New Bitcoin ATH... But Is This A Fake Pump?

Welcome to a new Bitcoin all-time high, guys. As mentioned yesterday, today is likely going to be a very bullish day for the entirety of crypto, although I wasn't expecting things to happen quite as quickly, especially quite a few hours before President Trump actually got, you know, inaugurated. So the question now becomes, is this a bull trap? Because we've seen this happen in the past before where, you know, all the way back in November prior to the announcement that Donald Trump has won the election all the way back here, you know, things actually pumped quite aggressively until we reached the current, or like the previous all-time high, which is at around $108,000. And we got some kind of a deviation outside of the value area. If you guys remember watching my videos from back then, this was a deviation. And until right now, if we still take a look at the volume profile, especially on the 4-hourly chart, you can see that for the most part, the value area still remains around here. Now, this is looking at the volume profile. This is where the majority of the trading volume has been know, occurring. And we could potentially even refine this down all the way to just that. But I think at the moment this looks a little bit better because it does cover for all of these wicks to the range low. So previously we did get a deviation outside of the value area. Ultimately it failed and accepted back into the value area. And well, you know how that played out. We went through a month-long retracement on Bitcoin, which didn't really, you know, end up being a big retracement, but The majority of the altcoins did start bleeding quite heavily. And so the question is like, what's next? Is this also the deviation? And the answer to this might surprise some of you. In this video, this is the question that I'm going to answer, and I'm gonna give you just a few supporting pieces of evidence, as well as just give you a playbook on how to navigate this week moving forward. So if you're interested, stay tuned. Right before we get into it though, I would like to take a moment to share some of the wins that you would've gotten if you joined the AOC Alpha Group anytime within the last month. Now, For those of you who are in the market, you know that the last month was really tough, especially for altcoins, because the majority of them actually retraced more than, you know, 60 to 70% from the high back in December. In such a tough market condition, this is what we've been able to achieve. And I do not shill this lightheartedly, just, or just purely because I'm trying to get a cash grab. I truly believe this is something that is going to help you guys out, especially for those of you who struggle to find the right coins to get into. Well, this is what the ACA Alpha Group helps with. You don't have to spend hours upon hours on Twitter trying to find the right play, and you definitely don't have to follow the wrong YouTube gurus. This is all just given to you on a silver platter. And if you want to stop just missing out on all of the big plays and just start the year strong and actually start making money in crypto, then guys, the first link in the description down below. Of course, if this isn't relevant to you, it's no problem at all. I'm only putting this out because, well, the results speak for themselves. We've been able to achieve this in a really tough market condition, and it's only going to get easier from here on out. But anyways, it's time to get into the video. So one of the first things that we want to keep in mind is that if we take a look at the funding rates right now on Bitcoin, we are sitting quite literally at neutral. And what if there's one thing for sure is that I have never seen some kind of a blow-off top or like just the top of the bull run or even range deviation such as this with neutral funding rates. This is one of the most telltale signs that things have barely heated up. And so to give you a really short answer to the question of is this the top, I really do not believe so. The last time we were at this spot though, funding rates across the board, not just for Bitcoin, was sitting at like 0.1%, potentially 0.2%, and on some exchanges even up to 0.3% and 0.5%. Now for those of you who don't understand how funding rates work, the higher the funding rate is above 0.01%, which is neutral, right, the higher the funding rate, Compared to that. So for example, let's use 0.1%. That means that there are almost like 10 times the amount of longs compared to shorts, at least in terms of open interest in the market. Open interest just means the amount of people that are on leverage taking a long. At 0.1%, that number is already really high. So you can only imagine what happens when you have 0.2% or even 0.3%. Like that, the amount of longs that are just easily— like if the market dumps by like 10 or 20%, the amount of longs that are going to get liquidated is Immense. And there's one thing I want you guys to understand about crypto, not just crypto, by the way, every financial market in general. The main purpose of every market participant, like the reason why you're here, is to make money. Nobody's here to lose money. And this also applies to the market makers. And in crypto, they could be some really big institutional fund. It also primarily involves exchanges like Binance and Bybit. Like all of these exchanges, the way they make money is for you to lose money, right? It's not in their best interest to allow the general retail public to win. Because guess what happens when you do win? You're not just making money out of thin air. This is not business. This is not a job. You're not working or like generating value in the overall economy, right? When you— trading is a zero-sum game. When you do win money, usually you're taking it from somebody else who is losing money. And when you win, guess who's losing money out of their pocket? That's right, the big players, the market makers. And so this is why crypto always goes through these big liquidation events to make sure that everyone gets shaken out, right? Because at some point, if you were to have went long, like, let me just paint this picture out for you. You could have went long at any point here, and unless you got liquidated at some point along the way, you would be just deep in the profit with zero concern, right? You feel really good. Your unrealized profit and loss is really high. And great, you're making money. But here's the thing about retail traders, and maybe you might be able to relate to this as well, which is that most retail traders, or just people that don't know what they're doing, they get a good entry, right? The entry is never a problem, but the exit's always a problem. It's either they get out too early, but in most cases they ride everything to the top and they think like, hey, maybe it's still going to go till like $150K or something, and they don't take their profit. And that gives Like the market makers pray, like this is prime, just juicy meat. Just people that don't take profit and don't have any sort of exit strategy. Guess what happens when the market goes through a liquidation event? That's right. Not only does your position, like all of your unrealized profit just goes back to breakeven, or in most cases you actually lose the trade, especially if you're on leverage and especially even more so if you're on high leverage, like anything above 10x, like a 10, less than a 10% move. is going to just liquidate you or liquidate that position. And 10% moves happens in quite literally on an hourly basis. Quite like even on Bitcoin, the largest, you know, market cap coin out there, which moves the least, just went through. I'm on a 4-hourly chart right now. In one 4— like in 2 4-hourly candles, it went up by 10%. Imagine if you were short at any point here, you would've already got liquidated at 10x. Now, does that mean that leverage is bad? No, leverage is ultimately just a tool. And just like a kitchen knife, put in the right hands, it can create just culinary masterpieces that is super delicious and it creates a lot of value for, you know, everyone involved. Or if you put it in the wrong hands, it could be a tool that is used to make crime happen. Ultimately, leverage is just a tool. As a trader, it's your job to know how to use leverage. If there's one thing I can tell you for sure is that if you've had a bad experience using leverage, or maybe if you've lost money more than you've made on leverage, then one of the easiest fixes is to change your mentality around leverage. Instead of buying or like investing into coins using leverage, treat them as trades, right? Have a set stop loss so that you don't— you can avoid liquidation events. Also have a very clear exit. This is very important. Without an exit, you are literally either investing or just praying and hoping, which is not a profitable strategy when it comes to the financial markets. So have some kind of exit, take your profit as your price is going up, trail your stop loss or whatever it is, but just ensure that, you know, you're treating this with the responsibility that it demands because that is the nature of leverage. And don't fall into the trap also of using like cross leverage or low leverage because like at the end of the day, sometimes you go through, especially if you're heavily invested into altcoins, like just take a look at Popcat for example, from Well, ever since, let's see here, 17th of November, Popcat has went down by like 80%. And this is very common for altcoins, even amongst the top like 30. Anything within, anything outside of the top 30, maybe like top 20, they go through 50% retracements like very commonly. And imagine if you have, you know, if you stack multiple altcoin positions onto each other on cross-leverage, just because you're on low leverage doesn't mean anything because your account could go down exponentially, like your margin the amount of margin that you have available to cover the positions can go down exponentially in a very short span of time. So whatever the case, if you're using leverage, make sure you have a clear invalidation and a clear exit. Otherwise, you are in for a really bad time. You can lose months of progress within a single day. But anyways, um, enough of that like really pessimistic talk because, well, Bitcoin's in a new all-time high right now. And let me share with you the playbook, or at least what I expect for price to to do over the upcoming week and potentially heading into next week. Although by the time we get into next week, I'll definitely be making another market update video. So make sure you click the subscribe button down below if you don't wanna miss any of these smart money analyses on crypto. Now just to kick things off with understanding the overall picture heading into this week, let's take a look at the economic news that are coming up this week. And as you can see right here, there is nothing really too significant. Yeah, sure, jobless claims or whatever, but we don't have CPI. We do not have NFP. And usually those are the biggest events outside of FOMC, right? This is the big 3, and we have none of this so far this week, which means one thing: price action this week is expected to be very clean. Now, this is going to apply much more so to traditional finance, but it also plays a role in crypto because on some days where there are— on some weeks where there is an abundance of red news, which is CPI, FOMC, NFP, You could see like a lot of choppy price action before the news event actually happens. But on weeks where there are no news, price action tends to be a lot cleaner. Of course, this is just a rule of thumb, but knowing that itself can help us come up with a better, you know, prediction or strategy heading into this week. So one thing you have to understand first is that yes, we have broken the all-time high, but usually there are only 2 ways that this can play out. Like, duh, right? It's either going to keep going up or it's going to go down. But just to break this down into a more nuanced fashion, yes, we have the main, you know, value area over here. And currently we have already broken out of it, found a retest, and then now we have already pumped out of that value area. So currently price is in, well, price discovery mode. And at the moment, expect price within the next week or 2 to start just pumping to a certain point, but then it's going to start forming a new value area. Now at that point, you're going to have a really high probability just opportunity to get into the markets. But what if you want to get into the markets right now and you want to follow the momentum? And you don't want to wait for the value area because ultimately, while this is going to give you a really high probability trading condition, you don't have to just sit on the sidelines and like miss out on everything. And the first thing that you're going to want to look at is this little value area here. Now, this is not going to be as strong as something like this because just take a look at the volume profile. Like, this is tiny compared to what's happening here, but still, this is going to give you an opportunity. First of all, we've drawn the value area. You can see that whenever you have a deviation underneath the value area low, this is a discount opportunity. And right now we're in a premium opportunity because we're above the value area high. Now here's how you can use this information though. There are really only 2 ways that value areas can play out after a deviation, which is after you break one of the value area high or the value area low. Again, there are only 2 ways that this can play out. One is you accept back into the value area and you find resistance at the value area high and you oscillate back to the value area low. Sometimes you don't have to find resistance, but you just accept back into the value area and you oscillate to the opposite end of the value area. The second way that this plays out is you get a successful breakout of the value area, just like what happened with here. Like value area, ultimately that's a failed breakout, oscillate to the value area low before ultimately breaking below the value area low. Again, this is a failed breakout, and so this is a discount opportunity. I called this, by the way, like to the dollar. I just said that this blue box here is the weekly fair value gap. We have a value area, we have liquidity, everything lines up that this is going to be the bottom. So congratulations to those, by the way, who took this play because you would be up a significant amount right now, especially if you applied this. And now if we come back to the current example, you can see that this was very close to the bottom and the playbook is exactly the same. So right now, given the fact that today Trump is getting inaugurated, this is a very bullish event. For crypto, I would actually expect price to just come down to find support at the value area high before continuing on to 115. And so this could be the trade setup for today where you place your stop loss closer, like right underneath the midpoint of the value area. Now, why do we place it at the midpoint of the value area? Well, if you're expecting this area to act as support, then ideally you should not be accepting back into the value area or like going, you know, to the value area low. You would want this level to hold, and even if it does dip a bit, it's not going to dip by too much. And so all I'm essentially trying to say is that if we take this entry here, then price comes all the way down to here, that means that our idea it is going to hold as support has been invalidated. And so we, you know, we take the loss. It's a calculated risk, especially in this case it would be a 3:1 risk-to-reward ratio. So this is a good trade in terms of risk-to-reward and something that you should take, you know, most of the time. Especially combined with an economic event such as Trump's inauguration. Now, this is going to be setup number 1. But setup number 2, and arguably this is going to be the higher probability setup, is this demand zone right here. Now, for those of you who know anything about supply and demand, well, first of all, a lot of people tend to get this wrong. It's like there are a lot of variations and there are a lot of interpretations of supply and demand. But for me, it boils down to Where does the most explosive move happen? And all I want to see for a valid demand zone is an aggressive drop, some kind of an indecisive candle where it doesn't— like, it's not quite sure if it wants to go up or it wants to go down. In this case, this 4-hourly candle went down, went up, but ultimately the candle body is just really small. So that's your base. So this is your drop. Now ultimately you want to get your rally, and in this case, this is an aggressive pump. So this area here where the indecisive candle right before an explosive move often gives you a really high probability entry, just like what we had here on Lockin. For example, right here you have your drop, kind of an indecisive candle. Price eventually pumped out of it. Of course, this is not as clean as the setup that I'm showing you on Bitcoin right now, but still it's valid. This is a demand zone. Price eventually returned back to the demand zone, and that was the bottom. From this entry here, $0.04, it would be up around 50% at the moment. Very simple, and I've been using this for you know quite a long time in just my trading in general. And so coming back to Bitcoin, this makes this the ideal entry, especially because it's also a demand zone that's formed on a four hourly chart, which means this is a high enough time frame to where we can associate a good amount of strength to this level. And the last time that we actually used a demand zone at the same time that Trump got elected. was back in November and we managed to catch the bottom right before the big pump. So for example, right here, this was— this pump happened about a week and a half, maybe 2 weeks before the US elections. And we already knew that this was going to be just manipulation to trap people in because like there was a demand zone over here and this was formed on the daily chart. Again, same thing here. You have a drop, base, and rally. Ultimately, price retraced fully and aggressively. So anyone that went long at any point here, especially on leverage, would've been stopped out. Because price went down pretty aggressively, and then boom, you come back into the demand zone, and boom, right? That's where the explosive move happens. But note, like, notice how price returns back to the area before the first explosive move happens. And this is the type of supply-demand trading that I use and teach in the AOC Alpha Group. But anyways, this is lining up very perfectly with the type of news events that we have. So in this case, I'm going to set the second entry in case the first one gets stopped out. As an entry at the start of the 4-hourly demand zone, stop at the end of the demand zone. Because again, if we're expecting this zone here to hold as demand, it probably shouldn't be breaking below the level. Like, this is just how we should approach setting stop losses. Like, at what point does our idea get invalidated? In this case, the idea will get invalidated here. And so that's going to be the stop. There's the entry, and that is the target. And, and these would be the 2 trade setups that I'm looking at at the moment. Especially heading into later today or potentially even the rest of this week, unless something really bad happens. Then one of the things that I would also like to clarify is that I have no way of telling you like which entry is gonna be like more high probability, right? Ultimately, as traders, we are dealing, we're always dealing with probabilities here. And if there's one thing certain about the financial markets is that nothing is ever certain. You cannot ever say that this trade's gonna have like a 100% win rate. Like either one is going to be valid. All that matters is that you actually manage your risk so that if you do lose a trade, you're not, you're not losing too much. And if you win the trade, you're winning more than you lose. And that's ultimately how you build your account up over the long term. I know that a 1:3, like a 3:1 risk-to-reward ratio, does not seem like much, especially if you don't already have tens of thousands of dollars. But at some point, your account's going to compound over time to the point where you reach hundreds of thousands of dollars. And at that point, you know, a 3:1 risk-to-reward ratio could be $100,000. Now granted, I'm not at that point yet, but having been doing this for years and slowly compounding your account up, I truly understand that this is a slow and steady game. You're not trying to make it big all in one trade. In fact, the— if there's one thing I've learned also, like, throughout the years, is that our desire to make quick money is oftentimes the very thing that's going to prevent us from making big money. So guys, the goal is to make big money over the long term, and the way to do that is to take the high probability, you know, entry and high probability trades and just keep stacking that over months and years. And that's how you're gonna ultimately make it. But anyways, that is the slow and steady approach to doing things. If you would like to just speed up the process a little bit, then consider joining the Alpha Group. Like, I can only imagine if you knew exactly what coins to get in and where, I think the process for you is gonna get sped up a lot as well. But anyways, guys, I'm gonna see you in the next market update. Hope you enjoyed this. Bye-bye.