The Wolf Of All Streets - Here Is Why Bitcoin & Crypto Prices Are Falling (When You Should Buy The Dip)

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

What's going on with Bitcoin ETFs? Are Bitcoin ETFs the sole reason for this market fall? What's happening with the demand and what should you expect? I am joined by the two main Bitcoin ETF brains: Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart, Bloomberg's Senior ETF Analyst and ETF Research Analyst, respectively. Eric Balchunas: https://twitter.com/EricBalchunas James Seyffart: https://twitter.com/JSeyff Chris Inks will join in the second part to share some interesting trades in crypto and beyond.  Chris Inks: https://twitter.com/TXWestCapital ►► Sponsored by 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 THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉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 2:00 Who is selling? 4:00 No one is buying GBTC 6:55 IBIT is 45% up already 8:40 ETFs are gonna sell and take profit 10:00 Retail demand 13:30 We are still too early 14:05 Ethereum ETFs: what are the odds? 18:50 ETH spot ETF is 10% of Bitcoin’s 20:10 Will staking be included? 24:10 BlackRock moves to RWA 28:30 Every financial firm is interested in crypto 30:55 DevvE 31:55 Newsletter 34:40 Bitcoin’s dips 35:20 Bitcoin chart 45:50 [LUV] Southwest Airlines Co  47:20 [FET] Forum Energy Technologies Inc 47:50 [CHZ] Chiliz  48:20 [AXL] Axelar 49:40 [TRX] Tron 50:10 [STX] Stacks 51:17 Wu-Tang Clan news 51:50 TexasWest Capital 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 and altcoins have been mounting a small recovery, but this has been a sizable dip. In fact, yesterday's price action was the biggest drop in Bitcoin since FTX collapsed in November of 2022. Pretty sizable move to the downside. I was told by sources on X that I trust that Bitcoin was in a new paradigm and could literally never go down because of Bitcoin spot ETF inflows. I guess they were lying. They were wrong because yesterday was the largest outflow

day from the Bitcoin spot ETFs from what I saw, net 326 million. Well, rarely do we get the opportunity to talk ETFs with the Michael Jordan and LeBron James of ETFs. That, of course, being Eric Balchunas and James Seifert. If you guys are not watching this, you can probably get it in pay-per-view down the road when these guys start charging. You do not want to miss this. And we've got Texas West Capital on the back half. Let's go. Let's go.

What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of All Streets. Before we get started, please subscribe to the channel and hit that like button. I'm going to bring on today's two amazing guests right now. I've got Eric Balchunas and James Safer. I don't know who's LeBron and who's Jordan. Eric, you're a Philly guy, right? So maybe you're AI.

Practice. I'll take it. Maybe I'm Jordan because I'm older. Maybe. LeBron's getting pretty old too. I got to say. Everybody's getting old. I'm flying.

James, who are you a fan of? Anyone? I'm not a huge NBA fan. Neither. I'm not a Laker fan. Every other sport I can chop it up with, but NBA, I'm a little backdoor. And you guys might notice that Eric is doing his best Mike McGlone impression in a Bloomberg office with the headsets.

I asked him before if those were, uh, they give you one at the door. If they're standard issue. Pretty much. Yeah. It's part of the package. When you get hired here,

you also get one of these, one of these badges that has become mean. Now it's the guy with the coffee cup. That's literally the coffee cup. I don't do the vest to complete the look. I don't do the vest to complete. James is the vest guy. We need to get coffee cup meme. I have the vest to complete the look. I don't have the vest to complete. James is the vest guy. We need to get you guys together

and throw the vest. And we'll judge everybody. This is totally the content that everybody's here for. I appreciate it. Guys, I was told we'd never see Outflows. New paradigm.

Inflows only. Yesterday, 326 million of Outflows. Are we seeing, Eric, you mentioned many times that this has largely been retail driven, right? The average ticket, roughly $13,000. To me, that's very bullish, actually, that that's who's buying these ETFs. But are we seeing that they panic on a big day drop and basically paper hand their ETFs away? Well, I mean, let's unpack the flows there. What really happened is GBTC dropped two gigantic bomb outflows in two days in a row, way more than we thought. We thought the GBTC outflows would wind down a little bit, and they were. And then if you look at the rest, they've taken money. I mean, let's look at I-Bit yesterday, 75 million and be like,

well, it's hardly anything, but I'd argue A, it's inflows in the face of a really nasty drawdown. If you launched an ETF, the Scott Melker ETF or the Eric Balchunas ETF, and you got 75 million in the first year, you'd be pretty happy. And this is considered a horrible day for iBit. So let's keep this in perspective. If iBit, iBit could even see some outflows, but at this point, it's still nursing like a 45, 50-day inflow streak. So keep in mind that the money coming out of GBTC was pre-Boomer. So you can't, you've got to unpack this a little bit. The Boomers who are buying the nine are still buying.

Nobody's buying GBTC. So anything that's going on there is simply people who were trapped in there, who are now leaving from the old days. That really isn't something you should judge sentiment on. Now, the nine coming down and flows a little bit probably is noteworthy because perhaps the sell-off is a little nasty and you might not have the excitement because the market's down. But as long as you're eking out some inflows, I don push back and kind of put all this on the crypto crowd because this sell-off started last week when the flows were buoyant, $2.6 billion or something into the boomer ETFs last week.

And yet the sell-off started like Wednesday or Thursday. Who in the hell is selling? You finally got these boomers coming in and like someone's going to just go crazy selling. Like, why are you ruining your own party? You ever been here before? Yeah. See, in the past, every time we get excited and meme coins go wild and we see these alt seasons, there's some Bitcoin whales who take the opportunity to flush leverage and make

a shit ton of money by selling down Bitcoin and then probably buying it again. 600 million in liquidations, right? There's a story. Every single time, it's a leverage flush. I mean, that really is the story is that the Bitcoin whales can still play games and I don't think they really care about spoiling the party in my brief experience in this market. I mean, James, do we have any idea why GPTC is seeing the two massive days? Was there another one of these like, we're going to get a ftx liquidation type news that we don't know about there's nothing that i know of right like i we we know about what was going on with genesis and gemini it's i thought most of that had started at the end of feb it seemed like it was kind of winding down but maybe this is some of from that

still and it's not completely done i really don't know uh there's nothing i've seen that would indicate okay yeah this is the tranche coming from this state or whatever, what have you. But I actually agree with the tweet you put out. I think it was last week talking about how everything feels kind of toppy with all the meme coins rallying and all these other things going off and Bitcoin kind of flat, it kind of felt like we were, I don't know, two years from now in a typical Bitcoin cycle. So it's not surprising to see it drop off. They were on 170% run from October when we went up to our odds to 90%. The day we upped our odds to 90% going back till the peak was 170% run. So it's not surprising that people are taking profits

in any way to me. And let me jump in here real quick. Even with all the crap that just happened, iBit is up 41% in two months. I mean, again, let's just say if you'd launched an ETF, the Scott Melker ETF, and you picked a bunch of stocks or bonds, and you were up 41% in a year, you would be celebrating like there's no tomorrow. And that's a year. So I think, again, there's, it's like that movie Interstellar. There's crypto time and there's regular time. There's like crypto returns and there's regular returns. And it just seems like everything is so amplified and sped up in planet crypto. It's either like total exuberance or complete depression. But if you step out and you look at it from like a regular world point of view, I mean, everything's fine. Yeah, I mean, 40% would be outperforming Citadel's like banner year or whatever it was a year or two years ago when Ken Griffin, you know, had 30% mean look something qqq is up 7.5 and that is a juggernaut and so we got what's seven

into 42 six so it's six times better than the q's and everybody's like it's celebrating the nasdaq right and everybody's been celebrating nvidia and the massive tech rise and the nasdaq and historic flows and here here we are, right? Can I say this, James? I know you're about to jump in, but when we talked before the ETF, it was like we had these endless predictions about how much they could take in and a certain amount of time and what would, because we all know that performance is based on expectation, not on reality. And it was like, if these things did 5 billion total in the first six months, it'd be the greatest thing ever. And I bet it's at 15 itself.

Yeah. I mean, we're at 12 billion in net inflows. Our estimate, we thought we'd see 10 to 15 in the first year. I have a couple of bets with people that it'd be under 25 billion in the first year. So I mean, I'm on track to lose that. So it's already blown. And honestly, even if we stopped here and we got to the end of the year, and this was all the net flows that we saw, I would say that was still a successful launch of Bitcoin ETFs because they've taken in $12 billion in their first year. And the other thing I was going to say on the flows aspect, when you look at advisors, there's going to be outflows from these ETFs because they're going to be balanced. Right now, this is not the same thing, but to be outflows from these ETFs because they're going to rebalance.

Right now, this is not the same thing, but you can look to see these ETFs. They're likely going to sell and take profits. If you're an advisor and you're used to seeing things, when you see something run up like this after you bought it, you're likely even going to trim your allocations if you're doing a rebalance for your client's portfolios. Like Eric said, and you said, it's mostly retail, but there's definitely advisors buying here. And if you're an advisor and you're up 40% on iBit in the first month or two, you're probably thinking, all right, I'm going to trim some of this and maybe I'll buy back again and rebalance.

And I have a feeling there's some of that going on too. Yeah. But to Eric's point, it's still net inflows on all of those on a historic run. So even if that's happening, we're still getting general buying. Eric, I want to zoom back in on the point I made before you had pointed out through a series of tweets and writing that this is largely retail, right? We're not seeing huge institutional trances of buying here yet. Is that a function of the slow sort of unlock of platforms and due diligence? And most RAs aren't even here, don't have access? Yeah. They move slower. I was speaking with a model portfolio, an advisor network, and they all kind of say the same thing, which is, look, there's a due diligence process.

And these are fine. They've almost came out of the womb ready to go because the volume and the fees, and you know what they do, it's very clear. These rules and due diligence processes are really for these issuers not to get confused with the new ETF. Some of these ETFs have a lot of differential things. You got to like the index, how is it designed? An index white paper can be like 35 pages full of a lot of Greek formulas. And then when does it rebalance? Does it have any volume? All these things for a new ETF are normally things you really do have to do due diligence. It's like vetting a new active manager. It just happens that these are simple to understand. They hold Bitcoin. They already got the volume that it would take a normal ETF 10 years to get. So everything, again, has been like, you know, hyper speeded up.

So I think that some platforms will probably add them earlier and some models will look into it. We already have seven, six or seven mutual funds that have added iBit. And I would call mutual funds somewhat like a model that's a professional. So I would look for asset managers to add them, some advisors, but I think long-term we're going to see advisors come around. I think right now, if you're an advisor and you have a client who's really interested in this, they would call you and say, I really want to get in. That would be called an unsolicited investment. Right now they can do that. From what I hear, they're not really allowed to or interested in doing solicited just yet, maybe down the road, but for now, incoming, they can do that. From what I hear, they're not really allowed to, or interested in doing solicited just yet, maybe down the road, but for now incoming,

they can do. So I think, you know, we had a guy on from Carson group and he said that there's only a handful of advisors that allocated, but the average allocation was 3.5%. There you go. That's pretty good. That's more than I thought. So I think that's the good news. I think the ones that are coming in now are, as it goes through and moves through, there will be catalysts down the road. So again, I think the fact – and also one more thing. This retail investor that's coming in, this is not a GameStop ape. ETF retail investors are a little more heads up. They probably have a base 401k type investment. They're smart enough to have a brokerage account. They're smart enough to know that ETFs rule. And they're probably going to be much more disciplined than your average GameStop.

This is the argument I have with Jim Bianco constantly, although he's probably going to do a touchdown dance just because our shares didn't take a million dollars in yesterday. But you're going to find these are much more sturdy retail investors, in my opinion. Not that it won't be outflows, but they're not going to just all run for the hills in a sell-off, as they are not now. Yeah, the TLDR there is, we really are still early as far as institutions and advisor networks go. That's not just a phrase in this case. As far as we're concerned, like Eric said, it's not 100% there yet, and it probably won't be for some time. To me, that's exceptionally bullish that we'll get a slow trickle of these guys coming online because it's just more steady buying pressure. Like I said, I mean, in the face of a day,

Bitcoin registers biggest single day loss since FTX collapsed. To not have outflows from the big ones minus GBTC, I think is astounding. Although maybe we have to wait for T plus one to see that. But I want to talk about Ethereum. Obviously, I think you guys have cooled off based on the news of what we're seeing. Here you are. This is you on CoinDesk. Seyfert and his colleague, I believe that's you, Eric, had previously seen a 35% chance that one or more of the issuers will receive a green light. I remember we were kind of 50-50-ish a few months ago, right? So what's happening with the Ethereum spot ETF and the odds there?

Want me to take this one, Eric? Yeah. James is fresh off a deep dive on it. Yeah. I'm still writing on more parts of it. Yeah. So we were cautiously optimistic. You talked to me, I was on your show. We thought there was greater than 50% chance. I mean, you look at the court case from Grayscale, you look at what they did with the Bitcoin ETFs. We have Ethereum futures and Ethereum futures ETFs. It just makes sense to go through that same precedent, that same process, just apply it to Ethereum. There's no reason to believe this would force them down a rabbit hole where they have to approve

other products. There's a wall set up here. There are no other CME futures. So for all those reasons, we were just like, it just makes sense. The most common sense way to address this is to allow an Ethereum spot ETF to get through, allow ETH to convert. And we kind of just assumed the SEC was going to go through a similar process they went through with Bitcoin. And we're not seeing it. Nothing is, we're seeing some stuff from on the issuer side, but any of the updates we've seen are not indicative of any conversations that they're having with the SEC.

There's not like unique stuff. So when we saw the Bitcoin ETF switch from in-kind to cash create, like no issue would do that. That was obviously the SEC telling them to do this. Right now we're seeing some issuers try to file for allowing staking in Ethereum. We don't think that's going to happen. We don't think the SEC will allow staking at least to start similar to how they're not allowing in-kind transactions for Bitcoin. They won't allow in-kind for Ethereum either. So for all these reasons, we're basically 60-ish days out. When we went to 90%, it was because we saw that ARK and 21 shares filing, right? And that filing was indicative to us that there was conversations happening between the SEC

and we were hearing rumblings before that, that the SEC was moving on this. So once we saw that filing, we were like, okay, this is it. That's why we went to 90 when there were no rumblings that was 91 days out we're 60 days out now yeah yeah we have sources scott like we're not just putting our thumb in the air okay we're we're like uh poking around um and asking around and nobody has reported any comments from the sec and, as somebody put it to me, the SEC is not going to give themselves two months to deal with the comments.

It's just not how they roll. This is the government. Everything's like, talk about interstellar. This is like the planet that everything takes a long time, you know? It's like there's

the crypto planet and the regular world and then the government world is like really slow. So I think it just doesn't look good. We're not at zero, but the other thing that I think is noteworthy here is, you know, Gensler in his heart, you know, he thinks

Ethers are security. And I think he just can't stomach it the same way he could stomach the Bitcoin as a commodity in a 33 act. So, and then, But the argument there is, well, they did ETH Futures, which I made two months ago. But as I thought about this more, the ETH Futures ETFs were not launched in a normal way. This was almost a game of chicken played by this company named Volshares. And the Volshares ran the stop sign and forced the SEC for a cease and desist. And at that moment, the SEC was just dealing with the Grayscale lawsuit loss, and they just weren't in a place of strength. And I think they were just like, they just kind of got run over. It wasn't like they said, yeah, ETH futures are great. Let's launch them.

They kind of got cornered into it. And so I don't know if approving ETH futures is necessarily the gotcha that people think it is in this case. So then you go back to, well, how can they possibly deny it? And we think that they're going to use correlation. And we think that's what the meeting with Coinbase was about. So they had one meeting with Grayscale and Coinbase, and we think they wanted to unpack the correlation study Coinbase did that found that ETH futures were as correlated as Bitcoin futures, because they're probably writing up a correlation study that's worse. You know, as I like to say, they're going to torture the data until it confesses, and

they're going to find a way that it's going to look bad, and they're going to just deny it based on that, we think. And that also is almost lawsuit immune because the whole fraud and manipulation thing was shot down because the spot and the futures market were too correlated. So if you do this, you A, protect yourself from the lawsuit a little bit. It's a different situation. You've proved they're less correlated. The second thing is, does Grayscale really have the stomach to sue this time? Because- That was my next question. Yeah. I'll just answer it. The ETH market potential to me is tiny. James is a little

more bullish. I think maybe 10% of Bitcoin assets. That's the ceiling for ETH spot is 10% of this market. And the other thing is, for 10 of that market, and you know, BlackRock's in the race, Grayscale just saw that they just spent all this money to basically give BlackRock and Fidelity blockbuster hit products while they bleed. So is the motivation for Grayscale to spend the money? And nobody threw Grayscale a bone. Like there was never any, like the other nine, like didn't like, I don't know, chip in at all all so i don't know if i'm grayscale i'm like i don't know and plus they're making a ton in their ether trust um you know with the higher fee anyway two and a half percent for et yeah yeah i mean that's that's a lot and so i don't know, is there a will there? Everybody assumes we're going to sue. So anyway, you add all that up and the delay, the not comment is the most important thing. But then when you

think, why aren't they commenting? You sort of piece together the circumstantial evidence. I guess that's my point. We've seen it before. I mean, we saw them not comment consistently on Bitcoin and kick these down the road as long as they could for ages. And also like James, I'll let you jump in, but I want your comment on this. Fidelity amends body theory of ETF proposal to include staking. We saw the same with ARK. A lot of people have pointed at this as a massive, bullish event. To me, knowing that it's less likely to get approved with staking as a part of the mechanism,

these guys are now positioning for the next administration when these things might get approved by someone who understands it better. But I would say Gary and the SEC are less likely to approve an Ethereum spot ETF that includes staking right now. Yeah, that's our view. Exactly. And I think so it's Franklin also includes staking in their application. The only one that really doesn't is VanEck. And I think I'm not sure if there's somebody else. But the other thing is Bitwise hasn't even filed here. So Bitwise is so bearish on this happening that they haven't even bothered to file a 19 before in this process.

So that's another thing that's there. The flip side, another point here that Eric was hinting around, but I want to say blatantly, the reason we got Bitcoin ETFs was because Gensler went away from his democratic commissioners he went away from crenshaw and lizraga i think i don't know how to pronounce the name um so and they wrote crenshaw wrote a dissent letter basically saying i still wanted to deny they voted to deny despite the grayscale case despite all the information we saw most people looking that were like secs backed into a corner so the fact that she still wanted to deny deny Bitcoin and then Gary wrote a letter that basically said, I'm only doing this because the courts are forcing to me, I'm backed into a corner. He cried out the door.

Right. I mean, he went home and soaked his hands. Exactly. I think just that indicates that it's probably going to be another, it would be a three, two vote if it came to a vote on these East spot ETFs and you're going to have to force them in court. But on what Eric was saying, I also, I don't think Grayscale will do this on their own maybe they will if it's expensive we know for a fact it was very expensive i could see like uh uh a consortium of these issuers going to bat and fighting fighting the sec on their on their aisles let's say the sec uses correlation how could they win that yeah i mean so like less winnable they torture the data though i mean you could you could prove they did a study that included like times when there was obviously they weren't training at the

same time or something and you could say like this study was um i don't know arbitrary and capricious yeah so essentially my view on this is like if you get in front of a court and the court you look at the language they use in the grayscale case on this, there's nothing that says specifically about like these correlation numbers. They do look at them a little bit. For the most part, they just talk about the fact that a derivatives market of a spot market is like intertwined. And if you look at the Ethereum market, it's pretty heavily intertwined, particularly over

the last year or so. If you go back a longer ways, there's a little bit less correlation. So I think the SEC would possibly lose a case. And honestly, I think that those things have become so much more intertwined recently that just over time, that correlation defense from the SEC is going to be gone in the next year or two. Let me ask you guys the obvious question here, James. When do they have to give an answer by to BlackRock? BlackRock, I think, is early August. Yes. Yeah, VanEck is first, I think, right? VanEck is May 23rd, but they're not going to deny VanEck and then approve a substantially similar product two months early. This is the same argument that we were having when we were saying January 10th is the deadline. I can't tell you how many people on Twitter were like,

it's not the deadline because BlackRock is until March. And it's like, the SEC is not going to go through this process of denying someone and then approving a substantially similar application like three months there. That would be horrendous. It will look so bad. They'll look like they're playing favorites with BlackRock. I can't imagine them writing a denial letter. These things are long documents. And then writing the exact opposite thing two months later without much things changing. That's just my view. I don't think BlackRock's timing matters. The one that could matter is hashtags.

They're doing something slightly different. But even then, maybe they have a 5% better chance of approval than these other guys. But even then, I'd be surprised. Before we jump, there is something I want to mention about BlackRock that's not necessarily ETF related, but seems to have been somehow lost in the news cycle last few days. BlackRock creates fund with Securitize, a big player in real world asset tokenization. This is called, by the way, they've gone full DJ. It's called Biddle, B-U-I-D-L, Biddle, right?

So they went with a good old fashioned crypto meme as the name. And this is on Ethereum for tokenizing real world assets, which Larry Fink has talked about, and they've already seeded it with $100 million. Ethereum price didn't move an inch on this, which I thought was kind of interesting just in context of the market. But doesn't this show that whether Ethereum spot ETF gets approved, and in the same breaths, Larry Fink says everything will be an ETF and that's how everything will trade and those will eventually be tokenized. Doesn't this show that at least BlackRock and Fink are truly committed to doing something on Ethereum and to pushing this ball forward, whether it's an Ethereum spot ETF or not? I think so. They're obviously bought in.

The flip side to that argument, which I think Eric is probably thinking is they're also 100% heavily bought into ESG a couple of years ago. And now you don't really hear Larry Fink are those letters anymore. So he does tend to move, but there's obviously some genuine underscoring of hardcore belief in the decentralized finance world from Larry Fink and BlackRock, and they're putting their money where their mouth is. So anyone critiquing them, I just, I don't know what to tell you. Like they're, they're actually out there doing it. And this, that, that announcement and launch yesterday is kind of proves it. Yeah. And, and, you know, I was, they have a podcast called the bid and there's a couple of times where their digital assets head and some of their executives are on there and you can tell, and that a lot of people internally are bought in.

It's not just like Larry had an awakening one day. This has been building for many years. And that's why I think it is more permanent. It wasn't an overnight thing. It took its time. I just think the ESG flopping provided maybe a little more motivation. They need something that can be growth-oriented. And if ESG is not going to bring in the assets, they were probably looking for something new.

This is one of those things. But it's more than that, I think. I really think there was a genuine slow evolution internally with some of the top executives. There's a guy named Robert Bick. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. That's important because some of the people that are around Larry, if they were against this, it would be awkward and weird a lot of the times, but I think they're all in as

far as I hear and what I've been listening to on that podcast, which has really good information in it, by the way, if you're interested in learning about BlackRock's mindset in some of this. They have, I don't know, every fifth episode seems to be on Bitcoin or digital assets. Yeah, that's not a mistake, right? I was saying before, I think he was at Ripple, but a guy named Robert Michnik was hired by BlackRock. And Anthony Scaramucci came on the show, actually, and says, I'm friends with Robert. I talked to Larry. Larry told me in 2020 or 2021, Bitcoin's a scam scam why are you into this then he hired mitch nick and mitch nick orange build him basically and you know and i mean that was the story that mooch told us he understood it

and that larry fink really is down the rabbit hole with us now that that was first of all that was a great interview and that really was um got me into this guy if you look, he's on that show with, uh, Samara Cohen, who's a top, you know, one of the big wigs at BlackRock. And he recounts a story where he was in her office in 2018. And she was like seeing the late then based on him. So he'd been out there evangelizing for five years before they even had the thought of the filing. That's a long time. And that's why I do think it's more permanent than, oh, they just hired this guy like a year ago. He came in. That's a little more flimsy. But the idea that Samara Cohen is like getting orange pilled in 2018, that's like two years before the Biddo even launched. That's how long

ago that was. And so over the time, the more they chirp about, hey, this isn't a bad idea. This isn't a bad idea. The more it becomes way more easy, easier internally, politically for Fink to come around, I think. So, but he certainly seems like he deserves the credit, but it wasn't just Fink he seemed to orange pill. It seems like he story that Eric told is kind of similar. Like you talk to most financial firms, there's a there's always groups of people in pockets of people. Some of them end up leaving going to start their own firms, which I've a lot of my colleagues at Bloomberg have gone to do. But there's there's this underground underswell of people that you kind of learn and everyone kind of talks to each other. And I don't know, full orange pill is the right word. But there's a lot of interest in the space at pretty much every financial firm. And it's usually the top bigwigs you have to actually convince. And obviously, at places like JPM, that isn't happening, not even really at Bloomberg. But it's definitely happening in areas across Wall Street at firms all over the place. Perfect. All right, guys, this is amazing. I mean, Michael Saylor even needed to be convinced, right? And he's the biggest bull we've ever had. And he tweeted in 2013 and 14 about Bitcoin being a scam and going to zero. So it just takes people time. And I think that sort of lends our narrative of how long it's going to take with all these RIAs and platforms even to get online

with the spot ETF. Guys, you can follow Eric and James both on X. They're linked down below. Everything ETF. People in the comments are asking how many groupies you guys have now. ETF groupies. Eric, I know you're a happily married man. You would never answer that, I'm sure. But, you know, James, maybe the best is bringing in the groupies. I got to wear my lanyard next time I'm on. I'll wear my lanyard next time.

I know. You really can. You get a lanyard. Honestly, I'm not kidding. Can you get a lanyard? A cup of like a mochaccino just take the picture yeah and and let's let's redo the meme and have take a picture of yourself you're you're perfect and then i'll find it and then say something like yeah blockchain's a good technology but the coins are a scam something like that i can literally, I'm trying to search it and it's everywhere in my feed, but I can't find it in the moment.

I have performance anxiety. All right, guys. Thank you so much. I know you got to go back to work. James, good luck on Bloomberg Dubai. That should be fun. Thanks. All right.

Thank you. Thanks for having us. Awesome. Always love chatting with those two gentlemen, putting in perspective. And the fact that Eric pointed out very quickly that we had inflows everywhere, but GBTC tells you a lot on the day that was the biggest net outflow and the biggest drop for that we have had. And we still had net inflows to everything not named GBTC. Before we move on to the next, of course, I'm going to talk about Debi, our sponsor. You guys see me talk about them once a week. They're in the newsletter, of course. If you haven't checked them out, this is their brand new website. You can see it right here. That's

devve.io. They're a hypers right here. That's D-E-V-V-E dot I-O. They're a hyperscale blockchain. It's flexible to be regulatory compliant in every legal jurisdiction in the world. They have licensing in France that literally nobody else on the planet has. I wish I could tell you about the companies and countries that they're going to be working with. But speaking of ESG, they solve that problem for any who are believing in buying into the ESG FUD. And I've told you before, guys, the former head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, the guy who created the Kindle, the former CIO of Starbucks, former president of Universal Pictures. Those are the dudes who are doing this.

Massively bullish for the space, by the way, that you have names like that contributing in blockchain at all. There's nothing you need to do. I just ask that you check them out, check out their blockchain, click the link down in the description and do that. And speaking of my newsletter, I literally wrote an entire thing today about that last topic, which was BlackRock seeding this Ethereum fund to tokenize. If you guys are not subscribed to The Wolf Den, I've written 927 of these damn things. It's like 15 encyclopedias worth of writing five days a week for free. That's it. I mean, look how long this thing is. I analyze charts. I tell you about legacy markets and what's happening there. I present all the

news. I gave you guys some perspective on bull market it's a lot of work and it's free and you should sign up stop being an asshole anyways guys i'm gonna go ahead and bring on chris and he can tell us how it's all over and bitcoin's going to zero uh we've re-entered a new bear market and the world is ending is that correct capo was right right no no no you know the the one thing i'm getting a lot of um overnight today is uh what the heck happened to etfs why why the buying stop i'm like okay so this is like the third i think it's like the third or fourth net outflow day in two months. You know, I just, but, you know, again, it just shows that the normal emotional kind of toll that trading takes on, you know, retail traders who get in and they don't really know what they're doing yet. And so everything, they're very hypersensitive emotionally, right? Whether price goes up or price goes down, it's always the extreme.

So I guess almost like a bipolar type thing, right? Where you've got a very, you go very hard extreme one way and then very hard extreme next way. And it's never really any kind of chilling, you know, kind of middle ground there. Eric literally said that before. He was like in crypto, he was using Interstellar, I think, or Inception. Interstellar is a reference. I think it was Interstellar. He was like, you got crypto time and you have is still high. It was like extreme greed a day ago or something. But I wonder if that has swung at all. Not that I know, think that that's necessarily accurate or not. But it's still at 74. I'm looking right now. It's still we're still extremely greedy if it makes you guys feel any better. But we were now we're just greed. We were extreme greed yesterday and last week. Okay. So we've, we've let off, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a bit ridiculous. And I want to like, just for some context, I just showed it in that newsletter and I'll bring it back up. I just want to, before you go, like, I mean, we've had so many of these dips in history,

right? I mean, this is like so par for the course and it's shallow. We're at, I think, 15.5% dip from 74%. In the run up to 20,000 in 2017, 41, 38, 29, 34. These are the percentage dips, 41, 40, 27. In the next run up to 69,000, 21, 17, 31, 26, a bit shallower, 55. People seem to forget that we went from like 69 to the 30s in a matter of days, 65, and then back to 69, 25. And in this correction that we're having right now, it's 15.5. And I don't think we've had one that's even above 21 on this entire run up. Exactly. Exactly. We've got a lot more, as I've talked about many times here with you and on other shows and whatnot. We've had a lot more of the sideways.

We had the seven, eight months here. We had it over here. I think we're getting a lot more of the sideways this time around rather than the sharp pullbacks. It does the same thing. People that don't trade or don't have a lot of experience trading don't understand that, but you're getting the same net effect, right? Just instead of all that energy being taken down into a sharp move down, it's distributed sideways.

And I think that's throwing people off, because crypto has generally been a lot of very, very intense volatility, right? We've had a lot of sharp drawdowns. But, you know, again, like you said, it's like, what, 15%? 15.5%? I mean, it's nothing. This is, I mean, this is baby stuff in terms of crypto, right? 17%, maybe, something like that.

It's very, very little. And so, you know, when I look at them, like, okay, uh, what have we done right now? We pulled back, we have a triangle right here that we pulled back into. We had originally ran up and dipped down to the bottom of that triangle and then we're back up and here we are again, right into the same area. Um, that's by the way, that's also just beyond the 78, six pullback here. Uh, we're kind of finding we, we went down lower, but on these but on these daily candles, we're closing right around that 78.6, which also, as you can see, I thought was pretty interesting. These candles right here.

You see how we've got this all kind of right in the same area right now? Can you zoom into that area for people? Just so we don't leave everything on the left. Yeah, perfect. That really makes it easier to see. Perfect. Yeah. So this is actually a triangle right here which is why i got three here and four over here but you can notice that all these daily candles closing opening right on that same area which is then pulled back and wicked into and we get over here and we're just

right into that area again um now does that mean that this has to be you know the bottom no you know we're looking at a few things. Um, the first thing we looked at was the fact that, uh, it rallied up into the R1 pivot area. And so, you know, you may remember, uh, something that I taught and I still teach today, which is this idea that when you come in here, when you're coming in sideways between the pivot and the R1, you're right at the R1, it pulled back. It never came back to the pivot.

We rallied to the higher. We're pulling back to the same area here. If we get a rally off this, there's no reason to think that we're not going to rally up, you know, R4, R5 on the pivots here. So, you know, that would be up there around 105 or, you know, 119,000. But that's just some general price action thing that I learned trading pivots for a couple of years, just pivots alone. And so that's what I'm watching for here. Now, if we lose this support, this swing low on this big pullback that we had right here, on this chart here, this is the Bitcoin USD chart on Coinbase, that swing low is 59, 224 and 68 cents. So if we lose that, I would be looking right here at the pivot, you know, which is right there on 55, 730 or so, 740 around that. So, you know, again, when we got up here and got this rejected,

you know, first thing we're kind of looking at is the possibility we could drop back to pivot. That's perfectly normal. But along the way, we have to watch this area here. And then we've just kind of, as it's played out, you know, we looked at targets along the way down here, not want to give it too much room because of how aggressive the rally's been so far and the pullbacks have been so limited, but it's so far, nothing really surprising, nothing terrible. I mean, if you go outside of our Academy, you know,

it seems like everybody out there is losing their mind. They're losing their freaking minds over the fact that we're just coming down this bit. And no matter how many times you tell them, listen, it's just, you know, it's 15 percent, 17 percent. This is nothing in terms of normal pullbacks. And then, you know, now it's the ETF. So, oh, my God, the ETF stopped buying. Which is not even true right now that we just dug into it. It's just GBTC outflowing.

By the way, if we drop to that pivot, I just did it over here on my chart, it'd be about 25% from the top. Yeah. A very, very minor bull market correction in crypto. To get to 30%, we'd be in the low 50s and that would still be totally normal. Exactly. Exactly. So for me, like I said, we got to pull back here around 78.6 um this is my

count at the moment here this local one two maybe maybe too many nested one twos in here but if we rally up through here and we get above this swing high on this chart here which is uh 68 877 at 82 cents if we're breaking out above that uh my my target here is 86,985 based on this being a 1, 2, and a 3. If we get it, if we break down below this swing low here, well, then we've got to change the count a bit. But we should get a bounce. By the way, you also notice that this pivot is right around. This is that large ascending channel off the bear market swing low. So, you know, coming back here, this is where we kind of went sideways on and then popped out above. So if we get back and we're just coming to retest

this whole area again, and I'll tell you what, if that holds, again, there's no reason you shouldn't be looking upward toward 100 grand or higher, which- Yeah, I mean, you're talking about 86. That would be 12,000 above the all-time high we just made. We just went down 12,000 in like a matter of days from there to 62. Like a $12,000 move is Tuesday. Exactly. It's literally Tuesday. Yeah, yeah. It was actually Tuesday.

Well, and that's what it's all about. It's about trying to put it into perspective because, again, if you're a retail trader, if you're new, and you won't really know what's going on and emotions are really hard. I mean, think about it. Emotions are tough in life in general, right? We have, we have a bad breakup with a significant other. You know, the kids get on our, you know, get on our nerves too much in a day. You know, emotions are there. They're always there. And when you're in, when you're, you know, new to trading, you're all, I can all but guarantee everybody at this new trading is

over leveraged, oversized, over position size, you know? And so that adds onto that stress significantly. That's why they freak out. They freak out. They freak out. And that, or just the fact that like, they look at a portfolio number a week and a half ago, and it's some number they never imagined they would had, and it's some number they never imagined they would have had, and they didn't sell because you shouldn't just based on the number on your portfolio. And then they see that number go down and will forever compare the current wealth that they have to the highest point it ever theoretically would have been if they were perfect and sold everything at that moment, which they rationally would have never done and probably couldn't have even to get the liquidity. And they will always be chasing that

highest number of their portfolio period that was on paper anyways, and wasn't real. And that's why. 100%. Yep. Yep. And you know, I mean, one of the biggest things we go through as human beings is this loss aversion, right? And so, you know, I think pretty much anybody that's in any kind of psychological education or whatnot, you know, I have a psychology degree. They know all about it. You know, as human beings, loss aversion affects us much more deeply than all this greed and all this gain that we get. So it's always worse when, like you said, you see your number up there and then it comes back against you. And you're like, if only I had sold, because now it's not like, oh, look, I'm up 50%. It's, oh, I'm down 10% from where I could have been.

That's right. I guarantee everybody's portfolio is higher than two to three weeks ago right now. Yeah. Yeah. So, but you know, as a trader, those are the difficult things. And the one, the first thing that you guys can do if you want to combat that is stop putting in everything you have. You have to absolutely 100% be comfortable with what you're going to lose because nothing's guaranteed in the markets, except that you're going to lose money from time to time. And the newer you are, the more money you're going to lose and the more often you're going to lose it. But other than that, there is no guarantee. Risk management's the number one, most important thing you're going to lose, the more often you're going to lose it. But other than that, there is no guarantee. Risk management is the number one most important thing you're going to do day in and day out as a trader. So yeah. Yeah. I want to ask you a question. Is

this weekly candle structure, by the way, this weekly candle is not closed. So relevant. Let's say that it did close somewhere down here on Sunday. Does this concern you at all? I mean, 69,000 obviously was the previous all time high. That's that line at the top. You can see that we have all like this candle closed exactly there. This candle opened exactly there, wicked above. This candle touched it almost to the penny before we saw the drop. And now we have this sort of, you can't call it an evening star without the gaps, but we don't get gaps in crypto. But you have a spinning top, which obviously for anyone who doesn't understand, a lot of people say it's a reversal. It's more of a pause, but if you do get a big candle after it,

that can be viewed as confirmation that the trend has stalled or changed. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's the way I always teach it. You know, when I first came in and the way most people, when they come in, it's, it's you know, like you said, a reversal candle, reversal candles, but it's never, there aren't reversal candles. They're all pauses, potential reversals. And so, you know, you get the pause first and then you need follow through. And even the follow through on the first candle doesn't guarantee it's going to reverse, right? Again, this goes back to people coming in and wanting these guarantees and these definitives and really trading is just a lot of

gray. It's a lot of, you know, mitting along the way. Right. So yeah. Does it, does it really, um, concern me? Uh, my, my focus really is the longer term. And so no, not, not, not at all. Um, I could see it pulling back further again. We already talked about, you know, potential daily pivot there, pull back a little bit more. And, um, you know, that's all good. We do have a bit of a bigger candle there from a few weeks prior, uh, It looks like coming up from that 53 area. And so, you know, that we just saw there on yours. And if we had that, you know, what does it do? Again, it just kind of gets you back down here to this support area. So, I mean, you know, at the end of the day, I just look at this as a correction.

And I'm looking for the areas really i want to um for me i want a breakthrough of around 68.9 uh to really kind of signal okay the pullback is probably complete if we can get an impulsive breakout and close above that um i i think then you know we're up we're new all-time highs coming in again and people freak out i mean for me it's just like you 68.9 60 you know it's right around that 69 area i think you agree yeah what else what else are you looking at at the moment? Uh, let me see real quick. I want to throw up love real quick. Uh, Southwest airlines. Um, they had this, this, this, uh, big gap down and drop here. Uh, this is a 50% pull down. It looks like potentially an a, a B and a C here is a flat at the 50% low volume node here. Uh, if it does break down further, I'd be looking

forward to get here around 2586 to 26 and a quarter, um, on that. But right now this is looking good and it looks like we're going to rally back up. Uh, and if we can do that, you know, we, we should be breaking out higher here and heading back up. Um, you know, even just filling that gap would be a huge move, even though it's a breakaway. It doesn't necessarily, quote, unquote, need to be filled. But, I mean, yeah. Exactly, exactly. So, for me, I think it's looking like a good bottom right here.

I like the move down into this. And, again, I think it looks like it's ABC down, ABC up. And then if you zoom in, it looks like one, two, three, four, five here. So, 50% pull back right to this previous area of support um i would look for this thing to rally back up and i think it i think it's set up for a pretty decent trade they just had uh if you if you guys are interested in uh fundamental stuff here uh they just re uh reached that tentative agreement with the flight attendant unit uh union a couple hours ago so that's gonna going to give it there. But again, chart was already looking like it wanted to go.

So I like that. Got a few charts here. Alts are kind of iffy at the moment, but there are some that look like they're better than others. This is FET. And so I think it's bottomed out here, looking for a target

of about $3.95. If we can break out above $3 here, of about three dollars and 95 cents um if we can break out above uh you know three dollars here that should that should do it and say we're getting up there um but you know that's what i'm looking for right now i'm looking for the breakout above three to get us up around 395 uh with fett there uh let me see here that now is still running strong for FET. Yeah. Yeah. CHZ here. Looking at a potential, if we can hold here or this S1 pivot area, then a breakout here above, it's about 0.1417 or so. Breakdown about there should get us a target up here of 0.21268 area at least. So I'm looking for it to hold in this area.

And then if we can get that breakout right there, I'll be looking forward to head up toward that target. These are daily charts, by the way, here. Well, this is 12-hour axle here. Axle's interesting. We had the nice move up. We've got an A, we've got a B, and a C done here, uh, right around this S1 pivot. So if we can get this and rally up, uh, you know, again, looking through this descending resistance here, really it's, it's the pivot here on the hourly right there around $2.

We can break out impulsively through that. Wave three is up here around $5 and 98 cents. Um, and so that's what i'm looking at we could though break down further to the 78.6 here first which is around a dollar 44 and if we get that that'll just pull that target down a little bit lower but ultimately my big in is you know the breakout through that descending resistance right around that hourly pivot two dollar area. Let me see here. What else? I like how you're daring to look at alts in this. I know, right?

You know, it's a lot of, you know, if it holds in this area and goes through this, then this is what I'm looking at. Trading should always be about if this happens then. I always say trading is if then. It's not, oh, my God, right now. Exactly. You've got to know where you would do things. Yeah.

Uh, right here. Uh, TRX here. Everybody loves Tron, right? Um, if we can hold where we're at here and again, breakout,

uh, I'm looking for an impulsive breakout above, uh, the pivot here on the daily. That's right around 13.2 cents. So 0.12 or 0.132. Uh, if we can do that, I'm looking for a target up here around 17 cents so again have to kind of hold here breakout impulsively above that pivot and then i'd be looking for that target uh but that day look at that daily reset down that looks good stoke rsi

rsi both reset down and oversold and then finally finally, I happened to stumble across STX and it's looking pretty good. Yeah, it's been just this has been the key like beneficiary of the whole building on Bitcoin narrative because they were kind of their first as a, you know, the first sort of L2 to build on for. Yeah. Yeah. So great pullback right here. You know, again, we have the wick here, but everything just it's holding on this daily pivot just continually. And we're getting a nice rally here. Breakout above three dollars and seventeen three three point one seven four here has an initial target up there. Four and a half dollars. So it looks like a pretty good setup on there to get us up there toward that four and a half, four and a half dollar mark. So this one looking exceptionally strong this morning, especially across most alts,

which are still potentially bottoming, potentially having bottom. But again, it's like the other ones I said, you got to hold there and then you got to rally through that certain level and then you're looking, okay, now we look like we should be entering. So, but that's what I've got, man. Beautiful's beautiful. Man, I forgot to share the most important crypto news of the day. I don't know if you saw this, but I'm going to keep you on because I think you'll appreciate it. But Wu-Tang's Ghostface Killer drops exclusive music as Bitcoin Ordinals. Yeah.

So like he's dropping a 10,000 collection on Bitcoin. And those are the only people who get the music, those 10,000 and they have the rights to do whatever they want with that music. I would have killed to have the rights to do whatever I wanted with all the music that I copyright infringed on in my, in my old days. So just that's what kind of ended by DJ.

But who changed for the children, who changed forever. I just think that's pretty cool. I don't think it matters. I'll be a matters, but it's cool. It's cool. Listen, before we, before we go, just think that's pretty cool. I don't think it matters. I don't think it matters, but it's cool. It's cool. Listen, before we, before we go, what's, uh, what's going over on over at Texas West Capitol at the moment.

Man, I'll tell you what, we just, um, we just opened up a monthly subscription service. So people jump on that. Um, you get, it's our charts. What was our courses, charts and community. Um, it's one, uh, you know, you get access to the courses, so the charts, the hot takes, the daily updates, the community itself. And then we do, we're going to do one group coaching a month. And so this is kind of like for those that maybe don't have the money for the group coaching that we generally do, or that maybe want to check us out first and,

you know, make sure we're legit. I get that. You know, we go out there, we talk a lot, and it's hard to believe sometimes. But, yeah, you can jump in there and do it. $97 a month. It'll get you ahead. Our hot takes generally pay for that. So, you know, again, Cody, man, Cody was huge. We had like a 500% rally on that from when we entered.

And a few others we got. We're in AG right now, which has been great as well. It's a stock, a silver stock, but you know, lots of ones that we put in throughout the month, you know, hot takes are just charts that I come across in stocks and crypto that, that look really, really, really good. And we kind of let you know. You have a lot of happy, happy community members over here in the chat. I can see. So i'll do it that's great man yeah i'll say that you know we work hard right oh yeah well he said is he chris if this is what i want to bring the two whitest middle-aged men in the world what are you gonna do i will let

chris go before we embarrass him anymore man thank you so much all right man guys i may be one of the whitest middle-aged men in the world but but i guess a lot of people in the comments don't know that i actually used to dj for rayquan from from wu-tang and so i i you know my whiteness was not as in question in my earlier years as maybe it is now but i dj for a lot of rappers but it's a good it's a good comment i mean we're we're both like middle 40 guys out here talking about ghostface on bitcoin yeah I guess I could see that there could be a slight cringe factor that guys, I've got WIC today at 3.30pm Eastern Standard Time for our show Trading Alpha. And then tonight, the Alpha show with Joe Vizzani, which has been

building nicely. I know you guys have been watching at 9pm Eastern Standard Time, you should be checking that out too. And of course, I've got Twitter spaces in 15 minutes. I'm a little bit busy. Been a little bit busy lately. Yeah. I get a like for that, says Crypto Ocho. Good. Yeah. You may be white, but you're tan white. So it's fine. Yeah. Well, I get a good tan. Anyways, guys, that's all I got. See you in 15 minutes on spaces. See you at 3.30 PM with Wick for Trading Alpha. We're going to dig into these charts. Peace.