Live with Minotaur Trading Systems, August 14th 2026

We've decided to switch the times around a little bit, make it a little bit earlier in the week. So this is going to be the new time going forwards. So make sure you bookmark that. I've got myself, CEO of Minotaur Trading Systems. I've got Marcus with us, Chief Strategist, and Chris, Head of Support as well. So we're going to be discussing today the market, what we're seeing, and also what our accumulator is currently looking at, what assets we're trading, and you know, what the whole process looks like. So yeah, it's been an interesting week.

We've—

I guess since the last time we spoke, there was a significant, um, appreciation in Bitcoin's price. One of the— yeah, potentially could have been a short squeeze that's going to have some kind of severe correction soon before the bear market ends, or is it the beginning of the bull market? Um, these are questions we're going to try and answer in today's, uh, live stream for you. So Another thing we want to go over is diversification of assets. So it's these kind of, these sort of parabolic moves when they happen that if you're caught on the long side of the trade, you really have to have good risk management that keeps you in the game. So one of the things that we do with our accumulator hedge fund, we call it, is firstly, we focus on volatility capture and not necessarily trying to chase a direction. So this kind of move, even if we do get stopped out, getting stopped out is part of the game, right? That's the way it's built. And also diversifying across different assets in the same sub-account, which is something that's really unique to what Minotaur does with their strategy. We use a combination of margin folding, diversification of uncorrelated assets within the same sub-account, also running both long and short, also running hedged positions. So extremely well-protected volatility harvesting across a diversified bunch of assets. And these kind of events, when they happen on either side of the price, either a pump up that's unforeseen or a black swan event that crashes the market down, it really shouldn't take too much of a bite out of your trading portfolio, out of your trading strategy. They really shouldn't hurt too much. We like to call them paper cuts. The Accelerator is also really well designed to follow trends. So So it doesn't rush to reenter the market when it's stopped out, which also makes it quite patient and far superior to any kind of DCA mechanical martingale strategy or anything like that. An algorithm does have brains and we can kind of see that in action. So yeah, I guess anything to add, guys, to that?

Yeah, I put emphasis on, like you were saying, We want to focus on volatility harvesting, right? That's our operation, right? So we harvest the volatility. And we're not so subjective to market direction because at the end of the day, it's incredibly difficult or almost a fool's errand to try to detect or determine what the market's going to do directionally, at least in the short term, right? So therefore, we focus more on delta-neutral type strategies to where We try to take out directional prognosticating from the equation, right, and just focus on harvesting the volatility. And in doing that, we operate more like a casino. You know, we're a casino type of business model to where we're not determinant on one occurrence to the next. It doesn't really matter what the roulette wheel is going to roll next or the dice or the cards. We understand that when we harvest volatility, we are harvesting volume, right? So as long as we keep operating The volatility or the occurrences will play out in our favor as long as we manage risk. So good points, Costa. And that's just how we do it. We built this and we've learned this over years, right? You kind of learn by what not to do, and that's how we get good at what to do.

Well, that's exactly right. And that's how things should be done, right? You need to put your money on the line. You need to test your theories. You need to stress test things. And that's part of the game. And I guess one of the benefits that people have when they sign up with us is they get the benefits of all that experience. Sometimes you talk to people and they're like, oh, I'm building an algorithm on my own. And it's like, great. But once you finish building it, you're going to have to test it. You're going to have to run it. You're going to have to put money into it. You're going to lose money. It's going to take you years, right? That's fine. Everyone has the right and the technology at their fingertips to do whatever they want. But you're also paying for the experience. that comes with a team that spent a lot of time testing, stress testing, and kind of been there, done that. So, so you are getting a shortcut to the end goal that you want, which is an algorithm that works, right? That's what we want, an algorithm that works.

Right. Money loves speed, right? And time, right? So when you do business with us, when you license our algorithms, you're also paying for the time. You know, you're gaining the time, like you said, to not have to go through the weeds and the wilderness and learning all this stuff, doing all the data, of the testing, the live testing, forward testing, back testing, stress testing. So you're gaining all of that and the money's buying you the time. The license is buying you the time so you don't have to do it. Sometimes it's better to buy a plane ticket than build your own airplane, right? You could do it, but probably just easier to get a ticket and pay Boeing. They've already done all the work. Just buy your first-class ticket and sit back. Put your trade tables down.

That's very true. All right, Chris, why don't you bring up the charts? Let's take a look at what we've been doing.

Yeah, totally. Just kind of piggyback what you were saying, Costa, about the diversification of it and stop loss as well. Let me know if you can see my screen.

Yeah, we got you.

Yes, sir.

Perfect. So right over here, as we can see, um, this is BTC, right? USDT, top left corner, right? This is that short algorithm and Kind of to reflect kind of what Kosta was talking about, um, there was a stop loss that occurred. Obviously it's the name of the game, but it's also a paper cut like he was saying, right? Because while obviously this stopped out, we also have other assets running at the same time. So we have just on this chart, we have the long side still running after that small paper cut like you said. We also have the gold that is consistently running, making sure it's long exits as well. Also silver, as you can see here. Front oil, the short side as well. Then also natural gas. And then kind of to reflect what Marcus was saying as well too, is what— how the algorithm, yes, it got stopped, but how the market kind of settled down a little bit as it got into a trade before it took one aggressively. That's what's great about this algorithm as well. Kind of the calm before the storm, essentially.

Just to add to that real quick, Chris, the algorithm is very good. We built it defensively. So in the event the stop loss is part of the risk management, right? So we lock the drawdown to a maximum of 5% and then the hedge pays off 1% of the 5%. So you have a net drawdown stop loss, max loss of 4% per occurrence, right? So when that stop loss is triggered, it's 4% of position size. However, in a ripping market, the market on Bitcoin— because that was the only one that stopped out of the 4 semi to non-correlated assets you're trading— Bitcoin hit the stop because it ripped 25%, right? So 4% on a 25 to 30% move is— that's, that's awesome. We should be celebrating that, right? Yeah, that's right. A typical Achilles heel of any DCA or dollar cost averaging type of system is when it can either get severely out of range and you could be in drawdown forever, called red bags, right? Or you get liquidated in an event like that. So our accumulator protected the account with only a 4% paper cut. Then on top of that, it didn't start trading until the market settled down. So it didn't like take it back to back. So that's A really, really strong, strong sleep good at night point that our algorithm can do.

And just so you can visualize it too, right? As you can see, the purple, right, is this long position. So right now we're all in the money with this hedge, right? We're in profit. And once that stop loss gets hit, that hedge is in the profit, as you can see above the purple line, right?

Yeah. And that hedge is like a It's like a deductible on an insurance policy, right? It pays a portion of that deductible so you don't have the full hit. So it's pretty, pretty cool.

Yeah, yeah. The point to understand here is we're not playing a game of chasing direction, right? This is a system that we've created based on our own understanding of the unpredictability of markets, but the predictability that they will be volatile, right? And, um, we've chased a lot of systems that have tried to guess direction, and at some point the wheels come off. And it's, you know, the best example is a casino, like Markus says, eventually red will come up 20 times. That's just the reality. And it's those unlucky streaks that can blow up an account. And that's what tends to happen when you're trying to build something, when you're trying to codify a strategy that's predicting direction. It might work for a while, but when it doesn't work, the wheels come off extremely disastrously. We've seen that through a lot of competitors. We've seen that through a lot of clients that we talk to, is that things tend to work good for a while, Um, and then they pile money into it, not fully understanding why it was working in the first place, therefore also not fully understanding why it won't work when the time comes. Um, and they do get wrecked. So, you know, we've come from a risk management perspective where we build a framework around the volatility and then we just allow the market's natural movement to generate the alpha. That's, that's the Minotaur approach and that's what we're, um, doing. And the diversification is also something that's, um, come from the tokenization of broader TradFi assets. Right? It's these digital asset exchanges that we use, that we suggest that our clients use. They tend to have much more transparent and open backend that allow developers like us to build systems like our trading one into theirs. And now with the tokenization of assets, we're also getting the ability to trade, like we said, silver, gold, oil, natural gas. This allows us to just diversify the trading portfolio. So, you know, at one point you were only trading altcoins against Bitcoin. Unfortunately, with Bitcoin as the mother correlator, if Bitcoin crashed, everything crashed. So it wasn't, it wasn't a really good trade to be in. So what we're doing now is, is really finding some great assets that work against each other, right?

And then to add to that, Costa, good point. Um, we, when we were, uh, we were doing this for almost 4 years on this particular, uh, development of this algorithm, and 4 years ago, we were kind of locked into a crypto world. Um, so in a crypto world, yes, you could try to offset Bitcoin and trade Solana or some other ones, but Bitcoin is so dominant in cryptocurrency that the, uh, Bitcoin weight or Bitcoin dominance effect is like 0.75. It's, it's, it's, it's the whole crypto market. So we couldn't get, we couldn't get, uh, decorrelated from Bitcoin. But with the advent of, uh, What BlackRock and some of the other Vanguard, some of these other asset managers are pushing now is this tokenization of real-world assets. And that's bringing the standardized commodities legacy assets into crypto now. And that allows us to just really open up the floodgates on being able to now harvest Bitcoin and natural gas and oil all uncorrelated from each other. And now you've got a volatility harvesting machine. You know, it's it's it's incredible how we're able to do that now and trade it with the algorithm. Perfect.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, cool, Chris. Thanks for that demo. Let's jump into Marcus's heat maps and take a look at Bitcoin because there is there is a bit of a we're kind of on a knife's edge here, I think. And let's see what potentially might happen. I know that we're starting to see some some some bearish divergence potentially here, looking to potentially correct this move. A bit of my own research. Maybe we can discuss, but I think this kind of parabolic move, 8 out of 8 times has corrected a minimum of 20%. And I think almost over 80% of the time has actually reached lower. So in other words, it would go below where it started. So interesting to look at past to see if it will repeat itself. But also let's just take a look at what the heat maps are saying. Yeah.

You know, everybody wants to see the crystal ball, right? So yeah, here we go. So there's a couple of things here. Obviously, you know, here's the elephant in the room, right? So we basically had a— we were faced with about a 20-30% rip. I mean, that is— that's a crazy move. These counter-trend rallies have happened before in bear markets. It's not like it's, you know, people are chirping on social media that this has never happened before. It has happened before, although it is an incredible move and it's highly respectable. I mean, that's a big move. And, um, like you mentioned earlier, Kosta, it was kind of, uh, predicated off of a short squeeze. You had a tremendous amount of shorts built up on either side. It could have really broke either way. Then Mr., uh, Scott Bessette, uh, decided to put out a tweet, or he did a news, uh, release where the Treasury is going to buy back its own debt. I mean, if I'm going to loan myself money, I'm going to be my lender and my, my debtor at the same time. I mean, that, that's moving money from your left pocket, putting it in your right, and counting it twice. I mean, come on. So, so yeah, that kind of was good news for risk assets, and Bitcoin is just— is, is the king of risk assets, right? Uh, so it kind of set off the match that once it got into this liquidity here, it just turned into a short squeeze from hell. And right here we can see that once I add in the other leverage amounts You know, we were already targeting this as a natural retracement here, but it just blew right on through there. And let me put in the 5x now. We can see that it even went past that point, and it's starting to cool off a little bit. But here's here's the thing: the market is very very very good at it's going to wreck the people that are the most. It's going to punish late traders, right? So when the market You know, when the market was in this area here, everybody was looking for lower prices. There was a lot of sentiment that was incredibly bearish, and we had a lot of late shorts. I'll show you them right now. You had tons of late shorts here. Let me zoom in just a little bit here so you can see that you had a series of accumulation of late shorts. They were shorts all along, but late shorts. And those late shorts that were looking for the market to go this way tipped the market that way. It's kind of like a seesaw. It tipped it the other way. Then you have a news trigger, lights the match, and then the gasoline just takes off. However, we also have— you cannot unsee that we have a ton of late longs now. Longs are offsides. They're offsides. And, uh, here's, here's the point I want to make very, very clear. We, even though this is an incredibly strong move, we have not confirmed the end of the bear market yet. For me, there's a couple things that I need to still see. Structurally speaking, we have a, uh, high that we put in here in May that went to 83. That high is right here. So we haven't taken that high out. We are knocking at it, but we haven't taken it out. So we would need to close above and claim that level for that structure to be taken. We haven't done that yet. So structurally speaking, we're still in a bear market. Also, one other thing here to be aware of: we still have a tremendous amount of liquidity that hasn't been tapped. That was the original direction the price was going in anyway. This was the trend. But a lot of times what the market will do before it takes out the obvious, it'll take out the other side first and then. Take out the, the obvious liquidity that it was heading towards anyway. We were already liquidating the longs. That was what was in progress already. Then we had this short squeeze, and then we're back on track to come back and finish the job. This job is not finished. So it will be— it will stand to reason that before we can go to all-time highs or start a healthy bull market, we need to offset all of this long side liquidity first, or a big chunk of it. We don't have to take it all out, but we definitely need to, to mitigate some of it, especially these high concentrations. So, uh, as good as this market move was, you know, it's starting to already to weaken, you know. So this is still very much in play, and that is the play that's going to wreck a ton of people. Because when the market was rallying before, previously, these moves, these bullish moves wasn't enough to flip the sentiment. Everybody was still incredibly bearish. So what does the market do? It says, okay, what is it going to take to get people to flip bullish? A 30% move. Now everybody and their mother's bullish. And what do you do now that you got everybody bullish? Now you can come down here and finish the longs and all the late longs too that are in here. So it's just a perfect wrecking machine, and the market does what it has to do to fool the most people. You know, if it was able to fool them with this move here, it would have been sufficient. Like, uh, we were already targeting this for a nice healthy pullback, but that wasn't good enough. So it had to really get people excited. It has done that. So, so let's just pump our brakes and see what happens next. Is it 100% that we're going here? No, we could, uh, retrace the move back to these levels here, like these levels to reclaim some of this older liquidity, build strength, and move for this, uh, Making that new high here, so it could could happen. But until it does, we're still in a bear market until we reclaim this level.

So what level would we have to lose? Do you think for it?

Yeah.

So what what levels do we have to be lose to see a clear direction back down into the low sixties at least?

Well, just from a liquidity standpoint. If we come— the probabilities, if we come down here again, obviously we're going to take out this— the high probability we take out the low. So that's 57, right? There's already a volume profile that goes back to forever that has never been tapped. We have only front run. That's another nail in the coffin that we're probably going to come back down here because this low did not tap this key level. Remember, the market works like an auction, right? So in an auction, everybody has to get a chance to bid. So we work all the way through the auction, point of control, value area low. Well, we didn't tap this key level that goes all the way back to 2024. We didn't tap it. The market is very efficient, right? So it finishes what it starts, even though it doesn't look like it. So this level hasn't been tapped yet, and that level puts you at 50 You know, that's 55, 54 right there. That may be good enough. But coming back to an older point in time where we had liquidity below the level in 2024, we swept it really quick and got out of there. So, you know, the market rhymes, right? So it's potential that it'll sweep it again, same levels. So it has you at about, you know, the low 50s. And then hopefully we don't stay down there long enough. We just want to finish the job, finish off those longs so we can clear all those late traders. And open up for a healthy bull market, because it wouldn't be healthy to go up now and you got all that leverage that hasn't been taken out of the market yet. You know, to clean all this— clean out a big chunk of this leverage is very healthy for the market. Leverage kind of works like a weight. How do you swim when you got weight on your back, right? So we kill— clean, clean these guys out, and now we're healthy and good, ready to go. So I'd like to see these levels get completed because if we don't do it, it's just gonna— it's like a, a Band-Aid that needs to be cleaned. You know, it's a wound that needs to be cleaned. So, you know, sooner than later. Plus the last thing, so we have the key level here that we didn't tap, liquidity remaining. And then don't forget that we have 100 days left before we get to the, uh, time. There's also time involved in a bear market, bull market transition. So we have about 100 days left from the time cycle. We're early. This is early. So we need about another 100 days from where it happened. Where is that at? That puts us, you know, November, mid to late November. So we're not even done in the time factor too. That gives us time to come in here and sweep this really quick and get out of here. So there's still a time too, because if we go up from here, This is way early, way early.

You know, sir, what was that one you did where it went down, back up to 100, and back down?

Uh, well, here's the thing. If we, if we remember, the market works like if this, then that, right? So if we somehow pull back here, there's, there's, there's, there's support here. Um, there's liquidity support. There's lots of support here. There's a There's liquidity that we take out. So there's a convert, there's a zone here. So we find some support here and then it starts to move back up. Remember, we have to reclaim this level. So there's 5x liquidity here. We take out that liquidity, reclaim the level, and we can hang out here. Then yeah, we can get going. That's what would have to happen if we're going to go now.

Yeah.

We gotta, we gotta reclaim this level here from, uh, May. Take out this liquidity, flip the support, and then you know then we can start to build a base. So that's that is a bullish scenario. Yes, a viable one. Yeah.

And then yeah. And another thing I wanted to just bring up quickly on my I'm just going to show my screen. This is something that we built into the application itself. So this is called the Bitcoin Clock, and it's developed by Giovanni, and you can actually see where we are. on the clock. And we're actually, you know, early where the bottom of the cycle is there on the, on the right, that's at that 3 o'clock position. And it is currently showing there around 2 o'clock. So this also confirms what Marcus is saying in a way that if we do get out of this bear market prematurely, or if it's, it's just, there's a lot more reasons for us to continue downwards, that the market has, has, you know, convinced everyone that the bull market started. But really we've got liquidity that remains there. We've got time on the clock. And these are really important things when it comes to Bitcoin. Also make it so unique as an asset as well, right?

And we also have technical structure. So we have about 4 or 5 major occurrences that haven't been completed yet. You know, we're early. You know, the market is notorious for front running, right? So it'll front run and then come back and finish it later. So, but who knows? I mean, that's the beauty of why we use algorithms. So we don't have to sit here and make bets, directional bets. We just harvest the Volatility, you know. Yeah, doesn't really matter to us which way it goes, but it matters to people want to know. Well, it does matter because we all hold Bitcoin and we all have long-term holdings that will benefit from a bull run. Of course, yeah, of course. But I wouldn't mind seeing lower prices because if it gets to the 50s, I'm backing up the truck. You know, hey, I got a lot of capital that was just waiting on that number. So. If it goes up good, the Bitcoin I already have will go up. If it goes down, I'll buy a whole lot more down there and be real happy about it.

So yeah, I guess what's one of the arguments a lot of people are making is that people are waiting for lower prices that will never come. Well, but I guess this move doesn't really—

that's why it has to shake everybody up. You know, too many people were waiting for that. It was too obvious.

So yeah, now it's not obvious, but it can still happen.

Yeah, it's obvious the other way now. Everybody's saying, oh, it's obviously bullish now.

Yeah, what do you, what do you think, Chris?

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think we're still headed lower when it comes to the volume itself. There's so much volume down below. I mean, when that 60 area Um, I mean, they have left some in the past, but looking at the previous, um, kind of cycle, they took out that 5x, and that kind of coincides what's happening now, about that 5x is still kind of there ready to be harvested. So I think we're still going to be headed down. Obviously I don't know when, but, um, looking like it's eventually going to go there.

Yeah, I don't feel like the economy is too strong yet either. Like, it just doesn't feel like things are bullish from an economy perspective. Like, the people— the word on the street that I'm— I don't feel like a lot of people have a lot of money ready to throw at Bitcoin right now. Um, maybe at lower prices with a little bit more time. I think 2027 will— things will start to ease up a little bit. But people have— it's very tight right now. And to think that we go straight into a bull market without any correction after a 30% move, um, without any— Significant pullback seems unrealistic.

Plus, like you were saying, Kosta, Fed Chairman Walsh came out with those hawkish statements, right? That the Fed is not going to be just handing out free interest rate cuts anytime soon. So that's kind of a wind in our front face blowing against us.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a big one too. I think if that had been dovish, well, it would have maybe pushed things up a bit further. But that's, that's kind of shown it, you know, paints the picture because a lot of people in, in the space are, you know, waiting for these cuts because that's what they think drives the liquidity that goes into Bitcoin. But yeah, look, it's going to be interesting. I think we need to prepare for some consolidation and then some increased volatility, um, in the short term.

Yeah, but it's like you said, it's like you said, the only thing that we can guarantee— can't guarantee any specific direction one way or the other, but what we can guarantee, that we can guarantee volatility, that, that we can wake up to every day, there's going to be volatility. And if there's volatility, our algorithm can harvest it, you know. So that's the business.

Yeah, absolutely.

Cool.

All right, guys. All right, thank you for your update. That was, um, good, and we'll see you all again at this time next week.

All right.