In another reality, Bill Noble would be just another guy in a suit behind a big desk at the Fed or the SEC, probably murmuring negative incantations l
In another reality, Bill Noble would be just another guy in a suit behind a big desk at the Fed or the SEC, probably murmuring negative incantations like “crypto is bad.”
He’s certainly got the track record for it: JP Morgan, UBS, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs. But that’s Noble in an evil mirror dimension. In our world, he is a true crypto guy, talking to me in a t-shirt with bicycles in the back of the room. He turned from the Dark Side and joined the rebels.
He is known for his popular YouTube podcasts and TV appearances. Currently, he is a senior market analyst at Token Metrics.
Wall Street career
While studying economics (1987–1991) at Rutgers University in New Jersey, he managed to wangle one of only two sought-after internships at the time at JP Morgan’s forex desk on Wall Street. Noble started off when trading technology was primitive and lots of analysis was done by hand on paper. In August 1990, he was put in charge of the desk, while everyone went on holiday, “‘Cos nothing happens in August, let the kid fill in.” Then Iraq invaded Kuwait, and all sorts of craziness broke out in the markets.
“The price volatility seemed so extreme to me. I had no idea how anyone kept track of this. So, I went to the technical analyst who was attached to the currency unit. I said, ‘I bet everybody comes to you looking for help trying to figure this out.’”
“He goes, ‘Actually, no one does.’ So, he gave me John Murphy’s chart book [Charting Made Easy] and took me out for sushi. And I was off to the races from there using charts.”
During his years of progression through the conventional Wall Street milieu, he became an expert technical analyst, which he combined with writing reports on different markets. During crashes and Black Swan events — like the 1998 implosion of Long Term Capital Management, which nearly cratered the western financial world — Noble was the go-to guy. “I’m like a firefighter: When everybody’s running out of the burning building, I’m running in,” he jokes.
From stocks and bonds to crypto analysis
In 2017, he became intrigued by crypto. He went to an Austin, Texas Bitcoin conference and started doing charts for Ether by hand, which eventually became a gigantic scroll as the price went up and down. Then he met Bitcoin early adopter Charlie Schrem walking through an airport (who has had a crypto career with spectacular ups and downs, even doing jail time connected to the Silk Road marketplace implosion). They got together in crypto.IQ, a consultancy service aiming to improve cryptocurrency analysis with stocks, bonds, interest rates and other mainstream data, which no one else was doing at the time.
In September 2019, Noble joined Token Metrics as a senior market analyst. Led by CEO Ian Balina, the subscription service provides retail traders with AI-driven insights, combined with the work of analysts researching the volatile cryptocurrency markets to assist in making beneficial trades, whatever the overall conditions.
He explains it puts an “artificial intelligence system together with my charting. You effectively have a quantitative research product, an institutional quantitative research product that we can deliver to retail, which, you know, is not, is not really around. I mean, there are data and service providers, but, you know, we can provide you with tools you can use yourself. Plus, we have top analysts that look at everything from charts macro to NFTs.”
As I recall, Sterling crashing is usually the start of contagion. $GBP has always been a canary in the coal mine. #DXY
— Bill Noble (@crypto_noble) September 26, 2022
Noble has 17,600 Twitter followers, a popular YouTube channel and is a sought-after guest analyst on crypto TV, with his Tony Soprano-esque, no-nonsense New Jersey accent.
He thrives on crypto’s volatility, “It’s 10% up or 10% down each day,” he says. “I don’t have to wait five years in between crises. As a matter of fact, I only have to wait about 45 minutes.”
Noble stresses that you need to be very flexible in crypto technical analysis and not tied to one methodology. Surprisingly, he looks to the distant past for his basic systems, “Gann works very well [William Gann, an influential early charting pioneer]. I find that the systems — Wyckoff is another — anything that worked in the early 20th century when stocks were the wild west, and there were 50 publicly traded car companies [work well]. I find Fibonacci is also helpful; Tom DeMark’s work is excellent.”
The current state of the market
Taking something of a contrarian position, he sees the current crypto winter as having a long-term benefit: clearing out the market and liquidating terrible projects.
“The previous run-up was driven by a massive liquidity push by central banks. Then when central banks had to pull the liquidity, you had the ‘2008…
cointelegraph.com