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Synquote Market Discussion
Recorded: March 31, 2025 Duration: 0:55:35Space Recording
Short Summary
The crypto market is experiencing a decline, with altcoins retracing gains and ETH's valuation dropping. Bitcoin is closely following traditional markets, reflecting a trend of crypto assets moving in tandem with them. New projects like Bera Chain are entering the market, while the absence of major supporters like FTX is contributing to the decline. Despite large purchases, Bitcoin's price remains stagnant, indicating a lack of market confidence.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you All right, let's get started.
Hopefully, Maine will be able to hop on at some point.
Yeah, let's just dive in.
I think it's shaping up to be potentially a big week.
Terrace are about to kick in.
Looks like the market's reacting pretty strongly across the world
over the last 24 hours.
So why don't you
give us a market summary,
Ryan? And by the way, guys,
feel free to request speaker access anytime if you have a question
that you want to have answered.
This is for you guys to
get some
insights on the market,
get an informed opinion. So don't
be shy, just request speaker access if you want to hop on. All right, let's get started.
Yeah, what's going on, guys? Yeah, so I mean, it's a headline-driven market, and we have
an event that the market has been looking to now for the last couple of weeks, and that's the
announcement of the tariff bazooka of sorts on April 2nd.
And you could see just vol rising up in traditional markets
over the course of the last few days.
It didn't help over the weekend that Trump made some comments
about seeking potentially a third term
and there being a way around it.
So whatever that means, it's it's in the
constitution that you can only serve two terms but um i think that was like post 1952 uh but either
way he um you know trump is is a constant headline risk and traditional markets haven't been able to
find their footing they're actually trading down to uh
i think for the first time since 2020 maybe march 2020 um they're trading down to one of the strikes uh that's part of the jpm collar trade which uh today is the last day of that trade it's a
quarterly trade so it gets rolled but um it refers to the uh jheX, JP Morgan hedge fund, essentially, collar trade, which
hedges the long equity portfolio.
And basically, that's rolled every quarter.
The hedging flows from that typically don't have that much of an impact on the market.
And just to be clear, to give everyone some insight into what the collar is it's uh they they
sell like a three to five percent out of the money call and they use that to finance the three to five
percent out of the money put spread so um a a long put and then further out a a short put uh and we're
trading right at or we opened right at um that long put long put. So that was like, I think that was 55, 65, 55, 65. There's
a ton of gamma around there. So there's just a lot of erratic price action where we're trading
right now in, in equities. So we'll probably see some of this, uh, flow continuing to the close.
It's probably gonna be a lot of, um, market on close flows today. Uh, as that, as those hedges
come off, because it's, you know, obviously trading not out hedges come off because it's you know obviously trading
not out of the money or now it's out of the money um we could possibly see some upside in stock
market going into the close and and that's it looks like you know i just got back from jujitsu but
it looks like that's taking place already um there was a turn in the s p this morning and btc has
just been following that lock step um but outside of that, crypto is very much just the tail right now still.
So it's still following equities.
Not like crypto gets impacted directly by tariffs, right?
But it's just it's a risk asset and people are trading it around other risk assets.
Outside of the tariffs, though, there's not really much excitement.
So it's not like people are betting on upside as much as we're just seeing the S&P correlation
tether to the upside moves in the S&P intraday.
If you go by how the market feels from a sentiment standpoint,
and to look at, say, for example, the options market,
every skew is the lowest it's been for the last six months.
So going back six months, looking back at a one- to six-month forward outlook,
so one-month expiry out, six months out, and then going back as a look-back period,
we're continuing to trend down.
So there's a lot of pessimism in the market,
and there's not a whole lot of interest in taking risk
and betting on upside.
Implied volatilities are down as well.
It's not like we're seeing a ton of shorts building up down here
and positioning get offside.
Funding hasn't gone drastically negative.
Anything funding going negative has
been rewarded because prices consistently have traded lower. So that, you know, cost is pretty
easy to bear if the funding rate is temporarily negative by a few basis points, but price is
dropping, you know, thousands of dollars intraday. It's not really that big of a deal to carry that
cost. And then I think recently this morning, which is just another like you know it's not a good sign
uh a sailor announced another you know two roughly two 1.9 billion dollar purchase i think it was and
his average price was it was higher than here um but we're at like 83.5 now i think it was around
87 so it's never a good sign when someone comes into the market and lifts like two yards of an
asset and uh it's trading lower and this is you know happened numerous times where we are so
sailor's kind of like the only buyer right now um you know game stop made announcement last week
i don't think that's a good thing i think it's more i think it's becoming more of like a stigma
than anything i know you know it should have a material impact on the market you talk about just
supply and demand dynamics but there are definitely a lot of people that are willing to sell into
any and all flow. Because again, there's no market impact from what should be something that would
normally move the needle. At least it might be moving the needle intraday for those sessions
when we're trading at those prices, but's not doing anything to to put in a
floor so the market's just hanging on um every headline which is not fun for people that are
you know swing traders and investors but it's been a it's been a great market to trade um as
long as you're willing to you know take the other side as far as like the rest of the market you
know everyone knows in my opinion on alts are it's it's looking pretty dire most alts that bounced and they got people bullish last week
uh have completely retraced their you know low liquid you know low liquidity bounces
and there's a ton of emissions i think today for example um there's like $500 million in unlocks, most of that from blockchain service.
And then, you know, L1s, L2s.
So there's a lot of supply in the market.
There's not really a narrative in sight yet.
So, you know, everyone's just kind of waiting
for something to happen, it feels like.
But who knows what's going to happen.
Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot to unpack in that.
I mean, first, like, just looking at ETH, I mean, is ETH now considered, like, an alt?
I mean, I feel like the way ETH is trading, it is kind of like, I mean, it's an 1800.
I think 2018 winter, like, peaked around, like, 1400.
So if you're, like, a long-term ETH holder, this has been a
pretty brutal cycle, I'd say. And, you know, we've, we've kind of been on the space warning,
you know, this, you know, you don't want to be the guy that's like dying on the hill along ETH.
I still see the timeline every once in a while. I don't know if this is like engagement farming,
I think it likely is. I still see a bit of ETH bullposting.
To me, it feels like people haven't quite yet separated the technology from the price.
It's true that ETH is going to continue to be a foundational piece of crypto infrastructure.
But what's the value of that?
What is the dollar market cap signed?
I mean, it's possible that this leads over to
other L1s, right? Like, we've so long held the belief that, you know, leading L1 has a, should
have valuation in the tens of billions, you know, Swan is sitting FTV, like 75 billion, market cap
64 billion. But is it possible, I mean, two years down, two years from now, it could just be that,
like, the leading L1 is, you know, a successful leading L1 is, like,
single-digit billions.
I mean, I think that's unlikely for a few reasons.
I'm not saying ETH's going to go down another 90% from here.
But, yeah, I mean, what do you make of that?
It really seems pretty bleak.
Like, if you're holding ETH right now,
what would be the thing that you're looking
to for a relief rally to get out?
Yeah, so a couple things. One of the things that we touched on a while ago was how
TradFi types that are analyzing balance sheets and cash flow and much more granular and demanding of fundamentals wouldn't look at ETH the same way that your crypto native has this hand-wavy opinion on it and is therefore bullish.
So they're much more stringent and you know we're not seeing any
inflows in etf we're not really seeing any demand there at all so there was a major disconnect in
terms of what ct thought you know the outside world would think of when it came to having access
to eth finally through an etf product um you have to go down to like the the 100 like the 90s or the hundreds um in terms of rank to find a crypto and obviously
this includes like stable coins in it as well there's some other things in it too that is under
you know in terms of ftb ftv is under 1 billion dollars so you know there's not really a whole
lot here yet but there's a ton of assets that are reflecting extremely lofty valuations.
And ETH is like $200 billion.
So maybe the fair value of ETH is considerably lower than where it is right here.
I'm personally under the assumption that regardless of fundamentals and regardless of everything
I just said, we still get,
we're still going to get these positioning driven bounces. So you do have to, you know,
keep your eye on the sentiment and the price action. And when there's starting to be a major
divergence, because, you know, on the way down, even there's going to be massive bounces and it's
due to, you know, mechanical flows, it's due to changes in liquidity. It's due to, you know,
very large imbalances of
positioning that build up when you have a market that's so sentiment-driven and not driven on
fundamentals, but driven on prices. So I do think, I don't want to be the person to do this because
everyone has died doing this so far, but I do think that ETH is probably approaching an area
where, let's say in the next month or so, maybe over the course of April, the prices you
pick up in April look kind of decent going into May and June. This is if the floor doesn't fall
out in the stock market, but I'm starting to feel like things are getting a little overdone,
at least in the short term. I think this market is obviously way bifurcated.
There's going to be the things that are able to mesh into TradFi world and the things that are very much just stuck on the other side of the wall and remain with the crypto natives.
Maybe like a couple assets.
Clearly, Bitcoin has been selected and has graduated.
But there'll be a few more assets that obviously ultimately do make a large transition. If it's ETH, if it's something else, I think it will go back to having
a tremendously lofty valuation in the hundreds of billions of dollars that kind of doesn't make
sense because I think you'll still have everyone that's crypto native piling in with hopefully
everyone that's outside of crypto that also starts to see the value proposition there as well.
And hopefully at that point, it's really doing something significant to reflect that extremely lofty valuation.
But I don't know.
I'm not the person to ultimately make that judgment and be a picker.
It certainly feels like if the market is a voting machine and a weighing machine,
that right now it's not doing
anything for ETH. If you go off just the wisdom of the crowds, it seems like ETH is not a very good
investment so far. Whereas the entire cycle, everyone was waiting for ETH to do something
because it did it in the past. I think it's much more likely that the patterns in this market that
do persist are the ones that are like
more general and enforced by retail, which are once a cycle, once every, I don't want to say cycle
and give the idea of like a permanent four-year cycle, but instead thinking about like a secular,
larger trend for each positive, secular, larger trend, macro trend that we have up,
there'll be like a darling and the last darling will get recycled and show, you know, there'll be less interest until something actually does
graduate to being, you know, um, adopted majorly outside.
Right.
Um, but, uh, you know, I don't know.
I, ETH is not, ETH looks like it's, it wants to continue lower, but I do think we're probably
you lower. But I do think we're probably going to find some kind of floor, at least in the short term.
going to find some kind of floor, at least in the short term.
Yeah. And, you know, I think I was reading late last night that Japanese markets opened
considerably lower as a result of tariff news. Their slates kick in April 2nd, I think is the
date, which is Wednesday. What's your take on that?
And with the knowledge that neither of us isn't an economist,
it seems like there's a little bit of outrage around terrorists.
But at the same time, when you just think about it,
it doesn't seem that crazy.
I think it's true that there's not a ton of analysis that's done here.
But I'm kind of a little bit pro-experimentation here.
I mean, I feel like, you know, the only risk here is like the long-term damage that can be done.
In the meantime, if your economy is, you know, one of the world's largest consumers playing with the tariff, you know, knobs a little bit, it seems like a, you know, reasonable thing to try.
I mean, I don't know that people want the
the experimentation to be done at a global level um but yeah i could this be you know good a good
move in the long run i don't know what do you think about yeah i don't know either like i'm
definitely not equipped but to answer this but, but the administration is definitely taking an approach that maybe a smaller entrepreneur would, which would be like, move fast and break shit and see what works.
I do think, obviously, the market hates this right now.
And if you want an opinion on anything, one of the best things, and this is why markets are great, because in some way they find the truth um the s p
is telling you everything right now like markets absolutely hate this markets outside of the u.s
um btc is actually the worst performing market right now uh worst performing asset if you just
look at larger assets um yeah there's other markets that are doing really well. China, German equities, gold, pretty much everything outside of the United States.
Magnificent Seven and then BTC and Nasdaq are the bottom three.
But I don't know.
It's the safest answer for me.
I don't know.
I could tell you what the market is telling you right now.
Goldman Sachs, they posted something and they are leaning towards a negative surprise so there's a lot of people that have been you know maybe
rightfully so and it it's a decent line of thinking thinking okay so this is obviously
an event that we know well in advance like the market should be pricing this into some degree
um but macro events like there's this tendency to think that, oh, when they arrive, something happens,
they arrive, you get the response in equities.
There's this tendency to think, okay, that was a response, we're good.
But really, it's much more slow moving.
So this is the perfect example of big ships turn slowly if this is a major change that's
going to stick.
And then I don't know if the first response by the market
is necessarily the honest response.
You know, Goldman said that they're forecasting
that, you know, the 12-month recession probability increased.
So I don't know what it would be.
I think they increased it to like 35%.
GDP was brought down.
Their estimates of GDP.
They think, obviously, the tariffs are going to affect prices,
boost prices, obviously, in a negative way. So I don't know. This is all so far, it's bad.
And there are a few people that tend to be more informed that think that the tariffs on the second
are actually going to be far more than what anyone is
anticipating like trump's gonna like i don't know uh tariff every single creature under the sun
um your your your uh your hamster in its cage right now on its wheel little doesn't know it's
gonna have to deal with tariffs too um but i don't know it It's going to be a really interesting week, that's all.
There's a comment that came in as a question from Andrew. What do you think about Bitcoin's
core relation to global M2? Wouldn't that suggest that good days should be coming back
in the coming months without a major black swan? Talking about the monetary supply?
coming months without a major black swan thing that talking about the monetary supply yeah so
obviously you know there's the people bring up m2 a lot um i'm not an economist i'm not a macro
trader but bitcoin benefits when there's larger amounts of liquidity sloshing around in the system
uh it's not you know the the highest feedback um it's much more slow it's it's much slower moving but i i don't know i you
know i i'm more focused on the short term and how markets are responding in the short term than
trying to make any you know longer term position longer term um uh assumptions about how that is
going to change i do think that you know while all this is taking. I don't think that this can afford to continue.
I don't think, you know, Trump wants to break the economy or hurt people as much as it's starting to
look right now. You know, as far as the direction we're headed, he's doing a lot of things though
that are very different, right? You know, there seems to be a lot of cozying up to Putin and turning our backs on other allies that we've had in the past.
So there's big changes from a policy standpoint that definitely are taking place and are not trivial.
I do think, though, that the S&P is off the highs, like 9%.
Some stocks, internals are much lower.
Obviously, Tesla got its ass kicked. I do think, though, that in a couple of years, this looks like the clear buying opportunity. So for anyone who's thinking, hey, where do I allocate? I never know
where to add into my 401k or add to my long-term positioning. Not financial advice, but I was
telling my father-in-law last night, I was like, as long as you're just not going to look to take this out and flip it
quickly, this is probably a time when you want to start, you know, adding a little bit sort of,
rather than dollar cost averaging, um, it's more like you're averaging based on volatility. Uh,
so we've had this kind of pullback. You add a little bit more here than just spreading out
over time because this kind of
extreme, all I think about is how the pendulum always swings back. So I think, you know, who
knows? It could be potentially deadly to be long into a big event that comes because of this,
right? Like, before oil went negative, no one thought oil was going to go negative. No one
foresaw the crash in March 2020 that happened. Maybe a few people did, but there's always going to be somebody. So I don't know if we're still looking down the barrel of that. Over the last week the rear view looks like a great buying opportunity because I don't think we're looking at the end of like some kind of secular long term bull market in the S&P.
I think that this is going to be, you know, could be ugly for a bit, but I'm trying to stay as optimistic as possible and tactical so that I could get as long as possible when it seems like the tide
shifts. I can't see Trump doing this for the next two years and just leaving everything in absolute
shit condition. He's got a lot of friends that are being affected by the market right now.
That's my assumption. I think that that's the case. At some point, it's going to hit his pocket
too, but maybe he doesn't care at this point. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I'm of the same view, like,
and this is part of what makes me a little bit less anti-tariff than others. I think the U.S.
is in a position of strength right now. And, you know, in that position, like, if you make a
mistake, you can roll it back. And, you know, if you launch a tariff on a country and then they have a reciprocal tariff.
Everybody's getting hurt.
And then, you know, you roll it back with some face-safe and commentary and you undo the damage that was done.
But I really think that the risk of the U.S. here is, like, in the long term because it's, you know, it's been kind of like a part of the global economy for a long
time, at the center of global economy for a long time.
And it's possible that moves like this and instability like this for partners leads them
to reduce dependency on the U.S., which is bad for us in the long term.
So that's kind of why I have no idea what's happening in the next couple of decades,
but it feels like in the short term,
people may be overreacting just a little bit.
But yeah, it's hard to really say.
So one thing I want to talk about is
BC's been ranging for quite a while here
in the low mid 80s.
And I think that crypto holders as a whole tend to be optimistic and look for the next
leg up.
I think there's a little bit more of worrying about missing out on more gains that are to
come than there is about like locking in profits or, you know, preventing losses.
But the longer that we drag on in this range, does that become more, it's hard for me to
say, like, does this become more and more bullish?
We see it's like, all right, we're trading in the mid 80s for a while.
This is fair value, you know, or could the counterpoint be like, eventually, there'll be some big move down at an inopportune time.
Like, let's say the stock market takes a hit.
BTC goes to 75K.
And then you just get this massive flood of people dumping, worried that we'll go back to the mid-50s, mid-60s, or even lower.
I mean, all kinds of, hard to say, it could be engagement farming, but all kinds of opinions
floating around these days.
And then I think at that point, the risk becomes like, okay, you didn't sell while we were
significantly higher than previous all-time highs,
and you don't have an opportunity to buy back lower.
So what do you make of this extended period of ranging?
I think that anytime you have a divergence building in price action and every single thing that's taking place outside of that,
that's a good sign, right?
So anytime you have price that is moving sideways, but the news, the sentiment, all of that
quote unquote is moving down still and trending down, that's a good sign when there's a
divergence.
It is still quite early though.
I think you have to think of things in scale. So we're in the frame of larger context.
So the move that we just had down, that broke down, that didn't just happen.
You know, at this point, it happened at the end of February, first week of March, right?
Broke down from a, what was a multi-month range.
So it's still technically early, if it's the case that this is the beginning of a larger
move down.
But we did stall in a relatively nice area.
We're filling out this gap that we created on the way up.
We haven't been going sideways that long.
So it's a little early to tell.
And again, as of today, as of the last few sessions, as of the last couple of weeks, we're trading mostly tick and tick with the S&P.
So that hasn't changed yet.
So it is very path dependent in the sense that if the S&P goes down, I'm not betting on crypto holding up.
As weak as it is, I think it would just continue to be weak.
say that the low that we put in, so right around like 76, 777, uh, if I get another chance to buy
that, I would, I would look to be a buyer between that level and around like 74. Um, because I do
think there's the opportunity now that we've put in that significant low to create a big trap on
a return to that level. So this would have to be something that,
that immediately was responded to, like immediately have responsive price action,
responsive buyers. Um, so it shouldn't be the case that we're able to trade below 76,
you know, and price is still listless at that point. Yeah. I would, I would assume we're going
much lower. Like I kind of carve things out. Um, we're accepting back into a gap. Now it was the gap
between 90 and the prior highs around 74, 73, seven. Uh, it makes sense for us to fill this
out for a little bit. If we start trading back in that range, you know, let's say we fall back
below the, like, what was it like February, 2024 eyes. Um, it's, it's, it's extremely rare for BTC
to, to not fill that structure out the way it filled it out on
the way up on the way down.
So if we traded below 73 and there was no response there, it's unlikely that you just
stop at 70.
You know, it's more than likely that you start looking at liquidity that's in the low 60s,
possibly back in the 50s.
We're, you know, we're ways away from that right now.
And I think that the lows that we currently
have in possibly be another good buying opportunity. I hate to look at prior structure
and draw too much from it. But if you do go back to the structure on the breakdown in 2021 and go
back into the summer of 2021, there's a decent amount of similarity between not only BTC, but how ETH behaved,
how others behave.
So if you look at, you know, alts outside of BTC and ETH, there's been a very big decline
already, right, with alts especially.
So I'd give it another shot at these lows.
The more we move sideways, yeah, and especially if stocks begin to find footing again
um the more bullish i get but it's it is still i think relatively early i can't imagine much
happening over the next you know few months in the summer i i don't know it's summer months are
always you know there's there's a decent amount of seasonality at play that tends to be pretty actionable.
And outside of the one thing that we don't have that we did have during 2021, that summer, you know, 2021, like July, August, was we had FTX that supported the market extensively.
So we don't have a party like that that's doing a lot of lifting, FTX, three hours capital.
So we don't have a party like that that's doing a lot of lifting, FTX, three hours capital.
And that's, you know, it's completely different this time around from that standpoint, but we'll see.
Looking at Microsoft strategy since, almost unbelievably, like if you had said six years ago that the main buyer is still a sailor, I would think that that's an extremely bearish outlook.
But if you look at the MicroStrategy NAV premium,
right now it's currently trading at 70% premium to BTC holdings.
I'm still struggling to make sense of this.
I mean, do you have any idea what's going on there?
Like you would think that at some point over time, this would, this would be more,
much more limited as the size of MSTR grows and as the amount of BT holds grows, but
it's, it almost keeps just plugging along. I mean, how could you possibly explain this,
this large of a NAV premium? Is this just like, this is me talking this out, it's trading, or is there some rational explanation for this?
You're muted, by the way.
Oh, sorry about that.
It's an impressive amount of financial engineering.
I don't know if I have too much to offer on talking to it.
Uh, he's tapping into literally everything he can to, to buy more Bitcoin.
Um, you know, the stark, uh, micro strategy.
Uh, so it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's very, it's interesting to be, to
experience this and see this because he's
at this point now i think he holds two and a half percent of btc um which is something that makes me
mildly uncomfortable uh i know that he's not close to like any he's not we're not close to any kind of you know liquidation um he's been in worse position before
um but yeah i mean this is just knowing it you know the micro strategy holders are
i don't know something special about them because i i don't i don't see how this i don't see how
this ends well over the long term in the short term it doesn't look like we're at much risk
uh but at this point,
the guy is having no impact on the market either. So I don't know. Personally, I don't know. I don't
know enough about it. Yeah. Okay. So as far as beyond the majors, I know we,
long-term view on alts is you don't want to be holding them relative to BTC.
But in the short term, let's say the market gets going again,
what would you be looking at as something to keep an eye on?
Yeah, so my opinion with alts is it's relegated to any alts really that have already been broken.
So a broken chart has a pretty big effect, I think, on psychology of people here.
So if you're like, you know, you arrived to the exchange, you're
scanning through charts, it's already like, you know, we're down tremendously.
If we're coming off the bottom or if we're coming off of, you know,
potentially a short term bottom, there's something to be said with a fresh chart,
a newer alt,
something that's relatively new listing or an existence period, where you don't have that
sort of overhang, whether from a supply standpoint or a psychological standpoint, looking at something
that is extremely far off its all-time highs, approaching the lows almost asymptotically for
a period of months. So I look to anything that's relatively new that
doesn't have a significantly broken chart. So a lot of times when we get to periods in the market
like this, where things are beat to shit, and it looks like we're going to have a long ways ahead
of us. I'll defer to saying like, hey, things that are probably going to do well over the next few
months, they might not even be at market right now.
So there's a lot of crap that comes to markets.
I don't want to just make that too generally.
I will say that I'm looking at and still keeping an eye on hype, on Athena, on Barra as an example.
I think Barra Chain has, it's probably one of the newest, largest, most spoken about alts that has come out recently finally um and it doesn't have i don't think it has a whole lot of overhead for the next year or
so so this potentially might be a good level to list at or just have come to existence at the
right time you know having gone live in fe in February and still trading in a relatively confined range between like five 50 and, um, and you know, 10 bucks.
So, you know, if it's fresh, if it's new, if it doesn't have a ton of price history,
that just looks like it's gotten its ass kicked already.
I think there's something to be said for that because you have to deal with all those people
on the way back up.
So, you know, everyone's looking to get out at better prices.
If you don't have anything in the rear view,
it's the sky's the limit kind of mentality.
So there's only a few alts that really, I think,
satisfy that currently.
And then any project that's new and that can pick up steam,
I think you just look at things very crudely
with like a moving average and you'll probably do well.
I think that alts are in the right conditions,
really simple to trade with a trend following approach.
But yeah, right now there's only a few things that really stand out.
Other than that, I'm looking at alts from an intraday standpoint.
I'm looking at alts that they get to relative extremes, whether using a Z-score or some kind of momentum oscillator and just fading things that are clearly not moving on any kind of new narrative.
EOS is an example.
Like EOS has been moving up over the last few days.
It's outperforming.
It's,
it's decently overbought for what it should be.
And it has some kind of like bullshit catalyst.
I think it was like,
I don't know,
like vault or something like that.
But EOS has been around forever
and I don't think EOS is really doing anything.
So I think there's some decent fading opportunities
still that exist,
but long-term investment positions,
trading swing trades.
I don't know if we're,
I don't know if we're really there in that place yet.
I think I need to,
I personally always need to see BTC,
you know, on much more stable ground.
Yeah, I was actually just looking up
the EOS market cap relative to ETH
at its peak.
And it's, you know,
I've just looked at EOS,
I haven't looked at this chart
since basically forever.
And look at the market cap right now
is 1.3 billion. Well, now is $1.3 billion.
Well, FTV is $1.3 billion.
And that's quite a hit.
This was the first wildly considered to be ETH killer, so to speak.
And I think they raised more than that in terms of just ETH deposits on launch.
So interesting to see.
Speaking of Bera, I mean, it's down like 20-odd percent
over the last three days.
And I think a lot of alts are in the same position.
I mean, I'm starting to wonder, like,
are some of the easiest trades here potentially just shorting alts
that look like they're in a bad spot
and ready to move down much lower in a short amount of time?
And what would you be looking for as, like, an indicator?
Because it's a little bit of, of like a double-edged sword,
like, you know, it can easily blow up in your face.
But it's honestly really hard to resist the temptation,
I think, looking at some of these coins.
And if you believe that the alt market will continue to see a decline,
unless, you know, BTC majors really take off,
it honestly maybe seems like one of the higher EV trades out there.
What would you say in response to that?
I mean, some caution advised here, but...
Oh, yeah, I would actually...
Sorry, I did mention, you know, looking at some very brief plays,
almost to, I guess,
the best way to put it is like stay active and stay in step with the market as a shorter term trader.
But I definitely am not looking at, you know, arriving to my desk and thinking like, hey,
what is a really good short opportunity in alts right now?
I have just like a couple rules that I follow.
One of them is, is there just a better trade and not in alts right now. I have just a couple rules that I follow. And one of them is,
is there just a better trade
in not trading at all right now
than looking for shorts?
Because if I'm a ride,
me personally,
if I'm starting to think
alts look like easy shorts,
I mean, look at the chart.
Look at others.
It's already tremendously down at this point.
And that doesn't mean it's down 50%, right?
I mean, a big trade is already behind us. That doesn't mean these won't continue down, you know,
much, much further. I just personally don't think that shorting alts makes a whole lot of sense
after we've seen this much depression in prices, unless the setup is like coming off of the back
of a very significant rally
that is, again, starting to fail and showing some kind of failure
on the underside of the structure.
So like let's say, for example, let's like use ETH as an example.
Let's say ETH trades up to like, you know, don't take this with a grain of salt
because, you know, this is just for an example.
Let's say ETH trades up to 25.
If we see that we're rejected at that prior structure
going back to like 2024 summer,
I'll look for the failure to start to develop
and start to see the underside retests of that resistance level
and then possibly short after a rally.
But at this point, you know, looking at alts,
like some of them have started to really compress,
like their average daily ranges are starting to compress.
Volatility overall is starting to compress and starting to funnel.
There's way too much jump risk in shorting alts.
Like you can, you know, if you have a ton of margin to put up
and just, you know, place shorts across the board and, you know, if you have a ton of margin to put up and just, you know, place shorts across the board and, you know, you're well out of the range of any kind of possible foreseeable jump that could take you out.
Right.
Especially when people are using leverage.
You can, but I think it's almost like a misallocation of capital at this point.
I think when prices are this low, I just start to, you know, I might still be bearish, but I start to look for the other side because essentially like in commodities and crypto, you're looking at trends on both sides
get crowded at some point. And I think we're getting relatively close to one of those points
with BTC where not BTC, BTC, some crypto in general, where we will have a rally that will
occur just mechanically based on people getting too crowded
into the lows. But I would not look at alts right now. And even if I had the most dire outlook for
them on an individual basis too, like, oh, this project's bullshit. You have to just remember
like scams pump the hardest and there's a ton of jump risk in this market. So it doesn't take much,
especially after prices have moved down this much for prices
to cover a you know vast distance in a short amount of time and for nothing like it's literally
like the book is just evaporating and and prices are going to jump tremendously um so i don't want
to try to uh i don't want to try to short at this point for that reason i think there's way too much
risk in it got it yeah that makes sense i mean we, we were quite a ways down and it's not too hard to move some of these.
All right.
I think that covers it for like the main topics of the week.
I mean, it hasn't been a ton happening besides the continued tariff flip-flopping and noise around, you know, general economy, kind of more of like
a macro discussion really.
But, but the guys, feel free to request speaker access.
I think we'll, we'll, we'll wrap up here with just what's your outlook for the next couple
months?
Has it changed?
Anything new come to light that would kind of impact your view on
short slash midterm market, crypto market? And yeah.
Just the price action at this point, honestly. Because the sentiment, the negative sentiment is still being rewarded.
All the things in terms of looking at market internals,
looking at positioning, whether you're looking at options,
sentiment derived from the options market,
whether you're looking at sentiment derived from the futures market,
all of that is being still rewarded with prices moving lower.
So until there's some kind of major
divergence between those, I think that you just have to focus on price action. I think it's the
first thing I would want to see is just markets start to look like it has a bid again and more
than sailor. So, you know, again, like one of the best examples is when someone is coming to an
BTC is like, it's a liquid asset,
but on the big scale of things, like someone buying billions of dollars worth of it should
move the needle more than just intraday. But there's also no carry on effect on that momentum.
So like people aren't confident at all to even follow that up. And normally like you have people,
you know, anyone who's like a market maker, anyone does HFT, anyone who's more dialed in
at a more atomized level is going to be able to pick up on someone buying.
And you're going to see sort of the auto correlation and momentum begin to pick up off of that.
You see someone sort of swimming beneath the surface, a large entity, and you start to ride in that wake.
There's none of that right now
like people are like oh yeah sellers are buying a lot okay like you're the only buyer happy to
happy to sell to you um so yeah until the price action changes um and maybe like we're right on
the horizon of that right like with this april 2nd uh tariff announcement but something tells me that
trump is like um what what you hope for is that like,
if someone is relatively consistent in their rhetoric, that you're able to judge market impact
off of that over time and see how that changes. So like, Trump is relatively consistent in his
rhetoric, he says the same things often enough that we see the market begin to shift in the face
of that. And it's like, okay, maybe that's a good leading indicator.
But it's not that case yet where the market seems to have found any stability in anything
headline related from him.
Because he might be talking about the tariffs and you get like a feel for that.
And then, okay, the market begins to absorb that a little bit.
And then he's like, you know what?
Our best friends are Russia.
And then the market's like, oh, fuck.
So, you know, the market really can't figure this guy out, it seems.
And while I want to say that April 2nd seems like some kind of culmination to this, it just feels like it might always be every week from the next.
We're just kind of, you know, one foot in, one foot out, not really sure what's going to happen.
foot in, one foot out, not really sure what's going to happen.
Yeah, I mean, the guy's in his late 70s.
I mean, to give him credit, I think it's reasonable that he wouldn't be so concerned with day-to-day
market moves.
I mean, in his position, he probably sees it as a mandate from God or something like
that to do whatever he desires.
And so I think there's going to be a lot of just Trump-driven market moves over the next
year.
And this guy is like holding a PlayStation controller or something, but controlling the
world economy with that. So it'll be interesting to watch. I don't think, PlayStation controller or something, but, you know, controlling the world economy with that.
So it'll be interesting to watch. I don't think it'll be.
And this is interesting because it's in stark contrast to his last term.
He did introduce some tariffs in like 2018 that had some impact and creative splashes.
I think we actually saw a continuation of those under Biden.
I think they're mainly the
China-oriented tariffs. They weren't so widespread, but yeah, this time around feels quite
different. All right, E, you're at it as a speaker, if you have any questions.
Hi, yeah. Thanks very much for taking my question. Earlier, you guys talked about the potential move upwards to 2500 and only there could there be some potential for shorting the ultra market on the back of a failed rally.
I was just wondering what your guys, you know, maybe had to allocate probabilities to it.
What's the likelihood we see between this 1700 2100 range. What do you think is the likelihood we're going to see 2100 before we
go down further potentially to 1.7 or lower? Sounds like a guy who's in a really path
dependent future position. No, the 2500 level, I was just using that as an example. I'm not
thinking about that as a specific target at all.
But what I am starting to...
And this might be a problem because I just realized
my agger has been on the background pinging for a while now.
So I apologize if you guys have been hearing that.
My eyes deceive me, but my ears don't.
It's always good to hear the tape.
The thing about ETH is it feels like ETH eth on its own like idiosyncratically is is
just really you know we're beating a dead horse at this point like the rest of the market yeah
has been getting an ass kicking but it feels like now people are starting to really pile on to the
whole eth is dead um narrative um and i think that you, over long time horizons, things might be right, right?
ETH might not be the winner. But in the short term, markets are driven by positioning and sentiment.
So I think with ETH more than BTC almost, I'm looking for, and that might not be smart because
ETH is, you know, higher vol than BTC. Sometimes it's higher beta to the upside.
Sometimes it's not.
But I think ETH kind of, I'm getting the vibes right now that in the next month or so, we'll find that the prices that ETH trades at, whether that's here, whether that's at 1600, we could have something come down the barrel this week that sends markets much lower. But I think we're getting to an overdone point. And I don't know, I don't know
where that ends up taking us. I think that if we bounced from like, let's say, let's say 16,
or let's say 17, this region, it doesn't look like the, you know, ETH doesn't look like it has as
good of a low as BTC so far. If you just look at how Bitcoin has the, you know, ETH doesn't look like it has as good of a low as
BTC so far. If you just look at how Bitcoin has rejected the lows and how ETH has rejected the
lows. So I wouldn't be surprised if ETH spikes lower one more time. Who knows where that takes
us? It's much thinner. I would probably look to sell, you know, an overshoot of 2000, think that 2,000 seems like the round number target
that you'll get a good amount of people taking profit around,
but also a good amount of people shorting the round,
such a large, obvious number,
that you end up getting something that takes us much higher
for a brief period.
Again, just look at the history of ETH.
These things, even if this is the beginning of a bigger trend down that goes much lower,
there are very significant throwbacks in the interim that take place.
And it's because one side of the market gets ultimately crowded the same way it happened
at the high, but this time they're clicking the red instead of the green button.
I don't know if we're there yet, but something inside of this black box inside my head that is just like a little bit of intuition tells me that we're getting close to that point.
Fantastic. Thank you very much.
So you reckon there's probably a greater chance that we sort of see that 2K level before that maybe larger downward trend towards 1600?
Well, I mean, not for nothing nothing 2k is literally right here you know so 2k at this point you have to remember like at lower prices
um percentages change so yeah 2k is 10 away uh and that might be feel that might feel nice to
someone who's like underwater or looking to get out at a fair price. I do think that we'll, my point is we'll get a bigger bounce, whether it's a bounce that
goes, you know, halfway up, like we're talking 2021 summer, or whether it's, you know, going
back to like Q, beginning at Q2, end of Q1, 2022, we had a much larger bounce.
And the market continued to trend lower, but it was a positioning driven bounce.
We haven't really had any of that yet. ETH sell-off has been pretty much down, not down only like monotonically down only, but it, it, there's been no very significant
throwbacks. You had a big throwback, you know, beginning of March, um, that retested the
underside of that previous structure very cleanly. But nothing that had fooled anyone into thinking that maybe there's been a trend change.
So nothing that's lasted for a period of weeks, which even in a market that is moving down
in a secular downtrend, like a very significant downtrend over a long period of time,
you're going to have those rallies that are really violent and take place over the course
of weeks.
It's tough to just say that, you know,
I could say that and it doesn't really give you anything as far as an entry
and a target, but I would say we're closer to that than we were at any other
point. Um, it just feels like from a sentiment standpoint,
specifically it's, it's getting, if we're not there now,
we're pretty damn close.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Thanks, man.
All right.
That wraps up the space.
Thanks, everybody, for hopping on.
Thanks, Ryan, as usual, for the insights.
And we'll see you guys next week.
Thanks, guys.
