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Crypto trader Luke Martin is breaking down Bitcoin’s inability to push above the psychological level of $20,000.
In a new video, Martin says there’s plenty of evidence to show institutions are buying Bitcoin and pushing the price higher during US hours. The trouble is, traders are noticing the pattern and may be too eager to get ahead of the action.
Martin cites recent comments from Alameda Research quantitative analyst Sam Trabucco, who describes BTC’s overall price trend in recent weeks.
“Heading into the past few weekdays US time, there’s been a kind of predictable pattern. Everyone knows the narrative by now – BTC is getting bought up by institutional investors and other entities in the US. So BTC has been going up in the morning! Makes sense.
But let’s suppose that the world understands this pattern – won’t it just go up before that? Well, today that *did* happen – from about noon HK time right until the big crash at the peak, BTC steadily rose, presumably as people expected BTC to get bought during US hours.
So even though we’ve seen this effect previous days this week, the BTC rally during Asia day tells me that it’s not clear what to expect *during* US day, because maybe all the impact has happened already and US people won’t want to buy!
Martin says Trabucco’s take is spot on, and traders appear to be getting too eager, too exposed, too early.
“All of a sudden people said, ‘Why don’t I just front run that US buyer?’ And that started to happen. During Asian trading hours, traders started to front run that buyer. They got too excited. People started to open longs on leverage, and as price ran up ahead of that buyer then things crashed because we saw there was no buying pressure to actually take us through.”
Amid BTC’s pullback to the low $18,000 region, Trabucco says he’s watching for the same pattern to return.
“For what it’s worth, while the markets have obviously cooled off, I still expect a lot of the same behavior from last week to return once the price either falls a lot of rises a lot – we’re in a ‘low-momentum zone’ mostly because a lot of the liquidations nearby have *already happened*…
Whatever this ride ends up looking like, I think we can count on one thing: it will be bumpy. (OK, maybe we can count on a second thing: liquidations will be involved.)”
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Featured Image: Shutterstock/Daniel Prudek