Trading the Markets: January 28, 2026 | Kris Bullock and Nico Brugge

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1:11Welcome back to Trading the Markets. Bichon is on a flight. As you all know, a bunch of the Real Vision staff got stuck in Miami after the crypto gathering. Chris, I know you had a bit of crazy travel as well, but let's focus on the positives. How was your time at the crypto gathering? It was amazing. I would say even better than last year. And last year was amazing too. I met, again, so many great people, had really good conversations, really got to connect with a lot of people that I had been looking forward to. And it really sort of just further enriched my connection to this community. And yeah, I mean, it was nothing but positive, honestly.

1:50Which is amazing to hear, considering where the crypto markets are at at the moment. I know we're going to take a look at a bunch of different things today, crypto included, but where do you want to start off today, Chris? Yeah, no, it's ugly out there, honestly, in terms of crypto. I think I want to start with Bitcoin because it's sort of the center of the crypto universe, of course. So really what's going on with Bitcoin is a proxy for everything right now. Bitcoin itself, it's slightly net positive in that It bounced pretty good off of this major dip that it had last week. Last week was a big, ugly week in terms of weekly candles here.

2:28It was down 7.5 % or so. Came all the way back down to this major support line that I've had drawn for, well, months on end now. But it's been a nice bounce off of that. It's got a nice bullish divergence flag flipping. Literally, as you were talking, it dipped back down below this 10-week moving average, but it was above it a minute ago. So nevertheless, it's kind of hovering right where it needs to be. I don't really want to see it lose this level. I keep talking about 84 ,000 being my real major line in the sand, which is sort of down here at these wicks, at these lower wicks. I think as long as it can hold this level, you know, I'll remain cautiously optimistic.

3:08But at the same time, clearly we can see that it's not doing anything either. It's not like it's in an uptrend. It's very much just plodding along sideways. And meanwhile, while it's doing that, the majority of alts are bleeding out slowly at the same time. Some more than others. Some are just kind of flat. The majors like Ethereum and Solana and XRP and such, they're hovering around less than a percent down on the day. So they're not necessarily doing poorly. I mean, Bitcoin's not even up a whole percent, not even a half a percent at the moment either. So they're all just essentially flat. Meanwhile, some of the lower market cap alts, some of them are down pretty significantly.

3:49And I think that that's a pretty common theme that we're going to see really for the foreseeable future until we get a major sort of structural shift in the current liquidity environment. We need to see rates come down. We need to see liquidity come back in earnest. This ending QT and providing a little bit of liquidity through the banking system is helpful, but that's more just keeping things running. That's not the same thing as full-on liquidity injections coming into the system, all a 2021 COVID-era type scenario. We're sort of nowhere even close to resembling what that environment is. And so it's going to be a little bit until I think we get to where we need to be.

4:33And right now, all of the action is really in other asset classes. I mean, it's in metals, as we know. Those are ripping. It's in certain AI stock sectors. And there's lots of place that's capturing a lot of the attention right now. And I think that that's reflected in the alt space as well. So we can get into that in a little bit. But that's kind of the state of affairs at the moment. Yeah, it's obviously not where we wanted to be or thought where we'd be at this point in the cycle. But like you said, Chris, there's some still really interesting plays out there. If you step outside of crypto just a little bit, what are you looking at in that arena?

5:08We got some viewer questions. I want you to look at some tickers. But first, I wanted to sort of see what's on your watch list at the moment. Yeah, so there are a couple. Well, there's a couple of alts that are getting some attention lately. But it's sort of it's funny. It's due to their connections, if you will, to two more traditional trad fi markets. But let's let's look at Hyperliquid for a second. I want to touch on Hyperliquid. We can see that it had a massive week last week or rather this week, I should say, starting yesterday. It had a major, major broke out, just blew. You know, it had been trending down steadily.

5:42We had a DMARC nine here a couple of weeks ago, but it looked like it was just going to sort of keep going. And then out of nowhere yesterday, it broke out way above its 10 week moving average, which we saw Bitcoin again a second ago was really just hovering right at its 10-week, came all the way up and bounced off of the underside of its 20-week moving average. So huge reversal candle for Hyperliquid. This is because Hyperliquid launched a protocol on their platform. Hyperliquid is a decentralized perp DEX platform that allows you to trade well, perhaps, you know, on-chain. They launched a protocol that allows people to trade commodities, basically, like old and silver and precious metals and whatnot, on-chain, on Hyperliquid.

6:27And that caused a massive, obviously, surge in price. We can see, too, I want to touch on, not only did it create a massive surge in price, but in terms of market share, Hyperliquid came roaring back. Like it had been facing serious competition from the likes of Aster, from the likes of Lighter, and, you know, some of these newer DEXs that have come online more recently. And we're really sort of capturing a lot of that. And we can see Hyperliquid has come back to, it's a 26 % market share. Granted, it at one point had, you know, over a 70 % market share. But at one point in recent times, it was actually lower than Aster and Lighter for a brief period.

7:09And so we can see that it's reclaimed a significant portion of that, not to mention trading volume and open interest remain more than double, you know, in most cases, if not triple or quadruple, some of these numbers from some of these competitive products. So Hyperliquid, I think, has sort of reclaimed its spot at the top of the stack. It never really left it in terms of the quality of its product, but people wanted to go out and kind of see what the competition had to offer. And I think they're realizing that Hyperliquid is really the best offering this whole time. And so because of that, you know, because of this new protocol, because of the popularity of gold and silver, which we'll get into in a minute, we're seeing Hyperliquid benefit from that.

7:50And then a proxy to hyperliquid that also is benefiting tremendously from that is the digital asset treasury hyperliquid strategies, which we can see also just ripped. Yeah, it's down a little bit from its peak. Let me kind of switch this to a daily timeframe. We can see. So it, I mean, major, major gapped up. It closed last Friday. It closed at around$3.74. Monday, it opened at$4. Huge gap up. And then another big gap up today, though, it's given a fair bit of that back this morning. But Hyperliquid Strategies is also, again, benefiting tremendously from what is going on on the actual Hyperliquid platform itself.

8:30And then to kind of continue this TradFi narrative, another crypto asset that is doing really, really well is Kida, which – hold on. Let me find my watch list here. It's Kida, which is also sort of a TradFi adjacent crypto project in that it's basically an FX-enabled layer one that is angling to, I think you could say become... It's right under Tau, under Tether. Yeah, sorry. I got distracted here. No, no, under Troll. It was up. Sorry. Thank you. No worries. Here we go. Here we go. Kida. All right. Yeah, it's up today. So basically, what is Kida? Kida is a layer one. um it's it's designed to be a financial layer one it's designed it's like a trying to become like the preferred settlement layer for tokenized fiat and securities um and you know holding kita is essentially you could call it a levered bet on uh infrastructure becoming real institutional plumbing for tradfi on crypto what layer one is it built on it is it is a layer one it's it's only okay so it's its own bet in that regard yes it's a specialized layer one that is designed to be like securities compliant, you know, regulatory compliant, ready to go, ready to just trade real world tokenized assets on it.

9:48And so that's its major angle. And it too, like most crypto assets has been in a pretty significant downturn, but right around the beginning of the year, you know, it's, it's made some improvements. It's, it's caught some attention and you can see that it's been generally outperforming the rest of the crypto market largely since January. And so, and it's continuing, you know, it's up 7 % today, just like hype is up 7 % today. Meanwhile, again, most altcoins are down multiple percent. And this, we can see has been in quite a trend even longer than Hyperliquid has. It's been running really for the entire month.

10:22So, but again, it's all sort of due to its TradFi connections. Those are the ones that are benefiting. The altcoins that are benefiting right now are the ones that are these real world businesses that are working to bring TradFi onto blockchain rails, essentially. And that's why they're doing well and why the other ones are not, basically.

10:47So, outside of that, yeah, I don't know if you want to get on some questions, if you want to look at some other asset classes. We do have a couple questions. This first one comes to us from Jack G. what are your thoughts on graph ticker grt it looks like it's bottomed good time for entry uh heavy defi links and ai agent growth thank you great job as always uh let's see let's look at grt i haven't looked i'm familiar with grt i haven't looked at it in years i feel like in a hot minute yeah yeah yeah but i remember last cycle it was definitely one of those right um let's kind of zoom out and take a a zoomed out look because i'm not totally in the loop on what we have here so just from a technical standpoint uh definitely is showing some some seller exhaustion we do have a bottom here we had a rollover that that flagged sort of a a d mark combo 13 countdown so that's definitely very bottomy for sure in terms of being very oversold on the weekly timeframe, no less.

11:53So that's a good sign, I would say, but it definitely has a lot of work to do to start showing constructive price action. Like obviously it's been showing resistance against the bottom side of this 10 week moving average really since, I mean, going all the way back to, you know, May, middle of last year, it's not really shown any meaningful breakouts above it. Any breakouts have been short-lived, just a big spike up and an immediate retrace a shorter one here and then it's just been essentially resistance only ever since then so there's a lot of a lot of technical damage here we can see we can see these two moving averages are continuing to deviate even further apart which is signaling that there's even momentum building to the downside still so i need to see some of this wane before i would feel comfortable uh you know trying to catch the falling knife as they say also i'm not loving this volume profile, it's really just stayed flat this whole time.

12:52On any kind of a breakout, what I'm going to look for is obviously price needs to start having closes above, well, even just starting with the 10-week moving average. We need more than a couple of closes above it. Ultimately, we want to see this turn into an uptrend before I think I would feel comfortable with it. And we need to see that uptrend come with big volume spikes like we had here, like we had here and here and so on. So without even getting into the fundamentals of the project, clearly the market is telling us what it thinks about this asset. And right now, it doesn't value it very highly.

13:29And so, yeah, we just need to see some structural reversals and then we can go from there. But until then, I wouldn't touch it until at least we've got three or four or five closes back above this 10-week moving average with a volume spike associated with it. There you go, Jack. Next up, we got a question from Stuart R. He asks, hi gang, can we please take a look at ticker I-R-E-N? Thank you. Oh, yes. Iron. That's, yep. That's been on my radar. Oh, well done there, Stuart. Here, hold on. Let me go to this one here. Oh, this is a precious metal play? It's a Bitcoin miner. Oh, it's a Bitcoin miner?

14:13It's a Bitcoin miner, but also they're sort of pivoting a little bit into the AI space via hosting GPU power. Oh, interesting. Through their compute. Clearly, it's done well. I mean, and it had a pretty heavy correction here. In fact, I owned it briefly and then sold it because it looked like it was going to roll over. I kind of bought it at the wrong time. And now it's sort of right back up to my entry level here. But yes, no, this bounced, bottomed is right back up. The reason this cratered a little bit as much as it did is because it was caught up in the whole MSCI delisting potential threat.

14:53You know, everybody was talking about MicroStrategy getting delisted from the MSCI, but Bitcoin miners were absolutely every bit as much impacted in that scenario as they, too, hold more than 50 % of their assets of their corporate balance sheet in crypto assets. And so they were potentially going to be forced to sell Bitcoin in order to stay operational. And that had an impact on their stock price. So now that the MSCI situation is resolved, at least for the time being, the stock has resumed its uptrend and is, I think, going to continue to do well. um yeah so i like the look of this this this chart i think it's you know structurally good uh it's still not overbought necessarily i think it still has room to run and i still think that it it's going to be then it's going to benefit from the ai narrative in that it can pivot to ai compute uh as needed to bolster its its you know bottom line so yeah i don't think it's bad and clearly the the market says so too because the volume you know has continued to tick right back up it dropped well below its its uh volume average on the weekly time frame for a good chunk while it was going through all of that uncertainty with msci but again once that returned or once that went away the volume came ripping right back and is now back up you know at average or above average levels again so um i i generally feel pretty good about this chart i like the look of it a lot actually nice um all right we got a question um in the chat this comes from sibilan chris what's your take on tokenized gold such as pax g and xaut available on coinings coinbase binance and uh mex c during beast dc's downtime yeah i like it i've used it in the past I track it here regularly on my chart.

16:48I mean, it's effectively just, you know, again, it's like a gold stable coin, if you will. It's pegged to the value of gold. The only consideration with it, I'll say, is that it's a less liquid market, certainly, than gold itself is. Because it's tokenized gold and it runs on exchanges, its liquidity is fractured across these various venues that it's stored on. and um it's yes it's going to move with the price of gold but if you're wanting to move in and out of it in size for example um you're gonna get you're not going to get as good of fills you're gonna have you're gonna have slippage so while it's convenient because it allows you to keep your money in the crypto ecosystem and you know get in and out of crypto and into into gold easily um just know that it comes with some limitations but if if it's if you're not trading huge size with it.

17:42Or at the very least, I would say go on and find the biggest exchange. Like for example, let's look, we're on CoinMarketCap here. Let's just say PAXG. So what you do, go on CoinMarketCap and look at the market data here and find where the deepest liquidity is for it. You can see here, it's not that huge. Even on Binance, which looks like it's one of the biggest, It is the biggest exchange. Doesn't have a super deep order book. I mean, Binance is probably the best one. But outside of that, you're going to run into issues if you're wanting to move in and out of it with any big chunks. You're not going to get great fills.

18:25Even on Coinbase, it's just okay. So I guess keep that in mind. But again, outside of that, it's a good way to get in and out of gold if you don't want to take your money out of the crypto ecosystem for sure. Love it. We got a, this one comes from Suli's Hana or Suli Shana. It's a bit of a long one, Chris, so stick with me. I get that the OG who sold 9 billion of BTC and people switching out for metals is affecting the price of BTC, especially, but why when there are so many intuitions, including BlackRock, Blinks, et cetera, are buying in and using blockchain for their infrastructure, is it crashing so hard?

19:08Pretty scary. Is it better to just hold long-term, as Raoul always said, and once again, ignore the noise? This feels almost too noisy to ignore, especially with the increasing cost of mining and threat of quantum. Can you give us a long-term vision, Chris? Thank you. Yeah, there is a lot to unpack there. So the reason the price of Bitcoin and crypto, I think just as a broader asset class, isn't moving up or hold on. Let me back up. The reason like BlackRock and such isn't having as much of a direct price or impact on the price of Bitcoin is because they're doing everything through OTC channels.

19:49They're not buying on exchanges. You know, they're not going on and putting orders. They're not buying your BTC. They're not buying your BTC. They're not going on and putting an order on the order book, you know, the live order book on Coinbase or whatever and impacting the price that way. They buy behind the scenes and it doesn't really have as direct of an impact on the spot price on a day-to-day level. What we need for the spot price really to move is more retail. It's more retail interest, it's more liquidity into the system. And we're just not there yet from kind of a macro standpoint, kind of like I talked about earlier at the top of the show.

20:28That said, where do I see things going into the future? I still am bullish on Bitcoin specifically. I think buying and holding is probably the preferred strategy. Generally, that's the preferred strategy for most people anyway. I mean, nine times out of 10, buying and holding is going to outperform anybody who's trying to actively trade because active trading is much, much harder than people think it is. And so, So, yeah, I think anybody that is holding Bitcoin now, is it going to be worth more in a year or two or three or four from now? Absolutely it is. I think this is a little bit noise and it's easy to get stuck in this sort of downward spiral right now when you look at price action like this, when you look at the fact that we're in a bit of a bear market at the moment.

21:17But we have to zoom out and look at the things that like Raul and Julian talk about. Look at look at the business cycle, look at the larger, you know, economic trends that are going on right now. And really, it explains why Bitcoin isn't moving and why it is likely to move going forward. So, Chris, can you show the all time chart? I think visually that is helps. Some of us are visual learners. And I think just because it's always Raul always reminds us just to zoom out. and you know look it i personally and i'm by no means an expert on any of this and chris i don't know how you feel but especially being at the crypto gathering next week or this past weekend it felt like the quantum fear is overblown and quite overblown at the moment and that what we're really dealing with as you said is larger business cycle issues um that have been um you know unpredictable due to geopolitical circumstances all around the world, as we know.

22:20But yeah, I mean, yeah, it's chart and it feels, you know, it feels good. It does. The quantum threat. I mean, of course, it's it is a threat. It shouldn't be discounted, but it also it is being acknowledged and it is being dealt with. There is a Bitcoin improvement protocol. I think it's like 300 or 350. I need to double check that where they're working actively on that very issue and, you know, are making headway. So there will be there will be changes. I think that that's, you know, it's like people make it make it seem like it's an immediate threat. It's not an immediate threat. It's maybe a threat five years from now, you know.

23:00And I think that in the meantime, the Bitcoin community, the larger crypto community is working on it. But another thing to think about with quantum threats is people think, oh, like, if quantum computing can hack, you know, this cryptography protocol, like this SHA-256 or whatever, then Bitcoin is going to be destroyed. Well, like, if that happens, literally everything is going to be destroyed. I think Jordy Visser was saying, it's like, it's not just crypto. It's your bank account. It's the federal government. It's everything. Right. Everything, you know, we are living in a hacker's paradise at that point.

23:37So to just focus it solely on Bitcoin, it's like people, you know, it's like, is Bitcoin have any value in a post-nuclear war where there's no electricity? No. But what are the chances of that happening in the next couple of years? You know, so personally, I feel, you know, at least, you know, in my own financial journey, I'm the type of person that likes to hold. And I just start I just don't look at the charts as much during times like this. you know i think another thing that you're yes you're right another thing to think about too is if if if somehow bitcoin gets destroyed whatever that even means by quantum computing um it what is the advantage it's worthless then at that point so like there's no advantage to gain by hacking bitcoin because it will literally not benefit the people that do that because it won't be worth anything nobody will you know like there's like some game theory involved there a little bit so like it's like all of a sudden if you discovered that there was like billions of dollars worth of gold sitting in a you know mine in alaska if you're a gold person you're keeping that a fucking secret because that's just gonna bring the coins of gold all the way down so yeah i i think the quantum thing is it's obviously and we've heard this and you've i think chris have even done some of these interviews.

24:58But even the wallet people have been looking at this from the very beginning, have been working at it in the background because they know it's coming as well. So, you know, I told the guys, you know, at Bitcoin, Ledger, that they're going to figure this out. There's been a number of interviews on the Real Vision platform that I've seen of companies that are working in this area, that are working to quantum proof everything in crypto and and everywhere else, you know, for that matter too. And there's all kinds of interesting technologies that have come about as a result. So, yeah. Awesome. We're running out of time here.

25:35Any couple final charts you want to hit us with before we sign off for the day? Let's see. Well, it's funny. A bit outside the norm, but I want to look at, you know, I want to look at silver for a second. Oh, of course. Of course. All anyone could talk about for the last week, silver this, silver that. No, I know. Really? It really was the hot topic. I mean, it was all anybody's talking about. And it's funny because it's absolutely behaving like, you know, like a like a meme coin. It's yeah, it's as overextended as it can possibly be. And so I think it's important to look at, too, on on a weekly time frame here.

26:20these are weekly candles mind you and look it is so parabolic but it's so overextended that it's i mean what is it above just its its 20 20 week moving average so like a mean reversion back to basically the fair value sort of trend weekly trend is a 43 percent decline like that's kind of insane to me if you think about it yeah that's so numbers right i mean you don't expect that type of volatility in precious metals? No, like if you look at it anywhere else along here, like the most, you know, it would ever get deviated is, I mean, I don't even know, like pick here, for example, 15%, maybe, you know, something like that, 15 to 20%.

27:00So to be 47 % away is just bonkers. So the main point here, don't go chasing this right now. Like, I know it's tempting. I know a lot of people see this and they're just like, I got to get me some silver. Ah, you know, you've missed the boat if you're not in it already like just and you're you're i think andreas had a note to that effect uh earlier this week basically on the platform like this is the classic time where everybody piles in it drops and everybody loses a ton of money who wasn't in the trade early right so that's not to say that silver won't end higher won't go higher won't end the year higher than it is now, but I think that it's just, it's, it's way overdue a, a reset, you know, a technical reset.

27:47And so wait for that reset, be patient. You know, ideally it comes back down to the, to the 10, 10 week moving average, even better if it comes back down to the 20 and it might not like drop straight down in this scenario. It might just sort of slowly meander and we'll see a scenario where it kind of just goes diagonal and the moving averages just work to catch up to it. So maybe that works out to be around the$85 level or somewhere kind of in the middle between these two. But be looking for that dynamic to play out. Don't go chasing this right now or you're going to be upside down for weeks or even months before you start to see profit on that position.

28:25So, yeah, that's what I want to end with. Perfect. I think that's a perfect caution, perfectly themed with many of the discussions at Real Vision about silver, gold, copper and all of that fun stuff. But thank you so much, Chris. I know you had a harrowing journey home yesterday, so I'm so glad you could make it. Everybody should also go check out Chris's interview with Benjamin Cowan on the platform. Chris is doing double duty. He just finished that interview about 90 minutes ago. So please check that out. Always great when we get Ben back on the platform. Otherwise, Bijan will be back next week for another episode of Trading the Markets.

29:05And Bijan and Chris will be back next Monday for the Discord TA show. Thank you for watching, everybody.

29:27In seconds. The ones that transform how we spend, how we save, how we build. The moments we connect and create memories that last a lifetime. The moments 300 million people say in unison, we want a better way. But the moments that really matter are the ones that come next.