Trading the Markets: July 30, 2025 | Kris Bullock and Bijan Maleki

0:05Happy Wednesday, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Trading the markets.

0:25I'm a trade idea of yours, a chart you want us to look at or anything really, just drop it in the chat and we'll get to it. And, you know, it might not seem like this right now because the markets have been so boring over the past week or so, but the world really is shifting. We are just absolutely changing. The sector is just changing. And if you're not ahead of that curve, you're going to be falling behind. So that's why Raoul recently released a free report that lays out what's changing, where he sees the big opportunities, and how he's positioning his own portfolio for max upside. So the old playbook, that's dead, right?

1:04The roadmap to the next financial revolution is here. So make sure you check out the report. You've got five years to survive this economic tidal wave. And speaking of changes, you may have noticed that here at Real Vision, We've been working with SWE to transition from Web 2 into Web 3, and we just dropped an episode today. Make sure you check that out. Web 3 in the real world. Damian Orner sits down with Raoul and other founders to talk about how they're using SWE's blockchain technology to advance themselves into Web 3. So definitely worth a look if you want to see how companies are thinking about that transition and what it looks like.

1:47Chris, how are you? Happy Wednesday. What's on your mind? Doing well, thank you. Yes, it's happy FOMC Day today. So we have that to look forward to later this afternoon. And it's funny, in light of that, really, the market is kind of in no man's land. There's kind of nothing going on. It's like there's plenty of stuff to talk about. But at the same time, there's really nothing going on, at least in terms of the charts go. And it's just I think we're kind of in this spot where we're just waiting for the next big catalyst, you know, which if we kind of touch on the economic calendar briefly, we can see here that there's quite a bit going on.

2:21You know, we've got the, like I said, we've got the FOMC coming up this afternoon. Tomorrow we've got, you know, core CPI. We've got non-farm payrolls coming out on Friday. We've got the PMI update coming out on Friday for the next month. So there's a lot of big news information that's coming out over the rest of this week. I think that will certainly drive the market one way or another. We don't know yet if it's going to be up or down, at least in the short term. We don't know what Powell is going to come out with. I think nobody thinks there's going to be an interest rate cut yet at this point.

2:51That's kind of the general consensus. But of course, it all comes down to his tone in the presser and is he hawkish or dovish? And what does he see in the coming months? And so that's what it's going to come down to. We'll be obviously anxiously awaiting that. And so in the meantime, there's really just, I think, a couple of big scenarios that could likely play out for Bitcoin, which will then trickle down through the broader market, the broader crypto market. But what I'm seeing here is, you know, as I said, we've been basically just going sideways for like two plus weeks now, really just consolidating.

3:25We've kind of come back up to where the 10 and the 20 day moving average have essentially met up and where price is basically right there. And generally when that happens, we can also see one thing that really stands out to me is these Bollinger Bands. Like, look how tight they are compared to most of the time, they're hugely spread out here when there's sort of normal volatility happening. And now they're just like, they're, you know, just teeny tiny pinched all the way down. So this is signaling a volatility squeeze, basically, which means there's likely going to be a breakout soon in one direction or another.

3:56And so what I'm seeing in terms of the directions are thus, let's look at the liquidation heat map. So earlier in the week on the Monday show, I had called out this big, dark, yellow cluster here. And this is essentially, this would constitute a short squeeze. This would mean there's tons of liquidity up here from people who are short, thus getting stopped out basically by price going up through here. And so as we can see, the biggest chunk of liquidity is to the upside. But over the last few days, it's starting to get a little bit more intense down to the downside, maybe even down as low as like 112.

4:33And so if we kind of take that over and look at the chart, if we notice that 112 level is pretty much spot on perfect with this previous peak here earlier on, it's like 111.8. So what that could mean is it's really going to come down to are the market makers going to try and drive price down to that cluster and capture that, stop out those initial longs first and trap those traders before running the price up through that short squeeze, or are they just going to run it up? And so there's a couple of different scenarios here that we can outline. And basically, it would be just as simple as this.

5:08We come down, we kind of touch this level, and then we run up from here, and so on like that. Conversely, if it just wants to go up from here, it would simply looked something more akin to this. I think either way, either way we go up. The question is, do we come down here and trap those longs first and liquidate them and then run up from here? Either way, I'm bullish overall. I think my biases to the upside. I think generally sentiment is good. It's just, again, it's just a matter of do we come down first and bounce or do we just run up straight from here. I will say too, regarding this heat map, once we do get up into this range, this is really going to serve to juice the market to the upside.

6:02And so it'll help. All we got to do is start dipping into this and that's going to create a lot of forced buying by liquidating all of these shorts, which is going to, again, juice the price and sort of amplify the gains to the upside whenever this does happen. So again, whether it's this first and up or just straight up from here remains to be seen. And that's going to kind of probably be somewhat influenced by, again, the economic data and the news coming out over the remainder of the week. Separately from that, in the moment, we can see based on this funding rate heat map, just looking at this far right sort of column here.

6:36So what we're looking at here is there's on the left axis, we've got all these different assets. And then these are basically dates. And when it's blue like this or kind of this bluish green, we can see it sort of right in the middle of this color range, meaning that the market is not really, you know, biased to one side or the other. The market is basically very net. It's not like everybody's, you know, overly long or short the market right now. It's just essentially flat neutral. So this is telling us too that like, you know, there's not a lot going on in terms of like actual movement right now, market movement.

7:13So what we're seeing is essentially just this is the playground for short term traders. This is basically when market makers, this is a market maker's dream. These sort of sideways consolidations are when market makers just cash in on people being bored and trading a short term price action. And so and most of them are losing and market makers are raking in cash. So right now in these long sideways consolidations, this is the time when a lot of people just kind of get chopped up because they get antsy. They're waiting for something to happen. So they're like, well, I'm just going to go over and trade perps or whatever and just try and try and make a few bucks on the side.

7:48And of course, market makers know that. And, you know, they're always a step ahead of everybody. And so really in that scenario, when markets aren't trending, but rather they're just kind of chopping sideways, that's when sort of inexperienced traders tend to flush money down the toilet and just hand it over to market makers. And that's that's really what we're seeing right now. So right now, it's funny. I really would encourage people to, I know the show is called Trading the Markets, but like right now is not the time to be trading the markets. Right now is the time to be going outside and touching grass and just sort of ignoring the markets until we resume some kind of established trend.

8:25And then we'll get opportunities to trade. And it's funny, you could say, well, maybe isn't now a good time to buy? Like aren't a lot of alts sort of at support levels, which we can touch on here in a second. And the answer to that is yes, absolutely. Many of them are at support levels and probably are at good buying opportunities. But the problem is, we don't really know how this is going to play out yet. And the market hasn't really shown its hand. So I can say, yeah, go buy right now because we're at support levels across the board. But if we get this flush down to say 111, 112 on Bitcoin, and suddenly all the alts that you bought today, drop another 10 or 15 % before V-shape bouncing out of there, you're going to be, you know, you're going to be cursing me for telling you to go buy right now.

9:05So it's like it's just one of those times when you just kind of got to sit on your hands and sort of just wait and see what happens. And that's OK. You know, sometimes the best play is to do nothing at all. And I think right now is that's the situation we're in. So, yeah, that's where we're at, basically. That absolutely is, though, a trade, right? I think, Chris, you've in the chat, you've also talked about your mom who has Bitcoin right now. She's maybe a better trader than like 99 percent of the people here because she does nothing. She doesn't touch it and just watch the stack grow over time.

9:37So there is something to that. Absolutely. Absolutely. And yeah, like right now, again, right now is the time for that. We can, like I said, we can look at a few different alts. I probably want to touch on, I think Ethereum is worth touching on. Like, let's look at that real quick. Because one interesting thing I'm noticing is Ethereum is holding up really well. But like a lot of other alts are not doing as well in the moment. I mean, they're not doing poorly. Many of them are still in overall uptrends, but they're maybe experiencing a short-term correction, whereas Ethereum is basically just trading sideways for the last, going on three weeks now.

10:15And so a lot of people ask, well, because Ethereum is doing well, does that mean it's alt season across the board? Is it time to jump into alts and things like that? And cautiously, yes, I will say, but if we look at like others' dominance, we can see here, if we kind of pivot over to others' dominance, others' dominance isn't necessarily doing great. I mean, it's actually quite down on the weak. And so while Ethereum itself is doing well, and that's creating sort of, as we've talked about, an outsized impact on Bitcoin dominance dropping here on this left-hand chart we can see, alts in general are still kind of just doing okay.

10:55Now, there are a contingent of alts. There are a selection of alts. Like if we go over and look at the bullmarketsupportband.com website that I've touched on now for a few weeks in a row, we can see that now 62 % of the top 100 are in weekly uptrends. So there's definitely plays to be had. There's definitely alts that are outpacing the rest of the market. But the bigger, the more important point is going over and looking at, hold on, where is it? Where is it?

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12:26The Alt Season Index. So of sort of that 68 or whatever that I just mentioned, only, say, 36 of them are actually outpacing Bitcoin in this moment. And so, or not even that, actually, there's just these handful. And so those are the ones you really want to focus on. And it's real easy to do. All you got to do, look at this site, you know, go over to CoinMarketCap, pull up the Altcoin Index, go over to bullmarketsupportband.com, look at those. that's your filter. That's your funnel. That's all you need to do is go find what's in the green there. And you immediately filter out, you know, 99 % of the rest of the market that currently is effectively garbage right now.

13:03You know, those are the alts you don't want to mess with. These are the alts you do want to mess with. So go over, look at this list. And if, you know, you're holding stuff that's sort of way down here in the red, ask yourself why. And, you know, why are you not concentrating at least on Bitcoin and maybe some of these other ones? You know, We know there's the common ones we talk about all the time. We've got the Pengu. We've got SPX. We've got Hype. We've got ETH. Those are all crushing it. Obviously, there's a number of others. One I want to call out that Jamie Coots has mentioned that's a bit of a, you know, not an underdog, a dark horse.

13:41That's sort of the word I'm looking for, is Tron. Now, it's not super exciting. It's not like a flashy thing that's going to go and do 100X from here. but it's it's just a steady steady gainer like if we look at it real quick um and i totally get why jamie added it to his sort of longer term crypto portfolio um because it's just you know it's been in a steady steady uptrend for for like a long time now and so and like we zoom way out you know you can see it too but like it's one of those that's just like it plods along and it does well and i think it's a good a good one to have like if you look, if you're looking for something that's like a safe, something that's going to go up steadily over time, but isn't, you know, and you don't have to worry about it kind of dropping through the floor overnight or anything.

14:27I would put like Tron and XRP sort of in that category of ones that maybe aren't going to, again, no, they're not going to do a 10X from here, but they're just going to steadily cruise upwards. And I think that they're good ones to sort of think about right now. But yeah, outside of that, again, there's plenty of opportunities to be had, not enough to not enough to necessarily move the needle on this others dominance chart yet, you know, because there's not enough of them across the board to sort of outpace Bitcoin overall. But there's definitely enough out there where if you pick your opportunities, you can be crushing it.

15:01Like in the model portfolio that I do for the Connect tier here on Real Vision, I'm way up on Bitcoin right now. I'm up, you know, 20, 30, 40 % or something like that against Bitcoin with just, you know, the alt positions that I've had, which is, again, hard to do when you consider that others dominance has been in this major downtrend and hasn't recovered since January. Yet it's proof that there's opportunities out there to be had if you just kind of use the right tools and focus on the right assets, which which isn't hard to do. So. So, yeah. I want to kind of circle back because we started with an ETH chart.

15:35So I want to take this question from Kevin that comes on the platform. Isn't ETH technically still in a downtrend against Bitcoin? if you connect the lows on the weekly from the last couple of years, ETH is still below the trend line.

15:53Well, connect the lows on the weekly over the last couple of years. I mean, technically, well, I'm going to say no. I mean, I see what you're saying, but I think the downtrend is reversed. And I've talked about this before because the main reason I say that is because one, the bull market support band, which is the two 20-week moving averages basically, has reversed to the upside rather sharply, I might add. Also, we've got the 10-week moving average has crossed up over the 20. And also, we've set a much higher high against the rest of the chart for the first time since going back to December of 2021.

16:29So I believe we have effectively reversed that downtrend. I mean, sure, yes, maybe we need to still set a second higher high, but I don't call this a downtrend anymore at this point. I feel like we haven't done anything like this structure here anywhere else since this trend began, again, way back in December of 2021. Each time we've tried to come back out of it, it never was able to set a higher high. It never was able to break this trend. It kept continuously just getting rejected by this 20-week moving average and getting lower and lower and setting new lows. We've reversed that trend. I mean, we've got a higher low here.

17:07We've got a higher high here, again, for the first time in four plus years. So I don't believe we are still in a downtrend against Bitcoin at this point. Thank you for the question, Kevin. And I also want to, because while we were on the topic of bull market support ban, we were showing all those coins that are outperforming Bitcoin right now. I want to combine Oliver's and Ludovic's questions here because they're pretty similar. Oliver just sold his dot and he's thinking about what what he can enter now. So I definitely think, Oliver, you're going to want to check out those those two charts that we showed at the beginning.

17:41Bull market support ban and all the alts that are outpacing Bitcoin for something. But Ludovic says you had a great point the other day about opportunity costs. Do you think one should just drop LINK, AI16Z, Tau, and WorldCoin for Sol, SWE, XRP, HBAR, or ETH at this point? Ludovic, my short answer is yes. But Chris, why don't you take a crack at those? I mean, again, probably my short answer is yes, too. I mean, really, it comes down to, you know, you just ask yourself, why are you in these assets to begin with? Why are you holding them as long as you have? And, you know, if they haven't reversed by this point, then the odds of them kind of suddenly reversing and rapidly outpacing the rest of the market are much, much lower.

18:30I mean, of course, anything can happen. You know, you could win the lottery, too. But like there's the odds of as we get later and later into this this four year cycle, the odds of one of those assets suddenly catching a massive bid and catching up to everything else and outpacing everything else, just it kind of gets lower by the day. And so at some point, you're going to have to just kind of cut bait and, you know, pivot into the things that are proving to be where the market wants to be right now, you know, and the price action kind of trumps all basically. And so, yes, and Bijan, like you said, basically, go to those two websites, bullmarketsupportband.com and the alt season index on coin market cap.

19:17And just sort of use, you know, use this as a funnel, use this as a guide to narrow down your selections. And then you can spend some time researching any of these and formulate a thesis for why you feel like you should be in them or, you know, whether you think they're long term or short term and things like that. But it's a whole lot easier to research, you know, 25 or 30 different assets than it is to research a thousand different assets. And so just start with these, you know, start by looking at the charts, obviously start with the ones that are doing the best and, and start working your way down.

19:47And obviously you can even go a little bit below Bitcoin here. Like, you know, some of these aren't quite outpacing Bitcoin in this moment, but generally probably will. Certainly Solana is, is one of those that I think is on that list. And I think SWE maybe is a little, So yes, SWE too, I do think. Potentially some of these other ones too. So don't just look at the ones above Bitcoin, but also don't necessarily dig into these ones that are way down in the red either. You probably want to stop at sort of break even and just kind of look at that. And this kind of goes back again to the bull market support band website here.

20:26Again, anyone that's in the green here, just start by looking at it. And then some of these have been in the green a lot longer than others. And so some of them are doing much better. So don't just automatically go, oh, well, if it's in the green, that means it's good. Like definitely look, you can kind of mouse over any of these and it'll pop up, it'll populate a chart or it should anyway. It's not working for me at the moment. But anyway, yeah, it'll populate a chart and then, or you can just go pull it up on TradingView or whatever. Look at the chart, look at the bull market support band, see definitely how well it's doing, how strong the trend is.

21:00Like here, I'll just look at on TradingView, for example. like an example of a good bull market support band is like this Tron right here. I mean, it's well and truly to the upside. It's, you know, it's in a very long term established uptrend. Like this is something that is a perfect example of something that I would be happy to put money in. You know, it's been an uptrend for a long time. Whereas conversely, something more like, like virtuals, for example, it's technically in an uptrend. It's like, yes, by just a tiny margin, we can see the two moving averages are technically pointed to the upside, but this is definitely much weaker of a signal overall than, say, the Tron chart was.

21:40And so if you go back to this website, the Tron one is a perfect example of one that you would want to get into, whereas while technically virtuals is still a green dot here, it's not nearly as strong of a signal overall. So kind of just use that metric to narrow down or refine down your possibilities. And the ones that are likely in the strongest uptrends right now are the ones that are going to continue to be in the strongest uptrends going forward. So that's the easiest way to kind of refine your probabilities and pick winners right now. So yeah. Great. Thank you guys for the question there.

22:20where Jake wants to know, or Jake is saying, would love some commentary on SWE if possible. Yeah, so let's look at the SWE chart. It too is, it's funny, it's a lot more like virtuals, I guess, than say Tron in that it really only just recently pivoted into an uptrend. But what I do like about SWE is it's definitely recovered. You know, a lot of assets never really recovered from this downtrend. You know, a lot of them came up and just sort of bounced off the bottom side of this support band here and just went on to set lower lows. And SWE sort of well and truly has broken that trend. And not only that, since these lows in April, it actually technically has outpaced Bitcoin.

23:06It's not by a ton. Hold on, I've got actually a chart here. I can tell you exactly. It's outpaced Bitcoin by round about 40%. So it's doing better. You're better off in SWE than you are in Bitcoin. Again, had you bought here, you'd be up 40 % on this Bitcoin trade. So it's looking good. I like also too that it's worked its way back up into this upper sideways range that it had sort of filled out earlier in the year. It did kind of bounce up here earlier in May and then it dropped back down, touched its longer term trend line. And then it's back up here again. And it's currently holding support at the bottom side of this range.

23:41So structurally, I think it looks really well. I do like, too, that it's sort of maintained this longer term uptrend. Yes, it got way overextended, way far deviated from the trend line, but it came back down, touched it perfectly at the April lows, came back down, held it as support all the way through this other sort of correction phase that we got kind of during the Iran sort of events that were taking place in the Middle East. You know, the market kind of flushed out then, but it basically held this trend line as support. So it's never really broken down its longer-term trend that it started since August of last year.