Citrini’s growing reach across finance and crypto
Citrini has repeatedly appeared at the center of conversations in both traditional finance and crypto markets this year. In February, the firm published The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, a report that was linked to a sell-off in U.S. software stocks and intensified anxiety around job losses in Silicon Valley. In April, Citrini’s Analyst#3 travelled to the Strait of Hormuz and wrote a field report that drew a strong response by describing the reality of a major conflict chokepoint through direct observation. More recently, Citrini semiconductor analyst Jukan accurately identified the importance of copper foil to the AI and semiconductor industries, helping fuel another round of investment interest.
The founder behind Citrini is James van Geelen, a non-traditional entrant into finance. He holds dual degrees in biology and psychology from UCLA, previously worked as an emergency medical technician and caregiver, founded a healthcare company, and later moved into investing. Odaily’s profile frames him as a cross-disciplinary founder whose background combines healthcare, entrepreneurship, long-term thematic thinking, and practical trading research.
For many in the crypto industry, Citrini first became hard to ignore around the time of Cerebras (CBRS) preparing to list in May. Citrini posted that fund managers were conducting price discovery in advance through Trade.xyz, a platform in the Hyperliquid ecosystem. That post was later reposted and confirmed by Trade.xyz founder Shokun. The episode placed crypto-based RWA platforms, U.S. stock pre-market contract platforms, and on-chain U.S. equity trading platforms in front of a broader audience, and Odaily described it as one of the forces that helped push forward this year’s wave of interest in U.S. equity RWA assets.
Citrini had already built influence in traditional finance through The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. Its endorsement of Hyperliquid’s ecosystem and Trade.xyz’s role in pre-market U.S. stock pricing sent a direct message to traditional markets: crypto-native participants were no longer confined to crypto trading venues, but were turning their attention to equity pricing, pre-market activity, and on-chain financial infrastructure.
James van Geelen’s route from medicine to investing
James van Geelen, now 33, did not begin his career in AI or finance. Public information shows that he graduated from UCLA with degrees in biology and psychology. He also worked in downtown Los Angeles as an emergency medical technician and caregiver. The combination of a major university education and front-line emergency work shaped a personality focused on efficiency and planning. He has said, “If you don’t have a plan, you’re going to have a bad time.” He has also described himself as a “genius musician,” although the source notes that there are no notable works to support that label.
Geelen’s original plan was to become a doctor, but his career took a different path. He first founded a healthcare company and sold it to a private equity fund, which allowed him to step away from the conventional route of elite university, employment, and corporate management. He later founded Citrini. In a 2023 appearance on the Odd Lots podcast, he also said that he had co-founded one of Connecticut’s earliest medical cannabis dispensaries.
In 2018, after gaining some initial capital, Geelen began his personal investing career under the name Citrinitas Capital. He captured early opportunities in themes such as AI, including Nvidia, and GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, including Ozempic and Wegovy. According to PitchBook information cited in the source, Citrini completed an approximately $5.05 million seed round in December 2025. The firm has around 10 employees and remains privately held.
The report that hit U.S. software stocks
In February, Geelen and Alap Shah, who came from traditional finance, co-authored The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. Citrini repeatedly stressed that the report was a “thought experiment” and a hypothetical scenario rather than a forecast. Even so, the scenarios it described — including large-scale white-collar unemployment, falling consumer spending, and economic contraction referred to as “Ghost GDP” — triggered concern in capital markets and led to sharp declines in delivery, payments, and software stocks.
IBM’s share price recorded its largest single-day drop of 2025 on February 23. American Express and Blackstone each fell more than 8%. The overall software sector declined nearly 5%. DoorDash, Uber, Mastercard, Visa, Capital One, and Apollo Global Management Inc. each at one point fell 3%. Multiple U.S. equity sectors were pulled into the sell-off, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average at one point dropped more than 800 points. Alap Shah later publicly described his investment stance as “short the losers, long the winners”: shorting companies they believed would be disrupted by AI while holding semiconductor technology stocks that benefit from AI.
Odaily characterized the report as causing hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. equity market value to vanish and said it led to follow-up coverage by overseas media outlets including Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. The event became one of the clearest examples of Citrini’s influence beyond a newsletter audience.
Hormuz research and the meaning of “citrinitas”
On April 6, Citrini’s “Analyst #3” travelled to the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokepoint in the U.S.-Iran conflict, and published field observations. The report described details of how Iran’s “toll station” model in the strait operates and presented several counterintuitive conclusions: shipping volume through the strait would gradually rise regardless of how the situation developed; Iran did not want to close the Strait of Hormuz; traffic would continue to increase; the diplomatic “toll station” system was in fact orderly; even if ground operations began, shipping volume through the strait would still continue to increase; and the conflict was not a simple confrontation between two sides, but a multi-party contest and a reshaping of the regional order.
Geelen has also explained why the company was named “citrinitas.” The name was inspired by George Soros’s The Alchemy of Finance. Citrinitas is a stage in alchemy in which lead begins to turn into gold but has not yet fully become gold. For Geelen, that transition is his preferred moment to act: seeing the birth of “gold” before others have noticed the change in “lead.”
Citrini’s investment style is closely tied to Geelen’s cross-disciplinary background and strongly emphasizes “second-order thinking.” Based on its historical content and public information, the firm focuses on long-term “supertrends” such as AI, robotics, energy demand, fiscal policy, geopolitics, and modern warfare. It also aims to provide executable baskets of investment references and tactical macro trading ideas. Its research leans toward long-term structural change rather than short-term trading. On its Substack homepage, Citrini stresses practicality and writes that readers “will no longer need to ask ‘what is the trade?’”
The firm also uses scenario analysis to help readers understand second- and third-order effects. Geelen has said: “Don’t just think about what you think is going to happen. Think about the things that have to happen. How will the market’s reaction change the reality of the situation? What are the second-order effects? What are the obstacles to a trend continuing? Where does the money flow to overcome those obstacles?” In March 2023, during the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, he bought overnight financing rate call options and earned nearly 50 times the return. Last December, before the United States launched military action in Venezuela, he shared views on investment opportunities in Venezuelan sovereign bonds.
Since the start of this year, Citrini has brought in several independent analysts, including macro analyst Nick Reece, Korean semiconductor industry analyst @jukan05, and AI chip industry analyst @zephyr_z9. Their addition has helped fill gaps in industrial details, technical processes, and changes in sector direction. The firm currently maintains a production model driven by its founder and supported by collaboration with an anonymous elite analyst team.