Trading the Markets: October 8, 2025 | Kris Bullock and Bijan Maleki

0:00Hey, everyone. As you know, on this podcast, I bring the best guests in the world at that nexus of understanding of macro crypto crypto in the exponential age of technology. If you're enjoying the show, a quick five-star rating goes a long way. It helps us grow and keep these conversations coming with the best guests in the world. Thanks a lot.

0:46happy wednesday everyone and welcome back to another episode of trading the markets of course we're joined by chris bullock aka blastoplast this is the show where we talk about the weekly trends in the markets talk about any trades that we're considering and of course take your questions live. So if you have any questions, please drop them into the live chat on X or on platform, and we will get to as many as we can. Speaking of platform, just today, we had a sneak peek drop on Real Vision 3.0. Our engineering team walks you through the changes that are coming and how this is really going to supercharge the RV hive mind.

1:31So definitely check that out. something's coming and it's coming soon. And speaking of a lot of things that are coming, Real Vision and actually the Connect here has released quite a bit of content. Joe Bland and Chris released their reports last week. And Chris actually just yesterday released a video on how to gauge crypto projects value. He kind of walks you through about what he looks for when looking at other projects and protocols and, you know, kind of the charts and the indicators that he uses that make him identify a good trade or something that he wants to get into. So Chris, happy Wednesday.

2:11How are you doing? What are the markets telling us this week? Yes, doing well. Thank you. I wanted to start by just kind of reiterating one thing I talked about on our Monday show, which is the Bitcoin dominance seasonality. And so the reason for that is because Bitcoin dominance seasonality actually peaks or not peaks, but it has its best month in October. And so let's look at the chart first. So we know this is Bitcoin dominance on the weekly timeframe. We know Bitcoin dominance has likely peaked. It likely peaked back here in the June timeframe. It has broken this major weekly trend that it had been in for the entirety of this four-year cycle, basically.

2:51And it has sort of rebounded a little bit. It has bottomed. And that makes sense. Nobody's expecting it to just drop like a rock necessarily. So this isn't too surprising to see. But I do think overall, the trend will continue to the downside. But if we look at the seasonality matrix, which I'm going to pull up here, you've probably seen these before. This basically just shows like this is basically, you know, the months across the top and the years on the side. And what we're seeing here, these green months, and it's showing here that typically October in terms of Bitcoin dominance. Now, not Bitcoin price, but Bitcoin dominance specifically is the highest in the month of October.

3:28So I said on the Monday show that we're likely to see, you know, Bitcoin run for a little bit and Bitcoin kind of lead the broader market. And I think we're starting to see that in the moment. I think that what that means is Bitcoin will outpace like the broader alt market, but there will be some alts that will continue to do well over these three to four weeks. And then I think, you know, as we sort of wane into the latter stages of this month and come into, you know, November and December, then I think the alts will sort of take over from there. And we do see that here reflected in this seasonal pattern too.

4:02We see, you know, basically a 90 % increase typically in October, but then a 20 % decrease in November and a 40 % decrease in September or December. And then if we look at others' dominance, kind of the opposite of that, we see kind of, you know, again, the opposite. We typically see a decrease in October and then steady increases in alts in November and December. So this is kind of what I'm looking at. And this is sort of setting the tone for all of the price action that I'm sort of weighing and analyzing over the next month. And we are seeing that in the price action. We are seeing Bitcoin basically do well.

4:41I mean, obviously, it set a new all-time high just a few days ago. It is resetting at the moment. It kind of is mean reverting back to its 10-day moving average. It got a little bit over its skis. It ran. It was pretty overextended and pretty deviated from the moving average we see here. So not at all surprised to see it kind of come back and retouch this. But my bias remains to the upside. I want to look at another chart here. So I do think that it's possible. There's a couple of things that I'm looking at here. I see we did get sort of rejected basically at this all-time high level effectively.

5:13Yes, it did poke a new high, but it came back down. It's currently sitting just above the 10-day moving average. I do think that even though my bias remains to the upside, even though I do think that we've still got probably a good two plus weeks of decent upside action before any real sort of cooling period, I do think in the short term it's possible we come back down to this breakout level here at around 118 to maybe even 120. And the reason I say that is because I'm looking at the liquidation heat maps, and I do see a good concentration of liquidity at this 120 level kind of all the way dipping down into the the 118 range so it's possible that you know the market makers may want to kind of take that out before running it back up into this uh you know 126 range and and basically liquidating all of those all of those shorts so if we kind of come back and look at the chart there's a possible scenario where if it if it doesn't bounce on this 10-day moving average right here it may come back down to this range before before running up so So it would be, you know, for both a technical reason, because this is the breakout level, and also because of like the liquidity situation.

6:16So I am seeing that with Bitcoin. But despite that, again, I still remain bullish. My bias is still to the upside. I still think we're seeing generally good funding rates. Funding rates are generally green, you know, which is showing that people are more long. There's more longing. There's more longing orders than there are shorts open, basically. This is what I'm trying to say there. So I think that generally the market is still biased to the upside too. And I think like if you're in good alts like Solana and Ethereum, I think just stay in those and ride out this volatility. I think don't try to trade necessarily the alt volatility that we're going to be seeing over the next few weeks.

6:54If you're in smaller stuff and you really insist on trading it, I think the odds are stacked against you probably. I think we're going to see a lot of volatility in smaller cap alts. and honestly, you're probably going to lose money if you're trying to trade the swings on these lower cap alls, I think, over the next two to three weeks, but you do you. So yeah, I think generally I'm still bullish. There's a few reasons to think that maybe Momentum might stall for a minute, but I do expect to see a good couple of weeks of upside still. So that's where I'm at at the moment. Yeah, and that lines up with what historically has been the trend, right?

7:31You know, historically, we've seen all season kind of come alive in, you know, November, December time period, kind of aligning with that Bitcoin dominance. Now, you know, a question I've been seeing pop up a lot in our Discord and just a reminder to you all, you know, join our Discord, join the conversation, stress test your ideas and theories. So one thing I've been seeing pop up a lot is people wondering what to do with their Bitcoin right now. Obviously, it's a good month for Bitcoin dominance. I think it's probably best to hold that, especially through the month. But would you say kind of as we're approaching the end of the month, is that time to maybe start thinking for those that, you know, want to switching out of Bitcoin into some of those higher conviction alts like an ETH or a Solana?

8:16Or do you what do you what do you think of that type of idea? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, going back to just the statistics, you know, odds show that Bitcoin will probably do better than most things for this month. That said, you know, Solana technically has been a little bit outpacing Bitcoin overall. Hold on. I got a chart here. Yeah. Well, a little bit. Let's see. So if we look, here's sort of the Solana Bitcoin chart. It's generally been doing better than Bitcoin since the lows back here in June. It's largely been outpaced. Yes, it's down at the moment, but it's still in a larger weekly uptrend.

8:52It's still above its bull market support band against Bitcoin. So like if you were in Solana right now, I would say stay in Solana. Probably you could say the same thing with Ethereum, if I'm not mistaken. It too is in an uptrend. I think I've got it back here. Yeah, I mean, largely it's been in a big uptrend since April against Bitcoin here. So if you're in Solana and ETH, stay in Solana and ETH. I think that they've been outpacing Bitcoin and they're going to continue to outpace Bitcoin. That can't be said for most other things. I mean, I'm sure I could dig around in these charts and find a handful of other alts that have been largely outpacing Bitcoin.

9:27But like you said, I think just stay in Bitcoin. It's going to continue to do better overall than most alts. So if you want to play the odds, just stay in Bitcoin. And then, yeah, as we get towards the later stages of the month, maybe, you know, the third or fourth week of this month, then look to rotate out and really just, like I said, just kind of go through and do a lot of comparisons against Bitcoin. Look at charts against Bitcoin pairs and see what's doing better than Bitcoin. Or go to the alt-season index on CoinMarketCap. Look at all of the things that have been outpacing Bitcoin over the last 90 days.

10:02This is a good way to sort of filter it down. And then you can dig in here and start looking at individual charts and picking ones that have been showing a sustained run. You don't want to pick ones that just have kind of blown up. And I'm going to, I think I'm going to call out Zcash here as a good example of that. Let's, let's look at that chart real quick because, um, Zcash is one of those that has had like a crazy, now watch it proves me wrong and it's been on a sustained run, but, um, it, it blew up here. Like it's been largely, uh, underwhelming, you know, it's been kind of downtrending against Bitcoin for, for really this entire year.

10:40Like the, the bull market its sport band has been going down. Yeah, it poked above a couple of times, but largely it's been trending down and setting lower lows. And then out of nowhere, it blew up and it's up, you know, I mean, crazy, crazy amount, honestly. But like, this is what you don't want to look for. So don't automatically look at this list and go, oh, I can just buy any one of these. Like, that doesn't mean you can buy anyone because you want to make sure it's not just some big rally in the last like 30 days that sort of threw that statistic off. You know, you want to look for something that's been largely outpacing it.

11:11I think probably a good one is going to be like BNB, just for example's sake, of what maybe a better looking chart would be. Yeah, so like, yeah, it went down, but it's been running since, you know, basically July. And it's been just steadily outpacing Bitcoin for way more than three months. And so this is kind of more what you want to see. And even something better still that's been, you know, outpacing it for longer. So that's kind of what I would do is as we get towards the later stages of this month, use that list on CoinMarketCap alt season index to kind of, again, narrow your search field down and then look in the individual charts against Bitcoin pairs and find things that are doing better than Bitcoin for months on end.

11:51And those are probably going to be solid bets to continue to outpace Bitcoin through the end of the year and further. So that's how I would approach that. Yeah. And also like on the bottom of that chart, I mean, just look at the volume coming in for BNB as compared to Zcash. The BNB is relatively consistent. Obviously, you know, kind of mid-July, you saw a little bit of a spike, but it also remained consistent from that spike to where we are today, whereas Zcat had virtually no volume. And then over the last, what, two or three days, you just see it shoot up out of like nowhere. It's just a rocket of a volume candle.

12:26So, yeah. And that's a great point. That's a great point for sure. So absolutely. what happened there all right so let's uh let's maybe it's the privacy narrative privacy narrative something something i don't know you know like i mean it is a privacy coin and and things are going on with governments and i don't who knows i mean for all i know it's whale manipulation i don't really follow this asset too closely it doesn't have a ton of trading volume like you said um it's kind of a unique asset it's it's sort of always been there and and it probably isn't going away, but it doesn't have a huge market either, you know?

13:04So who knows? Who knows with that? Anyway, sorry. That's a dangerous chart. I can't feel you'd be buying in at the top of there if you choose to get in there. But yeah, anyway, Francisco actually had a question on Zcash. So Francisco, there goes your answer. All right. So Brent Meeks on the platform wants us to talk about SWE. I haven't heard an update on SWE in a few videos, looking at taking a significant position in SWE sometime soon. Been trying for over a year to get capital, but now it's finally coming. So Brent wants us to take a look at SWE, let them know what we think of it. And do we think it's a good time to get into SWE now, as opposed to maybe something else?

13:58Well, it's...

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14:53Plus 500, it's trading with a plus. Funny, we do have this, you know, I kind of, I have it highlighted here, this sort of wedge pattern, this coiling action that we've been seeing going on for, well, over a year now. Basically, it's just been narrowing and narrowing and narrowing, and now it's almost just kind of flat sideways. And if we look at it on this trading alpha chart on the weekly, we can see that effectively it's kind of lost a lot of momentum. This shaded area here indicates what's called a volatility squeeze, meaning there's just been little to no price action on a week-to-week basis for several weeks now, or even going back months.

15:34And also, I do want to touch on a report that Jamie Coutts put out a few days ago, I think it was earlier this week, that it wasn't negative against SWE, but it was just calling out some objective on-chain metrics, saying that things like developer activity has waned a little bit. A lot of the volumes have waned a bit. We're seeing sort of waning, just waning fundamentals in terms of its activity and its ecosystem development and things like that. And this coincides with the sort of very sort of static price action that we're seeing. So you could often say when you do see these volatility squeezes that that signals that a price breakout is looming.

16:16And we do think and typically wedge patterns also indicate a breakout. But at the same time, I want to see more going on behind the scenes to kind of drive that momentum. And I'm not seeing that at the moment. So I'm a little cautious. Like I want to say SWE is going to break out to the upside. And, you know, the odds are in its favor that it still will. I mean, we know it's a really good team. We know it's well-funded. We know it's, we know they're continuing to develop and put out new protocols and, and, and make amazing stuff over there. Like they're doing very good, but, um, I, this price action just honestly gives me caution a little bit.

16:53And I would want to wait and see how it resolved before really going in. I think that if you sort of try to front run this breakout and assume that it's going to launch to the upside, you're making a bit of a risky bet in the moment, just based on all of the stuff that's going on right now with this project. So for me, I would look at this and I would say, I would feel a lot better about going in with any amount of size if it started trending upwards, at least, and started setting higher highs and started eclipsing some of these previous weekly closes from back here in July and back here in May.

17:28After I saw that, I would feel better about And even after it gets above this sort of resistance level here at like the right around the$5 level. Now, I know you're kind of giving up a fair bit of upside by waiting for that. But at the same time, it's a much more sure bet. You know, you would you would have confidence going into it that the trend is likely resuming to the upside. Whereas if you got in right now, it's a bit of a 50 50 gamble. You know, there's a chance that it could come back down and break some of these lower closes, too. And, you know, I'd hate to see that. So I feel like because of the sort of neutrality of this chart, I would hold off and wait for the chart to kind of tell you which way it looks like it wants to run before going all in on it.

18:11So I think the fact that you're still sitting on the sidelines waiting for that, I think continue to do that and let the chart tell you what it's going to do first. Yeah, well said. Sweet just has, honestly, charts aside, Sweet has just absolutely felt like a stable coin for the last few months. It kind of just waffles in between this range that we're seeing. Maybe it goes up a little bit, then it comes down, but it always is sticking in between these ranges. So as somebody who's just been holding Sweet, it hasn't been an action-packed hold, if that helps you, Brent. Like Chris said, keep waiting.

18:49wait for that confirmation and if anything just sit tight there alright next question comes from Dubs ETH Dub I'll catch the recording later thanks Dub but I'm hoping for an update on Pump and SPX and Punk Strategy so yeah what do we got there? Let's start with I guess Pump or SPX let's look at pump it's right here so actually let me kind of zoom in on pump since it's got not nearly as much price history and let's sort of see pump is kind of it's funny it's leveled off to a bit of a sort of similar wedge pattern to what we saw just a second ago with sweet uh granted this is on the daily time frame but i think too it's um it needs to kind of prove itself like it's definitely broken its uptrend it's no longer running i mean that's objectively clear so I would say, you know, it came down here and it set a lower high, which isn't necessarily a good look.

19:48And then it's basically on its way back down. And so I need to see, again, a little bit of a sign from Pump that it wants to continue this uptrend. And so right now it's in the opposite of that. It needs to get back up and basically clear this level and show that it's wanting to set another higher high instead of a lower high. And so right now I would steer clear of Pump until it gives us a sign. Let me kind of look at it on this chart real quick to see if it kind of tells me anything different.

20:21Yeah, similar thing. Like, I don't like that it's basically under its 10-day moving average. It's essentially, yes, it's above its 20-day moving average at the moment, but it's more or less trending with it. So, and its volume is kind of ticked down a bit too. So, again, I would hold off on pump. Just give it a minute to show what it's going to do. looking at SPX just briefly, SPX looks good to me. I mean, it ran up 50 plus percent. It kind of dipped here back down below this kind of key$1.50 support resistance level, but then immediately engulfed that candle today and is back up 11 % on the day right now.

20:58So SPX actually looks really good. It's showing a lot of strength. It's got a nice uptick in volume. I like what I'm seeing there. It's sort of broken this downtrend that it was in. And yeah, I mean, no complaints with that and then what was that what was the next one um strategy oh yeah punk strategy that one um so we've had a little bit of a wobble there for sure um i know bijan you're a little bit more dialed in with this project than i am we know we had some whales sell we know we've had some people uh kind of trying to game the game the the system a little bit with it not necessarily hacking it or or breaking it, but just kind of exposing loopholes and things like that, you know.

21:40And so I don't know. I don't know what that's ultimately going to do to the price. But at the moment, I'm not looking at it as a buy. I'm looking at it as I need to see the stabilize before I would feel comfortable jumping back in it. And kind of the same thing. We just want to see price set, you know, price reverse and start setting higher highs. and we also want to start seeing some of these punks start selling, you know, that it's buying, that it's collecting. I mean, real quick, what is it? This hasn't sold anymore. It still just sold the one. I mean, we know this one was a test, I think you told me, and that it sold the one, but even this was a little bit of manipulation, I guess, if you will, on the part of an early holder, just kind of, again, trying to game the system a little bit, but there hasn't really been any other truly organic cells in terms of all of these punks.

22:29So it keeps just accumulating all these punks. I think it's what got 3 million plus dollars worth of punks now. And none of them have sold yet. And meanwhile, the floor price of actual punks is well below this, you know, mid to high fifties range. I think it's in the low fifties or right around 50, if I'm not mistaken. So it's going to be interesting. Like I still like what they're doing. I still like the idea of it. But the flywheel has yet to fully start flying, you know, and doing what it needs to do. So in the meantime, we've got people just, again, gaming the system a little bit. And I don't know.

23:10There is the idea, though, that we've got all these other projects that are kind of stemming from this that are basically giving money to, what is it, giving their fee, 1 % of their fees to Punk Strategy. So we know we've got buying pressure in terms of the token itself coming in from these fees, from all these other NFT strategy projects that are going on. There's probably, what, six or eight of them now or even more. And so there is a mechanism for buying pressure of the token itself outside of whatever is happening with the NFTs. So there are some unique dynamics going on here. But again, I need to see price resume to the upside before I'll feel comfortable with it.

23:49So I'm going to keep an eye on it because I still think there's potential here for this to just rip out of nowhere. You know, certainly if some of these punks do start selling, that's going to be obviously massive, massive buying pressure for the token. And so it's kind of a wait and see. But in the moment, obviously it's iffy. And I continue to say with this asset, because of its unique nature, because of all of the stuff going on with it, this is a very, very small allocation. Don't go into this with any amount of size. This is very, very much a gambling play. this is an experiment that you're betting on.

24:22And if you want to bet on this experiment with a little bit of money, knowing that you might lose all of it, then by all means do it. I get it, but you might lose all of it. But also you might 50 exit or 100 exit. I mean, literally if all these punks sold, I mean, this price is going to be way, way more than it is right now. So there's potential there, but there's also potential for it to go to zero and completely just melt down. and all of these punks. I don't even know what's going to ultimately happen with all these punks in that scenario either. So it's going to be interesting to see. Yeah, I think you broke that down very well.

24:59You know, punk strategy, like you said, it's a very new idea and it's a new project. So a lot of kinks are still being worked out. I think, you know, they have learned from some mistakes. You know, I think maybe launching Goblin Strategy with all that momentum maybe wasn't, in hindsight, wasn't the smartest first launch that probably also hurt them. I think the broader market downturn has hurt them. I think the Bitcoin dominance, like Lisa being strong, this is going to be strong this month will also hurt them. So probably not something you want to go into with any real size, like Chris was saying.

25:34You know, and this was something I kind of saw being one of the downsides of this play when I wrote this note back when I first came across Punk Strategy was if NFT volume starts to wane, punk floors start coming down, it's going to reflect in the token price as well. So I think for this token to have success and for this ecosystem to have success, NFTs need to have success. You want NFT volumes to be picking up and you need floor prices to be picking up for this to show that. And right now it's been the opposite of that. So we're seeing that come into play. But like Chris said, I think a couple of punks sell.