MANY are going to be stopped out on Bitcoin today (do this instead!)
In this YouTube video, Xuan (The Art of Crypto) walks viewers through his current Bitcoin trade outlook, explaining why he recommends not trading today despite a bullish daily bias. He begins by establishing his credibility (75% win‑rate, publicly documented calls) and mentions a secondary channel for deeper coaching content. He then reviews recent price action, focusing on daily, hourly, and 5‑minute charts, highlighting liquidity sweeps, consecutive bearish CSDs, and order‑block dynamics that suggest a bearish order‑flow bias. Xuan discusses the impact of the recent FOMC announcement, noting that expected volatility did not materialize and the market remains choppy across multiple assets (e.g., gold, GBP, JPY). He introduces his "hell yes / hell no" mental model, urging traders to only take A‑plus setups and avoid forcing trades when conditions are unclear. He outlines specific criteria for a valid long (bullish candle close above $77,000, bullish CICD) or short (break below $75,600, bearish order‑block confirmation) on Bitcoin, and explains why neither condition is currently met. He then shifts to alternative opportunities, presenting a clearer GBP trade setup based on news and liquidity points. Throughout, Xuan emphasizes risk management, the importance of waiting for key level confirmations, and the value of mental models over any single strategy. He concludes by recommending a no‑trade stance for Bitcoin today, suggesting traders wait for tomorrow’s range extremes, and promotes two of his other beginner‑friendly videos on daily close direction prediction and order‑block fundamentals.
Chapters
What's good guys, welcome back to another video. In this one, I'm going to break down the exact trade that I'm going to be looking at for Bitcoin today. And let me tell you, the idea that we're going to have today is going to be a little bit counterintuitive compared to what we usually do. And yeah, I'm going to break all of this down within this video. Before I get into it, if you're new here, welcome, my name is Xuan. I have a 75% win rate across like all of these YouTube trade calls that I've been publicly documenting on X. So hopefully that gives you a bit of a reason to listen to me because I tend to be right just a tiny bit more often Compared to when I'm wrong. Also, recently we made a second channel where I'm posting a lot of the high-value segments from the coaching calls, the live trading calls, and the one-on-one calls that I do with my students. And essentially, like in a lot of these calls that I do, there's a whole lot of alpha within them. But you know, I can't exactly just post a call recording right here on YouTube. So we've decided to clip out these high-value segments and post it on the second channel. If you'd like to check it out, you'll be able to find it somewhere in the link in the description box below or just somewhere on the screen right here. So now let's just get right into the video, and we're going to kick things off on the daily chart because what we've seen yesterday in terms of price action has. Has kind of confirmed the fact that, okay, if you guys recall from what I mentioned on Monday and Tuesday, I was saying like, okay, I'm highly anticipating this liquidity level right here to get swept out first before any sort of up move can even begin. Now I did predict that though. However, the thing I kind of got a little bit wrong was the fact that, you know, I was anticipating this to be completed by the time that Wednesday was over, right? So Monday, Tuesday, we head towards the downside, then by Wednesday Like we'll be, you know, already showing some sort of a strong bullish move to the upside. And Thursday and Friday, we can just kind of ride the trend and just, you know, take a trade towards the upside. However, yesterday was a lot more underwhelming than I or a lot of people have initially thought, right? You would have thought that, okay, with FOMC and with them announcing that, okay, yeah, the interest rates are going to go up and stuff like that, there will be a lot more price action in Bitcoin. However, compared to Monday and Tuesday, which were non-newsdays, by the way, significantly underperformed that. So yeah, definitely did not see that coming. Although, like, trying to predict how much volatility there is going to be in the day is— it's a fool's game. I can give you the read on like, hey, which direction do you want to go towards and what is the trade idea based on that direction. But volatility, meaning like how much price action we're going to anticipate on that very trading day, on that specific trading day, is a little bit harder to pull off. But either way, yesterday we managed to close bullish after sweeping out that liquidity on Tuesday and Wednesday. And so if you know anything about, uh, the system that we trade here, you know, when we get a bullish candle close, we're supposed to be looking for longs. Now the thing that stands out to me that potentially could get in the way of that long idea is the fact that currently we're dealing with this bearish candle close. Now, why is this significant? Well, 2 reasons. First of all is that we initially got this, uh, CSD over here on the daily chart that got confirmed on last week, right, last Thursday. Now, once this bearish CSD got confirmed, it already signified that, okay, the market is definitely reaching for some sort of sell-side liquidity, which was this level right here. Now, now that this level has been taken out though, the problem, the slight red flag that I'm seeing on the chart right now is the fact that we also got a second bearish CSD. Now, usually when you get 2 bearish CSDs in a row, or just 2 CSDs in a row period, it That tells you that okay, the market is now shifted into a different style of order flow, which currently is bearish order flow. Now you couple that with the fact that on the weekly chart we are technically having a bearish weekly bias, and what that basically means is that the overall order flow is bearish, right? Which means shorts are going to be favored in this kind of market condition. However, just on an intraday perspective for today, because we got a bullish candle close, we are technically supposed to look for longs. Today we're operating in a state where you know you can make an argument for both sides of the equation, which if you guys have watched this channel for any period of time, there is a phrase that I like to live by and. I just demonstrated this on yesterday's live trading call with the Bootcamp and Blueprint students, which is yesterday was like by all accounts horrible in terms of the market conditions that we were operating in, where as you can see right here, like just really choppy. And even when we eventually got that news drop, it just ended up being a liquidity sweep on both sides, which is exactly what I pointed out from yesterday. So even after that liquidity sweep though, you would've expected, yeah, you know, with interest rates and stuff like that, this would lead to some trending conditions. However, That did not happen. If anything, we're still very much just within very choppy conditions. So this makes today very tough to navigate. And yesterday, what I ended up doing on the live trading call, where I just basically hop on and I look through forex indices and just kind of live trade the markets together with the students and just kind of walk through my thought process through for like 2 hours in a row where, all right, we're navigating live market conditions. And what I ended up just doing a lot yesterday was trying to deliver the lesson that When you run into a situation where the market conditions are clearly subpar, the correct thing to do is to be a lot more cautious than you otherwise would be. Because yesterday, in like 2 hours of live trading, I think we took like 2 trades, and even both of those ended up getting closed prematurely at breakeven. And so ultimately, like, yeah, we just didn't really take many trades even though we were looking at the chart for like 2 hours straight. And I was looking through like 10 different charts multiple times just to see like, hey, you know, do we have an opportunity here? And what I'm Hoping to share with you by sharing that example is that there are times when the market conditions are absolutely amazing, and it would be a mistake if you were overly cautious because yeah, everything's moving really cleanly. In situations like those, you want to be though less conservative, right? You want to be more aggressive and just kind of oh, the moment you see like one or two confirmations, right? You're hopping in because you know the market conditions are amazing. Yesterday was the complete opposite of that because not only did we get very choppy price action on Bitcoin, but we also got really choppy price action from basically every other major chart. And you can see like gold is an example here. Where you know we got a clear idea, right? Very clear idea where this black line right here was a liquidity point that got swept sometime during the New York session, specifically at around 9 a.m. And once that liquidity point gets swept, and once you see a 5-minute CSD, that is usually a trigger to kind of enter a trade, right? Liquidity point gets swept, you get the 5-minute CSD. All right, you try it out. But again, market conditions were really choppy, and you'll see that the majority of the move did not end up happening until after. the drop of the news. And that's what makes these FOMC Wednesdays so hard to trade, is that prior to 2 PM, everyone's anticipating that the majority of the volatility is going to come at 2 PM. And so what happens in the morning is that it's incredibly choppy. Situations like those, I want you guys to be perfectly comfortable with the idea that, like, I'm sure you've heard this phrase before mentioned time and time again by like all of the trading gurus out there, which is not every day is a trading day, or sometimes not every week is a trading week. And this year, for instance, from January to March, like, this system was just absolutely dead. we basically got near zero opportunities on Bitcoin. And even when there were good trade opportunities, they just did not end up playing out. And that was like for 3 months in a row, right? And the funny thing also, because I'm the one making these videos, so I can kind of see the analytics. But over the course, like in January, everyone was still like really excited, right? Everyone's like, yeah, you know, Xuan's really good at trading. Yeah, if I watch his channel, I'm gonna make money. And then come February, it's like, Xuan hasn't been getting this right for like a month right now. And he's been just every video he's coming on and he's saying, oh yeah, the market conditions look really uncertain, or like there's just good opportunities, don't trade. And then by month 3 in March, literally, I think like we lost half of the usual amount of viewers because like, and the reality is like this happens in trading. It doesn't happen often, mind you, but you're still going to run into situations where for certain periods of time, you're going to get less than ideal market conditions, especially for your system to perform. And one of the most valuable skills as a trader that you could possibly have is to be able to identify market conditions that are good for your system. Then you'll be able to, you know, stop banging your head against the wall and trying to force things when it's just not ideal. Like, it's just not an ideal time for you to force things. There is a time and place for you to be aggressive, and there is a time and place for you to be conservative. And as long as you're trading, you can't expect every single day to look exactly the same. After all, every day— heck, every hour— heck, even on a minute-to-minute basis, you're always dealing with like constantly changing market conditions. You're going to be dealing with constantly changing price action. And super valuable skill to have is to simply identify like, hey, when the setup is not really there, Don't force it. And oftentimes this, like, oh yeah, you just need to be more selective with your trades or whatever, can come off as very vague advice. And oftentimes, like, what people tend to tell you to do in these situations is like, oh yeah, just take higher quality trades but take less trades. But that can be a bit vague sometimes. And especially if you've heard this piece of advice before and you were unable to put it into action and actually, you know, change your trading as a result of this advice, then here's something that works much better instead. And this is the thing that I kind of repeated all throughout yesterday's live trading call, which is, I live by this phrase called, if it's not a hell yes, it's a hell no. Essentially, I want you to think back to your own trading, and there were definitely periods out there where you have looked, like the moment you pulled up the chart, you looked at it for like 15 seconds and immediately it's like, oh yeah, this is an A+ trade, right? Everything lines up. There's absolutely zero doubt, no hesitation. All right, this is an A+ trade, and you just go right into it. Those are the trades that is an example of a hell yes. So you look at it and hell yeah, and you just catch yourself smiling at the screen the moment you open up the chart. Like, you know, you have an A+ opportunity on your hands. And then there are other trades, and I did this a lot yesterday where I opened up the chart, I could see how the trade could play out. But then just to give you an example on Bitcoin, we had a couple of red flags with the fact that, you know, A, this level right here was a level that I anticipated to get swept before some sort of a downside move. And I know that entering prior to this level getting swept would mean that I would very likely be swept out first and then price would actually hit the TP as an example. Now yesterday was a bit complicated because, you know, and in fact I think you can see this from yesterday's example, but I know for a fact that I don't like trading into relatively equal levels or equal levels in this case. Or for those of you that are not familiar with this term, like this is a double top, right? Trading into double tops, especially if you're trying to short, is a red flag because it leaves behind a lot of liquidity and there is a very high chance where you could, like even though you get the overall direction right, you could get swept out first and then price heads in your direction. So you end up in a situation where you read the direction correctly but you lost money as a result of it. That's just one example. Because of these red flags, and yesterday there were quite a few red flags across a lot of the assets that I was looking at, like I could always see how they could play out, but then at the same time there were just like quite a few red flags. So you start having to justify to yourself like, hey, if I take this trade, like I really want to take this trade, but this, but this, right? And the moment you observe yourself, like the moment you catch yourself like having to justify a trade or trying to hunt for reasons why you should take this trade and how this trade could play out, you're already justifying, right? It's already a trade that is not obvious. It's already a trade where, yeah, it's not an immediate hell yes. And if you're able to just catch onto that, And stop yourself from doing anything because it's not a hell yes. Guess what? Naturally, you're going to start having a trading diet of just A+ trades. And guess what happens when you only have a trading diet of A+ trades? That's right, you are going to find it a lot easier to make money. All of the trades that you do take are going to give you a lot less headache because they're just so clear, and oftentimes they just kind of move straight to the TP. It leaves very little room for doubt or hesitation, and you're just going to enjoy trading a lot more as a result of it. Now sure, these ideas, or rather these setups, are not going to come along as often, But that's also the point of it. If you walk down the street right now and every single girl that you see is like a 10 out of 10 baddie, guess what? Like, they're all just normal, right? Nothing stands out. A+ trades are not going to come around that often. Like, you're not going to see a 10 out of 10 baddie every single time on the street, but that's also what makes them a baddie. So yesterday, market conditions were not great, and if you were trading by yourself and you found yourself like constantly trying to force trades and you ended up losing quite a few trades in the process, just understand yesterday was a prime example of Super choppy price action, and you were just leaving behind like you were engineering liquidity on both sides of the equation. And then once you come time to the news, literally relatively equal lows, relatively equal highs sweep out both sides, and everyone loses as a result. So yeah, yesterday, even though we put in a lot of time into the charts, the actual we didn't take too many actions, and there's a very big difference there, right? Just because you look at the chart or just because you spend time on the charts doesn't mean you have to take an action. A lot of the times, sometimes no trade. Is the best trade that you could possibly have. And it's also the reason why I didn't end up posting anything on Twitter yesterday. Every chart I looked at was just, I can see how this works out, but like it's also not looking that great. Yeah, hopefully that little new kind of lesson is valuable to you. It's definitely boring, but little things like this, like just mental models or like ways to think about the markets, is honestly way more valuable than a lot of the things that I could share about like, oh yeah, just you just go long here or like you just go short here. Because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what strategy that you're using as long as you know how to think about the markets or think about trading like. As long as you're equipped with these mental models, you're going to be very likely to be successful regardless of what strategy that you're using. But, you know, with that out of the way, let's get back into the trade idea for today. So I've already established the fact that you don't ideally want to be jumping into trades where you can make arguments for both sides of the equation. Now, today is one such example. In terms of the daily bias pointing towards the upside, in terms of the overall order flow pointing towards the downside. If you go into the 1-hourly chart, you can see that for the most part, this is very choppy price action. Currently, you're trading above the range high, and there is a very high likelihood that you could just kind of return back to the range low today. So if I'm going to be honest, I'm going to give you the boring and the responsible answer because I don't want any of you to lose money unnecessarily. Bitcoin today, like I am leaning towards a no trade for Bitcoin today just based on what I'm seeing on the price action right now. Now there are a couple things that could change this, but I highly doubt we're going to get these confirmation signals like by the time the New York session rolls around because today is also a non-news day. Now you have news on GBP and you have news on JPY tomorrow. Actually, it's not going to be today, but you have news on GBP. And if you take a look at GBP, for example, assuming that the best trades are always the ones where we are following the news, right? We're trading these charts on On a day where there is news, then GBP is actually looking pretty clean, right? Yesterday ended up being a super bearish candle close. You're coming back into an hourly fair value gap right here. And so as you approach that London session, or sorry, as you approach the New York session, if you see more evidence that the market is kind of breaking down, guess what? You can just jump into a bearish trade. Notice how GBP is a lot easier for me to make an argument. And what I want you to notice specifically is how much more easy the read on GBP is compared to what I'm about to do on Bitcoin, where Again, you're kind of in a resistance level right now, and on the 5-minute you have 1, 2, 3, 4, and potentially 5 trendline touches. And usually when you have this many touches on a trendline, this is also a form of engineering liquidity where all of this is going to get swept at some point during the day. So it wouldn't even make sense to go long at any point in time right now, at least before these lows get swept. Also, London session so far, couple hours in, and you have not swept either the Asia high or the Asia low. This leads me to believe that today is going to be another choppy day. So again, market conditions are not really lining up here. So earlier on I mentioned that there were a couple conditions that would kind of make it a lot easier for us to jump into a trade. A is going to be a convincing candle close above here at $77,000. Reason why this is the case is because if you get a candle close on 1-hourly chart above this level, you're going to get a bullish CSD, and at that point you can go into a continuation trade towards the upside. Now this will be a trade in the direction of the daily bias. Now the reason why we don't want to jump into a trade right now towards the long side, well, A other than the trendline liquidity over here, is secondly, like, we're literally trading into like this bearish daily order block right now. This blue box that I've drawn on the daily chart, bearish daily order block. Usually when price comes back into a bearish order block, you anticipate that order block holding as resistance and for price to actually make a move back towards the downside. So for a long to even be possible here, we need to see convincing, like convincing evidence from the market that yes, there is interested parties in pushing the price higher. That's going to come with a bullish CICD on the 1-hour chart here. If we see that, Then yes, could consider jumping into a long. And so you might be thinking at this point, okay, if today we're not supposed to be looking for a long, I guess that means that we're going short then. Well, not really either, because, you know, technically speaking, you have a bullish daily bias, plus the fact that you have a bullish CSD on the 1-hourly chart here means that if you want to jump into a short here, I would recommend at the very minimum you want to get a candle close beneath $75,600 in the same, you know, kind of way that this is currently a bullish order block. So if you were to close beneath this bullish order block, This will kind of show you that, okay, this is a strong level of support right here. The market has shown evidence that there is enough people that are interested in selling and driving price lower. And at that point, you can jump into a trade here. That will be a high probability trade. Entering any time before this, you're just kind of making a bet that you think the market's going to go down. So you're going to take a bet. But what's usually going to happen when you just take a bet based on what you think the market is going to do is that you're trading your own opinion. And I've always mentioned this time and time again, but for any trade idea to become a valid trade setup, You need two things. One is an idea of what you think the market's going to do. In this case, we think that the market's going to go towards the downside because we think the market's not going to go towards the upside. But that's just what we think. Now, second part of the equation is that you also need the market to give you some sort of evidence to confirm that before you risk your hard-earned money on this idea. That evidence is going to come once you get a break beneath this bearish order block. That is, in my opinion. And so when you couple both of these facts together, you realize that, okay, you're literally in the middle of nowhere. You have this level that needs to get traded above in order to validate some sort of long, and you need this level to get traded below in order to validate some sort of short. And so right now we're in the middle of nowhere, and there's one phrase that our head coach at AOC loves to say, which is don't diddle in the middle. And after working with a lot of people right now to help them, you know, get better at trading, one of the most common patterns that I see time and time again is that beginners really struggle with being patient to wait for, you know, certain key levels or certain confirmations to get hit before they jump into a trade. So often they see like even the slightest confirmation, they fail to realize that they're literally in the middle of a range, and then they just jump in at the middle and they wonder why they get chopped up. Because guess what? When you're in the middle of a range, this is when the choppy price action tends to happen. Whenever you realize, right, whenever you are aware that you're in a range, the asymmetric areas are going to be above the range high and below the range low. This is where you could potentially jump into a short and take advantage of a movement all the way back to the range low. Likewise, or vice versa, if you jump into a trade Once the range low has been swept, you stand the chance to take it, to extract a move that is this large. And also to add on to that fact, your probability when you take a trade above or below the range low is usually a lot higher than when you're taking it in the middle. Because right now, where are you going to place a stop loss if I go for a long here? All right, I place it here. What if the price just kind of chops me out and then it heads towards the upside? That's right, standing way higher chance of just losing a trade when you take a trade in the middle. So yeah, as much as I hate doing this, especially because it's a YouTube video and a lot of people are expecting every single day to be a trading day, the responsible thing to say is honestly like, yes, Like, you can absolutely get profitable trades out of this type of price action. You can absolutely get a profitable trade out of market conditions like this, but the truth is the odds are going to be stacked against you. And if there's one thing I've learned throughout my many years of trading and being able to achieve like a decently high win rate, it's publicly documented where I call every single trade before like I take it, exact entries, exact stop loss, like exact TP, is that you want to optimize towards taking less trades, but you take higher quality trades. Otherwise, you're going to end up in a situation where you have like a 25% win rate. You're going to win a trade every now and then where you make some money, but then you're going to proceed to round trip all of your profits because you don't have discipline when it comes to selecting trades. What I highly encourage you to do today, instead of trying to force trades in these type of market conditions, is A, just maybe let's wait for tomorrow once we hit the range low or the range high and we have a bit more certain or like a bit more solid price action for us to actually work with. You can jump into a trade then. So then you might ask, what do you do with your time until that point? Well, I've made a couple of videos recently. A is a video where I show you how I am able to predict the direction of the day close to 80% of the time, this video right here, and is explained in a way that is very friendly for beginners. And B, if you've heard me talk a lot about order blocks and liquidity and CICD and all this stuff, but you don't really understand how it works and you would like to learn in a very beginner-friendly way, check this video out right here.
