Is this a bull run or a bull trap?

Foreign. Hello, everyone. Welcome and thank you for hanging out with us on the market report on cointelegraph. My name is Joe Hall. I'm going to be your host today. And we are joined once again by our resident experts, Marcel Peckman and Sam Borgi. Now, Sam Borgi is a business editor at Cointelegraph, where he brings over a decade of experience in economic analysis and financial market writing. Marcel Pechman applies his 17 years of experience trading derivatives options and futures to the crypto derivatives markets just before we get there. Today's show is sponsored by Web3 antivirus. It's a security solution that helps protect users from online threats and scams on the decentralized web. Okay, now we've got that out of the way. How are we doing today, gentlemen? Marcel, is it sun beautiful and bright in Brazil?

No, Joe, the past week hasn't been really sunny, but at least the temperature is good. But as for the crypto markets, I think for the first time in a very long time, I don't see my friends or people on the street or at the gym talking about cryptocurrencies because we had a 35, 30% rally and some of the names up. So I think this is a good sign. If the Uber driver is not yet talking about cryptocurrencies, it means we still have a long way up. So I'm optimistic.

Okay, fantastic. I'm glad to hear it. How about yourself, Sam? We've had a 25% pump since we last talked. You're not retired on a beach somewhere? How's it going?

No, there's no beaches in sight, Joe, let me tell you that right now there's no beaches. This is in Portugal or Brazil, but thanks for rubbing it in. Yeah, we just saw the biggest weekly gain and I think 100 weeks for Bitcoin, which I think is, is very notable for me. What's notable about this is that it really coincides with the whole four year cycle. And I'm starting to believe that perhaps the bottom is in, you know, the fact that we sold off like we did during the chaotic news last year in November and bitcoin managed to just to kind of hold that line. I think 15.6k was where the bottom was around. But seeing the strength right now, I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist. So I'm looking at the charts and I'm seeing, you know, it's a nice healthy rally. I'm going to take it for what it is. I'm still a proponent of the four year cycle. I think that we will be range bound for a while moving forward, but that doesn't mean in the short term we can get more upside. I think that's likely since that we've now consolidated the gains that we saw over the past week. We could see more upside of the 25-30k, but ultimately I think 2023 is going to be a positive year, but one where we're more range bound than what the past week suggested was possible.

Wow.

Wow.

Well, there you go. You heard it here first, guys. Marcel is optimistic and Sam starting to believe the bottom is in. It looks like 2023 is going to be the year now. Now the market report brings you guys, the viewers, the information you can't find anywhere else on the web. And today, Sam, Marcel and I are going to discuss what's been making the headlines in the crypto space as well as the wider business and financial markets. Most importantly though, we are here to help you guys, our loyal viewers, to try to navigate these sometimes trying and sometimes pumping times. We're looking forward to interacting with you and answering any questions or concerns you may have. So feel free to drop a comment in the chat below. Click the like button, click the subscribe button as you may be in it to win it. This week we're giving away a gift voucher of $50 to the Cointelegraph swag store. So if you're getting a bit cold over the winter time, the energy bill is going up. Get yourself a new Cointelegraph hoodie or, you know, Cointelegraph things to pop on your wall. For example, show your love for your chosen crypto. Now, today's show is broken down into the Market roundup where we kick off with a weekly highlight video. Meantime, the funniest part of the show, market news updates, a quick crypto trip from Tip even not a trip from yours truly. Marcel's Trading. Insights from Marcel Pechman, our resident experts in all things trading and a Market Pro coin watch. Catch up. And finally, we round it all off with a giveaway, the $50 gift voucher that I mentioned earlier. Quick reminder as well before we kick on with the show. If you want 20% off Markets Pro, there is a link in the description to this video just below. Take advantage while you can because we don't know when this, this discount might be taken away again. Okay, gents, are we all ready to fire into the first segment, the weekly roundup video. Yay or nay?

Let's do it.

Let's do it. Okay, take it away, Danilo. There it is there. It is indeed. Another busy week in the bitcoin and crypto space. Yes, Marcel. I was going to say hello to the chat, but the chat can wait. Marcel's got his hand up, I think.

There's an important news that was highlighted about the NFT guy who was hacked. He downloaded some obs application using fake links advertised on Google, but that was not why he lost his coins. He entered his seed phrase on metamask, he typed his words, he gave away his private keys. So if your computer is compromised and you're not using a hardware wallet, you're gonna lose everything you have on that wallet. But if you're using a trezor, a ledger, any hardware wallet that can pay $50, $60, and you use it on QR code or USB cable or Bluetooth, that would not have happened to him. So he entered his seed phrase, his 12 or 14, 24 words on his metamask. That's why he lost his coins.

Very good public announcement that to kick off the show. And yeah, I mean, it makes me wonder, when is Cointelegraph going to start selling hardware wallets? It feels like a partnership waiting to happen, you know, if the biz dev team is watching. Take notes. Right. Good stuff. Kicking off some security. I just wanted to say hi to long term watchers or listeners. Rajesh. Wrong again. And Suleiman Deni. Is this a dead cat bounce? I think we're going to get onto that very briefly in terms of the markets. But first up, we've got the best part of the show, the meme review. Let's take it away. Danilo.

Oh.

Ah, there it is. Yeah, it is time to celebrate, isn't it, guys? Did any of you guys pop open a bottle or, you know, take advantage of that pump? When was like maybe Thursday or Friday last week, you know, went from 17 ish k to 20 k quite quickly. Was it cause for celebration in your households?

I'm perfectly numb to all of us.

Good. Okay.

I told friends and family, I told friends and family to buy a 50k. So I cannot celebrate anything below that.

Okay. I mean, yeah, I think this meme is relevant. In that case, you know, this is a green. A giant green dildo. Not sure if I can say that in this channel, but I'm doing it anyway. Going through the guy's face because, you know, it was an epic, epic pump last week, wasn't it? Sam Bankman fried being arrested. Three AC founders launching a new exchange after blowing up $40 billion. Yet this is a fascinating story and Just goes to show how much ridiculousness there is in the. In the crypto market. Marcel, did you follow this story this week?

Yeah.

And it's not just 3ac. They've partnered with Coinflex, which is an exchange that also failed during the crash. So it's a crashed venture capital or fund or whatever with a failed exchange. So it's a fail. With another failure, it can only have one result.

It's amazing, isn't it? But, hey, Hansel's so hot right now. Or whatever the expression was for. Is that Zoolander? It is Zoolander, isn't it? What does it mean to be a good person? Aristotle. What does it mean? Nietzsche. What does it mean? Bertrand Russell. What? Sbf. Good. That was obviously in reference to his tweet thread where he started off with number one. What? And then two. Was it? Was it? What the hell is going on? The whole phrase in the end, I can't actually remember. Do you guys remember.

My mind? Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. Not worth.

Last time we see bitcoin on the 20k. Biggest bull trap I've ever seen. Oh, this meme is relevant and pertinent to our show today. Crypto influences. Right now we're more like, you know, crypto journalists or analysts in Marcel's case. But yeah, that's kind of what we're discussing today. We're not sweating though, are we? Good selection of memes there. And yes, just the comment from. Wrong again in the chat. Who says, I don't like Metamask. You know, these are of course our opinions on this channel. This does not reflect the opinions of Cointelegraph, but also I find it very cumbersome. I tend to use it only for research and research only. Brilliant. So those memes have really put us in a good place to discuss the first article of the week, which is all about whether or not we are in a bitcoin price breakout or a bull trap. I'm glad I've got Marcel and Sam here to discuss this because inevitably I would have been far too excited to. And I would have been longing this all the way to 21.9K, the new local top. So this article comes from William Seuberg, of course, our one of our longest standing markets reports, I believe, who titled the headline Bitcoin price breakout or bull trap? 5,000 Twitter users weigh in. So what's happening now is that Cointelegraph is actually doing more citizen journalism or guerrilla journalism. You know, we're actively interacting with the audience and there's a really interesting poll from this article. Which shows what you guys, the traders, the observers, the analysts, or the, you know, the armchair observers, think about the bitcoin and crypto markets right now. So it's been called the biggest bull trap ever seen. And despite holding above $20,000, Bitcoin price action is fooling no one. That includes you, the viewer. Because at the time of writing, only 38.6% of over 5,000 respondents believe it does, with the majority agreeing that $21,000 is a bull trap. Here you can see the original tweet from the Cointelegraph account, which has upwards of a million followers. What did you guys vote? It would be interesting to see in the chat. And now I'm going to ask this very simple to Sam first. Bull run or bull trap? What's your thought?

Well, a technical bull market is a 20 or more rally from the bottom. So I guess technically that means it's a bull run. I mean, look, it all depends on your time frame. I think the really important questions for us to evaluate is whether we think bitcoin has bottomed. And I've been pretty consistent in saying that, you know, for all of last year, I was expecting one final flush out. Sometime in Q4 and Q1 we had the FTX debacle. We saw Bitcoin hit 15.6k. I was expecting one more flush out. We never got it. Looking at the current rally, I see it as being, you know, a healthy leg up. It seems to me that the prospects of a new low are diminishing, especially if you take a look at the four year timing band. And we're seeing some sideways action here, which isn't bad because it means gains are being consolidated. I wouldn't be surprised if we take it at 25 to 30k. But again, as I mentioned at the outset, I still see a lot of range bound trading for bitcoin this year. So if we're talking about bull market bull trap, it really depends on your time horizon and what you expect in the short term. I think we might have some more room to run.

Interesting. I mean it does beg the question who is buying? But I mean, Marcel, would you be able to add some color to this discussion? Would you also be able to answer the question, what is a bull trap? You know, are we trapping bulls now? Is this what we're doing? We're hunting.

Okay, Joe, so the bull trap is typically it's the pump and dump scheme is when we see a dramatic price increase, sharp increase on 6 hours, 12 hours most at the most. It doesn't take 2, 3 or 4 days and it holds for short period of time, sometimes a couple of hours, sometimes a week or 10 days. Then we see the barred candle. So the same movement that went up, so the same buyers that colluded to, to make the price go up, they created this bull trap. So everybody was expecting another rally and they dump on the market, causing the crash. So that, that's what's a typical bull trap means it's a pump and dump. I don't think that's the case here because we came from a crash in November when FTX collapsed. So we're returning to the 20, 21,000 level right now. So that would be the opposite of a boot trap. It means that Whoever was expecting 12k or 14k for Bitcoin will never, probably never get it as the market is recovering its initial condition. So we're back to the level that we were 70 days ago. But more important, if you think that there's no chance in hell that we're going to revisit 19 or $18,000, I think you're crazy because the traditional markets are telling us that likely a bigger recession is coming our way. And if, if we do happen to see a recession, we all know that the correlation to the cryptos and traditional markets is really high because of the Federal reserve, central banking, etc. So if we see a deeper crisis, there's a good chance that we're going to drop. I don't know if we're going to drop from 25,000 to 20,000 or from 22 to 19,000, but there's a good chance that $20,000 will be broken again. There's nothing set on stone saying, yeah, 20,000 was, we're not going to see any price lower than that. So even if we are on a bull run, even if you're going to see 40,000 by year end, there's a good chance we're going to revisit 17, $18,000.

Okay. Okay. So calls for caution as well for any.

So.

Sorry, Marcel, I think we had a little bit of technical difficulties there just to prove that we are live. Guys, this isn't pre recorded. Yeah, I was just commenting on the fact that you cannot actually buy a bull trap is a completely fictitious invention specifically for the cryptocurrency or trading markets previously, you know, Tradfi and Legacy finance and now of course crypto. So Marcel, I think we were coming back to you there anyway because why are people so divided about where the price is headed? You know, why is there this confusion and also if I can buy a little more time here, viewers do click yes or no in the chat as we're currently running a new poll to see how you guys think about the price nowadays. And then we'll go back to Marcel to ask about why people are just so divided about where the price is going. Marcel?

Okay, Joe, so for two reasons. First, because we saw a bunch of traditional assets rallying, stocks like United Airlines jump 37% year to date, Alibaba 33, Mercado Libri 28, GE General Electric 23%. So everybody is hoping that the central banks would pivot, would stop raising interest rates and would start injecting money again on the markets because the economies are on a standstill. So if this happens, it's going to be a bullish year for cryptocurrencies because of scarcity and etc. But the very first moment, if people think, well, if Federal Reserve is injecting more money, it means that we are on a recession, so maybe I should have some money available, cash in hands. So if we have a bigger crash in cryptos or stock markets, etc. So the first moment, the first phase of that pivot could be bad for cryptocurrencies. But looking at the longer time frame, meaning 12 to 24 months, it's going to be exceptionally bullish for cryptos.

Fantastic. I'm sure the viewers are happy to hear that. Sam, has it changed your own personal investment thesis? Do you continue to stack sats and dollar cost average into these lows?

Stacking sats is the name of the game and I have definitely been doing that. I mean, it's been a very difficult macro environment, as Marcel mentioned. And you know, the wild card is perhaps bitcoin and crypto might become correlated again with the broader market. I mean, we've seen some kind of decoupling recently and a lot of it right now is dependent on the Fed. It seems like everyone is still expecting about a 50 basis point increase by the Fed, maybe one or two more hikes before they stabilize the federal funds rate for a while. But it, I think there was a news announcement last week about some new hedonic adjustments to the cpi, which means we could be seeing the CPI lower, you know, manipulated lower, which it has been for decades. But the whole idea, if CPI has peaked, that's going to be good for the market outlook because it means the Fed's rate hike campaign largely succeeded based on their own measure. But I don't think that the Fed will be able to maintain ultra high interest rates for long. If you take a look at, for example, the housing market right now, the percentage of household expenditure going towards mortgages is unsustainable. It's skyrocketed. So that's where the delicate balancing act takes place. Controlling inflation or taming inflation versus dealing with a severe recession. And it's all going to depend on how far they can kick the can down the road. But the economy right now is showing a lot of warning signs. And I think the Fed would like to ease. I mean, I think the easiest thing for them to do is to ease probably what they want to do. But it's hard when you let the inflation genie out of the bottle. And that's really what it's all about right now. So I think the first pivot we're going to see is a soft pivot where they announced they're not going to be raising again or they're going to be stabilizing for a while. And that could be seen as a positive for markets overall. But, you know, we'll see how that works.

Interesting. Yeah, I know it's. I think it's crucial actually to get the macro picture and to understand what the Fed is doing because ultimately it's. It's those guys that meet up every now and then that decide what's going to happen with money and therefore largely the markets. One of the reasons why many of us choose to bitcoin and stack sats. As Sam says, stacking sats literally means buying bitcoin. You can do so regularly or you can do so, you know, yoloing in, as some people do not. Financial advice, of course. Marcel, one last point before we move on to the next article here. There was a. I mean, yeah, some, some there bringing in a note of caution, but of course we are rallying as well. What should viewers be aware of is there, you know, we're still at a small market cap. Is there anything that's going to really drive bitcoin into the next, next leg of this bull run?

Yeah, Joe, there's two paths that we can go from here. The first one is the average guy trying protect himself that are locking up their accounts and assets because they're not aligned with their political agenda or climate crisis or whatever. So this is the first path, the little guy going out of the US dollar or whatever fiat currency he's running away from. The second path, which I think is the most probable, at least for the short term, is that the financial institutions themselves, like the Fidelities or the JP Morgans, they are Seeking alternative investment instruments. Because when you think about it, the stock market, especially the global stock market, became really correlated. There's a bunch of Chinese stocks or European companies which are either multinational or directly listed on US markets. So they kind of move tandem. And the same thing happens to real estate markets we've seen during the last two crisis, the COVID in 2020 and the, the Lehman Brothers crash in 2008, the real estate crisis. Both the stock markets and the real estate markets moved in tandem on the way down and on the way up. And if you are a fund manager, the more different asset classes that you have, especially if they are liquid, if they are large enough like a trillion dollar fund, obviously cannot trade a shitcoin, that market cap is a billion dollar or lower. But if Bitcoin and Ethereum surpasses the trillion dollar mark or at least gets closer to a trillion, those giant hedge funds and investment funds and mutual funds and wealth managers will be able to invest on cryptocurrency even if it's 1%. Not because they think it's the future of money, but because they need an uncorrelated asset. And when you think about the long term, like 3 year, 5 year, 10 year window, I don't see any other asset class that can decouple from traditional markets as big as cryptocurrencies. So my bet is on the institutional investors.

Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. And I think it's also a question of liquidity. Right. If they're looking at a 300 billion market cap and they have say 40 billion to allocate, they know that they can't actually market buy or over the counter buys. They'd have to either dollar cost average in or they'd have to speak to miners directly or speak to one of the big custod of bitcoin, whether that's a Kraken or whether that's a, a coinbase in order to get that deal done. So I think yeah, it would, it would move the market in a big way if they were to come in and just start stacking sats in a really big way. It's an exciting thought to entertain as well, isn't it? There's quite an interesting comment there in the chat there from Master Blender who said bull run this year though plausible is highly unlikely. So I think, yeah, we're getting a sort of an echo in the chat from what our expert commentators are saying. Now moving on to the next article. It's price related as well, but it's trading related in that we're talking about the death cross and whether or not bitcoin could see 25k by March 2023. So in just 45 days time or so. Now bitcoin, as we discussed, is enjoying this lovely price recovery. We all feel like we can eat maybe some chicken with our noodles again as the bear market is subsiding. But there is more trouble on the horizon as there is what's called a death cross. The text here says Bitcoin's bullish technical outlook appears against the backdrop of a relatively weaker US dollar which is down due to expectations that the Fed Reserve, the Federal Reserve, will stop raising interest rates as a result of this lowering inflation. This is what Sam was saying earlier about either inflation is going down or the CPI or the Consumer Price Index, the basket of goods they look at to form that index, they manipulated it in such a way, this hedonic adjustment to show that the price of stuff is going down. I really want to know what this death cross is. I really want to know if it's something that I should be concerned about and if I should be, you know, making a trade based off of that. Um, so let's go to Sam first. Sam, what's a death cross? And you know, does it mean the Grim reaper is angry? Does it mean bitcoin is dead again? You know, what are these two words put together?

Well, I, you know, the death cross is usually a lagging indicator. I think it refers to when the 50 day moving average goes below the 200 day and it signals that bullish momentum has faded. And I think this is in reference actually to the US dollar, if you recall the dxy which is a US dollar index. It tracks the performance, the dollar against the basket of six currencies, primarily the Euro. It really shot up in the, in, in the Q3, Q4 and we hit a multi year high, I think almost record highs for the DXY. Now the DXY has declined, I think around over 10 points from its, from its peak. So Marcel's touched upon this in the past. But we've seen an inverse correlation between the dollar and Bitcoin and that kind of makes sense, right? Investors are piling into the dollar during the Fed's upward adjustments. Now it seems like inflation expectations are declining, expectations around monetary policy are shifting and the dollar, which was the hottest trade, is no longer the hottest trade. And if the DXY continues to fall, falls below 100 into the 90s, that could be bullish for risk assets, which Bitcoin is still within that umbrella. So I think that could be seen as a positive indicator because risk for Bitcoin, at least, because, you know, the US Dollar has been a, a strong indicator of where the market is, is, is going to be heading, especially in the short term. So that's what I look at when it comes to the death cross for the dxy.

Interesting. Yeah, I remember lots of sort of Gen Z and millennial traders referring to the DXY as the Dixie for a long period last year and hearing that repeatedly and all sorts of podcasts and things. Marcel, how about yourself? Do you let, let's see which demographic you fall into as well. Do you refer to it as the Dixie or the dxy?

I track it as the dxy.

Just checking. Dxy Maximalist.

I don't see how that works. You're measuring the dollar against the euro, the British pound and the Japanese yen and the Chinese yen. It's all the same. It's all fiat money. So what the hell you're measuring against? You can measure against real estate, against gold, against Bitcoin, but you cannot measure fiat against fiat. Doesn't make any sense for me.

Okay. It's all a fugazi to steal a line out of. I forgot the name of the film. What's it called? Wolf of Wall Street. There we go. So what about this death cross? What does it mean to viewers and to readers of Coin Telegraph Markets reports? Should we be concerned about it? Marcel?

I think the US Dollar, the Federal Reserve should be concerned about it, not us. If the dollar is losing value against a basket of other currencies, it means that investors over the world are not so much confident that the $34 trillion debt of the United States is going to be repaid. Because if you start raising interest rates, there comes a time, I think it's going to happen in two or three months that the interest rates payment, it's going to be 1 trillion dollar per year. The United States is going to have to pay 1 trillion dollar per year in interest rates, and that's crazy. You're going to have to steal money from companies and from families to pay bankers and investors over the world on the amount of $1 trillion per year. That's unsustainable. So that's what the DXY, that cross is telling us.

Okay, okay, okay. Let's continue down this sort of psychological track. I mean, as we know, FIAT monies are conjured up by governments. They can be printed out of thin air. And the only thing that's really backing them, I guess, for the US Dollar is the army and the Monopoly it has on violence. Let's really go down this sort of philosophical or libertarian viewpoint. However, there are still these psychological tropes, these hangovers from the fiat money times. For example, the 20k price ceiling. We all know that the dollar is made up and yet at the same time, 20k seems to be this psychological ceiling that traders are failing to sort of work their way around. Why is that? Why is. And also why is this 20k such a milestone price? I remember personally when Bitcoin hit 20k in 2017 or it hit 19,853 or something. And I remember that was when I first started to get really interested in the sort of the crypto space. And then I remember actually getting quite drunk the night of breaking through 20k in 2020. Yeah, it must have been mid December 2020. And then this time last week I also got quite excited about 20k. Why Marcel, diagnose me. Do I have 20k ITIS. What's going on there?

Well, Joe, it's a psychological number, but it doesn't make sense. For instance, When Bitcoin touched $20,000 back in 2020, there were 16.7 million coins in circulation. And right now we have 19.3 million coins. So 16% more coins in circulation. So looking at the nominal price on a longer time frame on inflationary assets doesn't make sense because the number of bitcoins in circulation is higher. But the psychological number stays on our mind. And every time you log in at Cointelegraph and what on Binance or whatever exchange use the number is you're gonna see is not a market capitalization, it's the unitary price. So it makes sense for us to say, well, we need to defend $20,000 because that was the the top from the previous cycle. So we cannot trade below that number again. Let's buy some coin. So that's what's happening on the investor's mind, but it really doesn't make any sense if you think it through.

Okay, okay, interesting. Maybe I need to drop this 20k obsession myself and move on to more productive things. Before we move on to the final story of this week's market Report, I just wanted to touch upon some more comments in the chat. I know that Humar Sami, for example, is bringing up that the Shiba Inu, one of the dog tokens, announced its upgrade today. I know that Cointelegraph covered that story. And also Fernando Schmidt had a comment for you saying their young clients will force all the big players into Bitcoin. Wouldn't that Be nice. You know, when these Gen Z's and millennials enter the workforce and talk to the higher ups, they realize this bitcoin thing, maybe I should take it a bit more seriously. I think we will see that, that transition purely due to demographics. Now, finally, the third story today is another one that I'm a little bit not clueless, but I'm eager to earn more on. And it's about how Silvergate reported a $1 billion net loss in the fourth quarter of 2022. There's a couple of things that I wanted to highlight in this article. Here's your. Your graphic. Obviously, all Cointelegraph articles come with a rather creative graphic, and this one was reported here by my European colleague, Ezra Regera. And now in the fourth quarter of 2022. So from September to December last year, Silvergate reported a $1 billion loss and their fourth quarter deposits were 7.3 billion, which was lower than the third quarter figure of 12 billion. So not only are their losses going down, but their revenues or their deposits are also decreasing somewhat substantially. There it dropped from, you know, 12 billion to 7.3 billion. The part I wanted to highlight here was that on January 5, the company also laid off about 200 employees, which accounted for roughly 40% of the workforce as part of its efforts to stay afloat. Inevitably, when you're managing a business, one of the biggest overheads is hr, you know, salaries. And so when times get tough, you tend to cut heads. And that's what we're seeing across a lot of the crypto industry right now for those that don't have enough Runway or enough money to keep them afloat for the rest of the year. In addition, the company also shelved plans to launch a digital currency project, writing off $200 million used to purchase technology developed by Facebook. So another thing, which is a variable cost when running, running a company is R and D. And here they've just decided to shaft that 200 million or mothball even this 200 million purchase from Facebook. I guess it was Facebook then. Meta. Gents, why is Silvergate bank important? And is it, you know, is it substantial for the crypto industry? What's the relevance to what we talk about on a weekly basis? Let's go to Sam first. What's your take?

Well, I think this is Silvergate, which is a digital asset bank that was fairly well capitalized and was doing, you know, a business with a lot of the biggest crypto players. I think that the fact that we're seeing these losses reflects the overwhelming bearish tone in the overall market and a lot of that is tied to ftx. I know that last month three members of Congress in the US sent a letter to Silverbait asking them to answer questions about their role in basically the loss at FTX and Almida, given the, you know, working relationship it had with, with, with those two companies. So it seems like they had some shoddy risk management practices or perhaps they were all under Sam's spell. It seems like everybody was. And overall I think their failure reflects really bad oversight on the FTX debacle, you know, but then again, not a lot of us knew that SBF was a psychopath fraudster who was very similar to Bernie Madoff and his dealings. So maybe they didn't foresee that in their evaluation of ftx. You know, I certainly didn't. And I think that just reflects where we are in the market. I see them as another casualty emanating from the FTX debacle.

Interesting. Yeah, the SPF bashing is, well, the SPF deception. It feels like we have a new story every day regarding people that trusted Sam Bankman Fried and now realize that, oh my gosh, he was the devil. We had an exclusive interview with Anthony Scaramucci, or the Mooch, as he's affectionately known today on cointelegraph, as our colleagues are in Davos at the World Economic Forum and they're privy to these sorts of exclusive conversations and interviews. So do check cointelegraph to check them all out. Marcel, is this just another casualty? You know, could silvergate have continued a bit longer, trying to keep their dream alive until this pump that we've had over the past two and a half weeks?

Now, I think there are two separate things here, Joe. The first one is that the cryptocurrency players, meaning the venture capital funds, the exchanges and their project themselves, they still need the banking system because they pay for Amazon Web services and cloud services. They pay for their facilities and for their, their staff. They still pay those in US dollars mostly. Even if they pay in stablecoins, the end user is likely going to convert those stable coins to fiat to pay for their bills. So they need a gateway, a payment gateway. And silvergate used to be the top, top, top, the number one in the United States. But that's not what caused the one billion dollar loss to Silver Grid, obviously. Yes, he lost some clients, yes, maybe there was a default on some of the loans, etc. It's normal, but that's normal to the business. What happened there is that they accepted some Tokens like FTT as margin as collateral for loans. So when you start behaving like a crypto bank and you don't understand how markets work, that 20 billion dollar capitalization coin like FTX, the FTT token can vanish overnight. When your risk assessment was not good, then you run into those risks. So what he was doing was gambling. He was accepting some tokens such as FTT and I think even NFTs as collateral for loans. And when you do that, eventually you're gonna get broke.

That is a not a great risk management strategy. Here, here's my JPEG as proof that I will pay you back one day. It's just crazy. Looking back on 2022, how many of these stories are, you know, now casualties and now things that we go. Of course, that makes sense, but at the time it was peak bull run euphoria.

Even if it's shares on the FTX exchange, for example, yes, it used to be worth $80 billion, but what's the liquidity for that? If you own 10% of the FTX exchange, you cannot go to a market and sell it overnight, even if it's a 20% discount. That's not how venture capital works. So they took too much risk, they gambled and they lost.

Well, there you go. Okay, we are going to pass on to actually the next crypto tip for this week, which is pointly named a bull run. We're going to explain what a bull run is before we get there. Marcel, Lovely images. Really like the new setup you got there. The nice be your own bank and bitcoin framed pictures there. I need to get some myself. Probably from the coin telegraph store. What about my background? Oh, sorry. Lovely plants. I love the plants. What's the, what's the frame behind it? Is that, is that bitcoin? I don't know.

I don't know. This isn't, this isn't. This is a bnb, so I have no idea. So.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean, I'm not in the habit of traveling with stuff to put on my wall yet, but I will get, I will get to that point. I'm sure. Cointelegraph store. It's there for all those sorts of needs. And you can win $50 this week if you put a comment or something in the chat. Now let's move on to the quick crypto tip of this week where I'm going to talk you through what a bull run is. Don't we miss the bull runs of 2020 and 2021? Or are we in a built Run right now, let's discuss. So a bull run refers to an extended period during which a lot of investors are purchasing crypto or bitcoin. It's characterized by rising prices and demand outweighing supply. So you've got your supply demand, demand goes up and supply stays the same. So inevitably prices have to go up. It's also marked by high market confidence. Now, investor confidence typically drives a positive feedback loop, further extending the bull run because more investments means a continued rise in price. And for cryptocurrency, especially the price of a given. Cryptocurrency is largely influenced and driven by public confidence in an asset. In the bitcoin and crypto markets, we sometimes refer to this as fear and. Sorry, fear and greed. And there's actually an index which tracks the fear and greed and I think you would have seen in the intro to this week's video that the fear and greed index stepped out of fear for the first time this week in a very long time. And as Sam pointed out, this week was the biggest leg up or the biggest green candles for 100 weeks. I think that was right. Which is pretty cool, right? You know, two, two years almost of, of gains to compare with. And this was the biggest week of it. So maybe, maybe cause for celebration. Brilliant. Okay, back to the co hosts and yeah, humor semi in the chat saying, can you imagine FTX pumped by 2% today? Yeah, that is scary that tokens like FTX which are clearly not to be trusted and are just vaporware, continue to pump. It reminds me of when what was it called? Squid game token pumped 50% after it had been rug pulled because people continue to buy this asset despite the fact that we know it's a clear scam. So yeah, human nature, eh? Fascinating.

Cool.

We also, before I pass on to the next segment, as of 2023 we have a sponsor of the market report which have they very kindly put together a video which we're going to play now just before we flip to Marcel. So Danilo, let's check the video from today's sponsor, Web3 antivirus. They are there to protect you from all things scammy in the world of Web3. If that is your cup of tea. Fantastic. Marcel, are you ready for your trading insights for this week? Yes, brilliant. Take it away.

Okay, Joe, so crypto markets have experienced a 31% rally year to date to $820 billion, excluding stablecoins. That might seem impressive, but when we take into account the entire g entire global money and investment assets, crypto remains an unnoticeable asset class that has its positives and negatives. For example, governments are less worried about the sector right now as they struggle to combat inflation and the backlash on their economies from the reduced stimulus packages. To put things in perspective, The S&P 500 index, which is the largest 500 companies in America, they have a market capitalization, a total market capaciton of 36 trillion dollars. So cryptocurrencies, the entire cryptocurrencies excluding stablecoins is 97% smaller. Even gold for instance, is a 11 trillion dollar asset classes despite hardly being used on day to day activities such as remittance, currency conversions or commercial trades. No one buys oil or nobody buys euros using gold on day to day trades that does not exist. More importantly, what we know as money, meaning the fiscal notes, the bank deposits, the checking accounts, the total global money stands at $27 trillion. So from one side 800 billion is enough to surpass the national currencies of India, India, Canada, Russia and Brazil. So crypto is doing just fine. But it so it is becoming increasingly difficult for those smaller competitors outside of the US Dollar, the Japanese Y and the euro to survive because of inflation. So their currencies are getting devalued because those countries outside of the United States, they hold US dollar treasuries in their balance sheets. So if there's more money circulating, their holdings are worth less. And the international companies, the large companies also issue debt in dollars and euros. So those companies have to buy dollars and euros for the monthly repayments of interest rates. On the other hand, if you think that oh, $21,000 is a little bit too high for Bitcoin or $1,600 seems stretch for Ethereum. Remember this, every time the stock market moves up or down 2%. 2% on a stock market it means that $1.8 trillion was either created or destroyed. So a 2% move is double more than double of the entire crypto asset class. So if the stock markets go up 2%, it means the world is wealthier on $1.8 trillion. That's crazy. Can you believe that? So what you a trader with little knowledge on global markets and macroeconomics should do? First, understand that the central banks control $28 trillion of balance sheet. So they decide if they're buying assets every month or selling assets every month. And every markets move accordingly. Because $28 trillion to manage is a lot of money. Moral of the story, always leave 15 to 20% in cash as a reserve to survive the dips and not be forced to desperately sell your assets at a loss. So leave some 15 to 20% cash position always.

Great. Really important tips there from Marcel. And wow, boggles my mind that 2% is a $1.8 trillion injection or destruction of dollars. Really does go to show how early we are to the bitcoin and crypto space and how small and insignificant we all are. It's like looking at stars in the sky at night, isn't it? You know, we are so small in comparison with the the Tradfi markets. Fantastic segment there. Now we're going to move on to the Markets Pro, but I've just had word. Yep. Coming in live that the cointograph store gift this week will actually be a Markets Pro giveaway instead. So, you know, for those that are watching at home, this is really good news if you're into your trading. And I've got a tip now to help you on that trading journey which comes to you from the Markets Pro team. So this week we are talking about newsquakes with Avax. Avax you might recognize as it's one of the more popular crypto tokens out there, definitely in the top 50, maybe even in the top 20. It's avalanche token. And what we're talking about today is the newsquake related to that. So newsquakes are what help you stay on top of the crypto markets. And news ultimately is the thing that drives the crypto markets. So our service made by the cointelegraph Markets Pro team helps traders to stay on top of these important developments and sometimes get the upper hand. So these alerts are automated and they instantly notify subscribers to Markets Pro when market moving events events may happen. And thanks to them, Markets Pro subscribers often beat the crowds to the most important news of the day because of course, in crypto, timing and being quick is is everything when it comes to trading. So newsquakes went wild this week, alerting Markets Pro subscribers of news about the partnership between Ava Labs. Of course, this is the startup responsible for the Avalanche platform and Amazon Web Services. Of course. Yeah, Amazon, you know, the guys worth $1.5 trillion, formerly headed up by Jeff Bezos or Bezos, depending on where you're from. Now, the first string of news quakes dropped when Avalanche's native token called Avax, was trading at around $14.52. If you were a subscriber to Markets Pro and you bought the asset at this price point, you would have seen a 24% increase to hit its weekly peak of $18.02. All because of that news. News drives markets and we give you the news as quick as possible so you can take advantage of those those insights. Fantastic. That's Avalanche and I think we actually might have an interview today, an exclusive one with the one of the founders of Avax. I'm just checking the website now to make sure we do and we know we don't. They must be coming up later today, but we sure should have some interviews coming up with the founder of Avax. Sorry, founder of Avalanche. Now next segment today is the Vortex score and we're looking at the token IQ here. Vortex scores are another really useful feature that the Markets Pro platform offers you. It's an algorithmic metric and what it does is it compares the current market conditions with the social conditions of the market conditions in the past. A high score would mean that judging from historical data, the asset's current outlook is bullish for the next 12 to 72 hours, a vortex score of 80 and above or around that figure, as we can see here, we have 79 that is considered confidently bullish. Conversely, a low score, something like 30 or a bit below would indicate historically bearish conditions. So possibly means to take out a short or to sell the asset in question. Iq. Our example of this week and one that Markets Pro subscribers were able to take advantage of IQ's performance serves as another reminder to keep an eye on Vortex scores as it hit 80 or 79 this week. On January 8th, this high score of 79 lit up when the asset was trading at 0.0043 cents. So just shy of half of a penny. Traders who bought at this price level could have seen a 55% gain when the price hit its weekly peak of 0.0067 cents. That's a whopping 50, 50 plus percentage gain. These are the sorts of tips and tricks and you know, ideas that you can take advantage of if you subscribe to Markets Pro. And as I just mentioned, this week we're giving away a free subscription to Markets Pro. So make sure you like, subscribe, drop a comment in the chat or if you just want to buy it outright, there's a 20% off discount in the link below. Click it and yeah, enjoy your trading journey Back to the show. Very good gents. We got through another weird and wonderful week in the crypto markets. Although it does feel like it's a happier place to be crypto, isn't it? When when the price is going up, I dread to think next year. Tuesday, when we gathered around the microphones and we realized that the price has gone sub 19k again. Any, any sort of advice maybe from you, Sam, first regarding what to do or what to observe over the coming week?

Yeah, just remember that this is a, a long journey. You know, investing in general is a long journey and that also applies to Bitcoin. I would be less concerned with these week to week movements. You know, when the market rallies, it's really fun to collect our thoughts and to explore why it's really exciting when bitcoin goes up. But you're going to have a lot of down weeks as well. I mean that's going to be pretty much a guarantee moving forward. If, if this cycle is like any, any of the previous ones, you know, we could be headed for, you know, a long consolidation period. But I still think 2023 will be positive. So if you're interested in bitcoin, you see value in it. You know, it hasn't changed block after block after block. The technology is as resilient as ever, as amazing as ever. Decentralized money, peer to peer money. If you want to invest in that cost average in. And I think that your net worth will thank you in the future.

Exactly. I think yeah, it's really important to underline that long term time frame as yes, we are markets pro and we're all about getting those quick gains. But when you look at the future of this money, essentially it does look quite bright. Marcel, take us home.

Okay, so my general tips would be if you got 100% gains on your altcoin this year, like Solana, Decentraland, FTT, Aptos, Helium, Lido or wherever, take profits at least 50% of the position. On the other hand, if you missed that gains, if you don't have Cointelegraph Pro and you don't get the alerts and you miss that gain, don't chase after it spiked over a hundred percent. Look at smaller coins, look at the ones that are more closer to Bitcoin and Ethereum and try to time those ones. Don't chase after the gains, after the rallies and profit and take profits at least 50% of the position.

Always very good. And what would you. This is of course just a conversation. It's not financial advice. These are the views, our own personal views. But Marcel, what would you take those profits and put them into? You know, are you putting them into the euro, the yen, the. I don't know, the bat? What do you put these into?

When I want to reduce my bitcoin exposure, what I usually do, I sell future contracts so I stay with my money. Decentralized on cold storage bitcoins, but I create some negative exposure by selling futures. But if you just want to leave cash, US dollars or euros for a month, it's good for a year. Not good, but it works for short time frames.

Fantastic. Yes, a fiat does serve a purpose at some periods of your trading journey. Fantastic. Thanks so much, everyone for tuning in this week. All that's left to do is to choose our winner and to announce the poll results of this week's poll. It's the first time we've done a live poll, I think in the chat, and it's quite interesting to see the votes. We had just over 46 votes to the question bull run or bull trap? And the results are in. I don't know how to do a drum roll. Should it on the mic or would that be really annoying? The run came in. Thank you, Marcel. The run was 34%. So almost just over a third of you think that we're going to continue this run upwards, up only from now on. And 65% thought that we are in the period of a bull trap. That means we're going back down, possibly to sub 20k. As for our winner, I'm just waiting on the announcement again. It's going to be paged into my ear in some shape or form, but in the meantime, I'll give you my advice, which is of course to stay humble, stack sats and spend sats, because we're not going to get to adoption without people, you know spending SATs. And the best way to spend SATs, in my opinion, is to use the Lightning Network because it's super easy to use, frictionless and barely costs a penny. Oh, just got the winner. His name is Humar. Sammy or Humay. Sorry, Sammy, Sorry. So please DM us on Twitter or send it as email and we will get you your markets pro subscription all sorted out so you can take advantage of all those things like Vortex scores and, you know, maybe even trade some of these coins that have been on crazy runs recently. Thank you so much everyone for tuning in. Goodbye, Kurt Eichello. Goodbye, Rong again. Goodbye, Humair. Hopefully see you next week and thanks again to Marcel Pekman and Sam Borgi. Marcel, who's got his upgraded studio. It looks amazing. Cheers, guys. Take care of it.

Sa.