How To Identify The Macro Market Direction
In this episode of the $10K to $100K challenge, The Art of Crypto walks viewers through a real‑world short trade on OGN/USDT, using it as a case study to explain how to spot macro market direction. He introduces his proprietary "Spaceman BTC Key Levels" indicator, which plots critical price levels such as the monthly open, previous weekly high/low, daily mid‑range, etc., and shows how these high‑time‑frame levels act as resistance or support. The video explains why, despite an apparent up‑trend, a "scam pump" created an unsustainable price imbalance that market makers must later fill, prompting a short opportunity. He details his workflow: setting TradingView server‑side alerts on key levels, analyzing structure breaks on 1‑minute, 5‑minute, and 1‑hour charts, identifying fair‑value gaps, and using Fibonacci 0.5 and 0.618 zones to set targets. Risk management is covered extensively, contrasting automatic stop‑loss placement with manual stops, position sizing (≈1.5% risk), and the pitfalls of entering too early on low timeframes. Throughout, he stresses patience, trading with market makers rather than chasing price, and the importance of using alerts and a disciplined risk plan. The video also promotes his paid Discord/course and a TradingView affiliate link.
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What's up everybody, welcome back to the $10K to $100K challenge where basically I try to walk you through all of the trades that I'm taking, or at least the major ones, throughout the process of growing a $10K account into $100K so that you guys may be able to replicate these results for yourself. Now if that's interesting to you, make sure you stick around to the end of this video and make sure you subscribe to keep up to date with all the latest episodes that are getting posted. So today's episode, we are going to talk about this trade right here where if you can see on the screen right there, you can see that I shorted pretty much the exact top of this move right there. And I did not actually make any money from this trade. In fact, I lost money, but I will get into why later. But the first thing that all of you must be curious about is how did I know that this would be the top right here? Why did it, you know, just went straight down from there? Now that is the real topic that most of you are interested in. So let's dive into it. So first thing that you need to do, well, if you are already a student of mine, you would have already known that I use this indicator called Spaceman BTC Key Levels. Now what this indicator does is shows you all of the key levels that you need to pay attention to, such as the monthly open, previous weekly high, the previous monthly mid-range, previous daily high, previous daily low, you know, the daily open. All these levels, they exist for a reason. Nowadays I rarely even draw quote-unquote support or resistance lines anymore. I Literally just use this indicator right here. Well, you don't need the indicator if you know how to draw these lines out yourself, or if you are diligent enough to keep up to date on all the happenings of this particular coin. But for me, I am lazy, and as such, I use this indicator, and it just draws it out neatly, and I can use these levels whenever they hit. For example, at the moment, price is hitting the previous daily mid-range, which would give me an opportunity to start shorting this. If I see a short setup. Now in this case, we are going to be focusing on the monthly open. That is how I identified that this would be a key level of resistance. And as you can see, even though the price did go slightly above the monthly open, you can see that indeed this was key resistance on a higher time frame. In this case, we're using the 1-hourly. Now why did I start looking for a short instead of a long, right? Because by accounts, if you just take a look at the market structure over here, you can see that we are forming higher highs and higher lows. So by all accounts, you're supposed to be going up. Not only that, but after this recent pump here, you can see that you are pretty much forming some kind of a rounded bottom formation. So by most retail standards, you would have been, you know, going up. So why wasn't I looking for a long instead? And honestly, the answer is twofold. Firstly, usually after Ridiculous pumps like these. This is generally what you call a scam pump, right? Where basically there are entities behind this coin that artificially just inflates the price really quickly over the course of a couple of days or a few days or even within the same day. You can see how far these— like, this exact coin pumped, which is about 100% in one day. Literally within 24 hours, it pumped almost 80%. Now, the thing you need to understand about the financial markets is that this is not sustainable. When you go straight up like this, notice how much imbalance you leave behind on this coin. And if you follow my channel for any amount of time at all, you know that imbalances always tend to get filled. And if you want a more detailed video on how in particular I use imbalances in order to figure out if Bitcoin's going to be pumping or dumping on every given week, then you're going to want to watch this latest Bitcoin video that I made. It will teach you about this magical thing called the CME futures gap. Anyways, since imbalances tend to get filled and these kinds of pumps are not sustainable in the sense that you do not expect it to just keep going up because the market makers are the ones who pump these markets up and they will need to mitigate their positions at some point, right? Because unlike us retail traders where we are either long or we are either short, when the market makers decide they want to pump the price of any given asset in any given direction, like essentially during this entire move upwards, their short positions would've been massively in the red. So in order to mitigate, right, in order to put things back into equilibrium, you have to bring the price down in order to, you know, mitigate the short positions. So I hope that makes sense and why I was not expecting this move to continue upwards even though it was showing signs that it should be going upwards. And not only that, but as previously mentioned, price was coming close to the monthly open. Because of this, when the price hit this level, I immediately just started looking for shorts. So you can apply this Theory to literally every single cryptocurrency out there. In the sense, let's say you trade like five main coins, right? So every week in the beginning of the week, you literally just go to all of these coins and right near to these levels, right? Maybe right before the monthly open, I'll just come down here. I'll set an alert and bam, right? The alert is set, which means that when the price returns close to the monthly open, you will get alerted that hey, price is coming to a very key level where you can start taking the trade, and then you'll be put on high alert essentially. Literally, you do this just. the beginning of every week, you know, you have alert, alert, alert, alert, alert, like something like that, right? So that whatever happens, you will be notified and you'll be able to take advantage of it. Now, the important thing about this is the fact that I always like to talk about how you do not ever chase price, in the sense that you always wait for price to come to a very key level where you would like to place a trade instead of you chasing price. If price is going up, you don't, you know, try to long as it's going up. So it's just an example like that. So when you do this, you'll find that your win rate and profits that you make from trading is going to be so much better because you are taking trades basically from the same areas that market makers would take their trades from. They're not just going long here like just for no reason. They're waiting for price to get to a key level, whether that be this kind of a key level or a previous high, previous low, relatively equal lows, relatively equal highs, for example. When you're trading with this style in mind, you are trading with the market makers and not against them. So your profits are going to be exponentially higher than if you were trying to chase price. And if you are wondering how you will be able to set so many alerts, fun fact, you do need a premium TradingView account, right? Either that be a Pro, Pro Plus, or a Premium plan. Now my suggestion for a lot of you asking, right, a lot of you have asked me this question before, what is the best plan to get TradingView. Now my sincere recommendation is going to be the Pro Plus plan, right? For most of you, 95 to 99% of you, you are not going to need Premium. Now I do use Premium because I am able to make use of all these 400 server-side alerts, but for most people, 100 is very sufficient. Now you don't want to get Pro because you only get 20 alerts to work with. When you progress In your path as a trader, you are going to use and you're going to be able to make way more profits when you have an abundance of alerts that you can utilize. And you have to remember this, right? Most— like, there are alerts that you can set for a lifetime. Like, basically every time the EMA crosses, then you'll get alerted, and those alerts will be there permanently, essentially, and you will never miss a beat in the market. So 100 Trust me, it might not seem like it will be useful to you yet, but it is incredibly useful and it will set— like, it will make you a lot of money basically. Now forget the indicators, right? As you can see, I really don't use many indicators at all at any given one time. Maybe it's just 1, 2 at most. You don't need indicators to succeed, but the server-side alerts make it worthwhile. Now if you want $30 off your TradingView subscription, you can just head over to the link in the description box below. When you sign up, you will get $30 off. It is an affiliate link, so just be aware that, but it will come at no extra cost to you. But anyways, now that you understand the key levels, we are going to dive into what I look for for this trade right here and why I said in the beginning that I did not actually make any money from this trade. Now to do that, I'm going to set a vertical line and let's dive into the 5-minute chart to identify this. So you can see that I in fact shorted this chart right here, over here, and you can see that I bought over here, which means during this pump I got stopped out. Now My actual entry was actually like that, right? With a 1.5% stop loss. And my target for this trade in particular was right there, right there at that low right there. Now I'm going to get into the reasons why I took this trade, but if this trade were to have went through, I believe that I used— I risked about, let's see here, OGN/USDT, right? I lost $221, which means on that trade I risked about 1.5% of the account. Give or take. Now, 1.5% times 7.5 would have been about 10R to 11R. I would have made about $1,200 to $1,300 on this trade if it succeeded. And you can see that it indeed succeeded, right? In fact, I had a TP2 right down there at 14%, right? That's— that would have been about 15R, which would have equated to about $1,500 to $1,700 on the account. Sadly, Whilst I got the direction right, I did not. And I'm— and throughout this episode, I'm going to tell you later as well how to prevent something like this from happening, because you can see that I just got stopped out barely, and then, you know, the price literally never came back and just hit the TP. So I'm going to teach you how to prevent this. But firstly, let's try to identify what I look for. I don't even think that I was entering into this trade based on the 5-minute chart, because if I did, there would be clearly some kind of a break of structure on the 5-minute chart before I entered into this trade. And by the way, if you want a full guide on like my bread and butter strategy that I use on a day-to-day basis in order to get gains. I'm gonna link that video in the description box below as well. Make sure you check that video out after this video. It's 20 minutes of just pure gold. It's stuff that I would teach in my private Discord group inside the trading course. So seriously, it's just a lot of free value that I'm giving to you guys that hopefully will help a lot of you. But anyways, seeing how there is no break of structure whatsoever on the 5-minute, I definitely entered into this trade based, like, predicated entirely on the 1-minute chart. Now you will see later that that is going to be a mistake, because when you enter into a trade purely based off the 1-minute, that can be an issue because it's really low time frame. So you can see that when I entered into this trade, there was indeed a break of structure over here, right? That is a swing low right there. A swing low's again basically just defined like that, where the low of this candle is lower than the 2 candles right next to it. So That swing low was broken right there, and on the retrace, I want you to pay attention to this. Take a look at this, right? After you broke structure right here, you can see that there was a point of imbalance, right? This is a fair value gap right here. This blue box right here is a fair value gap where there is zero price action. Now, before this candle, before all these candles, you can see that there is zero price action on this box here. That is a fair value gap, and so that is where I entered right there. But sadly, On the 5-minute, you had not broke structure yet. In hindsight, I should have been a little bit more patient and waited for some kind of a break of structure from the 5-minute or the 15-minute before I dove right into it. But that is fine. I'm going to teach you how to mitigate like mistakes like these from happening in the future. And honestly, I could use a lesson in it myself. Now admittedly, one of the reasons why I just set a stop loss here and forgot about it is because I was doing other stuff at the moment. Now, I have done something like this a lot in the past where, you know, I just enter a trade, place a stop loss, and just, you know, let it do its thing. And while that can be effective when you are entering in such a low time frame, because of how volatile altcoins are in general, especially OGN— it's probably considered like a mid to small cap coin— because of the sheer volatility of these coins, it can be very dangerous to just set and forget without monitoring the price at all. Now, sometimes What you can do instead is to use a manual stop loss. Now let's define a manual stop loss, right? It is essentially you enter into the trade without setting the stop loss until you monitor the market and see stuff that happens that lets you believe that, okay, now I can set my stop loss. Now you might say that this is not a particularly smart thing to do because you enter into a position without— if you don't know the stop loss, then how do you know how much of a position size that you should enter into? And that will be a struggle for a lot of people. So my recommendation is if you are unsure, Always wait for the market to show you something, to show you some kind of confirmation, right? Because patience pays in these markets. You don't need to catch the exact top. As you can see here, I was hasty. But when you wait for the market to show you confirmation signal, essentially you can see that on this next move down here, this is where I should have entered. Because right here you would have broke 5-minute structure and you would have left behind a fair value gap right here that you could have entered into twice, in fact, right here and right here. And this would have been the perfect entry. So Now, if you struggle a lot with entering into a position either too early and then getting just barely stopped out, and then, you know, price just does its thing— like, you were right about direction, you know, all the while, it's just you weren't right about the entry— a lot of the times the simple fix to that is to just be patient. And it's okay to miss entries. Sadly, I was— I showed a bad example of this, but hopefully my mistakes will be able to save you guys some money in the future, and that's why I'm sharing this. It's okay to miss entries because there are so many cryptocurrencies, like thousands in fact. If you miss an entry on this one, I'm sure you're going to find another entry somewhere else. So entries are a dime a dozen. But if you dive into an entry too early based on FOMO and you get stopped out, then that money is lost forever. You're not going to make back that money magically. But if you miss a pump or you miss a dump, then you're still at zero, right? Nothing's changed. And ultimately, you have to remember that 90% of the crypto markets, or the financial markets in general, are losing traders. Which means that if you simply just not lose money, you're already ahead of 90% of other traders. So patience is key, right? In hindsight, I did not see that, and that's fine. You know, traders make mistakes. It's a part of the game. That's where risk management comes in. That's why I only lost $200, which is not much in the context of a $13,000 account. But if I had just waited for a little bit, or maybe if I just ran a manual stop, then this trade would've played out brilliantly. Now, that was the first step in how not to fall prey to this, right? But the second one, which is a little bit less recommended, and it's something that I talked about just now, is to run a manual stop. Now, manual stops are very risky things because you literally just enter into a position in the sense that you are literally just gambling, right, where you don't place the stop loss immediately. Then the position size becomes somewhat of an issue because let's say you enter into a trade here with, with the intention of placing the stop loss here. So let's say your account risk is 2%, right? But if let's say you use a manual stop loss and eventually the stop loss ends up somewhere like here, then realistically you're gonna be taking on like 3 to 4% of account risk. And that is not really a good sign if you wanna have your risk management strategy down pat. This is not a highly recommended strategy. I only recommend this if you are experienced in the markets, right? You've been doing this for a while. In that sense, well, in that event, you probably wouldn't be watching this video in the first place. But if you've been doing this for a while, Right, until you backtest it like 100, 200 times based on your exact strategy— I mean, I have a few samples of strategies on my channel that you could use as well— but until you have backtested multiple times of your strategy and forward tested, which basically is what I'm doing here, which is playing with paper money, then it is going to be a very good idea that you do not run a manual stop loss, because then you do not have enough knowledge of the markets to know that, hey, price is very close to a key resistance at the moment, and it just needs a little bit more time to play out, to go through a distribution phase before it dumps. And I just got to be patient. I don't have to panic, and I don't have to exit the position prematurely, which is admittedly what I did here. But when you are experienced enough in the markets, you can afford to go with a manual stop only after price has broke structure and everything. And then at this point on, maybe you can place a stop loss here. You can place it here, for example. Now, that is how to mitigate, you know, just prematurely exiting into a, like, out of a position, like, for absolutely no reason at all. Now we dive into why I set my target right here. And to do that, we're going to have to go back to the 5-minute. And in particular, the reasoning that I set my target here can be explained for the fact that I want you to take a look at this, right? This move right here, this move, this swing high to that swing low. You can see that this is essentially just one move. Now, some might argue it has to be from there to there. Some might argue from there to there. Why did I take from this point to that point? And honestly, the simple reason for that is simply because this is the long-term low and this is the long-term high. Or at least I thought it was a long-term high, because initially when I drew the fib from here to here, I drew it from there to there instead of, you know, that high. I wasn't expecting that high to get breached. Well, again, Traders make mistakes. I was on too low of a time frame, so I did not get the bigger picture. So 1-minute structure was broken, 5-minute wasn't broken, so I just assumed that that would be the top. So it stems from a couple of issues, honestly, from patience as well as just FOMO, you know, and being on too low of a time frame. So the reason why I'm using this low and that low, you know, other than the fact that how do I know it's a long-term low and how do I know it's a long-term high? Honestly, it's a little bit hard for me to explain to you because it comes down to experience. For example, if I was on the 5-minute and I was trying to trade the mid-range of this move right here, like let's say I would have caught that top right there. The reason how I would have been able to catch the top there is because that from this move right here can be a long-term high and the long-term low. This is very close to the mid-range. So it's a little bit hard for me to explain to you But this is something that comes with experience. Like, how do you identify, like, hey, this is where the move began, right, from here to here? So that is how I use the fib. Like, that's how I draw the fib, a long-term fib. So for example, sometimes I will draw the fib from here to here. Let's say when I'm looking to go long, maybe on the 0.705 or the 0.618, which is the golden pocket. But sometimes I will draw it as that, right, because I'm targeting— I'm believing— because my analysis was done based on the monthly open, which is a very high time frame sort of level, then I would like to believe that that would be a very significant resistance that will lead to a bigger price swing compared to, let's say, if I was just using the daily open or the previous daily high, for example. In that case, then I might have drawn the fib from here to here, and it also depends on what time that I entered into this trade in particular. And as you can see, it was steering off market hours for the New York session. So this trade in general was not going to be an intraday position. I was trying from the very beginning to try to catch a bigger swing, and that's why my target was at this previous low right here. Now again, I will just draw that fib from that low to that high right there. To my students, you will know that you always want to look for a 0.5 fib because anything— when price is within any given range, I want you to imagine it this way, right? Anytime the price is above the 0.5, which is this entire chunk here, the price is trading at a premium, right? In the sense that based on like the algorithms that run the markets, which essentially account for about 80% of daily trading volume, based on these algorithms and the way they are programmed to do things, these prices, all, all the prices over here are at a premium, which basically just means that it is overpriced. And when things are at a premium you have to bring it back into equilibrium, right? And that is the 0.5 right here. So whenever things are trading above the 0.5, there is always a tendency to want to bring it back below the 0.5, or maybe even, even lower. But 0.5 is going to be the first target of any type, like any type of trade that you take. Now, any prices below the 0.5, like my students, you already know this. And just remember, if you want to join the private group where there is going to be pretty much daily market updates as well as trades being called by me and my moderators, as well as the full trading course that is about to be released in about a month's time, then you're going to want to head over to the website in the description box below. And this is how you are going to want to join. But anyways, anything below the 0.5 is considered as a discount, right? So when price is at a heavy premium, we expect the price to come back down to the 0.5 fib in order to even things out. Remember what I said earlier about when there is a massive, massive pump, the market makers need to mitigate their positions, right? This is essentially how these algorithms or programs work. So now that you understand this premium and discount kind of thing, then you can see that the first level, right, you want to look for the first swing low or any key area that is right beneath the 0.5. And as you can see, this low right here just happens to be right beneath the 0.5 Fib, and you can see how the target just reaches for this level, right? The moment it takes it out, there is some kind of retracement back up. It's not very big because the price is still, you know, trying to push lower, but you get the idea that this was the first key significant level that price was pushing for. In fact, I can give you another example right here. When I draw the fib from that swing low to that swing high, I want you to notice, right, the moment price hits 0.5 fib right here, the moment price hits it, bam, right? Again, this is a range within a range, right? This is a shorter-term range Within a longer-term range, and you can like this is the power of fibs and why it's a non-negotiable, right? If you want to trade properly, you're going to need to know how to use the fibs because they are so powerful, and they give you just exactly just exact knowledge of what is going to be happening in the markets. So I hope you understand where my target came from. That was my target, and it just so happened that it was near the previous weekly mid-range. I believe. Let's see if I remember correctly. Yeah, right there. The previous weekly mid-range is this line right here. And honestly, realistically speaking, you could have just taken profit there as well instead of here, and that would have been just more profit. And then my TP2 would have been down here, I believe, if I was not mistaken. It was either down here or it was down here, right? Because again, I want you to take a look at these levels. What do you see? Relatively equal lows. Yeah, so these are levels that market makers would like to target. And I know it's been like really long ranty style video, but I do dive really deep and just explain to you why things happen the way they do. And if you appreciate videos like this, I really want you to comment down in the comment section below 10K. Or if you would like a shorter, more condensed version instead of me diving into every little detail and explaining it like 5 minutes at a time, then I also want you to comment down in the comment section below that you would like some shorter form just analysis, you know, instead of this kind of long form content. But if you do enjoy this and you wanna see more, make sure you like this video And subscribe to the channel. And remember to join the private Discord group if you want to follow along with these $10K to $100K trades live. For now, bye-bye.
