Trading the Markets: September 24, 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 and 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.

0:25Happy Wednesday, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Trading the Markets with Chris Bullock, aka BlastoPlass. The market took quite a hit to start out this week, right? But as RAL and as we often say on Real Vision, shakeouts like this often clear the path for stronger moves ahead. Obviously, we saw over$1.5 billion in leveraged bets wiped out, which was led by$516 million on ETH and just under$300 million on Bitcoin. So obviously, there was quite some blood in the streets. But if you caught Macro Monday with Andreas and Mikkel, they discussed this sudden Monday sell-off and that it looks like a buying opportunity.

1:17And that's what we're going to do here today. We're going to dive into the charts, look at the market, and see what alpha we can find and what buying opportunities we're seeing here. Obviously, you've heard of Aster coming out, which we'll dive into as well. That's just ripping the market. Make sure as well, guys, if you're not in our Discord, you go ahead and join. You can take part in the conversation, take part in all the alpha sharing that we have within our great Hivemind community. And if you're not a member of RV Connect, make sure you sign up because you do get access to Chris's entry level crypto portfolio that kind of walks you through all of, you know, some great trades.

1:59He's doing the work for you. So you can just sit back, relax and just take those profits. He's up quite a bit year to date and just for the history of this portfolio. And he's not the only portfolio you're getting. You're also getting Joe Bland's entry level equity portfolio, which is also up pretty almost 200 percent year to date. Might be higher than that. Don't just don't quote me on it, but he's up quite a bit year to date also. So you have two great portfolios. And of course, you get our live show on Monday. and speaking of live shows, RAL is going to be back for the much anticipated, much requested drinks AMA, drinks with RAL tonight at 6 p.m.

2:42Eastern. So make sure you tune in. And also, Jamie Coots has an interview dropping probably any minute now, if it hasn't dropped already while we're live on air, where he goes through the Bitcoin cycle. So make sure you also check that out so you can see where we're at and what Jamie's insights tell us. Chris, happy Wednesday. How are we doing? How are you feeling about the markets today? I'm actually feeling quite good, in fact. I know we talked about it on Monday. Everything was pretty ominous on Monday, lots of red candles. But even then, I was reasonably bullish with the short to medium term outlook even.

3:20And we're seeing a continuation of that. So I wanted to highlight, I think I talked about this maybe a couple of weeks ago. I'm struggling to remember which show it was on, but the September seasonality thing. And what I want to talk about here is I want to look at the Bitcoin chart here on the weekly timeframe and look at the sort of the last two September, October sort of periods and how similar it is right now compared to them. And I think that the same thing is playing out. And so what we're looking at here, if we go back to September 2023, we can see that was really the bottom and things started to pick back up in reverse.

3:57But if we kind of zoom in closer, we can see that it did this thing where it, you know, starting around the middle of September, it started to run up and then it sort of corrected, came back down, retested the moving average, and then, you know, launched from there right around the beginning to middle of October. So we saw, you know, a reasonable launch at the end of September. And then, you know, again, the retest. And then if we go to sort of September of last year of 2024, a very similar thing, it bottomed in the beginning of September, we had a nice couple of weeks come up. And then we had a, you know, a bit of a correction.

4:31Again, it came back down, retested the moving average perfectly right at the end of September and launched out from there again, big, big run up. And if we look at where we are now, almost the same exact thing. We came down here, you know, We bottomed at the beginning of September. We have two nice big candles up, a bit of a comeback down, retest perfectly on the moving average again. And we're seeing a nice big wick to the downside, which is a bullish sign that shows that there's a good amount of buying pressure at this same support level right here. That's right on the 20-week moving average, which is also right on this horizontal support level.

5:04and I suspect we're going to see something very similar where starting this week, next week, somewhere in the next week or two, a continuation of this pattern where we get another big leg up coming into October, coming into sort of the Q4 period that we've been talking about for months now. And so far it's playing out exactly. So I think that's super interesting. I think it's also bolstered by, a couple of weeks ago, Raoul had Michael Howell on his show. on his journeyman show. And that was a fascinating interview where they talked about just the sort of the global liquidity environment and how both of them were on the same page in terms of the business cycle extending into next year.

5:45And, you know, we're not anywhere close to a peak type environment yet. And so I, you know, I encourage people to watch this if you haven't. It's on both the Real Vision platform and on YouTube as well on Raoul's journeyman YouTube page. Amazing interview. These two people are the, you know, the sort of global foremost experts on global liquidity. And I, it was great. I mean, it was just full of fascinating charts and highly recommended. It's very, it's very like relieving, you know, you watch it and you're like, oh, okay, I feel, I feel much better about what's going on now than, than maybe I did, you know, a couple of weeks ago.

6:18And it's important because like some of the technicals, I see a lot of people saying there's technicals out there. There's technical indications that are showing maybe, you know, things do look toppy and maybe, you know, we are right around the, the, the same time period that the market has topped in the last two, four-year cycles. And so that's weighing on a lot of people. And I think it's important to get this macro perspective, this liquidity perspective, because it sort of counters the technicals and gives you a lot of insight that you don't see in the charts. And I think it's important to factor that into the equation.

6:52Another thing I noticed too was just looking at the Bitcoin ETF flows, we saw it had been trending upwards all through the year, basically, May, June, July. And then in August, we had a net outflow month. And that sort of is perfectly reflected in the charts. Like if we go back here and look, this was the month of August, basically, these three weekly red candles here on the Bitcoin chart. And so that makes sense. But again, if we go back and look at the ETF inflows, we're seeing a net inflow again. And we're seeing basically institutional money coming back into the Bitcoin space, buying Bitcoin back.

7:30And again, this is reflected in the chart as well. And I think that this also sort of bolsters my thesis that we're going to see future green candles in the coming quarter. And so overall, I'm generally bullish. I think, too, as we go through the show, looking on the daily timeframe on a lot of charts, we're seeing a ton of bottoming signals. We're seeing like DMARC9s. We're seeing bullish divergence flags popping up on some of my indicators. There's a lot of signals that are showing seller exhaustion and momentum shifting back to the upside. So I think it's all there, and I'm generally pretty bullish on what's going on right now.

8:08So good times ahead for us. Chris, do you have another chart that you want to get to? I do want to remind everyone, if you have any questions you want us to take live on air, just put them in the live chat on X or on our platform. We'll get to as many as we can. Yeah, I wanted to go through just some daily charts, you know, on this trading alpha indicator and kind of speak to some of those bullish, you know, changes that I'm seeing just to show because like it's definitely happening. Like here, for example, this is Bitcoin on the daily timeframe. We're seeing this big, this thrust candle here, this showing there's a ton of volume coming in today.

8:44We did have a bullish divergence flag pop up here, you know, again, showing just there's a bid. There's money coming in. And then if we look at Ethereum, we have a nice clean DMARC9 signal today, plus a big bullish divergence flag that's kind of hiding behind that. You can't really see it. But this is showing, again, seller exhaustion on Ethereum and momentum shifting back to the upside. if we look at solana it does it's actually oh it's got a bullish divergence flag here too plus a big wick to the downside which is showing um big you know these kinds of wicks to the downside uh sort of can can signal like what's called a swing low where you know you get a big flush to the downside it quickly gets bought back up and it's it you know signals a shift in momentum so if we get a big sort of green candle you know tomorrow that that eclipses the the high of this one today, that's going to be a strong momentum signal to the upside too.

9:38So again, and I can go through a ton of these charts. We're seeing them kind of across the board. We have one here on SWE. You know, we have one here on XRP, same thing here. And it just kind of, if we go down the list, again, we're seeing lots of bottoming signals. So I mean, we can dig into individual charts if we have questions, but just across the board, you can see just as I'm going down the list, it's kind of happening on all of them. So again, it's, it's, it's, it's good stuff right now, honestly. You know, if you've ever wished you could ask me a question, any question 24 seven, well, now you can.

10:11The Raoul Pal bot is my AI assistant trained on all of my insights, macro research, macro views, even wine and travel knowledge. The Raoul bot is available for everybody who subscribes to either connect alpha or pro. It can really change your life. You get me as your mentor 24-7. The link's in the description. I think you're going to love it. Love it when things happen, kind of as we expect them to. You know, earlier in the month, you were kind of talking about exactly this playing out and we saw it play out almost to a T, Chris. So credit to you for reading the charts and the T leaves there and really making that call for everyone who was paying attention, right?

10:52So love to see that history is, you know, kind of repeating itself in a good way here as we kind of set up for hopefully what's a great October. Yeah, it's interesting. I had drawn here, let me pull it back up. I had it hidden here, but I had drawn this line.

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11:42With 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. Visit 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. Plus 500, it's trading with a plus. Right here, this kind of, this poly line. And I drew this, I mean, you might remember from previous shows, I drew this all the way back on September 3rd. And I'm like, I have a pretty strong feeling this is likely how the month is going to play out, you know?

12:19And it's, I mean, of course, it's not exact, you know, but at the same time, it's pretty close. I knew that we were going to come up here likely back to this sort of horizontal range and get rejected somehow and kind of come back. I was urging sort of patience at that time. I was saying, don't get too over exuberant when we get this run out of here because there's a decent chance it's going to get rejected. It did get rejected. But I do like, again, looking here on the daily timeframe even, it hasn't come back down as low as I thought it might. To me, that's actually an incredibly bullish signal too for it to bounce almost perfectly.

12:50Again, I didn't draw this line today. This line was drawn weeks and weeks ago and for it to come down and perfectly bounce, you know, right off of this 112 ,000 level and, you know, big green candle today. So it's funny, you draw these lines sometimes and it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy almost. But yeah, it's perfect. And so I love the way this is playing out. I love the fact that so far for now it's setting a higher low. You know, it didn't come all the way back down to this level. And I mean, again, yet more evidence for a reason to be optimistic. And so I like what I'm seeing here. And another great reason that you should be a member of RV Connect, because Chris, like he said, he drew that line on September 3rd.

13:30And obviously, it didn't happen exactly as he drew it, but it's pretty damn close. And that's just another reason why you want to be following his entry level portfolio. So Chris, we have a coin that's pretty much just taken over the talk of crypto Twitter. It's the talk of the sound all over anyone who's involved in crypto, which is Aster, which I'm sure you've all seen it. I actually just input a trade idea on the RV website on Aster. So make sure you go ahead and like that. Give a comment. Tell me that it's going to zero or help pump it to the moon. But Chris, what are we seeing on Aster? Do we like it?

14:11Is it going to eat hype's market share? What are you thinking here? Well, it's funny. at the moment, it certainly is eating Hype's market share. In fact, I looked just this morning and here we have the top crypto decentralized exchanges by volume and market share. And in fact, Hyper, or I'm sorry, Aster is well above Hyperliquid in both market share and trading volume over the last 24 hours. But we have to keep in mind, Aster is brand new. It's very much the new shiny object on the block. It's the one that has everybody's attention. And Hyperliquid, you know, was, was it had its run too, when it too was the shiny object.

14:50Um, and, and very much did, you know, something similar. So it's going to be interesting. It's still very early. Obviously Aster has only been out for not even less than a week. And so it makes sense that everybody wants to go there and try it out and, and see if they like it. Um, it remains to be seen if it has staying power. I'm sure it will to some extent, given, you know, it's backed by Binance and backed by CZ and, and, you know, it's got clearly it's got a lot of money. It's got a lot of talent in it. And so I think it will be a legitimate competitor, but it remains to be seen ultimately what the market is going to settle on or where they're going to, you know, where that's going to play out.

15:26Yeah. I think it's important to also remember that nothing, nothing bad has happened to hype. You know, hype is still as it was last week or the week before. I mean, it's, it's still doing well. It's still a very solid product. It still has sort of first mover advantage. It's, you know, it's, it's a, maybe even a more mature product and that it's had, it's had time to evolve and develop and be tweaked, whereas Aster is literally brand new. But obviously, the price action speaks for itself. This is on the hourly timeframe because it's so brand new. It's not even worth looking at it on the daily.

15:56But I think on Monday, yeah, we were looking at it, and it was right around this level here. And that proved to be the bottom. It reversed later that day and has been just ripping ever since. And it obviously looks great. So I think there's still quite a bit of room to run for Aster. It's only at around a$2 billion market cap, whereas hype is upwards of 11, 12, 13, somewhere in there, I think. And if we're going to compare the same, I think that Aster could keep going for a while. But again, it's very new. So be prepared. If this is something you want to get into, it's something you're going to have to be glued to.

16:33You're going to have to be watching it on the regular, keep the chart open all the time and just know that you know, it could, it could turn on a dime basically. So, um, and just because it's at 2 billion now, it doesn't mean that it's going to be at hyperliquids market cap in a week from now either. We don't, we don't know that. So, uh, but we can tell, like I said, just from the, just from that, uh, chart, I was looking at a second ago that it clearly is eating hyperliquids lunch at the moment, you know? Um, but that's just, again, that's, that's new, that's enthusiasm and, uh, it remains to be seen how long that lasts.

17:06So, so yeah, but it's interesting. It's fun to watch yeah like you said i think we kind of have to see where this all settles when when everything is said and done and and astor's had a few months if you will of uh of time there but i do think it is i don't think it's going to flip hype um i think hype is too strong i think hype has been too organic of a of a thing had that fair launch right don't know if i can say the same for astor i have to do a little more research into that but i do think uh right now the the upside on Aster compared to how much further down the market cap it is compared to hype is a good high risk, high reward type of play there.

17:47Do you feel like you missed hype? Well, you have another opportunity potentially here. Yeah, I would agree with that. And I don't think it's necessarily too late on Aster. I mean, clearly you sort of missed getting down here at the 60, 70 cent level, but like even at$2,$2.36 where it is now, like you said, I still think it has a decent amount of room to go. Um, and, and so, yeah. And, and, and like you said, it's, it's, it's going to, it's got more upside in the short term than obviously hype does. Uh, even though I still think hype has quite a bit of upside to go, uh, for sure. But, um, if you know, there's a gap there that you can catch up with on the, on the hype, I'm sorry, on the Astor side.

18:25So, so yeah, for sure. Absolutely. So speaking of hype, Shirag on the RV website wants us to take a look, more in-depth look at hype. Chris, what level of downside on hype would get you worried? Well, let's look at the hype chart here first, because the hype chart actually still looks really strong. I mean, yeah, it's had a bit of a, you know, a correction at the moment, but even just like zooming out on the weekly timeframe, hype is still one of the better looking, better looking weekly charts there. I mean, in the space, honestly, it kind of came down and touched its, barely touched its 20 week moving average.

19:03But what I love here is the volume. The volume is still continuing to trend up, you know, at a nice rate on the weekly level. And even just last week, it's funny, it was just last week it put in a new all-time high. So it's not even like hype is doing poorly, you know, because we know a lot of stuff through the month of August. Like if you go back and look at Bitcoin, it's been on a downtrend through the entire month of August, whereas Hyperliquid literally put in a new all time high just last week. So it's not like the market is fading hype by any stretch. You know, it's it's it's it's doing really well, objectively.

19:34So if I were to say there was a level where I'd get worried, it would probably be this, you know, like the 39, 40 cent level where I have this basically support line drawn right now that's kind of reflective of this horizontal range that we saw. So I would say if it lost the 40 cent level and started closing below that, that would give me pause. That would give me concern. But even still, hype is just so strong. They just make so much money and they use it to buy back the token, which is going to create constant buying pressure. And it's just like it's almost I just don't see that happening. You know, I really don't.

20:12um so so yeah but again if there was a level i would say the 40 cent level uh is where it would i would start to i guess look a little closer and and maybe decide if i wanted to cut it or not but at the moment i'm not really worried about it fantastic all right let's take this question from jc on x chris do we see any bottom signals on deep uh jc very you must be lurking in our discord because that is a topic of definite conversation, a little bit of anxiety and stress as well as quite a few of us have deep and are wondering when it's going to do something. Well, in fact, we do. In fact, we have quite a strong buy signal here.

21:00So I'll kind of zoom in on this and try to decipher what we're looking at here. But we've got three different indications here. We've got, first of all, a reversal signal. Let me see if I can kind of filter some of these. We've got a reversal signal to start right here. So this is actually, this is better than just like a bullish divergence kind of signal. This is saying, you know, this is the bottom kind of thing. So we've got that. And then on top of that, we've got a, what is it? I got too many indicators. We've got basically a buy signal. We've got strong bullish divergence signal. We've got this up thrust arrow.

21:35So I've got like three or four different indicators here signaling a bottom reversal by the bottom is in type signal on deep at the moment. Now, of course, these are just indicators. Anything can happen. But the good thing is there's confluence here. There's multiple indicators from independent sources all signaling that there's seller exhaustion. There's momentum shifting back to the upside. There's sort of a reversal happening. So when you see that from multiple signals, I see that's a pretty strong signal. So hopefully it plays out that way. But I like what I'm seeing there with Deep for sure.

22:09And this is on a daily timeframe. So it's generally a pretty strong signal. Fantastic. All right. There's some hope for those of you that are holding Deep. Yeah. Okay. So this one comes from Pierre on RV website. We talked about this coin a little bit on Monday. What do you think about punk strategy? That's an interesting one. I haven't looked at the price since Monday. I don't remember. What was... Bijan, do you remember the symbol for it? It's P-N-K-S-T-R. Right, right, right. Okay. Yeah, I've been a little out of the loop this week, but let's take a look at this one. And I kind of got it going on the hourly on this one too.

22:54Or hold on.

23:01Okay. I'm really curious about the upside potential with this one. I like what they're doing. It's a super novel approach. I don't exactly, I'm not super familiar with how the, kind of the tokenomics work or what's going to ultimately drive it up other than just, I know they're, you know, they buy the punks, they turn around, resell them. They take the profits and they use it to buy back the, buy the token with. Clearly that's working. Clearly it's creating upside buy pressure. It's interesting to see that the volume is starting to wane a little bit. So I'm curious to see how this is going to ultimately play out.

23:37But it's a very novel strategy. It's very new. We haven't really seen anything like it, you know, with NFTs like this, with Punks especially. But also, you know, again, it's only, what is it, a week or two old. So it's still early days. I kind of said this on Monday. It's a little bit too early to know ultimately how it's going to play out. But I do like what I'm seeing. I do like the fact that it's generally pretty organic looking price action. There's not a lot of wild swings. There's not a lot of huge wicks. Um, so it's, it's interesting, but I think it's, it's definitely worth paying attention to, um, probably worth taking a, taking a punt on, honestly.