Trading the Markets: July 16, 2025 | Kris Bullock and Bijan Maleki

0:06Happy Wednesday, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Trading the markets. I'm Bijan And of course, as always, I'm joined by Chris Bullock. It's only midweek and we've already had some bangers content wise. And of course we would. It is crypto week. So yesterday, Sebastian Purcell and a panel of experts debated several pieces of crypto legislation with the headlines being obviously the Genius Bill and Clarity Act. Raul's live AMA with our pro members joining the show also dropped yesterday. And for our Alpha tier, Raul and Julian were back to shoot the shit for round nine of shooting the shit, of course.

0:46And we had Macro Monday, another great session of Macro Monday with Andreas and Mikkel, where they discuss the new round or I guess doubling down of tariffs. Are they actually bullish this time? Check it out to find out. And if you want the latest insights, Alpha, Macro Trends, Crypto News and more, make sure you're signed up to Real Vision. We've got something for everyone, no matter your level of expertise. We've definitely got some great information that you can digest. So another quick reminder is that we discuss this stuff all day, every day in our Discord. So whether you want to stress test your ideas, get insights on new trades, you need to join us in RV Connect and join us in the Discord.

1:29You'll also have access to Chris's portfolio and Joe Bland's portfolio. So make sure you sign up to that. And if you have any questions during the show, we take them live on air. We'll look at any charts you'd like. Just throw it in the chat on X or on platform, and we'll get to as many as we can. Chris, how are you doing Wednesday? Let's get into it. What's on your mind this midweek? Yeah, yeah. Happy Wednesday for sure. Lots of good stuff. I woke up to some really nice alerts this morning, some new all-time highs on a lot of good assets. And yeah, everything is running right now. And like you said, crypto week.

2:08So it's game on. I definitely wanted to, I'm noticing a bit of a shift. Obviously, Bitcoin is pushing all-time highs. So too is total crypto market cap, which we're going to talk about in a second. But I'm really seeing a resurgence in the alt sector that's being actually led by Ethereum. And I think to me right now, that's kind of the story. That's the big development that I'm seeing. We're seeing a shift into the alt sector. And if ETH can continue to maintain the strength that it's showing right now, I think that that will only help the rest of the alt sector and give us a little bit more of a maybe a broader based alt season than what we might have anticipated.

2:48I think the better that ETH does overall, the more outside of ETH will benefit from that. So it's actually pretty exciting right now. And I'm looking forward to digging into the charts here and breaking it all down. Let's do it. But, you know, we always talk, we've always talked about this moment about ETH breaking out or, you know, poking a stick like when ETH break out, when ETH break out. Seems like it could be coming. Obviously, Raul and Julian charted it on shooting the shit. Julian was pretty bullish on ETH's prospects. And like we've been saying, you know, we want whether you hold ETH or not, we want it to pump because that is going to bring about alt season.

3:22It's going to bring that Bitcoin dominance down and just let the alts flow. So, yeah, let's dive into to the market cap. I know you've got some ETH BTC charts. You've got a whole bunch of charts to dive through. So why don't we get into those? Yeah, yeah. So let's start with total market cap. And one thing that I've observed here, so I've drawn, this is actually the chart we're looking at here is total market cap going all the way back to, well, 2014 when it started being calculated by CoinMarket or by TradingView. And what I've drawn here is we'll notice in the last three cycles that we've gone through here.

3:57It starts out at the bottom on one trajectory. And then at some point along the way, you know, round about halfway through or a little after halfway through, it sharply pivots upwards to a much steeper trajectory, you know, and starts to go parabolic up until the peak. And, you know, it did this to the sharpest extent in 2017. Then if we look at 2021, of course, it did it again. It broke through where, you know, initially it falls along this first trend line. And then at some point it breaks away from this trend line again, and kind of never looks back and ultimately closes much higher. And so if we go to right now where we are, I can't help but wonder if this is what we're starting to see.

4:35We're starting to see the final breakaway. Now, granted, we've had a couple of teasers here where it did deviate pretty significantly from this original trend line only to come back and touch it again. But we know based on timing where we are within the four-year cycle that we're into the latter stages. We're sort of looking for that phase two of the banana zone, you know, that Raul and Julian talk about. And so I can't help but wonder if this is in fact that breakaway. And just by going on the general, I hear a lot of the macro people, again, like Raul and Julian talk about, you know, the crypto market achieving like a 10 trillion market cap overall by the end of this cycle.

5:12They also talk about how this particular cycle is breaking a little bit away from the trends, the previous four-year trends where it might actually extend into Q1 or even the end of Q1 of next year, as opposed to peaking out, say, in November or December like previous cycles have. So what I did here is I just kind of drew this line out to$10 trillion at about the end of Q1 just to sort of gauge what this trajectory might look like. And of course, this is just an estimate based on rough guesses from everybody. But it does match quite in line with the trajectory that we're following thus far. So fingers crossed here that this is the final breakaway from this initial uptrend, and we're entering into the more parabolic phase of this market, which I kind of think we are.

6:03I mean, if you look at any of the headlines right now with anything that's going on in the market, everything is bullish. I mean, across the board, fundamentally, technically, from the government, from the regulatory standpoint, there's literally no reason to be bearish at all at this point. I mean, the amount of treasuries, the new Bitcoin treasuries, you know, that we're seeing coming online is just insane right now. And so you can't help but think that there's a, you know, a high likelihood that this is the final breakaway from this initial trend. And we're off to the races here. So I'm, you know, I'm going to be keeping an eye on this chart for sure.

6:39Yeah. The next thing I want. Oh, go ahead. No, go ahead. I was going to say, the next thing I wanted to talk about was Bitcoin dominance, because this has kind of been the story, too, outside of that, is even though Bitcoin is doing incredibly well right now, breaking into new all-time highs, you know, it's in price discovery, it's put new all-time highs in multiple times over the last several days. Despite that, if we look at Bitcoin dominance, it's actually got four red weeks in a row, and this current week that we're on is the biggest candle yet. And not only that, it's actually broken down below its 20-week moving average for the first time since going back to, you know, November of last year.

7:15So this is a pretty significant development. And I honestly feel like this time it's a little bit different. One, because we are so much further into the cycle. Two, because I like that it's actually more of a gradual decline. I like the fact that it's not just a quick nukedown or a quick wickdown like we had, you know, back in the beginning of May. I like the fact that it's more of a slow, gradual rollover, you know, because that tells me that it's, there's a little more actually strength to the signal, I think, with this kind of price action versus these quick spikes down, you know, or these quick drastic drops.

7:47So this is going to be interesting to watch. And then kind of the inverse of this is essentially looking at the ETH chart. And if you've been watching the show for a while now, you'll be familiar with this chart, but we're seeing ETH continue to push higher highs and higher highs still. In fact, now this week, I know when we did our show on Monday, we were, you know, right or back right here. And we had just kind of closed above these initial wicks, but now we've actually really pushed above it. And in fact, we're well on pace now to finally setting a higher high, like, and we're well above the bull market support band on the ETH Bitcoin pair.

8:26So this to me is, this is becoming more and more legitimate by the day. Like this is, this is actually something I'm paying attention to now. And I'm really pretty confident that we're seeing a strong reversal in ETH. And not only just looking at the price action, but just based on what we're seeing fundamentally from ETH. We're seeing ETH being talked about as like the blockchain for tokenizing, you know, the stock markets and things like that. And so it's not going anywhere. And it's just becoming, the signal is getting louder and louder by the day. And I'm becoming more and more confident by the day that maybe the bottom is in for ETH, you know, for this cycle, and it's going to rally.

9:02And so if we kind of look at this ETH I've got this other chart here. And so what we're looking at here, the center line is actually Ethereum dominance, ETH dominance. This top line is Bitcoin dominance. And then this bottom line is others dominance or others.d, which I just kind of means alts basically. And for a long time, you know, alt dominance was actually showing a lot more strength. And suddenly alt dominance just kind of went through the floor and ETH dominance has rebounded significantly and is back above 10%, which I think is a pretty significant development too. So this is also showing how, from a dominant standpoint, Ethereum is actually really outpacing everything.

9:42And honestly, since the mid-April lows, Ethereum dominance has just been on an absolute tear and is taking over everything. So this also sort of further cements my belief that ETH is back, I guess you could say. I think it's safe to say ETH is back at this point. And I don't really think it's going anywhere. However, there's one small caveat that I wanted to throw out. Not a big deal, but looking at it real quick on the, oops, let me pull up this chart here. Looking at it real quick, just on the daily, on the trading alpha indicator, it's a little overheated in the moment on the short term. We've got like a DMARC 8 and 9 here, which is signaling a little bit of an overbought signal.

10:23We've also got a overbought RSI signal here. So ETH could be due for possibly a short-term pullback. But at the same time, I feel like the whole market is about to just rip right now with all the headlines that I'm seeing. So really, this could be nothing. There's plenty of times where DMARC9s show up and it's not even a blip on the radar. It just blows right by it. But I did want to call it out because I did notice it and I thought it was worth mentioning. Outside of that, though, like I said, I think ETH is the story. I think Bitcoin dominance is the story. And I think, again, the market just looks ready to ready to run across the board.

10:58I mean, we're seeing highs everywhere. So. So, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I knew. And for those of us that have been here for a little while now, we know in the middle of, you know, ripping that having corrections or slight dips are just, you know, normal. Right. And sometimes this happens so fast that if you blink, you don't even catch it so uh just something to be aware of love to see it uh to quote to quote a wise man who has uh often predicted you know yellow fruits in our future uh those were some fuck you higher charts and absolutely love to see these breakouts here um yeah well done so chris i know you also you also had some some charts on some of the trades we talked about from last week or pengu in particular i know you wanted to touch on the chart oh my god what a trade that one has uh has proven to be um there so let's yeah i mean like pangu looks great it's just it's absolutely on a rip i mean all the you know all the the the boxes ticked we got green candles we got green dots we got a green track line it's it's closing back in on on all-time highs you know it's it's going to be in uh price discovery again before too long i i know back here we had the airdrop and it kind of went up for a bit.

12:11And as happens with most airdrops, it just kind of, you know, the bottom fell out. Plus the timing was a little bit bad. It kind of happened when the rest of the market corrected at the beginning of the year. So it, you know, was kind of down only for the first phase of its life here. But ever since then, you know, ever since the April lows, it's been pretty strong. And then as of late, again, when we had the 60-day cycle correction back at the end of June, it's just absolutely been on a tear and really has been outpacing everything. Like if we look at the alt season index, you know, Pengu's right at the top basically over the last 90 days.

12:47So it's, you know, what can you say? Not argue with that. Right, right. Yeah, it's crushing it. So Pengu's looks good. And like we've talked about before with everything that's going on with Pengu outside of just crypto, you know, I feel like it's kind of crossed over a little bit into more of just mainstream consciousness. you know with all it's got a cartoon it's got stuffed animals i mean it's got the nfts of course it's got you know pengu is out there it's a it's a global brand now it's way beyond just like a meme coin and so for me that's you know that signals a lot of strength i know you could argue there's there's times when you could say the first time you put like a real world asset to a meme then you know it's over but like somehow pengu has sort of become an exception there and like i said It sort of crossed over into mainstream a little bit.

13:37And, you know, I think it's probably going to be one of the stronger meme assets in the space over the rest of the cycle, honestly. Absolutely. Pengu is getting hundreds of millions of views just across Instagram, Twitter. They have an expansive gift library as well that, you know, I think even just normies are just using because they're cute penguins. I've bought my all my my nieces and my baby cousins every one of them that was a newborn I sent them the pudgy penguin toys that I got from Amazon so yeah they're in Amazon they're in Walmart I know that you said utility sometimes has a negative effect on things right but I don't think so for the penguins because they are absolutely just just building a brand that's going to transcend web 3 in my opinion and we're and we're seeing the proof in the chart right now so I know you had a few other charts to get into so before we had we actually have some bunch of questions rolling in so before we do that let's definitely check out some of some of your other charts I know I know bonk is on your mind we had some people talking about bonk in the discord as well so with some nice entry points but what's your chart saying yeah a bunk too looks great I mean very much like pengu almost the same type of price action out of the most recent dip, also just ripping, you know, on the back of the new, basically the meme coin platform that they've launched.

15:06It's getting a ton of play because of that. I guess I suppose I question a little bit the long-term viability of this, you know, meme coin launch platform that they've created. But for now, it's great. Like, I think that, you know, it's doing well. It's going to allow Bonk to get back up into all-time high territory, which can only be good. So I think for me, Bonk is a really good short-term play. And some people may disagree with me, and that's fine. But I still, again, debate whether or not the long-term is going to play out, I guess, with this. Like, I don't know how long this meme coin launchpad is ultimately going to be a thing, you know, before enthusiasm wanes and people kind of move on to the next thing.

15:50Plus they've got competition with Pump.Fun, of course, which I think is going to be a thing. But one thing that I did think about, especially with Bonk, with their platform launch and with Pump.Fun, is all of this is amazing for Solana itself, like the Solana blockchain. I think that all of this is going to ultimately play back into number go up for Solana, which we kind of need because Solana has been lagging a little bit behind. I know we talk about Solana and SWE being neck and neck a lot, and SWE has kind of outpaced it as of late, but I think these two platforms can only be a good thing for Solana going forward and just all of this activity that's basically coming back to Solana right now.

16:30Plus we know memes are ripping, which we'll get into in a minute. So just in general, I see good things happening for Solana. I think it's only a matter of time before it rallies hard and catches up. I wouldn't be surprised to see some double digit days come out of Solana here in the near term, just because of the momentum of everything that's happening right now. 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. With just a few clicks, you can register and start practicing with their free and unlimited demo.

17:03See a trading opportunity? You'll be 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, Plus 500 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 can trade anytime, anywhere. Experience the fast, accessible futures trading you've been waiting for with Plus500. With over 20 years of experience, Plus500 is your gateway to the markets.

17:36Visit us.plus500.com to learn more. Trading in futures involves the risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus500. It's trading with a plus. now for those of us holding sauna we would welcome that absolutely curious to hear the community's thoughts on this who do you guys think is going to win this competition uh between bonk and pump fun just leave your thoughts in the comment section curious to see what you guys think on that i personally think it's gonna be pump fun but uh we'll we'll see how it plays out and we'll see if you guys agree there um all right chris i think we have what else we got i know oh let's check into the SWE ecosystem and then let's check out some of those meme coin gains and then we'll start diving into some of the questions and some of our trade ideas.

18:28Sounds good. So SWE also, like I said just a second ago, SWE has been outpacing Solana. It's been on an absolute rip too. It's doing really well. It's kind of coming back closer to all-time highs as well. It's kind of right at a resistance level based on this previous price cluster here. So I'm going to want to see it break out of this. Noting, too, it also has a DMARC 8 and 9. But again, with just the overall enthusiasm we're seeing across the board right now, my gut tells me that these DMARC signals are probably going to be invalidated and it's just going to keep going higher. because, again, I just, you know, I'm waiting for an announcement about the Genius Act that's supposed to be happening.

19:07There's a vote going on even right now, I think, in Congress right now, a procedural vote. So that headline could cause the market to rip. And again, it's just going to blow right past these DMARC signals. But nevertheless, SWE looks good. And then on top of SWE itself, I think there's a couple SWE ecosystem plays that we've been keeping track of that also look amazing. One of them being Lo-Fi. Now, granted, it's not quite as far along. It had a little bit bigger of a dip down than SWE itself did because, of course, it's a beta play. So, of course, it's going to have wilder volatility. But it, too, has had some really big days over the last week.

19:40Like this day here, it was a 43 % day, like in one day. That's mega. And then just a couple of days ago, we had a 15 % day. And today we're up six. So it's catching up rapidly. And I think as long as SWE continues to do well, I think LoFi will do well. We also know that LoFi is essentially one of the top memes or the top meme in the SWE ecosystem. And so if SWE really takes off, I think that bodes well for LoFi. Also, LoFi has a really, really small market cap right now, which also works in its favor because it takes so little to move that needle. And so just any influx into the SWE ecosystem that trickles into LoFi is just going to cause it to rip.

20:20And then Deep is the other one. And Deep, which we know is sort of the foundational liquidity protocol for the entire SWE ecosystem, also just looks amazing. Also right back up at this same level like SWE is and also inching up closer to all-time highs, just like SWE is. So basically, as SWE does, so too does Deep. And I think you're going to get a little bit better beta out of Deep than you are SWE directly. So I think Deep is also just a phenomenal play from the SWE ecosystem and is only going to keep running as well, too. So, yeah, all three of these look really good. Yeah, SWE is absolutely thriving.

20:58While we're on that, though, I know I said we would get to questions a little bit later, but this question ties into exactly what you just said. Steve from the platform wants to know, is it time to leverage up my SWE trade? I mean, like I said, you know, as far as everything, money's coming into the space. We know that. We also know money is flowing out the risk curve into the alt space, which we can confirm. Actually, perfect segue into, let me touch on the crypto dashboard here on the Real Vision website. I've talked about this before. We've got the top 200 market cap weighted and then the top 200 equal weighted.

21:34And as I've said in the past, when we know the top 200 equal weighted starts outpacing the market cap weight, then that means alts basically are outpacing like the likes of Bitcoin and Ethereum. And we can see over the last 30 days, you know, the equal weight has outpaced over the last seven days, equal weights up. And over the last day, it's up. And even on the last 90 days, while it's not outpacing, it's still it's still up a nice chunk. So we're starting to see a reversal basically play out in the lower end of the top 200 by looking at these numbers here. So this is telling us that money is moving out the risk curve.

22:12And just we know that going back to the charts that, you know, SWE and Solana have outpaced Bitcoin in that same time span. And so it's probably safe to assume that the more beta plays within the SWE ecosystem are likely to do better still. So I can't tell you yes or no, but I can tell you that the probabilities are in your favor that money is going further out the risk curve. And I guess now is as good a time as any, I suppose. All right. Thank you for the question, Steve. All right. Let's round this out with those mean coin gains. Yeah, yeah. And then maybe into some more of these questions and my NFT trade idea for you guys.

22:55Perfect. So yeah, this chart you may have seen before I've shared. So this blue line is basically an aggregate of like the top 20 or so meme tokens. And it's had its ups and downs, but we can see it's basically bottomed and reversed. Back on June 30th or July 1st, rather, it bottomed. Memes have gone up well since then. They've actually gotten back above this aggregate moving average. So by and large, memes have bottomed and are running. are running. And then this green chart here is basically SPX just sort of isolated on its own, just to highlight that SPX is in fact wildly outpacing the larger meme sector as a whole, which is interesting to me, you know, and it continues to do well.

23:37In fact, it hit all-time highs just this morning, which was fantastic. So good, you know, good on memes in general, good on SPX. I think this is also a really solid indication that money is, again, flowing further They're out the risk curve. When we see memes running, that means that, you know, people are taking those Bitcoin gains or whatever and rolling the dice on them. And so this is what we want to see here. This is an indication that it's game on, basically. Game on. We love that. Yeah, a lot of bullish things happening, right? You know, you have this crypto week. A lot of key pieces of legislation are going to be voted on, hopefully passed, especially the ones that really help our industry.

24:18You've got people going down the risk curve. You got talks of rates, you know, coming down in the near future. So it looks like a perfect storm is a brewing for our bags. Okay, so real quickly, I just want to go over one trade that I wanted to highlight for you guys. And you probably, if you're listening to Raoul, which, you know, you should be, you've probably heard him talk about this quite a bit. You know that he's a big fan of XCopy. So I do want to use that for my trade idea of the week. I want to throw in Max Payne and Friends by Xcopy. And I also want to give a shout out to our incredible mod BDez, who really gave me some great alpha on this and, you know, just kind of helped me think of this kind of in a different way.

25:03All right, listen, Max Payne, Xcopy, right? It's an iconic collection from a well-known artist, basically like the likes of Beeple and the fuck renders of our space. It's a deflationary collection, right? So you can burn your max pain for another collection from XCopy, or you can either just hold on to that max pain and the art's going to go up in value, right? Because if you're burning the collection, it's going to become more inherently valuable. So that's obviously something great. Affordable, right? It's under 1 ETH. It's under 0.7 ETH right now as we stand. It's, I think, 0.65 ETH. I know saying something that's$2 ,000 is affordable for digital art sounds kind of crazy, but it's true.

25:51But like Raul often says, you have to think of these in terms of ETH, right? It's an ETH store of value. So that's definitely something to consider because as ETH goes up and we just charted it, we see it on the verge of a breakout. We're hoping the ETH value goes up. So you're kind of like you're double dipping, so to speak, on that dollar value and upwards price action. So love that idea of it as well. So that is my little spiel for you on XCopy. Go grab yourself one if you can. Really, really bullish on this collection as a whole and anything coming out of XCopy for that matter. All right. He's back, guys.

26:35Minor technical difficulties. just in time because uh we're hitting some questions now so this one comes from shafiq on the rv platform if you have dry powder right now where would you invest it that's such a hard question to answer i mean honestly there's so many things that goes into that yeah yeah well how much dry powder like where on the risk curve are you you know are you looking for a home run swing? Are you looking for just kind of a steady, steady, safe gainer? I mean, there's any, any number of ways you could answer that. I mean, you know, I would say ETH honestly is probably a good bet for like a lower risk play.

27:20If you want to go further out the risk curve, there's any number. I mean, there's, I think SWE, I would say SPX, I would say hype. I would say Pengu, I would say even bonk. There's, you know, there's, there's so many ways. the thing with it when we get into uh even like a slightly broader based alt season like we seem to be experiencing right now literally you can throw money at the wall and it'll stick i mean it's just like everything's going up you know some stuff's going to go up a little bit more than others but everything's going to go up you know and so um yeah i don't know it's like i said any any any one of those they're all going to go up some more than others but um yeah i wish i think you have a more precise answer no but i think that's a great one you gave them some you know some lower risk ones, right?