The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Cool-Off: Here Is How Macro Will Affect The Price Of Bitcoin

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

I am joined by Noelle Acheson, author of the 'Crypto is Macro Now' newsletter, as we discuss the impact of macroeconomics on cryptocurrency and what to expect from Bitcoin in the near future. Chris Inks will join in the second part to share some interesting trades in crypto and beyond.  Noelle Acheson: https://twitter.com/NoelleInMadrid Noelle's newsletter: https://www.cryptoismacro.com/ Chris Inks: https://twitter.com/TXWestCapital ►► DevvE DevvE is a next-generation cryptocurrency - DevvE addresses Bitcoin’s most significant weaknesses—regulatory compliance, energy consumption, costs and speed! 👉 Follow DevvE on X for Updates: https://twitter.com/DevveEcosystem  👉 Join the DevvE Telegram group to stay in the know! https://t.me/DevveOfficial  ►► JOIN SNIPER SCHOOL W/SCOTT MELKER - LEARN LIFE-CHANGING KNOWLEDGE! Join Sheldon the Sniper and Scott Melker for Expert Insights & Strategies in Crypto Trading! Starting January 31st!!  👉 https://cryptoschool.cryptobanter.com/sniper-school?source=scottmelker   ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   ►►OKX SIGN UP FOR AN OKX TRADING ACCOUNT THEN DEPOSIT & TRADE TO UNLOCK MYSTERY BOX REWARDS OF UP TO $60,000!  👉 https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER  ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘25OFF’ FOR 25% OFF WHEN VISITING MY LINK.  👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd  ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets   Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #trading  Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:00 Up Only is a myth 2:50 Market structure of Bitcoin ETFs 5:00 Outflows: not alarming 6:10 Bitcoin is a macro asset 8:00 Rising treasury yields  9:30 Rate cuts or hikes? 16:40 Data accuracy 19:30 When recession? 21:00 Jobs 23:00 Bitcoin thesis 26:30 Noelle’s newsletter 28:00 Devve 31:30 Bitcoin chart 38:00 SEI 39:30 Injective 42:30 CRV 47:00 VET 50:30 Meme coins The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Bitcoin has cooled off and is chopping sideways ever since hitting a high around 74,000. Of course, driving crypto traders insane who think that we need to go up every single day or we're in a bear market. And of course, leading Bloomberg and other financial publications to search for reasons in macro why Bitcoin is not making new all-time highs every single day. I have one of my favorite guests on today, Noah Altschul, to discuss this and everything happening in Bitcoin and macro, and of course, Texas West Capital at 9.30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Let's go. mentioning an Echo and realized I was talking into my AirPods and not into my microphone. And hopefully it is better now. But I'm the guy who makes those kind of mistakes on a daily basis, even though I show up and do this every single day. Sad, sad for me. As I said, guys, we're having a bit of a Bitcoin correction, if you want to call it that. Bitcoin currently trading at $65,936. If I had told you five or

six months ago that Bitcoin would be trading at $66,000, you would have lined up outside with no food in the freezing cold for a month to get in on that sweet price action. But apparently now we're in a bear market because we have hit 74 000. that's what i'm hearing from the community i want to talk to noel about this because i think 6 6 000 is a pretty decent price for bitcoin hey scott how are you so good to be with you here good i mean 66 000 new all-time highs having hasn't even happened. It happened in only a matter of months. Yeah, seems like pretty good news.

Yeah, a matter of weeks even I mean, we're looking at the end of April. So we're just days away practically. And this is a breather. I mean, this is a welcome breather because up only as we know in crypto is a myth. And this breather gives a lot of the investment platforms that we know are working on this topic and know are trying to get ready to onboard clients. It gives them more time to catch up and it gives investors to have a think about why they're even in this in the first place. And there are a couple of really positive things to take away from this correction also. And I'll shut up in a second because this is one of my favorite topics at the moment, the impact on market structure of the ETFs.

I was really worried when I saw that very strong crash on really early Tuesday morning Europe time, thinking, OK, now we get to test whether the ETFs are going to exacerbate volatility or mitigate it. Because when ETF investors wake up in the morning and they see this on their screens, we, of course, have been seeing it because crypto trades 24-7, but ETF investors don't trade 24-7. When they see this on their screens, are they going to just send in a ton of redemption orders and they're going to be lined up on the open whenever they do their actual redemptions? But we didn't see that. We didn't see the big crash yesterday. So ETF investors were not dumping in panic as we had feared they might. We're actually starting to test that. That is very encouraging. I have a few theories as to why that might be the case, probably worth putting out there. A, I would imagine that a lot of the

people who have bought the ETFs are not even checking the price in the morning and don't even know that the price has quote unquote crashed or corrected because hopefully they're the type of people who added 1% and might look at it in six months. That's one theory. I mean, that's really my main theory, to be quite honest, is the kind of people who are buying these are probably longer term investors and just aren't looking for an exit the day that it happened. So that's what's encouraging to me. And we saw a bigger drop even a week or two ago and thought we might test that theory. And we ended up with net inflows. Even though GBTC was outflowing, we still saw net inflows. So I think generally, it's just a different kind of investor in our echo chamber. As you said, we're obsessing over the chart, but I just don't think they are. Absolutely, because also the ETFs are a terrible vehicle to trade because they don't trade 24-7, 365. I mean, why would you intentionally limit yourself

if you are indeed a trader? They would be either holding an account on Coinbase or similar if they wanted to be in and out with agility. So I think you're totally right, but to actually see that happen, because also, Scott, we hear, we get told Bitcoin is volatile. For new investors to actually see it is something else. But they held, okay, it wasn't a stellar day for ETFs yesterday, but they held pretty firm. Interestingly, I actually have this news brought up. We did see something that might attract our attention, which is that ARK21 shares ETF logged an 88 million outflow, which was more than Grayscale's outflow. This is the first time we've really even seen a sizable outflow from any single ETF not named Grayscale, but also certainly the first time that we've seen

one larger than what was happening in Grayscale. I have no theories on this, to be quite honest, but really was surprising when I dug into the news today. Again, positive spin. And I don't want to be the kind of person that always has a positive spin, because there's plenty to be negative about out there, right? But the positive spin here is that one, grayscale outflows hopefully are starting to slow down. I mean, that would be really good for the overall picture, right? And two, we don't really know if this is many investors in the ARK ETF or is this just one big investor that is maybe moving it somewhere else or just getting out entirely. That happens when you see prices move like they have.

So again, not alarming, potentially positive. So I want to share a few of the narratives that are circulating about the interrelationship between macro and Bitcoin right now that are being used to sort of explain this correction. First, Bitcoin sinks on ebbing Fed rate cut bets and cooling ETF demand. Okay, cooling ETF demand, debatable. But do you think that the fact that we're seeing less excitement about interest rate cuts could have anything to do with the fact that Bitcoin's trading at 66 for 74. Yes, absolutely. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the main driver. And there's several messages here. One, you know, we can talk about whether this is the correct narrative,

the correct macro narrative to have at the moment. And Scott, I think you and I talked about this before. We both agree that the market was just getting it wrong on pricing in six rate cuts at the beginning of the year. And I think they're still getting it wrong on pricing in six rate cuts at the beginning of the year. And I think they're still getting it wrong pricing in three. I think it's going to be a lot less than that. And we'll get into why, if you like, a bit later. But pulling this back to the crypto question, yeah, Bitcoin is still a macro asset. It's not ever going to de-correlate totally from the macro drivers because there will always be a strong investor cohort that sees it as a macro asset. When they see it as a macro asset, they treat it as a macro asset. It behaves like a

macro asset. And this is where market structure comes back in. The price is always decided by the last trade. And when people are selling for macro reasons, that's the price that we see. We're also seeing buyers coming in. If not, we'd be seeing a lot sharper falls than we're already seeing. So the price is set by those that are treating it as a macro asset. So that was the main reason behind the drop, which is understandable for, again, especially US-based investors. They don't really see the use case beyond the borders, those that need it as an inflation hedge or a currency debasement hedge, those that need it for financial access. They are going to treat it as a macro asset. So macro is always going to be

a very strong driver. But narratives do come in to support it and things do shift. I want to circle back in one second to the Fed and rate cuts and what you said about them getting it wrong, which I think you and I have shared that opinion probably going on 12 to 18 months at this point, it feels like. But this is the other one. Bitcoin back down to 66K as rising treasury yields catch investor interest. Do you think that people would be buying treasuries in lieu of Bitcoin because they think yields will be higher? I think perhaps not.

That's part of it. Yeah, I'd say not necessarily. It's just a symptom, a signal rather, a signal that risk assets are not really where you want to be when rates expectations are going to be repricing and yields are going to be heading higher. And there's a whole lot of other reasons why yields are heading higher. It's not just the rates expectations. It's also the fact that there's a flood of debt coming out. And it's also, I think, Scott, and I think we're overlooking this a lot in markets. It's also just risk premia. There's bad stuff going on out there. We've got Iran threatening

to retaliate against the attack from Israel on its consulate in Damascus. That is not good on any way, in any shape or form. And the US, what can they really do about it? So there's a risk premium in markets that we can't really overlook. And we have to ask ourselves, you know, what's going to make that any better? So it's the yields maybe, but I think it's just, you know, let's go into something like NVIDIA, which is probably going to be doing very nicely. Thank you. Let's go into any of the other opportunities that are less risky, given the shifting rates environments. And right now, the US is continuing to drive the price through its macro realignment, shall we say. So I do want to talk about the Fed and how predictive markets seem to be getting it wrong. It's a debate that I seem to have endlessly with people on Twitter.

If people remember a year ago this time, maybe even 14 months ago this time, we were supposed to see six cuts in 2023. Right. And now it's 2024. We were supposed to see six cuts in 2023. And now it's 2024. And we were supposed to see six cuts. As you said, in December, I looked it up actually on CME FedWatch. There was a 72% chance of at least two hikes by now, by May. And if you included three to four hikes, it was 89% chance. And here we are. So even on CME FedWatch, which is the most reliable, predictive engine, you have polymarkets and all these other where people could actually bet on these things. Everybody, seemingly, I can't say everybody, but the crowd has gotten this wrong over and over and over and over again. And even today, we have incredibly strong private sector employment, 184,000 jobs versus 148,000 forecasts. And we even see

March annual pay up 5.1%. So knowing that the Fed only watches inflation and jobs in theory, as their mandates, they watch everything. Those are their mandates. Inflation is sticky at 3%. Jobs are strong. Wages are rising. Wouldn't it be more rational in a vacuum not looking at the treasury etc for the fed to hike rates again instead of to cut them oh but that would be so unpolitical so unpopular politically speaking an election year but wouldn't that rationally make sense if these numbers are accurate just imagine what would fall on their heads i personally don't think we're going to see a rate hike i don't think we're going to see a rate hike. I don't think we're going to see cuts either. A couple of things on the rate hike, it would just be, you know, that would really royal markets and a rate hike right now that

would put the treasury market at risk. And I think that's, that's also a no go area for the Fed. We all know that employment and stability of prices are the main mandates, but the unspoken mandate is they got to keep the treasury market working as well. And a rate hike just might send the move index into the stratosphere. But going back to the are they going to cut? Why would they? Seriously, there's no reason to cut. One, you've got stock market breaking through all time highs.

Why would they go? OK, stock market's not the economy going down to the economy financial conditions are as loose now as they were in early 2022 before the fed started hiking you have annualized growth of consumer credit climbing and now higher than it was before the pandemic and corporate profits are doing really pretty well again doing better than they were before the pandemic so why on earth would they cut right now? We are also seeing the data that you have pointed out that is showing inflation is not going away. Employment is still strong. The economy is doing very well.

Atlanta Fed GDP Now model knocked it up half a percentage point, their expectations for the first quarter to 2.8. I mean, that is very far from needing to cut rates to stimulate the economy. And inflation, as we know, is also dependent on international events. We're seeing the oil price now at its highest point since last November. And that's partly because of the geopolitical tension and the risk of escalation in the Middle East, as well as we have Mexico and we have Russia going to cut output even more. So things are just not looking great on that front. Meanwhile, the United States economy is continuing to grow, which we should be appreciative of. That's very, very good news.

What is fascinating, Scott, is that I watch the CME Fed Watch, as you do as well. I think it's fascinating to see what bond traders are pricing. And that's bond traders, which, OK, we can agree are separate. Their money is their mouth, but their money is where their mouth is. Exactly. Exactly. But what's really interesting now, which I haven't actually seen for a while, is that you have the economists of Wall Street actually agreeing with the bond traders. Often they're speaking different languages. But right now, the economists are the consensus forecast from the big houses is also three cuts this year.

Why? Yeah, but even Powell said it. So I don't understand why he's towing the line on that narrative when he sees the exact same data as we do. I don't know if he's speaking politically, as you sort of hinted at maybe before, right? It's a very popular narrative to say that coming into an election, we will have some cuts. Whether he does it or not, he can keep sort of kicking that can down the road, but saying it's going to happen. And also, he told us why in one of the previous FOMC press conferences, not the last one, but I think it was the previous perhaps, or maybe two ago, he said, and I'm paraphrasing here, he said, part of my job is to manage

expectations. And that's right. That's why we hear so much from Powell, as well as from all of his officials. There's just so much Fed speak going on. It's a flood of voices. And they're pretty much all saying, you know, keep calm. Don't raise those expectations, because that would be really bad. Because when expectations jump, then the spending behavior jumps. And that's just not good for the economy. And there's an election this year. Now, another another thing that I hear often is that they have to cut this year because they said they were going to, their credibility is on the line to that you can say well arguably their credibility would be even more damaged if they have to

you know then hike again after cutting but it's political either way. I hear people insist that they're going to be cutting if they're going to cut they're going to cut in June because otherwise it's too close to the election. But that is also a political decision. In other words, there's no way they can escape the politics of this. So do what they think is right for the economy would be what I would recommend. I assume that Powell has a bit of PTSD from being too late on pivoting the other way, right?

So potentially there's an urge to get ahead of what could be the case before. I've also heard the theory over and over again, which is rational, if you believe that the Fed will sort of try to influence Treasury policy that because of the refinancing all this debt, obviously, a trillion every 100 days and a higher interest rate, that's all of the old debt, you're going to refinance from sub 2% to 4% or 5%. But they might do it for that reason. But that really isn't their mandate. That would be somewhat overstepping in theory. And you said we have a lot of liquidity because we're effectively printing it in bonds on the treasury side. Exactly. It's not their mandate. And Powell has sort of started to hint at his frustration with the fiscal policy, totally

undoing the work that he's trying to do on monetary policy. He said this in the, what was that, the show that he was on, the primetime show. Yeah, 60 Minutes. 60 Minutes, thank you, a few weeks ago. It was the first time he'd actually said so, and I thought the timing of him saying so was quite significant. We also have to remember, Scott, that Trump has said that he will fire Powell if he wins. And whatever your views on

the likely outcome of the US election, this is something that no doubt Powell is taking into account. What I don't know, and this is pure speculation, is whether he would welcome that right now or not. Maybe he wants a break. Maybe he would like that. I have no idea. But it does underscore that whatever they do, it is political from here on in. And this is, you know, inevitable, really, when the economy and its outlook is so intertwined with politics and in the other direction as well. Yeah, you put on the tinfoil hat. I love what you just said, because, in my opinion, Powell's best case scenario is that the economy is doing well at the election. He moves on, somebody else takes the job, and then all the problems come out. And

basically, he's kicked the can far enough down the road for him to have his Volcker moment for people to say he threaded the needle. During his tenure, it was a soft landing, and he did everything that he possibly could, and then the next guy sort of suffers. I want to ask you more specifically. So we have the strong economy, of course, but we've seen over and over that we get numbers like these job numbers and such. And then when nobody's looking, they sort of redo the numbers. We get a recalculation. Maybe we were wrong. Generally, the numbers look worse in hindsight, as they put it. We've seen quite a few. I mean, this is one, right? Wage growth of job stayers versus job changers. People who stay at their job, their wages are not going up. People who are switching jobs are getting offered, obviously, higher wages. That's part of the story here. We've also seen a

ton of charts that the primary job growth in the United States has been either migrants or second jobs. And that native-born Americans, whatever your feeling on this is, these are the stats, are not actually having an improved situation. I guess the question I'm getting at is, do we believe these numbers in real time? And maybe Powell knows the real numbers, and that would be a reason to pivot. Data is noisy, right? Another saying that I love is, if you're going to predict predict often you know eventually you'll be right so i think what we've got here is one data is really noisy two there is no way to get accurate data because we're talking about a very wide range of data points here we're

talking about people and you know no jobs are the same no people are the same no regions are the same but um and they're done by surveys and and people don't answer surveys anymore. When last did you answer one of the surveys that you probably get in your inbox, we got better things to do. We're online all the time. So it's not even special. And they shouldn't even dare to call us at dinnertime. So surveys are simply not as reliable as they used to be, even though we do have better mathematical methods through with which to calculate, but they have got to do something. And one day we'll get to a point where it's all automatic and they'll know exactly what prices are doing through the receipts at tills.

But that data structure is not yet in place. I know they're working on it, but data is unreliable yet. They do have to rely on that. One thing I've been so frustrated by, Scott, is when the Fed keeps insisting that they're data dependent. We're getting that here in Europe as well. Data dependent means, one, you're relying on incomplete information, and two, backward looking. All of the data that we're getting is backward looking, and we know the dangers of reacting too late because they did this in the last time. So do we still think that a recession is coming and they've just managed to push it further down the road or blue skies ahead?

It comes down to the definition of recession, doesn't it? Some very smart analysts have been talking about what they call rolling recessions, just going through various industries, but we're not going to see it at the economic level as a whole because of timing differences, because of structural differences, and because of fiscal policy selection, should we say. But recession, I still think we're going to see one. I do. I don't see how we can actually get away with not having one unless we see the government just print, print, print, which is actually probably just as likely, if not more so at this stage. I'm coming around to that. That's just kicking a recession into a future depression, but it would work politically and it would work for now. I've said many times on Macro Monday to Dave and Mike and James, what I've been most astounded by is the ability of the government to kick the can down the road on these problems and how many levers they have to pull behind the scenes that we probably have no idea about as we try to analyze

these things to keep everything propped up. And maybe they can do that almost indefinitely. I have no idea. But you look at all of the charts and you look at the math and you look at the numbers and you look at commodities crashing and you say, recession, recession, recession. It just never seems to come, at least not here. It's also disingenuous to say no recession when we know we've had them in other parts of the world. Absolutely. But the thing that we tend to forget, I'm in Europe, as I think I mentioned, is that the United States is in a privileged position because its bonds are seen as the safe asset in times of turmoil, which let's face it is, if not already here, it is certainly coming. So they can issue more bonds and they will issue more bonds. Have you seen the levels of government, US government

debt are as high now as they were during the pandemic. And one, we have a growing economy and two, relative peacetime so far touch wood. So why on earth? I think partly it's because they saw that modern monetary theory worked in the pandemic, got us out of the hole. So let's just keep on doing that. What could possibly go wrong? On the government spending though, and we're seeing this work. I don't know if you looked deep into the latest employment data, the last release, we saw that government jobs were 20% of the increase in jobs, 20%. And the last release, we saw that government jobs were 20 percent of the increase in jobs, 20 percent. And the last time they were that high was in 2008. Just saying. It's incredible. Now I'm trying to look up the numbers, but I don't have it for 2023. But the

amount, I was astounded. I heard it on a podcast recently, but the amount of people employed by the government in the United States and the percentage of effectively GDP that that is, I mean, it's just incredible. It is. And, you know, jobs are great, but we kind of start to look at the sustainability of this. It's just like spending is great, but the sustainability on the product of output of that spending, that's actually what matters so what does this all mean in your opinion for bitcoin to circle back to the original topic we know the four-year cycle the having coming we have i would say generally tailwinds from utf inflows over time i don't think we expect those to diminish over time we will have these pockets

where perhaps people panic sell or need to sell something for taxes, whatever narrative it is. But we're going to get these steady unlocks of new platforms and new people and new access. So with all of that said, it feels like there's very few headwinds unless something tremendously bad happens in the back room. Well, there's always something tremendously bad just around the corner, right? That's what gets us clicking in the morning and scrolling through our feeds. But what's interesting about the current situation is while I am not at all saying that cycles no longer matter, of course they do because they're narrative driven narratives move in cycles, is that this one is going to be very, very different. ramps that we have available now. The ETFs, I don't think are the driver, but the ETFs are key to bringing in new segments of the market. They are key to the education question, which has always

been underlying the growth of the market in crypto. And again, you can compare the potential growth of crypto investors to the potential growth in the number of stock investors or bond investors. The marginal investor right now is in crypto. So that's one thing. The second thing is the global evidence, as if more were needed, that fiat currencies are in a race to the bottom. There is virtually no, perhaps Argentina may be exception, no sovereign that is trying to bring down the money supply. And this is going to depreciate fiat currencies, including the dollar. And again, everything is relative. But eventually, we're going to start to price currencies, including the dollar against commodities. This is very much the Bretton Woods three thesis that you and I talked about before. If you're looking at the value of currencies relative to fixed supply

commodities, then we are starting to see that very large melting ice cube that is the global supply of all sorts of fiat currencies. And this is where Bitcoin will come into play. It comes into play for US based investors because of the dilution of the dollar that we have coming. But it's especially important for non US based investors, both on the retail and the institutional and even the sovereign level who are going to one need to diversify their reserves to preserve purchasing power in a world in which their currencies may be depreciating even

faster than the dollar is and to access two dollars which they still arguably need to be able to purchase key commodities at a time when their economies are going to be suffering from a slowdown in asia and from a potential slowdown in the United States as well. So that's the main thesis for Bitcoin. The main thesis for Bitcoin is the utility as a store of value against depreciating fiat currencies around the world. And that is going to feed into the new on-ramps that are now available for that. And we have to remember also, Scott, it's not just the US that has new on-ramps. We have potential ETFs, spot ETFs coming online in Hong Kong this year. That's a potentially huge market. And in the UK, less of a huge market because that's institution limited, but still not

insignificant. Yeah. As you were speaking, I recalled an article that I just read that I found was shocking. I'm not sure if you've heard about this, so you don't even need to comment. But I don't know if you saw that Jamaica, of all countries in the world, has actually halved its debt in the last 10 years by, this is going to be crazy, guys, by balancing their budget. I did not see that. That is going on my list of situational models. Yeah. I was trying to do a deep dive and there wasn't very much on it, but

yeah, they put in basically a clear roadmap in 2010, and they've stuck to their fiscal policy and balanced the budget. And that would never get anyone elected in the United States, sadly, even if it's what needs to be done, which is why I don't really comprehend how this can end. Yes, you hit on the nail on the head there. What is going to turn this around? And I want to, finally, before I let you go, I've never shared it for some reason, but Noelle writes an incredible newsletter that's my favorite and keeps me on top of everything. It's called Crypto is Macro Now. And she wrote about, I was just bringing it up and you literally wrote about this yesterday, all this, the Bitcoin drop, which is interesting.

I probably should have read it before so that I would have the context for the literal conversation we just have. But she writes about this on a very, very regular basis, almost daily, correct? Yep, daily except for Sundays. Yeah, daily except for Sundays and absolutely incredible insight. So I really highly recommend it. Cryptoismacro.com, correct? Thank you so much, Scott. Really appreciate that. Yeah, I think you should all be reading it because it's even more insightful than the conversations because she doesn't have to deal with me asking questions. Although happy to take feedback

and happy to be as interactive as possible. You know, I sometimes have people ask me, how do you come up with something to write about every day? And my problem is, what do I leave out? There's just so much going on. And it's all so interesting. But I do try to take a step back. I don't get into market technicals. I don't know the slightest thing about technical analysis, and I never give trading ideas. But I do care very much about the impact of the macro economy on the crypto ecosystem, but also of the crypto ecosystem

on the macro economy. And arguably arguably it matters more now than ever. Yeah, well, I love the perspective on how the two interact and affect one another. And I think it's really important because most crypto natives don't quite get it, I think. So thank you for that. And thank you, Noel. Guys, you should absolutely be following. Guys and gals.

Noel, her Twitter X is linked below. Thank you so much. Hopefully we'll speak again soon. Looking forward to it, Scott. Thank you so much. Hopefully we'll speak again soon. Looking forward to Scott. Thank you so much. It's been fun as always. Awesome. Thanks, Noelle.

All right, guys, before we move on to Texas West Capital, I'm obviously going to tell you about today's sponsor. Now it's been a couple of months. So you guys should know everything about Debbie by now. But if you don't, Debbie is orders of magnitude faster, cheaper, more scalable, more architecturally flexible than any other layer one. They've got contracts with governments, huge corporations, because they are environmentally friendly, faster, cheaper, scalable, and built for that scale specifically for governments and for large corporations. And I don't hear enough about it.

You guys, I've told you this before, the people who founded this, former head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, guy who created the Kindle, CIO of Starbucks, former president of Universal Pictures, absolutely worth checking out. They're making incredible investments actually in ESG and other narratives that are helpful for pushing the narrative of crypto forward with governments and institutions, whether you agree with those narratives or not. They're doing absolutely incredible work for adoption. Nothing you need to do except for go look at the website and click on the link. There's no real call to action here. Just want you guys to know about them and to check them out. And now

on to the man of the half hour, man of the 933 hour, Christopher Inks of Texas West Capital. How are things in West Texas? I'm in South Texas now. I was going to say, you're not there. So misnomer, whatever, man. You can still tell me. Texas is good. Texas is good. Texas is good. I want to show you something. By the way, so I've been trying to unpack in my mind the popularity of meme coins, which doesn't take much. But I just happened to see this today.

Americans spent over $113 billion on lottery tickets last year, more than they spent on movies, books, concerts, and sports tickets combined. So that explains meme coins to me. It's kind of funny the way you say it, but really it does. We love to gamble. We love to gamble and we want to think that we can get rich on one shot. And what they find when they're looking at the studies is that those, the lower your income bracket, the more likely you are to gamble, to buy lottery

tickets and in the markets to kind of get into the really, you know, the pink, uh, the pink sheets and then, you know, and in crypto, the real, the shit points and whatnot. So yeah, I mean, it's just human nature, you know, everybody tried to, uh, up their position and the lower down, you know, in the income, uh, bracket you are, the faster you're trying to do it. So, yeah, you got to got to hit that one lottery ticket to change your life and make you wealthy. And you will see a few people on Twitter who talk about how they did it. A might be true, might not be. Call me in six months and see if they still have it and see there's still the one

in a thousand and the 999 people who went broke aren't sharing their stories and don't have a following on twitter but anyways yes i think druzefine literally said yesterday i told you yesterday scott meme coins are like digital lottery tickets there's your credit buddy you said it right there all right man let's take a look at the charts. Obviously, Bitcoin still correcting, I guess, arguably, although I would just say ranging. It's ranging. I mean, here's the thing, guys. End of the day, this is your last... Well, actually, when you zoom in, because you want the real trend, right? This is your trend. Your last higher low is this one here. Let'm going to zoom in there a little bit. This one right here, which was right around 59,000, depending what charts you're looking at.

Okay. Until you actually break down below that, the fact that you're thinking bearish is silliness. And actually what you're looking for when it comes to structure is you want to see a breakdown through it, right? So you'd want to see something like this, like a breakdown through it. And then a reaction, a bit of a pushing back up into it. And then a breakdown below that breakdown. And then you go, okay, now we may have a pullback. And even here, it's not even necessary. It has to be a reversal pullback, right? But until you're doing that, we are just sideways. And that's what I've been talking about for a month now. And everybody's freaking out on a, you know, a 9% pullback or whatever, but I think, I think it has to do with unit bias. You know, everybody's like, Oh my God, that's, you know, $7,000 or something. Well,

yeah, but it's only 9%. So, I mean, you know, in the grand scheme of things. Correction or consolidation, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, for me, this right here, again, I've talked about this before. I've shown this so many times over the years. I know you know this. When you're coming in sideways between the pivot and the R1,

and you're not even coming back to test the pivot, you're just ramping right up to the R1 into the R2 like this, very rarely will it not break through the R5. Almost exclusively, this setup, this price action right here into this leads to a breakout through the R5. So this is the weekly chart. So we would say before the end of the year, you would expect this breakout above whatever it's around 117, 116.

And then that's not wishful thinking. That's not overly bullish. That's just this particular setup, which again, I've shown so many times on your show. I teach it over there at the Trading Academy. I've shown it on my Friday shows all the time. This is just one of the absolute best setups here. It doesn't mean you won't pull back along the way, but ultimately you should be like, so this idea that the top is in is, is actual silliness, I believe. And as a matter of fact, I've got one other chart here. I posted this, I think just yesterday.

And, you know, I'm always kind of looking at, okay, what things usually happen with, with the, the cycles. And so what I found here was that once the monthly RSI breaks out here into overbought, it stays overbought until the end of the bull run. And the previous two times here, it's actually broken out above 96. And once it got above 96, then you knew the top was there or pretty nearby. The only time it didn't do that was this last time right over here where it hit 91.73. Still massively overbought for a monthly chart. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so right here, we've only hit 76.79. We're still overbought here. So, you know, again, it doesn't mean that it actually has to do it. You know, I want to get that out there. Nobody says it has to do this again. But historically, you need to at least be looking at 91, you know, up there, 91, 96, before you consider that the top that the bull run is probably over with. And, you know, when you're trading, it's not about this being sure and being 100% positive

because if you are, I guarantee you're lying about making money consistently. But what you do is you look at it and you go, okay, well, what does it normally do? What is it most likely to do that it's done previously? And you work with that first. And if it doesn't do it, okay, it doesn't do it. But most of the time it's going to repeat generally or rhyme with what's happened previously.

And so, I mean, that's how you trade. That's how you trade. So yeah, I pointed this out on the weekly, the same RSI people think, you know, overbought tops in, but when you're on high timeframes, that's the power hour. That's when you're just hitting the zone. And I said this when it happened. We hit RSI being overbought on the weekly for the first time since the last 65 top, not even the 69K top. It actually didn't even get back to overbought. But the first time we hit it there was on the break, basically from 28,000 and up. And I said, we're just getting started. RSI doesn't just tap overbought for a second on the weekly.

This is when it starts. So it's different. You know, listen, four hour RSI can go massively overbought in a day. If you're talking about the weekly, you've got months and months and months generally to go of being overbought, which is what you're talking about on the monthly, even more appropriate. Exactly. And I think that's so important for especially newer traders or traders that aren't consistent to really understand, because when you first come

in, there's a lot of half-truths and outright lies that you come across. And one of those is that, oh my God, you got to look for a reversal when it hits overbought or oversold. But like you were saying, once it hits overbought, all that tells you is that your bullish trend is very strong. That's all it tells you. Eventually it's going to pull back down below, but it doesn't usually happen right away. And the same thing when it gets oversold, it just tells you that downtrend is just really strong. It's at the strongest part of that downtrend. And then eventually you will get that reversal. But if you're new to trading or if you're not consistently profitable,

the big thing is to get a lot of this stuff that people kind of regurgitate out there a lot, reversal candles. There's no such thing as a reversal candle. There are pauses, potential reversals. You need follow through, right? Yeah, like when people call a double top, right. When price hits the same price the second time. Exactly. Exactly. So of course, if you can get yourself out of those, you're going to be so much further ahead in terms of emotional control when you're doing that. So, but yeah.

So what are you looking at now? I mean, usually when we see Bitcoin consolidate, that means if we're not calling it correction, we're calling it consolidation. Yeah. That means we got some opportunity in the rest of the market generally, even outside of dog with cat with face, hat, yarmulke. I don't know. Dog with butt?

I don't know. I've got, I like SEI. I've been watching this a bit. We've been trading on this one a bit. Right now, I think we're probably doing a flat correction here with a target down here of this, this daily S1 pivot area.

So, you know, again, it looks like it's three waves up here. So we come one, two, we'll get a three and a four, and then we'll dip down for a five here.

And that's the buyer. That's where you want. Now don't just buy blindly right there, but zoom in. This is the daily zoom into a smaller timeframe, maybe like the four hour, the one hour look for some, some kind of reversal happening down there, um, in this area. But, uh, you know, that's where I would look for the reversal. And then if you can get an impulsive breakout here above the daily pivoted around, uh, what is that? Right around 86 cents or so that'll signal that the wave force probably done wave five, uh, initial target of 1.6850 secondary target of 1.8360. Uh, but that's how I would approach that. It looks good. I mean, again, just kind of hit the all time high. We're sideways here from back in january which is i mean it makes sense right we've got this big huge move up here we

had a little bit of sideways here but really this is a big move up you're gonna go sideways for a bit building that base before you break out higher so uh i like i like that setup uh coming up here so just got a little bit longer wait for that pullback, I believe. I've got Injective here. Starting out here in the weekly, you see very clean descending channel, nice breakout, very clean ascending channel. And I wanted to bring this up here because you can see we're just consolidating, again, above the all-time high.

Yeah, everybody, I just want to bring this up because everybody's freaking out about Bitcoin. Like, oh my God, it's not going up any higher. So it's got to be topped out now. It's going way back. And I'm just showing, you know, again, this is what you get generally. You usually get consolidation around that all-time high to build the base before you, you know, before you really break out and get your legs going. So right now that's what we're looking at here. And if we zoom in to the daily again, I'm looking for potentially I'm looking for it to fall down further here,

maybe hit this S one pivot area. So that's right there around $28 and 20 cents maybe. And if we can get that again, like the other one, I would be looking for that reversal right there to head up, right? Along the way, likely a breakout above this red descending resistance here will signal that the pullback is probably complete. Impulsive breakout above the pivot here, The daily pivot about $40.60 is going to signal that it really is. That's probably done and heading up.

And I've just got a local target here of $78. So, I mean, even if you waited for the breakout above this $40, you've almost got 100% rally getting up toward that local target. But, again, I think it's another good setup. Been sideways here since right here mid-December or so, end of December. So a lot of good. It does look like potentially a bit of a reaccumulation here. It does look like it could be.

So again, looking for that potential spring down here. It doesn't have to get there, but I think it will. Do I? Yeah, I like Injective. I love Injective. It was like the first coin in the cycle really to make a new all-time high from last cycle. And so now people get bored of it, obviously, because it goes sideways after that. But like you showed on the Bitcoin chart, usually it doesn't stop there. Yeah. And what'll happen is it'll go sideways it goes, I would like to have people get bored. They just, they, they need, they need the dopamine hit, right? Again, we go back to everybody's, you know, gambling and that's kind of really where we're at with it. And unfortunately they're going to

miss the breakout. They're going to miss, they're not going to be in it, right? You should be getting in down in this area for this breakout here, not up here. You should be getting in down here and then you let everybody else get in up here or up here and let them carry you up. That's how you should be trading. But everybody gets bored. They want the movement immediately. So they wait for the breakout up here and then they hope it goes up. Nothing's guaranteed in the markets other than you're going to lose money from time to time. And the newer you are, the more money you're going to lose, the more often, right? Absolutely.

Oh, I'm agreeing. I'm now looking at CRV. Yeah. Yeah. CRV. This is another, I think this is a really great setup here. This is another one that's got potential. You know, every once in a while, come on here.

A little bit more every once in a while, come on here a little bit more every once in a while. I give you guys a chart that really has potential, like a lot of, of upward, um, you know, movement. If you just buy it and you hold it for a bit. Uh, I think this is it. We've got this accumulation range since back down here at selling climax in November of 22. Um, so we're still going sideways here. This next move up should break, um, through what we call the creek, which is just this supply. You even drew it in the color of water. I like that. It looks like a creek. That's the way it is.

That's the brush. This is the river. I don't even know how you did the brush. Is that from the... That's cool. There's the brush tool. Yeah, with the brush tool, man. But yeah, and basically, again, it's just, it's a thing somebody came up with like, you know, 70 years ago.

It wasn't even originally what was with Wyckoff. It's just some guy was studying later on and says, well, I'm going to come up with this idea. We'll call it a river. And it's basically this idea that you're jumping across that river, right? All it means is you're breaking through resistance. Okay. And so that's what we're looking for. So we should be seeing that coming up on this next move up. All it means is you're breaking through resistance. Okay. And so that's what we're looking for.

So we should be seeing that coming up on this next move up. And that should be a large candle, uh, you know, decently large candle spread, large spike of volume type thing going up through this area. And, uh, that's what we call the jump across the Creek that signals the end of accumulation. And at that point, um, you know, mean, easily, you should be looking up here, it's $6 easily, easily. So right now we're at 60 cents, $6. Casual 10X. And the thing is, you're getting down here at the bottom with some good structure. You don't even really have to worry about it. You put it in there, don't worry about it,

check back in six know six months a year uh and look for that but um looks really good anyway for me i like it but locally we may see it okay i kind of like the other ones right let me kind of zoom into the daily here you may see it dip a little bit further down here i think and hit like the the eq of the range here right around the the s1 pivot on the daily that'll get us 65%, 70.5% area. It's this range, 61.8% to 70.5%. So basically 53 cents to 57 cents is the target area. I'm looking for it to get a reversal.

So for me, I'm going to be watching at that point on that lower timeframe to see if we can find a reversal on that to set up the potential move. Once again, breakout through the descending resistance should indicate that the bottom's in. This is a little local range here, so that would give us a spring on that local range breakout. Impulsive breakout above the daily pivot here, it's 71, 72 cents, is going to signal that, yeah, at confidence account, we're headed up. And once again, you know, you should be looking up there $6 at least on this.

So a lot of good potential return on this one. Yeah, even just looking at it on mine on the weekly, I think there's a real, like if you want to take the super safe trade, there's a very clear, I think, defined resistance here at 87 cents. So if you flip that, you're gone. And that would also kind of be a doubt., I think you're, you're, you're flying from there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's, I think it's a good, easy trade. Um, just, you know, again, but you know, if,

if you're new and you're watching this, make sure you're listening to what I'm saying. I'm not saying everything's going to happen overnight. It's going to get $6 overnight. What I'm saying is watch for the reversal in that area I'm talking about. And if you get it, that's the first indication it's probably bottomed out. Look for the breakout above the descending resistance. That'll give you more confidence. Look for an impulsive breakout above the daily pivot. That'll give you even more confidence. Look for what Scott was saying, the swing high up there, get a breakthrough there. So you've got multiple areas you can choose to get in. But don't put your stop loss like right below it,

except in the case of, you know, this right here. So, you know, again, if you're getting this reversal and it's breaking through the red line, you can put your stop loss right below where you, you know, below the swing low, wherever that happens to end up at. You don't have to put it way down here. But, you know, the important thing is a lot of times people get in and they'll put the the stop loss right below where they enter and they're just begging to to be run over for a pullback to push

them and then go unfortunately but don't so don't screw yourselves like that guys okay um and then vet man remember when man remember when that was the thing it was then originally before that and then it became vet so we were even training when it was then in the original days yeah i had sunny i forgot about that on last week actually he's great yeah i i remember it well he's got he's got great rally here off um what is this here june of 23. It's got this great rally. It's come up here so far at the swing high there at about 321%. I've got two things. My initial thing says, okay, we're one up and two's in progress. And we'll look for a target down here at around 0.0269 area. That's the 50%. That would be my initial target. Wave two usually pulls back around the bottom of wave four. However, just in case it doesn't go there. And by the way, if it does go there and we get that, we get the rally wave three up here at 28, almost 29 cents, minimum expected target. Okay. Here's the thing though, locally here,

if this thing breaks out above say five and a half, well, 50, 5.1, 5.2 cents. Actually, you know what? Let me make it this one right here. 0.05328. If we're breaking out above that, instead of getting down here, it may signal that we've got a nested wave three in here. And then we'll have a target wave one, we'll end up here at 0.07. And then we'll pull back down here toward, you know, three cents or so for wave two. And then we'll get a little bit higher there on wave three. But that would be the idea. Right now we've got it as this one, two, and then one, two, three, four, and then five.

That gives us three. But, again, it may be nested here, and this could be one, two, and then one, two, three, four, five. That gives us three, four on that pullback, and still have five. So, again, if it rallies from here and breaks out above.05328, then look for wave one to terminate up here around seven cents. But I do think it's probably done here. So if we can break down below this swing low,

we should be looking down here initially at.0269 to get us a wave two and start looking for potential reversal there. If it continues going lower that, 61.8 is the next target at 0.02275. And then the 70.5 down here at 0.02. Those would be the other targets I'd watch, but usually your wave two will pull back to the bottom of your wave four, which is a 50% area most often. So that's, uh, that's where I'm really looking for it to kind of pop out of. But again, um, another, you know, another good, uh, uh, good chart there, another good rally. And again, this is just wave three locally here, you know, the overall, it would go higher than that. Ultimately. Love it. I mean, this is one of those projects that actually has,

I know we don't care about these things here, but like really adoption, that means the token has to accrue value, but like the company itself is just incredible things with like, it's just impressive all that they've done. And you don't necessarily always see it in the charts. Well, and that, you know, I mean, with, with how much rugging that we get, uh, and all this, this nonsense and meme coins or whatever, I mean, it's good to actually, you know, even though I'm not a fundamentals guy, it's good to see a company that's actually a company that's actually doing something that, that benefits something out benefits something out there rather than just the lottery. Are you partaking in meme coins?

Are you partaking? Are you partaking in meme coins? No. Are you participating? You know, man, I don't do that. We used to trade Doge, man. It was still a meme back then. Doge is the only one.

But Doge because that was part of the culture. It was a special time. It was. It was. Now it's going to $1,000 apparently, right? Again. Straight to $1,000 by next week or I delete my account. All right, guys.

You can follow TX West Capital on X slash Twitter. And you've been doing some great spaces with Gary Cardone, by the way. So it's cool to see you doing some new stuff out there. Love it. Yeah, man. Gary is absolutely great. A lot of people get him confused with his twin brother. But regardless of whatever you think about Grant, and you're probably wrong on that anyway, but Gary is a different person. I've spent a lot of time with him. He's great. Yeah. Oh man. I think the best thing about him for most of retail that's in crypto is listening to get an understanding of how ultra high net worth individuals will perceive Bitcoin and how they grow wealth. I think that's why I do a lot with him because there's so much that people can learn

from him that takes them outside of their own socioeconomic status and allows them to view the world a little bit differently, which hopefully will help them move up that wealth ladder. I got to say, the amount of money that those twin brothers have independently made is absolutely astounding. I mean, I've been to Gary's house twice for parties and stuff. He's on the market for $14 million. I mean, they're both probably built. I don't know if he's a billionaire, his brother's a billionaire, but he just sold that other property of that two and a half million ball Bitcoin with it. So, um, I mean, there's somebody putting his money where his mouth is, right? I mean, uh, yeah, it's impressive.

It's impressive. All right. Well, we got to run and get ready for, uh, for crypto town hall on spaces guys. Once again, everybody follow Chris, man. Thank you so much. And we'll see you guys soon. Peace, everyone. Have a good one.

Let's go.