Wednesday we have the FOMC.

You guys know the drill, I don't care about speculating around how it plays out, I just know it's a tradable event.

Other traders are going to be gambling and trying to guess, and that can create some opportunity for us to react to.

L doomers

Equity indexes more or less the same stuff we've been talking about.

The doomers have clearly lost out and the recovery in April has been enormous. My TradFi port is in all-time high territory.

As we get later into Q2 and into summertime, I think the bid is going to dry up for risk assets like equities and BTC. More of a choppy environment in late Q2 and into Q3.

Just playing it day by day, but this will probably create an opportunity for us to get long-term, high conviction entries.

Right now is the time to grind. Later in Q2 is maybe the time to chill.

Metals weak, REMX still strong

I don't feel as good about my metals positioning.

Gold looks a little bit weak, consolidating, but this is a super long-term lifetime hold so I'm not sweating it.

Same argument with silver, just higher beta.

The metal I'd actually look to add on a pullback is copper given its application in infrastructure.

I’m long REMX.

I told you guys when we went up to 103k we should expect a pullback. Honestly I expected more of one than what we got. If it does another move down into the 94, 95 region, that's where I'd add. Thesis still very much intact.

XLE worked out really well. I'm leaning towards risking the round trip because this was supposed to be a long-term play, just played out faster than I expected. If I come back in a week or two and it looks bad, then maybe I sell.

First crack in the trend

Today we’re seeing a bit of a momentum loss pattern with weaker impulses up.

I originally said as we built out these composite structures and traded higher, I wanted to see an escalation in price. That has not played out.

If price can’t reclaim the most recent comp above 77k soon, then the local trend could be dead.

Whatever happens, as we get later into summer and towards Q4, I want to be more long-biased. Re-accumulation mindset on the high timeframe.

L bozo for me today

Intraday kind of sucked for me today.

Had a sick trade to open the session, and then I was overconfident in the face of all that Coinbase selling.

Longing into Coinbase selling has been a good bet over the past couple weeks because it's been getting soaked. Today it just puked right through any sort of bid liquidity that was there.

So L bozo for me. But I always want to make these moments a teachable lesson. You are going to fuck up.

The takeaway is you have to be quick to pick yourself back up and not dwell on it.

If your mental strength wanes, it breeds an environment where you make more mistakes. Three months of crushing it, one week of being bad, and all your confidence is gone. Avoid ending up like that.

Positioning

Core: Bitcoin, SPX, cash.

Smaller positions: NASDAQ, gold, silver, REMX, XLE, XLU.

Still sitting on a good amount of cash. Approach is always to micromanage Bitcoin and let SPX do its thing.

Slow and steady wins the race.

We've been in a bullish environment on the medium time frame for the past month.

But we've kind of gone nowhere over the past 10 days.

With the month coming to an end and FOMC this week, the difference is now we have traded into the weekly trend on the CME chart.

If the roles were reversed

Let me invert the chart for a different perspective.

If we had a 30% selloff tagging the high time frame trend in a bull market, I would be buying coins.

Since it's not a bull market, it's difficult to pound my chest and tell you, hey, just short.

90% of my trades are on the long side. But I do want to keep your eyes open to the fact that we are trading into HTF resistance.

The altcoin argument

Look at something like SOL, one of the goats of this cycle.

It didn't even have a rally. Am I supposed to be short biased with a coin that's just trading sideways?

No.

Look at Pepe, down 90%. Volatility is dead on many alts, and this is probably an accumulation range.

If any coin in the market looks similar to this, it actually makes more sense to be more bull biased.

But I'd size appropriately to be able to stomach a 50% drop back to range lows. This is a much higher timeframe optimistic approach.

A lot of alts bottomed months before BTC in the previous cycle, even though they didn't do much for a while after the initial low.

Two plans

Back to Bitcoin. I consider 60k value territory.

I don't really care if we go to 50k or 40k. 60k buys will look good a year from now.

But from a trader perspective, do I want to all-in top blast into the weekly trend? The EV continues to diminish on the long side as we trade up.

My near-term plans centered on last week’s VWAP

Plan 1 was to long the previous week’s VWAP (77.3). But we’ve since lost that.

Plan 2: If we bounce up, we're going to need a solid reaction at previous week's value high to get through it. Hold value above like we did a few weeks in a row, we get another trending leg.

Below 77.3, it starts to look like trend loss. Whenever I say trend loss, it doesn't mean immediately we have to go to zero.

The ABCs of trend loss: highest EV is bet on range or chop, second is reversal, lowest EV is reclaim and continuation.

So you don't want to be turbo bear at the lows if this thing keeps selling off bc it could just chop back up in a range.

What I'm doing

Over the next couple days or weeks, I'm going to be onboarding cash back into crypto, getting ready to buy more Bitcoin.

I already have a starting point of spot from the past few months, so it doesn't stress me out too much. If I'm totally wrong and we V-shape recover to 100k in a few weeks, at least I have some exposure.

Yeah, I'll be coping about not going all in at 60k, but if I get a pullback to 80 or 70 or whatever, I'll just pick up spot then.

I'm not going to lie, the market is pretty dull from an alt rotation perspective.

I'm only in Monero at the minute, and it's actually rejecting pretty brutally, but it's still got reasonable market structure, so I'm going to stick with it and play it out.

Vicariously claiming clout on Zcash

I didn't take the entry cuz I wasn't actually logged in to buy it at the time, which is probably demonstrative of how little I'm trading at the minute.

If I were in this, I'd just hold it. Strong downtrend, compression, consolidation into a leg up. Not much else looks like it.

Don't diddle in the middle

The place to long Bitcoin was back in the low 70s.

Only other trades are up at like 86 or a reclaim down at 62. I don't want to diddle in the middle.

I'd stay long if I were already in, but there's a momentum divergence across these highs, so it's not looking particularly strong.

But until we lose that little meme diagonal in the chart above, I wouldn't bother trying to sell the pico highs. This just looks like slow grind up price action, which usually ends one way, big candle up or down (really helpful, thanks Charlie).

TLDR it'll probably push very violently up or very violently down. I'm short from somewhere like 89k, so there's no trade for me here.

ETH is just weak sauce

ETH is just weak sauce.

We've pushed up, failed to gain any traction, and it's had a ripple effect on altcoins across the board. With no major catalysts or buyers in alts generally, I fail to see how we get this out of nowhere.

It's a bleak structure out here. Only a couple of altcoins really outperforming BTC.

Bitcoin just needs to do something.

Cash is a position

Just another week of probably doing very little.

I always feel bad when it's like, oh, I'm not really doing much, but equally I'm not going to sit here and throw 100 trades I don't believe in.

The hardest thing about this game is the boring weeks when all you want to do is trade.

I don't have a lot of conviction in high time frame direction of the market, but it wouldn't surprise me if BTC tags the 40s or 50s.

We'll see.

BTC price action remains in counter trend rally on the weekly.

On the lower timeframe, the 7D rolling VWAP has been the logical gauge of strength and trend since the start of the month.

To keep things simple, a decisive loss of the 7D rolling VWAP flips it to resistance and leads to more downside. Reclaim opens up continuation to take out some highs for 80k+.

As I've said multiple times over the past few weeks, my thoughts remain that this is a counter trend rally until proven otherwise.

With Bitcoin breaking down below the local trend of recent weeks (1H 200 MAs), we're seeing weakness enter the market on lower timeframes.

This would logically allow for a deeper pullback into our previous range highs, for a retest of that major support level.

Our 12H 200 MAs trend, which we've used to navigate the market in both directions throughout the recent cycle including the past 6 months, also sits in that support region as confluence around $73k.

As long as the daily market structure remains intact and price holds above the range and 12H 200 MAs, the idea of a larger rally into $90k resistance, which lines up with the 2D 200 MAs cyclical trend, is still on the table, and favored, imo.

If the 12H 200 MAs fail

If instead we deviate back into the previous range and the 12H 200 MAs retest fails, the higher timeframe context takes over. That opens the door to a full downtrend resumption across all timeframes (see the 2D chart).

For now, we're okay. The current local weakness is implying we may just have to be even more patient than we already have been, before a move into the ~$90k region plays out.