Live with Minotaur Trading Systems, May 7th 2026

Welcome to this week's market update. How you doing, Marcus?

All right, how you doing, my man? 50 grand.

I'm doing very well, very well. We got some events coming up as well. We might as well talk about those. We're going to be in New Zealand for a couple of days. We're speaking on the stage as well, but we'll have a booth there. And then we're flying off to Europe, off to Prague, to be attending the BTC Prague conference for 3 days, which is the biggest event in Europe, which we're really excited about. Gone there for the first time.

Yeah, I feel like a rock star. We're going to be spreading the gospel.

We're on tour. It's exciting, it's exciting. Um, all right, let's just take a look at where the market is. So we're going to start off looking at Bitcoin because the majority of the work we do is on Bitcoin. So, you know, as we can see, we are in the sort of first, you know, the bottom, called the bottom quantile. We like to call it 0 to 25 range. You can see that, that red line is almost acting as support right now and kind of see that there. We discussed last week a few possibilities that could happen here. One of them could be that we play catch up to, to this kind of line here. I know we looked previously at this, the double top, you know, you can see that this was much earlier and you can see that there is the potential that we, that, you know, this is kind of a mid-cycle correction. You know, I'll buy a really big one. It's also been going for a long time, but we could essentially creep back up and then come back down to follow this line. I guess that's one possible outcome. The other outcome I think is a sustained, you know, a sweep, new sweep of the lows, which probably delay the market. And then we kind of catch up here and then maybe track, track there, something like that. I think that that's probably one of the two outcomes that might happen. I might draw them both in there, but they're both going to kind of converge anyway. What are your thoughts on that, Marcus?

Yeah, because, uh, we do, uh, deviate from the mean, right, in both regimes, in a bear and bull market. So We're in a bear market right now, so at some point at the bottom of the, uh, of the power law model, we should start to deviate away from it. Uh, typically the bear markets, it's all about levels and time, right? So we have a certain price point to reach, that's the price level. Then the time, the bear market usually lasts about a year, so that's November, right? October, November. So one way or the other, yeah. Either the first scenario is if we go up then come back down, that'll be the bull trap of the century, right? Or, or we, you know, bleed, paper cut everybody to death on the low side and come up later, you know.

Yeah, I guess the issue that I have that still, still like this line here, kind of this, this bear market playing out to the, to the month, to the time, you know. If you look at timing though you know, transition to full bull. If you look here right now, we should be at peak of the bull, right? Oh, sorry, we're here right now, so we should just be coming down. So what I'm saying is that we didn't have the peak of the bull based on the timing, right? We would actually— we'd already quite severely by then. So we didn't get that top according to the timeline. Then in a way, here is the end of the bull, beginning of the bear, right? We look here, um, for it to just play out in this kind of dampened paper cup fashion and play out exactly to the time, I don't know, it seems a little bit too easy for me. Like, um, a lot of people got caught here. Why aren't a lot of people going to get caught out? Just word on the street is a lot of people that I talk to say they're not buying right now, they're waiting for the 40K They're waiting for it to come lower. You know, Michael Saylor has bought more Bitcoin than has been mined already this year. So there's institutional buying is extremely aggressive right now. I think people with the money behind them, they're not waiting for price to get any cheaper. I know a lot of retail is, and I don't know, it makes me a little bit suspicious of what can happen. That's all. This is my— I'm speaking from my gut now, right?

Yeah, that, that's the way to wreck the most people is right now is very— the pessimism is definitely bearish. And if you— the market has a way, it's a wrecking machine, right? So if everybody's too bearish, then that's going to make it bullish, and then it won't go back down again until it flips the pessimism to bullish. You know, once that sentiment flips, then that's the perfect setup to come back down and do a final test. But yeah, that's probably one of the problems is right now the market is a little bit pessimistic, which is going to keep down.

So yeah, I know funding rates still negative as well. They've been negative for a while, so long as you're getting paid. Another thing that I find interesting is this, is where this power law support is, or where this line is here. And, and let's just say the market coming down to $40K like people say, you know, we, we travel a lot, we talk to a lot of Bitcoin maxis, we talk to a lot of people that, that that are big on Bitcoin. I'll tell you the truth, not many people have one Bitcoin, right? They really don't. A lot of people have a little bit of Bitcoin, but not many people have more than one Bitcoin. Not— and, and the thing about a $40K Bitcoin is that it makes owning a Bitcoin possible for most people. They can sell their car and buy Bitcoin, right? They can sell their house and buy maybe 3 or 4 Bitcoin. I think those days are behind us where it's easy for the average person to become a whole pointer. I truly do. And and this is why that I think the buying pressure is already so high. Once we get to that $60K price point where it is almost too cheap, right? Because it is difficult to be a whole coiner. And 6 months ago to a year ago when the price was at $125K, it was out of everyone's reach, right? And now we're going to say it's going to get down to the point where it's $35K, $40K. It's as much as a Toyota Camry. I just don't see it. I just don't see it happening. I really don't. I think it's too cheap. And this is why I'm a bit— I guess I'm bullish on the high time frame because I can see it coming back down again to the $80K, $90K, $100K range, which just puts it out of that ability for the average person to become a whole corner again. That's kind of, again, my personal opinion. What do you think, Marcus?

Well, also, you know, when we were talking with Giovanni, uh, we all like, we all collectively see some different behavior, right, in the asset. One is we don't have these, uh, extreme, uh, deviations, right? So you, you said it earlier when we got off of the roller coaster, right? Uh, we didn't have the banana zone. We just, we've almost gone full-blown institutional, right? So when institutions came in there, they they kind of dampened all that banana volatility. So we haven't had it. And Giovanni, you know, I keep going back to what he said. He, he, he was honest. I mean, he's the developer of this. Uh, we just might stay on the mid, the mean, you know, we may not have much more banana stuff. We may just stay on the mean and this thing just keeps a trajectory that keeps a little bit ahead of the S&P 500 and it just stays kind of close to the mean. And if, and the deviations will become less and less. And from a liquidity standpoint, the way I back that theory up is you have a foundational asset, just like in stocks. You can buy Apple, you can buy Nvidia, the stock, just like in Bitcoin, you can buy the spot. Institutions are buying the spot, but they're hedging with derivatives. And there's a lot of players that are hedging with derivatives. And what happens is because there's so much leverage and derivatives products on top of Bitcoin. There's only 21 million Bitcoin. It can only be so big, right, in, in asset. But derivatives can be 10 times, 15 times, 20 times, multiple times bigger than the asset base. Happens is when you have so much derivatives and trading and all that type of stuff, you're going to kill the volatility because The institutions are constantly hedging, so it's going to be more back and feel, back and forth, you know, liquidity hunting and liquidation and re-leverage, de-leverage. So, you know, it's probably— might not go back, may not— more bananas. There's more and more derivatives every day. It's just getting bigger and bigger. Derivatives are getting huge, options, futures, and that's just going to dampen the bananas. You're not gonna have it.

Yeah, yeah, I think, I think the banana definitely, but I think we're going to have within it the, the boom and bust that will become the new normal version of the boom and bust for this asset.

I think it's going to be a different version of it, maybe not as extreme on the peaks, you know, it's going to probably stay closer to that mean. Yeah, they have— they're hedging, but they're not going to get away. Yeah.

Yeah, it's going to be interesting to how it plays out. Obviously we want things to move faster than they do, so I'm, you know, maybe have some kind of bias that I'm looking for this to kind of happen. But I don't know, I just think that there's just something to this, just slow grind down further. I don't know, it seems like that's not going to catch anyone out. I think that's what everyone thinks is going to happen. I think this other version is going to leave a lot of people behind and then potentially crash back down again anyway. Like if you came up to here, we're talking $161. What's really interesting about this is that it really does bring us to the liquidity that's been there for over a year, right? Maybe even close to 18 months now, which is the short side liquidity that sits untapped all the way up to about $155, $160.

So possibility of a squeeze up to there and then a correction back down, possibly crazy, because you're going to change the market structure to get up there if you're going to go that high. You're gonna completely flip the market structure bullish on the longer term for, for all the, all the technical purists, you know, uh, you can probably go all the way to about 90, 90. I can't see the thing, but probably can go all the way to maybe 90, 95 without flipping structure. There are a lot of technical purists out there that if we go higher than like the 9, low 90s, you flip structure. So what are we doing? Are we going, you know, bullish or bearish or what? You know, it's crazy. You know, I don't, I don't know, I have no idea.

Yeah, yeah. All right, let's quickly have a look at— since we said that, let's just look at one of our algos. Uh, we're going to replace this and just show how when you're running an algo, it doesn't really matter too much, um, what the market is going to do. So this is our power law algo. This is the one that we developed with Giovanni. Um, really cool. Uh, one of the features— actually, let me just change this so we can see it a bit better. Make this— that's right, leave it like that. All right, so, um, what's really cool about this one is it understands it all to find where the position is relative to the power law. So we have the power law mode up in the top right-hand corner of the screen. It tells us the value of the power law now, 26. Which usually means that we're around 20, 26% away from the power law support, which you can see down here. And then this algorithm is perfectly optimized to adjust its own settings and be completely dynamic no matter where it is relative to the power law price. So at the moment, with the new setup that we have with our software, um, we're having a lot of success, uh, actually accumulating more Bitcoin by trading an inverse version of BTC/USD. So, uh, it means that, uh, the pro— the profits, instead of being realized in USDT, are being realized in Bitcoin. So essentially it's like mining Bitcoin with software, which is really cool. Uh, my— you know, you can use your own Bitcoin to mine Bitcoin with software, and you're trading based on, uh, the math and science behind the power law. And again, we're using the source code, uh, that Giovanni has given us in order to be able to apply this to our trading. Which I think is, well, it is Minotaur's IP and it's completely unique to us. No one else in the world has this strategy.

Just to add to that thought, you know, you're not only mining Bitcoin with software, you have an asymmetrical advantage from a CapEx standpoint because you don't have to have the infrastructure, warehouses, racks of computers, and operating expenses, electricity, and you're able to do it without that. So that is incredibly unique to our IP and we're, you know, that's our secret sauce. Secret sauce, our alpha that we give to our clients. They can leverage that like we do.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And of course, we also have the, the hedged version of our strategy, which trades other different assets as well. Um, and we've been experimenting with that. That's working really well. Look, to be, to be honest, it trades fantastically on Bitcoin as well. But with that strategy, we'd like to realize the profits in USDT to generate a kind of cash flow. Um, but again, it's, um you know, working really well on other assets as well. I know Marcus is running some Solana, running some MicroStrategy as well, and, and we're getting just as good results. So if it has volatility, you know, we can harness it. I guess that's, that's what the way we put it.

We're harnessing volatility like you said. We're, we're harnessing that electricity. Yeah, the energy.

Uh, do you want to have a quick look at the liquidity Yeah, peek at it here.

Let me share my screen. All right, let me know if you see it. You see that?

Yeah, we got it. All right, good.

All right, when in doubt, zoom out. So, uh, we're looking at the daily, uh, on, uh, the Bybit futures. As I was saying earlier, uh, there's basically, when you have an asset underneath you, it's just a matter of time before more and more derivative products are created to trade as a proxy or a derivative of that asset. So especially a high-quality asset like Bitcoin, a very unique asset. So the futures, the derivatives, the options, those markets are, are going to continue to expand at a very rapid rate. Now, you could call it a necessary evil because you need speculation, liquidity, uh, hedging. So the derivatives, they provide value to the health of a market, because if you just had to trade spot, it'd be like buying real estate and there's no banks to, to get a mortgage from. I mean, it'd be incredibly difficult. So leverage has its place, but the, the price of leverage is it constantly creates these leverage, deleverage, uh, scenarios where, uh, leverage is built up over time. That's called leverage. And then it gets deleveraged when price moves through it. It's deleveraged, then it's created again, it leverage, then it deleverages. So you have this engine or this cycle of constant leveraging and deleveraging of bubbles. You can call it bubbles, uh, where the market is constantly shaking out the overleveraged side. Now, as a result of that, the leverages drive the intermediate and short-term price action because the price is gonna discover first where the money's concentrated. So it, it's the spot doesn't drive price. It's the leverage. The spot's gonna drive the long-term price, this long-term price, because if institutions are actually accumulating Bitcoin, at a more rapid rate than they're selling it, then the long-term trajectory of the asset is up. However, all of this ebbs and flows and noise is created by the liquidity. So it's just a matter— the reason I bring that point up is we have to start to pay attention to how much the liquidity is going to impact price trajectory, right? So if there's tons of liquidity in the market because institutions don't trade directionally, they hedge, they, they basis trade. So they have corresponding offset side and liquidity to offset the asset. So that's gonna damper the long-term volatile moves. It's gonna, it's gonna be volatile on the short term, but the long term is gonna be more, uh, less volatile. So anyway, currently we're right here in this zone here. Uh, I do see a little bit. Me, I, my, uh, my probability say at some point, let me, uh, at some point we sweep this low right here. And just from a Wyckoff perspective, that low is important because, uh, it is what you call a distribution. This is like an accumulation zone here. And it's important when you have a major reversal, you're looking for a sweep that Wyckoff calls that the spring. You know, you sweep out that liquidity. There's actually a little bit left here, you can see there from the 3x. So you sweep that, uh, we had it here where you had a low and then you sweep it. That's called a Model 1 distribution from Wyckoff. So you sweep that low and that opens the door for higher prices. So we haven't done that yet. This is just technically purist speaking now. Uh, do we have to? No, anything's possible, but we still haven't swept that. Uh, you can tell that we were on this bullish trajectory here. We're kind of testing that now, trying to see if we can find some support here before— so before we go lower, we'll have to see. We don't know. There is liquidity higher. We were kind of targeting, uh, up to— it's— there's liquidity up to about 90s. Let's, let's drop down in liquidity here for a second. Let's go 5x. So from a 5x perspective, One thing I also want to highlight here is all liquidity is being taken at all timeframes, all, all, all levels. It just takes longer for higher timeframes to round trip than lower timeframes. So I like to look at the 5 because it's not too— it's kind of Goldilocks. You get a good, good range, but, uh, not too small, not too tight. So we're looking at about 85, that's in play. Uh, if we bail from here, then we're probably going to be bringing this wick back into play. There's liquidity down here to take, which would give us that spring effect that we're looking for from Wyckoff. Uh, from a timing perspective, uh, we have been in this bearish state here for, uh, 189 days. So we've got about— we could potentially have, um You know, that puts us in that November, mid-November, October. But so we've got how much to go? Uh, let's see here. What'd I say? November? Yeah, right here. So it could be another 100, 100, about halfway through it potentially. So Kosta's version, we could go continue to squeeze up here. That puts us, uh, It's 110. That puts us at a very high, high level. Uh, we could get to this 90. That's what I was saying, this 92 level here. There is a point of control there. Let's see if I can find it. Go on fixed range here. Let's see what we got. Uh, where's my POC? Well, I guess I got it turned off here. Let me Bear with me. Yeah, yeah, there it is. It's actually down. I'm messed up here, but there's a, there's a high volume node here, right here.

Yeah, big one, big one here.

So this is, this is technically POC. I just got too much data on here, so I'll just draw this in right here. That's confluent with that. So I think we can squeeze as high as 93 without breaking structure, because if we break this structure and come down from there— because if we break structure, then that's something else. So probably at between 85 and 93. Now what is interesting, let me showcase this. Let's drill down a little bit to just look at some really short-term stuff here. There's a critical— we're at a critical pivot point right now. Actually, let me, uh, let me zoom in here. So let's take a look at this. The critical pivot point is right now. So either this trend is going to continue going this way, takes us into that 93 to 85 range that we were looking at. However, this level, if we break into this liquidity here, we're going lower. And if we take this liquidity here, we're opening the door for higher. So we had a pivot point, a very, very important point right now. That's going to determine which way we go. We take that liquidity above, it's sitting right there at 77. We take that, then these targets open up. If we don't and we start taking this liquidity here at 74, then we're going down. And it's probably gonna take— it's probably gonna take about another 3 or 4 days for that to play out, but it is— we are at the inflection point right now. Yeah, I thought that was interesting too.

Yeah, very interesting. I'm saying the same thing as well. I agree. Yeah, interesting time, interesting time. Um, all right, well, anything else you want to go over today?

It's about it. Uh, one thing that kind of came out from this call is, you know, you're constantly in a state of learning, right? You're always evolving and learning. And if you don't learn, then you relearn because you get taught a lesson, right, that you should have learned previously, right? So we're constantly— you, you kind of alluded to it a little bit in the call. I think the sooner you come to a realization that you don't know what the market's going to do, the better off you're going to be.

Yeah.

You know, you have to understand that you live in an environment where you don't really know, but the, the way to deal with that uncertainty of not knowing what's going to happen is have a plan for both scenarios. You know, that's, it's kind of like, we're not traders, we're trappers, right? So we have a plan. If it goes to 85, 92, we have a plan for that. If it goes to 60, we have a plan for that. That's what institutions do. They hedge. They, they, they don't, they try to take the directional out of it. So yeah, just have your plans and be ready. Let the market come to you. Don't chase it. Don't get induced, you know, just sit back and set your traps and let the price come to you.

Yeah, good advice, Marcus. Good advice. All right, well, if anyone's watching this and they want to book a call and learn more about what we do, use that QR code in the top right-hand— top left-hand corner of the screen and speak to someone from the Minutoor team, get you started. All right, leave it at that then today. Thanks, Marcus.