Trading the Markets: August 20, 2025 | Kris Bullock and Bijan Maleki

0:00It's August 11th and Ready Set Connect starts today. Two weeks of AI and crypto alpha exclusive to RV Connect. And yeah, I'm going to be doing a live AMA, so bring the spicy questions. Join before midnight for a 50 % off, plus a bonus pack with a secret video from me. Go to realvision.com forward slash 50 off or click in the link in the description.

0:30Happy Wednesday, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Trading the Markets with Chris Bullock, a.k.a. BlastoPlast. We have a great show in store for you today, so make sure you tune into the charts, take notes, and see how you're going to play this market right now. But before we get into that, if you're not already an RV Connect member, we have a great opportunity for you to become one. We are currently running our Ready, Set, Connect two-week series that is designed for this moment that we're in right now. It offers you real-world tactics at the intersection of AI, crypto, and macro to help you really discover or uncover a new trading edge.

1:16And you can join just by clicking the banner below and get up to 50 % off. And you can also tune in to Jamie Kutz's conversation tomorrow with Pondering Durian from Delphi Digital. And Raoul's doing an AMA on Friday as well for the Connect members. and you can also tune into all the other great content we've had throughout the last couple of weeks for Connect. So make sure you do that. You can get up to 50 % off. Just click the banner below, scan the QR code, join us in Connect. And you'll get access also to Joe Bland's portfolio, which is just doing such great multiples right now. And Chris is entry-level crypto portfolio as well.

1:58So you don't have to trade the markets. You don't have to worry about all of that. You can go touch grass, let Chris do the work for you here. His portfolio is up over 100 % since inception. So I don't think you'll have too much to worry about there. Chris, how are you doing? Happy Wednesday. Doing well, thank you. In fact, I was going to say, if you're new to crypto, please don't try to go trade the markets, actually. Just follow the portfolio, sit back, relax, and let us do the work for you. It's so much easier and you'll make so much more money than you will flushing it down the toilet trying to trade with with no experience it's it's really just that simple so so do that well said and honestly like and if you do or if you're one of those people that you're you have that phone on you do need to trade just maybe take like a little bit of money to just you know play around with it and enjoy but nothing crazy right you know just start with a very small amount and see if you can grow it and keep going from there that's always fun but uh definitely the majority of your portfolio.

2:58If you want an idea, check out Chris's entry-level crypto portfolio or Joe Blaine's portfolio for whatever's your vibe, and you should enjoy some nice returns. So Chris, we've got a great show. I've already got a few questions lined up from the Discord, and I think this one is a great one to start the show with because I think you have a few charts for us to go through that's going to really answer this question. So I wanted to bring this to everyone's attention because I know we have a lot of people in the audience that are in a similar situation as Paul. So this question comes from Paul T in the discord as someone new to the space and firmly a hodler and not a trader.

3:38Should we be worried about this dip? Everyone is expecting rip in Q4 that runs into 2026, but I can't help feeling that if everyone is saying one thing, expect the opposite to happen. But I'm just a newbie who's never experienced the banana zone and looking for some reassurance. Chris, what do we what do the charts have to say to Paul and everyone else who's in Paul's similar situation? Right. So that's that's a great question. And it's funny. I get the whole consensus thing where if everybody's saying one thing, it's probably the opposite that's going to happen. But you need there's a little more nuance to that.

4:13You need to kind of apply a little bit more context to that. There's a you know, and think about ask yourself, what is the reason why everybody is saying this? Is it, you know, because everybody is just, oh, the charts did this same thing three, three years ago at this time, or is there more to it? Is there more kind of meat on the bones? Is there, is there macro catalysts that are driving this price action and, and, you know, creating this, these, uh, the situation that we're in and the, the likely outcome that we're, you know, predicting and things like that. So always just kind of ask yourself, where is this consensus coming from?

4:44Because it's not always the same every time. And sometimes there's weight to it, and other times it's just a coincidence. And so you want to be careful with that. But in the moment, actually, what I want to do to start, and this is a perfect question to start with, is, and I know this isn't TA that I'm going to show you here. I'm just really going to show, we're going to start with this one indicator that just is the mega trend indicator. And it's as simple as red equals bad, green equals good. And I know there's not a lot of in-depth analysis in that. But the point I'm wanting to make with this is just to give you some perspective and look at a lot of these major assets and sort of see what we're looking at here.

5:22And so let's start with Bitcoin. And what we're seeing is, and again, this is the weekly megatrend, and it's green. And usually when the weekly megatrend is green, it's pretty accurate at gauging trend reversals and just general overall strength. And what I want to show you is that it's green pretty much across the board with all the majors right now. And in a lot of instances, even prices, in fact, above it. And really, Bitcoin is honestly the worst looking of the bunch in the moment in that it's technically below it. And we'll get into Bitcoin more in a minute with additional deeper analysis.

5:56But just looking at Bitcoin here, megatrend green. I'm going to kind of zip through the list of the majors. Ethereum looks fantastic. Not only is the megatrend green, it's ripping to the north. It's way, way above the megatrend, and it's very green. So Ethereum looks phenomenal, probably the best of anything going on. Solana looks great. Prices well above the megatrend, green megatrend on the weekly. SWE, not quite as good, but still green megatrend on the weekly. You know, XRP, green megatrend on the weekly. You get what I'm saying here. The point being, generally everything is just in a nice, solid weekly uptrend, showing a lot of strength.

6:36And this is really just a pullback, a mean reversion, if you will, back to kind of the center. And so nothing really to worry about overall. Now, that said, I do think we've got a little bit of wobble still to come. But I do think that at the moment, the market is a fair bit oversold and we're due a bounce. And so we can get into that in a second, Bijan. But I really, again, just wanted to kind of highlight that across the board, all of the major crypto assets and particularly alts, I think, are outperforming Bitcoin in this moment. And everything is generally in a nice weekly green uptrend. So there's nothing really to worry about.

7:13I know it's ugly. It's been ugly for the last few weeks. But honestly, everything's fine. I mean, really? Is the short answer to that? 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.

7:55be able to trade it in just two clicks. Feel ready? You can move to real money with as little as$100 once your account is approved. And the great thing is that in addition to crypto, Plus500 gives you access to a wide range of instruments. S &P 500, NASDAQ, gas, and much more. Explore equity indices, energy, metals, Forex, and beyond. With a simple and intuitive platform, you could trade anytime, anywhere. Experience the fast, accessible futures trading you've been waiting for with Plus 500. With over 20 years of experience, Plus 500 is your gateway to the markets. Visit us.plus500.com to learn more.

8:30Trading and futures involves the risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus 500, it's trading with a plus.

8:40Love to hear that. Yeah, I think Bitcoin dominance, we have been seeing it fall. ETH has been recovering very nicely. And Solana, too, for that matter. They just, over the weekend, they had a pretty big piece of breaking news for their ecosystem where they ran a test that had over 100 ,000 transactions per second. So I think these are all just bullish things happening underlying that may be not reflecting in the price action right now, but we're due. Yeah. And we can get into that here now if we want. We can look at some kind of zoomed in timeframes and talk about what I'm seeing in terms of things being a little bit oversold and do a bounce and kind of what I'm seeing play out over the coming days and weeks.

9:27And let's start with Bitcoin here for a second. And really what we're seeing, so what I've got now, I've shifted my indicators around. I've got a bunch of moving averages on here now. I like to use like a 10 and a 20 as is common. You've probably seen on a lot of the shows, I talk a lot about how the 10 interacts with the 20. But I went ahead and threw a 50 on here, also this blue line, and then a 200, because I think that's going to kind of come into play in terms of like looking at how the coming weeks play out, I guess. But in the moment, we can see here with Bitcoin specifically, we've had effectively a double bottom retest of this breakout level.

10:03Note we had this long line here that was this previous peak, this previous all-time high. We broke out, set an all-time high, came back, retested it, went on, set a higher all-time high, and we've come back down and we've effectively retested this line again. But we're starting to show a lot of bullish divergence flags popping up, indicating that a lot of these assets are oversold in the short term and are likely to abounce. and kind of what I'm looking at here with Bitcoin. Oh, also, I wanted to, with regards to Bitcoin too, let's, I wanted to highlight this liquidation heat map too. We've kind of exhausted a lot of the liquidity to the downside we can see here.

10:41It's not, there's no longer these like intense yellow chunks. Basically, we've basically broken down through all of them and captured all of that. And so really, you know, there's more sort of motivation for the market makers to take it north at this point and likely capture a lot of this around the 119, 120 range. And so I'm kind of looking at that here. And if we go back to the chart, that sort of lines up perfectly with, you know, basically Bitcoin kind of coming back up to whatever, give or take right around here. And then maybe kind of hovering around here for a little bit before ultimately coming back down.

11:20And then maybe even we might see it come back down So if we look at it right here in this range, what we're looking at, we've got multiple levels of confluence here. We've got this big cluster of sideways price action. I kind of talked about this on the Monday show, but there's just a ton of price action trading sideways right here. Likely the bull market support band or the 20-week moving average will kind of have made its way up into this range by this point. And then also like the 200-day moving average will have made its way up into this range by this point as well. So I know that, you know, we don't necessarily want to see whatever 105, 107 kind of prices, but this to me is kind of my base case for likely how this will play out.

12:04Now, there's a lot of things that can swing this. Obviously, we've got the Jackson Hole meeting coming up. We've got Jerome Powell speaking on Friday. That could change things, maybe, but probably not. I'm starting to think a rate cut is sort of baked in a little bit to the price at this point. But, you know, we've got a lot of other things potentially that could influence this. But in the moment, I kind of see this as the most likely scenario. And then I think we just bounce out from here in terms of Bitcoin. And then looking at Ethereum, Ethereum looks a lot better. It's funny, Ethereum really bounced hard to back up to the upside off of its 20-day moving average.

12:41It hasn't even come anywhere close to its 50-day, let alone its 200-day or anything. So Ethereum continues to look incredibly strong. It's in a strong uptrend still, and really effectively it just mean reverted here. It didn't even break down or anything. I think that's important to note. Yes, it came way up here. It almost set a new all-time high, and then it's been sort of down only since then. But you have to remember, it was really far deviated from its 20-day moving average. And for it to just come back down to the 20-day moving average and bounce again, that's not a trend reversal. That's not like a bearish development.

13:15That's, again, that's just a mean reversion in an otherwise strong daily uptrend. So Ethereum looks amazing right now. You wouldn't even know we were in a correction at the moment, basically looking at this Ethereum chart. And then Solana, too, not quite as good, but still it's plodding along. You know, it did set a little bit higher high here than this previous one. It's setting higher lows. So it's generally grinding upwards. And I think, you know, showing a lot of strength, too. And yes, it did come down a little bit below its 20-day moving average, but not much. And it, too, bounced really strong out of it.

13:47And so we're seeing that across the board with just, I think, a lot of alts outperforming Bitcoin in the moment. You know, Bitcoin's only up not even 1 % today. And we've got ETH and Solana upwards of, you know, 4 % and 5%. And so I think good things are happening. I think that it's, you know, it's not time to panic. It's not time to sell. Please don't. I don't think that the top is anywhere close to being in. I think you're going to run the risk of, you know, getting left on the sidelines. If you try to play this chop right now and sell it, just kind of ride it out and we'll be fine. And even, you know, going back to Bitcoin, don't don't worry too much about any kind of a any kind of a rollover like this.

14:27This is still like if you look at this longer term trend line that we have, you know, going back to the beginning of the cycle, even with a correction like this, if it does play out, we're still nowhere even really close to this longer term trend line. We're still, you know, well deviated above it. And this is just kind of healthy ebb and flow price action. You know, I get that we all want it to just rip to the moon, but, you know, markets don't work that way. You got to take the bad with the good sometimes. And in the moment, we're in the bad phase. And that's OK, because even in that sense, I don't think it's that bad.

14:59So I think we're good. Just buying opportunities as I see them. Exactly, exactly. And don't panic like two weeks from now when suddenly we're at, you know, 105, please. Like, just know right now today, I'm telling you this. If we're at 105 in three weeks from now, you should have been expecting it. And you should be mentally preparing for that right now today. So, yeah. Well said. All right. I want to head over and highlight a trade from our hive mind on our trade ideas on our platform. and just a reminder you can sign up for connect right now and check out some of these trade ideas uh checks from j swans is up i mean look at that guys it is up what is it 70 percent already um so j swans input this trade and here is why i think i'm just going to take some highlights from his uh his little thesis here on checks obviously do your own research but i mean proof is right there.

16:05He's up 70 % already. Chex brings, according to J. Swan's Chex brings real estate, commodities, and other real world assets on chain. Clinti's AI delivers real-time analytics for data-backed investment decisions. And Chex's multi-chain staking without KYC, that's coming soon, apparently. So that's pretty, I love that. And then they're targeting, they have a bullish target of$10 trillion market cap or$10 trillion by 2030. So go ahead, check out that trade from Jay Swans on checks and also check out all the trades on our trading platform. You can search by leaderboard, see who puts in good trades, follow them, put notifications on whenever they input a trade so you don't miss it.

16:57And maybe you can get some of these gains because we've had some real runners in the last couple of months. Chex obviously comes to mind, but SBET was a huge one that people were inputting on the platform. So check those out. And then for me, I just want to mention, I'm sounding like a broken record here, but I want to mention RektCoin again. They literally just sold out again in record time with their base collab, their base lime RektRink collab with BaseChain. They sold out in, I think it was under one minute. So these things are just proof for me. So I think I'm so bullish on RektCoin, so much higher.

17:37And then if you have a little spare change after a RektTrade, maybe check out some Pengu as well. Maybe you can try farming on the abstract ecosystem because there's an interesting drop coming up potentially soon there. So that's where I will throw it for you guys. Now, Chris, I actually want to take this question from... Alex on the RV website. A coin that I don't think we've ever talked about, or maybe we have, but not very memorable. But what are your thoughts on Filecoin? Looks like a top decentralized storage project that performed really well in the 2021 cycle. Are all-time highs possible this cycle, or am I being delusional?

18:23Many thanks. Well, let's take a look.

18:29I haven't looked at BioCoin in a hot minute, so let me see.

18:36Well, boy, my first thought is no. And so the reason I'm saying that is because, well, one, the all-time high is all the way up here at, you know, what is this,$237. We're now at$242. Well, a couple of things jump out. So first of all, I like to compare things. I like to look at things in terms of like, where is it from the beginning of this current four-year cycle? And that current four-year cycle started in January of 2023. So let's mark there and just see where we're at. So in fact, since in this entire four-year cycle, Farcoin's down actually 20%. 100%. Really nothing should be down since the beginning of January 2023 in this four-year cycle.

19:25Like nothing should be down against USD. I mean, even Bitcoin is up like, I mean, what is it? Five, six X or something, I feel like. So I feel like given the fact that not only has it not made gains, it hasn't tracked with the rest of the market. It's basically in a long-term downtrend on its USD pair. Um, yes, it's had a couple of periods of short outperformance. You could argue even in, in the end of 2023 into the beginning of 2024, it did well for like a quarter maybe, but really it just turned around and gave all that back. And then it had a shorter bump and, and immediately gave it all back.

20:02But not only did it give it back, it went on to set lower lows and lower all time lows. And, um, I don't think anybody really, you don't want to be in anything that is in the negatives, uh, in this current four-year cycle. And so what this tells me is that the market doesn't see this as a good investment. I mean, regardless of what the technology is, regardless of what the potential is, kind of it doesn't matter if Filecoin ends up taking over the world from a project standpoint. But for whatever reason, the crypto market, the people that invest in crypto don't see this as a good investment. And so I personally wouldn't touch this with a 10-foot pole basically just by looking at this chart alone.

20:41It just doesn't, this tells me that it just doesn't have a bid. People don't want to buy it. And so, yeah. And I'm sure if we looked at the Bitcoin pairing, it would be 10 times worse, which we don't even need to do. I mean, if it's in the negatives against the dollar, it's going to be that much worse against Bitcoin. And so I just don't see any reason why you would want to be in this asset. Yeah, well said, James. So there's your there's I think some data you can glean from there. Two major things on Filecoin. It's not up against Bitcoin and it's not up against the dollar. Two major reasons for to answer your question why you might be delusional.

21:22I mean, yeah, it would have to do like 100x basically to get back to its all time high. And I just don't. Yeah, that's that's not a thing. Did you wait? I'm sorry. Can you repeat that number? Can you repeat that number again? Like 100x. Oh my god. Yeah, James, cut it. If you have Filecoin, get rid of it. Go get some Rectcoin, like I liked for that trade before. All right, let's do one more from Petra here on the RV website. I would like to hear your thoughts on Wormhole's W token.

22:06um do we know the symbol for that i don't know if i know this is it just oh wormhole w okay um

22:17that doesn't look great either um it almost i i don't actually i'm not super familiar with this token but just looking at this price action it looks like something that was maybe uh you know a VC token that sort of launched at too high of a valuation. And so the people that when this launched, there was already people that bought in in a pre-sale that were up 10x and sold and have basically just been taking profits all the way down. And so it maybe have bottomed here. This is a decent bullish divergence flag on the weekly timeframe. And so this could have been the bottom and it could be bouncing, but it's far too early to tell.

22:52I feel like still it needs to like, it needs to reverse this weekly trend and resume back to the upside. So I wouldn't be buying this right now, but I do like the volume. It's decent volume. So it's got people's attention. But we still need to see a little bit more constructive price action. We need to see additional higher highs set, like looking at, you know, this kind of level. Let's see, you draw a little line here. But like, it's got to get above this line, this 11.7 cents, and and kind of flip that to support and continue bouncing. I think if it can do that and start setting higher highs off of this 11.7 level, then maybe that could be a buy.

23:30But right now, I wouldn't be in it. And if I was in it, well, yeah, I would have sold it a while ago. But it's a little bit ugly at the moment. Thank you for the question, Petra. And James, thank you for your earlier question on Filecoin. Actually, let's take this last one from Jorge. Hey, this was a coin we had discussed once or twice a while ago. Do you think Casper will pick up the pace again? That's a tricky one, too. Let's take a look at that.

24:07That one, it's like it did incredibly well for the first part of this four-year cycle and then just hasn't really been able to recover since it peaked. Let's see.