Citrini has become one of the research names repeatedly appearing at the intersection of traditional finance, technology and crypto. In February, its report, The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, triggered a selloff in U.S. software stocks and intensified anxiety around the employment shock already associated with Silicon Valley. In April, Citrini’s Analyst#3 traveled to the Strait of Hormuz and produced a field report that drew strong reactions by describing the real operating conditions around a conflict-sensitive chokepoint. More recently, Citrini semiconductor analyst Jukan accurately identified the importance of copper foil in the AI and semiconductor industries, helping fuel a fresh round of investment interest.
The figure behind this research institution is not a traditionally trained finance professional. James van Geelen, now 33, holds dual degrees in biology and psychology from UCLA, has worked as an emergency medical technician and caregiver in downtown Los Angeles, founded a healthcare company, and then entered investing from a very different starting point. That unusual path has become central to his public image. He is now described by some as a “god of investment research,” even though his career record began far away from AI, semiconductors or public-market analysis.
From emergency medicine to Citrinitas Capital
Public information shows that van Geelen’s early background was shaped by medicine and operational discipline. His education at UCLA and his work in emergency care helped form a personality that emphasizes efficiency and planning. One phrase attributed to him captures that mindset: “If you don’t have a plan, you’re gonna have a bad time.” He has also described himself as a “genius musician,” although the source notes that he does not have a notable body of work to show for that label.
Van Geelen’s original plan would have taken him toward becoming a doctor. Instead, he moved into entrepreneurship. He first founded a healthcare company and sold it to a private equity fund, which allowed him to move away from the usual path of elite university, employment and professional management. 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. This part of his background shows a person who did not follow the image of a rigid or conventional physician.
In 2018, after obtaining startup capital, van Geelen began his personal investment career under the name Citrinitas Capital. According to the source article, he captured early opportunities in AI, including Nvidia, and in GLP-1 weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy. PitchBook information cited in the source says that in December 2025, Citrini completed a seed round of about $5.05 million. The firm had only around 10 employees and remained privately held.
The AI report that shook U.S. equities
The report that pushed Citrini into wider attention was written in February by van Geelen and Alap Shah, who came from the traditional finance world. The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis was repeatedly described by its authors as a “thought experiment” and a scenario exercise rather than a forecast. Even so, the discussion of mass white-collar unemployment, falling consumer spending and economic contraction under the label “Ghost GDP” created fear across parts of the capital market.
The immediate stock-market reaction described in the source was severe. Delivery, payment and software-related stocks dropped sharply. IBM posted its largest single-day decline of 2025 on February 23. American Express and Blackstone both fell by more than 8%, the broader software sector dropped nearly 5%, and shares of DoorDash, Uber, Mastercard, Visa, Capital One and Apollo Global Management Inc. were at one point down 3%. Several U.S. equity sectors were pulled into the selloff, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average at one point fell more than 800 points.
The market value wiped out in the episode was described as reaching hundreds of billions of dollars, and the report drew follow-up coverage from overseas media including Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. Alap Shah later publicly described his stance as “short and long”: shorting companies they believed would be disrupted by AI while holding semiconductor technology stocks expected to benefit from AI. The episode turned Citrini from a research publisher into a market-moving voice across multiple equity sectors.
Crypto attention through Hyperliquid and Trade.xyz
For many in the crypto market, the first encounter with Citrini came around the period before Cerebras (CBRS) was expected to list in May. Citrini posted that fund managers were conducting price discovery in advance through Trade.xyz, which sits in the Hyperliquid ecosystem. The post was later reposted and confirmed by Trade.xyz founder Shokun. For a research account already known in traditional finance through the AI crisis report, the endorsement of Trade.xyz’s role in pre-market pricing brought the crypto trading infrastructure into a broader conversation.
The source frames this as a moment that helped bring RWA platforms, U.S. equity pre-market contract venues and on-chain U.S. stock trading platforms into the view of more participants. It also says this helped drive this year’s “U.S. stock RWA asset boom” to a certain degree. In that sense, Citrini served as a warning signal to traditional finance: crypto-native players that had once seemed marginal were directing attention toward the large opportunity set of conventional financial markets.
Hormuz field research and the logic of chokepoints
On April 6, Citrini’s “Analyst#3” traveled to the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokepoint in the U.S.-Iran conflict, and produced a research report based on first-hand observations. The report described little-known conditions on the ground and explained the operating model of what it called Iran’s “toll station” in the strait. Its conclusions ran against common assumptions. It argued that shipping volume through the strait would gradually rise regardless of how the situation developed, that Iran did not want to close the Strait of Hormuz, and that the actual order of transit through the waterway was surprisingly standardized.
The report also presented the conflict not as a simple two-sided confrontation but as a multi-party game and a reshaping of the broader structure. It listed several points: shipping volume would continue to increase; the “toll station” operated in a diplomatic manner; even if ground operations unfolded, shipping volume was still included in an upward scenario; and the issue was more about structural reorganization than a clean contest of victory and defeat. The source article notes that geographic disputes within great-power competition are also within the research range of Citrini.
Second-order thinking and a founder-led research model
Van Geelen has explained the name “citrinitas” by referring to George Soros’s The Alchemy of Finance. Citrinitas is a stage in alchemy. In this transitional phase, lead begins to turn into gold but has not fully become gold. Van Geelen said this is the moment he likes most: seeing the birth of “gold” before others have noticed that the “lead” has begun to change. That metaphor closely matches Citrini’s stated preference for identifying structural change before it becomes obvious.
Citrini’s investment style is built around cross-disciplinary experience and second-order thinking. Its past work and public information show a focus on long-term “supertrends,” including AI, robotics, energy demand, fiscal policy, geopolitics and modern warfare. The firm aims to provide executable baskets of investment references and tactical macro trading ideas. Its emphasis is on long-term structural change rather than short-term trading alone. On its Substack profile, Citrini stresses practical application with the line: “You will never have to ask ‘what’s the trade?’ again.”
Van Geelen has also described how to think through second- and third-order effects. He has said that investors should not focus only on what they think will happen, but should ask what must happen, how market reactions will change reality, what secondary effects will follow, what obstacles stand in the way of a trend continuing, and where capital will flow in order to overcome those obstacles. The source cites several earlier examples: in March 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, he bought call options on the overnight financing rate and gained nearly 50 times; in December last year, before the United States launched military action in Venezuela, he had shared views on investment opportunities in Venezuelan sovereign bonds.
This year, Citrini has brought in several independent researchers, including macro analyst Nick Reece, Korean semiconductor industry analyst @jukan05, and AI chip industry analyst @zephyr_z9. Their addition helped fill gaps in industry detail, technical process knowledge and assessments of sector direction. The firm continues to operate with a founder-driven model combined with collaboration from an anonymous elite research team.