One of the strangest pieces of information I read in psychiatry is that people who cannot sleep without a blanket, even in the summer, this is called (self-soothing), and this is one of the ways in which the body needs security, and the blanket is not just a piece of cloth, but it is an alternative embrace and a means of protection and security
Ten lazy years can disappear the moment you lock in. Six months of discipline can erase a decade of drifting. Momentum is magic. It turns yesterday's failures into tomorrow's fuel.
Trades im looking at:
$CL OIL - i liked the oil long before the TACO news today, realistically it would mean oil is still elevated though so im confused on the PA, dont want to fade the market but would punt any strength i see
$XAG SILVER - Metals look bottomed but i dont know how much room they have to run, think realistically could expect a 10% move on silver here but again im not solid on it its purely a TA play
$BTC/ $HYPE - the quantum news will go viral and should see BTC drop along with other alts, i think BTC is the best play for this down to $60k but hype is the best beta also
$ZEC/ $ALGO - both mentioned in the article and could be good counter longs to the BTC shorts, they are the normie bet for quantum resistance? seems easier to just bet on BTC downside?
When I first entered crypto, the most common advice I heard (and still see echoed a lot) was some variation of "don't chase the pump, be patient, don't sell conviction bags for narrative, etc." The narrative is always that one should remain patient while other coins are pumping, and that your chosen coin will have its turn eventually. This is wrong. It’s framed as a test of discipline, where "chasing green candles" is the ultimate sin and holding a stagnant bag is a mark of a "true" investor. This mindset treats the market like a waiting room, assuming that if you just sit still long enough, your number will eventually be called.
Looking back, I find this to be the most horrible advice. By prioritizing "discretionary conviction" over Relative Strength and momentum, you are essentially deciding that your personal judgment of a project’s value is more reliable than the market’s immediate, objective feedback on something much simpler. It asks you to ignore the momentum and trend staring you in the face in favor of your subjective story. In reality, the coins that are leading the charge are doing so for a reason. If you trade momentum/trend only you don't even have to care about that reason all that much. Instead of waiting for a laggard to wake up, a more effective approach is to identify what is actually picking up speed. Quite the opposite of "don't chase the pump".
@Credib1eGuy Inserted to hear ur thoughts on why not SPX over fartcoin, im currently building a bag of both as i see the former as more of a cult than a meme similar to xrp, also reminiscent of gmx with a cult leader, whilst fart is the obvious meme of choice and doesnt need any championing
Because of the 4 year cycle, all crypto market participants are primed to view the market as either in a bull or bear phase.
What if, as a part of the market maturing, we are simply in an extended consolidation window where overhead supply is being absorbed?
I have not seen anyone frame it in this way before. Gold chopped between $1,650-2,050 from April 2020 to March 2024. It is logical to assume that as BTC evolves, it will exhibit more gold-like behaviors. Things tend to play out faster in BTC than gold, but another 6-18 months of rangebound activity wouldn't be strange at all.
Sellers emerged aggressively whenever price entered the $120k range. There are strong arguments those sellers were motivated by the 4 year cycle memetic consensus, but there are equally good arguments those sellers were driven by other factors including age, price, liquidity, thesis change, and emerging tail risks. If price gets back to that level, it's rational for people to front run that, which helps reinforce the range.
This also dovetails with my intuitive feeling that the lows may be in, or at the least not significantly lower than what we have seen, but upside also being capped. As I have been discussing, liquidity conditions are poised to moderately improve, so there is potential for a bounce, but I'd be cautious about betting on regime change.
Why did crypto underperform other assets in 2025?
1. BTC ownership was too concentrated. It never fully distributed out at lower prices. Then there was significant confluence of factors concentrating selling in 2025: heavy liquidity available for exiting large bags at the mythical $100k price target, fulfilment of the narrative of "dumping on the suits", huge ideological shifts from being a cypherpunk beacon to a Wall St/Trump family vehicle, the apex of 4 year cycle (even if they didn't believe in it, people were afraid of the belief of others), and quantum fears finally becoming more tangible.
2. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who has massive bags that can’t be sold overnight, with 99.99% of their wealth tied up in a single asset. Now there’s this existential quantum threat on the horizon. You don’t know when it’s going to happen, but the timeline has been accelerating. Technical solutions exist, but they’re all difficult, and you’re well aware of the political dysfunction within the Bitcoin dev community. It isn’t an imminent, black-and-white threat, more a nagging worry sitting in the back of your mind, but once you start thinking about it, the mind-virus is hard to shake. Combine that with all the other reasons to sell, and it becomes totally rational to dump a meaningful part of the bag. Depending on how you count it and what’s lost or not, there are $200–250bn+ of OG holdings out there. To put it simply, BTC got to a price where the supply overwhelmed the demand in the market.
3. There wasn't anything to believe in. Financial nihilism is a real story but also one that does not captivate the interest of retail buyers. Meanwhile there were more compelling dreams being sold in the equity markets around AI, quantum, space, drones, nuclear, and defense. The debasement story for BTC was real but gold simply beat it out. BTC had adverse supply dynamics, while gold had favorable demand dynamics (Central Bank buying), and at some point the divergence became impossible to ignore and it meaningfully weakened the story for BTC. Then from a crypto native perspective, BTC lacked a strong narrative in 2025. In late 23/early 24 we had the ETFs, in late 24 we had Trump. There also wasn't a narrative around liquidity, or an overarching sense of hope and optimism around what crypto could achieve for the world.
4. Crypto is the tip of the spear for liquidity conditions. You can view it as a blow-off valve for excess liquidity. There are different forms of liquidity and weighting between them is more of an art than a science, but without any doubt, liquidity conditions were the most loose in 2021, and arguably were meaningfully more loose in 2024 over 2025. This tracks very well with general price action, market breadth, and the state of the game.
5. It didn't feel like there was enough upside anymore. BTC still had a lot of volatility and risk and traded like aids a large part of the time, and enduring all of that made sense when there was the prospect of a 3-5x, but as people came to Jesus on the shift in potential upside, 50% gains weren't enough. Meanwhile, events like the $10bn seller in July were sobering. So if one guy could absorb $10bn in demand then, at $500k his bag would have been $50bn? At $1mm it would have been $100bn? It didn't pass the smell test.
5. The game continuing on in a liquidity deprived state drove an acceleration in the lack of belief and PvP conditions, which became a vicious cycle in of itself. Money within the game would concentrate into sharps, who would then offramp the money into other asset classes, helping to fuel them. I tend to believe the weakness in altcoins ultimately became a drag in BTC as well, because it had the effect of driving people to fully offramp from the crypto ecosystem, instead of taking profits into BTC.
6. What happens from here? It remains to be seen how much OGs and other large holders will continue to sell post the 4 year cycle being removed as a driver. Quantum has been gaining more awareness and narrative traction so that will be an overhang. Meanwhile, gold and silver are cleaner and simpler bets on debasement. Liquidity dynamics may improve a lot if Trump successfully takes over the Fed, but that is a complex process, and half a year away from here. It feels most likely that BTC needs to go through a period of re-accumulation. Alts can have idiosyncratic moves but overall attention is declining and I don't see any obvious narratives that can re-captivate the attention of the market.