Trading the Markets: December 17, 2025 | Kris Bullock and Nico Brugge

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1:58It helps us grow and keep these conversations coming with the best guests in the world. Thanks a lot.

2:11Welcome back to Trading the Markets. I know I promised everybody last week that Bijan would be back, but the guy is closing in on a house. So, you know, congrats to Bijan. I believe it's his first house to own and far more important than looking at crypto prices at this time of year, though. Chris, you told me before we got started, you have a real doozy of a show for us today, it seems. Yeah, I want to spend some time looking at some charts that support why the cycle is likely not over and the top is not in. And I think I've got some interesting information here that is new and not stuff that I've been talking about and will shed some interesting light.

2:53So yeah, I'm excited to dig into it. Awesome. I got a bit of a sneak peek, so I can say the hype is worth it. So Chris, why don't we start in on the first chart? Yeah, so there's a lot of information here. And so bear with me for a minute. It's going to take a minute to get through this, but I think once we do, you'll see what I'm saying. So what we're looking at here, We've got the Bitcoin chart kind of hiding in the background here. This is the Bitcoin chart on the weekly timeframe with a 100-week moving average, this red line sort of hiding below it. And then over the top, overlaid over the top of it, we've got this indicator called the plus directional movement indicator.

3:32And that's made up of like this line chart here and these green and red, you know, horizontal bars. and what this is telling us, like think of this indicator as basically a gauge for buyer ambition, you could say. Like it ignores the noise and focuses strictly on whether buyers are successfully pushing the weekly highs up. And basically it works by comparing this week's high to last week's high. And if we're not making higher highs, then the value drops, then the line drops essentially. And so when we're at all-time highs or super high values, sort of euphoric trend chasing type values, it'll cross over this threshold here and we'll see, you know, a red sort of overbought, over euphoric indication pop up.

4:16And then conversely, when we're at the bottom, when the market has basically stopped trying to go up entirely, we'll see these ultimate lows here. And if you look kind of overlaid on the Bitcoin chart, you can see that these lows happen historically sort of at or near larger bear trend lows. Now, granted in 2022, it didn't quite happen at the ultimate low. We still had a little bit more price action. And then of course, we had this FTX flush out here that nuked it a little bit further, but it came off the back of like the three arrows capital collapse and the Luna collapse and all of that. That's when it triggered.

4:52And then here back in 2019, it basically triggered at the market lows. And then going back to 2015, it also started, it triggered initially, but then ultimately triggered again, kind of at the market lows. And if you look at this, you'll see that it took quite a while for the market to become fully exhausted, for sellers to ultimately become so exhausted that they push this threshold all the way down into this lower range. Like last cycle, it took 31 weeks or 217 days. So, you know, two thirds of a year, basically, it took from the peak for this to ultimately signal. going back to 2019, it took almost a whole year.

5:33It took 350 days before finally sellers were so exhausted that it triggered this signal. And then again, going back to 2014, 2015, it first signaled 315 days after the peak that happened. Now, if you go and look at here, where we are right now, it triggered basically 21 days. So we hadn't even really entered the bear market yet. We hadn't even broke down below the major moving averages yet. And already, this line had gone below this threshold. And not only that, it has continued down to the lowest level that it has ever recorded in Bitcoin's history. And we're still just a month off of the all-time highs.

6:20So this is basically telling us that this is signaling the most exhausted sellers ever measured in Bitcoin's history a month after we peaked from all-time highs, let alone at the end of a bear market, let alone at the end of major, major structural breakdowns and anything like that. So like, OK, what can we glean from that? I've been staring at this chart for a while, for like an hour, basically, looking at all kinds of insights. And so again, this is telling me that the market has experienced a massive, it's like a super accelerated bear market. And then to kind of support that, if we look real quick over here, we can see like the weekly RSI is also at or near bear market levels.

7:04Now, granted, you know, yes, at the bottom in 2022, it does sort of poke down below the oversold sort of the 30 level threshold and the same thing back in 2019. But you can see it's still hovering right now in this sort of range where it clusters at a bottoming level. And then the same thing here, like, yeah, it hasn't had the ultimate poke below, but it's still sort of at bear market low type levels, basically, on the weekly RSI. And again, we're only a little over a month off of the all time highs, even when we were peaking, you know, at all time highs, we were already trending well down on the weekly RSI.

7:43And so, again, this is telling us that we've sort of gone through an accelerated bear market phase in the span of a month, a month and a half, give or take. And right now we're sort of at bear market lows in terms of momentum, in terms of washout, in terms of sentiment, in terms of selling pressure, all of that stuff. Yet the price hasn't really collapsed. I mean, yeah, it's down. It's down 30 % off the highs. But back when it was doing it, you know, back when these signals happened, it was already down, you know, 60, 70, 80 % off the highs by the time we hit these sort of exhausted seller type levels.

8:27And so this is interesting to me. It's interesting to me that we're already at these levels. We're already so oversold, yet the price didn't fully collapse. And I think that that's actually bullish. I think that that's a sign that this is less of a long-term extended bear market and more something that looks like a mid-cycle type correction. And so the other thing is we're holding right here at the 100-week moving average. and you can see ultimately when this signal triggered back here, we were way below the 100-week moving average. Same thing back here, way below the 100-week moving average. And then not here, but ultimately here also.

9:09So I think that this is more a signal of, again, seller exhaustion. And I think that that carries more weight than the structural damage that has occurred on the chart. Like we know we've had breakdowns. we know it's broken down below the 50-week moving average and the 200-day moving average. And everybody's talking about structurally, we're in a bear market. And technically, yes, that is true. But I think there's some nuance here that we need to pay attention to. And this is telling me that the fact that it's holding, again, if we zoom in here, let me zoom in. So in this chart, the 100-week moving average is this yellow line.

9:48And we're holding support here. And this is telling me that, you know, it's holding here and we're so exhausted here that essentially there's not that there's not a whole lot more sellers to sell. You know, I mean, yeah, we've got those big, big OG whales out there. But like, I think we're seeing a lot of the selling that's already going to sell. And to me, it's looking like, you know, the the proverbial beach ball held under the water getting ready to pump. And I've got a couple other charts that sort of support what I'm seeing here that I want to talk about. So this one is what we talked about on the Monday show.

10:23And this is a chart you can pull up on CryptoQuant. It's called Spot Average Order Size. And these gray dots are sort of normal, average, order-sized price action. When we get these green dots, that means these are big whale orders that are buying and selling on exchanges. And then when we get these red dots, these are retail-sized orders. And so typically what you see is like, you know, everyday normal price action. And then as soon as something starts to trend heavily in one direction or the other, we'll start to see whales either buying or selling. You know, initially they'll sell off and they're ahead of it.

10:59They're the quote smart money. And as soon as they're done selling, then we see all the retail sellers kind of basically sell the bottom, capitulate at the lows, you know. And that happens all too often. And it's really a bummer. And I hate to see that. But this is showing exactly what happens here. And then once all the retail sellers have capitulated at the lows, then we start to see the big money come back in. Like if you go back over here and look at what happened earlier in the year, we had the big whale sell off. We had retail capitulate at the lows. And then we had whales start to start buying back in and start running the price back up.

11:32And if you look here, on Monday, we just had one green dot. We've had two more green dots in a row on Tuesday and today. So this is telling me that whales are stepping back in. We are starting to see whale-sized orders coming back in and buying back up. So again, this supports the idea that sellers are exhausted. When I go back to that last chart and show you that everything is heavily oversold and that sellers are heavily exhausted, this is also indicating that we are starting to see whales coming back in and buying and much less retail capitulation happening. So a quick break in your regular programming.

12:11If 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. And then if we look here, we've been talking about liquidity a lot, too, over the last weeks and months. And this is, I think, a really important chart, too, that I want to highlight and compare to previous cycles. So if we look at these sort of mountainy looking, this chart is basically global M2 year-on-year growth. And the blue line is the actual global M2 supply.

12:47And then the yellow line is the Bitcoin price. And so let's look at kind of earlier cycles for just comparison's sake. So back in 2015 at the lows, we saw year-on-year growth of M2 just really bottomed out. I mean, it went below the even threshold, went into the negatives. And you could see it on the aggregate, too. You could see a huge decline in aggregate M2 that sort of coincided with Bitcoin losing value. And then the same thing in 2017, 2018. Now, granted, it didn't fully, you know, nuke out like it did back here, but it did technically go into the red. It did poke into the red ever so slightly.

13:26And we saw also, you know, a rollover in M2 in the blue line here at the same time. And then same thing in 2021. Same thing, we had the peak, we had global M2 peak. We had the year-on-year actually peak way earlier, back in the early stages of February in 2021. And it just nuked and went through the floor. Year-on-year went way red again, way into the negatives as M2 rolled over into this sort of year-long bear market phase that we experienced at that point. Now look at what's going on right now today. This doesn't look anything like either of those previous times. Like the market has peaked already.

14:04You know, it peaked back here in October, November, I'm sorry. And yet we've ripped year on year global M2 has actually ripped since then and is going up. And we've actually set a new all time high in aggregate M2, even though Bitcoin price is going down. But if you look, we're not anywhere close to like the year on year peaking here or here. And we're not anywhere close to it bottoming out. If anything, we're actually setting new. we're in an uptrend in terms of year-on-year global M2, and clearly we're in an uptrend in aggregate global M2. So this is telling me liquidity is not only not slowing down, it's actually speeding up.

14:44The liquidity conditions are speeding up right now. So if you look at this, and then you look at the fact that sellers are exhausted, which we touched on, if you look at the fact that whales are stepping in to buy at the lows here, I'm not seeing the cycle being over that I don't know. I don't know about you. I don't know about you, but I'm not seeing the cycle being over. I'm seeing like a strange sort of anomaly that happened off the back of like the October 10th events and, you know, market makers kind of taking a step back and we're in a bit of a low liquidity environment with crypto specifically.

15:20But like this is telling me that sellers are very exhausted. There's not there's way more buying pressure than there is selling pressure based on what I'm seeing right now. Because again, we know this is telling us, again, that sellers are exhausted. And this here, oops, where's my chart? This here is telling us that whales are stepping back in to buy. So I can't help but be optimistic right now when I look at this information. Again, I don't know about you, but this looks good to me. So I, and then I, go ahead, Nico, sorry. Oh, no, I was just gonna say, after listening to all of that, how could I not be bullish still?

15:55I was going to joke with you that so we're in a bear market, but obviously not. Especially that last chart you showed us with the M2. So really, really great stuff. So, you know, and then that leads us to, well, what about the price action right now? Price action is garbage. Everything looks like, you know, looks terrible. Everything's going down. Everything's chopping sideways. We know there's very little liquidity on the exchanges. If you kind of watch the show on Monday, I went through that explanation a bit. And so right now, again, we're just in this very choppy, very sideways, very illiquid crypto environment.

16:33And I think it's going to be that way for a month, maybe two months. You know, I'm not expecting a big Santa rally. I even I even acknowledge the idea that we could see a bit of a, you know, cheeky wick down to the mid 70s or something like that. And, you know, a bounce out of there. I think any major dip is going to get bought. Clearly, that's the case based on what we're seeing from whale buying. And so, yeah, I would say, you know, if you're trying to sort of be active and trade this, you're going to it's a very, very risky environment for trading right now. The trade right now is to do nothing, honestly, because it's very illiquid.

17:14We've seen a lot of those, quote, Bart Simpson candles that are being shared on Twitter everywhere. It's just market makers going up and straight down. And, you know, and that's really what's happening right now. And so trying to play that is essentially, you know, pulling the handle on a slot machine. And so there's no edge you can glean from what's going on. And I really feel like the thing to do right now is to just kind of sit back and wait and enjoy the holidays and, you know, come back in January and, you know, wait for something to happen. Wait for the liquidity fountain, faucet, whatever, to really be turned on in earnest.

17:49Like we know that things are happening. We know that liquidity is coming in. Um, but, uh, it needs, it needs serious momentum and maybe even a bit of a, a sentiment catalyst or something to, to juice the markets in a, in a positive direction to really kind of kick on. And, and the fact that the market is so illiquid right now, any kind of sentiment catalyst that we get is actually going to result in a much bigger spike than maybe it otherwise would because the order books are so thin, it's going to take less money to move that needle. and we are going to see, you know, prices are going to spike in both directions.

18:23But in the case of a positive catalyst, of course, that means a spike upside. So yeah, I mean, I feel like don't read too much into it right now. Don't look at every little candle and wonder who's dumping or who's buying or who's doing what. Like, it's just noise. It doesn't really matter. Everything is, I think, really fine when you zoom out and look at what's actually going on. And so that's where I'm at. I love that, man. very positive news heading into the holidays. I also love, yeah, step away from the charts for like a couple weeks. Not the end of the world at all. Obviously, if something big goes on, you will be alerted.

19:04So step away, step away, you know, touch some grass. I'll do my end of the year TV, film, book recommendation on Friday at the end of weekly wrap up. so maybe some ideas you can find there but Chris, after that amazing nearly 20 minute monologue basically you just pulled a Rowl and a Julian that was awesome to watch YouTube, we got a question from YouTube

19:37EliBarackijohn7463 and you're going to love this one because of your t-shirt what about SPX? um what i'll say about spx real quick is let's uh what i keep coming back to with that oops is is the holders um and i think that this this says says it more than anything and so i i go back and i look at i look at holder scan and i look at holders over a thousand um holders over 10 ,000 and holders over 100 ,000. And SPX leads the charge in all of those. SPX is the top of the stack in holders over 1 ,000, over 10 ,000, and over 100 ,000. And that's actually big because these are big. It's being compared to a lot of big memes out there.

20:24We're talking the likes of Whiff and Bonk and Trump and Fartcoin and Pengu and Pepe and all of that stuff. And SPX is at the top of the pack and remains at the top of the pack. So this is telling me that like, there's people here that are heavily invested in this that have skin in the game. And I think the one that's really the most important is the$10 ,000 level. Because that's, you know, that's a lot of money for like a new retail investor who's going to come in, maybe is new to crypto and who's going to invest in a meme coin to put$10 ,000 in that. Again, that's a lot of money for a lot of people.

20:58And for SPX to have almost twice as much as just about every other meme out there at that$10 ,000 wallet level says a lot about just, again, people who are invested in the long-term outcome of this meme. So I don't need to look at the chart. Like the chart doesn't matter, as we know with SPX. To me, what matters is the conviction of the community. And this wallet metric here tells me everything that I need to know with that. I love that. That's fascinating. I actually had never seen this website before. I feel like an idiot. Can we actually just take a look for this while we're here, Rekt? Obviously not expecting it to be this high up.

21:38It's definitely more niche at the moment still. But just curious what their holders look like. Yeah, it's funny. I thought I had it on here, actually. I'm surprised I don't. Yes, so let's look. They're primarily on base, but it looks like they've got ETH2.

22:01So, yeah. So combined total, they've got 600 and about 615, 16, something like that. Holders over 10 ,000. Compared to SPX, we've got 28, about 3 ,000, a little over 3 ,000. So, yeah. That's interesting. The one that stands out to me the most is Pepe, because Pepe has like a really high market cap. Pepe is basically kind of right under the likes of Shiba and Dogecoin, you know, as like big, big sort of OG memes. It only has 31 holders over 10 ,000, again, compared to like over 3 ,000 in SPX. yeah so i wonder if one of those holders in pepe is still mando and uh osf uh could very well be they're one of those perhaps um we have another uh question this from crypticity great great username um chris what did what's your take on zora and aerodrome finance the concept and the coin um i'm not familiar with zora i'm not either but let's look at it i feel like i should be um well i guess i can't as far as the concept i can't speak to it because honestly i don't know i don't know what it is um the chart the chart looks okay though the chart is uh essentially holding up pretty well like it's off of its highs but it has a couple of d mark 13s you know a nine a 13 9 13 actually to a 913, 913.

23:44And it's held up well, it hasn't like, bottomed out and it's slowly reversed. It's, it's I see structurally, it looks pretty good. But again, I can't speak to it fundamentally, I don't know what it is. As far as aerodrome, though, I'm very familiar with that. And I am bullish on that. From a fundamental standpoint, let's look at its technicals here real quick. Technicals look a bit ugly at the moment, it's in the process of completing a DMARC9, It's at an eight right now. It's definitely trending down and not holding up as well as others. But I like Aerodrome because of its Coinbase tie-in, because it's sort of the de facto decentralized back end for Coinbase trading, for DeFi trading on Coinbase.

24:29It's all going through Aerodrome. And also they have mechanisms in place to accrue value back to its token holders. So that's another solid checkbox that you want to have ticked for an altcoin, basically. So yeah, it's a bit ugly at the moment, but I think that this one ultimately is going to have longer-term staying power. And it's just a matter of time, I think, before this one reverses. So I'm not going to say in terms of when to get in or when to get out, But I think, again, just fundamentally, this one is one of those that I would put in the category of an alt that's doing all the right things, so to speak.

25:07It's got major tie-ins. It's a legit business that's generating revenue. It's giving that revenue back to the token holders. Of course, it's got a tie-in with one of the biggest exchanges on the planet. So I don't really see it going anywhere anytime soon. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. I'll have to take a look closer at Zora as well. not familiar with that coin either. Anything else you wanted to take a look at before we wrap out the year, actually? You know, honestly, no. I think I can't. And the reason I say that is because I kind of come back to, really, price action is just noise right now.

25:46Like, I feel like we've been saying for quite some time that you should be in the positions that you're going to be in because you have high conviction in these positions and not because you are, you know, just sort of saw a tweet somewhere and thought, I'll buy some of that, you know, like you need whatever you're in in crypto right now. And I think this is going to be the same. This can be said for crypto going forward is the days of easy money where you just throw a bunch of money in a bank account and you sort of fumble backwards into into sort of, you know, huge wealth. Those days are gone.