: NONE OF THIS IS FINANCIAL ADVICE.

If you want to get additional updates on UPALERT and the other stuff I’m working on, click subscribe :)