Trading the Markets: November 19, 2025

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1:20Thanks a lot.

1:27happy wednesday everyone welcome back to another episode of trading the markets with chris bullock this is the show where we talk about the markets and of course we take your questions live so if you have any questions for us just throw them into the live chat on x or on platform and we will take as many as we can. I know I said a happy Wednesday to start, but I don't know how happy of a Wednesday it is. At the end of our Monday show, I was talking about how I was hoping we'd have some green candles to reflect on and look into, but unfortunately we don't. They're even redder than they were on Monday, it seems.

2:07But we have a great show for you today. We're gonna talk, take a little bit more, Chris is gonna take a little bit more of a macro approach to things because that's probably the best thing we can do right now in a market like this. So we're going to be talking about liquidity. We're going to be talking about the USD. We're going to be talking about institutional holdings, this irrational four-year cycle, and some more indicators as well that Chris wants to look into. So let's just dive right into it. And Chris, welcome back to the show. How are you doing today? Doing well, thank you. Yes, we did have a green Tuesday.

2:41I mean, nice little bounce yesterday. I thought maybe that was the start of something, But alas, it was not meant to be. So here we are today. Yeah, I think probably what a lot of people are wondering is like, what's going on right now? Because everything just looks like garbage. I mean, it's not just crypto, it's stocks, it's everything across the board. We're seeing the dollar index surge. And so, yeah, I kind of wanted to pull up some charts and just sort of dig into what's going on there. The dollar index is basically surging today and the market is tanking today. because the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, announced not too long before the show started that they're not going to be publishing any jobs data reports for the month of October, which kind of sent the odds of a zero rate cut happening, surging everybody with, you know, because Powell basically in the last press conference stated that they didn't have a lot of data to go from.

3:34They were kind of driving in a fog, if you will. And now with the announcement that they're not going to have this jobs data going forward, It sent the probability of zero rate cut next month surging, basically. And so if we look at that, we can see that here on Polymarket. It was kind of going along and then just boom. You can see that yellowish orange line just shot up almost to 60%. It was actually starting to trend back down before that announcement and it just completely reversed. And so that sort of fueled, that sort of added fuel to the fire that we were already seeing asset prices go down kind of just off the back of weaker jobs or weaker data, economic data in Europe and Asia, and a little bit of uncertainty like surrounding tech earnings reports like NVIDIA that's supposed to come out later today.

4:22So we were already seeing a bit of a flight out of risk assets and into the dollar, which again is being reflected here on this dollar chart. And so now we've just got, you know, this kind of big mess going on right now. And that's sending everything. It's not just, like I said, it's not just crypto, it's stocks. If we look at the major stock indices, they're all down big on the day too. Although they have stabilized a little bit, I think, after that initial surge off the announcement. So yeah, I mean, kind of that's what we're seeing. Although I am curious because the NVIDIA, people are optimistic about that.

4:55And that could come out and be a little bit of a positive catalyst. but we're not going to know that until after the markets close later today. I think it's scheduled for 4.30 or so when that report will drop, literally right as the markets close. So we'll get that information. Obviously, if that's good, that could prove to be a little bit of a bounce for tomorrow. But basically, that's what's going on right now. So if you're looking at your charts and you're wondering, why is everything red today? This is basically it, you know. And I really kind of feel like this is going to be relatively short-lived.

5:22It's like, yeah, we might not get a rate cut in December. But I do think there's other things that are going on that could prove to be positive catalysts. In the meantime, I do think that we will get some liquidity injections coming in, which I'll talk about here in a little bit. But I'm not really too worried about this. Even if we don't get a rate cut at all in December, I still think I'm bullish for the coming weeks and months. So we'll see how it goes. But yeah, that's the short term anyway. Right. So what do you, I guess, what do you think will be that catalyst? I know you mentioned liquidity injections.

5:59Obviously, Trump has been a little more vocal about these tariff stimulus checks as well. Is it just as simple as just getting another round of stimulus checks that kind of turn us around? Or are there other things that you're looking at for that kind of catalyst to help us bounce back up? No, honestly, that I feel like, I mean, I'm optimistic about that, but I'm starting to see that that might not even come into place until the middle of next year even. So that's not going to be any kind of a short-term catalyst. But just like basically the, well, here, let's kind of pivot to liquidity. I want to look at a few charts here, starting with net liquidity.

6:46So this is global, or no, let's start with U.S. liquidity. Let's start with U.S. liquidity. So I think we touched on this last week in the same show, how I've basically just been waiting. We've been noticing that as soon as QT started way back in 2021, early 2022, U.S. liquidity has effectively been in a larger downtrend. I mean, yes, it's had a few periods of uptrend in the middle of that, but it's going on and setting lower lows and lower highs all throughout. And I think we're getting to the point now where we know QT is ending in two weeks. And yesterday on just here on Real Vision, I was watching the AMA with Andreas Stenelarsson, Andreas and Mikkel, and they were talking about this.

7:30And Andreas was basically saying that the TGA is going to get plugged in, literally plugged back in, you know, literally tomorrow. He specifically said Thursday of this week that it would, you know, we'd start to see some economic activity, some funds being sort of the joints being lubricated, if you will. And so we'll start to see some money flowing in from that. And then I think that I'm hoping that that'll be reflected here in this chart and we'll start to see an uptick in liquidity. But I wanted to kind of look at a few things in terms of how this relates to Bitcoin and how this has interacted with Bitcoin, I guess, over the years and over the cycle.

8:07And so let's start with this net liquidity chart. I thought this was interesting because I'm going to kind of backtrack a little bit and just sort of give a little bit of a history lesson of how this last sort of four years has played out. So we had the peak, the first peak of 2021, where, you know, liquidity was at its highest. And, you know, basically it rolled off after that. And so, yes, we got a subsequent peak in Bitcoin price. But by then, sort of the global net liquidity, if you will, had already been well into a declining phase and actually bottomed. It bottomed here at the end of October.

8:43Coincidentally, it bottomed literally the week before FTX collapsed. So it was already liquidity was already starting to reverse back up. But we got this huge flush out in Bitcoin and in all of crypto because literally FTX collapsed the very next week. And so that sort of threw off the sink, if you will. You know, like we were already starting to see a little bit of a rounding up of price, you know, that was sort of corresponding to this reversal in liquidity before we got that. And so that kind of threw crypto off for like a solid month and a half before it kind of synced back up again finally and was starting to trend up with these uptrends.

9:20Notice we had a little bit of a peak here that corresponded with a peak here, another peak here that also corresponded with a peak here, and then liquidity tapered off again. But in this span, starting right about here is when we got the announcement of the ETFs. And then a little bit further on, we got the approval of the ETFs. And so even though sort of global net liquidity was trending down during this time, this was enough strength just from like Bitcoin alone, you know, to kind of allow it to break away from the liquidity, from being so stuck to liquidity and break away and kind of go on its own little trend here because it had literally, it had institutional inflows coming in that it didn't really matter what liquidity was doing.

10:03You know, it just had big money coming in. And that finally peaked out, you know, in March or April of 2024. And then after, you know, off the back of this big, like 100 % rally in Bitcoin, it basically needed to consolidate for like eight or nine months, which I know we all remember vividly as we went through that. And then liquidity, again, bottomed and started running up right around the time we got like the meme coin craze that kicked in and sort of started fueling everything. And then that sort of led into Trump looking like maybe Trump was going to win and Trump becoming the sort of crypto president, which further served to juice the markets and rally them into the beginning of the year.

10:46I'm getting somewhere with this, I promise. And so, you know, then we had a bottom in liquidity again. You know, we had the tariffs and that nuked everything. So even though liquidity had bottomed here in, say, December, and we had been running up for most, you know, the better part of six or eight months, we had the tariff coming in that was, you know, again, caused crypto and risk assets to break away from the liquidity regime a little bit. And so it was going counter to liquidity until finally it bottomed in April and has been running up. Now, that gets us to June or July of this year. And I've seen a number of people say, we actually peaked.

11:22They're even saying like the four-year cycle peaked in July. And I can kind of get where they're coming from with that. We did have a break in momentum. We did have, you know, yes, we did go on and set higher highs in October and even in August slightly. But, you know, liquidity tapered off. We had major like DMARC 13 on weekly indicators around the July timeframe. and we saw everything kind of dip back down. And so those people are like, oh, cycle's over, everything's done. But as we can see here, liquidity has bottomed and has reversed back up now. And I wouldn't even call it like a little bit of a mean reversion even.

11:59Like it's a true trend reversal at this point and it is kicking back up. It's continuing. And now we're seeing it sort of heavily broken away from the price of Bitcoin right now. It's going completely counter to it. Another interesting thing is sort of just a series of higher highs and higher lows. Like we had a liquidity peak here, you know, in May that was here. We had a higher peak here in September and even higher still peak in July. Same thing with the lows, ultimate low, higher low, higher low. We could all arguably call this a higher low as well, meaning that it didn't even really dip into the negatives.

12:33And it's now, you know, gunning for a new higher high. So I'm looking at this here and then I'm looking at the price of Bitcoin. And I'm thinking something's got to give here, you know, and I think we know that liquidity is going to win this, win this bout. And so I really think that this is just one indicator of why it's only a matter of time before we see price kind of fall back in line with what's going on with global net liquidity. And so I'm reasonably optimistic based on what I'm seeing here. And I know that, you know, I think once the U.S. kind of kicks into gear, because again, if we go back to U.S.

13:07liquidity, we can see that it's really been in a downtrend this whole entire time. Even though we were getting sort of global net liquidity on an increase, the U.S. side of things has been not really contributing to that very much. And if we look at it even like on a year-on-year basis, you know, we can see it even still. We're basically in the negative still. So I'm looking for this to reverse both on a year-on-year basis and sort of on an aggregate basis. And I think that, you know, maybe that's going to be the key kicker for when Bitcoin finally reverses. And so that's where I'm at. That's what I'm waiting for.

13:45And again, you know, based on what everybody's saying, all the macro people that we follow, particularly Andreas yesterday, I thought that was a great AMA that he did, that both those guys did. And I'm confident going forward, but we'll just have to wait a little bit longer. You know, we're like right there. We're so close, but it's not happening quite yet. I mean, that was a fascinating history lesson, Chris. And it's also pretty crazy to see how tied Bitcoin's price action to the U.S. liquidity is overall. So, right, because like right now, even on this chart that you have, it's trending down.

14:22price action is trending. They're just like almost matched, like in a perfect little dance with each other. So honestly, I don't know how we can look at this chart and not be pretty bullish because we know that the liquidity is going to turn around. So if it doesn't break off from it, kind of like it did briefly in the global liquidity chart, I mean, we should be game on pretty soon, right? Am I right in thinking that or am I getting kind of ahead of myself? Yeah, no, I would think so too. Like I said, I mean, we know global liquidity has sort of, you know, it's generally followed it. That's why it's sort of up as much as it is, you know.

14:56But I think, again, through all of this, the U.S. has not been a major contributor in that equation. Outside of a few, you know, sort of countertrend rallies, like I said, I mean, again, if we go back and look at sort of the year-on-year, we can see that there were periods where year-on-year, it did go on uptrends, you know, shorter-term uptrends that kind of matched, again, with, with, you know, these, these trends here and like this trend here. So it's, it's played a role occasionally along the way, but it hasn't played an outsized significant role in, in sort of this three-year rally, that three-year bull run that we've had.

15:30So I can only imagine what happens once the U S does in earnest start actively, you know, injecting liquidity into the system. I think that, you know, we could see, I mean, I'm not going to say what we're going to, And I'm not saying it's going to do this COVID-like injection, of course, but we could see pretty significant rallies in the price of Bitcoin and other crypto too. Even like going back to 2017, you know, I mean, crypto already ran a fair bit like through 2015, 2016, even though liquidity was kind of trending down like year on year net liquidity, similar to how it has been now over the same sort of early stages of the longer bull run.

16:12And then, you know, starting in late 2016, you know, year on year started to increase and the price of Bitcoin just, again, blew up from there. So, reason to be optimistic, I guess? You could look at it that way? I'm going to look at it, though. You need all the optimism to get, so that's the only way I will take it. Do you want to take a question here? We did say it could be a little bit more of a macro-focused show, so we did get a macro question here from Mapex. What are your thoughts, Chris, on the threat of yen carry trade unwinding? So a quick break in your regular programming. If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called Prepare for 2030.

16:57I 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.

17:09um i i that's way out of my wheelhouse unfortunately

17:15um so yeah i can see my face froze on the monitor uh i don't know i can't yeah i can't really i don't i'm not worried about it but the only reason i'm going to say i'm not worried about it is again i'm going to defer back to the ama with andreas from yesterday he addressed that question far more eloquently than i could and in the end to him it was not a huge factor that is going to cause any major issues. So I'm not so much of a global macro expert to the degree in which he is. So yeah, I'm going to defer to Andreas on that. But again, based on what he said, I'm not super worried about it. I don't think it's going to be a big deal.

17:53Yeah, great shout out to go check out Andreas's AMA from yesterday as well. He covered not just that, but he covered a lot of things and took a lot of questions from the community. So definitely recommend you guys go back and check that out. And we're going to have an AMA tomorrow with with Ralph and Julian as well for members. So you'll definitely want to check that out and ask ask some questions. Chris, we looked at a few charts on Monday that looked I mean, I know it's really hard to take a trade right now or with any with any level of of confidence, really. But we looked at a few charts that looked pretty good or that were at least holding up better than, you know, the rest of the market, like the B &Bs.

18:35Hype was looking pretty good. XRP was also looking pretty good. So from like, I guess from those three charts and I might be missing one that we also covered that we liked as well. But I guess from those three charts and those majors considered, what what what would you like the best right now? now um well let's look at hype let's start with that um and i'm kind of just going a little bit off the top of my head hype actually looks it's held up the best or one of the best you know as far as like well most crypto assets but especially i would you know i'm going to consider hype one of the majors at this point um it has held up the best it has sort of gone down the least it's sort of held its support level the best and i think that you know once once the money starts flowing again, it's likely to run up more than most because it's one of the stronger assets, as we've talked about already, we know.

19:33It's funny, though, in terms of like a setup, it's not necessarily that oversold, I guess, compared to some other stuff, not even according, not even compared to Bitcoin, even like if you look at Bitcoin, I mean, it's just been kind of down only for quite some time. We've got a big fat D Mark nine here. We've got, you know, bullish divergence flags popping up like it's very oversold. So it's likely even to, you know, get a little bit of a bigger bounce out of it. And a lot of charts look like this. I mean, Ethereum, probably the same thing. Well, yeah, I mean, pretty much not quite as bad. A good bearish divergence here.

20:07I think Solana, yeah. I mean, they're all really just ugly and down where again, if you go back and look at hype, it's just kind of flat and steady. You know, it doesn't look like that at all. So I like the look of hype, but honestly, I think, I think everything is likely going to bounce to some degree or another. Some things will definitely bounce more than others, but I think we're going to see green across the board and, and pretty good, good amounts of it. You know, like we're going to see likely double digit gains coming out of this once everything rallies literally on everything, you know?

20:43And so the ultimate question becomes, I think more the question is how high is the bounce ultimately going to be? You know, whether it just kind of comes back up and, you know, does it just, well, here, let me kind of kick on a couple of moving averages real quick instead. So like we've got the 20-day moving average here. This is going to be a big one I'm looking at. This is at about 100, 101 ,000. That's going to be the first level where I'm like, is it just going to come up to here and get rejected and bounce back down? basically just do like a mean reversion in a larger downtrend and get rejected and roll back over again.

21:18We don't want to see that, obviously. We want to see it come back up above this 104 and even kind of get back up into the 110, 112. Another thing I'm looking for with Bitcoin is we've got a bit of a trend line here. And let me kind of look, let me kind of identify it on the, or no, let's go back to the daily. We've got a bit of a trend line here that I want to see broken pretty quickly. And that's this.

21:46You know, we've got these, this, these kind of right here. And so I don't want to see us basically come back up to this trend line here and just get rejected off of it. Similar to like the 20 day moving average, get rejected off of it and roll back over to me, that's going to be a really ugly sign. So those are going to be the first signs of trouble that I'm looking for is, let me kind of clean this up, is a rejection sort of at those levels. And so if we can break above here and break above here, get above 104 and start to show some constructive continuation back to the upside, then I'll feel pretty good about it.

22:20But I'm really wary because I know there's a huge contingent of people out there who are all but convinced that the four-year cycle top is in, and they're going to be looking to sell on the first bounce that they can to sort of get out and recover any gains and capture any gains and things like that. And so there's going to be a fair amount of selling pressure, which honestly, I feel like is pretty irrational. But it's going to be tough to weather through that. And so I think another thing real quick that I'll be looking for to kind of guide us is institutional holdings. and we did see an uptick in institutional holdings in treasuries because MicroStrategy bought a bunch of Bitcoin, like 8 ,000 Bitcoin.

23:05And so we did see an uptick from the treasury side, but we were seeing a leveling off at least from the ETF side. But if you look at just sort of the net total institutional holding, it has ticked back up. And also we can see, and I did touch on this, oops, I did touch on this a week or two ago too, that, you know, institutional holdings haven't really, it's not like they're dropping precipitously. They're not, they're not tanking, you know, ETFs aren't setting new lows or anything like that. If anything, they just kind of came back down to early September levels, kind of back here, and they're starting to trend back up.

23:42Meanwhile, again, Bitcoin is continuing to tank. And so this is another reason why I remain optimistic is I'm not seeing institutions selling at a rate that is sort of in proportion to the decline in price that we're seeing with Bitcoin. So I feel like this is all just four-year cycle doomsdayers that are, you know, liquidating their positions and getting out. And I feel like once we get through that, once we can kind of push through that and flip that psychological barrier, you know, I think that'll help things to run back up again. And hopefully we'll see ETFs kind of kick back in too and start contributing to that because that's what's going to help, I think, push the price back up above these levels too.