Joe McCann, a hedge fund founder, has combined Wall Street with Meme Street. His funds specialize in trading meme coins while employing traditional tools and risk management strategies. By 2025, he takes a long position on Bitcoin and Solana but is short on Ethereum. When speaking about meme coins, one typically envisions retail traders pursuing hype for quick profits. However, in 2025, former President Donald Trump significantly raised the profile of meme coins with the launch of his own Trump Coin, capturing global attention.
Though Joe McCann did not partake in the Trump Coin trend, he made a minor personal investment in LIBRA Coin, a cryptocurrency briefly endorsed by Argentine President Javier Milei after a recommendation from a friend. Unfortunately, he sold it quickly at a loss as it rapidly declined in value, recognizing it was a rug pull. Luckily, he limited his bet to pocket change, ensuring that it didn’t affect his fund’s performance.
McCann began his professional journey as a proprietary equities trader in the early 2000s before stepping away from Wall Street to serve as an executive in the software industry. He continued to engage in equity and options trading alongside his executive role. In a recent interview with Business Insider, he chuckled at the prospect of re-entering the industry full-time.
“I’m covered in tattoos,” McCann stated. “I don’t look like a traditional hedge fund manager at all. A high-profile VC once pitched me to Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon as the first investor in a fund I hadn’t even formed yet.”
In 2022, McCann launched Asymmetric, and by 2024, he successfully managed multiple funds, including those focused on cryptocurrency and meme coins.
Trading on Meme Street
Hedge funds deploy various strategies to engage in buying, shorting, and utilizing leverage to maximize profit potential, even amid increased volatility. However, merging Wall Street with Meme Street represents a relatively new zone for higher risk exposure.
“I’m literally sitting on the deck of my condo in Miami right now,” remarked McCann. Although he maintains an office, he often prefers working remotely. Recently, he completed a rollover of options contracts on Solana via Telegram from his laptop, promptly receiving trade confirmation by email.
McCann’s strategy is to strike a balance between embracing digital assets and implementing traditional Wall Street methodologies to manage risk, one of which includes proprietary software that tracks his firm’s risk exposure requiring multiple authorizations before executing trades.
“I’ve been trading for so long that your trading skill should be to remain as unemotional as possible,” he emphasized. “Market euphoria or panic can lead to poor trading decisions.”
For McCann, all cryptocurrencies were, at some point, meme coins, with Bitcoin heralded as the original one, built on internet hype. Meme coins are generally recognized as digital assets reflecting internet memes, trends, or significant events. Their appeal lies in the potential for rapid returns exceeding 1,000%, likening them to gambling. However, a critical challenge for institutional trading lies in their liquidity, complicating large position movements when quick exits become necessary.
Consequently, McCann’s funds avoid relatively newer tokens, focusing larger investments on “blue-chip meme coins,” which he defines as those sustaining billion-dollar market capitalizations for at least 90 days. Additionally, he caps exposure to 2% of the fund’s assets for tokens outside the top 20% in market capitalization. Once these fundamental parameters are established, McCann treats this asset class like any other, employing data and technical analysis to predict upswings.
In 2023, he noted stablecoin movements shifting from Ethereum to Solana. During this period, SOL’s price remained under $30. He hypothesized that new inflows pushing its price beyond key resistance levels would attract greater market attention, including momentum traders and algorithms, propelling prices further upwards.
“When moving stable coins to another protocol, you typically purchase the underlying asset, in this case, SOL,” he explained.
As SOL’s value increased, he anticipated that holders may leverage some of those gains to invest in higher-beta, riskier tokens using profits derived from their investments. Utilizing historical trends, he speculated on which asset would see a higher-risk investment on Solana’s blockchain. Since Dogecoin, the original meme currency, originated from Bitcoin, and Ethereum’s copycat, Shiba Inu Coin, surged alongside ETH, he deduced that the Solana equivalent might be Bonk Coin, which also featured the Shiba Inu imagery.
In the final quarter of 2023, indeed, Bonk Coin showed notable growth. McCann revealed that his hedge fund capitalized on this trade before exiting in December.
The key challenge in trading meme coins remains knowing when to exit while prices are still rising. As Bonk Coin approached unprecedented highs, devoid of previous benchmarks, traditional technical indicators were of limited use for exit strategies, indicating the token was in price discovery mode. Consequently, he reverted to tape reading to observe rapid real-time order flows for hints of slowing momentum in SOL’s trading. He concurrently monitored SOL’s chart for pivotal technical indicators signaling overbought conditions.
“I developed an internal tool to analyze the top five spot trading exchanges, allowing me to input a ticker like Solana and identify large order flows. This helps map the patterns of these flows—whether they’re institutional buys accumulating or distributions indicating selling,” McCann elaborated.
He asserts that the Bonk trade is instrumental in elevating his flagship fund’s rankings by March 2024. For 2025, McCann’s focus includes long positions in Bitcoin and Solana primarily due to Bitcoin’s growing institutional recognition, alongside Solana’s advantages of speed and cost, while he maintains a short position in Ethereum.
“There’s an analogous contrast in foreign exchange markets; for instance, you can price assets in yen, euro, or dollars. Similarly, on platforms like Coinbase, you can acquire a Solana-ETH pair, simultaneously being long Solana and short ETH,” McCann noted. “Another method is shorting perpetual derivatives or futures contracts, or for a more controlled risk strategy, purchasing puts or put spreads in the options market.”
Overall, he perceives the Trump Coin as a bullish indicator for crypto and meme coins, yet remains convinced that the era of easy money has concluded. McCann anticipates considerable volatility in the forthcoming year, benefiting strategic traders over those merely chasing hype or adopting a buy-and-hold mentality. This perspective hinges on two significant factors. Firstly, the mixed impacts of the Trump administration’s policies have induced substantial market uncertainties. Secondly, given the S&P 500’s strong performance over the past two years, historical patterns suggest diminished returns in the third year, a trend that could influence the crypto market as well.
