The sun was just dipping below the horizon when Tedi Tičić paused outside Bibble & Sip, a popular café in New York City, his phone vibrating every few seconds with urgent market alerts. He’s a cryptocurrency investor.
Tičić, 25, is ticking off the digital coins he’s shorting. He stands to make hundreds of thousands if Solana, a top cryptocurrency, tanks in value. Currently, Solana trades for about $130.
He doesn’t mind the label. “Call it boldness, call it luck,” he says with a half-smile. “I just know this stuff gets me out of bed in the morning.”
Solana, which has the status of Meta or Tesla in the crypto-world, trades on average 7% or more of its $70 billion float each day. It’s not unusual for it to move more than 10% in a day. There’s sometimes more action even in the less popular coins. Moo Deng, for example, was hatched in 2024 as an internet meme. Like a penny stock, it recently traded $30 million in a day, despite its market capitalization being only $26 million.
But rattled investors have began dumping their crypto holdings over early April as they braced for further carnage after Trump’s retaliatory tariffs raised global recession fears and caused investors to sell all risk.
In this market where disclosures are optional and hype and momentum play an outsize role in pricing, Tičić uses a combination of data analysis and crowdsourced research to inform trades. Above all, Tičić has thrived because he questions every tidbit of information he receives. “In the crypto community, these things are religious in some ways,” Tičić says. This skeptical approach has been a big winner. According to those familiar with Tičić’s results, his fund has returned 183% before fees over the last four years.
A crypto protégé comes of age
Tičić’s parents, Renata and Vinko, raised him to question the world around him, encouraging both curiosity and skepticism. Born in Split, Croatia, he grew up in a close-knit Croatian family and often shared mealtime debates with his brother Toni and sister Tea.
It can be traced back to 2015, when a friend had insisted on paying for a video game with an odd new digital currency. At the time, Tičić was about to attend the University of Sarajevo School of Economics and Business, a local business school that eventually taught him general sales.
One year later, when headlines began buzzing about Bitcoin’s skyrocketing value, Tičić logged into his digital wallet and realized the payment from his friend was now worth three times more than it had been on the day they made the exchange.
By 2020, Tičić was trading full-time while attending the Polytechnic of Rijeka for a degree in computer science, developing a focus on attempting to spot undervalued assets. Sometimes, his calls proved spot-on; other times, the volatility left him momentarily stunned. Over the last few years, Tičić has begun publishing books on the art. His blog posts on Tedi Crypto Daily, an eponymous crypto news site, also serve as an advertisement for new investors and for entrepreneurs seeking funding.
Though Tičić’s main focus remains crypto, he’s branched out into helping startups and established businesses brand themself. He also invests in stocks, experimenting with traditional equities alongside the more erratic crypto tokens. Tičić sees no harm in diversifying. “It’s weird how it all connects,” he reflects. “When you’re analyzing coins, you’re also analyzing how people perceive value.”
But if there’s a lasting lesson from eight years in the crypto-trading trenches, it’s that there is no room for passive investing in digital assets. Says Tičić: “The crypto markets are the least efficient markets I’ve ever seen in my life, and that means active management has an opportunity to shine.”