VirtualBacon

Bitcoin bounced about 6% off the 59k area to trade near 63,600, and the whole question this week is whether that move is the start of a real rally or a bull trap. My read is that it's still risky to chase here. We're in a daily and weekly downtrend, the downside target near 53k is closer than the 82k upside, so on the balance of probability Bitcoin is more likely to retest the low 50s befo...

Solana is down more than 70% from its $280 peak, trading around $80, and the whole question of whether that makes it a buy or a value trap comes back to Bitcoin. The framework here is simple: altcoins don't lead, Bitcoin leads, so Bitcoin has to be cheap in your own analysis before any altcoin is worth touching, and the all-in level sits near $53K, the realized price where the average holder i...

Q2 2026 just closed as the best quarter for US stocks since 2020, the S&P up 15% and the Nasdaq more than 20%, all of it driven by AI. Bitcoin sat the whole thing out, down 14%, while gold fell 13% and silver dropped 20%, unwinding the entire 2023 to 2025 debasement trade in two quarters. The split comes down to the Fed. New chair Kevin Warsh wants price stability, a rate hike is coming in Jul...

Strategy announced this morning that it plans to sell up to $1.25 billion of Bitcoin to rebuild its USD cash reserve and steady its STRC yield product, and the headline number set off panic across crypto. The number is far less scary once you size it. It is about 2.5% of Strategy's 847,000 Bitcoin, and it is smaller than the $1.79 billion that left the US spot Bitcoin ETFs over just the past t...

Saylor's Stretch preferred stock fell 25 percent in a week and broke its soft $100 peg down to $75, and the real question is whether it drags Bitcoin down with it. My answer is no, and the reason is mechanical: unlike Luna, nothing forces Strategy to sell a single Bitcoin. Their forced-liquidation price sits near $10,400, they hold roughly 14.5 months of cash to cover the yield, and even when...

Bitcoin broke below $60,000 and gold dropped under $4,000 this week, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq sit at all-time highs. The split comes down to the dollar: the two-year yield is rising on near-term rate-hike odds (CME FedWatch puts a hike to 375bps near 49% within the next two FOMC meetings), and a stronger dollar pushes anti-debasement assets like Bitcoin and gold down. I read it as short-te...

Stocks are ripping on the Iran peace deal, with the Nasdaq and the Russell 2000 both at all-time highs, but Bitcoin and gold sat the rally out. Here is why. The peace deal flipped sentiment risk-on, which lifts equities, but it leaves inflation behind, so the Fed stays stuck, cannot cut, and may hike once more in the next three months. That keeps the dollar strong, and a strong dollar is exactly w...

Bitcoin is chopping right at its 200 week moving average near $62,000, the line I use to mark when it's genuinely cheap. The framework is simple: buy at or below that line, sit on my hands through the middle of the range up toward the 50 week SMA near $91,000, and only take aggressive altcoin risk once price reclaims that upper line and confirms the bull market. Over the next six months I thin...

New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh held rates at 3.5 to 3.75% in his first FOMC, which markets had already priced at 99%, so the real signal was everything he said around the decision rather than the decision itself. The biggest tell: Warsh wants to change how the Fed measures inflation, swapping core PCE for trimmed mean PCE, a number that currently reads closer to 2.3% and would give the Fed far more roo...

SpaceX just pulled off the biggest IPO in history: it sold out at $135 a share, raised $75 billion, and opened on the Nasdaq under SPCX trading around $170, near a $2 trillion valuation. At that size I'm not treating it as a buy-and-hold, but the volatility is the opportunity. I walk through trading the $158 to $178 range with a neutral grid bot, the satellite-stock proxies like EchoStar, Rock...

Bitcoin is trading just below the 200-week SMA around $61,700, the level I've called cheap in every past cycle. So I'm already DCAing across the $53k to $62k range instead of waiting for a perfect bottom. If we reach $53k I'll call it the bottom outright, since that lines up with the summer 2024 lows, Bitcoin's realized price near $53,500, and the MVRV-Z score touching zero, the sa...

AI stocks had a Black Monday. South Korea's Kospi fell 8.29% in a single day and hit its third circuit breaker of the year, the NYSE semiconductor index dropped over 10% on the open, and chip names like Broadcom, Arm and Marvell beat earnings but still sold off. My read is the bubble has roughly six more months left, because the real liquidity event isn't earnings, it's the wave of meg...

Bitcoin just broke below the 200-week SMA at $59k, and that's the signal I use to start building an altcoin watchlist for the next cycle. I go through the 14 coins on my radar and split them into two groups: coins that already rallied hard in the bear market and have no safe entry yet (HyperLiquid, Venice, Zcash, Near, Canton), and proven oscillators worth buying once they hit the right drawdo...

Why I think it's time to start buying bitcoin this week. Bitcoin is around 65,800, sitting right on the 65k support it has bounced from three times since February, with the 200-week moving average near 62k as my buy trigger. That indicator has marked cheap prices in every cycle for the last decade, so I'm done waiting for a magic number. I walk through the three ways a bottom can play out,...

Stocks are at all-time highs while bitcoin just closed its first down month since February, sitting around 71k. The entire tradfi rally is the AI trade, and it should keep running until the SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI IPOs are done later this year. What matters for bitcoin is that this bear market looks nothing like 2018 or 2022, when stocks and bitcoin bottomed together on a macro catalyst. It&...

HyperLiquid just hit a new all-time high near $64, and people are asking whether this is the start of alt season or a coin you can simply buy and hold through a bear market. My read is no on both, even though the technology is the strongest in its category. HyperLiquid is now the fifth-largest futures exchange by open interest at $9.6B and does about $740M in annualized revenue, and through HIP-3...

Ethereum FUD is at all-time highs after 8 senior Foundation contributors left and Vitalik wrote that the EF is no longer the center of Ethereum. Most people read that as the founder abandoning ship. I read it the opposite way. BlackRock has 3 crypto products and 2 of them are ETH ETFs. Fidelity runs a $10.1B ETH fund. JP Morgan, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Citi, the DTCC, every major Wall Street firm...

New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh was just sworn in, and the FOMC minutes he inherited show an 8-4 vote, easing bias removed, and a majority ready to hike. CME Fed Watch now prices a 70 percent chance of a hike by year-end. Bitcoin trades against the dollar more than any other asset, so a strong DXY here points to a 60K retest before this bear market ends. The 65 to 69K zone is my high-confluence buy wind...

Today is the most stacked day for the AI trade all year. Nvidia reports tonight with 355 billion dollars in market cap on the line, Goldman just took the SpaceX IPO with an 80 billion dollar raise, and the bubble has at least one more month before the cash-out window starts. My read: bull market through June, summer correction into October, second wave into the Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs by year-en...

Bitcoin's rally just broke. The 82K push got sold the moment CLARITY passed, ETF outflows are back, and the next real technical decision is at 76-77K. Below that, the 65K buy zone is in play. Both Fidelity and VanEck called 65-69K the cycle bottom two months ago. Meanwhile Google I/O, Apple's WWDC, and Nvidia earnings will set the AI chips tape this week, and Kevin Warsh kicks off his first week a...

CLARITY Act passed the Banking Committee, Kevin Warsh is the new Fed chair, and the US-China summit produced real deals. Bitcoin still got rejected three times at the 200-day SMA at 81.9K and altcoins shed 30 billion dollars in market cap this week. This is what a classic sell-the-news environment looks like inside a bear market: short-term hype runs out, and the real positive effects do not kick...

The CLARITY Act gets its Senate Banking markup tomorrow with over 100 amendments waiting. This is the bill that finally gives Bitcoin and crypto a regulatory framework in the US, and a clean markup vote could be the biggest catalyst since the spot ETFs. The sell-the-news risk is real: signing into law is still weeks away, midterm elections threaten the timing, and altcoin season may not start unti...

Bitcoin is at 82K with the short squeeze still loaded for an 85K retest. Three catalysts decide if this rally has legs: Trump meets Xi in Beijing on Wednesday with Huang, Musk, and Cook in the delegation; the Senate Banking Committee marks up the CLARITY Act the same day; and Powell leaves the Fed chair seat to Kevin Warsh on Friday. 95K is still the real bull market confirmation level. Chapters:...

Bitcoin funding has been negative for 67 days, the longest stretch since the 2022 bear market bottom. Shorts are piling in right at 85K resistance, exactly where the liquidation heat map shows the squeeze fires. This is still a bear market rally, not a bull confirmation. 85K is where the institutions take their exit liquidity, and 95K is the real bull market level. Chapters: (00:00) Bitcoin at 79K...

Saylor just hinted at selling Bitcoin to fund Strategy buybacks for the first time. AMD printed its best quarterly earnings in 7 years and confirmed the AI chips supercycle. Gold broke out 170 dollars in two days while Bitcoin runs out of room versus gold. Three trades I'm watching this week. Chapters: (00:00) Strategy Q1 earnings: fair value accounting first quarter (09:33) Why Saylor may sell Bi...