Trading the Markets: August 27, 2025 | Kris Bullock and Nico Brugge

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0:36Welcome back to Trading the Markets. Your eyes do not deceive you. It is I, Nico Bruga. Bijan is on vacation, so you are all stuck with me. Chris, welcome back from your travels. How was it? Thank you. Yes, it was amazing. I had a lovely time in Canada. Got to meet tons of Real Vision members. Made, you know, really great connections with a number of them. And, you know, that we'll continue to talk going forward. So it's always nice to meet new friends. It's always nice to meet members of the larger Real Vision community. And of course, Canada was amazing. Everybody was so friendly and welcoming.

1:09Just stunning scenery. I mean, you just can't go wrong with Canada, I feel like. And I had a great time. So yeah, everything was awesome. So lovely to hear that. In other news, we are finishing out our Ready, Set, Connect campaign, which closes at the end of the month. You can join the Connect tier where you get exclusive access to Chris Bullock's portfolios on crypto, as well as Joe Bland's on macro. You can go to realvision.com forward slash ready, set, connect. Do it. You won't regret it. All right, Chris, I'm seeing green all over my feed today, so I'm feeling super optimistic. Let's see if that maintains itself through this conversation.

1:52But where did you want to start today? So, yeah, we're going to start with Bitcoin, of course, since kind of everything revolves around Bitcoin. It is green today. We are, I think, bouncing. We're having a bit of a reflexive bounce from a bit of an oversold condition. But I do think that's going to be a little short-lived, unfortunately. I'm still calling for additional downside. I don't think it's anything to worry about. I talked about it much more in depth on our Monday show. But, yeah, I think that, you know, I called for downside on Monday. We got that downside. In fact, you know, here was Monday, big red.

2:25Monday was ugly, for sure. We did actually come a little bit further down on Tuesday, but ultimately finished the day out green. This, having a big wick to the downside, is a good signal of kind of a reversal pattern, a swing low, if you will. And we've, you know, gone up and exceeded that now today. Although it's a bit muted today. And so what I'm looking at, I think we do have a bounce back up into this sort of 115, 116 range in the cards. And this white line is sort of just a gauge of what I thought the market might do. You know, I drew this line back on August 20th, just kind of predicting what I figured would play out over the coming weeks.

3:04And it's not quite following that exactly. But I do still think that, yeah, we've got to bounce back up. And then I think we're going to come back down a little bit more, possibly into this 106, 108 range sometime in December. and that's also further supported by like this heat map right now, this liquidation heat map, basically kind of saying the same thing. We've got a big pocket of liquidity up in this sort of 117, 118 range, which is right what I just showed on that previous chart. And then we've got another pocket down here at around 108. And I think, you know, we're bouncing back to the upside in the moment.

3:38Market makers are going to sort of capture this liquidity and then likely bring it back down. Not a big deal in the long run. This is, again, what we're expecting. This is kind of just part of the cyclical nature of Bitcoin. I'm still very bullish long term. I still think that everything is in play, you know, for Q4 and Q1. All good. But I just think that in the moment, we're in for some, you know, boring volatility that we all love, you know. So I think based on that, I'm still just recommending patience. I think if you're a long term holder, you shouldn't even be looking at charts right now.

4:10this is the kind of stuff that you don't need to bother yourself with. This is just the noise of the market. This is the short-term traders and the market makers just kind of doing their thing at the fringes, kind of making the price do the wobble, you know. But outside of that, the longer term is just well and truly up and to the right. And so everything is fine. And this is all basically normal. So if you're a short-term trader, this is great. This is kind of where you can get in and sort of have some fun and play the swings. But if you're a long-term trader, again, just go outside and touch grass and don't look at this because it's just going to stress you out.

4:45It's just going to keep you up at night. And in the end, it's not going to matter. And so kind of to dig in a little bit further, what we're seeing zoomed in a bit is right now, the major, not Bitcoin, but the major alts, the mega cap alts, I guess, if you will, that's where the big rotation is at the moment. We're seeing things like Ethereum continues to look amazing. Like here, let me kind of dig into a few charts on this and just sort of show what I'm talking about. So we're seeing Ethereum not even in a in a corrective phase at all. Like if you would look at Ethereum, you think, what are you talking about?

5:21Everything looks fine. The market looks awesome. You know, Ethereum looks great. Solana quietly looking amazing, putting in, you know, higher highs and higher lows on the regular. Pretty much everything in the top 10 right now is kind of crushing it. I mean, just kind of continuing on that theme. If we look look at some of these other top 10 ones, like ones you wouldn't expect, ones that people don't talk about. Like, hold on. I had this all dialed in here. Have you ever wanted to trade Bitcoin, but haven't dared try? With Plus 500 Futures, you can trade crypto without the hassle of opening a wallet.

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6:49Stuff like Link. Link is doing really well. Link is in a heavy uptrend. Tron. Tron also not in a corrective phase at all. B &B token looks great. You know, B &B token just poked a new cycle high like last week. Like even Doge, like it's a little, it's flat, but it's still like in a nice uptrend. Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid's another one that really caught my eye. Hyperliquid, if I'm not mistaken, is in price discovery? It is. So hyper, well, it dipped a little bit back down, but today set a new all-time high, Hyperliquid. Like the top 10 is where it's at right now. And so we're seeing that and that's showing, I know I'm kind of bouncing all over, but what we're seeing and how that's sort of manifesting is Bitcoin dominance is tanking.

7:35As we know, Bitcoin dominance has peaked and is bottoming out. But at the same time, others dominance is just sort of, it's kind of flat. It's not really, it's not doing the exact correlation. It's not doing this upswing to the same degree that Bitcoin dominance is doing this downswing. And that's because others dominance is basically everything outside the top 10. So none of those tokens, you know, none of those charts that I just showed you are reflected in this equation. So that means we're in the phase of the rotation where the money comes out of Bitcoin and into the large cap alts like your Ethereum, like your Solana, like your BNB and XRP and Link and stuff like that.

8:13And then from there, it'll ultimately rotate out into the others, I guess, the rest of them. And so I think at that point, we'll start to see this chart run back up. But until we see that, we're not there yet. So we're sort of in that second phase of that rotation. And then finally, that's further illustrated by looking at like this bullmarketsupportband.com website. We can see how pretty much everything in the top 10 is green. I mean, really everything in the top 20 outside of a handful are green. So this is showing us that the highest market cap stuff is really outperforming the rest of the market.

8:48And then as we work our way further out into the, you know, 20 to 40 and 40 to 60 and so on, we can see a lot more red in here and a lot less green sort of peppered in throughout. And so this is showing us that right now, the biggest amount of strength in the crypto market is really in the top 20, I guess you could say. And then it starts to get a lot more selective after that. And so what I'm going to be paying attention to is when I'm going to be looking for the rest of these to kind of flip back green. And for this number, right now we've got 46 out of the top 100 in the green. Not too long ago, this number was up around 60 or 70, I feel like.

9:23And so I'm going to be looking for this number to kick back up into that region. And then I'll know that like, we're really getting branched out and the money is starting to move back further out the risk curve into a more broader alt season. So that's what I'm seeing at the moment. But again, just everything's fine. Just be patient. Ignore the charts and go outside unless you want to trade. In that case, stare at the charts all day and be my guest. But that's not my jam. on this note Alfie Hollins in the Real Vision chat wants to know would have thought what we'd be higher by now having followed the liquidity narrative why so slow um I mean well liquidity has kind of actually if you look at liquidity here let me I think I have it on this chart so this is lined up let me line it up on the weekly and this is without a lag I've been actually enjoying looking at liquidity and Bitcoin without any kind of a offset at the moment, because we can see they're actually pretty well lined up.

10:28They've, you know, since whatever, going back to March, it's been pretty well correlated. And if we look at it in this moment, we can see liquidity has had a bit of a wobble. Like it's actually, you know, it's not correcting, it's having a sort of, I guess, short term correction in a larger uptrend. But we can see that, you know, yeah, price is a little bit extended to the downside, but actually it's following this wobble pretty spot on really, I think. And so I think this is actually pretty accurate as far as what's going on right now. And I'm, I totally get what Raoul and Julian are onto with, with the, you know, with the sort of leading indicator with the 12 week offset.

11:09And there's absolute merit to that, but I think it's important to also look at it without an offset because there's a lot of correlation to it. And I can go into a whole long dissertation about why zero correlation also makes a ton of sense. And right now, I see you're a 12-week guy, not an eight-week. So you side with Julian, not Raoul on that great debate. Right. Yeah, exactly. But in the moment, like I said, I think, again, there's merit to zero offset because, you know, right now it's almost perfectly lined up. So. So and also we haven't you know, we know or we don't know, but we it seems like we are getting rate cuts in September, but that hasn't happened yet.

11:48So, you know, there's still more liquidity to come that we are not seeing yet in the actual charts. That's something to keep in mind as well. This is an old deal, but a goodie, I guess. uh john san uh was wondering if we could take a look at the chart of polka dot which i saw on the market cap uh website was down on the day is it red it is red yeah well and in fact it's been red for um for a long time so let's take let's take let's take a look at polka dot um let me kind of zoom out here i think it's important to look at something like polka dot on a weekly timeframe, because we can see here that, you know, by and large, it's been in a extended downtrend.

12:37I mean, since the peak, it, yes, it has had a couple of periods of outperformance in both in Q3, I'm sorry, Q4 of 2023 and 2024. It had big runs, big, you know, where it went from what around three or$4 up to eight or$9. So, you know, what a three X it'll, it'll run up into a 3x but then basically it just gives it all right back and then it did another kind of 3x and then it went on to set even lower lows um kind of new all-time lows and it's been just hovering since then and then more importantly i think what i what i'm focusing on is just starting from like this year forward so year to date we had the big peak at the end of uh q4 last year and then when the market bottomed most of the market bottomed in april at this low here right here and um all of the things that went on to outperform reestablished new uptrends at this point.

13:30But we can see Polkadot didn't really do that. If we look at kind of this bull market support band, this clouded moving average here, we can see that really price kind of bounced. It got rejected off of this band and went on to set lower lows. And here it kind of poked above it for a second, but it was really more of like a false break. And then it broke down again. Now you could argue, yes, it's setting higher lows at this point. So possibly the bottom was in on this week of June 16th, but it hasn't really gone on to flip this band green like Nico, like you just mentioned. So on a weekly timeframe, it's not in an uptrend yet.

14:09And it's really struggling to establish an uptrend. It's not like it has broken out and set higher highs or anything. So it's not tracking with the rest of the market overall, I would say it's underperforming the rest of the market. It's I would consider this even to be a bit of a below average looking chart. So I'm not I'm not loving polka dot at the moment. And then honestly, if even more so if you kind of look at it against Bitcoin, it's even worse. It's just it's just kind of like drastic, steady down. I mean, down only like literally like and so it's like if you look at this you really have to ask yourself why why be in this as a just hold bitcoin i mean you're you're literally 10 times better off just holding bitcoin than holding dot right now and so why incur that extra risk and that extra volatility um you know by by doing this when when it's not even you know outpacing the class benchmark basically and hasn't been doing that since since really the the peak of the previous four-year cycle.

15:11I mean, and just to kind of put a finer point on it real quick, like it since the peak, it's down 96 % against Bitcoin right now. So that's, you know, that that's pretty stark. And so really, again, there's just no reason to be in this asset. And there's no reason to think, well, maybe this is the bottom and it's finally going to reverse because you could have, you know, you could have said that here, you could have said that here, you could have said that here. and it just can't seem to really break out and reestablish an uptrend against Bitcoin. So I just see no reason to hold DOT. I'm with you, Chris, especially after all of this time.

15:48I mean, DOT was definitely a hot altcoin back in the last cycle, and it's had a ton of time, obviously. It's been four years since then, and nothing has seemingly changed over there, including the tech. it seems very much like SWE is eating their lunch to a certain degree. I have to agree. 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. Already, we got a question from Jorge.

16:28So from Polkadot, we're going to move to Aave. Jorge wants to know do you think DeFi will get a new wave with older assets like Aave Aave definitely a different deal than Polkadot yeah I do I do I think Aave is actually a pretty solid bet right now and I do agree with that DeFi thesis I think that uh legacy not all legacy DeFi but Aave in particular is is outpacing because Aave is like the it has the highest TVL I think of any one of or one of the top highest TVLs of any DeFi project out there. It's by far and away a sort of class leader in terms of its tech stack and in terms of its performance.

17:07And Aave is not going anywhere. And so at the same time, I don't know that I see Aave doing a 10X from here. So it's kind of like you have to ask yourself what your sort of desired outcome, what your goal is with investing in Aave. Sure, it's going to be a good project. Sure, it's going to make money. I think it's maybe, and I kind of touched on this on a Monday show too, but it's a good example of a kind of an anchor asset in a portfolio that you might hold to sort of temper the volatility. Like we know that it's going to go up. We know that it's going to be a reliable, steady gainer. We know that it's going to be a pretty safe investment, but also at the same time, it's not going to be blowing everything away.

17:44It's not going to be the home run swing. So you would put that in there to kind of just act as an anchor to kind of mute some of your volatility and take a little bit of money and put it further out the risk curve. But yeah, obviously a good one for that. And yeah, again, it's not going anywhere. It's solid. All right. I know you wanted to take a look at RET. Let's do that. I took your advice, right? It wasn't advice, but I saw your analysis a couple of weeks ago on Lo-Fi and decided to rotate all of Lo-Fi into RET. So very intrigued what you're thinking here. So yeah, let's take a look at Rekt.

18:24It's had a bit of a wobble for sure. It was doing well. It was kind of blowing everything away. It definitely has retraced more than most over the last couple of weeks. It's had a bigger correction. You could argue that's somewhat due in part to the fact that it kind of was so far overextended to begin with. It was, you know, it got pretty overbought. And so it's going to generally when things get so overbought or so extended above their, say 20-day moving average, they're generally going to correct more than others might. And this is no exception. But we can see at this point, we're starting to see a number of signals, signals, signals, suggesting that it's oversold now.

19:02We have like a DMARC13 indicator here. We've got these bullish divergence indications flagging, saying that there's multiple bullish divergences happening here. So definitely, RECT is oversold at this point and is likely due a bit of a bounce. Now, where it goes, I think, you know, remains to be seen. We had a support level here that I had identified the other day on a previous show talking about that it actually has lost. I'd like to see it for sure reclaim this support level, which I think is likely to happen. And I think the most important thing here is it's still well above its 20-week moving average.

19:38It's still well above its bull market support band. And so it's still, the uptrend is still well intact despite this larger than normal correction that it had, you know, this sort of outsized correction, the uptrend is still well intact. And if we look at it on the weekly timeframe real quick too, we can see that it really is just kind of, it kind of came back down and touched perfectly on its 10-week moving average, wigged below it slightly, is holding support right at it perfectly. This is very common for sort of a, quote, larger correction to, you know, be a perfect touch on either the 10 week and sometimes even the 20 week moving average and then a bounce from there and so to me this looks really clean like i look at this this weekly chart i don't see a problem at all with this you know like it's it's totally normal it did this here earlier it had a wobble came back down touched its 10 week moving average perfectly ran back up for another stretch again came back down touched its 10 week moving average perfectly and you know we're likely juicing up for another run so overall i think wrecked looks good we know fundamentally they're crushing it they just had another drink launch that sold out within like a minute, I think, on the actual project side.

20:45So they're doing well. I'm not worried about Rekt at all. I think the chart looks good. I think it just got a little bit over its skis. We can see there's this huge gap here, kind of just like a huge gap here. And so not surprised to see this, but overall, I think Rekt looks good. Love it. Next up, the chat wants to know about Kronos, C-R-O-N-O-S. Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, I haven't, I've been a little bit out of pocket, so I'm not super up to speed, but I saw a headline, I think that the, what is it, the Trump world, somehow Trump got involved and bought a bunch of Kronos. I know I'm totally butchering that, it literally just was, yeah.

21:32That's the world we live in now. It was a headline I saw flash across my phone as I was walking through the airport yesterday. So forgive me for missing all the detail here, but I think it was something along those lines. And obviously we're seeing that reflected in the chart. For all I know, this green candle was the buy of them actually buying into it and isn't like a broader sort of reflection of broad-based buying. So I would be a little wary of this because it could give most of this back. Typically, when you see giant candles like this with mega huge outsized volume out of nowhere, nine times out of 10, it's going to give half of this back at least.

22:14And so don't go chasing this. It would be my first thought. What this means in terms of like the longer term future of Kronos, I have no idea. I'm, you know, I know crypto.com as an exchange. They're kind of they're not killing it, I guess, you know, to be blunt. And so I'm curious to see what the motivation here is or what's going to happen as a result of this sort of interaction with the Trump world. But I don't think it's Trump. It's not like Trump the president. It's like Trump's kids and whatever's going on. They bought a bunch of crow. And so that's what we're seeing here is that. I love that it's crow.

22:59Yeah. I really appreciate who decided to land on that one. The other one that the chat is buzzing about is Sweet, which I believe we touched on briefly up top. But obviously it is also in the midst of its pullback at the moment. It was one of the few in the red of the top 20. It was, yeah. It too has had a bit of a wobble. It's not keeping pace with the likes of Solana. But at the same time, you know, I think with Sweet, again, it's just you got to zoom out a little bit because, hold on, let me kind of reshape this. What we're seeing here is just this big upward, you know, sort of wedge pattern that, you know, is continuing to set higher lows.

23:44And yeah, it did break down just a tick, but I still think a breakout is imminent. I still think that it's going to be there in the end. You know, it's still in an uptrend overall. Yes, it's like the bull market support band. One of those two moving average did kind of flatten out, but it's still above its 20 week moving average. It's still kind of right at its 10 week moving average, if not slightly below it, it's, it, it's not much of a wobble. I'm not worried about it. I think it's fine. Um, and, uh, you know, I think that it's still going to bounce in the sooner rather than later. So, um, I'm holding it.

24:20I still have it in the model portfolio that we, that I do for real vision and I don't plan on removing it anytime soon. Um, like I said, I I still think that ultimately, I wouldn't even be surprised if it ultimately outperformed Solana when it's all said and done. So even though Solana's kind of killing it at the moment, I still think that SWE will be in the conversation. Just because its market cap is so much lower than Solana, it just has so much more room to go to the upside. And it takes so much less inflows to move the needle. And so just mathematically, it's going to be so much easier for it to run once it finally does.

24:55I totally feel you on that. um another one the chat wanted to look at was spx believe it or not um we can't go one week without mentioning it at least once uh well yeah so let's see let's take a look at sps real quick um i know the community is going to kill me for pulling up a chart so i'm not going to spend too much time on it but just um really yeah it's it too has had a wobble i'm going to kind of put it in the same category as um as wrecked in terms of it got a little bit over its skis too and it's been just so solidly outperforming everything for so long. And it's just been grinding up that it was ultimately do a bit of a correction, which I think we had here.

25:33I know some wallets got hacked, a bunch of wallets got hacked. And so there was some outsized selling to the downside. There also there was some liquidations that had that happened that caused some selling. So this is a little bit artificial and I wouldn't really put any weight on it. And I know, again, if you're in the SPX community there is no chart i fully get it but um yeah i'm not worried about this because you know because there is no chart so uh i think spx is still there i think it just had some artificial uh selling to the downside and so it's it's um yeah not a big deal and uh the other one the chat was curious about and i know it's not your favorite was xrp yeah uh xrp xrp i haven't looked at it recently oh xrp is absolutely in the conversation it's in that top 10 category that's outperforming the rest of the market it's you know well it's above its 10 week moving average well above its bull market support band um it's in a nice steady uptrend uh it's it's holding up better than you know pretty much everything outside the top 10 so it it fits into that chunk that i listed at the top of the show in that uh this is where the money is going right now And that's why XRP is, yes, it's down a little bit, but it's really strong.

26:49I mean, ultimately, compared to a lot of stuff right now. Love it. Got another one from the chat. Toshi. Toshi. T-O-S-H-I. It is the, let me get this. It's the meme coin named after Coinbase's CEO, Brian Armstrong's cat. Okay. I guess you could say it's the number one base meme with a huge community support. It's got a nice groove here. You know, here's the April lows. It bottomed, granted, it hadn't been around for very long, but it bottomed in April when everything else did and has gone on to set a nice steady uptrend since then. Yeah, not going to lie. I like it. It's a pretty, it's not like blowing everything away.