Bitcoin Is In PRICE DISCOVERY — How HIGH Will It Go?

0:00Hello, everyone. We've got a lot to discuss today. Bitcoin has become the greatest show on Wall Street, gold has now outperformed the U.S. stock market over the last 25 years, and retail investors, they are pouring capital into assets at an insane pace. We're live today from the desk of Anthony Pompliano.

0:27Bitcoin's been on a historic run recently. The digital currency had a weekly close above$119 ,000 last night. That's the highest weekly close in Bitcoin's history, 15 different years. As our friends at Geiger Capital put it perfectly when they said, that's a hell of a candle. We are in price discovery. And this is exactly how price discovery works. Bitcoin will be repriced higher and higher until the net new buyers are exhausted. People keep buying until they run out of money. So how high could Bitcoin go during this price discovery? Well, you can see in the chart that back in November of 2024, last year, Bitcoin went from$70 ,000 to$90 ,000 in a matter of weeks after it broke through the previous all-time high.

1:06Now, Bitcoin would run to$140 ,000 in the next two weeks or so if the asset followed a similar breakout of 30%. Now, I'm not predicting we'll see$140 ,000 in short order, but I am showing you what happened the last time Bitcoin was in a similar price discovery phase. That's a big boy move. Now, this brings us to another question. What caused Bitcoin to finally break out of the previous range between$100 ,000 and$110 ,000? Well, that answer is a little bit more complex. There's a lot more detail to unpack. Now, first, we know that Bitcoin ETFs have seen significant inflows to start the month of July.

1:36Bar Chart highlights that last Thursday was the second highest day of inflows for all of the Bitcoin ETFs together. There was more than$1.2 billion of inflows for the Bitcoin ETFs in a single trading session. That's just incredible. It's hard to explain how successful these ETF launches have been for Wall Street. Bloomberg's Eric Balchunas, he's the GOAT, he does his best with this visualization of how dominant BlackRock's IBIT fund has been. Eric writes that IBIT blew through the$80 billion mark last night. It's the fastest ETF to get there in 374 days, five times faster than the previous record, which was held by VOO, and they did it in 1 ,800 days.

2:11So 83 billion, it's now the 21st largest Bitcoin ETF overall. Eric then goes on to explain that the collective Bitcoin ETF success by saying total assets for all spot Bitcoin ETFs, that's now 140 billion for the first time as well. These are monster numbers for products that are only about 18 months old or so. On top of the ETF inflows, Bitcoin options expired at the end of June for the second quarter. Here's what Jordy Visser had to tell me about options expiry on our weekly Saturday podcast. Once options expiration passed, I think a lot of the supply in Bitcoin started to wear off. I think people are going to have to just start recognizing that at the end of every quarter, there is a lot of open interest from people that are selling future production.

2:54I think the Bitcoin miners, from what I've seen, have done it. And I think there's a lot of people that just have joined on the party. And so vol was compressed. You got Bitcoin implied vols below 40. So I think once we came out of expiration, there was less sell pressure. There were a lot of shorts that had built up in the 110 to 120 area around the all-time highs or the prior all-time highs. So I think that started. But there's something big that's happened. And I think you and I, because we didn't do one last week, the momentum is growing from the traditional finance community and I can feel it.

3:27I think Circle was a bigger event and may have been truly, as Tom Lee said this week, the chat GPT moment. So there you have it. You can't just ignore the importance of option expirations happening just a few days before the Bitcoin breakout. But that isn't the full story either. Jordy goes on to explain that short sellers had built up and they got squeezed, which reinforced the price movement upwards. He told me that there were a lot of shorts that had built up in the$110 ,000 to$120 ,000 area around prior all-time highs. Now, this makes more sense. We've got a confluence of events. Bitcoin ETF inflows were near record levels.

4:04Bitcoin options had just expired and short sellers had become too complacent. So they got liquidated on the way up. Bitcoin loves to have these asymmetric moves and the short sellers, they're just in the way. It doesn't matter how high we go in the short term, though. The professional investing world finally realizes Bitcoin is not going away. These organizations and people are going to persistently bid the asset to much higher levels in the coming years. There's going to be plenty of volatility along the way, including bear markets. But make no mistake about it. Wall Street is capitulating. They are waving the white flag.

4:34Literally, they are saying no mas. No one wants to ignore, fight, or ridicule Bitcoin anymore. They all want to buy it and hold it. What else should they do if they can't figure out a way to outperform it? I continue to say it over and over and over again. Bitcoin is the new hurdle rate. If you can't beat it, you have to buy it. And Wall Street is finally starting to listen. I was on CNBC's Squawk Box this morning, and I explained why everyone wants Bitcoin. Take a listen to what I had to say. First of all, welcome to the greatest show on Wall Street. I think that Wall Street's full undivided attention now is on Bitcoin.

5:05Everyone wants Bitcoin. Like, this is no longer a contrarian trade. This is a consensus trade now. So you have the ETFs, you have the Bitcoin treasury companies, you have retail, you have sovereign wealth fund. Everybody wants Bitcoin. Should we be scared of that? Meaning, you know, we were talking about just economists and analysts were like, you know, when the economists have a consensus view, usually should go the other direction. Yeah. Well, the economists still don't like Bitcoin. So I think we're OK. But if you take a look at the S &P, everyone wants the S &P. Right. And so what you want is you want persistent kind of price insensitive buyers.

5:38And that's finally what Bitcoin has. Warren Buffett is sitting on 5 % of the treasury market. Boomers are buying up bonds. Young people are gobbling up as much Bitcoin as possible. What do you think young people care about? They don't care what happens in the bond market nearly as much as they care about what happens in the Bitcoin market. So there you have it. Bitcoin is the greatest show on Wall Street. Everyone wants some. And now the world is finally realizing that Bitcoin is undervalued compared to where it's going to be in the future. There's a lot of people in the traditional financial world.

6:05They don't like Bitcoin and they don't like gold. Why? Well, because they say stocks, you know, those are companies. They have earnings. They produce actual cash flows. But here's the thing. Did you know that gold has actually outperformed the U.S. stock market over the last 25 years? That's right. For most of you who are watching or listening to this, for most of your investing lifetime, gold has actually been the better thing to hold from 25 years ago till today rather than U.S. And yes, for all you genius reply guys out there, this includes dividends as well. See, here's the thing. Gold is simply benefiting from the debasement of the currency.

6:40Stocks do as well, but not nearly as much. Gold and Bitcoin are both sound money. They operate outside of the system. No one controls it and no one can create more of either asset. And so for all of the people who continue to tell you that stocks are better than holding sound money, well, now the data's in. 25 years. All you had to do was buy gold and hold it. And you outperformed all of your peers who are sitting there holding public equities. Retail investors are all in. Adam Kobisi shows that investors bought$155 billion of stocks and ETFs in the first half of 2025. That's the largest semi-annual net inflow on record.

7:16NVIDIA, Tesla, Palantir, those were the most actively traded stocks during that time. Because here's what's happened in the market. Retail investors, self-directed investors, or independent investors, whatever name you want to use. These are individuals who get their information directly online. They're on Reddit. They're on Twitter or X. They're sitting there reading sub stacks. They simply are learning for themselves. They're trying to go get the information, but then they turn around. They don't need a stockbroker. They don't need a financial advisor. They now have the tools at their disposal to access the market directly.

7:45That's why they're called self-directed investors. They're directing their own money into the assets they want. There's no one there to tell them, don't do that. That's too high of a concentration. Be careful. Don't take so much risk. All of that stuff, that's of the past. So ultimately what you got to realize is that the market is changing and people who are willing to take the time and energy to go learn and then allocate their own capital, take personal responsibility, use critical thinking and independent thought. Those are the people who are pouring capital into the market. Now you may say, well, retail investors, they've been the dumb money for a long time.

8:16Well, actually, if you look just over the last couple of months, what happened in April was the stock market went down about 20%. And guess what? All the geniuses on Wall Street, they sold and they took their money and they sat on the sidelines. They thought we were going lower. What did retail do? They do what they always do. They bought the dip. And by buying the dip, the stock market has had one of the most historic recoveries ever. More than 25 % up in 90 days. That's the type of thing where retail actually had an edge on the institutions. The institutions think about all kinds of risk mitigation.

8:46They think about Sharpe ratios and Serratinos, all this other stuff. But guess what retail cares about? How much money am I making? What am I buying? Am I willing to hold it for a long period of time? And retail was right. and hedge funds and institutional investors, they had less exposure to the stock market recovery than they otherwise wished that they had. And so it comes back to this idea that retail investors are becoming more and more important in the stock market. $155 billion invested in the first half of the year, single name stocks and ETFs. Retail investors, it's not yet at a point where we can say that they're the captain now, that they're actually in control because more than 50 % of the market still comes from the institutions.

9:22But I do think that retail investors, as they allocate more and more capital, we're going to see eventually retail on more than 50 % of the stock market. That's it for today. I hope you guys are enjoying the show. Please make sure that you're following on X. And also, please, please, please make sure that you subscribe on YouTube. I'll see you guys live from the desk of Anthony Pompliano tomorrow.