Gold Is Outperforming Bitcoin - Can It Continue? | Trading The Market: August 12, 2026

22:21Kris Bullock:So a quick break in your regular programming. If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called Prepare for 2030. I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible. And this guide will help you navigate what's coming. The link is in the description. Download it now.

22:38Bijan Maleki:We can, of course, talk about the on-chain activity and the usage. And that's not really doing much either. But again, And to be fair, it's not like Solana or Ethereum are in major uptrends in that regard either. So I don't know. For me personally, I just look at these and I kind of just, I go with what the chart tells me. With any crypto assets right now that I'm going to be invested in, it just has to be in an uptrend. Otherwise, don't hold it. I mean, period. Like I said a minute ago, you have to be tactical. You have to be mercenary. We need to move away from the idea of just this blind faith that someday, whatever, whether it's SWE or NIR or Solana or whatever, I'm not singling anything out, but it's going to be at, you know, it's going to do a 10x from here or 100x from here.

23:27Bijan Maleki:Like, I think you're those days of operating in the crypto space like that are not over, but it's become more and more challenging. And so you have to again, you have to be tactical. You have to play the charts. and right now the chart isn't giving me anything with SWE. So because of that, I wouldn't be holding it. And so, you know, I know, okay, let me say that it's not lost on me, obviously, that a lot of you are holding SWE and have been for a long time and have written it down quite a ways. And I get that. And I'm not saying that. So that's why I'm saying I don't think SWE is dead. I don't think it's any more dead than anything else, you know.

24:07Bijan Maleki:So I just think that it's going to take a while for the market to kind of come back around and for a lot of these layer ones to ramp back up and for activity to ramp back up. And we'll see how it shakes out. I don't know how it's going to shake out. I can't tell you.

24:25Kris Bullock:I think what a lot of people have a tough time reconciling with or just even understanding it, right? The technicals obviously show one thing. but like for for i don't even know how long we've been talking about that the underlying macro is like building up and it's bullish right in solana's case for example you have money graham that's running a node now on solana you know black rock what uh not fidelity what's um citadel and all of these that are actually like building auto watch i don't know don't quote me on citadel but like a lot of firms are actually building on solana but we have we're not seeing that in the price action And then you take on the other side, you take the agentic economy stuff and that's sweet and nears like bread and butter.

25:08Kris Bullock:And that's what they're focusing on is capitalizing on the agentic economy. Gentic economy, as we talked about on Monday, is like rearing up. It's like super bullish. It is ready to explode, essentially. But we're not seeing that with those either. So like, I think that's also another thing that people are like, just kind of confused about, you know, it's like, all of this great stuff is happening, but I'm not seeing it in the chart. And it's like, what gives? Why not? And I think that's a question on a lot of people's minds these days.

25:37Bijan Maleki:yeah no i think you're spot on i think another thing to keep in mind too is like sweet at the moment is also inflationary there's still you know token overhang there's unlocks coming um and there's not as far as like the sweet token again it doesn't you know they're not generating massive fees and burning it and you know doing buybacks and uh or yield heavily and giving back to the token holders like a lot of things so like those dynamics don't exist for And because of the fees being so microscopic on SWE too, I'm not sure how that ultimately plays out. Like there's, it's not like you have to buy even like Ethereum back in the day when you needed to have a bunch of ETH on hand just to pay for gas, to pay for transactions and stuff like that.

26:21Bijan Maleki:Transactions on SWE are, I mean, they might as well be free. They're virtually free. Free zero, yeah. And so like, where's the need to own or have SWE outside of just for speculative reasons, I guess, you know, like there's no mechanical reason to own it.

26:40Kris Bullock:So I don't know. I mean, I see what they're doing with the near zero fees, right? Their idea is capturing the agentic economy. And their thinking is, well, if we have millions upon millions of agents transacting on SWE doing millions upon millions of transactions, those near zero fees are going to add up. And if you are having agents on networks, a fee structure like ETH is just impossible to use something like that. Because imagine you have an agent making a call and then you have an agent buying, that's two separate transactions. God knows how much gas fees you're going to pay in that. So I do see the value.

27:21Kris Bullock:It's just I don't think the agents have come yet. And that's, I think that's, that's, that's the problem.

27:26Bijan Maleki:Right. So. Exactly. Exactly. You're, you're spot on there. And, and I mean, you know, as always, I, I'm, I'm rooting for those guys. It's a really good team. I think they're doing good work. I think they've got good ideas. But it's just, you know, we'll, we'll see. And, you know, I say a lot of the, a lot of the same stuff I'm talking about here, it could be applied to ETH. I've said the same thing about ETH being great tech, but kind of a terrible investment at the moment, you know, Like, and I don't see it for the same reasons. I don't see a reason to be holding ETH either at the moment. And so I'm a little bit down on.

28:01Bijan Maleki:Sorry, go ahead. Yeah. I was just, I'm just kind of down on layer ones as an investment in general right now. You know, the only one that's got me a little peaked and it's still early days is that new hyperliquid competitor that's going to launch on Solana. that uh uh the the the jito product jtx i think it's called um that's going to be interesting because it's going to be running on the base chain so it's going to be doing all of these massive order book you know trading and and live you know major action on the base chain not on a layer two like like some of these other uh perp decks and stuff and so that could actually create real demand for sui um i'm sorry for solana and so that's going to be interesting to see how that plays out, but it's not live yet.

28:48Bijan Maleki:It's still in beta. So I'm curious about that. I'm curious just about the performance of that too, because it's going to be, their liquidation engines and stuff are going to be commingled with regular meme coin traffic and whatever else is going on at the same time. But that's something that could generate real demand for the actual Solana token, whereas SWE and Ethereum aren't in the same boat at the moment. But yeah. Yeah. Anyway.

29:23Kris Bullock:Long-winded answer. You know what's interesting? I was like, as you were talking about that, I was just thinking about what the hell happened to the post-having pump that we had become so expecting. You know, we had it in what, the 2020 halving. We saw that pump in 2021. Same with the 2016 halving. We saw in 2017. Then we had the 2024 halving. 2025 came. I guess you could argue that the Trump bump is what kind of did it when it was it, but it didn't really seem like that was the halving bump. But I don't know. I don't know. This market really, you can make a plan and it'll laugh in your face.

30:09Bijan Maleki:It's funny. Like, let's kind of dig into that for a second, actually. So here's the havings. It's kind of this sort of thesis that I've had in my head for a little while now is that the havings played a little bit less of a direct role, as maybe people thought. The having absolutely does play a role in that it reduces the inflation rate. So the supply of Bitcoin floating around, being created every day does get dropped in half. But so really what that does is it kind of just serves to juice whatever otherwise underlying economic action we had going on already. So like if there was going to be demand, certainly in the case of like COVID, for example, this probably caused Bitcoin to go up quite a bit more than it otherwise would have.

31:00Bijan Maleki:because right around the same time, the supply dropped in half, like literally right here and then COVID rip. But that's not to say that had we not had that halving, it wouldn't have gone because we knew that the massive influx of liquidity from COVID and everything was going to cause it to move anyway. Kind of the same thing back here. The supply got dropped in half again, but there were economic reasons that caused this. There were less so in this range here. So like the having did cut it in half, but by this point, in the fourth having now, it was already being cut in half from a small number to an even smaller number.

31:39Bijan Maleki:Whereas back here in the beginning, it was a very big number to a slightly smaller big number, you know? And so it's not going to have each successive having isn't going to have as big of an impact in terms of its supply reduction. So that comes into play. But also just I do think that the overlying macro conditions have a bigger outsized impact on what the market's actually going to do than just the halving does on its own. So, yeah, kind of all of that. And, you know, as we've talked about, I've repeated in previous episodes how there wasn't really a lot of direct economic stimulus happening this for the past three years.

32:21Bijan Maleki:You know, there was that's why the market was largely flat for huge stretches of time. And really, were it not for just the ETFs, like, you know, the ETFs coming along in in like this stretch here and then kind of the Trump the Trump bump here. Outside of that, Bitcoin has kind of done nothing, you know, because, again, the economics weren't anything really up until up until kind of now, you know. And so with that in effect, it makes sense that this having would have had less of an impact overall than than previous one. So I don't know. That's just kind of my general general thought on how that picks out.

32:57Kris Bullock:Yeah, I'm sure the tariffs and the war and just the perception as well of, you know, the Trump family and their involvement in crypto has also absolutely not helped. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. So, yeah. Let's just take, can we just take a look at BNB and then we can move on to some AI stuff? So, yeah, BNB, it's kind of coming around.

33:31Bijan Maleki:Let's see what it looks like here. It had flipped its megatrend a little while back, but it's been still pretty, I guess, tepid is a good word to describe it. Even though it had done that, the 200-day moving average cloud had remained in a downtrend. But if we look, we can see that we had a bit of a bullish crossover back here in July when the exponential 200-day flipped above the simple moving average. And so So this is showing that we're starting to see a bit of a some bullish momentum, I guess, to the upside, which is good. And then but it's still not back over the level. It's really not back over the key level yet.

34:13Bijan Maleki:And of course, it's still in a pretty ugly downtrend here or rather not out of its bottoming pattern, I should say. It's, you know, got a red track line. It's still got red candles, even though the dots have disappeared. It's just not really it's not really reversing the trend yet. It's more in like bottoming pattern structure than trend reversal structure. I'll say so Yeah, that's that's kind of where it's at like if we were looking at some of these other charts in terms of like, you know How it broke down below its its previous horizontal range? Like Bitcoin and ETH and it has broken back up into that range so it's you know showing decent relative strength from like a like a structural standpoint which we can see too because you know it's it never got even as bad as Bitcoin did in terms of getting near its 200-week moving average.

35:02Bijan Maleki:But I don't know. All this to say, it's kind of hanging in there. It's a little bit stronger than some, but it's not as strong as some of the big outliers, you know, like Pump and like Hyperliquid and some of these other ones that we talk about. It hasn't really broken above its 200-day moving average, which I think is kind of the key line in the sand. Like if I go back to here, you know, a lot of the ones that we look at that are doing well are above this level here and BNB just isn't yet. Which is interesting to me because BNB does have buyback and burn. Also BNB has the whole, they've got that layer too, that whole blockchain that they run.

35:38Bijan Maleki:So there's demand for the BNB token. There's benefits to holding the token. So that's probably what's helping it do as well as it is. But also it's a big market cap. We know it's one of the biggest market caps in the space. So it takes a lot more buying and selling to move the needle with BNB than, you know, say Pump.Fun, for example. So like that's going to play into it also. I mean, it's a big, heavy, bloated legacy all really at this point. But I think overall, historically, it's still done better than most and probably stands to continue to do better than most. So yeah

36:17Kris Bullock:All right, there we have it Let's yeah, let's let's run. Let's end end the day with a few few the AI stuff that you wanted to look at so yeah

36:30Bijan Maleki:I'll kind of just go through the sectors Let's look let's kind of dig into the ones the ones that I got and then maybe some other ones within that sector So starting with energy because I have that at the top. I went ahead and went with Eaton So I had been holding Bloom, Bloom Energy for a while and Bloom actually, Bloom looks good. I mean, it kind of, you know, bottomed out along with everything else. It got hit pretty good. It had been in a downturn for a while, but it was really just consolidating. And I think Bloom stands to remain in the picture still. I think this is a good example of it here looking at this indicator.

37:05Bijan Maleki:It's like, yeah, it came down and bounced perfectly off of its track line, kind of held the track line green for the most part. I did flip red for a second, but it's on the way up. It's lost its red dots. It's looking to rebound. It's showing strength here So I like bloom. I think bloom is still gonna be in the picture going forward, but I kind of pivoted because bloom is a different type of product I mean bloom actually makes power generation equipment, you know, fuel cells and things like that Whereas Eaton, Eaton is more on like the mechanical switching side They actually make the products that direct electrical flow electricity flow and and things like that And so I just, yeah, I just wanted to kind of come at it from a different angle.

37:45Bijan Maleki:And I liked what Eaton was doing. I like the fact, too, that if you look at Eaton in this downtrend that we had, I mean, it really just, it wasn't even phased by it. Like, it didn't come back down hardly at all and look like it needed to test support at its 200-day moving average cloud. It really just kind of blew through that big correction like it wasn't even there. Like, it just pretty much treaded sideways the whole time. So I just liked the overall strength of it. I think it looked really good. And I like the fact that it's, you know, just continuing to plot along and and break. It's starting to break out now that everything is correcting and moving back up and it's starting to set higher highs.

38:22Bijan Maleki:So it it caught my eye. It looked like it just had the most relative strength really in this sector. And I liked what it was doing. I like the fact that Eaton is going to be a part of pretty much any data center build out in the world. You know, to some degree or another, they just they're so universal with the type of products that they make. So again, it just made sense to me. Moving along to optical. Optical has been really strong. Like, actually, let me pivot over to this for a second. So this is this chart I made showing the individual sectors and how they've been performing year to date.

38:55Bijan Maleki:And if we can look here, optical is this blue line, and it had a big correction. I mean, it blew up way above everything else and then just kind of, you know, went through the floor. Like we could tell it got way way overextended lost its first place fell below the whole rack sector and really just had the biggest correction of the bunch But coming out of the bounce It's also had the biggest bounce out like it's it's showing that it's clearly the most volatile But it's also got the most strength and it actually Regained first place over whole rack took it over and is back now at the top and is kind of again moving with just major major momentum right now.

39:33Bijan Maleki:So if we go back and look, I was like, I need some exposure to photonics and optics and interconnects for sure, because that looks like it's going to move. And if we look here just on the day, we've got one, two, three, four, like almost five assets that are in double digits on the day. So like this sector is just crushing it right now. So why did I pick Mphenol over any of these others. Honestly, it was a very tough choice and I could have picked any number of these. Now, to be fair, some of these are more speculative than others. Like AXTI is one that's been kind of ripping out of the gates really good.

40:12Bijan Maleki:Like it put up a 46 % week last week. And then the week prior to that out of the lows, it was up 27%. So it's been ripping, but it's also smaller. it's more speculative and it just, you know, gave me a little bit of pause. Another one, Lumentum is another big solid one that's kind of been in the mix and it also bounced really strong out of the gate. It had a 24 % week last week and it was one that was kind of right there in the mix. I almost went with Lumentum, but I just, I just sort of liked, you know, I liked what Enfinal was doing. I liked too that it didn't dip as much as the rest of them.

40:50Bijan Maleki:It didn't really lose its trend as much and just has showed better kind of stability through this correction and less volatility through this correction. And so I went with it. But again, I could have picked probably two or three or four other ones in here. And I'll probably look to add more from this sector kind of in the next round of buying, I think. But I had to pick one. I went with Amphenol. But like I said, any number of these would have been good. Coherent is another really good one that looks strong. But if you look, you can kind of see the difference. Let's look at this. So Coherent, this is why I didn't go with some of these because they properly lost their trend.

41:30Bijan Maleki:They flipped their mega trend green and they went all the way down and deep through their 200 day moving average. And yeah, they've had a big bounce. Like this one was up 44 % last week, but this is proper volatility. This is a proper loss of the trend where if we go back and look Amphenol, again, it didn't lose it. It didn't flip the trend. It kept it the whole time. It kept its strength. So that's sort of, you know, just looking at it from a technical standpoint, that's why I kind of went with this. So those are sort of the things I'm looking for and, you know, sort of why I'm picking some over others.

42:02Bijan Maleki:Moving on to semiconductors, briefly, let's look back here. We can see semiconductors also have had a nice bounce out of the lows. Maybe not quite to the degree of of optical or whole rack, but semiconductors compared to like these bottom three categories is looking strong too. So I wanted to kind of load back up into semis as well. So in doing so, I felt like Nvidia was a good choice. And it's funny, I talk about, you know, things not losing their trend where we can see Nvidia actually did. But we know, kind of like I mentioned in my note, We know NVIDIA is not going anywhere. We know it's the Bitcoin of this whole list, basically.

42:42Bijan Maleki:And I felt like it just made sense to have a decent chunk of it, even though I know it's not going to do a 10x. I'm not expecting anything major from it, but I do think it's going to be steady growth. And I think it's not going to be as volatile. And I think it's just going to serve as a good sort of portfolio anchor holding, you know, a good position to kind of stabilize and minimize some of that volatility and know that I'm going to get good, decent, positive upside from it. So that's why I went with NVIDIA. But I also wanted to get a decent one in Broadcom as well. Broadcom also lost its trend, not lost on me here, but it still remains strong and it wasn't terribly overextended to begin with.

43:25Bijan Maleki:And it didn't undergo as big of a correction and it's almost right back up to it. hides. So it just looked strong as well. And yeah, I liked it. But there's a lot of other good ones here. Qualcomm is good. These other two semiconductors, KLA and Lattice Semiconductor are both ones that I've held. Marvell is in the mix also. But they just, you know, they were, Marvell is a good example of one that was really overextended, big correction. And yeah, it's bouncing back up. I'm sure Marvell is going to do fine, but that volatility didn't sit well with me. If you look at this chart here, again, compared back to Broadcom, Broadcom looks a lot more like, yeah, I like this.

44:10Bijan Maleki:I like this just steady, steady, stable, going to keep going kind of thing. So that's kind of why I went with those. Moving on to whole rack. I wanted a couple here. I had already had a position in Arista Networks and Dell. I bought kind of starter positions in both of these back a month or so ago because they looked like they were just doing well. I mean, if you look at Dell, there was no correction in Dell here, basically. It barely even lost its megatrend. It came nowhere near its 200-day moving average cloud. So it was rock solid. And same thing with Arista. You know, it not quite to the same degree, but I mean, it it looks solid, too.

44:53Bijan Maleki:It also didn't really undergo any kind of a correction. So as soon as these really looked solid and a lot of these other ones kind of confirmed Megatrend switches, I kind of loaded up on these. So I actually, you know, double down and went into a more full size allocation with Arista because it's, I mean, strong out of the gates and looking like it's wanting to set, you know, new higher highs. So I liked those. I wanted exposure. You'll note that I didn't actually add any memory back in yet. I'm still looking at the likes of Micron and even like the DRAM ETF and you know SK Hynix and some of these.

45:30Bijan Maleki:But they're they're still really volatile and you know undergoing a pretty good correction and also like I've said, I still think that memory, the biggest gains have already been had in memory. I still think Micron is gonna go up. Micron is not gonna do a 10x from here. Micron is probably not going to do a 5X from here, like I say. You know, so I would put Micron more in the category of like an NVIDIA. Like we know Micron is going to be in the conversation and there's going to be heavy demand for it for the next five years or whatever. But like I got my big gain. I bought Micron first time back at around 180 bucks.

46:07Bijan Maleki:So like I rode this for most of this and I'm fine to take those gains and put them into some of these other ones that I think have more upside. And so that's why I'm not in Micron at the moment. That's not to say I won't get back in it or any of these other ones for that matter. There's a lot of good ones in this sector. We can see there's, you know, this one's upset. My super micros up 17 percent core weave is up 19 percent on the day. So this is another strong sector that I think will rebound and is rebounding. And there's a lot of good ones in here. But I wanted to kind of just, you know, go with stuff that I felt really, really solid with.

46:43Bijan Maleki:And then finally getting into the last couple here. I've actually not gotten back into chemicals yet. And it's kind of pretty obvious to see why. Chemicals have been, yeah, they've bounced out of the gate, but they've been just kind of flat, really. They're not really setting new highs yet. So I haven't gotten back into them yet. That's not to say I won't, but I'm sitting idle on that for now. And then finally, I wanted to, let's talk about the application layer here real quick. So a bunch of these are really small positions. These are all like at the bottom of the stack. Like I've got six positions in this category and all of them total combined probably make up about 10 % of the stack.

47:25Bijan Maleki:So it's kind of the more speculative bottom end of the stack. It's like equate this to kind of my crypto meme coins that I put at the bottom of my crypto stack. Like this is what I'm looking at in terms of these here, but I'll go through them real quickly. So Eli Lilly is one. We know Eli Lilly is not a small, it's not a small market cap fringe company or anything by any stretch, but I've just got, you know, small exposure to it. But obviously it's doing well. It wasn't phased by the correction either at all. Palantir is an interesting one for me because it's been in a downtrend since November of last year.

48:01Bijan Maleki:And finally it broke out, flipped its signal green, broke above its 200 day moving average cloud. and I just liked the look of that. I thought that that was a really strong signal and I'm hoping that it's going to stay green for basically as long as it stayed red and continue ripping. So that was the idea there. Some of these are pretty speculative like this Tempest AI. I called this one out. I made a note on the platform like a trade idea on the platform. It got stopped out because it, you know, basically peaked right where I entered, came back down, stopped out and now it's right back up where I called it.

48:38Bijan Maleki:So essentially I was like a month early on this one and it stopped me out, but maybe I should enter a new trade idea and see if it runs this time around. But either way, I kept it in the portfolio regardless and I think it's still gonna go. And then finally a few software companies and networking companies like Cloudflare. I just like the look of this. I think it's gonna be a good solid sort of agentic AI play in that it's gonna benefit from agentic traffic and then the same thing with Mongo database, which also, again, looks really good and looks like it's breaking out. And then finally ServiceNow.

49:13Bijan Maleki:ServiceNow is just a software company. They're like a SaaS company, but they're integrating AI into their products. They're changing their billing structure from per seat licensing to agentic AI usage and they've got a nice sticky moat. And so I wanted to just kind of take a flyer on that. Again, a very small position, way down at the bottom of the stack. But I think that this one could benefit too from, this could be one of the few software companies that benefits from AI. And now there's a bunch of other ones in this list too, that I think are good, but I'm not going to get into why. But yeah, notice too, I'm sticking away from the hyperscalers and sticking away from the big ones, because I think that I'm generally trying to avoid the spenders and go with the people that are actually receiving the money as opposed to spending the money.

50:01Bijan Maleki:Also, the revenue is going to be tricky with the hyperscalers in terms of how much money are they going to make from this AI stuff. We don't actually know yet. So I'm avoiding the big hyperscalers and I'm sticking with the picks and shovels. And we can see there's a lot more green in this side of things than there is just looking at the software right now and the hyperscalers right now. So yeah, that's kind of of where I'm at.

50:28Kris Bullock:All right, everyone. So we talked about crypto. We talked about AI, talked about the odds of clarity and a lot more. Thank you everyone for tuning in. We'll be back next Wednesday for another edition of Trading the Markets. Until then, let's keep the conversation going in the chats. Also, for those of you, I'm sure a lot of you are aware that are watching this right now, but our website has a new overhaul. Go on and check it out. Start posting notes, trade ideas, because you can get points that will go towards a membership upgrade or even a free membership if enough community members engage with what you're posting.

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