In February this year, Citrini published The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, a report that briefly intensified the sell-off in U.S. software stocks and deepened anxiety around job losses in Silicon Valley. In April, Citrini’s Analyst#3 traveled to the Strait of Hormuz and wrote a field report that tried to cut through the fog surrounding one of the world’s most sensitive conflict chokepoints. More recently, Citrini semiconductor analyst Jukan accurately pointed to the importance of copper foil in the AI and semiconductor supply chains, helping set off another round of investment interest around the theme.
Behind this research firm stands a founder with an unusual background for finance: James van Geelen. He holds dual degrees in biology and psychology from UCLA, previously worked as an emergency medical technician and caregiver in downtown Los Angeles, built a healthcare company, and later entered investing from outside the traditional financial track. Odaily’s profile frames him as the “god of investment research,” not because of a conventional Wall Street pedigree, but because Citrini has repeatedly placed research in areas where traditional finance, technology, geopolitics and crypto now overlap.
How Trade.xyz put Citrini on crypto’s radar
For many in crypto, Citrini first became visible around the listing of Cerebras (CBRS) in May this year. At that time, the account posted that fund managers were conducting early price discovery on Trade.xyz, a platform within the Hyperliquid ecosystem. Trade.xyz founder Shokun later reposted and confirmed the comment. For an account that had already published The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, that acknowledgement carried weight beyond a normal crypto post.
Citrini’s favorable view of the Hyperliquid ecosystem and Trade.xyz’s role in U.S. pre-market pricing helped put several categories into a wider conversation: crypto RWA platforms, pre-market U.S. equity contract platforms and on-chain trading venues for U.S. stocks. The original article describes this as one of the forces that helped push this year’s “U.S. stock RWA asset boom.” In that sense, Citrini became a signal from the border between traditional finance and crypto, warning that previously overlooked crypto players were aiming at a large part of the traditional financial market.
Geelen’s path from emergency medicine to Citrini
James van Geelen is 33 years old. Before AI became central to Citrini’s work, his résumé had little connection to the field. Public information shows that he graduated from UCLA with degrees in biology and psychology and worked as an emergency medical technician and caregiver in downtown Los Angeles. That combination of academic training and emergency medical work shaped a personality focused on efficiency and planning. As 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,” though the source notes that he does not have widely known work to show for it.
Geelen’s original path would have led him toward becoming a doctor, but he moved into entrepreneurship instead. He first founded a healthcare company and sold it to a private equity fund, using that exit to escape the conventional route of elite university, employment and professional management. He later founded Citrini. In a 2023 appearance on the Odd Lots podcast, he also mentioned that he had co-founded one of the earliest medical cannabis dispensaries in Connecticut. That detail reinforces the portrait of a founder who did not follow a narrow professional script.
In 2018, after gaining some startup capital, Geelen began his personal investment career under the name Citrinitas Capital. He captured early opportunities in AI-related assets such as Nvidia, and in GLP-1 weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy. According to PitchBook information cited in the source, Citrini completed about $5.05 million in seed financing in December 2025. The firm had only around 10 employees and remained privately held.
The report that shook U.S. software stocks
In February this year, Geelen and Alap Shah, who came from traditional finance, co-authored The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. The authors repeatedly emphasized that the report was a “thought experiment” and a scenario exercise rather than a forecast. Even so, its discussion of large-scale white-collar unemployment, declining consumer spending and economic contraction referred to as “Ghost GDP” triggered fear in capital markets. Delivery, payment and software stocks all fell sharply.
The figures cited in the source show the scale of the move. IBM recorded its largest single-day decline of 2025 on February 23. American Express and Blackstone each fell by more than 8%. The broader software sector dropped nearly 5%. DoorDash, Uber, Mastercard, Visa, Capital One and Apollo Global Management Inc. each fell as much as 3% at one point. Multiple U.S. equity sectors were caught in the sell-off, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average once fell by more than 800 points.
Alap Shah later stated publicly that his investment stance was to be “short and long” at the same time: short companies they believed would be disrupted by AI, while holding semiconductor technology stocks that benefit from AI. The report wiped hundreds of billions of dollars in market value from U.S. equities in a short period and drew follow-up coverage from overseas media including Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. This is the episode that transformed Citrini from a Substack account long ranked at the top into a research voice with direct visibility in traditional finance.
The Strait of Hormuz report and second-order thinking
On April 6 this year, Analyst#3, described as Citrini’s “No. 3 analyst,” traveled to the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokepoint in the U.S.-Iran conflict, to conduct field research. The report disclosed a series of first-hand observations and described how Iran operated a “toll booth” mechanism in the strait. It also 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; shipping volume would continue to increase; the “diplomatic toll booth” existed alongside a surprisingly orderly traffic system; even if ground operations unfolded, shipping volume could still continue rising; and the conflict was not a simple bilateral confrontation, but a multi-party game and a reshaping of the regional structure.
Geographical disputes within great-power competition are therefore also within Citrini’s research range. The firm is not limited to equities or crypto; it looks at how macro forces, industrial capacity, military realities and capital flows interact. That approach connects directly to Geelen’s explanation of the company name “citrinitas.” He said the name was inspired by George Soros’s The Alchemy of Finance: “It’s actually a stage in alchemy, but what most people don’t know is that in this transitional stage, lead begins to turn into gold, but it has not completely become gold.” For Geelen, that transition is the most attractive moment to act: before others notice the change in the lead, he wants to see the birth of the gold.
Citrini’s investment style follows from that idea. Because of Geelen’s cross-disciplinary experience and the firm’s mix of different labels, Citrini places heavy emphasis on “second-order thinking.” Its past content and public materials show a focus on long-term “super trends,” including AI, robotics, energy demand, fiscal policy, geopolitics and modern warfare. It also aims to offer executable “basket investment references” and tactical macro trading ideas. Its judgments lean toward long-term structural change rather than short-term trading alone.
The firm’s Substack homepage stresses practicality with the line: “You will no longer need to ask, ‘What is the trade?’” Geelen has also described the thought process behind the work: “Don’t always think about what you think will happen. Instead, think about the things that must happen. How will the market’s reaction change reality? What secondary effects will there be? What are the obstacles to keeping a trend going? Where will capital flow to overcome those obstacles?” The source cites two examples: during the Silicon Valley Bank collapse in March 2023, he bought overnight financing rate call options and earned nearly 50 times his money; last December, before the United States launched military action against Venezuela, he shared views on investment opportunities in Venezuelan sovereign bonds.
A founder-driven firm with anonymous specialist analysts
This year, Citrini has brought in several independent analysts. The list includes macro analyst Nick Reece, Korean semiconductor industry analyst @jukan05 and AI chip industry analyst @zephyr_z9. Their addition helped fill gaps in industrial detail, technical processes and changes in sector direction. At present, the firm still operates under a founder-driven model combined with collaboration from an anonymous elite team.
For the crypto market, Citrini’s significance is not limited to a single mention of Trade.xyz or Hyperliquid. Its broader importance comes from putting traditional finance, AI, semiconductors, geopolitics and RWA assets into one research map. The same framework that led Citrini to examine software stocks, the Strait of Hormuz, copper foil and AI supply chains also allowed it to identify why on-chain U.S. equity pricing and pre-market contracts had begun to matter to investors outside crypto.