Bitcoin surges above $20K, another ATH! | Charlie Burton, NebraskanGooner, Michaël van de Poppe

It's foreign.

Welcome to the new crypto markets live stream in which we are celebrating this historical day, the historical price movements of bitcoin as it broke the 20k barrier and we're currently facing 24k actually. My name is Michael Van Der Poppe and I am today the host of this crypto markets livestream. The bull cycle has started, but what will happen next from here on in the short term and long term for the cryptocurrencies markets, what are the crucial triggers in this cycle? That's what we're going to discuss with Charlie today and that's what we're going to discuss with Nebraska. Gunnar. Well, I won't be discussing Arsenal today, Nebraska, but I hope you're doing well, Charlie as well. Welcome guys to the live stream.

What's football? It's not rugby. I have an oval ball. That's what you need to be using there, Gunnar. That's where you're going, wr, away from Arsenal and go to watch rugby.

I think it's called soccer. I don't know.

Yeah, that's what you call it.

Right, well, if we're going to call.

It soccer then I'll probably hope out quite soon here. But.

Arsenal playing is not.

But before we start, I have to say something that this livestream is not financial advice and can't be taken as one. Our guest and me included are only sharing our opinions about the markets. So first of all, we've just witnessed a massive breakout of bitcoin as we have been accelerating from 10k to 24k within like 3 months. How did you experience this move and in your opinion, what has been the trigger for this massive rally that we've witnessed in the previous weeks?

Charlie, how did I experience the move? I watched it because I'd already. I don't trade it. I've just, I've invested in it. So I've been buying it all this year and so just sort of watched it go. I wasn't not trading it because I trade currencies on a day to day basis and other markets. But yeah, it's, it's been pretty good. It's benefited from a weaker dollar amongst other things. And, and as we know, we're starting to see more institutional managers coming out and saying that they're invested. I mean, Paul Shudder Jones was the biggie earlier this year when he said that. I think when I was last on the show that he'd come out and declared his investment. And then we're seeing more and more coming out. We've got Guggenheim giving a $400,000 prediction yesterday and one of the managers there. And so it's just been an interesting rise, I must admit. In late November, I thought when it had the quick shove down, I was hoping that it was going to come back down to about 15,000 or so, because I was going to buy some more then. And I think this is a real key, is that a lot of potential investors have missed this move. Now, we had a lot of consolidations earlier this year, which got very boring and I think that would have put.

A lot of investors off.

And yet that was a great. Obviously, we can now say, with the benefit of hindsight, it was a great time to buy. But then, of course, like in any bull market, once the move starts going, you get a lot of investors and traders feel like they're trapped on the outside thinking they want to be in. And so, yes, you're going to get some FOMO players, you're going to get some people jumping in on the move, but I think there's a lot of people trapped on the outside. Was hoping that there was going to be a pullback and yet to have one. No doubt there will be one at some point, but that's been my experience and what I've seen speaking to investors who are saying, yeah, I wanted to buy, but it's just running away from me. But I think that's what. I see that as a positive, because in any bull market, it's healthy to have people who are trapped on the outside wishing they were in. If you've got everyone in, that's when I start getting worried and I'm not worried just yet. We can talk about euphoria stages and everything else, and although this has gone pretty parabol in very recently here, but I don't think we're a general euphoric stage. Maybe within the community, but not in the wider investing public who are still licking their wounds from 2017. 18.

Yeah.

I think that what we see is that there are euphoric stages within those cycles. So in no way this move is comparable to the 2017 one, is that's just the end stage of a bull cycle, right?

Yeah.

But on a temporary basis, we might be getting into the same phase because of the community and just the vibe that's surrounded by Bitcoin right now.

Well, well, only reason I say, literally two weeks ago, I've got a chart here I could bring up. But if you look at the chat, the general media chat in relation to Bitcoin now and in the last month, relative to 2017. It's. It's on the floor.

It was.

I know it's picked up now in the. Literally in the last week, but I still think there's a. We're playing a bit of catch up there. And I totally agree with you that it's getting very frothy in the short term, but I don't think the larger investing public are on board. So I agree that yes, in the short term, there's at any time this could pull back and could pull back sharp. But. But I don't think we're anywhere close to a mania at the moment.

Well, what do you think about it, Gunnar? Do you see that there's some other parts that have actually triggered this move or.

Yeah, I totally agree with him, with Charlie. I mean, we're not seeing near the, you know, euphoria from the outside from the no coiners that we saw in 2017. You know, I was getting messages at 10 or 11k in 2017 and I'm just now that Bitcoin is 23,000 just now starting to get an influx of messages and texts from no coiners. And we saw that way sooner last time. It's kind of weird how bitcoin's gone so under the radar right now. But maybe that's what institutions wanted because they wanted to be able to get in. But you're just seeing these institutions continue to buy bitcoin every time it's going up, which is what you should do if you're an investor. You should buy on the dips and be dollar cost averaging. Right. Like Charlie said, I didn't really. I've been trading the move up a little bit, but I haven't been trading as much lately just because I did a lot of buying earlier this year and dollar cost averaging and I unfortunately didn't get all of my bids filled on bitcoin that I wanted all my allocation and I had more 17,500 and got front ran on that even so 17,500 was where I really wanted to get back in and get my more ads because I was starting to realize we just weren't really going to start pulling back anymore. But luckily I was able to look at things like litecoin, you know, that were a little bit more lagging and kind of move some more funds over there and you know, it's up about the same amount as bitcoin over the last couple weeks. Yeah.

We are going to discuss altcoins and cryptocurrencies in general in some bit from now as we also know that Once bitcoin is relatively calm, the altcoins will usually follow the path of the king. And bitcoin is the first one to move around. But what I want to discuss first is that the moment that we broke out yesterday, we saw some news coming out and mostly news is lining up pretty nicely with the actual breakout on the moment of the breakout. And that's not something from the cryptocurrency markets alone. That's also from the equity markets. What we witness yesterday, the ECME announced that there will be ETF futures, for instance. There's also UK FCA who said, okay, well, we're going to extend the crypto registrations just like the Netherlands have been doing. They are accepting crypto companies. Do you believe that this news, these new items, actually triggered this breakout yesterday? Or is it just a technical breakout above the recent high that just liquidated a bunch of shorters who tried to short the top, which. Not the top. How do you see that, Gunnar?

Yeah, I think it's the chicken or the egg. Right. Which came first? I think it was inevitable either way. It was coming either way. It just kind of gave reason, more reason for people to make it happen or it gave more justification to it, I guess. We've seen it all year. Bitcoin just isn't pulling back. We were used to getting some sort of pullbacks on bitcoin. Everyone's been talking about a 30% correction that we always see. And we're just not seeing that kind of. We're just not seeing it this year. And that's good for the adoption of bitcoin. It really is saying a lot. And I think we're going to see a lot more regulation come out, which is a lot of people are against that. And I see both sides of it. But I think overall from a sustainability standpoint, I think that's a really good thing for crypto and for bitcoin.

Yeah, Well, I think we actually need regulations if you want to go further in the markets. Right. So talking about those institutions and I think you are more in the equity markets, Charlie. So probably you know the behavior of these a little bit more, the cryptocurrencies markets, if I'm not judging, but that's what I hear from here. Do you believe that the institutions jumping into the market can actually change the behavior of the markets in 2021, as previously, it was mostly fueled by retail making movements, making it very bumpy and dumpy. Might we get into a more organic and natural behavior of a market for the next years?

Yeah, I Mean the institutions will be using all sorts of elaborate algorithms to be buying in and buying and getting their positions. I mean, I suspect a lot of the institutions as we already know, are already being in because they only start talking about it once they've already got their position, they're not going to talk about it beforehand. So I think a lot of those institutions have got their allocations now and any other trading they're doing is going to be smaller, but they'll be just be using algorithms anyway, as always to get them in and spread their entries as and when they do. But do I think it's a good thing for the market? Yes. I understand the community may not like it so much, but for the maturity of the market it's a good thing to be taken more seriously. When you've got so many big asset managers are saying, yes, this is an asset class now we need to have this asset class in our portfolio. And whereas that wasn't there just a few years ago. So that I think is a really good positive for the future. Will it take out some of the, the bumps? I suspect that we'll still see sharp retracements. We see sharp retracements in other asset classes at times. So why should it be any different to for example, gold? I know we're going to talk about that, but gold has always been there in many portfolio managers portfolios and we still see sharp retracements in gold at times as well. Not maybe quite the way that bitcoin's been in the past, but we still see it. So in any market there's still going to be periods of consolidation and there's going to be periods of pullbacks in price as well. And so I think that will be a natural thing. But certainly for the longevity of that market, I think it's a very good thing to see so many asset managers getting involved and seeing it as something that needs to be in their portfolios. And I think that it just means that maybe this market is growing up and it's gone through its teenage years and it's becoming an adult.

Well, at least it's trying to do. Not the community, but the market itself is trying to become an adult. But like if we discuss those institutions, we are always actually right now we are pointing at the fact that, okay, institutions are going to push the prices up. We do see that the outflow of exchange is on very high level right now, which means that everything is going into long term portfolios. Right. Could we also see a reasoning in which, okay, those institutions have bitcoin right now. Why would they want to push the price up right now? Is there also an argumentation that we actually could see a crash where they accumulate more from here, that they are going to push the prices down as there is just. It's still a very low market cap in general. If you compare it to gold or just to any forex market, it's very easy to manipulate. Right. Maybe that's a question for you, Charlius.

Oh, yeah, it is because it is, in relative terms, a low cap market. And no doubt that will happen at times.

I think you have to look at what point did these institutions, many of them, start getting involved in bitcoin?

And many of them, all right, some.

Of them were very clever and were buying, I'm sure in the spike down early this year in March. But some of them have openly come out and said, yeah, we were buying in at sort of 9, 10,000. Now bear it in mind, if you've got an institution that's buying at 9 or 10,000, yes, they're up, for argument's sake, 100% or more at the moment, but they're only buying in with 2% of their portfolio. So they don't necessarily. What they want is a 10 bagger with these because it's not like they're investing 50% of their assets. So like if they're investing in shares, they want to be able to get ride those bigger, longer trends. So they will push the price around at times once they feel that there's enough new interest coming in. And so because that makes it easier for them to sell their holdings, if you're getting more and more of the larger public getting involved. And as we've, and as Gunnar's already said, we haven't been seeing that, not as yet, not certainly.

In any real.

Great quantity at the moment, like Gunnar said about his inquiries. For me, I just wait for my builders to get in touch with me, start asking me about buying bitcoin and that's a great, it's a great measure for me, my bitcoins or any of my family who are non investors, non traders, and if they start phoning me up saying, charlie, I want to buy bitcoin, what do you think then? I know we're getting close to the top. We're not there yet.

Well, do you have something to add Gunnar to that or like.

No, that's a great point. He nailed it. They don't want a 2x on their investment. They want a 5, 6, 7, 10x on it. So I don't see any reason why we can't continue to push at least over the next 12 to 24 months and see some higher levels. But on the other side, I almost see it right now as more of a competition to get in. So I think that's why we haven't been seeing these pullbacks, because what was it grayscale was defending 10k, 9k area or something and just buying huge amounts. So I almost think that's what happened at 17,600 ish is we just had almost a competition and whoever, you know, we may have had some institutions and players waiting on the sidelines and somebody got there first and ran with it and then everyone else had to kind.

Of chase, I think another thing on again in any bull market like this. Look, this could pull back anytime. Like in any market technically there's no resistance, is there? We're at all time highs. But the. I forgot what I was going to say now as I'm watching it, as it's pulling back.

I was just putting it up as well.

But yeah, I mean it's going to. This sort of stuff's going to happen. It's natural that it's going to happen, that we're going to see retracements. A healthy bull market is one where you've got people looking for a correction that's a good sign of a healthy bull market. If you've got enough nervous people on the outside or even nervous people on the inside who are invested, that is a sign of a healthy bull market. So if you've got people saying when's the next correction? When's the next. What we got to worry about is when everyone's in just thinking it's going to carry on going higher. So all the time we've got people who are saying, oh yeah, when could it next pull back? How far is it going to pull back? That to me is a sign of a healthy market. I start getting concerned when you ask us and say, charlie, this thing's never going down, is it? And that's when I start getting worried. I was interviewed on TV a few years ago at the beginning of 2017 about the interview was asking me about Eurodollar and Eurodollar was at 105 and everybody was talking about the Eurodollar going down to parity. The interviewer was saying to me, charlie, how long do you think it's going to be before we go to parity? When you're getting people just assuming that and they're not even considering the other side of the market and of course euro went from 104, 105 and ended up at 117 or so by the end of that year. So when everyone's on one side, then we worry. But I'm still not concerned just yet.

Well, if you discuss this, I just get out of my memory that I was watching Ajax earlier this week or last week actually, and all of a sudden friends who have never been trading before were penny stock traders at this moment and they were talking about it like they are experts, which is saying a lot about the equity markets right now, which is full of speculators jumping in because everybody's making money. And those are the big signals that we might be getting to an end phase of a cycle or a period which is similar to the end of 2017 with crypto.

For instance, Robinhood traders.

Yep. That's just the main example right now.

Right.

Discussing 2021, I think that's where everybody's focused on right now. We've just hit the new all time high. Gunnar, do you agree or what is your view of the stock to flow model or just in general people expecting a bitcoin to run to 100k to 400k within the next year?

I don't know. Can you bet against bitcoin at this point? I do think there's definitely valid reasoning to think that 36k is achievable and even close to 60k. There are obviously some charts and calculations to be made saying we could go to 200k, so it's not out of the questions. We've seen parabolic rises on bitcoin percentage wise after bear markets. That has equated the percentage rise for bitcoin to go to 200k. So I definitely think it's possible. I definitely would want to be holding at least one bitcoin in case that happened. I would never want to fully scale out if we went to 100k. Think, you know, betting against it. I would always want to have some exposure there for who knows for how long. You know, just in case we go to 200k or 3 or 400k. It's just really hard to say right now.

It's also like at some point if you're fully out of crypto and it keeps running up, when are you going to jump back into the momentum? Right. And probably you're going to be the buyer to top. So. But if even if bitcoin is going to run to 100k or 200k, is that going to be something to celebrate or is it just something that we have to take in. Well, we have to be aware of that potentially our world economy or the dollar is going to be weaker, which means that we have less purchase power in general. Is that something that we have to take in mind for 2021 as the economy is having a hard time right now? Charlie, what do you see in the Forex markets as well like the dollar? I've been watching it myself. It's weakening, which might not be great for our economy and that might actually be the reason why bitcoin is running up this hard.

Well, yeah, the dollar's a big story at the moment. There's certainly. I've been lucky to have been on the short side of the dollar most of this year because I trade it via euro. So I trade euro dollar a lot.

But.

Of course we will get to a point in the not too distant future where we should see a dollar rebound. And I trade, this is my biggest market that I trade. So I do think that we will see that and I think we're closing in on it relatively soon. Depends on blimey dollar. I can show you some charts in a bit but certainly I think the dollar's really getting quite close to some technical levels where I would some sort of either consolidation or rebound. So and I think if we get that reprise then what we could also see is maybe a bit of a calmer bitcoin. Although bitcoin does move obviously for other reasons, not just because of the dollar, but that's what we could see as well that could have an impact on bitcoin. My concern as you're saying about the dollar is if the dollar was to continue to come down and, and yes, that could benefit bitcoin like it will benefit gold and other assets as well. And we're seeing gold and silver up a lot today as well. And do I think that it's a problem? I think that what's likely is going to happen is that if there are problems in the economy elsewhere, then you will still end up seeing some selling of the likes of bitcoin because people will have to sell their profitable positions to pay for some of their unprofitable positions elsewhere. So that's typical of what goes on. We saw this in the 20089 in the financial crisis at points when gold actually had some pretty steep sell offs, even though it was seen to be the market to offset equities. And it did because people were having to sell their gold positions to, to pay their margin calls. And I suspect that sort of thing is what would Happen in bitcoin as well. So I wouldn't see that Bitcoin would just carry on going to the moon just on that. But anyway, I'll leave it to Gunnar to add.

You nailed it. Yeah, totally agree. I don't know if I have much to add on there. That was good.

Well then we're going further. Like if you want to put up some charts that would be nice actually as we're just discussing this Charlie. And if you can actually screen share your. Your screen then we can see what your levels you are watching. As I'm personally also interested what you see on the dollar and just take us through your own view of the markets right now what you're seeing of bitcoin or anything that's correlated with it.

Okay, so bitcoin, well, this is the bitcoin futures chart I've got here at the moment. But I've got some other charts of bitcoin we can see. This is the daily chart here. We can see it's just off it off its highs a bit. But you can. It did like $1,000 in less than an hour, didn't it earlier today? So it got very. I think there was probably a fair few shorts got absolutely cleaned out there. But let's go to the dollar then because as you've just said now you can see this trend in the dollar being down the way it is. All I have on my charts, just a few moving averages and price action. That's all I really need. It's all I use most of the time. I have a MACD on some of my charts as well. But I have always liked moving averages. Not because I use them for moving average crossovers and stuff like that. I use them as support and resistance because moving averages are an average of price. Price likes to mean revert to its average mean revert. So having some moving averages for me has always been a really useful tool for using with mean reversion to see how far has it got stretched away from its average price and or is it retracing towards average price. So that's why I use them. But yeah, a really interesting chart to me and it has been for the last year or more is it's actually this quarterly chart here of this is the dollar, the dollar index itself. So you can see that actually from 2017 to 2000 or sorry, the beginning of this year we double topped here. So we did a double top. This is on the quarterly chart. And then we've. We've sold off. We had a big divergence here on the quarterly chart at the same time as double topping and we're selling off. So in some of the techniques I use for trading, if I see that type of pattern come in, then I would expect it as a minimum to get down to its 50 period. Now, the 50 moving average is my black moving average on my chart. So from a mean reversion perspective, after double topping and diverging, I would expect it to have a pretty good odds of getting to that 50. Now as you can see that 50 is not that far away anymore and the rate that it's going could do that in another few days. So I'm still seeing a bit more downside for the dollar but once it gets down into that zone, which technically is bringing us back into all of these highs as well, and obviously then a double bottom area. So technically that's a lovely area for to see a potential bounce in the dollar index. So until we get down there, I'm going to maintain my bearish case for the dollar. And if I flip side that over and actually look at the Euro dollar which what I trade a lot now, the euro dollar is very often, I'll put it onto a different one here. The Euro dollar is very much a, an inverted dollar index because the Euro is by far the biggest currency in that basket of currencies against the dollar. So it's very similar to that dollar chart I've just shown you which has flipped upside down. So the euro, I'm looking for it to come up to its quarterly 50. And that double top there as well, it's not exact, but it's very similar. So I'm still seeing that potential into the 123s. Bearing in mind this is a quarterly chart, we've only got two weeks and this, that moving average is at the beginning of January. That's going to come down by 75 pips. So I estimate around about 123.50 is what I'm looking for on euro dollar. So yes, I am seeing, I would like to see a bit more dollar weakness in the near term, but then once we get if we can get to 123.50, yes, we've got these highs over here at 125 or so to 126 and it could squeeze higher to those, but certainly I would take that and respect those levels for me anyway. So in relation to some of the other markets, I don't want to hog this, but if we come back to Bitcoin, then how does that affect Bitcoin? I Don't know because there are other asset, other factors that come into play with bitcoin. But if you're talking about a dollar weakness story, what does that mean? I see higher prices for bitcoin until at least we see that dollar find that level of support. Whether the support actually holds or not is another matter of course. But certainly I would respect that level. So in the meantime, I still see a dollar weakness story and we're seeing it in things like gold as well, which is perked up out of its slumber from the last few months. But gold had had a terrific run over this year as well. So like all markets, they have to breathe in and out. They can't just go up, they can't just go down. But gold's a good example of. I remember back in August, all of a sudden I've got my tree surgeon phoning me up saying, should I invest in silver? That was a sure fire sign to me that I needed to be wary of buying silver or gold. When you've got no disrespect but your tree surgeon phone you up who's not a qualified investor or trader. But the market does a good job of putting people off. It does initial pullback and certainly in the trading community that I'm involved in, loads of traders initially would like calling buying gold as soon as it did this pullback and then what's it done, it's then just gradually just ground them down and lots of those will have unwound their positions and then all of a sudden it starts to sneak up again. That's just the nature of things. So bitcoin. Yeah, highly bullish. But there's nothing technically on the charts. I'm not a Fibonacci extension man. Maybe you guys are. So I'm not going to put any technical extensions on my chart. Certainly one level now is going to be the 20,000 level is going to be a level which is going to attract buyers because that was a nice zone there where we consolidated for a while. So that will be a zone. We can look at some other timeframes but I'm very conscious of not hogging too much. So I'll stop the share and I'll hand back over to you.

Yeah, I'm also very interested. Thank you for your 10 minutes fuel on the markets. I'm also very interested in Gunnery's view on the markets right now as probably he has different indicators and different ways he's looking at the markets at this point before we're going to discuss a little bit more about gold as well and the weaker dollar and go into that topic a little bit more. Are you able to screen share or not, Gunar?

Yep, I'm trying right here. Wonderful.

Then I'll just hand over the mic to you as well and take it out.

Well, yeah, I really like what Charlie said. You know, I don't. I like to use my emas and price action. I like to read volume a little bit too, so I've got OBV on there but otherwise I don't really use much else. EMAs are really good for support. You can see I've got the gunner emas here. It's just the 11 and 22 MAS. And you can see this whole uptrend right here is basically just rode up these emas and we got one little. So we rode the 11 EMA the whole way up, broke down to the 22 EMA which was the first time it was tested in forever. So you'd think that a surefire buy. And then we finally broke down, but we only had one breakdown so it ended up being just a bear trap. And we see this every once in a while on lower timeframes as well where you get one breakdown but you are instantly bought back up. And a lot of people are still thinking we're going to drop here and things, but that's actually a great sign that we're going to keep going up because it's a nice quick little trap and we haven't had one this whole way up as far as, you know, technical levels. I threw some fibs on here recently and came up with 21, 428k as like kind of our next our bouncing range. But anybody can throw fibs on here has different fibs to, you know, go after. So that's. I feel like that's not a very good indicator to use. But as far as that support he pointed out right here, I mean that's eye catching, right? Like if you look on this chart and you just pull it up and you really know nothing about charting other than, you know, simple price action consolidation. This is where you would consider buying. And you can see it's a very nice high volume breakout as well. So that would give me confidence that there's a lot of buyers here that were interested at those prices, that we'd probably see those prices be bought up quickly if reached again. So I would like to add one.

Thing on that level. Like we are mentioning it and I'll probably also mention it to my followers as well. But the issue I have is that the construction is very similar to what we witnessed in the beginning of 2019 where we just were compressing further upwards and there was no real pullback at all. Yeah, that's a similar story as well. I think that if we are going to correct and we're going to discuss or think about where is the liquidity, we probably smash down below 19 and a half K and drop to 18 K or something to just liquidate everybody there and then we continue grinding. I think the main point here is that we are in a construction of higher lows, higher highs. And as long as we keep that momentum going in which I think the Last one is 18 and a half K, as long as we stay above there, I think everything is fine. That's probably a critical part here.

Yeah, I totally get what you're saying. I've definitely noticed this as well. I think the biggest difference this time is we're actually seeing a. This has been nice sustained all the way up. Whereas this was just an impulse, you know, like this was just one impulse. But also now we're seeing this follow through here. So the first time we got rejected basically right here. Right. And we continued to drop the next day. But here we're seeing this follow through now and that, that to me it changes the scenario. If you're looking at this at a. As a fractal based price action, that totally is game changer right here. Yeah, if we would have just sold off yesterday or sorry, today, if we just sell off today, very possible that we could follow something like this.

I mean it's very comparable to the, the run up that bitcoin did in the second quarter of 2019 where we had a similar construction of around 6K and everybody was expecting a further breakdown to occur and it just continued to accelerate. Yeah, further, further back. You're almost there. There we are. There we are here. Then on the down in April we had a similar construction. Yeah, yeah, those are just very similar to the breakout we have right now. Like what I mean here is that we can have a breakdown towards.

Yeah, this volume is way, way and there's no follow through. So the second day follow through is what is. Makes a difference to me in my opinion saying that it's. It's more, it. It's more of like a big. I don't know, it's not a red flag but it's more of like a big like aha. People notice this. So yeah, you're totally right. It could totally be like this big old fake out, you know, FOMO push up here and we start to drop, but we're not, we don't see that follow through on either of these two scenarios like we see here, which makes me think that we might spend a lot more time above 20k or 19.8k area than a lot of people are giving bitcoin credit for right now. And maybe just consolidate around here a little bit and make our way up to 30k or close to it.

If we are going to consolidate. That would be absolutely heaven for every crypto trade as you know that when bitcoin is going to consolidate, those smaller cryptocurrencies will probably take the spotlight and start to follow through. What are your expectations? What are you expecting from, for instance, ether or other altcoins to occur from here?

Yeah. So as far as like, let's just take a look at litecoin real quick. I've had this drawn for a long time and I think we're going to see continuation on some of these, especially the majors. I've really been concerned about the majors lately and not looking at like the smaller kappa altcoins. But we saw this before in 2017 and when Bitcoin's bullish and I posted about this recently where litecoin really likes to lag bitcoin and everyone's sitting in litecoin and bitcoin is going up and up and up and everyone gets tired of litecoin and sells it or whatever. And then bitcoin starts to kind of dwindle down a little bit and then litecoin quickly catches up and then it's up 30 to 40% before you know it and everyone's like, where'd that come from? I just sold that to get into bitcoin and now my bitcoin is going sideways. So as far as weekly trends go, litecoin is in a nice strong weekly uptrend early on, like bitcoin was earlier this year. My indicator is showing a nice uptrend and we're coming out of this consolidation zone and we're actually in full uptrend now and we don't really have much resistance locally. So I'm still expecting some more upside on this. And we're seeing nice buying power come in, which is what OBV is showing me here is that we're still seeing these nice buyers coming in at consolidation. So as far as litecoin and ethereum, I think they're going to continue to push and bitcoin might take a little bit of a backseat here while people take some profit on bitcoin and start to move those funds around at some point. We all know that we'll see people start to move funds around into other assets in the crypto space.

And what do you think about XRP at this point? It's such a big army. I'm not a big fan of discussing it at all. But it has been seeing some momentum in the past period maybe, or not it's been fueled by the airdrop that occurred. But what do you see on xrp? I mean, this is a pretty significant bounce from the 45 cents area. And I've actually taken a position myself as well there.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure if. I don't know if I joined this late, but as far as like a weekly time frame goes, and I've been sharing this for a long time and actually my indicator is showing a weekly buy here, which is pretty rare. We got this on Litecoin, you know, before it dropped to $20. So we got the, the buy signal in the drop. So we could consider a drop to, you know, 30 some cents, 28 cents. I would 110 buy that. XRP is a little difficult because honestly, I don't. I feel like it's heavily manipulated. I don't know that it is, but it just doesn't seem to follow typical TA guidelines or at least per my trading style. So this is one I've literally just been accumulating. I've been drawing these zones for a while now. So we kind of had our distribution zone up here that I drew in red and then our accumulation zone down here in green. And what I really wanted was an extra little spring down here to really load up. And I never got it. But you can see we've got this nice strong breakout now of downtrend. And my indicator is also showing that on a weekly time frame we've broken the downtrend and now we're technically in a bullish XRP market. So as long as we hold this breakout here, I think that there's no reason why we can't see 86, 96 cents, maybe finally sneak up to a dollar at some point.

XRP is one of those coins that if it respects the levels quite nicely, I mean, it flips those and then it starts to accelerate. But once it starts to move, there is literally no moment to get into the trade at all until you're probably not interested anymore. And then you have to get in.

Yeah, you see straight up and straight down for the most part. Even on these moves, you know, it's all straight up green, big Green candles. There's not like a lot of small ones in a row, really. Mm.

Well, like this all around the market you can see that those accumulation ranges are nicely being broken to. The upside eater is also showing that either BTCs might be even flipping such a level. So we might be getting into a bull market, but are we going to see any big old seasons like we have seen previously, or is bitcoin just taking the spotlight with all those big guns joining the markets? That's the big question right now. Are we going to get a gradual nice organic bull market until like 2023, 2024 or just a vertical spike to 100k in the next year and then the party is over?

That's a good point. I think, you know, a lot of people want an alt season, but that might not be a good thing because last time we had an alt season we had two years of bear market. So to have some an event like that, that's probably going to signal market top. If you can close your eyes and pick whatever ticker on Binance or whatever exchange you're using and throw a thousand dollars in there and in two or three weeks it's worth $5,000 or $10,000, that's probably where the top is, or at least some sort of local top, because that is the point, like Charlie said, where his family members are trying to buy and everyone's buying random things and everyone is thinking is taking out mortgages to buy and things like that. So those signs that you see market cycles are psychological cycles. So when you see those things and when you're experienced enough and Charlie's been through it way more times than I have, so he knows the clues even better and can trust his instinct on those things.

Are you trying to say I'm old? What are you trying to say?

I'm thinking of more experience.

I just got to have a look at those bags under the eyes.

Yeah, experience is not a bad thing. I admire experience.

Well, if we discuss those psychological cycles, and we have been discussing this before we actually went live and Charlie mentioned it, that the UK is going to bend trading Bitcoin on CFDs. I mean, what is your opinion on all those exchanges that have 100x leverage or any gambling tool where only the house wins and retail loses? What is, what is your view on that, Charlie?

Well, I mean that it's been going on for years. I mean, anyone who's been in the markets for at least a few years will remember the binary betting which has been banned across Europe and that was the Last really bad thing, which attracted people in because it was easy, where's the FTSE 100 going to be at the end of the day? And all of that stuff. People have been trading with leverage for a long time now and people have been cleared out of their money for a long time as well. We've seen across Europe the regulations on margin coming down. So whereas we used to be able to have 100, 200 to 1, it's now 30 to 1 in the UK and Europe, mainland Europe, Australia is coming into line with that as well next year. So we're going to see more of this type of regulation coming in and this sort of nanny state to an extent. But the problem is we also live in a world where people don't want to accept responsibility for their actions. So someone goes and blows up a trading account and then want to go and blame their broker, blame some analysts on Bloomberg, whatever. And that's the reality. No one wants to just say, yeah, I messed up, so. And I didn't know what I was doing. So do I think it's a good thing? Yes, in Bitcoin, it's being banned. CFD trading is being banned on Bitcoin from. I think it's the beginning of January, So in the uk and I suspect other. Other jurisdictions will come in, will do similar things, I'm sure. But it does concern me that what will happen is that it will drive investors overseas. So all will happen is the UK traders will then say, well, I'll go and open up an account in Vanuatu with some dodgy broker over there. And that's the natural way of things. Until we've got something which is pretty much global as far as regulation is concerned, people will put their money elsewhere and they'll still go and lose it elsewhere. So. But certainly I think in the main, it's a good thing to try and reign people in from, because so many people get into trading, whether it's in cryptocurrencies or. I mean, I was trading, I started trading in the late 90s. But in. In the noughties, you know, gold was the market to trade for volatility from 2000 to 2011. And that was before, obviously, the cryptos came along and that's where all the retail were then. They all wanted that because gold was volatile and gold was sexy. And so what I see is it's the same things go on over and over again. You can go all the way back to the tulip mania hundreds of years ago. The same stuff goes on over and over again. The hype and what people will do with their money. So yes, it's good that if we can rein them in, I think if people can trade unleveraged it'd be much better. But the problem we have is that you've got your, what's your average person trading with maybe £5,000 or dollars in a trading account. They need the leverage. So they don't want to trade one to one leverage because they can't make enough on it or whatever. So there's no simple answer to it. But certainly it would be good if we could stop more people blowing up their trading accounts. Yes.

Do you agree with Charlie regarding like the prevention of people blowing their accounts because of just not knowing what they are doing and just having the greed of being in the markets making a lot of money as people are sharing that they are making millions on social media. Do you believe that exchanges have to do more in order to prevent those mistakes?

Well, yeah, I mean I like to use high leverage sometimes but not, it's never like on my main account. You know, nobody should take their main account that's $100,000 or whatever and be using 100x leverage or 50x leverage on that. That's just idio. But yeah, it is kind of like gambling when you're using high leverage. And a lot of people, I don't think these, I don't think a lot of exchanges and we're actually seeing it more and more. We're seeing exchanges like Binance has started doing it and some others where they have like pop ups or they have you quizzes you have to take making sure you actually understand the risks and understand what 100x leverage means. You know because we see videos and things where people are, have absolutely no idea what they're doing are buying or doing options trading on like Robinhood and they're like oh, you know, well it just makes your money worth a hundred times more than it really is. And then so if it goes up 3% you make 300% and things like that and they're like you could just double your money, triple your money, easy. So there definitely needs to be a lot more education on it. One of my things is always just trying to you know, teach people about risk management. And when you enter a leverage position you need to know how far away your stop losses and your, you know, your implied risk on that trade. But yeah, 100x leverage. I mean it's, it's probably not necessary for any exchange to really absolutely need that. You know, if anybody needs to trade with 100x leverage to have bigger positions, then they probably shouldn't be trading at all. You, you should be able to trade 5x whatever your net worth is. You should be able to have enough of your account dedicated to that to be able to trade 5x max. And you might not be. If somebody's net worth is 5 million and your net worth is 50,000, you're not going to be making as much money as them trading, but you should be as responsible as them and not trying to make the same amounts that they're making. And I think that's what a lot of people misinterpret and they don't understand and they end up over leveraging to try to compete with other people with bigger accounts and then that's when they get into trouble.

Well, honestly for me it's not about the money, it's actually about trading well. So first you have to execute your trades the right way before you're actually able to handle more money than you're affording right now.

So I would say the one biggest thing, I did a poll not long ago on Twitter and I asked how much percentage of people's trading portfolios they have on leveraged trading exchanges and I think it was over 50% of people had had over like 50% of their trading account or their portfolio on a leverage exchange and a lot of some people even had 100%. So I mean I like to trade heavy in spot and have really large spot positions and dollar cost average on uptrending assets and trade like 10% of my portfolio in leverage. Whereas a lot of people don't understand that and they're putting 100% of their portfolio on these exchanges and trading it strictly with lever. That's another educational piece that a lot of people don't understand or don't know about or they just don't care about. But it's definitely important.

I think honestly, if it goes about being educational saying something about risk managers, you can actually say against the monkey. They first have to lose their bankroll before they start to understand that they have to use proper risk management before they can actually start trading. So true. I would like to end off this live stream with the question to you that what I'm experiencing the past few days is that many people are asking themselves what do I have to do now if I want to have exposure to the cryptocurrency markets? And in my belief I would never take the first step here of buying cryptocurrencies full at these rates, but I would Love to hear what your thoughts are about entering the markets right now. What would you advise to beginners at this point? Probably for you Charlius, you are having more experience with vertical markets probably. What would you say to new people right now? If they want to start trading in cryptocurrency markets or in such an overextended.

Move, don't do it. So yeah, joking aside, the way this word, this phrase has been mentioned a few times funnily enough by Gunnar this evening and, and what I would say someone wants some exposure to that asset class is to say okay, what's my earnings? You see you're brand new to trading, you're not a trader. So let's not try and say that these people are traders but they want some exposure. So look at their earnings, look at the disposable income and say okay, how much do I have can I put aside to invest, to have in cash and to have in speculative investments. So speculative investments I would see as cryptocurrencies of course. So because of the nature of the volatility and they're not going to be any good at dealing with being with buying something and then seeing their investment go underwater. That's what they're no good at. So the best thing that they can do is understand that that is going to happen. But they are just investing $50 a month or whatever the amount is and dollar cost average as Goone has been talking about a bit here today. Don't try and be technical, don't try and learn. If you want to try and learn to trade the markets, that's different. But if you just want some exposure, don't try and get too technical. Set a first level. So you could set a level at, let's say if Bitcoin for argument's sake pulls back to $20,000 as we've talked about earlier on, that would be the point where you would start and then you would dollar cost average over the year. If over that year bitcoin came down to 15,000, then you're getting a nice little build up of a position over that period of time and see it that way. See it as a three to five year investment and if it carries on going up, then yes, you're going to be investing 50 pounds, $50 a month as it goes up as well. So that would be my simple advice for someone who just wants to get some exposure. If they want to go and learn to trade, go and learn to trade separately to that. But that would be a very easy way to just say okay, I'm just investing and I'm forgetting about it. I'm not looking at a char chart. I've just set it up $50 a month or whatever the amount is. And I'm getting some exposure to that asset class without it being the end of the world if bitcoin crashes back down to $5,000 again.

Do you have something to add, Gunner? Like, should people be putting all their money into altcoins right now or just take. Or going 100x short? That's also a possibility.

No.

I really liked what Charlie had to say, and I think he absolutely nailed it. You know, like, I was dollar cost averaging into litecoin for the last X amount of months. I don't even know my average entry, but I would be, you know, like, I would make a post about it or tell somebody, you know, like, oh, look, litecoin's up over $100 today. I knew it'd be over $100 eventually. And they're like, oh, should I buy now? And I'm like, well, I told you I was buying all year. And they're like, well, yeah, but I didn't know that was a good time. So now should I buy? And they want to put their whole allocation into it now, whereas they didn't want to put their whole allocation into it earlier. So he made a great point of just, if you want some exposure, get some slow exposure. Because when I'm buying Litecoin for three months and it's not really moving and I'm just buying little amounts here and there, there's not like an emotional attachment to it. Sometimes I'm buying higher, sometimes I'm buying lower. I'm not going all in on Litecoin with my whole allocation at $70 and then watching it go down to $50 and not having any capital left to buy it. And I think that, like he said, there's a lot of people that don't like seeing their positions underwater and they don't realize that, you know, nine out of 10 times you buy something, it's probably going to go down before it goes up. You're not. Well, you're almost never going to catch a move as it just keeps going and going and never catch your level. So. So there's just so much to learn on that. And Charlie absolutely nailed it. Just little amounts at a time.

Yeah, it's an unleveraged. They don't need leverage on it. If they put leverage on it, that's ridiculous. So just unleverage. And if you go into any Investment with the right mindset, then you'll deal with it better. So if you start buying and it goes down then psychologically, you know. Well, actually I've got a recurring buy set up on this, so to speak on buy it once a month. So they almost don't mind it coming down because they know that oh, I'm going to be buying it a bit more. And again, it all comes back down to what you just said, Laguna, that you're not doing it with money you can't afford to lose. It's money that's coming out of your paycheck that you can afford to be underwater on or potentially lose on. But it's not the end of the world if you did. Otherwise you're only going to be spending at McDonald's or somewhere anyway. See it that way.

Yeah, well, people will be better off by not buying some clothes and just putting it in bitcoin just every month. That's just a better approach. Right. And always to have some liquidity don't go mayhem on positions like for instance, I've been buying into positions the past months which have been going down 15 to 20% but I know that the potential upside is several hundreds of percent. So I just don't care. I'm actually quite happy to put in more liquidity in those positions to actually be making more profits, hopefully in the future on it. So I think the key point is that people would not be looking at short term gains but at long term compounded gains, which is actually that's the majority of the people should focus on that rather than using leverage. Do you have anything to add to this live stream? Just what you want to say to the listeners before we're going to end off this stream. Any of the two of you, I.

Would just end off by reiterating that point you just said where you should be buying spot for long term gains. You're going to make more money overall by buying and holding and dollar cost averaging into assets that can potentially uptrend or in an uptrend and just holding those and making a plan. You're more likely to make lots more money that way than you are by leverage trading.

Yeah, I mean trading is certainly short term trading is a highly skilled thing to do and you know, that's what all three of us do, you know. But what I see is new people coming into the market, reading a book or two or going on a weekend course, teach them how to trade and then they think they're going to be expert traders and, and really one thing I think to remember as a new investor coming in is that until you've experienced a bear market, a bull market, a sideways market, recessions, booms, you name it, you cannot call yourself an experienced trader. So for most traders, just to give people an idea of what I would constitute, an experienced trader is someone who's been trading a minimum of 10 years. Not because you can't become a proficient trader in a much shorter timeframe than that, but you haven't got the experience of trading those different dynamics of markets. And I think that people need to be a lot more humble in front of the markets, otherwise the markets will humble you.

That's a really good one. Well, actually, if you started trading Bitcoin 10 years ago, I think you wouldn't be trading at all anymore.

Yeah, 10 years in traditional assets is five years in crypto, right?

Yeah, probably just two. Two years. 2017, 2018. And you've experienced it all. All right, guys, it was a pleasure for having you two on here. Thank you all for watching this live stream. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel of Cointelegraph and like the video beneath. And we'll see you again on the next one when probably bitcoin is going to be above 30k. So on to the next one. And thank you both.

Thank you.

Thank you. Nice to meet you.