Doomsayers Were Right, Just About the Wrong End

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The end is near. That’s what the bears have been saying every step of this cycle, and in a way, they’re right. But the end that’s near isn’t Bitcoin’s, it’s the bear market’s.

A month ago, Strategy sold Bitcoin for the first time in four years. The market reaction was disproportionate to the size of the sale, and that was the point. Saylor had spent years repeating the “never sell” line, so even a token 32 BTC sale (around $2.5 million) landed as a signal, not a rounding error. Bitcoin fell 20% over the following four days.

Fast forward to last week. Bitcoin had built real momentum off the cycle low, up 10% over five consecutive green days. Then came the disclosure that Strategy had sold again, this time 3,588 BTC to fund dividend payments, over 100 times the size of the first sale. Given what 32 BTC did a month earlier, the market was braced for a much larger reaction. The fall did start, Bitcoin down nearly 4% intraday and back testing $61k.

Until the man with an apparent habit of reversing things stepped in once more. Since returning to the Oval Office, Trump has shown he can move markets on a word, most recently overturning a red card in the FIFA World Cup, and now, seemingly, the Bitcoin market too. Bitcoin recovered and flipped green on the day.

The headlines around Saylor or Trump are noise. What matters is the reaction function. A sale 100x larger than the one that triggered a 20% drawdown a month ago barely dented price by comparison. That shift, from a market that panics on a small disclosure to one that absorbs a much larger one, is the actual data point.

This is what selling exhaustion looks like in practice. When the market stops reacting violently to negative catalysts, it means the marginal seller is running out of size, and the people left holding are less inclined to panic. Fewer active sellers at these levels is typically a late-cycle characteristic, not an early one.

To be clear, a 10%+ bounce off the low is encouraging, but it isn’t confirmation the bear market is over or that the low is in. One green reaction to a large sale doesn’t reverse a multi-month structure on its own. What it does show is that buyers are stepping in during this accumulation window, and that the balance between supply and demand is shifting in a way it wasn’t a month ago.

Stormrake Spotlight: Pax Gold (PAXG) ($4,156)

Source:https://www.tradingview.com/x/t9SWHPyu/

PAXG is looking to begin the first step of flipping momentum back to the bulls, with a few daily closures above the 21 exponential moving average (yellow line). In a strong downtrend this often acts as strong resistance, and has done so in this recent downtrend. If this can be sustained, it will complete the first step in flipping the momentum.

BTC/USD Key Levels and Price Action:

Source: https://www.tradingview.com/x/98aljr4S/

An intraday reversal thanks to the Trump comments, but also a strong technical bounce from the 200 moving averages, propelled Bitcoin above the key resistance level at $63.8k. Now flipped into support, this move needs to be sustained to continue the current bounce higher.

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*All prices are denominated in USD unless stated otherwise*

Written by Alexandar Artis

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