BTC Hits New ATH: Trading the Markets LIVE (May 21, 2025)

0:00Hi, everyone. I'm Raoul Pal, the CEO and co-founder of Real Vision. Here at Real Vision, we're committed to give you the best knowledge, tools, and network to help you succeed in your financial future. If you're enjoying this podcast, please take a moment to give it a five-star rating. It truly helps us continue to bring top-tier content. Thank you so much.

0:25Happy Wednesday, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Trading the Markets. I'm crypto contributor, Chris Bullock. Guys, Bitcoin just hit an all-time high. I'm sure everyone knows this already on X. I'm seeing we're so back tweets. Just really exciting times. Looks like we're approaching 110 now, which is really cool. So continuing with these exciting times, as many of you probably already know, we launched our brand new tiers at Real Vision. So if you have any questions about that, please reach out to Milton via email at Milton at realvision.com, Milton at realvision.com, or you can open a support ticket in Discord as well.

1:11And before we get into it, guys, make sure you check out our newest show from Andreas Steno, Macro Meets Micro, where Andreas updates pro members on his latest trade ideas and Steno Research Pro Portfolio Performance. That comes with a report and lots of charts as well. So if you want that alpha and latest insights, make sure you're signed up to RV Pro. We've also got drinks yesterday. It was really good. Sorry. Yeah. I mean, it's just such a great new addition. So shout out to our editorial team and Andreas for putting that together. And then also Drinks with Rao, Community Favorite, is returning tonight, 6 p.m.

1:53Eastern time. So make sure you have an ice-cold Bud light and some Doritos for that as well. And just a quick reminder, we discuss this stuff all day, every day in our Discord. So whether you want to stress test your ideas, chat over new coins or new protocols, you need to join us in Discord. So make sure you do that. You'll also have access to Chris's portfolio Leo as well. And if you have any questions during the show, just throw them in the chat on X or on the platform, and we will answer as many as we can. Hi, Raoul here. Listen, I think we've got until 2030 before the economic singularity arrives.

2:35Now, it might not be the exact date, but it's around then. So we have about six years to figure out how to unfuck our future. I've put together a report to help you called Prepare for 2030. It's going to help you take the first steps in that journey to make sure you're secure past 2030. So just click on the link below and start your journey now. That was a long intro, Chris, but let's talk about the exciting news that we have at hand. Bitcoin, Bitcoin dominance doesn't seem to be ending right now. What have you got for us on the charts? Yeah, so all time highs, right? It's funny, everybody's like, are we going to the moon now?

3:18Is you know, is it started? Is it you know, and I'm like, yes, but you have to remember, we've been running for about 43 days already, you know, since coming out of the the April, early April lows. So I feel like it's like, yeah, we are going to the moon, but not quite yet. I feel like we kind of need to take a bit of a breather. You know, maybe we grow. I feel like my base case is I think we grind, maybe grind a little bit higher over the course of the next few days and then probably roll over and come down a little bit. That's kind of what I think. I just feel like we need to have a little bit of a correction.

3:55We've been running for a while and it just for us to like run for 43 days straight and then continue to run for another, you know, 43 days or whatever. It just, it doesn't work that way. Like it's never really done that in Bitcoin's history outside of once or twice, you know? And so, and I don't think we're in that boat yet. So I feel like we need to kind of, you know, whatever, touch grass a little bit, just kind of come back to earth, take a deep breath. What all of those sayings. So what that means is if we look at this chart here, I feel like if you'd asked me this a week ago, where support, I would have said probably closer down to the bottom of this range where we had ranged sideways for, you know, close to two weeks and kind of came back and mean reverted back to the 20 day moving average.

4:38But since then, we've ran all the way back up to the top of this range and ran sideways for basically another week plus since then. So that's really good because basically this establishes a new support level. Now, I don't know that I, you know, that's a pretty shallow correction. I feel like for Bitcoin to only come down a little bit, that would be about 5 % give or take from where we are. So I don't on where it ultimately does peak out, I think if it gets rejected here off these all-time highs, and this proves to be the top today, then I could see us coming back down maybe to the middle portion of this range, back around, you know, 98 to 99, maybe right around 100 ,000.

5:16Maybe it, you know, kind of peaks out 110 and then just drops 10 % back down to 100. And that's a nice, good, you know, decent correction for right now. And so I think that that's, to me, the most logical scenario. It's funny, though. The reason I'm not sure if the top is in yet is because we're not really getting sort of outsized volume. Like what I'd be looking for on a, quote, peaking day is like a big wick to the upside and a big volume, like high volume candles, sort of high volume thrust. And, you know, we're not getting that. It's just kind of just grinding along and it's inching a little bit higher and inching a little bit higher.

5:54And we're not seeing sort of a massive, massive sort of rejection at any sort of level with a big wick to the upside, you know, showing that people want to be selling at these levels. So I don't know, it's interesting. That's why I think that it could go a little bit higher over the course of a few more days. And I do think that, you know, I will be looking for some kind of a big volume sort of stopping volume candle type, big flush out wick to the upside. And then I'll know that we've got a solid top in, but yet we're not, we're not, we're not quite there yet. So yeah, that's sort of what I'm seeing with Bitcoin.

6:26Alts, on the other hand, in a broad spectrum, alts, I feel like are not doing very well at all compared to Bitcoin right now. Like back here, when we were hitting these all time highs back in the early January, most of the alts that I had were also hitting all time highs at that point in time. And now Bitcoin is back to all time highs again. Most of my alt positions are still down 50 % from their all time highs, you know, give or take. So Bitcoin dominance, I think, is the big story right now. And I think that that's kind of what, you know, we should spend a little bit of time talking about because it's not slowing down at all.

6:57It's not showing any signs of slowing down at all. And it's really the story, I think. Yeah. And I mean, I think I know a lot of people were kind of expecting a similar alt season to what we saw last cycle. But I think that's a very great point that you bring up about Bitcoin dominance not really ending or seeming having a seeming end in sight in the near future, at least. And I think it makes sense, right? because all these institutions are gobbling up Bitcoin left and right. I think people are paying more attention to Bitcoin. Countries are starting to add Bitcoin as well. So I guess it was only a matter of time until this started happening.

7:35You talked about ETH as well kind of needing to be that catalyst. We discussed this on Monday, but I think that's an important point to make as well, that ETH kind of needs to be that catalyst for us to even have any semblance of alt season from last cycle. Totally agree. Like so I'll start, like you said, I'll start with Bitcoin dominance here. We did have a peak that, you know, what is this on the weekly? So, yeah, a couple of weeks ago, Bitcoin dominance did set a high and it kind of came down. It got rejected off of that high. But it so far hasn't proven to have broken any trends. Like if we zoom in here, really, all it did was mean revert back to the 20 week moving average and has since reclaimed the 10-week moving average and is starting to run back up again.

8:20So I'm not seeing any signs of a rollover here, like at all. I'm not seeing signs of it even slowing down hardly. You know, I mean, a mean reversion isn't even remotely a correction. And so, yeah, I feel like, you know, Bitcoin dominance is poised to set another high. And if you look at like the Ethereum Bitcoin chart, which I have here, it's essentially the exact inverse of that chart, this dominance chart here, you know, here it is bleeding out. It too mean reverted to the upside as Bitcoin did to the downside. But really, again, that's all it did. It came back up to its 20-week moving average, got rejected, and is starting to come back down again.

9:00So the trend did not break with ETH Bitcoin or with Bitcoin dominance or any of that, really. It got tested, but that's about it. And so, you know, it's until proven otherwise, ETH is still going down and Bitcoin is still going up. And like you said, we need to see this. We need to see Ethereum break this trend and start setting higher highs, which, as I've talked about numerous times in the past, it has not set a single higher high against Bitcoin since December of 2021. Ever since then, every successive high has been lower than the previous one, and this one included. So, yeah, I mean, it's got a lot to prove.

9:41It's very, very technically just broken. And, you know, I feel like until it at least gets back up to this last high, I'm not even really going to count this one because it's just not enough of a, it's not enough of anything really. Because especially how deviated it was from the moving average to begin with. So really, I'm looking at this, you know, 029 SATs level as sort of the next leg that it has to break through before I'll even think about, you know, it looking like any kind of a trend reversal or giving it any real credence, you know. And so a long way to go. We're a long way off from there.

10:18And yeah, I think what else? I wanted to talk about meme coins, too. Like, this was interesting, too. kind of, again, what I was touching on, you know, when we were hitting all time highs earlier on, memes were also hitting all time highs. Same thing back here when when Bitcoin was setting all time highs at this point in time, memes were also, you know, surging, I guess they did here, they had actually already started to break down here. And they broke way down way, way below, historically, any any point they ever have. Now they are coming back up. And they are, you know, running, they've gained more on a percentage basis in this amount of time than Bitcoin has since its lows.

10:59But they've had, you know, they were so broken down. They've got so much work to do to even get back to these upper levels here. And so while it's nice, we're seeing sort of higher highs and higher lows, this momentum has started to wane a little bit. This moving average is starting to level off and it needs to kind of, you know, get back going again, I feel like. So So I'm going to be watching this closely because if you look here, we've got a bit of a cluster here where it's starting to go sideways that sort of matches this previous cluster here. So if we don't see like a decent breakout, I think sooner rather than later, I'm going to start to be really, really selective in terms of which, you know, which alt I'm holding, which means I'm holding.

11:40And, you know, look to maybe pull the plug or maybe even rotate, rotate some of that back into Bitcoin, rotate some of those. Thankfully, I'm in profit, at least on all those positions. So I will be rotating profit back into Bitcoin. But if I don't see this, you know, get going here pretty quickly, then that's what's going to be happening. So, so yeah, I want to before we move on, I actually want to take this question from Jordan that comes on our website because I had a very similar question that I wanted to ask you about. But Jordan wants to know, is it time to sell Bitcoin to buy L1s and memes or is the Bitcoin dominance still too strong.

12:17So I think it brings a question of what do you do in this situation, right? Where your alts aren't running like we expected they would, but Bitcoin is running way more than the dominance is way more than we expected, right? So what does one do in this situation? Do you hold tight? I liked how you mentioned you're rotating profits back into Bitcoin. So you are catching that exposure, but what's your take on that? Well, I think the key to that is you need to make sure that anything that you're holding that's not Bitcoin is at least doing better than Bitcoin. And most things aren't. And so kind of I was just going to do a little bit of a rapid fire here.

12:58It's funny, that question sort of teed up exactly something that I wanted to talk about. So that's perfect. But, you know, go through all your alts, load up a Bitcoin chart, you know, against Bitcoin and just, you know, look and see. Like, let's look at we'll look at Solana, for example, downtrending against Bitcoin, you know, and really I look at the bull market support band, this this bit right here. If the bull market support band is pointed down and to the right and the price is below it against Bitcoin.

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14:24That's bad. I mean, it's like you really, really have to know why you're in that position and have some solid thesis for why you're holding it. Otherwise, don't be. And unfortunately, Solana is in that category. Solana is very just mediocre against Bitcoin right now. It has a very neutral track line here. Granted, the candles are green on this indicator, which is a positive sign, but just very, very weak overall. SWE, a little bit better. At least price is above the bull market support band. We've got a green track line here. So this is kind of what you want to see. This is sort of your benchmark.

14:57You want to see price above this band. You don't have to have this indicator. You can load up the bull market support band on any chart and trading view. But you want to see the band itself at worst going sideways and you want to see price above it against Bitcoin like this SWE chart here. So SWE sort of passes the test at the moment. Ethereum, as we know, not passing the test at all. Very ugly. Everything's pointed down. It got rejected off the band here. There's a few others I'll quickly go through. Deep. Deep looks really good. Granted, it's a much shorter price history. But again, this is what you want to see.

15:32price above the band, you know, and things generally going in the right direction. SPX is right on the line, but it's at least sort of trending in the right direction. So it's sort of right within the band. So I'm going to kind of give it a stay of execution for now. Partcoin, another one looks really good. The band is all the way down here. Price is way above it against Bitcoin. So, you know, again, this is what you want to see. There's a few others here. that aren't doing well, SPX, or I'm sorry, XRP rather, is starting to roll over against Bitcoin, not looking good. You can see the track line is red.

16:10It's below the band. Everything is just kind of starting to look ugly. Surprisingly, WIF is coming on strong, but it too, very, very ugly support band. I mean, way down and to the right. It's not even remotely sideways even yet. So not a good hold. Aave is another one that's come up a lot lately because it's had a really good week. It's like, yes, it has, but barely just kind of getting back to what I would consider break-even level, you know, against Bitcoin. Hyperliquid, which we'll touch on more, I think, in a minute here, but also it looks really good. Giga, not good, you know? So you get the picture here.

16:50Just go through your charts, look at all your alt positions and sort of look at how they're doing against Bitcoin and, you know, on the weekly timeframe, which is essentially what is reflected with this bull market support band. If the band is in a downward diagonal direction and prices below it, I wouldn't be holding it at all. I would get out of it. I would put it into Bitcoin. I would put it into at least one of these other ones that are outperforming. But you can see there's not that many that are. And if I could go through this whole entire watch list and I guarantee you probably 10, 15 % of it looks good against Bitcoin right now.

17:22And the rest of it is garbage. So this is why Bitcoin dominance is as high as it is and why it's only continuing to go up. And I think largely because Ethereum is an outsized sort of factor in that equation because of its second largest market cap. But still, you need to be in stuff that is outpacing Bitcoin right now, especially with Bitcoin as strong as it is. Otherwise, you're not winning. You're not winning at this game that we're all playing right now. You're actually losing. Even if your positions are going up in USD value, if they're not going up in Bitcoin value, then you're not winning.

17:55So that's the bottom line. So you need to be either be just in Bitcoin, which is totally fine, because we know that's crushing it. And we know every, you know, institution and, you know, sovereign wealth fund on the planet is migrating towards Bitcoin. But if you're not in that, then be in something that's at least doing better than Bitcoin. Otherwise, you know, again, you're doing it wrong. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with just holding Bitcoin either. No, not at all. The amount of, I mean, I guess it's crypto, so I can't say it's stress-free, but in crypto terms, you'll be stress-free, right, if you're just holding Bitcoin.

18:30Before we move on to some other alts, I want to take this question from Melvin that also came on our website, because he wants to know about Bitcoin dominance right now. So looking at previous bull cycles, doesn't it make sense that Bitcoin would run up first while the alts lag, followed by a period of Bitcoin going sideways and then a strong altcoin season kicking off? Initially, like, I mean, yeah, right. But I think in those previous cycles, we were a lot more confident in each performance than we are right now. But Chris, what's your take? Yeah, exactly. I mean, you're exactly right. And I think the huge difference between last cycle or every other previous cycle and this current cycle is the ETFs.

19:10and the institutional demand and all of the money coming in through that sort of mechanism that doesn't have direct, like none of that money is, you know, sovereign nations aren't rotating their Bitcoin profits into altcoins because there's no direct mechanism for that to take place. You can't take money that you make from an ETF and rotate that into ETH or Solana or SWE or whatever. It just, again, there's no direct connection there. So you're forgetting that a lot of the money, you know, a lot of what's driving the Bitcoin dominance is like micro strategy, you know, and the Middle East. And like that money isn't coming into alts.

19:50That money is staying in Bitcoin. And so that's why Bitcoin dominance, like if you look at this Bitcoin dominance chart here, it looks very different. Oops. It looks very different than previous cycles, like previous cycle, like the last cycle, which is sort of this box right here, starting in the 2018 cycle low going to the 2021 cycle peak, Bitcoin dominance was all over the map. Like it peaked twice and, you know, swung wildly, you know, it got as low as 50%. And then it went as high as 70%, came back down to 50 something percent again, again, back up to 70. And then just through the floor nuked all the way down to 39 when sort of DeFi summer and ETH took off and NFTs took off and all this stuff took off.

20:31None of that is happening this time around. Like literally none of it is happening. Yeah, sure. We have memes, but that's not enough. The meme sector isn't enough to break this pattern here, to break this run. And so, you know, what we're seeing now, this is sort of the new paradigm of Bitcoin dominance. It's just straight up and to the right compared to this wild, you know, hugely volatile sort of fluctuating dynamic that it had the last cycle. And the previous cycle, too, there's a little bit of price history from that. But it, too, was all over the map, too, in 2017 and everything. So if you look, Bitcoin dominance doesn't look anything like that anymore.

21:09And yes, I know the ETFs didn't come along until around this period here. But still, I think, if I'm not mistaken, I need to go back and double check. But this trend sort of broke. this was right around the time that Ethereum sort of changed its upgrade process. It moved into the layer two, this sort of fractured model where it has layer twos and the incentive mechanisms within the Ethereum ecosystem completely changed at this point. And ever since then, ETH has been kind of down only in terms of dominance and Bitcoin has done the complete opposite. And so I'd have to go back and look exactly, but I know it was right around this time that ETH fundamentally changed and everything else changed too.

21:57So I don't think we're going to see something like we got last time around. I would be surprised if Bitcoin dominance even tops at all. You know, I don't know if it'll just kind of keep grinding up towards 70. Maybe it'll go even higher. But again, there's so much going on that's different this time around. There's so many more alts coming out. There's so many more alt tokens or just crypto assets, whatever. There's literally thousands, if not millions more assets. Whereas back here in this time, there was only a few thousand like total, you know? And so now everything is so heavily diluted and everything is sort of taking market share away from everything else in terms of the alt market.

22:36Meanwhile, Bitcoin is just like plodding along. Like everything's great. It's got plenty of money coming in. It's doing what it needs to do. You know, every big, big institutions, big nations are buying it. And that's why I think that we're just going to see a very selective, not alt season, there will be art, like I just showed a few minutes ago, there are some alts that are doing better than Bitcoin. And I do think that that will continue, but I don't think it's gonna be this broad-based alt season like we talk about. I think you need to be very, very selective and don't just assume that because XYZ alt that you're holding has all this sort of fundamental promise that they're gonna go change the world somehow, that that's going to have any impact on price whatsoever.

23:20You know, like I think if it's not got the hype right now and it's not being talked about on crypto Twitter all day long and, you know, speculative hype, speculative buying is taking place, then it's not going to do well. It's just not. That's not to say that at some point down the road, it will become a decent investment. But right now today for the next six to 12 months, you know, I think Bitcoin is the story outside of whatever, maybe 20, 30, 40, give or take alts, maybe. And surprisingly, a lot of those are meme coins, you know, which is sort of funny too. Because again, it's all about hype.

23:56It's not really about fundamentals. And so you got to just be really selective about what you're in, you know, kind of throw your bias out the window in terms of why you think you're holding it and just look at what's doing well and what's not. And it doesn't matter if it's a meme, it doesn't matter if it's an RWA or a D-PIN or whatever, if it's got hype, if it's got buzz, then it's going to do well. And if it doesn't, then the fundamentals don't matter. Very well said. So let's move to a new ecosystem. We got this question early on from Chris on our website. How is SUI vs. Deep looking? I'm looking to take a large position in the SUI ecosystem.

24:34So I'm trying to DCA over the next 14 days to catch the back end of the 60-day cycle dip, but considering what split between the two is sensible. So yeah, I think he just wants us to compare those two for him so he can get a good idea. Well, let's see. So this is Deep versus Swee. So Swee's the denominator here. So Deep at the moment is in a daily downtrend, but sort of looks like it's bounced here at the bottom, at the bottom of the bands, also at the bottom of the sort of 20-week moving average. and seems to be in the process of reversing this trend so it's like yes it's in a downtrend but maybe it's got the momentum at the moment um but you can see largely uh if if you kind of just track this overall deep has been outperforming sweet you know it's it's it's in this kind of channel a little bit like if we kind of draw some lines here you know it's in a slightly it's setting higher highs uh i'm sorry higher lows and slightly higher highs not not quite the same but like you know kind of like this something along these lines so yeah uh generally deep is trending upwards against sweet and so probably you know now is a decent time to rotate if that's what you're going to do uh based on this bounce here off this 20-week moving average so but i mean it's you're you're what we're seeing notice this big sort of oscillation we're seeing so basically swee is just imagine swee just kind of like if you will kind of plotting along up the middle of this of this oops of this channel so like this is what swee is doing like this and by holding deep you're gonna just ride it way you're gonna oscillate way up and down above and below it.