Forget the image of amateur investors chasing fleeting trends when you think of meme-based cryptocurrencies. In 2025, the landscape shifted dramatically when former President Donald Trump entered the fray, launching his own digital token and capturing global attention.
While many dove headfirst into the “Trump coin” frenzy, Joe McCann, a hedge fund manager who includes meme coins in his investment strategy, took a different approach. He made a small, personal investment in LIBRA coin, a cryptocurrency briefly endorsed by Argentina’s President Javier Milei after a tip from a friend. However, recognizing a “rug pull” in the making, he quickly sold, absorbing a minor loss. He emphasized it was a trivial amount and kept completely separate from his fund’s assets.
McCann’s career began in the early 2000s as a proprietary equities trader before transitioning to an executive role in the tech sector, while continuing to trade stocks and options independently. In a recent interview, he expressed amusement at the idea of returning to Wall Street in a formal capacity.
“Let’s just say I don’t fit the traditional hedge fund manager mold,” McCann joked, referencing his tattoos. He revealed he’d been approached by a prominent venture capitalist to launch his own fund, with preemptive pitches made to Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon as potential early investors.
He established Asymmetric in 2022. By 2024, he was managing multiple funds trading cryptocurrencies, including meme coins. His initial flagship fund, the Technology Master Fund, achieved a top-three ranking for 12-month returns among 2,280 global funds in March 2024, according to Preqin data.
Navigating the Meme Coin Market
Hedge funds commonly employ a range of tactics, from short selling to leveraged positions, aiming for substantial profits while acknowledging increased volatility. But the intersection of established finance and the meme coin market presents an unprecedented level of risk.
“I’m literally working from my condo in Miami right now,” McCann shared, noting that while he maintains an office, he rarely uses it. He described completing options contract rollovers on Solana via Telegram on his laptop, followed by email trade confirmations.
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McCann balances embracing digital assets with implementing risk-mitigation strategies used by major Wall Street firms. This includes proprietary software that meticulously tracks risk across all positions, requiring multiple approvals before any capital movement.
“To be clear, after trading for so long, the key is to be as objective as possible,” McCann explained. “Letting emotions like euphoria or panic influence your decisions leads to poor trading outcomes.”
McCann views all cryptocurrencies, at some point, as meme coins, considering Bitcoin the original, fueled by internet hype. Today, meme coins are typically digital assets tied to internet memes, cultural trends, or current events. Their appeal lies in the potential for rapid gains, sometimes exceeding 1,000%, making them a high-stakes gamble. However, institutional trading faces the hurdle of low liquidity, making it challenging to manage large positions, especially when quick exits are necessary.
This translates to McCann’s funds avoiding newer, untested tokens. Larger allocations are reserved for what he terms “blue-chip meme coins,” those with sustained billion-dollar market caps for at least 90 days. He also limits exposure to non-top 20% crypto by market cap tokens to 2% of the fund’s managed assets. With these safeguards, he analyzes the asset class like any other, using data and technical analysis to identify potential breakout candidates.
In 2023, he observed stablecoin migration from Ethereum to Solana. At the time, SOL’s price had mostly remained below $30. He believed that inflows pushing the price above a crucial resistance point would attract more traders, including momentum-based participants and algorithms, driving the price even higher.
“When stablecoins are transferred to a different protocol or blockchain, they’re not just left in USDC; they’re used to purchase something, usually the underlying asset, which in this case was SOL,” he said.
As SOL’s price increased, holders would likely use some gains to acquire higher-beta or more volatile tokens for a greater risk-reward ratio. McCann used historical precedent to predict the asset of choice on Solana’s blockchain. Given that Dogecoin originated from Bitcoin and Shiba Inu Coin became the Ethereum equivalent, he anticipated that Solana’s version would be Bonk Coin, also featuring a Shiba Inu image.
Bonk Coin did rally in the final quarter of 2023. McCann confirmed his hedge fund traded Bonk, exiting the position by December.
The final challenge is knowing when to sell during a meme coin’s upward surge. Since Bonk was reaching unprecedented highs, historical technical indicators were useless for establishing an exit point. Therefore, he reverted to tape reading, which monitors real-time order flow for slowdowns in SOL’s momentum, as well as observing SOL’s chart for key technical points that might signal an overbought condition.
“I built an internal tool to analyze top spot trading exchanges. I enter a ticker symbol like Solana and identify significant order flows, then I assess whether these flows are real, indicating institutional accumulation, or institutional distribution, which signals selling,” McCann explained.
He credits the Bonk trade as a contributing factor to his flagship fund’s high ranking in March 2024.
For 2025, he is bullish on both Bitcoin and Solana, citing Bitcoin’s growing institutional adoption and Solana’s faster, more affordable, and user-friendly alternative to Ethereum, on which he holds a short position.
“There’s a Solana-ETH trading pair available on Coinbase, allowing you to go long on Solana and short on ETH simultaneously,” McCann said. “Alternatively, you can short perpetual derivative contracts, or use a fixed-risk approach by buying puts or put spreads in the options market.”
He considers the Trump coin a positive indicator for the crypto and meme coin space. However, he believes easy profits are now in the past. He anticipates heightened volatility in the current year, favoring strategic traders over those who blindly chase hype or adopt a buy-and-hold strategy. This is primarily due to the potential for unpredictable market impacts stemming from the Trump administration’s policies and the expectation that the S&P 500’s strong performance over the last two years will slow down in the third year, influencing the crypto market as well.